He frowned.
“It seems like that now, sure, almost twenty years on. But I wasn’t who I am today.”
“That’s easy to say.”
“Are you the same person you were then?” he asked.
“For the most part, yes.”
“You stand by every decision you made in those days?”
“Fair enough.”
“You have to recognize that this was a major event in an otherwise uneventful life. Nothing I’d done had ever resulted in such profound consequences. Just think, if I had somehow not saved Francis’s life, if instead he’d died on that beach, everything that came after would not have happened like it did.”
“To be fair, that could be said for many things. A butterfly flaps its wings…”
He put up his hand. “Some events have more impact than others. And the cascade of consequences spreads out over everything. That rendezvous in the hotel? Wouldn’t have happened. The next gallery show? Same. Everything I’d read up on from UCLA, that would have been the end. A few obituaries would get tacked on, no more.
“But thanks to me, thanks to my intervention, Francis continued along his timeline.”
“As if nothing had happened.”
“Well, the episode left its mark on him too.”
“How so?”
“I’ll get to that. As for my state of mind, it was impossible for me to look at anything Francis-related and not feel that I was at least partially responsible for it.”
“Like God in plain clothes,” I said, quoting a book I’d read two decades before.
He leaned closer. “It started to sink in that I’d accomplished something. But what, exactly, remained to be seen.”
“By you.”
“By me.”
“More like a spy than a god, then.”
He shook his head. “A spy reserves judgment.”
17
Jeff visited the coffee shop regularly, learned the name of the frizzy-haired woman behind the counter (“Molly—amazing what the mind retains”), and spent inordinate amounts of time watching the gallery across the street. It wasn’t hard to imagine an alternate version of the gallery, one with a CLOSED FOR BUSINESS sign out front, or some such indicator that the man for whom the gallery was named had perished in an unfortunate swimming accident. He did this, now and then, imagined the alternate universe, to remind himself that he was the one responsible for the ongoingness of the one in which he and Francis and the rest of us lived. He was trying to gather the courage to cross the street and go in. He hadn’t seen Francis since the day he’d followed him to the hotel. With each passing day he came closer to taking the plunge. What was stopping him? He wasn’t sure. Fear of discovery? Of recognition? Perhaps it was wisdom. Perhaps he should have walked away, and a voice inside him was telling him to do so.
He didn’t listen, of course.
Still he did not cross the street.
One day he was just about to leave the café when he spotted a FAFA assistant storming out of the gallery. Behind her the glass door clanged against its stopper so hard he was surprised it didn’t shatter. She crossed the street on shaky heels, cheeks red and eyes brimming with tears. He’d seen her before, fetching coffees for the staff. This time she didn’t walk into the coffee shop but went straight for the adjacent parking garage, mumbling a string of frustrated expletives. Two minutes later, she squealed away in a little silver Mercedes.
The next morning, Jeff came in, ordered his customary drink, opened his laptop, and looked across the street as usual. Tucked in the lower left corner of the massive windowed front of the gallery, pressed up against the frosted glass so as to be legible from outside, was a letter-size sheet of paper, on which someone had laser-printed the words assistant needed apply within.
18
“You didn’t,” I said.
He removed his glasses, held them up to the light to examine the lenses, pulled a shirttail to wipe them clean, and put them back on. He was stalling for some reason, or trying to milk a dramatic pause. He cleared his throat.
“Would that have been crossing a line?” he asked.
I said I didn’t know.
“It would have been a different life—the last twenty years, I mean—if I hadn’t.”
19
Jeff stood before the partition that ran across the front of the gallery, peering into the small opening near the entrance. He saw a man—not Francis—on the telephone. He paused, wondering whether he should check in before proceeding, but the man was wrapped up in his call and paid him no mind. Jeff walked the length of the partition and stepped around it into the main gallery, an expansive bright white cube with ceilings that must have been twenty-four feet high. He could hear his own footsteps echoing on the concrete floor, as well as one half of the man’s telephone conversation. The gallery was devoid of any other people. Jeff heard the man say Francis into the phone, and he felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.
“Francis is going to need the pieces here before he’s back from Kassel,” the man said. “Or there’s no show.”
Francis was out of town, a relief. Jeff would have a moment to find his footing.
The man, curly-haired and olive-skinned, in his early thirties, sat behind a small desk-cum-counter on which a pile of brochures was stacked next to a business card holder. To the right, a series of stairs, marked PRIVATE, led up to what must have been offices. Jeff was surprised to see so few people. Whenever he sat across the street, watching people go in and out, he pictured the gallery as a beehive of activity.
He stepped into the back gallery, feeling as if he were trespassing. It was as free from human presence as the front room and as suffused with natural light. At this point he allowed himself to absorb what hung on the wall. Until that moment the art had been only rectangles in his peripheral vision, objects that were where they were supposed to be. He’d have noticed only if they’d been absent. The back room was hung with large-scale paintings of energetic colorful strokes in a variety of styles. One painting depicted a house-like structure, but the others were entirely abstract. He thought what many had thought before and what many would think again: a child could have made these.
He examined the wall labels, surprised that so many of the works lacked titles. None of the artists’ names meant anything to him. He was relieved to see no prices listed. He concluded from this that FAFA sometimes functioned as a museum or nonprofit exhibition space. This made him more charitable toward the work: despite it not being to his taste, he allowed that it might have emerged from a sincere desire on the part of the artists to express themselves, and who was he to argue with that, as long as they weren’t ripping people off.
The man at the desk finished his phone call, which took a surprising turn at the end, an “Okay, love you” out of nowhere. Jeff returned to the main gallery, making for the desk. The man behind it was scribbling in a notebook. After a moment of Jeff standing there, he looked up.
“I’m here about the job,” Jeff said.
The man looked him up and down and smiled as if relieved to see him.
20
His name was Marcus, and, he said, he was eager to be off the floor and upstairs, where he had unimaginable amounts of work to do. The job was simple, if you were cool babysitting artwork, shooing tourists, and getting yelled at.
He raised his finger. “All while looking good,” he added. “You can’t look sloppy.”
Then, realizing he’d jumped forward a few steps, he asked Jeff about his experience.