He made his way down the hall to the door at the end. It was open. Francis sat leaning back in his chair, feet up on his desk, phone to his ear. He waved Jeff in and gestured for him to sit. Behind him hung a large painting, a square canvas, dark, with a large bright circle of gold leaf at the center. And, as if a shadow had been cast on it, the outline of a head and neck in black in the circle. As Jeff looked at the painting, he felt that he recognized it, then he remembered. It had been in one of the articles he’d found at UCLA. In black and white he hadn’t realized that it was gold. Also, in the portrait, Francis had been sitting up, his head filling the negative space in the gold circle, so that he looked like Jesus from one of those old paintings. In Francis’s current position, he left the work unobscured, the void unfilled, so that the shadow denoted an absence.
Francis barked into the phone. “Some people buy with their eyes, and some people buy with their ears. This guy buys with his ears. And he’s a dead end, a sinkhole. This thing is going to go into his apartment on the Upper West Side and be seen by nobody but his maid, his dog, and his future ex-wife. If we’re lucky. So much shit in storage. You give this guy a good painting, you might as well throw it out the window. No, no, sure, they’re all good. But some are less good than others. Sell him one of those. Ears.” And with that, he hung up.
He looked at Jeff. There was the drooping eyelid. The gaze. The eye. Jeff felt a chill run up his spine. He didn’t dare speak first.
“You’re not an idiot,” Francis said.
“No, sir,” Jeff said.
“I thought you might be,” Francis continued, “with that lost-puppy look on your face. One of those pretty boys we put up front to avoid being accused of only putting pretty girls up there.”
“No, sir,” Jeff repeated, painfully aware that he was currently wearing the lost-puppy look on his face.
“These extra fields,” Francis said, turning his laptop around to face Jeff. “You did this?”
Jeff scanned the screen. It was the database he’d created from the Rolodex. While transcribing the information, he’d found a whole bunch of extra marks, scattered scribbles, codes. Marginalia. Not wanting to lose that data in the transition, he created a few extra fields in the database to contain the information: AlphaNum (for the alphanumeric codes); Artists (for those who had artist names scribbled next to them); and Notes (for anything else).
“Yes, sir,” Jeff said. “I wanted to make sure everything went into the database.”
Francis turned the laptop around again. He pulled a pair of readers off the desk and put them on, settling them on the tip of his nose. He then took a pen from the desk and started chewing on the end.
“Those notes, those codes,” he said. “They’re more important than the phone numbers and addresses. Anyone can find a fucking phone number. That extra information, that is the most important stuff, the fruit of years of cultivation. And you thought to put it into the database. Very clever. Because that information exists only in one other place.” He tapped his temple with the pen. “And there’s no transcribing what’s in here. That goes where I go.”
“And when,” Jeff felt compelled to add.
“When what?”
“When you go.”
Francis looked at him strangely, as if recognizing him for the first time. Jeff wondered if he was remembering the encounter by the hotel elevators. He couldn’t possibly be remembering what happened at the beach, could he?
“Tell me about yourself,” Francis said.
Jeff laid out a few biographical details. Santa Cruz, single mom, UCLA, worked for a startup.
“Young and ambitious,” Francis said wistfully.
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Thing about having a smart kid around,” he said, “they’re a real asset to the business, until they’re not. And when they’re not, it’s because they’re plunging the knife into your back.”
“That’s not what I’m about, I can assure you,” he said.
“Give it time. Meanwhile, keep your eyes and ears open. I might have more work for you. If you can figure out how to wipe that look off your face.”
The meeting was over, such as it was. Jeff thanked Francis and headed for the door. Marcus would be getting impatient. He hated manning the front desk.
“One more thing,” Francis said.
Jeff turned.
“If you break her heart, I’ll destroy you.”
35
“He knew?” I asked. “How did he know?”
“To this day I’m not sure. Someone must have seen us, or heard me talking to her on the phone, or caught sight of one of our emails to each other. And I hadn’t yet learned how information moves in a business like that, a business predicated on knowing things others did not. Whoever tipped off Francis was no doubt rewarded.”
“But how would Francis know whether the information was good?”
“He checked with Chloe first.”
“She didn’t give you a heads-up?”
“He told her that if she did, he would fire me immediately. She explained that to me later. He wanted to keep me in the dark.”
“That’s messed up,” I said, “putting her in that situation.”
“That was Francis, as I was learning.”
“But there was an implied approval too, right? I mean he didn’t say, ‘Don’t date my daughter.’?”
“Had nothing to do with me. He knew what kind of person his daughter was. She wouldn’t kick anyone to the curb on his orders.”
36
At the front desk, Marcus gave him a long, searching look. He wasn’t fired, so he must have been moving up. Jeff gave Marcus a look too. Was he the one who had ratted him out?
From that moment on, their interactions simmered with mutual suspicion. Whatever trust they’d established had been premised on Jeff being a lowly assistant and Marcus the highest power to which he could report.
Word spread quickly. Jeff wasn’t quite sure how. Within a few days, everyone in the gallery knew about him and Chloe. Jeff sensed that he’d risen, that he was no longer someone who could be inconsequentially ignored. He sensed, too, that he was perceived as an opportunist and a carpetbagger.
None of this bothered him particularly deeply, this underlying narrative that he was fucking his way to the top, mainly because, unbeknownst to all of them, he wasn’t angling for a better position. He was more or less devoid of ambition with relation to the gallery, so if he ended up at the top, in his view, it would be purely by happenstance.
37
The Arsenault house, the one they were living in while the Mandeville house was being built, was situated in the grid streets of Santa Monica, north of Montana, where postwar bungalows sat shoulder to shoulder with weathered Spanish colonials, bloated traditionals, Tuscan fantasias, and the occasional Persian palace. It stood out by being modern, or modernish. A small box atop a larger box, rectangular windows gesturing at an international style, it was all light grays and clean lines. Behind it stood an incongruous garage, Spanish-tile roof, old stucco, betraying the house’s heritage as decidedly non-modernist while also presumably sheltering Francis’s new Porsche.
Jeff sat in his car across the street, watching Chloe and her mother through the large picture window. Chloe had invited him to Sunday dinner, telling him that her mother was dying to meet him. He was trying to gather the courage to go inside, even as he knew that his joining the Arsenaults was a foregone conclusion.
He saw no sign of Francis but wished he had, to prepare himself. He was about to step into an utterly foreign environment—Francis’s environment—and subject himself to his scrutiny. How had a string of actions, guileless and improvised, led him here, into the belly of the beast?
He rang the bell. Chloe opened the door. She kissed him and invited him inside, informing him that her father wasn’t home yet. They moved into the kitchen, where Chloe poured him a glass of white wine and introduced him to her mother, first name and last name, Alison Baker. Apparently she’d maintained her professional name since her early art-making days.