He looked at the transparencies as soon as she was downstairs. The work consisted of a series of six square paintings, large, seventy-two inches by seventy-two inches, each of which was a nude portrait of a thin woman, posed so that her form filled almost the whole canvas. He respected the effort, and the scale, but the works, in transparency form at least, left him cold. Not in technique—Astrid could paint—but in something else, Jeff wasn’t sure how to express it. Clarity of vision. Or impetus. Yes, that was it, he couldn’t figure out the impetus behind the paintings, other than to show off Astrid’s facility for painting.
He delivered the box to Francis’s desk, staring at the nimbus painting on the wall for a moment, the absence of the man. He hadn’t been in there alone before, hadn’t had a reason or excuse, and now he struggled to resist the urge to snoop. What if he were to pull open one of Francis’s desk drawers? What would he find inside? He decided to try one, only one. Pretending (for nobody) that he was making sure the portfolio box was in the right place, he reached down below the surface of the desk and pulled the handle. It was locked.
44
A few days later, Francis called Jeff into his office. Cooped up with Fiona, Jeff hadn’t noticed Francis’s arrival. He’d been in Manhattan for a few days, checking in on his gallery there. Astrid’s transparencies were stacked on the box they’d come in, at one end of Francis’s desk. Jeff glanced at them, and Francis followed his eyes.
“She said she dropped them off with you. Did you get a chance to look at them?”
Jeff shook his head. He knew better than to step into that mess.
“Take a look,” Francis said. “I’d love to hear your thoughts.”
Jeff protested—he didn’t have much of an eye, he told Francis.
“An eye? Bullshit. The only thing you need is the courage of your convictions.”
“But everyone talks about your eye. You talk about your eye.”
“Only because it would be impolite to talk about my balls,” Francis said. “It’s art. I could take anything and pump it up or tear it down.”
Jeff reached for the transparencies. “You want me to pump it up or tear it down?” he asked.
“Just tell me what you think. Does she have it or not?”
Jeff examined the images again, holding the slides up to the light coming through the window. “The bodies are almost geometric,” he said, “and seem confined in the square of the canvas like they’re in a glass cube. It’s claustrophobic. But the skin textures are really complex, they create an opening, something to look at, so that you’re escaping the claustrophobia through them—”
Francis was next to him, looking through the same transparency.
“Remind me to have you write catalogue copy,” he said.
“For Astrid?”
Francis laughed once, almost a cough. “No, no, no. This is student work. Skinny girl Jenny Savilles.”
Another name Jeff didn’t know.
“Astrid can paint,” Francis said, “but her work is not yet her own, if you catch my drift.”
This was what Jeff had sensed the first time he looked at them. He had thought of it as a question of impetus and motivation rather than originality. Nevertheless, he felt buoyed by the idea that he had perceived something in a work of art that fell in line with Francis’s far more educated and experienced view. It was the first inkling that he too might develop an eye, a real eye, not a euphemism for balls, for the ability to push his opinion regardless of the underlying material, but an actual aesthetic sense. Which Francis himself did possess, his self-deprecating comments and domineering tactics aside.
Francis gathered the transparencies and put them back in the box. Replacing the cover, he sighed, and it seemed to Jeff that he was already steeling himself to face Astrid and an inevitably dull and treacherous conversation about her work.
But he hadn’t been called into the office to look at Astrid’s work. Francis wanted Jeff to accompany him to Sotheby’s, down the block, to check on a painting by one of his artists that was coming up for auction. He wanted to know the presale estimate and the prospect for the sale. Did they have any buyers lined up already, et cetera. Jeff asked him how he felt about collectors turning around and auctioning works they bought from his gallery.
Francis declared that he would never sell to that collector again. That said, from time to time, one needed to prime the pump to keep the secondary market moving. The artist had a show coming up in the spring, and a good result at the fall auctions could boost both values and interest.
“What if the work doesn’t sell?” Jeff asked.
Francis took a beat to figure out how to put it. “There are two kinds of idiot in this world, Jeff. Those who hope for the best, and those who prepare for the worst. I am neither.”
“You know it’s going to sell?”
“I like to eliminate uncertainty, let’s put it that way.”
Jeff thought about this all the way to Sotheby’s. He supposed it to mean that Francis had a buyer on his payroll, someone who could make sure the painting was bid up to a certain level, bolstering the artist’s secondary market. But what if that buyer won? Would Francis openly buy back a work by one of his artists? Perhaps he had enlisted one of his collectors. This struck Jeff as a form of insider trading, but he wasn’t sure who the victims were. If the market said the work was worth five million, then it was worth five million. Collectors who then bought work at inflated prices in the spring were likely to want to keep those prices up and would participate in doing so. The only situation in which real fraud would occur, real fraud as opposed to the system as a whole, which struck Jeff as inherently fraudulent, was one in which a market was created out of thin air and then abandoned, with some taking profits and others left holding the bag, as it were. But Francis wouldn’t do that—he was playing the long game.
It wasn’t lost on Jeff that they were walking the same sidewalk he’d once followed Francis down clandestinely. His circumstances were so transformed that he could hardly bring to mind the feverish intensity he’d felt at the sight of Francis walking on his own, dry, alive. It seemed an impossibly long time ago, though it wasn’t, as if a narrow but impassable chasm kept magnifying its impassability by getting deeper and deeper. Still, something of it remained with him, unresolved. He would always, in the context of Francis, remember that none of this would be happening without his having intervened that morning on the beach. What he didn’t know, and couldn’t decide, was where or when or how he might lay claim to that action. For now, he would watch the repercussions unfold, or rather, participate in them, following the new course of his life, charted by an accidental encounter with someone else’s mortality.
Or, he thought, if he possessed the strength to keep his secret forever, he might be able to enjoy the life into which he’d serendipitously slipped, not as reward—he refused to see it in those terms, that way corrosion lay—but as a chain of circumstances arising from his decision—how easy it was to recast it as a decision now, rather than what he’d felt forced to do—his noble decision to come to the aid of a stranger in distress.
Could he set it all aside, the trauma, the confusion, the echoes of his heartbreak over G, and commit to this life? Cling to the old life preserver of everything happens for a reason? Walking down the street toward Sotheby’s, with the shadow of his past tracing the same route, he thought it might be possible.
The auction house’s imposing front desk was manned by staffers in their twenties wearing black suits. They knew Francis by sight. He and Jeff walked straight to the offices. The large space had a surprisingly low ceiling. People tapped away in cubicles, while beyond, others stood at a long table, perusing what looked to be layouts for catalogues. Francis found who he was looking for, a thirtysomething woman with a glimmer of the hunt in her eye, someone who enjoyed a good battle, Jeff sensed, and they made their way into a gallery where works were being hung for a preview event in a week’s time.