“I can. He’s written me two letters so far, and they’ve both been odes to his love for Dominique, plus a pasta recipe.”
Frank laughed. “He’s the last living romantic. Remember the speech he made at our wedding?”
“I do. He said we were both made of gold or something.”
“I don’t know about me, but you certainly are.”
Cleo smiled. She really did look golden to him.
“Want to see my studio?” she asked. “It’s in the other building.”
Frank followed her out of the room and down the hall. He watched her liquid, soft-footed walk.
“Has anyone else been here to visit you? Quentin?”
“We don’t speak anymore,” said Cleo quietly.
Frank waited for her to elaborate. She stopped walking and turned to face him.
“Meth,” she said. “I guess Alex got him onto it. He’s not doing well.”
The last time Cleo saw Quentin, she explained, he had invited her to a cheap hotel in midtown. When she arrived, there were three other hollow-eyed men pacing the room with him. Quentin was half naked and manic, his thin, pale body jolting as if with electricity. He needed money, he’d said. He’d run out of the substantial monthly allowance his grandmother provided, and there was still a week left in the month. When she tried to get him to leave, he had attacked her. Don’t you dare judge me, you fucking cunt. Cleo fled the room and called Johnny, but he was no help, and she didn’t have the number of any member of Quentin’s family. There was nothing to do but leave him there. Frank shook his head as she recounted this.
“I had no idea.”
“He gave us cocaine as a wedding present. You didn’t think he might have a teeny-tiny drug problem?”
“He’s a character?” offered Frank. “I just didn’t think it would get that bad for him. I mean, if doing a bit of blow and drinking too much makes you an addict, then everyone we know—” Frank stopped and pinched his brow. “Jesus, Cley. Everyone we know in New York is an addict, aren’t they?”
Cleo nodded grimly. “Looking like it.”
“You haven’t tried to reach him again?”
She gave him a pained look.
“I did, of course I did. Countless times. I called rehabs and found free beds, but he refused to go. Then his number got disconnected. At this point, I’m not sure who I’d even be getting in touch with.”
“You mean someone else got the number?”
“I mean, I don’t know who he is anymore.”
“Are you okay?”
She looked up at him with her exhausted smile. “One of us has to be.”
“You’re lucky you got out of New York when you did.”
“By the skin of my teeth,” she said.
She guided him to her studio, which was cluttered and small, not exactly the light-filled factory space he’d been imagining. Low wooden ceiling beams, the chemical smell of paint thinner in the air, a dusty concrete floor streaked with dark red. Frank’s heart jerked. Was it blood? No. It was paint, of course. He spotted the same rust color on the canvases lining the wall.
Frank remembered Cleo’s work as florid and fleshly, the colors of a bruise in the ugly part of healing, sour yellows and dark violets and crimson-tinted creams. These canvases were much simpler, clean red lines on white or gray backgrounds. He looked more carefully and saw that the lines were abstracted parts of women’s bodies, twin spread buttocks, a roll of stomach, the heavy curve of a breast.
He had never really known if she was any good as an artist. She had certainly been unhappy enough to be good. But what did that mean? Talented people were often unhappy, but unhappy people were not often talented. Frank always thought that Cleo’s main gift was her way of being. She was uniquely attractive, not just in her looks but in her essence. She had a way of bringing the light into a room with her, like a window being flung open.
Cleo watched Frank as he knelt to examine a small square canvas and the subject, which before had been the curve of a bent knee brimming with human movement, became just a line. They were bodies presented as absence; as you drew closer, they retreated. She was proud of these paintings, which were less obviously figurative than her previous work, lending her the freedom and anonymity of abstraction. She watched his face, trying to decipher his thoughts.
Frank looked up and saw Cleo was watching him with that curious intensity of hers. She was expecting something from him, he knew, some response he didn’t know how to give. What he understood was language. Branding. What a dirty word that had become, but there was a straightforwardness to it verging on the sublime for him. All interactions were, at heart, transactional; at least advertising didn’t pretend. This subtle world of shade and lines Cleo occupied, ostensibly so full of meaning, potentially so meaningless … Frank felt like he was trying to open a package with the instructions written on the inside.
“It’s really smart, Cleo,” he said. “So … artistic.”
Cleo laughed. She could see he was mystified, but she was surprised to learn she cared less about his reaction than she’d expected. Regardless of what he thought, she was satisfied with the work.
“I’m having a show next month,” she said, unable to conceal the pride in her voice. “In a little gallery in Monti.”
“Do you have a title?”
“Life Lines,” she said.
“Appropriate.”
“How so?”
“Just appropriate,” he said again vaguely. “For you.”
“There’s an installation piece too,” she said. “I think it’s the best part. If you want to see it?”
She was so earnest, so hopeful. Frank felt for her. There was no guarantee she would succeed at this; in fact, most likely she would not. He remembered the first time he met her, walking along the streets of New York declaring she was an artist with a proud little flick of her head. He saw the same confidence in Zoe’s fight to become an actor, trading on her youth and beauty, wearing them away without return. They did not yet know what he did. That you could be gifted, hardworking, tenacious, even touched by a little bit of luck, and still not succeed, or if you did, not have it last. That never to experience achievements commensurate to your talent, never to receive adequate payment for your efforts, was a terrible, demoralizing thing.
Frank followed Cleo out to the courtyard that separated the buildings. The unseasonably warm Mediterranean breeze circled around them like a cat rubbing against their ankles.
“The installation’s in the shed,” said Cleo. “I just wanted to smoke a cigarette first.”
She rolled a cigarette and passed it to him, then made another for herself.
“I don’t smoke,” he said, putting it between his lips.
She smiled. “Everyone who quits drinking starts smoking, just a little.”
It was quiet except for the tinny sound of a radio from an open window above them. Cleo tucked the tobacco pouch into her back pocket and crossed her arms. It was time they talked about what he had come here to talk about.