by Adam Mitzner
“I think you know that statement is the verbal equivalent of a shrug. I’m asking you to talk to me, Owen. Here’s the thing, and I’m not under any illusion that you’re going to believe any of it, but I swear to you that what I’m about to say is the one hundred percent God’s honest truth. In your life, you’ll meet lots of people. Some you’ll like. Some you’ll love. Some will like you. If you’re lucky, some will love you. But no one is going to love you the way your mom and I do. And that’s not bragging. It’s just . . . a fact, is all. Everyone else you ever meet, their love for you is conditional. And by that I mean you could do something to make them stop loving you, or you could just fall out of love with them, or vice versa. I guess your mom and I are Exhibit A on that one. But it doesn’t work that way with your children. There is nothing—and I mean nothing—that you could ever do that would change the way your mom and I feel about you.”
He had composed this little speech while in the Sloan Kettering waiting room. It had come out even better than it sounded in his head. So much so that Wayne’s only regret was that Jessica hadn’t been present to witness it.
“Why are you telling me this, Dad? Did the doctor say something?”
Wayne had intended this pep talk to cause his son to trust him more. But like so many things he did these days, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.
“No. Nothing like that,” he said, backpedaling. “What I’m trying to say is that you should know that you can always tell your mom and me the truth. Because there’s nothing you’re going to say to us that’ll change the way we feel about you. So, long story short, talk to me, Owen. I won’t judge. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll come up with something helpful. Or, even if I don’t, you’ll surprise yourself and feel better just for sharing.”
If Owen was moved by his father’s sentiments, he hid it well. “Thanks for saying all of that, Dad. I just . . . I really don’t have much to say about it. Honest. I’m bummed about missing school. Senior year and all, especially because I had a real shot at being first violin. But in the big scheme of things, that stuff isn’t important. What matters is that I get accepted into the treatment, and they find a donor, and all the rest. I figure that’s all going to happen because, you know, there’s no real benefit to thinking about the worst-case scenario all the time. So, I might as well have a positive attitude, right? And if all goes well, then, like the doctor said, it’ll suck for a while, and then I’ll be okay.”
Wayne stared hard at his son, trying to comprehend the jumble of contradictions that could reside in a seventeen-year-old mind. Owen rarely displayed any emotion, giving off the vibe that he didn’t care much about anything. But all it took was listening to him play the violin for two minutes to realize that wasn’t true. With a bow in his hand, Owen gave voice to feelings more deeply held than Wayne imagined possible. Last year, when Owen was rehearsing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for hours on end, all he could think about was that no one could play it like Owen did without fully experiencing the range of emotion those pieces called for—joy, sadness, anger, love.
Yet, away from the concert stage, Owen ran on a completely even keel. Today was a perfect example: his calm, considered reaction to what would be the scariest time in most people’s lives.
In this way, Wayne understood his son perfectly. For Owen had undoubtedly learned from him how to hide his anger from the world.
Jessica’s mother had been a high school teacher. She always said she taught history, but the curriculum called it social studies and included things like geography and basic economics. She claimed that as a girl, she had wanted to be a lawyer or a college professor but had to put aside such ambitions because those opportunities were not available to girls of her generation. Jessica knew that wasn’t entirely true. Two of the women on the Supreme Court were younger than Linda Terry, as had been many of Jessica’s college professors.
But in her mother’s telling of her life, her options were limited by her gender, the times in which she lived, and her own mother’s low expectations. “My mother—your grandmother—made it very clear to me that finding a husband was my only real job,” she’d told Jessica more times than she could count. “Anything else I wanted to do ended when I got married, which meant pursuing something that required a long-term payoff made no sense. Thank God women today have more choices.”
Many of Jessica’s classmates ended up in high-powered fields, but those women weren’t reared by Linda Terry. While Jessica’s mother claimed to be an equal-rights disciple, the subtext of everything she had ever told Jessica was no different from the pearls of wisdom her own mother had imparted a generation earlier—that you were nothing unless you had a man. Over and over again, Linda Terry made clear to her daughter that women were divided into two categories: those who were able to attract men—life’s winners—and those who, in her mother’s words, “never had a date in their lives.”
Jessica had been determined not to be a loser in her mother’s eyes. So she made sure that she had plenty of boyfriends. Even if it required she barely eat a meal for ten years after she got her period. Even if it meant not pursuing a JD or MD or PhD because by the time she got out of school, she’d be too old to attract a man.
Wayne was the first of those men who asked her to marry him. She said yes because she feared that there would never be another one who would ask.
Linda Terry died two years before Jessica’s marriage did. Wayne always said the two were connected. That so long as her mother was alive, Jessica would have stayed married, but the moment she didn’t have to face Linda’s disapproval, she could have the rebellious adolescence she’d denied herself back when it was age appropriate.
Jessica knew that explanation was too pat. Her mother had died six months after Owen’s diagnosis, and Jessica saw the potential loss of her son as a far greater proximate cause of her need to rethink her life choices than the subsequent death of her mother.
But this much was true: Jessica had wanted a brand-new life. Not just wanted. Had to have.
The first step in that renaissance was to be with a man she loved and not the one she had accepted out of fear that no one else would have her. And then, while that thought was beginning to take root, fate handed her James.
In the last months that she was living with Wayne, when her affair with James was all-consuming, Jessica sometimes heard her mother’s voice in her head, trying to talk her out of the path she had begun to think of as inevitable.
Think about Owen, Linda Terry’s voice would say.
“I am, Mom,” Jessica would say back. “This will be good for him too.”
You know that’s not true, her mother would answer. Divorce is never good for kids. It teaches them that love can end, and they fear that might be true of your love for them too. Why do you think I stayed with your father all those years?
“Hopefully, by leaving an unhappy marriage, I’ll teach Owen that he has the power to make himself happy. To show him what a loving marriage looks like,” she answered.
Jessica never for a second believed that she’d persuaded her mother in this imaginary debate. But the rightness of leaving Wayne for James was reinforced every time she saw James, including early that afternoon when she paid him a visit at his office.
“What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “And your timing is impeccable. My last appointment just left, and it ended very well.”
“Is that so? Well, I was, as they say, in the neighborhood. I thought we could get lunch. And now there seems to be something to celebrate.”
“Sadly, I’m not hungry,” he said with a smile that told her exactly what he meant.
“Then how will we ever fill the time?”
8
Allison Longley called James later that afternoon, while he and Jessica were in flagrante delicto in the bedroom in James’s office. He phoned her back after Jessica had left and he’d showered.
“I think there are some real opportunities for you and me,” Allison said, sounding much more like
a character out of a 1940s femme fatale movie than an art expert.
“Is that right?”
“I have clients. You have access to Pollocks. What’s the phrase? This sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Like I told you, your client bought our entire inventory of the Pollocks.”
She laughed. “Yes. That’s what you told me. What kind of an art person would I be if I believed that? But, look, if you have the other Pollocks earmarked for other buyers, then there’s no need for me to take you for drinks so we can talk further about making some serious money.”
He paused for a moment. Jessica was cooking tonight. She wanted to have a family dinner to cheer Owen up. Still, landing this business opportunity would be far better for Owen than lasagna.
“I never turn down an offer to make serious money,” he said at last.
“Good. Meet me at the Flora Bar. Let’s say six.”
He was about to hang up when she made a second request. “Just you, James. Don’t bring your partner.”
The Flora Bar was the newest place to be seen among the players in the New York City art market. It was located in the basement of the Met Breuer. Happy hour began at 5:30 p.m., and everyone certainly looked happy when James walked in. He immediately saw Allison at a table in the corner, a drink in her hand.
She had changed her outfit. This morning she’d worn a suit—gray flannel, if James recalled correctly. There was nothing remotely businesslike about this evening’s ensemble, however. Black, tight, and low cut.
“Twice in one day,” James said as he approached.
“I’m tempted to say, ‘That’s what she said,’ but I won’t.”
“But you just did.”
She laughed. “Touché.”
A waiter was on them fast. “Can I get you something from the bar?”
“Jack Daniel’s, neat,” he said.
As soon as the waiter left to fetch his drink, James said, “I trust that Noah’s over the moon with his new acquisition.”
“He is. Not every day you have an original Jackson Pollock to call your very own.”
“How’d you two meet, anyway? Last time I dealt with Noah it was . . . I don’t know, a year, maybe two years ago. I sold him a very nice Miró. I remember he said it reminded him of his dog.”
“Yes, that about sums up Noah’s art expertise right there.”
James took note that she had not answered his question about how they’d met. That likely meant that they had been at one time lovers, or still were.
The waiter returned with James’s whiskey.
“To Jackson Pollock,” he said, raising his glass.
“And to making money,” she answered before clinking.
“You’re quite direct and more than a little mercenary,” James said. “Most of the art dealers I encounter like to talk about the beauty of the pieces before getting to the real reason we’re meeting.”
“Well, you should learn this about me right now: I’m not a beat-around-the-bush kind of girl. I tell it straight. And when I want something, I go straight for it. No hesitation.”
It was becoming readily apparent to James that the Pollocks weren’t the only thing that Allison Longley wanted out of this meeting. “Cheers to that,” he said, and they both took another swig.
She was nearly finished with her drink. “Catch up, will ya?” she joked. “I never talk business until the second drink.”
She flashed a temptress’s smile if ever James had seen one. Openmouthed and inviting, with a subtle show of tongue between the teeth.
“Then you’re going to have to make small talk because I never rush a glass of whiskey.”
“Challenge accepted. Let’s start with you. I see you’re married,” she said, looking down at his wedding band.
“Yes. Just celebrated my one-year anniversary last week, in fact.”
“So does that mean that there are no children yet?”
“I have a seventeen-year-old stepson.”
“You’re already surprising me. Why did I think your wife would be in her twenties?”
He laughed. “Because you’re apparently the type of woman who jumps to unfounded conclusions about men. And you? I don’t see a ring on your finger.”
“And you never will. I’m not the marrying kind. But don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against married men. In fact—”
“Some of your best friends are married men?”
She laughed. James finished his drink. She called the waiter over and asked for two more.
Allison segued to business as soon as the second round arrived. She said that she had other buyers interested in paying top dollar for an original Pollock like the one they’d just sold Noah Reiss and pressed James about how many he could get his hands on. James did his best to be nonresponsive without seeming evasive, but he suspected that Allison saw through that act.
“How’d you get them?” she asked.
“I told you at the meeting. Our client had a relationship with Lee Krasner before she died.”
“I know that’s what you told me. But who is this mystery lover of the now more-than-thirty-years-deceased Lee Krasner?”
“I told you that too. His name is Anonymous.”
“Strange that so many sellers of high-priced art were named the same thing by their parents, isn’t it?”
“No odder than every butler being named Jeeves,” James said with a sly smile.
She touched his hand. “Funny. You’re very funny, you know that?”
“I have my moments.”
“Moments,” she said, as she finally removed her hand from atop his. “That’s what life is really comprised of, isn’t it? These spectacular moments without which the rest of it would be completely unbearable.”
“You mean like selling a Pollock?”
“No. That is entirely not what I mean.”
A long silence followed. James could see where this was going. Before Jessica, he’d closed many a high-priced deal not with a handshake but with intercourse.
“Here’s the thing, James. I’ll wager you cannot show me another Pollock this evening.”
She looked at him hard. A challenge in her eyes.
“What are the terms?”
“Whatever you want them to be.”
James hesitated for a moment, as if considering whether to take that bet. The truth was, he was already all in.
Haley still had a key to James’s office. It had been his home back when they’d met until after they’d wedded, at which time he’d moved into her place. When they got divorced, James moved into the loft, and likely had forgotten that he’d ever given Haley a key to the office because, if he had remembered, he would have certainly changed the locks.
She didn’t use the key very often. Maybe once a month. Okay, sometimes twice. But she knew that frequency was hardly the issue. That was why it was her secret. She hadn’t even told Dr. Rubenstein about it.
She had googled “is it breaking and entering if you have a key,” and the unequivocal answer was yes. No loophole. If your presence was not permitted—and hers was certainly not—then it was illegal to enter. A criminal act, in fact. Although whether it was the misdemeanor of criminal trespass or the felony of burglary depended on whether she intended to commit a crime, which was never clear, even in her own mind.
She took precautions to avoid detection, of course. She only ever entered after James left for the day. Even then, she waited at least thirty minutes in case he had forgotten something and decided to double back. And her visits were usually brief. She’d use the flashlight in her phone to see what was on James’s desk. Sometimes, if he hadn’t logged off his computer, she’d read his emails, hoping to see evidence of a fight with Jessica, or better yet, proof he was cheating on her. So far, at least, she hadn’t. To the contrary, the emails between them were so saccharine they made her want to vomit. How much they missed each other. Or lamer, what kind of wild sex they were planning.
Today she was look
ing for evidence that whatever deal James and Reid were cooking up was illegal. Unfortunately, James’s computer was locked. She wondered if he had done that because he and Reid were engaged in something shady.
She moved straight to the credenza. If James was hiding something, it would be there.
It too was locked. Normally it was not. To Haley, that was tantamount to a smoking gun. James was definitely hiding something.
Haley doubted that she’d find any answers in the bedroom, but now that she was here, she couldn’t resist entering the inner sanctum. It was pitch dark, but she didn’t dare risk turning on the light. Instead, she positioned the flashlight on her phone to guide her.
That was when Haley heard the most frightening sound of her life.
The front door was opening.
James had come back.
And he wasn’t alone. A woman’s laugh followed him in.
Not Jessica’s. Haley had that woman’s cackle committed to memory.
Haley hid in the bedroom closet, petrified. What if he found her? Would he prosecute her? Would Jessica insist on it?
But then she realized she had it all backward. Yes, it was perilous, but she was not the one in peril. James was. He would have to explain to Jessica why he was in his office after business hours with another woman.
From her vantage point inside the bedroom closet, Haley could not see what was going on in the main room. She could hear them, though. The sound was garbled, but foreplay always sounds the same, even without the words.
The credenza door clicked open. James reaching for a bottle of wine, perhaps. Then their voices went silent. They must have started kissing.
Haley knew that meant that they’d enter the bedroom shortly. She reached for her phone, ready to video the entire scene through the crack in the closet doors. Even in her wildest fantasies, she hadn’t imagined procuring a sex tape starring James and the woman he was cheating with. She was nearly salivating at the thought of Jessica’s face when she clicked on the email Haley would send her and saw a video of James doing to her what he’d done to Haley.