Jeff thought of Astrid’s work, the transparencies he’d seen. How could she have believed that she was ready for a show at FAFA? Didn’t she realize she’d be torn apart by reviews? Or was she one of those people who had no capacity for self-awareness, someone so sure of her own success that a no was an affront, if only because it ran counter to what should have been obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes, which was that her work was brilliant? She certainly carried that arrogance with her at dinner, and again when she dropped off the transparencies. He was surprised to hear that she’d crumbled so publicly, but then again, those kinds of people were often more fragile than they seemed. Harder, but more brittle.
“You know,” Jeff said, “if you keep it to yourself, you could prevent Astrid from having any power over the situation.”
“True.”
“Otherwise you’re playing right into her hands.”
Chloe cleared her throat. The line was quiet for a moment. “I wouldn’t be able to face my mom. To face my dad or my mom. If I kept it a secret, I mean. At the very least I have to give my dad the opportunity to defend himself, right? What if she did make the whole thing up?”
“Possible,” Jeff said.
“Wishful thinking, though.”
“You never know,” Jeff said.
“But I do.”
She returned to the idea of keeping the secret. She wouldn’t be able to do it, she was sure. She was incapable of carrying something like that around, something she knew could upend everything, a truth, or a potential truth, that needed, in her opinion, to be out in the world. Like a woodpecker in her mind, tapping at the inside of her skull. She would tell, she had to tell, she would describe the encounter, that was all, nothing about whether she believed it or not.
Jeff asked if she was worried about Francis’s reaction. They both knew how he could be when he was angry.
“I can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know already,” she said. “I’m going to tell my mom.”
49
Chloe arrived on his doorstep early the next morning looking as though she hadn’t slept. She asked Jeff if he would come with her to her parents’ house, to talk to her mom. She needed someone to be there, and she knew that it was Jeff’s day off. He said it was the least he could do, though he dreaded the scene. Together they took the old Volvo into Santa Monica.
Francis had already left for work. At the curb, Chloe asked Jeff if he would mind waiting in the car. She’d realized she didn’t want him to be there when she told her mother, but she wanted him nearby. He tried not to show his relief at being allowed to stay away from the epicenter.
She gathered herself, looked him in the eyes, and said a somewhat formal thank you. Then she was across the street and through the front door.
He waited patiently with the windows rolled down, the car off but the radio on, tuned to 91.5 KUSC, the classical station. He couldn’t see anything through the front window of the house. Not that Alison and Chloe would necessarily have their conversation in the living room, but the sun had made a mirror of the glass.
A gardener’s truck pulled up and parked in front of him, and he watched the gardener bringing the mower out of the back of the truck on little wooden ramps he’d connected to the tailgate. He could smell the gasoline and the dry yard trimmings. The gardener started the mower, and Jeff rolled up his windows.
He tried to imagine what was going on inside the house. Would Alison fly into a rage? Would she pick up the phone and call Francis immediately, to see whether he would confirm or deny what Astrid had said? He couldn’t quite picture it, but to be fair, he’d never seen her presented with devastating news.
The gardener and his coworker finished their rounds, reloaded the truck, and drove off. Jeff lowered the windows again. He started to worry that Chloe had forgotten about him out there, but he knew he couldn’t just drive off. Knocking on the door was the obvious solution, and yet he couldn’t do it. Invading her privacy would be as bad as disappearing on her. But he couldn’t just sit there all day, could he?
For Chloe he would. He leaned his seat back and closed his eyes.
He awoke to the sound of her opening the passenger door. She got in, and he could see by the way she held herself that she wasn’t as agitated as she’d been when they arrived. Her eyes were puffy still, and her hair a mess, but she was no longer in a panic. He put his hand on her leg and she put her hand over it. He asked her how it went.
“She tried to make it about me,” Chloe said.
After Chloe related the story of Astrid’s unhinged confrontation, Alison acted as if the primary injury was to Chloe. As if what had happened was unconnected to herself. She made tea, and asked Chloe if Astrid had hit her or otherwise attacked her physically. She asked Chloe if she felt unsafe at school.
Chloe was incredulous, but this made sense to Jeff. The Alison he knew, the one who made a living feathering other people’s nests, was a caretaker.
Chloe had had to repeat herself to her mother, to bring the subject back around to her father and his infidelity. Her mother said that it was between herself and Francis. Frustrated by her mother’s equanimity, Chloe asked her if she wasn’t angry or hurt or confused by what had happened. Why wasn’t she showing Chloe her emotions? They were both adults, after all.
Her mother replied that Chloe had been subjected to enough already.
Chloe asked if her father had done this before. Her mother repeated that some things were better kept between her and Francis.
This was followed by a stilted conversation about Chloe’s coursework.
Then just before Chloe left, her mother said that she was right. She was an adult, and so she would level with her. Her father had broken promises in the past, and she wasn’t surprised to see it happening again, especially now, considering the Porsche and all that nonsense. It was both expected and unexpected. Her heart hurt, she wouldn’t deny it. But whatever she’d been subjected to paled before the fact that Francis had—even if by accident, even if by proximity—roped Chloe into this mess.
For that she couldn’t forgive him.
50
Chloe decided to stay with Jeff for a little while. She wanted to be closer to her parents’ house if her mother needed her. She was also avoiding USC and any possible encounter with Astrid. She spoke to her mother on the phone every day but didn’t share updates with Jeff. No more disclosures would leak beyond the newly reinforced mother-daughter connection.
At work, Jeff figured that his best course of action was to show up and do the job, stay out of it. The official story was that Francis had had to skip off to New York, to broker a private sale. (When Jeff mentioned this to Chloe, she told him it was bullshit. If her mom had been home alone, didn’t he think she would have been there with her? Her father was definitely still in town, hunkered down, trying to save the marriage. Francis had gone all in. Look, he was no doubt saying, I have dropped everything for you. After a sufficient period of penitence, he must have figured, Alison would absorb the blow and let him back in.) Without Francis around, the office was curiously calm. None of his personal chaos had infected the gallery, unless you counted a bit of graffiti painted on the front glass one night, bunko, in large cursive script, which could have just as easily been the work of a random vandal, someone protesting the excesses of the art world or Beverly Hills in general. After a brief debate as to whether the graffiti constituted an artwork in and of itself, it was cleaned up, none of the gallery’s employees given any reason to think it had anything to do with Francis, at least not in the context of an affair.
Marcus and Andrea made their sales, Fiona did whatever she did with all her records, and Jeff continued his mission to digitize everything. There was no yelling, no drama. Everything ran smoother without Francis there. The staff even developed a sense of camaraderie, almost.
Yet Jeff knew that despite how tempting it might be to imagine a gallery this peaceful, nobody there had the vision, the chutzpah, “it,” to lead. With this crew, FAFA could only follow, probably drift along without Francis for a year, maybe eighteen months, depending on the attrition rate of artists and employees. They’d put up the shows they’d already scheduled, and sell to collectors who already had their eyes on the artists, until, beyond that, it would, like all businesses built around a cult of personality, fade into a shadow of its former self.
51