She was beautiful in an alien way, and her youth must have appealed to Francis. It held no sway over Jeff, who could only imagine her crawling across the bed like a spider, all arms and legs.
More drinks were ordered. Jeff got himself a gin and tonic this time. He observed the conversations quietly, trying to sort out who was who and making sure that his mouth wasn’t hanging open.
It was a long time before Francis acknowledged him, and then only to absentmindedly introduce Jeff as someone new to the gallery, no job title.
Food arrived. Jeff was famished. He ate everything put in front of him, careful not to outpace the other guests. Astrid didn’t touch her food but instead waxed philosophical at Francis and two of the collectors. She was going on and on about process and surfaces and the pitfalls of work that was little more than decorative. Once Jeff sorted out what she was trying to say, he noticed that she talked in circles, and the men listened, letting her go on and on while they admired her. She had been granted entry into this world for the most superficial reasons and was playing the role of someone of substance. As soon as he thought this, he checked himself. What did he know? Maybe she was a brilliant artist. Maybe she wasn’t even Francis’s mistress. In those days he questioned his judgment whenever it veered toward contempt.
The man to his right appeared to be a collector. He acted as though he was being wooed by Francis, then, when that didn’t seem to work, tried to ingratiate himself with him. It was obvious he had a lot of money, he casually dropped the insane numbers he’d spent on blue-chip work, but Francis didn’t want to talk money at that hour, or was playing hard to get. The collector blazed with insecurity, trying to convert his wealth into status, or cachet, or—it saddened Jeff to think of it—friendship.
At the other end of the table, Alex Post was already several drinks in, exchanging profound questions and outrageous statements with his fellow artist, the man in the striped jacket. They put on a bit of theater, Jeff thought, in exchange for meals and drinks and the sale of their work. It didn’t seem to bother them.
To Jeff’s left sat the woman with the cape. She remained quiet. Initially Jeff worried that she wasn’t having a good time, because she didn’t speak, but when he looked more closely, he detected a faint and enduring look of amusement in her eyes. He introduced himself, and they struck up a conversation, a tête-à-tête refuge from the bustling table.
He asked her if she knew Sasha.
She said that besides her husband, he was her favorite of all the FAFA artists.
“I mean, look at him. The coveralls alone,” she said, gesturing at Alex Post.
Jeff nodded to mask his confusion. Later that evening Chloe would explain to him that Sasha was a common Eastern European nickname for Alexander.
The woman asked whether he’d noticed any changes in Francis. He told her he hadn’t been working for him that long, then asked what changes she’d meant.
He’d always been shady in his business dealings, she said, robbing Peter to pay Paul, as they say, but now he was, in her words, openly fucking over his own artists. For one thing, he’d demanded new work from her husband, who was in a delicate phase, an incubatory phase, and when her husband failed to provide the new work, he stole unfinished work from the studio, faked her husband’s signature, and sold it. Her husband didn’t say a thing. How could he? The checks were in the bank. He was being beaten down, her husband was, by Francis, sucked dry too, and soon there would be nothing left.
Jeff looked to the artist in the striped jacket on the other side of the table. Was he the husband? He was laughing at something Alex Post had said, looking happy and full of life.
“Cocaine,” said the woman, following Jeff’s eyes. “Hell of a drug.”
Jeff wondered why Francis had invited him. He wasn’t meeting collectors or catering to the whims of eccentric artists. Rather, he was watching a bunch of old people party and absorbing the gripes of a blocked artist’s wife. He looked to Astrid in the corner, tried to gauge her face. She was no longer monologuing, but smiling vacantly and twitching or wincing, Jeff couldn’t be sure. Francis wore a devilish grin. His hand was under the table.
“I have to hand it to him,” said the artist’s wife, “he’s got chutzpah. Never asks anyone’s permission. An unstoppable object in search of an immovable mass. When he broke his ribs, we dropped off a care package, a little token, and you wouldn’t believe how happy Alison was to see us. She asked us to take him with us. A joke, but you just know she meant it. I didn’t get to see any of the madness firsthand. He was upstairs zonked out on Vicodin, with strict orders not to let anyone ever, ever, ever see him asleep.
“Do you think he knows I’m talking about him right now?” she asked.
Jeff looked toward Francis, who was already looking in his direction. He gave Jeff a blank look, an uninterpretable look, then smiled and asked if he was having a good time.
41
“I said yes, of course I said yes, but honestly I had no idea what kind of time I was having. My head was spinning from the whole thing, from Astrid, from the woman next to me, from the artists, the collectors, from being in that fancy restaurant in the first place. Not to mention the drinks. I tried to take it easy, but they just kept coming. My technique in those days, and it wasn’t a bad one, was to avoid opening my mouth at all when I was drunk. In vino veritas. Don’t say anything, don’t say anything stupid.”
“Wise.”
“Not exactly employing it now,” he said, raising his glass. “But I doubt I’ll ever see you again.”
“Give it another couple of decades,” I said.
A chuckle from him, but nothing in his eyes to signal that he hadn’t meant it seriously. It felt like a curtain had been pulled back, then let fall again.
“You’ve kept all this to yourself for a long time,” I said, breaking the silence.
He nodded.
“And now you’ve chosen to tell me.”
“As I said, seeing you… got the ball rolling.” He searched for the right words. “Look, we’re not getting any younger. That surgery I mentioned. I found myself in a forest dark and all that. Dante.”
“Right,” I said.
“And then there you were. Kismet.”
I must have looked skeptical because he continued.
“I suppose I’ve been feeling a pressure to share my story with another soul for a while now.” He put his hands together, smiled grimly. “Who better than someone who was there at the beginning?”
“You said that before. Only I’m not sure why it matters.”
“You knew me then. That I had a good heart.”
Knew him? It would have been generous to call us acquaintances. I felt like I was being pressed to testify to something I hadn’t actually witnessed.
“At the very least,” he said, “I know that you won’t convert it into something that can be held over me.”
“I’m not planning to blackmail you, if that’s what you mean.”
“People blackmail each other every day. We’re all keepers of each other’s secrets.”
Blackmail was one thing, secrets were another. He knew I was a writer. I was starting to think that that was the point, or had become the point. The self-portrait.
“I can’t make any guarantees,” I said.
“Stick with me here.”
There it was again, that phrase. His insistence on it reminded me of a telemarketer’s assurances that their call is purely informational—while behind every phrase, every detail, lurks the specter of a sales pitch.
“That dinner was a turning point for me,” Jeff said, “because until then I had been accumulating my own data, not coming to any conclusions, holding off on passing judgment. But when that woman spoke to me, it was as if she were giving form to my cloudy, nascent thoughts. She put into words for me what was plainly obvious but which I had not ventured to declare, even to myself. Francis was an asshole.”
“And you gave him new life.”
“That I did,” Jeff said, tossing back the rest of his drink.
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