SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  I went back to the desk and called Angela on her cell phone to let her know where to find us. Her taxi pulled up to the gallery a few minutes later. I walked Melissa to the Greene Street entrance and watched her cross the few steps of sidewalk toward the open door of the cab, the sun bright on her red-and-white togs.

  From inside the yellow sedan, Angela waved and called, “Thanks so much, Jack.”

  As I headed toward the back of the gallery again, I saw Laura peering at me from behind the reception counter. She shook her head slowly.

  “Very touching,” she said.

  “You’re not exactly the maternal type, are you, Laura?”

  “Me? No. I’ve always thought of children as nature’s way of telling you to stop having sex.” She held up a sheet of slides and picked two. “I’m not ready for that yet. How about you?”

  “I’ve never known what I’m ready for.”

  Turning, I glanced out again through the glass door and saw Melissa, safely strapped in, gaze back at me for a lingering moment. When our eyes met, she stuck out her tongue. Then abruptly, as the sunlight flared once on her blond hair, the taxi lurched forward and was gone.

  20

  “Come on, Jack,” Hogan said the next day over a drink at MercBar. “Help me out.”

  We were sitting in a corner near the room divider made of woven deer antlers. The dark space, lit by a glowing kayak suspended over the bar, was packed with lounge cruisers having their first drinks and plotting their night. I remembered the place fondly, from my own predatory times.

  “Use your annual junket, just this once,” Hogan prodded, “for something other than just harvesting money and getting laid.”

  “Why,” I asked, “should I take financial advice from a guy whose annual income wouldn’t pay my dry cleaning bills?”

  “Yeah, laugh. But if I were you, buddy, if I had no scruples detectable to the naked eye, I’d take this chance to do some good.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like finding out all you can about this dreamboat Paul Morse. What do you know?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “He performs once in a while in rat-hole galleries and warehouse spaces—in Dumbo or wherever. He shoots video constantly. Some of the footage he airs on late-night cable TV. No one really likes him. Girls think he’s hot.”

  “And not liking him doesn’t put them off?”

  “Not in the short run, which is probably all Morse cares about.”

  “That’s a break for him. Especially given the local consensus. Everyone I talked to at Amanda’s memorial said he’s a slimeball.”

  “You can’t please everyone.”

  “Seems like you’d have to go some, though, to earn a sleazy reputation in this SoHo crowd of yours. You’d have to work pretty hard.”

  “Unless it comes naturally.”

  “Anyway, it’s your call. Just ask around on your travels this summer. Or would you rather see Philip go down for murder?”

  Hogan knew the answer to that. We finished our drinks and wished each other luck.

  Little did I guess that the key to the case, the whole fatal charade, would come to me in Switzerland—from my own dear gallery director. I might have known. Nothing happens in the art world that Laura doesn’t hear about quickly. Women trust her, and men just want to keep talking to stay in her presence.

  The second week of June, we went to do the Basel art fair. Laura, arriving first, oversaw the installation of our booth—a double space in a premium center-aisle spot—while I trailed by a couple days. My first night in town, we attended a reception and then had dinner with some dismal European collectors. Afterwards, Laura and I adjourned, alone, to a cocktail lounge.

  I looked around at the plush seating groups and the knee-high little tables, each with a candle encased in red glass. Behind the bar was a mirrored wall lined with shelves holding a hierarchy of bottles. The barman was washing glasses, wiping each slowly with a white cotton cloth. I felt oddly at home. It was one of those nameless lounges in one of those placeless hotels. A Michael Bolton tune played on the sound system, mercifully subdued. I had to remind myself what country we were in—not that it mattered much really.

  “What do you know about Amanda’s boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Paul Morse? Just enough to be disgusted.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He wears those awful three-quarters-length pants. And a baseball cap, backwards.”

  “Anything more serious?”

  “Ask your Icelandic artist friend, the one with the cute little daughter.”

  “The Viking? Don’t tell me Paul acted funny with his little girl.”

  “All I saw was a grown man flirting with a child.” Laura paused. “Nauseating.”

  “Maybe they were just kidding around.”

  “Your Viking didn’t think so. Paul was making a video of his Madison Square Park project. Little Anna got a big part in it.”

  “Anything wrong with that?”

  “It’s the way Paul treated her. Like the whole thing was a date. Fortunately, the Viking is a good father—in his big awkward way. He stayed close. If things had gone any further, I don’t think Paul Morse would still be so pretty.”

  As I listened, something stirred in me like a sickness taking hold. I thought of a day years ago, when I went with Philip to pick up his daughter from a play date in Washington Square Park. Melissa was with a schoolmate, watching some Jamaican acrobats perform in the dry circular basin of the fountain, when she spied Philip and came tearing toward him.

  “Daddy, Daddy, can my friend Cindy stay over tonight? She’s like really cool and she’ll bring some Disney tapes with her and it’d be super fun. I promise I’ll do my homework first.”

  “Oh, all right, princess,” her father said. “If you promise.”

  The girl was in his arms before the reply was half finished, kissing his neck—and peeking over his shoulder to say a polite “Hi, Uncle Jack.”

  Philip had no choice, of course. Melissa owned him more certainly, more completely, than he owned Oliver Technologies.

  “Go, kumquat,” he said. “Go get Cindy and Emmanuelle.”

  The girl squealed and ran back toward the fountain, swerving around skateboarders and NYU kids with guitars, goths in chain-draped black jeans, and gay hunks with single earrings and bright pocket handkerchiefs advertising their preferences—top or bottom, water sports or S&M.

  “Adorable girl,” I said. “You breed well.”

  “She’s my great hope.”

  When Melissa started in our direction again, she and Cindy were holding Emmanuelle’s hands. The French nanny, about nineteen and dressed in sultry disarray, made a small sensation as she passed through the crowd.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Philip said.

  “What, Emmanuelle’s wardrobe?”

  “No, what girls do to your head. Until they’re a certain age, all you can think about is how you want to protect them, save them from everything bad in the world. But suddenly they change, they start to grow into women, and then all you can think about—if you’re not related by blood—is how you want to screw them stupid.”

  “Is that why you hired Emmanuelle?”

  “No,” he said, “I hired her because she’s extremely good at her work and speaks wonderful French, which Melissa desperately wants to learn. The two are crazy about each other.”

  “Very conscientious of you.”

  “Isn’t it, though? I’m quite a devoted father, Jack. The wild nanny sex is just a bonus.”

  I watched the au pair leading the two girls back toward us through the park. Emmanuelle held their hands tightly, making a straight path through the crowd. The girls—one blond, one dark-haired—jumped and dodged and chattered away, at elbow height. As the threesome came closer, Emmanuelle smiled. She was still some way off, but even at this distance her ripe lips could stir an instinctual response. It was the kind of smile you might encounter on a corner of the Boulevard de Clichy at nightfall.
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  “And after you sleep with them,” I said to Philip, “all you want to do is get rid of them.”

  “Of course. To make room for the next. It’s a biological thing.”

  “Renewing the species, I suppose. Like looking for breakout artists at an MFA show.”

  “Sure. We all do our best.”

  21

  So it was that, out of old friendship and brand-new empathy for Philip’s loss, I was pulled relentlessly deeper into the Oliver affair. It’s what I had to do, for the sweet vulnerable Melissa, for my own peace of mind, for some vague but insistent sense of propriety.

  Or so I told myself anyhow.

  Maybe a guilty conscience was the real reason I drank too much that night in Switzerland. I don’t know.

  Back in my room, already a little tight, I downed a couple glasses of minibar scotch before I called Hogan, and another as we talked. I filled him in about Paul Morse—what Laura had told me, little though it was. He thanked me grudgingly, as though he’d rather have heard something more directly tied to Amanda or nothing at all.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. “Partied out?”

  “It’s duller than you think.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  I let it go. It’d be hard to convince Hogan that evenings of champagne and canapés with German industrialists who collect works by Roni Horn or Wolfgang Laib—polished metal tubes, piles of yellow pollen—are not as madly debauched as he might imagine.

  “Any news about Philip?” I asked.

  “Nothing solid, but I’m getting a fix on life inside Oliver Technologies. The place is run like a cult.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Phil.”

  “It’s not him, it’s Andrews. He directs the show these days, and that’s how he directs it. They have regional managers competing for jewel-studded money clips in the shape of different countries, the ones with new high-tech markets they want to crack. The salesmen all memorize long passages from a couple of books ghost-written under Philip’s name a few years ago. Sell To Be Rich: Winning the Microchip Revolution and The O-Tech Way to Lifetime Success. I have copies here. Each chapter lays out some bullshit promotional strategy: ‘The Future Is Cybernetic,’ ‘One World, One Market, One Winner,’ ‘Netting Profits from the Internet.’ ”

  “I get the idea.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. They have these guys standing on chairs together in team spirit sessions, chanting O-Tech slogans and singing company songs.”

  “Makes the gallery business sound tame. Who’s your source for all this?”

  “Margaret.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember the tight-assed business lady, the junior exec who showed us around the offices that day?”

  “Do you ever miss one?”

  “What? Is it my fault she’s unhappy with her boss’s scheme?”

  “There’s a scheme?”

  “I don’t know for sure yet, but Margaret describes a pretty vicious scenario. Andrews and his cronies associate the company as closely as possible with Philip Oliver. He’s the genius, their very own Howard Hughes, and all that. When he gets arrested on the murder charge, the news stories come out about his confession and his messed-up brain. The company stock tanks. Andrews and the boys, as a gesture of faith in the underlying strength of O-Tech, buy big and buy cheap—knowing all the while that Philip will get off because they put him up to the bogus confession in the first place.”

  “But even if Philip walks, his credibility is shot.”

  “By then, given the pace of our justice system, Andrews will have been running things for a good year and a half. Six quarters of steady growth, even without the boy wonder. Andrews becomes chairman, the stock returns to its true value, and he and his crew cash in big.”

  “Why is Margaret letting you in on this? What did Andrews ever do to her?”

  “Nothing unusual, for a place like O-Tech. Let’s just say he’s a pig.”

  “That makes Margaret an awfully biased source.”

  “You know anybody who isn’t? Believe me, she’ll be a great witness.”

  “But is she telling the truth?”

  “Who knows? The D.A. will be able to build a solid case around her, I can guarantee that. And that’s all Bernstein asks.”

  “How’s Philip’s condition?”

  “Worse. He’s almost totally out of it these days.”

  “So what do you think? Is he faking?”

  “I don’t know. Those slick folks back at the Whitney service didn’t know. His doctors don’t know. Only Philip knows. And he may be fooling himself.”

  Once I hung up the phone, everything in the room was off kilter. Downing that third scotch didn’t help, I suppose, but it was something to do. Of all the varieties of solitude, none is worse than the void you inhabit, the void you are, at midnight in a foreign hotel room alone. Stunned by booze, trying not to feel or think, you sit on the edge of the bed with the lights out, seeing the vague shapes of furniture in the glow from the window, and then you are gone.

  That had been Philip’s life for many years. When I first met him, he was convinced that he would die before thirty, and in a sense he was right. The young man he had been—inventive, whip-smart, tireless—gave way in time to a calmer, slower self, still hungry to win but more calculating in his maneuvers. Marrying Amanda was his single best career move. Then that Philip, too, gradually vanished, leaving only the skilled CEO, haunted by his casualties—damages inflicted, losses sustained—alone and restless in luxury hotel suites late at night. There, over the years, he grew ever more exacting in his requirements for call girls and casual pickups, as though the women were subcontracted microprocessor parts—until luckily, at last, Claudia materialized out of the pages of a magazine and restored his lost eager youth.

  The spirited artist sustained him for a couple of years, pumping him full of false vigor. But now, with Mandy’s murder, the fight seemed to have gone out of Philip once and for all. The person he argued with most often, most vociferously, had ended up suddenly and violently dead. In his psyche, corrupted by disease and liquor and God knows what else, a causal link had been forged between their old bitter words and Mandy’s gory demise—a judgmental voodoo that his heart endorsed over the futile protests of his rational mind, whatever was left of it.

  He was always susceptible that way.

  Once, on a visit to the Sistine Chapel years ago, Philip stopped and stood transfixed in front of the Last Judgment, Michelangelo’s soaring depiction of the saved on the right hand of Christ being swept up gloriously into Heaven and the damned on the left being cast ignominiously into Hell.

  “Stunning,” he said. “Terrifying.” Other visitors pressed around him, and the guards tried to move him along. He turned expectantly to his wife.

  “Oh, what nonsense,” Mandy opined. “It’s just art, Philip. Pictures selling some tiresome old religion. No one takes these things seriously anymore.”

  “Don’t be such a heathen, my love.”

  “Oh, I’m not. Faith in rituals is exactly what we need.” Mandy gestured with her sunglasses. “Right now, I’m all in favor of the four-course lunch ritual. Then, at six, I’d like to partake of the evening cocktail ritual. By all means, yes. Ceremonies and rituals. What else can preserve us in this barbaric age?”

  What indeed?

  Once the four of us had paid to visit a young matador as he prepared for the corrida in Madrid. His attendant wrapped him tightly about the middle with a strip of white cotton and encased him in his dazzling jacket. Hardly a word passed between them. To us, the rich turistas, the young man said nothing at all—merely nodded once at Nathalie before the door was swung open in front of him. He was already his role.

  Well, isn’t that what we do for each other time and again, in marriages and the arts, in jobs and professions? Each day we get up and put on the suit of lights—striding out to defy death in a ritualized sport, until the day death inevitably wins.

&nbs
p; Death had certainly beaten Nathalie, in the nastiest way, taking its long painful time. At first, after I lost her, everything seemed lighter and cleaner. A weight had been lifted, and I felt joyously free. Only months afterwards did I realize that the lightness came from being empty, and the emptiness would go on forever.

  I woke up in the dark, and took off my clothes. The alcohol was still coursing through me like poison. I could feel it in my capillaries and joints, trying to kill me—which might have been all right, if it weren’t for the nagging discomfort required. I threw myself back on the bed and wondered what it would feel like to pray.

  When I woke again, the room was painfully bright. I stood unsteadily before the bathroom’s vicious mirror, glancing furtively at the wreck of my body. If you have ever once been athletic, you get up each morning feeling, knowing, that today you are weaker than yesterday, and that there is no reversing course now, no winning back the force that has gone. There is no hiding the insidious, sad facts from yourself. You drop your eyes. You try not to think about what you have been, try not to see yourself in the glass. Above all, you do not stare at the shriveled thing that dangles, crooked and thin, from your mangled left shoulder. You focus on coffee, a newspaper, and the morning light. For as long as possible, you forget the splendid things you did once with Nathalie, using two good arms and your fit body and the strength that pulsed through them.

  Somehow, I made myself presentable in a white shirt and fitted gray suit (Italian but not too Italian for Switzerland) and got down to the dining room for my croissant and café au lait, resolutely silent in my seat near a window. Outside, the good citizens of Basel went about their late-morning business, strolling between stores and offices with enviable, seemingly untroubled precision.

  After breakfast, I wandered through some nearby shops, killing time before the fair opened to the first rank of VIP buyers. On a side street, in a Milanese boutique, I came across several racks of dresses for preteens. Pulling one out, I held it at arm’s length on the hanger.