Miss Simms hung up the phone. “Sorry,” she said. “No call.”
Jessie realized she was biting her lip, stopped herself. Miss Simms was watching her. Jessie let her breath out with a sigh. “Christ,” she said.
“Yes,” said Miss Simms, taking out another piece of paper. “Dear Hilary,” she wrote.
Jessie got into her car and drove to the gate. The SS man opened it and ticked her off the clipboard. Jessie turned into the road, only then noticing that she still had the gift for Cameo.
She drove home. Traffic was suddenly very heavy, as though everyone were practicing for rush hour. Jessie switched on the radio. She heard a commercial for Levi’s. It sounded just like a lot of commercials, except for the ringing guitar line. She recognized the style at once: Pat. He was very good: only by choice did he remain a studio musician. She switched him off.
It was night by the time Jessie got home. She hurried up the walk, then saw that the house was dark, and slowed down. But as she went inside she still called, “Kate? Kate?” There was no answer.
She called Pat’s number. “Hi. No one’s—” She called the marina. There had been no reports of overdue or missing boats.
Jessie went downstairs to her workroom. She turned on the powerful overhead light. On one side of the room lay a jumble of bicycles, skis, camping equipment. On the other was the big table. Orpheus and Eurydice lay on it, sick with craquelure. Jessie studied them for a moment; Mrs. Stieffler wasn’t going to be happy.
She sat by the phone and started looking up Pat’s friends in her address book. Almost all of them had been erased since the divorce. Now, after five years, only Norman Wine was left. He’d once been Pat’s manager. Jessie supposed that she hadn’t erased him because he’d been the only one of all Pat’s friends she’d really liked. She dialed his number.
“Norman Wine Productions,” a woman said. A trumpeter played scales in the background.
“Norman Wine please.”
“Mr. Wine is not here right now.”
“Oh.”
The woman was silent for a moment. Then she said. “If it’s important, I can transfer your call through the marine operator.”
“The marine operator?”
“Yes.”
“It’s important.”
“Your name?”
Jessie told her, then waited; something clicked and the trumpeter was gone. Jessie heard more clicks, a roar like a typhoon, and then Norman was saying, “Hey, this is a nice surprise.” He could have been in the next room. “Over,” he added. “You have to say over. Over.”
“Are Pat and Kate with you?”
“You didn’t say it.”
“Are they?”
There was a pause. “No,” Norman answered less boisterously. “Is something wrong?”
“Not that I know of,” Jessie said. “Pat took Kate sailing this weekend and they’re not back yet. I’m trying to find out who they went with.”
“They were supposed to come with me,” Norman said. “They never showed up.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were scheduled to leave at nine on Saturday. Pat didn’t appear. We waited till ten. It made us late getting into Catalina.”
Jessie thought. She heard people laughing on Norman’s boat. She wondered if Pat was on it, and Norman was lying. “I didn’t know you were a sailor, Norman,” she said.
“I’m not, I’m a puker. This is a tax scam.” A woman laughed. “Over,” Norman added. The woman laughed louder.
“Are they on the boat, Norman?”
“Who?”
“Kate and Pat.”
“Hey. I just answered that.”
There was a long silence. Then Jessie said, “Have you got any idea where he might be?”
“Search me.” Maybe he heard the annoyance that lingered in his tone, because he smothered it and added, “What are you up to these days? Want to come for a sail sometime? My boat’s called Schlepper.” In the background, the woman shouted, “It cost two hundred g’s.”
“Did you try calling him?” Jessie said.
“Pat? He wasn’t home. But hey. Stop worrying. He’s not a child.”
That was the point in question, all right, but Jessie just said, “Kate is.”
Pause. She wasn’t being fun. “They need me up top,” Norman said. “Problem with a stuck cork.”
The woman laughed uncontrollably. “Good-bye, Norman,” Jessie said.
“I meant it about that sail.”
Jessie put down the phone and went upstairs. She opened the front door and stood in the doorway. Street lamps made greenish pools in the night. She crossed her arms. 9:21. Flash, flash.
After a while, Jessie heard a squeaking sound. The gum-cracking mother went by again, pushing her little Buddy Hackett in his stroller. This time they brought tears to Jessie’s eyes. “Shit,” she said, angry at herself. The gum-cracking mother jerked around, startled. Jessie went inside and slammed the door.
She dialed Pat again. “Hi—”
From the cupboard over the refrigerator, Jessie took a bottle of brandy and poured herself a glass. She sipped it, leaning against the counter. It didn’t calm her down. She drank some more.
Her gaze fell on a piece of notepaper, stuck on the refrigerator door:
My Mom
My mom is like a turtle shell,
so beautiful and strong,
My mom has eyes like oceans,
that know what’s right and wrong.
“Good use of simile,” Miss Fotheringham had written at the bottom in red pencil, “but not developed enough. B–.” Jessie wondered what Cameo’s poem was like.
She put down her drink. It was making her light-headed already. Perhaps she should eat. She made an omelette, set the table for one, sat down, didn’t eat. Instead she thought about her marriage and what had happened to it. “That’s simple,” Barbara Appleman, her friend and attorney, had said. “His conscience is in his schlong. He refuses to grow up.”
But that wasn’t fair. Who was Barbara, or who was she, to say what growing up was? And, like drowning to a deep-sea diver, casual sex was an occupational hazard of Pat’s career. But in the end, Jessie hadn’t been able to accept it. He’d debased his sexual currency. She’d frozen to his touch. Their lovemaking had stopped.
Now she had Kate. She had her work. It wasn’t enough.
Much later, Jessie realized she’d been staring at the omelette, staring until it looked like imitation food in the window of a Japanese restaurant. 3:00 A.M. Still flashing.
Her index finger jabbed out the digits of Pat’s number. Cuteness waited at the end of the line. “Hi. No one’s here right now, but just leave a message and we’ll buzz you back. Promise.”
“This is my message,” Jessie said, her voice rising into realms that cuteness never knew. “You were expected here at three this afternoon. Where is Kate? Where the hell are—” She checked herself, swallowed the rest of what she had to say. It was a physical effort. “Just call me,” she said, in as toneless a voice as she could manage, and hung up.
Jessie went upstairs, undressed, climbed into bed. She heard a small animal run across the roof. She heard a dog bark. She heard a plane fly overhead. But she didn’t hear the phone.
5
Jessie slept: a short, tiring, anxious sleep. A dream flashed by. In it her womb turned to a block of ice, and Philip said, “No one coughs in the movies without dying in the last reel.”
Jessie sat up, wide-eyed, shivering. 8:27. She got out of bed and went down the hall to Kate’s room. The sunlight that slanted through the window every morning pooled as it always did on the quilted bed; but today it didn’t gild a soft, sleepy face. The bed was empty.
Jessie picked up Kate’s Miss Piggy phone and dialed Pat’s number. “Hi. No one’s here right now, but just leave a message and we’ll buzz you back. Promise.” The last wisps of sleep vanished from her consciousness. It was all real.
A little jolt went through her—a jol
t of fear—but it triggered a hopeful image of Pat driving back from wherever they’d been and dropping Kate off at school. Jessie hurried into the bathroom. She jerked a brush through her hair. She splashed cold water on her face and rubbed it hard with a towel. She put on respectable clothes and went out.
A million dollars’ worth of European cars were double-and triple-parked in front of the Santa Monica Children’s School. Jessie squeezed into their midst and increased the total by $3,240, the current book value of her car. She had no objection to public schools, but Pat had insisted on private education for Kate, and he was willing to pay the cost.
Jessie didn’t see Pat, Kate or the blue BMW. Children filed through the front door. Cars sped away. At 9:02 a black man in a security guard uniform came to close the door. Jessie got out of her car and entered the building.
Room 24 had a picture of the Great Wall of China on the door. Jessie opened it and went in. The children were settling at their desks. Kate’s seat was at the back of the first row. It was empty.
At the next desk sat Cameo Brown, watching her with interest. Jessie tried to smile, but her face wouldn’t cooperate. She turned to go. A bony little woman came in. Miss Fotheringham. “Bonjour, classe,” she said, and then saw Jessie. “Miss Shapiro? May I help you?”
“I’m looking for Kate. I thought perhaps her father had brought her. There’s been a mix-up.”
Miss Fotheringham glanced at the empty desk, then at Jessie. She pursed her lips, then opened them and said, “Why don’t you try the office?” Jessie felt her name going up on Miss Fotheringham’s list of Bad Mothers.
In the office, the secretary riffled through the phone message slips. Jessie surveyed the bulletin board. It was covered with work by the children. A poem caught her eye.
My Mom by Cameo Brown
Looks so good
looks so nice
always makes you
pay the price
lips so blue
and eyes so green
I only see her
on Halloween
My Malibu mom.
“A,” Miss Fotheringham had written at the bottom. Jessie had her first insight into Kate’s and Cameo’s friendship.
“Sorry,” said the secretary, looking up. “No calls.”
Jessie went home. She paced back and forth across the kitchen floor. Then she called Barbara Appleman.
“Yeah?” a sleepy man answered. For a moment Jessie thought she’d dialed the wrong number.
“Barbara Appleman, please?”
“She left for the office. Should be there in half an hour or so.” He sounded very young. Jessie thanked him and hung up.
She called Gem Sound. She called the Hollywood Recording Studio. She called Pioneer Air. She called Electric Wing Recording. She called Bright Things A&R. Pat wasn’t at any of them. No one expected him or knew where he was. There was no one else to call. She didn’t know his friends, and he had no family: he was an only child, and his parents had died in a car crash back east; he’d dropped out of high school and gone to California soon after.
Jessie put the phone down. Then she picked it up again, toying with the buttons. Perhaps others had left messages on his machine, messages that might reveal where he’d gone. The machine had remote playback capability—Jessie had bought it herself, just after making her break from the Getty and going freelance. She searched her mind for the number code. It wasn’t there. She tried Pat’s number anyway, hoping her fingers would remember by themselves. She listened to the woman’s voice, then punched 92–356. Nothing happened. She tried again, punching 92–365. The tape whirred.
A man said, “No one home? Shit. Call you later.” Beep. Whir. A woman, the same woman who’d recorded the answering message, said, “Pat? Hi, listen honey, something’s come up and I can’t make it. See you when you get back. Don’t get wet.” She made a kissing sound. Beep. Whir. A man said, “Pat? Donnie. Did you get the sheets? Rehearsal’s changed from two to two-thirty. At the Barn.” Beep. Whir. Norman Wine said, “Patrick. Hey, let’s go. We’re all waiting.” Beep. Whir. There was a long pause. Jessie thought she heard an intake of breath. Then another woman spoke; her voice was tense, but faint, as though she were talking to herself. “Fuck, can’t you answer your phone?” Another pause. Then, more loudly, she said, “Listen: you’ve got to split. I’m a—” Beep. The woman’s time had run out. Whir. Jessie listened to the rest of the tape, wondering whether the woman had called back, but there was only one more voice, and it was her own: “This is my message. You were expected here at three this afternoon. Where is Kate? Where the hell are—Just call me.”
Jessie stood up. All at once her legs were weak, her mouth parched. She got the key to Pat’s house and started downstairs.
The doorbell rang. Jessie’s heart fluttered. She raced down the stairs and threw open the front door, her arms already positioning themselves to wrap around Kate.
But it wasn’t Kate. A plump young man and a middle-aged woman stood on the threshold. Jessie didn’t know the man; it took her a moment to recognize the woman. She had a too taut face and wore a short ermine jacket against the morning chill: Mrs. Stieffler.
“Oh God,” Jessie said, looking at her watch. 10:15. “I for—” A long explanation unreeled in her mind. She kept it there. “Come in,” she said. “Please.”
Mrs. Stieffler strode in. The man trailed after her. They eyed the living room. It hadn’t been straightened up. It hadn’t been cleaned, dusted or vacuumed either.
“This is Dr. de Vraag, from Berkeley,” said Mrs. Stieffler. “Ph.D. He knows everything there is to know about Rubens.”
“Well, I—” began Dr. de Vraag.
“Everything,” said Mrs. Stieffler. “So let’s see the baby.”
Jessie didn’t move.
“Are you sure this is convenient?” asked Dr. de Vraag. “Perhaps—”
“Mrs. Rodney set the time herself,” Mrs. Stieffler said. “I wanted to make it earlier, but she had to take her son to school.”
“Daughter,” said Jessie and turned from the door.
She led them along the hall, under the Calder mobile, which Dr. de Vraag looked at closely and Mrs. Stieffler ignored, and down to the workroom. Her feet wanted to go the other way.
Orpheus and Eurydice lay on the worktable under the five-hundred-watt bulb. Mrs. Stieffler and Dr. de Vraag bent to examine the canvas. In the bright light Jessie could see the tiny scar under Mrs. Stieffler’s hairline where the plastic surgeon had cut.
Mrs. Stieffler looked up. A smile spread across her face, the smile of a sugar lover who has just seen the dessert cart. “I love what you’ve done so far,” said Mrs. Stieffler. “Love it.”
“Thank you.”
“The colors! Look at those tones! Look at that pink!” She pointed to Eurydice’s pudgy arm. It was much like her own. “Doesn’t that remind you of the Helena Fourment we saw in Antwerp last week, Dirk? I knew it. I just knew it all along. Instinct.” She tapped her nose, a perfect object, untraceable to any ethnic group that ever walked the planet.
Dr. de Vraag looked uncomfortable. “Well, of course, we can’t make judgments from palette tones alone. At this stage, the provenance must remain School of.”
“Oh, don’t be such an old fart.” Mrs. Stieffler turned to Jessie, her breasts swelling under the ermine. “The moment I saw this painting, I felt it in my bones: the real McCoy.”
“You don’t mean you think it’s a Rubens?” Jessie said.
“Of course. All it needed was a cleaning job. And voilà!” Mrs. Stieffler laughed with delight. Her pointed red tongue bobbed up and down. “Do you know what I paid for it?”
“Seventeen thousand, I think you said.”
“Sixteen-five. And do you know what it’ll be worth when we prove it’s a Rubens?”
“A lot more.”
“A million more. At least. Isn’t that right, Dirk?”
“Well, prices fluctuate, and of course we’re still a long way …” He st
opped, having noticed something in the bottom corner of the painting, where Orpheus’s muscular calf was frozen in mid-stride. “What’s this?”
“The craquelure? I won’t be able to get rid of it completely.”
“I understand. It’s … it’s an odd shade of brown.” He was watching her carefully.
“Yes,” she said. There could be no postponing it now. “It’s bituminous.”
They exchanged a look. “Are you sure?”
Jessie shifted the heavy gilt frame, which she’d detached from the canvas, and picked up a folder lying under it. She handed it to Dr. de Vraag. Inside was a lab report and a minute brown flake mounted on a slide. “I had it analyzed.”
Dr. de Vraag glanced at Mrs. Stieffler out of the corner of his eye. “What’s underneath it?”
“Nothing. That’s the bottom layer. Maybe we can discuss this later. I’ve—”
“Hey, why the long faces?” said Mrs. Stieffler. “I don’t give a shit about that craquelure.” She waved it away. “It makes it look older, and that’s in our favor.”
There was a long pause while Jessie and Dr. de Vraag waited to see who would speak first. Finally, Dr. de Vraag said, “Mrs. Rodney has found a layer of bituminous oil paint under the varnish. It’s the cause of the craquelure.”
“Stop with the craquelure, will you? This is a coup, my friends.”
Dr. de Vraag cleared his throat. “Bitumens weren’t used in oil paints until seventeen-ninety, at the earliest.”
“So?” Mrs. Stieffler said. The expression in her eyes began to change. Her neck thickened and her chin thrust forward. Dr. de Vraag couldn’t meet her gaze. His lip twitched, but he said nothing. “So?” she repeated. “So, Mr. Five-hundred-a-day consultant?”
Jessie glanced at her watch. She had no more time to spar with Mrs. Stieffler. “Rubens died in sixteen-forty,” she said. “It means he couldn’t have done the painting. And …”
“And what?”
“It can’t be from his school, either.”
“Now,” said Dr. de Vraag, “I’m not sure we can rule—”
“Hold it,” said Mrs. Stieffler. Dr. de Vraag’s jaws clamped shut. Mrs. Stieffler rounded on Jessie. “Are you telling me it’s a fake?”
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