Each time she reads this letter, with its collusive flirty tone (so go ahead and call her a fag hag) and its graphic embellishments, she is baffled all over again. She had even begun to fantasize that the Greek vase in his studio might come to roost at the museum. As recently as two weeks ago, she envisioned creating a partial facsimile of his studio as a foyer through which viewers would enter the gallery devoted to his work—like a literal gateway to the man’s imagination. She hadn’t had a chance to mention the idea to Mort—would it have made a difference?
How on earth could Mort have put the destiny of all his work and all his collections—including the drawings that Enrico had so masterfully saved from the swift entropy that dooms most works on paper—in the hands of that caretaker woman? How on earth could she begin to understand what to do with her boss’s brilliant, prolific, and materially fragile legacy? The lawyer Merry had spoken to—Mort’s lawyer—said something about his client’s wish to establish a foundation that would fund a shelter for runaway boys. Forget the why; what, practically speaking, did this mean? That his drawings, manuscripts, and collections would be sold to fund this place? (Well, what else could it mean? Unless, even through the recession that had led to her husband’s layoff and the loss of the insurance that covered in vitro, Mort was a crack day trader. The sale of his snug estate might bring five or six mil, but that was pocket change when you aimed to endow such a thankless if worthy mission.)
She spent most of that phone call in a sweaty, panicked delirium—probably a preview of hot flashes, about which she’s heard plenty of complaints from friends who don’t see them as a minor price to pay for the gift of bearing children. Hot flash or mortification, she ought to have quickly and graciously ended the call, gone off and had a whopper of a drink, a good cry, or both, then lawyered up and called back on speakerphone for details. Such as, was his client in sound mind? (Could you enter dementia that fast? The will had been revised a month after Mort’s cozy letter with the charming bowl of soup.)
Photocopies of every letter in the folder before her, along with every e-mail and faxed scribble that ever passed between Mort and members of the museum staff over the past eight years (nearly the same time Merry spent attempting to get pregnant), are now in the hands of the museum’s board members and lawyers. She feels like a death row prisoner, waiting for the Supreme Court to grant her a stay of execution. Because without the keystone of Mort’s artwork and papers, the new museum, as presented to the donors already on board, is in trouble. For God’s sake, the floor intended to contain the Shine/Lear Collection is probably being girdered off this very minute, halfway across the city.
She looks grimly around her small, windowless office in the building she has regarded as a waystation en route to something sleeker, even modestly grand. Long Island City has grown hipper (and more expensive) around them over the past several years, but even a Frank Gehry or a Santiago Calatrava would be hard-pressed to turn this drafty, monolithic sarcophagus—hemmed in on three sides by taller industrial buildings—into anything with a vision, let alone a view. The new site, airier if not trendier, began as nothing more than a weedy, garbage-strewn acre of Gowanus Canal wasteland where a condemned casket factory had crumbled to the ground, its “vintage” bricks hauled away for salvage. Jonas Hecht, the architect they chose, immediately saw the forlorn setting as a favor from the gods. Unlike a building wedged between two skyscrapers at some imperial Midtown address, this structure would be filled with light and watery gleamings—and there was room to spare for a small parking lot. Good Lord, parking!
Privately, Merry has already fantasized about her view of the canal, possibly even a glimpse of the distant harbor.
It’s driving her crazy that Mort’s gatekeeper won’t return her messages and calls. She has only the office contacts now, because of course Mort’s cell phone is defunct. Why did she never bother to forge a personal connection with Daulair? Because, you fuckup, she tells herself, you never thought you’d need her, not with your “direct line” to the Great Man himself. Sometimes Merry fears that the so-called art world is turning her into a knee-jerk snob. It has already turned her, by necessity, into a social climber.
She will wait to hear what the suits have to say, the board members who have ruthless real-world jobs and salaries to match. And then it’s likely she’ll have to drive all the way to what she’s always thought of as Lear’s Lair in the mosquitoey wilderness beyond the suburbs. If she has to, she will beg.
Before leaving, she puts in her briefcase a photocopy of that magazine profile on which it is rumored a movie’s being based. Well, more than rumored by this point. The actor who signed on to play Lear just won a dozen awards and is now the subject of magazine profiles himself.
How in the world any of this can help her cause, Merry has no idea. But not since her do-or-die last-ditch shot at childbirth-through-chemistry has she felt this desperate or determined. She texts the girl next door to take Linus for an extra loop in the park, since she will be getting home late.
If Linus were a cat, and if she drank Chardonnay and believed in the soul-cleansing powers of yoga, Merry would fulfill every single criteria defining a tiresome urban cliché: the well-educated, well-heeled, well-respected nouvelle spinster. Here she is, thirty-nine years old, her marriage shipwrecked on the shoals of infertility angst, her apartment stripped of rent stabilization (what is stable anymore?), careening perilously toward a size twelve, wondering if it’s time to stop coloring her hair and whether, if she does, she’ll luck into that stately shade of chrome, the one you picture whenever you hear someone—though is it ever a woman?—described as an éminence grise.
She tries, but fails, not to look at the framed sketch on the wall beside her office door, another of Mort’s chummy cartoons. In a speeding car shaped like a snail, with a large Superman S mounted on the roof, two figures lean forward: in profile, Mort and Merry. Their faces, just a few strokes of ink, are gleeful, giddy with speed. They look like a pair of outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde as book nerds. The caption reads M&M in their S Car GO!
Mort had sent it to her after a lunch, two years ago, at which they shared an order of escargots and marveled at how or why people had come to eat these creatures in the first place, let alone regard them as a “delicacy.”
Looking at it now, she realizes, feels almost exactly like looking into Benjamin’s eyes just before they left that conference room after signing the divorce papers to go their separate ways forever. Benjamin had looked away first, quickly, probably dying to get back to the girlfriend he’d found all too quickly after moving out. Merry had to wonder if there had been, to put it discreetly, some “overlap” there.
But, to put it less discreetly, who could really blame him for growing cold toward a woman he must have heard, countless times, burst into tears behind the bathroom door at the sight of her own blood?