Solos (25 page)

“I was always going to plant them,” Marcus said.

“Well, there's a couple dozen in there, Marcus. Labeled. In her beautiful fancy printing. It's going to break your heart.”

It already has. Marcus wants to defend his mother to Hart—
a true innocent
, Tamarind called her—but he knows it's pointless. He also doesn't want to hear Hart's response. Even now that she's dead, when Hart says Summer's name there's always a little sneer behind it, as if he never loved her at all.

Or else can't face it that he did and she's gone.

Or something.

Marcus realizes he doesn't want to figure it out any more. All he feels for his father is a kind of wounded aversion, the same thing he felt when he was ten years old. Now, though, it is overlaid with something resembling pity. “So why did you quit fencing, Dad?”

“Because I'm not really a crook at heart,” Hart says. “At least I don't think I am. Maybe I was for a while. I'll be frank with you, Marcus. I liked the life. The crazy rich guys, the risk—the art, for Christ's sake. I liked the art. And I liked having money.”

“I think probably everybody does.”

Hart looks dubious. “I mean, I
really
liked having money.”

“There's a difference between
liked
and
really liked
?”

“You bet there is. I do not thrive on poverty,” he says in an aggrieved voice, as if it's something he can't help, like an allergy. “I'm a
thing
person. I like
things
. I like
good
things. When I lost the old Volvo in the divorce settlement, I bought myself a Porsche. Used, but still—Jesus, what a car!” Hart looks off into the distance, smiling reminiscently. “Silver-gray 911 Carrera Coupe. And how long did I have it? Exactly two years. Christ. It damn near killed me to sell that sucker. But what the hell.” Hart spreads his hands in a gesture meant to encompass his helplessness in trying to explain why he abandoned the life of crime that enabled him to drive a Porsche for two years. “Things were getting hot. It was a question of survival. I didn't want to end up in jail.”

Marcus is reminded of the scene in murder mysteries where the hero, in the clutches of the killer, gets him to brag about his crimes. “So what did you do next?”

“I had some pretty good money, and so I opened the gallery. A big mistake. The art market was in free fall, but I thought I could beat it. I thought Selma was foolproof. Merlin Wolf. Harold Watkins. You know their stuff? People loved that shit. Blood, gore, internal organs, roadkill. But I made some bad decisions. Maybe I'm not that good a judge of character. Whatever. Anyway, since then, I've been a kind of consultant, handling a guy who specializes in the Fauvists. Dufy, Vlaminck, Derain.”

“A guy who—what? Steals them? You're fencing again?”

For a moment, Hart looks affronted. Then he shakes his head. “No. That's over. These are fakes, basically. For collectors. Not copies. Fakes. Half the time these dingbat collectors know exactly what they're getting, and they don't care. We've done pretty well with the Fauvist guys. You don't want to mess with the really famous names, even in this game. Only a fool would work with Picasso or Matisse. And drawings. Not paintings. Drawings and prints.”

“So what happened?”

“What? Oh. Alex. My artist. The Michelangelo of fakes.”

“Your faux Fauvist.”

“Ha ha! Very good! Well, unfortunately, he's getting married. His girlfriend thinks he's a designer or something. So he had to go get a design job. He works for some magazine, designing their website. And he likes it! Says he's making a lot more money as a Web designer than a real artist. Can you imagine? We made one last deal a couple of months ago, to finance the wedding. Honeymoon in Thailand. The whole bit. We made a killing, actually. That money I gave you was part of my cut. A series of late Dufy drawings.” He almost chuckles. “Very late.”

“And that's it?”

“Yeah, that's it, laddie. The game is over. It's back to the old drawing board. Out to the desert, far from the madding fucking crowd.”

Marcus looks across the table at his father. He has never, really, known what to think of Hart. He wasn't a good father, he was mean to Summer, he was never there when they needed him, and God only knows what happened with Phoebe. What does his father enjoy? What makes him happy? He realizes with a jolt that, after this morning, he may never see Hart again, and he has no idea how he feels about this possibility. Marcus takes another sip of his coffee, lets a few more seconds go by, and then he says, “Emily's giving you half.”

“Come again?”

“She's in the process of selling the paintings, and she thinks you're entitled to half—morally, not legally. She says Joe would have wanted you to have it. You wouldn't believe how many people have tried to talk her out of it. Lawyers, friends, relatives. But she insists. Fifty-fifty, Pop, right down the middle.”

“You're fucking with me.”

“I am not fucking with you.”

Hart looks at Marcus for a long time, then transfers his gaze back to the window. In the harsh, wintry light, his father seems old again, tired, broken, and Marcus wonders if he is entirely well. The bags under his eyes make him look degenerate but also infinitely sorrowful. Slowly, Hart reaches into his pocket, brings out a grimy handkerchief, blows his nose, and slowly, as if he's an action toy that needs new batteries, puts the handkerchief back. Then he sighs and says, “Jesus.”

“It's going to be a lot of money.”

“Who's handling it?”

“A gallery on Madison. A place that specializes in twentieth-century Eastern European art.”

“They think they can sell the stuff?”

“Are you serious? They're going crazy.”

“It's the Polacks, right?”

“Partly. Not entirely. The Polish angle is driving up the value, of course, but the paintings are pretty valuable commodities in their own right. I think it's pretty generally accepted that Whack was a modern master.”

Hart shows a canine again, the old familiar sneer. “Where did you learn to talk the talk? All of a sudden the kid's an expert.” His teeth are so stained by years of cigarettes and coffee that they are almost beautiful—striated in ivory and ocher, like some semiprecious stone. Marcus has the feeling that his father could use the services of both Dr. Demand and Dr. Wrzeszczynski.

“I've spent some time with this gallery guy. Emily did the negotiating, but I went with her.”

“What? Negotiating?”

“Yeah. She was pretty cool. She's into it.”

“Emily? Jesus.” Hart lapses back into his melancholy staring, then rouses himself. “So who's the guy?”

“Mr. Ptak. Charles Ptak. He'll be getting in touch. There's some stuff you need to sign. He'll tell you all about it.”

Hart puts his elbows on the table and sinks his head into his hands. “There was a thing in
Art News
a couple of months ago. Little bitty two paragraphs, about how he's hot in Poland, and there are only a dozen or so known paintings.”

“Now there's over seventy.”

“Plus those self-portraits.”

“And some notebooks.”

“I forgot about the notebooks.” He lets out another sigh. “We grew up together, you know. In Wisconsin. Me and Joe Wakowski.”

“He was gassed in Poland.”

“Yeah.” Hart looks up at Marcus again. “He wasn't even eighteen when he went over there. It was some kind of poison gas, when he was rioting against the Commies in Warsaw. When he got back, he was sick. Nobody knew what it was—just me, I think. I don't think he had any family left in the states. And he never told Emily. He hated pity. Hated people fussing over him. He always tried to pretend he was okay. He used to ride his bike around the neighborhood. He'd bike up to Greenpoint for pierogies and borscht—I think it was the only food he could keep down. Every time he sold a painting, he sent most of the money to some second cousin of his in Poland. After a while, though, he didn't want to sell them. Didn't have the energy or something, I don't know. Lost interest. He just got sicker and sicker. But he kept painting. Those strange still lifes. I always liked them. I thought they were great. But hardly anybody else did.” Hart shakes his head and takes a sip of his coffee. “Shit. I wish he was alive to see this money. He was my best friend.”

“I know.”
Your only friend
, Marcus thinks, and wonders why Joe had liked Hart. Maybe the same reason Emily did, whatever that was.

“So—let me get this straight. She's selling the paintings.”

“There's going to be a small exhibit after Christmas. A dozen of the paintings, to whet the appetite. That was Emily's idea, actually, but Ptak really went for it. Then, probably in the spring, a bigger one. I'd say by summertime you'll have some real cash.”

“Real cash. What does that mean?”

“Talk to Ptak. What about this guy in Tucson? Can he wait a few months?”

“I don't know. I'll call him,” Hart says, but he is clearly thinking about something else, frowning, pursing his lips, tapping his fingers on the table.

Marcus wonders why these things are the traditional signs of impatient thought. In more primitive periods of human existence, were they warnings to an enemy that those fingers might pick up a rock or a club? That those eyes were narrowed in order to focus in on someone's jugular?

“Hey, Marcus?” Hart says finally, and his tone is slightly belligerent. “Let me ask you a question. Were you one of the people who tried to talk her out of it?”

“No.” Marcus is surprised that his father cares. He is also pretty certain that, if he had told Emily about Hart's evil intentions toward her, she wouldn't have changed her mind. She would have laughed and said that was ridiculous. “I agreed with her,” he says. “That Joe would have wanted it.”

“Do you get a cut or anything?”

“No.”

Hart sighs. “Then here. Take this.” He picks up the stack of money and counts out some bills. A woman at the next table glances over at them, wide-eyed. “Take half. And if I really do get some money out of this, I'll send you a check.”

“You don't have to do that, Dad.” Marcus takes the cash and stows it in his shirt pocket. He looks at the woman, and her gaze falls quickly back to her laptop.

“How is she, anyway?”

“Emily?”

“Yeah. She doing okay?”

“She is now. She was having a pretty tough time until this came along.”

“Hah. Well.” Marcus waits for more questions. He is reluctant to tell Hart anything much about Emily: The image has never left him of the innocent princess and the ravening beast. But Hart only says, “I'm glad it's working out for her,” and after another moment, “Tell her I said that. Okay?”

“Sure,” Marcus lies.

They sit for another minute in silence. Marcus can feel the lump of bills against his heart. For the second time since that fateful morning when Hart told him to keep the change from the ten, his father has given him money, out of sheer niceness, no other reason—well, niceness and guilt, most likely. Still, it's a gesture Marcus appreciates. Suddenly he remembers that he has a dog at home who needs to be taken out, and he gets up and puts on his coat. “I gotta go.”

“What?”

“I've got to get home.”

“Hey, you don't have a piece of gum, do you, Marcus?”

“No.”

“I'm trying to give up smoking.”

“Oh. Good. That's great.” Marcus sticks out his hand. “Well. Good luck, Dad. With everything.”

“Thank you, son.”

Marcus is tempted to tell his father he's leaving town, going back to the precise spot Hart advised him to get out of, when he has a sudden alarming premonition of Hart turning up on the doorstep, just as he used to, and so he keeps his mouth shut. What's the point? They shake hands. He half-expects his father to say something else, but Hart is still Hart and he doesn't, and finally Marcus goes out into the cold.

On his way to the subway, he looks back.

Through the window he can see his father, still sitting at the table, slowly dragging out his handkerchief, and slowly blowing his nose.

17

Mix a maxim

“The heel is a nice height,” says the saleswoman. “Very becoming to your slender foot.”

Emily is in a store on Bleecker Street trying to decide between the red shoes with black trim and the black shoes with red trim. The shoes cost more than she has spent on clothes in the last five years, and she wants both pairs.
Of course, the saleswoman would say that to anyone
.… On the other hand, never have her feet—which though long are indeed slender—looked more fetching.

She puts a red and black shoe on her left foot and a black and red shoe on her right. If the next person who comes in the door is a man, the left foot will win, if it's a woman, the right. If it's a transvestite, she gets to buy both. If it's a nun, she can't have either.

No one comes in.

Emily walks awkwardly around the store admiring her mismatched feet in various mirrors. Besides the shoes, she is wearing her old green jacket over her red sweater and jeans. The shoes make her clothes look cheesy. She has nothing that could possibly live up to these shoes, which she intends to wear on Thanksgiving, three days away. She will have to go to trendy boutiques in SoHo and discount outlets on Sixth Avenue and vast department stores and boring chains. She will have to buy a black silk dress, or satin pants, or a white cashmere sweater like Anstice's.

Then she will need stockings or something. Tights? A coat. Gloves. Hat? Two hats? A bracelet? An ankle bracelet? A nose ring? A feather boa? A studded leather bustier? A mink coat? A diamond tiara?

She wonders where it will all end.

“How are you doing? Are they comfortable?”