One morning Jeff arrived to a note on his desk. Francis was back. He was in his office already, and he wanted to see Jeff right away.
Jeff walked down the hall, not knowing what to expect.
Francis wore the face of a man who had been begging, every morning, for another day’s stay of execution. Jeff had been correct about Alison’s inflicting as much pain as she could. He wondered what had shifted to bring him back to work. Had she begun to let up, to forgive him?
“Come in,” he said, “and shut the door.”
Jeff sat, waiting, not knowing what he should say or how he should behave.
“As you may know,” Francis said.
Jeff nodded.
“I’ve made a bit of a mess. Nothing terminal.”
That was one way to put it, Jeff thought.
“I love my wife,” Francis said. “I love her deeply. I wouldn’t be the man I am without her.” He shifted in his chair. “That said, were she to leave me, as she has the right to, not to mention the reason, I could bear the absence of her affections.”
This seemed a strange way to frame the situation.
“However,” Francis said, pausing after the word, “the deprivation of filial love I cannot bear.”
It was clear that Francis had thought about what he was going to say ahead of time and that he had been turning that phrase over in his mind, editing it, revising it, compressing it for greatest impact. But to Jeff it sounded abstract to the point of near incoherence. He didn’t say anything.
“Chloe,” Francis clarified.
“Right,” Jeff said.
“I haven’t lost her, have I?”
Jeff felt it wasn’t his place to speak for Chloe, but Francis’s penetrating glare demanded an answer.
“I don’t think so,” Jeff said.
“What you think doesn’t matter,” Francis said. “Alison is on the phone with her every day, God knows what they’re talking about. We’re going to work it out, as far as I can tell, but I can’t tolerate Alison poisoning Chloe against me, if that’s what’s happening on those calls, and why shouldn’t it be? I need to know, definitively. I need you to talk to Chloe and find out where she stands on all of this. Can you do that for me?”
Jeff said he would.
Perceiving that he had found an ally, Francis spoke about his situation more freely.
“Alison blames me for drawing Chloe into this. She has used the word unforgivable. And she has forgiven a lot in the past, I don’t need to get into that. She won’t listen to reason, Jeff. I didn’t involve Chloe. It was a pure accident of fate that that little see-you-next-Tuesday Astrid happened to be getting her MFA at USC—I didn’t seek her out for that, I wasn’t trolling the campus, when I met her I thought she was older, you’ve seen the way she comports herself. And she is older, in my defense, the way Alison goes on you’d think I’d been fucking an undergraduate. In any case, once Astrid and I had established relations, I understood that they might cross paths, so we were exceptionally discreet about our… connection.”
Jeff remembered Francis waiting for the elevators at the hotel, lingerie bag in hand.
“Discreet enough. Did you suspect anything at the Alex Post dinner?”
“I did wonder.”
Francis looked surprised, then collected himself. “But Chloe wasn’t there, was she? Nor was anyone who was likely to tell her, other than you, of course, but you weren’t going to fuck yourself in the ass, were you?”
Jeff shook his head.
“No, you know when to keep your mouth shut,” Francis said. Something in his eyes might have hinted at a deeper significance there, if only for a moment, but Francis quickly returned to the subject at hand. “As far as I was concerned, despite their potential geographical overlap, Chloe and Astrid occupied distinct, hermetically sealed spheres. One always has to expect leakage with these sorts of things—you can’t prevent it. I’ve gotten in trouble before, but at no point did I think Chloe would be involved. I should have been more careful, I know that now, had I thought anything like this might happen, I would have been a thousand times more careful. But how could I have predicted Astrid’s reaction to my not falling all over myself at the sight of her admittedly capable but ultimately shitty paintings? I didn’t tell her no, by the way, if I had given her a definitive no, I might be able to understand her reaction a little bit better. I gave her a not now, a not yet, an I see potential here, a keep going. But she exploded.
“You know what she said? I see what this is really about. Those were her words. As if I were stringing her along, which, I should be crystal clear, I was not. I would have shown her work, eventually. I would have. She would have gotten there, eventually, and I would have shown her work, even if things between us had already ended. I would have.”
He repeated it, not as if trying to convince Jeff but himself.
“One sniff of rejection and that petulant little bitch blew the whole thing up. She decided it would be a good idea to approach my daughter? That is not the behavior of a stable person. How has she gotten this far in life? When I told her I wasn’t going to hang those paintings, she left in a huff, and I thought she would cool down, I thought she was having an emotional moment and would loop back to talk to me later, but instead she got plastered at a party and imploded her career by making what should have been strictly professional, personal.”
Strictly professional. Jeff had to restrain a laugh. Francis was dead serious. In his mind, he and Astrid had been playing by a well-established set of rules. But Astrid had misunderstood, or, frustrated, flipped the table, and she, not the dealer who had dangled a show in front of her in exchange for some pillow time, was to blame.
In the path of this firehose of self-justification, Jeff found himself looking at things from Astrid’s perspective. Even if her behavior had been reprehensible and her methods wackadoodle, Jeff thought, her grievance was legitimate.
52
“So Francis thought you were going to work on his behalf, Chloe assumed you were on her side, and your thoughts were with Astrid?”
“It was complicated,” Jeff said. “My head was spinning. Francis had taken me under his wing. And I knew about the affair already—it had already been incorporated into the portrait of the man I carried around in my head, returning, always returning, to the fact that none of this would have been happening if it weren’t for me. I would have preferred to erase that fact, to deal with everything at face value, but there was no excising it from my thinking, only tolerating its presence, or, I should say, its consistent reappearance.
“But you’re right, I had to ask myself whose side I was on, and it came down to this: I wanted to be on everyone’s side. Or neutral. Switzerland. It was how I thought of myself, as someone who is good and forgives and doesn’t hold grudges and so on. But I couldn’t ignore Chloe’s pain, and so, despite Francis having been very generous with me, my alignment naturally tilted toward her and, by extension, toward Alison.
“Nevertheless, Francis saw me as an ally, or, at the very least, a go-between, a connection to Chloe, who was consistently refusing to take his calls. For her part, she didn’t care for the arrangement, I couldn’t blame her, and she wouldn’t talk about Francis with me at all. I promised him that progress was being made.”
“You lied to him?”
Jeff put his hands up. “I presented him with an interpretation of what I observed, highlighting certain aspects and leaving out others. Which is how, when he broached the idea of a family ski trip, I told him I was sure Chloe would be game.”
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