The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  The most promising lead was the partial fingerprint taken from the inside of the weather journal. At my request, Annie had tried to be as noninvasive as possible when handling the art; and, going slowly, she had page by page examined the journals for usable evidence. The print had also been sent to the FBI, request still pending. As Samantha and Annie talked it once again became clear to me how much of what they did was paperwork, how much time got wasted in leaving messages and sending follow-up e-mails. In that sense, our jobs had a lot in common.

  When Annie left, Samantha and I turned our attention to the group of comparison cases. She had whittled it down to three, one of which left a surviving victim. The two other murders were cold, their evidence in storage, and we planned to get those boxes out of storage once the holiday had passed. The survivor was a boy—a man now, assuming he was still alive— named James Jarvis. At age eleven he had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and choked, and left for dead in a park four miles from Muller Courts; this happened in 1973, six years after the presumed final murder. So far, Samantha had been unable to locate Jarvis, but she was determined to keep trying. When she told me that, she got the little familiar bulge in her jaw.

  It was December 21. We were in a booth at the Chinese restaurant, tired of talking about homicide, content to watch the traffic. It was dark out, the sidewalk slush painted red and green by the stringlights in the window. I never found Queens beautiful, but at that moment it seemed realer than any place I had ever been.

  “ ‘You will endure a great trial,’ ” she read.

  “In bed.”

  “In bed.” She chewed loudly. “Your turn.”

  “ ‘You have many friends.’ ”

  “In bed.”

  “In bed. Please,” I said, holding up a hand, “don’t even bother.”

  She grinned and reached for her wallet.

  “On me,” I said.

  She studied me. “Is this a ruse?”

  “Consider it a gift to the working class.”

  She gave me the finger. But she let me pay.

  Outside we stood shivering and talking about the upcoming holiday. Samantha was headed to Wilmington with her mother and sister and their respective spouses. “I’ll be back on the second,” she said. “Try not to miss me.”

  “I will.”

  “Miss me, or try not to.”

  I shrugged. “You decide.”

  She smiled. “And what are your big plans?”

  “Marilyn’s having a party this Thursday. Yearly thing she does.”

  “That’s the twenty-third,” she said. “I meant Christmas itself.”

  “What about it.”

  “Are you going to be somewhere?”

  “Yes,” I said. “At home.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You can hang on to your condescension just a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why don’t you call your father?” she asked.

  “And do what, exactly.”

  “You could start by saying hello.”

  “That’s it? Say hi?”

  “Well, if that goes okay, you could ask how he’s doing.”

  “I don’t see this scenario playing out in a way that leaves anyone happy.”

  She shrugged.

  “We never celebrated Christmas,” I said. “We never even had a tree. My mother used to give me presents but that was the extent of it.”

  She nodded, although I sensed something vaguely accusatory. I said, “If I called him up and said hi, he’d expect more. He’d start asking why I hadn’t called before. Trust me, you don’t know him.”

  “You’re right, I don’t.”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Why are you doing that.”

  “Doing what.”

  “You’re making me feel guilty for something I haven’t done.”

  “I’m agreeing with you.”

  “You’re disagreeing with me by agreeing.”

  “Will you listen to yourself?” she said.

  I walked her to the subway.

  “Enjoy the canapés,” she said. “I’ll see you next year.”

  Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I remained standing there long after she’d gone.

  TO CALL MARILYN’S ANNUAL WINTER BASH a “holiday party” verges on sacrilege, insofar as that term implies drunken co-workers standing round the punchbowl, fondling one another to the strains of Bing Crosby. The event that takes place at the Wooten Gallery the week before Christmas is more like an opening par excellence. Everyone comes out for it, even when weather makes getting there a misery. Whatever the theme—“Underwater Cowboys” or “Warhol’s Shopping List” or “Yuppies Strike Back”—Marilyn always hires the same band, a thirteen-piece ensemble made up entirely of transvestites whose songbook never deviates from note-perfect Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald covers. They’re called Big and Swingin’.

  Busy as I’d been with the case, I’d forgotten to get my costume. For the life of me I couldn’t find my invitation, which meant that I didn’t know the theme. (I couldn’t very well ask anyone without making it scandalously clear that Marilyn and I weren’t talking, which at that point I still believed was a matter between the two of us.)

  When I arrived at the gallery in a suit, however, I found myself improbably appropriate, wading through a sea of revelers all dressed like members of the newly reelected Bush cabinet. Without a mask, I attracted a lot of attention, as people tried to guess my identity. It’s a real test of one’s patience to listen to someone insist that you look exactly like Donald Rumsfeld.

  “I’m sure he meant that in the nicest way possible,” said Ruby.

  “What way would that be?”

  “He has nice cheekbones,” Nat offered.

  I mingled. Some people asked if I was feeling well; I touched the one remaining Band-Aid on my temple and said, “Minor brain damage.” Other people tried to involve me in conversations about artists and shows that I hadn’t heard of. The pace of the contemporary market is such that you can be away for a little more than a month and find yourself completely out of the loop. I didn’t know what people were talking about and I didn’t care. After two or three minutes of group banter I would find myself drifting, my attention drawn by the surreal spectacle of a kickline consisting of Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney. When I did try to follow along, I could not help but get annoyed. Regardless of who or what was under discussion, the true subject was money.

  “I hear your murderer’s developed a strong following.”

  “How much of that stuff do you have in a vault, Ethan?”

  “More than he’s telling.”

  “Have you sold any more?”

  “Have you sold any more to Hollister?”

  “I heard he unloaded his.”

  “Is that true? Ethan?”

  “You went to the house, didn’t you? I know someone who’s been there, he said the place is too tacky. He hired Jaime Acosta-Blanca to paint all these tacky copies but he gave him seventy percent up front and Jaime ran off with the money to Moscow where’s he defrauding neo-oligarchs.”

  “Who’d he sell to, Ethan?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Ethan, who did Hollister sell to?”

  “Rita said it was Richard Branson.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to get shot into space, Ethan?”

  After two hours Marilyn was still nowhere to be seen. I made my way through white rooms covered in red canvases, white rooms covered with pink canvases, white rooms ready to be filled. As the Wooten Gallery has grown, it has gobbled up its neighbors, left and right and upstairs and downstairs. It takes up nearly a fifth of 567 West Twenty-fifth Street, not to mention the overflow space on Twenty-eighth or the Upper East Side prints gallery. As I fought through a clutch of John Ashcrofts, it struck me that I’d never be as big as Marilyn; even had I the ambition, I lacked the vision.


  I buttonholed one of her many assistants, who, after consulting a series of people on walkie-talkies, returned with the verdict that Marilyn had retired to the fourth floor.

  In the elevator I prepared an apology. My heart wasn’t in it, but it was Christmas.

  Marilyn has two offices, much in the way she has two kitchens: one for the world and one for herself. The big office with the high ceilings and the immaculate desk and the Rothko is downstairs, and she uses it to make deals and to impress her grandeur upon the uninitiated. The real one, with the Post-its and the coffee rings and the corner table mosaicked with slides, is off-limits to all but a few. I didn’t learn of its existence until we’d been dating for a year.

  I found her slumped in her rocking chair, a quaintly mismatched piece of furniture and the only thing she kept when she sold the house in Ironton. Her fingertips dangled near a tumbler of scotch sweating into the rug. The room vibrated with the noise of the band four stories below.

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked. “Everyone’s wondering what happened to you.”

  “That’s funny. Lately people have been asking me the same thing about you.”

  I waited. “Are you going to come downstairs?”

  “I don’t really feel like it.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  I wanted to deliver my apology, but I didn’t feel ready. Instead I knelt by her and put my hand on her arm, as hard as a crowbar. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Marilyn’s beauty had a sharp, almost masculine edge to it, all strong features and sharp angles. She smiled, her breath scalding me.

  “I hate these parties,” she said.

  “Then why do you give them?”

  “Because I have to.” She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. “And because I like them. I just hate them, too.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  She said nothing.

  I went across the room to the mini-fridge and got a bottle of Evian, which I set on the floor near the scotch. She didn’t move.

  “You’re not having fun, are you,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here if you were.”

  I leaned against the edge of the desk. “I’d have more if you came downstairs.”

  “I bet you’re seeing a lot of people.”

  “I am.”

  “People have been asking about you,” she said.

  “You said.”

  “Like you went off to war or something.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Mm.” She sighed, her eyes still closed. “I tell them I don’t know a thing.”

  I said nothing.

  “What else am I supposed to tell them,” she said.

  “You can tell them whatever you want.”

  “They ask me like I should know. They assume I have a direct line to you.”

  “You do.”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do.”

  She nodded. “That’s good.”

  “Of course you do,” I said again, although I don’t know why.

  “Did you have a pleasant stay, living in my house?”

  “You were wonderful,” I said. “You know I can’t thank you enough.”

  “I don’t remember you trying.”

  “If I didn’t say it before, then I’m sorry, and I’ll say it now: thank you.”

  “I shouldn’t need any thanks, but I do.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No,” she said. “I shouldn’t need anything from you. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

  I said, “It’s manners, Marilyn. You’re a hundred percent right.”

  She said nothing.

  She said, “Is it.”

  "Is it what.”

  "Manners.”

  I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Is that how we’re supposed to behave toward one another? Decorously?”

  “I thought so.”

  “I see,” she said. “News to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be polite to each other?”

  “Because,” she said, looking at me, “I love you, you fucking idiot.” She had never told me that before.

  She said, “When people ask me how you are and I can’t say, I am humiliated. But they ask and I’m supposed to know. I have to tell them something. Right?”

  I nodded.

  A silence.

  She said, “You’ll never guess who called me.”

  “Who.”

  “Guess.”

  “Marilyn—”

  “Play along, will you.” The drawl crept into her voice. “Have a little holiday spirit.” Holidee spurrut.

  “Kevin Hollister,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Who.”

  “Guess.”

  “George Bush.”

  She snickered. “Wrong.”

  “Then I give up.”

  “Jocko Steinberger.”

  “He did?”

  She nodded.

  “What for.”

  “He wants me to represent him. He said he doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough personal attention from you.”

  I was stunned. I’d known Jocko since he burst onto the scene as part of a group show organized by the late Leonora Waite. First her artist, then mine, he had always been a stalwart member of the gallery roster. I considered him moody but by no means treacherous, and the fact that he had gone to Marilyn, without speaking to me first, cut deeply. Losing Kristjana had been my doing, and no tragedy, but now I was down two artists in six months, an alarming rate of attrition.

  Marilyn said, “He has new stuff and he wants me to show it.”

  “I hope you told him no,” I said.

  “I did.”

  “Good.”

  “I did,” she said, “but now I think I’m going to tell him yes.”

  A silence.

  “And why’s that.”

  “Because I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of representing him.”

  “Really.”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t you think you should give me the chance to talk it over with him before you make that decision for me?”

  “I didn’t make the decision,” she said. “He did. He approached me, remember.”

  “Tell him to talk it over with me,” I said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Well I’m not doing that.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Marilyn.”

  “What’s the matter with you.”

  “Nothing’s the m—”

  “Bullshit.”

  A silence. My head throbbed.

  “Marilyn—”

  “I haven’t seen you for weeks.”

  I said nothing.

  “Where have you been.”

  "Busy.”

  "With what.”

  “The case.”

  “ ‘The case?’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s that coming.”

  “We’re making progress.”

  “Are you? That’s good. That’s wonderful news. Hooray. Are you going to shoot any guns?”

  “What?”

  “You know,” she said. “Bang bang bang.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “I honestly don’t,” I said, “and if it’s all right with you, I’m not done talking about Jocko yet. Just where do you get off thinking you can—”

  “Oh please,” she said.

  “Answer me, how do you think you—”

  “Stop talking,” she said.

  A silence. I stood up to leave. “Drink some water,” I said. “You’ll have a headache if you don’t.”

  “I know you’re fucking that girl.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “ ‘Excuse me, ’” she mocked. “You heard what I said.”

  “I heard it, but I don’
t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah.”

  “Goodnight, Marilyn.”

  “Don’t you walk out.”

  “I’m not going to stand here and listen to you make a fool of yourself.”

  “You walk out of here and you do not know what I will do.”

  “Please calm down.”

  “Tell me you fucked her.”

  “Who?”

  “Stop that,” she screamed.

  A silence.

  "Tell me.”

  “I fucked her.”

  “Excellent,” she said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  I said nothing.

  “You can’t lie to me. I know. I get reports from the field.”

  “What are you talking about?” Then I said, “Isaac?”

  “So don’t bother.”

  “Jesus Christ, Marilyn.”

  “Don’t act so goddamned entitled,” she said. “That’s your problem. You’re spoiled.”

  “Yes, well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not getting your money’s worth with him. I slept with her once, and that was before any of this got started.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you want, that’s the truth.”

  “You weren’t fucking me,” she said. “You have to be fucking someone.”

  “For God’s sake I was in the hospital.”

  “So what.”

  “So I wasn’t—I’m not going to indulge this.”

  “Tell me you fucked her.”

  “I already—do you have to keep saying that?”

  “What.”

  “ ‘Fuck.’ ”

  She started laughing. “What would you call it?”

  “I call it none of your business.”

  In a single motion she was up out of the chair, tumbler in hand. I ducked and it shattered against the wall, bits of glass and water and scotch spraying across the top of her copy machine.

  “Say that again,” she said. “Tell me it’s none of my business.”

  I stood up slowly, my hands raised. In the carpet was a wet spot where the tumbler had been.

  “When did you fuck her.”

  “What’s the purpose of this.”

  “When.”

  A silence.

  “About two months ago.”

  “When.”

  “I just tol—”

  “Be more specific.”

  “You want the time and date?”