As for Alison, she couldn’t speak of Francis without her eyes welling up, but from the outside, her life had improved immeasurably. She was free now, independent, and she didn’t shy away from challenge. She inherited the gallery, and, having heard Francis’s monologues about Marcus and Andrea, did not promote either to the director position but rather assumed it herself, quite capably, turning out to have an eye far superior to her husband’s, not to mention a tendency to discover underrepresented women artists, none of whom would have been to her late husband’s prurient tastes. And she displayed more kindness and generosity than she ever had before, as if her marriage to Francis had kept in check her most charitable tendencies.
The Mandeville dream house, the one at which Jeff had first sought Francis, was sold as soon as it was completed.
63
“The gallery didn’t collapse, then.”
“I hadn’t counted on Alison.”
“And now you’re a dealer yourself.”
He nodded. “For a while, things were complicated. Alison and Chloe turned inward, leaned on each other. I didn’t know where I stood in the whole picture. I kept going to work. Chloe and I were still dating, technically. But I kept my distance a little. In the same way that I had looked at everything and felt responsible for it happening when Francis was alive, I now felt responsible for everything happening as a result of his dying on the slopes, because I was convinced—no matter what you say, no matter what I believe now, which is that you’re probably right—I was convinced that I could have saved him. I had done it before, hadn’t I? And so I felt as though every tear that was shed, every memory that was sugarcoated, all of it, stemmed from my decision, a decision I didn’t even remember making as a decision, per se. The funeral, the obituary, the articles—all me. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but it had all gone too far. I wanted to scream: Don’t you remember who he was?”
“Do you think you were trying to diminish the tragic aspect of it all?”
Jeff looked me in the eye. “I tried to keep in mind the dilation idea, that he’d been given extra time, time which, in my opinion, he’d squandered. In his opinion, were he still around to express it, he’d say he took a big bite of the apple while he could.”
“The Porsche.”
“Yes. Astrid. All of it.”
“Do you still think he squandered the dilation?”
He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. His choices make more sense to me now.”
“Do you know what became of Alison and Chloe?’
He laughed, held up his left hand, a platinum band around the ring finger. “It took a good long time for everything to settle down.”
“Wait. You married her?”
“Yep.”
“And FAFA?”
“After seven years with Alison running things, she asked me to take over. We shuttered Beverly Hills, moved operations to the New York space.”
“Francis was right about you.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
I tried to read his face. He wore a curious grin of guileless satisfaction.
He’d dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom. Did he really expect me to believe he’d done so ingenuously, blundering forward with a heart full of the best intentions? I think he did. What was more, in that moment at least, he seemed to believe it himself.
64
An older man in a uniform came over and told us that our crew had arrived and that our plane would be ready to board shortly.
Jeff stood and straightened his jacket. It was remarkable what a wrinkle-free suit, a fancy roll-aboard, and a pair of Lucite frames could do. He didn’t look like a man who had been day-drinking but like someone of taste and refinement, ready to meet clients. I caught an obscure glimpse of myself in the black glass, my lumpy backpack, my cargo pants, my sagging button-up shirt. I needed a hairbrush. I couldn’t see my face so well, but I knew the look I wore. Someone who’s been burning the candle at both ends.
I followed him out of the lounge, gave Saskia a wave, rode the elevator, and followed him to the gate. There it was again, his hair neatly cropped above his collar. As when we had first been walking to those lounge elevators, he didn’t look back once to make sure I was following.
We didn’t stand long at the gate before first class was called to board. He turned to me then, looked me in the eyes with a solemn gaze that melted into something like sadness, and thanked me for listening to his story.
“Now it’s yours. It’s out there. Do with it what you will.”
There it was. He wanted me to write it. I had no intention of doing so.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“You listened so patiently. I suppose I want to know. What do you think?”
“You did what anyone would have done,” I said.
It was the closest thing to a benediction I could offer. The fact that I didn’t think it true didn’t make a difference. He took it in, and it seemed to please him. He shook my hand.
“I’m really glad I ran into you,” he said.
He approached the first-class boarding kiosk, where nobody was waiting, scanned his ticket, and glided down the jetway. He moved with the lightness of someone relieved of a heavy load.
My boarding pass indicated that I would board after three other groups. I joined a clump of people, some pushing through to the front as their groups were called, others standing in the way, a mass of competing needs and desires, individual identities and tastes and sorrows and pleasures, all trying to negotiate the simple act of getting from the terminal to our seats, carry-ons stowed, seat belts buckled, gearing up for whatever awaited us across the ocean.
65
Berlin was a bust. I wasn’t a cult author after all. My German editor, erudite and fatalistic, bought me dinner as consolation. I let him know that I’d blocked out a couple of days for media interviews. He said that he’d be sure to follow up if any materialized.
He was too polite to state the obvious, that I needn’t have come all this way.
I tried to make the best of it. I sleepwalked past the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the Holocaust Memorial, and so on.
At night I lay in bed, jet-lagged, wide awake, and staring at the ceiling of my mediocre lodgings. The lack of demand on my attention created an opening to think about my encounter with Jeff Cook. I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of his face when he’d denied that Francis had been right about him. The smile of the accidental conqueror. Something about it disturbed me, and, even as I tried to put Jeff out of my mind, sent me mentally riffling through the details of his narrative.
Eventually I found myself at the laptop, looking him up, looking up FAFA, looking up Francis Arsenault.
It was all there, just as he’d said it would be, with one exception.
In the earliest reports of Francis’s death, not what ended up running in the New York Times or Der Spiegel, but the local ones from Val d’Isère, Francis Arsenault died not from heart failure, it was written, but from injuries sustained after a collision with another skier.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel would not exist without the efforts and support of:
Jack Livings, Sarah Manguso, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Lauren Wein, Anna Stein, and Chrissy Levinson Wilson. I am eternally grateful to them.