The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  “It’s okay.”

  “I can’t go back in there right now.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  The wind bit again and she trembled. I gave her my coat.

  “Thank you.”

  I nodded.

  “Did you make any new friends?” she asked.

  “We’re all going out tonight after the depressing shit gets finished.” She smiled faintly.

  A silence.

  “I am so tired.” She looked at me. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “After my mother’s funeral I slept for a week. They thought something was wrong with me. They took me to the hospital.”

  “I didn’t know your mother died.”

  I nodded.

  “How old were you?”

  “Five.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what she died of?”

  “Breast cancer.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  I smiled at her. “Is this helping you?”

  “It is, actually.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “All right,” she said, but she didn’t say anything else.

  I said, “Maybe you have narcolepsy.”

  She smiled.

  Silence. The sea fired glittering buckshot.

  She said, “They were up all night with him. The cops. They had a party, like it was his birthday. I know they meant well, but they can go back to work tomorrow. I’m the one that has to deal with it after today.”

  I nodded.

  She pointed to the memorial. “I knew him.”

  “I know.”

  She looked at me.

  “Annie told me,” I said.

  “She did?”

  I nodded.

  “I wish she hadn’t done that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “It is what it is.”

  I said nothing.

  “That’s him.”

  “Ian.”

  She nodded, wiped her face, laughed once. “I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous. As soon as I’ve begun to deal with that… and now this. Come on.” She laughed again. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder, and she leaned against me. We stood there until the wind turned ferocious and her feet began to go numb.

  THE FEW PEOPLE THAT REMAINED were halfway into coats. Jerry Gordan had left, as had Samantha’s sister. Samantha told me to go on upstairs and wait for her there, but before I could, her mother emerged from the kitchen, grinding a dishtowel into a mug.

  “Where did you go?” she asked Samantha.

  “I needed air.”

  “I needed you. Julie had to take Jerry”—she looked at me, then at Samantha, then back at me. She put on a terrible smile. “Hello. Who’re you.”

  “Ethan Muller. I was a friend of Mr. McGrath’s.”

  She snorted. “ ‘Mister’?”

  “Mom.”

  “I don’t think he’s ever been called that.”

  “Mom.”

  “What, sweetheart. What’s the problem.”

  Samantha was staring at the ground, her fists balled.

  “He must have liked when you called him that,” Samantha’s mother said to me. “He must have loved that. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” At first she had seemed merely angry, but now I saw that she was very drunk. Over and over the mug started to slip from her hands, only to be caught at the last moment.

  “What happened to Jerry,” said Samantha.

  “Your sister had to drive him to the emergency room. Don’t look like that, he’s fine. He needs some stitches.”

  “What happened.”

  “One of your father’s shithead friends”—she stopped again, looked at me, seeming to appraise whether what she had to say could harm my tender ears—“what the hey, we’re all friends here, aren’t we.”

  I nodded cautiously.

  “Richard hit him,” she said. “He cold-cocked him in the middle of a toast.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I threw them out, the bunch of fucking apes. They split his lip open. I needed you. Where did you go.”

  “I told you. I went out for a walk.”

  Her mother stared at her, reloading; then she turned abruptly toward me and smiled. “And what’s your story?”

  “I’m an art dealer.”

  “Well la-dee-dah. I didn’t know Lee was into that. Excuse me, Mr. McGrath.”

  “I was helping him look into an old case,” I said.

  That set Samantha’s mother off; she laughed and laughed. “Really,” she said. “Which one would that be.”

  “Mom.”

  “It’s just a question, Samantha.”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Samantha said to me.

  “Actually, I think I’m going to go home—”

  “Oh, Lee. All the way til the end. Oh, Christ, what a joke.”

  “Can I talk to you for a minute, Mom.” Samantha yanked her mother into the kitchen. I vacillated, then went quietly upstairs.

  In all my time at McGrath’s, I’d never been upstairs, and on the second floor I faced two options, a yellow-and-brown master bedroom still filled with signs of illness: a cane, a bucket for vomit. The other room had wood-blocks glued to the door.

  JULIE AND SAMS OOM

  Inside I found a bunk bed with matching comforters, pilled and smelling of dust. Girlish stickers adorned the bedframe. On the floor was a duffel bag emblazoned with the logo of the Queens County District Attorney’s office, half open and spilling out hastily crammed clothes, a stick of deodorant, a running shoe.

  Downstairs I heard yelling.

  I looked through the books on the desk. A Wrinkle in Time. The Catcher in the Rye. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Julie had friendz forever, according to the picture frame. Samantha’s paper number from the 1998 New York City Marathon hung on a corkboard.

  The yelling crescendoed. A door slammed.

  A few minutes later Samantha entered and closed the door behind her.

  “Fucking bitch.” She stood for a moment with her face in her hands. When she looked up again, her expression was sober and purposeful. She stared at a blank spot on the far wall as she unbuttoned her shirt, shook it off, let it fall to the floor. “Help me with this, please,” she said, turning around.

  “DO YOU WANT ME TO GO ON THE TOP BUNK?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I don’t think this was made for someone your size.”

  “Probably not.”

  “How tall are you, anyway?”

  “Six-three.”

  “You must be uncomfortable. I can go up there.”

  “Stay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Good, because I don’t want to go up there. That one’s Julie’s.” A silence. I felt her smile. “How does it feel to take advantage of a vulnerable woman?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “This isn’t really what I do,” she said.

  “Grief makes us do strange things.”

  “In bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “No: in bed. You never played that game?”

  “What game.”

  “The fortune cookie game.”

  “I’m not familiar.”

  “You read your fortune cookie and then you add ‘in bed.’ You’ve never done that?”

  “I think you’re saying that I sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “You did just then.”

  “When.”

  “When you said, ‘Grief makes us do strange things.’ ”

  “It does.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but it’s still silly to talk like that.”

  My first instinct was to be offended, but then I saw how she was smiling and I had to smile, too. For years Marilyn had been telling me that I had to lighten up; how irritated
would she be to learn that all it took was a single goofy look?

  I said, “Your lucky numbers are five, nine, fifteen, twenty-two, and thirty.”

  “In bed.”

  “In bed. I don’t remember the last time I had a fortune cookie.”

  She said, “At my office we get Chinese twice a week. It’s horrible but it’s better than peanut-butter crackers.”

  “I could buy you lunch sometime.”

  “That might be nice.”

  “Well all right.”

  “All right.”

  A silence.

  She said, “But, I mean, really. I’m not used to this.”

  “So you said.”

  “I don’t know what this is.” She turned onto her elbow. “What is it?”

  I said, “I don’t know,” and she burst out laughing.

  “What?”

  “You should have seen the look on your face.”

  “What.”

  “You were like, ‘Oh shit, now she thinks she’s my girlfriend.’” She fell on her back, laughing. “ ‘What have I done!’ ”

  “I didn’t think that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Okay, I believe you. You just had a funny look.”

  I smiled. “If you say so.”

  She finished laughing and wiped her eyes. “I feel better now.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She nodded, then fixed me with a serious look. “I don’t really want to think about this right now. All I want is to not be crying.”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.”

  I nodded again, still unsure of what’d been gotten out of the way. “You and my dad seemed to get along.”

  “I liked him,” I said. “He reminded me of my father, except not an asshole.”

  “He could be an asshole, too.”

  “I’m sure he could.”

  “What’s wrong with your dad?” she asked.

  “A lot of things.”

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “Nope.”

  “All right,” she said. Then she said, “I know who he is, you know.”

  I looked at her.

  “I Googled you. You’re hanging out with my dad, I wanted to make sure you weren’t one of those guys who scams old people.”

  “As far as I could tell, Lee McGrath was not the easily scammed type.”

  “You can never be too careful.”

  “Fine, then, you know who I am.”

  “I know a little bit. Enough not to worry about you going after my dad’s retirement fund.”

  I laughed. “If you think I’m as rich as my father you’re sorely mistaken.”

  “Darn.”

  “What.”

  “I was hoping I’d get, like, a morning-after present in the mail. Like a diamond necklace or something.”

  “I can give you a lithograph.”

  “That’s it. I don’t even get a painting.”

  “For preferred clients only.”

  “Aw,” she said. “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “Please,” she said. “Where do you think I learned it.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry about when I called her a bitch. She’s not.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re all a little on edge right now.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “She was angry that I brought you here.”

  “I can apologize to her, if you’d like.”

  “Are you kidding? Absolutely not.”

  “I will if it’ll help.”

  “She’s not angry at you. She’s angry at me. And, you know, she’s not even angry at me, either. She never drinks. This is the first time I’ve seen her that way in my entire life. She used to hate my father’s drinking.”

  “I didn’t know he drank.”

  “You didn’t know him most of his life.” She sniffled. “He smoked, too. You don’t get esophageal cancer at sixty-one unless you’re trying pretty hard.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll never get them,” she said. “She loved him. I don’t think she ever stopped. You know what she said one time? Julie told me this. My mom was visiting her in Wilmington. They were driving along, and she goes, ‘Other than the fact that Jerry’s a total moron, he’s a good husband.’” She shifted; I felt her smile against my arm. “Can you believe that?”

  “Easily.”

  “I’d get upset except I agree with her.”

  “You and Jerry don’t get along.”

  “We have nothing to say to one another.”

  “So I gathered.”

  She smiled again. “Did Annie tell you that, too?”

  “I figured it out myself. She did tell me about your mom and Jerry.”

  “She really gave you the goods, didn’t she?” She turned over and our faces were close. I brushed the hair out of her eyes. She said, “Anything you don’t know?”

  “Plenty,” I said and kissed her again.

  • 12 •

  And then nothing happened.

  For a week my life became as quiet as it ever had been, pre-Victor Cracke quiet. At the gallery we began hanging a new show. For the most part, the frantic phone calls had tapered off; after a big fair, everyone needs time to recuperate, to make sure they’re still solvent and still care about art. I had lunches and dinners with clients and friends. A totally ordinary, totally empty week, and in trudging through it, McGrath’s void loomed unexpectedly large. I kept picking up the phone to call him and then standing there dumbly, holding the receiver and wondering who was in charge of the case now.

  The answer, of course, was no one. The mystery of Victor Cracke would remain exactly that.

  I had to ask myself if that was such a bad thing. The show had come and gone; the sales had gone through, the checks cleared. I stood very little to gain by asking more questions. It’s true that we are, by design or by fluke, a curious species, and ignorance grates inside us like sand in an oyster. But I had long trained myself to accept and love ambiguity. Why should five boys, four decades dead, matter to me when every day I read about murder, war, global injustice—without being moved to act? Any obligation I felt toward McGrath was strictly my own invention. I had not known the man long enough to feel guilty letting his last wishes go unfulfilled. The sense of loss that overtook me, then, was as surprising as it was overwhelming.

  As I mentioned, my reasons for helping McGrath were purely selfish. So I had told myself every time I got into a car and went to Breezy Point. With him gone, though, I had to admit that I actually missed the old bastard. Going back to work made me realize the degree to which he represented the polar opposite of everyone I normally dealt with. Without pretension, unafraid to admit ignorance or to show his hand when he wanted something. He had never attempted to keep up appearances, even as he fell apart; and in his physical frailty I discerned a profound honesty, verging at times on beauty. He became in my mind a walking work of art, a human Giacometti: sanded down by illness to within an inch of his bare essence, radiance peeking through the cracks.

  And I began to wonder if there hadn’t been something else motivating McGrath, as well. Why had he trusted me to begin with? Surely he had believed I had a vested interest in proving Victor innocent. (If he’d known the truth—that Victor’s popularity had tripled following the rumors—he might have suspected me of bias toward guilt.) By putting off his requests for a copy of the drawings as long as I did, I had made my caginess clear enough. And then—freaking out over the phone, turning up with that letter—I could hardly have seemed rational and levelheaded enough to be of any use. I was going to either conceal or exaggerate.

  Maybe, as Samantha had implied, I was the only person willing to help him.

  Or maybe he liked me, too.

  In any event, the idea that the case would simply return to some slush pile, never to be reso
lved, depressed me immensely. I’ve already mentioned that I hate to fail. You might find that amusing now that you know a little bit more about me and how much my early years consisted of failure. But here’s the thing: I always took my self-debasement very seriously. Once I had committed to becoming a fuckup, I strove to be the best fuckup around: a prince of debauchery. That drive is part of my character, as much a gift from my forebears as my inflated sense of self-worth—one is probably an outgrowth of the other, although I’m not sure which is which—and having reopened the case, I did not want to believe that it had bested me.

  The easiest opening move would have been to call Samantha. But I couldn’t very well do that. The fact that she hadn’t called me I took as a sign that she regretted our night together. Who was I to argue? But that couldn’t stop me from thinking about her. It had been one of the more physically awkward bouts of lovemaking of my life, the bedframe seemingly about to collapse into splinters and the sheets curling off at the corners—and for that, all the more exhilarating.

  All of a sudden my life was back to normal, and the drudgery crushed me. The phone was leaden in my hand; a client in the doorway gave me the beginnings of a headache. My mind wandered, and I found myself unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone hold a sparkling conversation.

  “Ethan.”

  Marilyn put down her cutlery, for her a grave gesture. She had been going on about something someone had done to someone else in Miami, could I believe the audacity. “Can you at least pretend to listen, please.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Where are you? Are you sick?”

  “No.” I paused. “I was thinking about McGrath.”

  Notice that I hadn’t lied. I had merely failed specify which McGrath. “Who? Oh. Your policeman?”

  Of the three or four—or maybe I’m misremembering, maybe it was five or six—digressions I’d taken since Marilyn and I got together, I had never once bragged to her afterward. But I’d also never lied.

  Your policeman.

  I lied, then: I lied with a nod.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s very, very sad. Are you too sad to eat that?”

  It came quickly, then, a stab of hate for her. Many times in the past I had been annoyed with her, but this was different, and I had to excuse myself.

  I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and slapped myself a couple of times. Pay attention. Common courtesy. I resolved to put the McGrath family out of my head and to be civil. And then—not tonight, but in a few days—and in a vague way—I would hint to Marilyn that I’d been with someone else. I didn’t have to say who. She’d be fine. I’d get it off my chest. I’d get over it, and so would she. I dried my hands and returned to the table. Marilyn had paid the check and left.