“She hadn’t suffered any massive blows.”
“She had been protected from those.”
“By her parents?”
“By Francis, more than by her mother. She loved her father, she assured me, but there was great ambivalence there. She recognized him as a vanguard in his field, as the provider, as the daddy who had given her everything she’d every wanted, who’d taken her on trips with him, and so on. But since she’d left the house, she’d begun to see things that hadn’t been obvious to her when she was younger and living with them. And his behavior toward her had changed. He insisted on her coming home for dinner every Sunday night, even if he was out of town. He was constantly adjusting her spending money up and down. He threatened, at one point, to stop paying her tuition, over a minor disagreement. He loved her, she knew he did, but her leaving home had made him more controlling.
“When he couldn’t take it out on her, he took it out on her mother, an extremely talented artist whose career had been scuttled, in Chloe’s estimation, by both the demands of motherhood and domination by Francis, who, while touting his support for her art, was always in some way undercutting it.
“That had all started when they first got together—Francis had been a fan of Alison’s work and went for a studio visit. He fell for her immediately, and she was drawn to his energy, what she perceived as a sense of fun and I would argue was a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. Her discovery that he wanted both to date her and show her work felt like a double bounty. She couldn’t have known, in those days, that one could cancel out the other, that she could be accused of sleeping her way to the top (before she had gotten anywhere near the top), that her beauty would be a handicap, that people would never see her work and not think of her as the girlfriend of, then the wife of. She had minor success, a few sales to real collectors, but she soon realized that it was contingent on her being with Francis. People couldn’t see her work, even when it was right in front of them. What they saw was potential to curry favor with the dealer.
“At one point, this was after Chloe was in school full-time, Alison showed a body of work at a different gallery, under a pseudonym. Of course, the gallerist knew who she was and was doing her a favor, and Francis was in on it, but otherwise nobody knew. The show didn’t sell well. There was no track record, no persona to attach the work to. It was good stuff, but on its own merits it didn’t rise above the glut of other work out there.”
“The market isn’t the only indicator of artistic quality.”
“It wasn’t only that the show didn’t sell. It wasn’t reviewed. It had zero impact. The idea she’d had, that the work could go out into the world purified of everything attached to her other work, was naive, and she should have realized it, but she took the failure of this venture as a sign that everyone had been right, that she had not been a distinguished artist but an average one, one who happened to have a pretty face and a powerful husband.”
“But in reality, how much work would stand up to that test?” I asked. “I mean work by highly successful contemporary artists.”
“Almost none. Alison refused to see it, at least with relation to her own work, but Chloe understood it. She had an innate understanding of her father’s world. She tried to convince her mother that the test had been impossible, that her work was wonderful, that she had to ignore the downside of her association with Francis and enjoy the upside. But her mother wouldn’t budge. The failure of the pseudonymous show was to her an incontestable verdict. Which, ironically, you could take as an indicator that she was a real artist. Artists, good ones, real ones, always take criticism seriously, even personally, and reject praise. If the work sucks, it’s their fault. If it’s brilliant, credit goes to the gods.
“She went into design. Founded a successful interior design business. A field in which her association with Francis was unquestionably useful. She claimed to be happy, but Chloe thought otherwise. One doesn’t stop being an artist. She had given up on her dreams. This was something Chloe had promised herself she would never do. I believed her, you know, she was very convincing. I didn’t have many dreams of my own, other than an abstract idea of not wanting to go backward, you know, not wanting to live in a shack in Santa Cruz with my mother. I didn’t have any big dreams to give up on. I’ve always been more of a regular guy. I guess what I did have, what I prided myself on, was my integrity.”
“The guy who returns the blanket.”
“Sure, also the guy who thinks there’s more to life than money.”
“That was all of us in those days.”
34
Jeff was working at the gallery one morning, sitting at the desk, putting address labels on postcards, when Marcus appeared next to him, a serious look on his face.
“He wants to see you.”
Marcus looked up and nodded his chin as if referring to God.
“I’ll watch the desk,” he said. And then, with what sounded like kindness, he wished Jeff good luck.
Jeff had been keeping his eyes and ears open, vis-à-vis Francis. This consisted mainly of watching him arrive and leave, yell at someone upstairs, and, occasionally, walk a collector through the gallery. Nothing had changed, in other words, and he and Francis remained strangers to each other.
His major source for Francis-related information was Chloe. Through her he was getting a clearer picture of the man he’d rescued. Possibly even a clearer picture than Francis had of himself, in some ways.
The problem was that Chloe hardly ever described the same Francis. One day he was a control-obsessed, domineering, personality-quashing monster. Another day, a loving, supportive, providing, beneficent king. Jeff asked leading questions, like “Has he always been like this?” Trying to figure out how the near drowning had affected him. At one point she mentioned a recent crisis, that after he hurt himself playing squash—she had been fed the same story as everyone at the gallery… or knew otherwise and wasn’t saying—he went out and bought himself a Porsche.
“How obvious is that?” she asked, incredulous. The inimitable Francis Arsenault, doing what every fifty-year-old man of means would do. Like a regular person.
Now Jeff had to walk upstairs and face the man himself. He couldn’t imagine why Francis would want to see him. They had not yet had an actual conversation. Jeff took each step slowly and carefully, his hand on the railing to temper the incipient dizziness. This was what he’d signed up for, wasn’t it? But now it had been complicated by what was happening with Chloe.