That weekend Chloe picked up Jeff in her little BMW and took him to check out the progress on the Mandeville house.
The site was protected by a green-fabric-covered chain-link construction fence, but the gate had been chained loosely enough that they were able to slide through. On the other side, Chloe stopped short, looking up at the massive steel beam and wood framing.
“All I can think about is the house that used to be here.”
“You miss it?”
The old house had been cozy, she said, with invisible paths grooved through it from all their years of living there. It had been a home, a real home. Unlike this behemoth, which was little more than an absurd showpiece for her father and blank canvas for her mother.
They entered through a large opening into what would one day be the foyer. Jeff could see through the whole structure to the hillside at the back of the lot.
“It just keeps going,” he said.
“You have no idea.” She led him across the plywood subfloor to a large rectangular hole, where a set of stairs led down into the basement, not a California basement, but a basement as large as the footprint of the entire house, a basement with what must have been ten-foot ceilings. Light shone down from airshafts at the perimeter, reflecting off hundreds of linear feet of cut pine, lending everything a golden-yellow cast.
“Jesus,” he said, his voice echoing off the concrete outer walls.
“My dad’s all about the square footage.”
Chloe led him along what would become the hallway, past what would become the laundry room, the maid’s room, and so on. As Chloe rattled off the rooms, he was struck by a kind of horizontal vertigo, a sense that he was no longer in the same house, on the same street, but in a generic, undefined space, far from anywhere.
They came to a large chamber at the end of the hall.
“This is going to be a movie theater.”
Chloe’s melancholy over the loss of her childhood home had evaporated, replaced with an emergent enthusiasm. Jeff tried to look impressed, but his thoughts, as usual, were with Francis.
“If you had to describe your dad,” he asked, “like what kind of person he is, how would you describe him?”
He didn’t expect much perspective—we don’t get perspective on our own families until very late, if ever—but was hoping that she might shed some light on Francis’s being-in-the-world.
Chloe asked why he’d brought it up.
He told her about the artist’s wife, and how critical of Francis she’d been.
She shrugged it off. “The lady sounds bitter,” she said.
He mentioned the accusation that Francis had stolen unfinished work from the studio and forged the artist’s signature.
Chloe laughed. She agreed that it was “a dick move” but said that she wasn’t surprised in the least.
What about the way he treated his employees, Jeff pointed out, snapping at them and berating them for seemingly no reason?
“He’s a shark,” she said. “They knew what they were getting into.”
Everything he threw in her direction was deflected, but instead of frustrating him, it calmed him.
Only later would he recognize how distracted he’d been by her beauty, by her presence, by the chemicals flowing through his veins as they embraced in the subterranean would-be theater’s half-light.
Only later, too, would he learn that the offenses he’d enumerated were of no import to Chloe, not because she felt one way or another about them, but because they didn’t affect her personally.
43
Thus Jeff drifted toward Chloe’s point of view, that her father was a character, a bit rough around the edges, but not a bad guy, necessarily, and that the artist’s wife had been venting, giving voice to what must have been sour grapes. This was no doubt aided by the positive reinforcement he was getting from Francis, who had pulled him off the front desk and into Fiona’s office, to work on digitizing the gallery, bringing it into the twenty-first century. Francis had pegged Jeff as a computer whiz, and Jeff did little to disabuse him of that notion. His newly acquired knowledge of Microsoft Excel had catapulted him to “database wizard” status, and he set about making himself indispensable.
Fiona—who, per Marcus, knew “where the bodies were buried”—welcomed Jeff into her registrar’s world, where, he discovered, she was already well on the way to digitizing the gallery’s data. A peculiarity in her character made her reluctant to claim credit for the work. She seemed to prefer the perverse joy of being the only one, save Jeff, who knew that she was the motive force behind these digital renovations. Whether this was from a sense of modesty or knowing better than to stick her head up for Francis to whack, Jeff couldn’t tell.
Meanwhile, Francis yelled at Marcus and Andrea whenever he had the chance. Now that Jeff was upstairs, he could hear the content of the yelling. Some of it sounded familiar, a more expletive-filled, splenetic version of the speech Francis had given Jeff. His tirades were usually provoked by a piece of unexpected news. If said news was printed in an art-world publication, and Francis hadn’t already heard about it, he could rant for a solid ten minutes about the incompetence of his employees. Marcus and Andrea would do their fair share of salaaming, and Francis, depleted, would return to his office, shutting the door behind him. Often they wouldn’t even know what he’d gotten riled up about until well afterward.
During these episodes, Fiona would become very quiet, as if by making any noise she might attract Francis’s attention and become the target of his ire. Jeff never heard Francis yell at Fiona.
This was no doubt because of the information she kept under digital and physical lock and key. The more Jeff saw of it, the more he became convinced that the gallery was all but a criminal enterprise. Money sloshed around via wire, and artworks of dubious provenance moved from collector to collector trailed by 1031 like-kind exchange tax forms, deferring taxes even as the work appreciated, or so Jeff understood, when Fiona explained it.
He saw the allegedly unfinished work Francis had pilfered from the artist’s studio, with the allegedly forged signature, sold to a collector, shipped straight to a warehouse. And other work, some of which they didn’t have photos of, and which lay outside what the gallery would show, a group of four Picasso works on paper, a Dürer, a Matisse, moving from hand to hand in an art-world version of musical chairs.
One afternoon, Jeff was scanning photographs into the computer when he saw Astrid in the upstairs hallway, carrying a small portfolio box. He greeted her as an old friend, and she returned his greeting as coolly as expected. In her unidentifiable accent, she said she was dropping off a batch of transparencies for Francis to look over. New work. He wasn’t in the office, Jeff said. Astrid set the portfolio box on the desk and carefully removed from it a smaller archival-type box, about four by five inches. She delivered it to Jeff with both hands. She might as well have been handing over her child. He told her he would make sure Francis got them. She gathered her portfolio and looked at him blankly. He assured her a second time that Francis would get the transparencies the moment he walked into the office. She gave a curt nod and left. When she turned, her wide-necked sweater slid to the side, revealing a scarlet bra strap.