by Nina Siegal
Some time later, the morning was still morning. And I was adrift again. The ceiling was forming new cracks, new clouds. His eyes opened and he turned over onto me, again finding my lips. “I can still taste the vermouth,” he said.
I got up, lazily, without wanting to. I still wasn’t thinking about anything. I was just sensing the room around me, feeling out the day. I looked for my clothes. I found my dress draped over the projector reel, one shoe inside a kitchen cabinet and another in the freezer. I closed the refrigerator and leaned against it, dreamily. There was something on my mind, swinging its legs like a kid on a fence. But I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then my cell phone was ringing.
It took a while to find my purse. It was in the bathroom sink. I recognized the incoming number as Curtis’s. “Hello there, partner,” I said. “I hope you’re enjoying all the praise.”
“No such luck,” he said, his voice all business.
“What’s the matter?”
“Sotheby’s announced a sale last night. A single owner sale. One of those celebrity auctions that attract big money. And who should be the seller but Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr., your exfiancé. The fax came in at six p.m., after we’d both left. Battinger checked back late, as she does sometimes, and picked it up from Rewrite. It turns out he’s putting a collection of fifty art works on the block, mostly Stain works, and a few other eighties artists. Good timing, it seems, since it will come on the heels of that retrospective in Germany. Battinger is having a fit. She wants to know how come we didn’t know about this. Or did we? It has to have been in the works for weeks, because they don’t just announce a sale like this without first appraising the works, some preparation. She wants to talk to you, and not Monday.”
This was bad. Jeremiah’s art? Could this be why he’d phoned last night? Was there some message in his call I hadn’t deciphered? Is this what he’d meant about how the floor could shift?
“I honestly don’t know anything about that,” I said to Curtis. “I knew he was a collector.” We’d talked about it. It was out in the open. Curtis had thumb-tacked Jeremiah to the wall map, and then he’d put me on there too, with a line from one to the other. It had been a joke at the time, but now it wasn’t as funny.
“We thought he had maybe a dozen Stains. This is a whole lot more. I didn’t even know anyone owned that many. Where did he get them?”
“I have no idea.” I didn’t have any idea. But then my mind started ticking like a taxi meter. Could Jeremiah have been Darla’s buyer? The one who’d cleared out the warehouse stash? If so, how did he get the money? As far as I knew he was broke. Could Blondie have been wrong about Jeremiah’s reason for visiting the gallery? Could he have been there to buy, not sell? But how could he be buying all those pictures when Angelica was bleeding him? Unless, of course, he’d had a plan to turn them around fast.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I said.
“Battinger will want to hear that from you. She doesn’t like the way it fits.”
“I don’t either.”
It was possible Jeremiah had bought those Stains from Darla with the intention of selling once something upped their value. But he would’ve had to be banking on a story. It didn’t tie together. How could I have been helping him if I hadn’t been in contact with him all this time?
Curtis’s voice softened. “Okay, just get in here soon.”
“I’m already there.” I rang off and held the phone in my hand, looking at it. Something moved behind me. I flinched, but it was only Cabeza. He was standing in the door frame in his boxer shorts, holding a knife.
“Do you want onions in your eggs?” he said, casually.
I didn’t answer him right away. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can stay for eggs.”
He looked at the phone in my hand. “The office?”
“Yeah.”
“Claro.” He smiled. “I guess that means you’re in demand now that you’re a big star.”
“You could say that.”
“I thought they’d given you the day off to bask in your success.”
“Something came up.”
“Too bad. I don’t mean to be selfish, but I was looking forward to lazing around for a while and having some brunch, maybe even going out to some galleries, talk about a little town called Woodstock.”
The mention of Woodstock suddenly made me queasy. “It is too bad. I’m sorry.” I went into the other room. I sat down on the bed, but got up just as quickly. There was something wrong with the way the sheets were straightened. There was something untrue about the pillows the way they were piled on one another. Looking around the studio, it seemed to me the furniture wasn’t set up right. As if it had been transported to this place and arranged, a little like a movie set. The cameras, the film reels on the table were just props.
I took a deep breath and told myself it was just the anxiety. Just the office. I was panicking because I was being accused, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. But once I made things clear, anyone would be able to see that I had nothing to do with Jeremiah’s sale. Why would I do anything that would benefit him, anyway? I hated the man. All I needed to do was put on my shoes, pick up my purse, go into work, and say so. I tried to clear my head, to tell myself nothing was wrong, to not think about anything.
“Everything all right?” said Cabeza, leaning into the room.
“Sure,” I said, and he started to back into the kitchen again. Then I ran out of things to not think about. “I mean, well. No. I mean, I meant to ask you.” He stepped into the room with me, and I had to swallow air fast.
“What?”
“About the martini you gave me last night when I arrived. It was a Vanitini,” I paused, thinking of it. “How did you know the recipe?”
He took a few steps deeper into the room. “The recipe? Oh,” he said, looking back into the kitchen as if the answer was there. Then he said, “That’s easy. I read it on the Internet.”
“On the Internet.”
“Of course. You were once a little famous. Or didn’t you know?”
Everything in the room started to look wrong. The walls seemed too thin, like hastily tacked-up plywood. Temporary. The windows seemed surprisingly small. There wasn’t enough light filtering into the space. It would fool a camera, but cameras had ways of obscuring things, of leaving things out.
“You read it on the Internet,” I said. The little lie always reveals the big lie. “And you never met Jeremiah Golden.”
Cabeza clucked at me. “You’d be surprised. The Internet is a very powerful tool.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
Cabeza took a few strides toward me. He was still holding the knife at his side.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said.
“Valerie, what is it? Has something happened? You’re so on edge.”
I wanted to take a step back, but my calves were already hard against the edge of the bed. There was nowhere to go on my side of the room. “Could you please back up a few steps? I don’t feel comfortable having you any closer right now.”
He took another step forward. “Sweetheart, what is it? What’s wrong?”
My body went rigid, my chest tensed. “Please!” I very nearly shouted, then steadied my voice. “I need you to take a few steps back.”
“Claro, okay, okay.” He backed up and I moved around the side of the bed. I looked around me for something heavy, like a bat or a frying pan.
“What do you want to know? I’m happy to talk about anything,” he said.
“Sotheby’s announced a sale of Stain paintings, all owned by Jeremiah Golden. The press release went out last night; that’s what they want me to come in to talk about this morning.”
“Ah.” Cabeza didn’t seem surprised. “How could it have anything to do with you that Jeremiah wants to sell paintings?”
“It’s weirdly coincidental.”
“Purely coincidental. They won’t be able to link you to him.” The phrasing was
wrong.
“You knew about this sale?”
He didn’t answer. He seemed to consider it, but then his face formed an expression that said, You’re smart. You figure it out.
“Then you know about the Jeremiah sale.”
“I do,” he said, matter-of-factly. “That doesn’t mean you do.”
He was already reasoning out my defense. But I didn’t even know I had a defense I needed to make. I took a deep breath. “Cabeza, when did you meet Jeremiah?”
Cabeza pursed his lips. “A while ago, at a gallery opening at Deitrick’s. Just once.”
I held my breath, wishing he hadn’t said that. I moved to the editing table and grabbed a film reel.
“Is that really necessary?” said Cabeza.
I held tighter to the metal; it felt useful in my hands. Maybe Cabeza had nothing to do with this. Maybe I was behaving foolishly, but I didn’t have time to reason it out.
“How much of a cut are you getting from the sale?”
Cabeza laughed. “Okay, well, he is giving me a cut of the sale, but that also doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. And maybe it’s best if you don’t know any of this, if you need to go in and talk to your editor right now. You’re not me. I’m not you. As far as your editor knows, we don’t even know each other. But anyway, for me, the money isn’t the main thing. It’s the exhibition that matters.”
I gasped. I hadn’t expected to be right. But now something solidified in the pit of my gut. My grip tightened around the film reel like it was a ship’s steering wheel in a nasty storm. “What exhibition?”
“The one at the Ludwig.” Now his body went slack, as if he’d been balancing a plate on the top of his head for weeks, and he’d finally let it drop. He was still shirtless and as he moved across the room I noticed how his skin sagged. He took a seat on the couch and his gut bulged over the top of his pants, like the folds of a curtain. He looked cheap, not like a leading man anymore. More like an impersonator. Everything in the room started to look shoddy. “You really have to trust me, sweetheart. I’ve protected you entirely. But you might as well know. I’m the curator of the Ludwig exhibition—it’s not official yet, but it will be soon, since I was technically working with Micah Stone. The Stain shorts will be of particular interest now.” He made it all seem as if we’d been collaborating, and these were the fruits of our labor.
I shook my head. “I’m not getting all this. I don’t see how what I did…” But even as I said it I was starting to put the pieces in place.
Cabeza studied my face and began to speak again, patiently this time, as if he were working with a very sweet but quite illiterate child. “I didn’t get into it earlier because I was protecting you, and probably it’s better if you wait until after your meeting to hear the rest of it, but since you seem to be so upset, I’ll share it with you now. You see, Wallace was truly a great artist—perhaps one of the best in the eighties—but he’d done himself a disservice. He’d made himself out to be a kind of political clown and then he’d dropped out of sight. This wasn’t good for his work. The best thing for him would’ve been to die in 1987 or so, just after his peak. Then we would’ve all made money.”
I was listening. I didn’t want to miss a single syllable. “You mean for his market. For his collectors, that’s what would’ve been best.”
“Precisely.”
“You own his work too?”
“Stain gave me about twenty pieces over the years, mostly small tokens of affection. They were worthless until a few days ago. But thanks to your beautiful page-one story, they’re seeing a remarkable market explosion. Just as we’d hoped. I’ve technically sold my paintings to Jeremiah to make the whole thing easier, and also, actually, to protect you in case the graffiti artists you’ve talked to, like from Bigs Cru or wherever, get upset because they know about us. With Jeremiah’s celebrity status and Stain all the rage in the press, I’d say we stand to make a killing.”
I swallowed. “Poor choice of words.” My knuckles were getting white clutching the reel. I was standing in front of a man I didn’t know at all.
Cabeza chuckled. “Ha. Sorry. Bad pun. Forgive me.”
“I should forgive the pun?” Incredible. “How? How is it possible? Malcolm was your friend; you thought of him as a brother. Didn’t you?”
Cabeza stood up, moving the knife from one hand to the other, mulling my question. “That would be harder to explain. Malcolm and I had a very, very long and complicated relationship.”
“I’d rather if you sit.” I backed up but kept my eyes on him. “I’ll take the time.”
Cabeza looked up at me with raised eyebrows. Then he looked down at his hand and the knife in it. He held it up and said, “Is this what you’re scared of? It was just for the onions, sweetheart. I didn’t even know it was still in my hand.” He slid the knife under the mattress and then showed me his empty hands. “See?”
I nodded. “I want to know why.”
“It would be hard for you to understand, Valerie,” he said. “Malcolm got under my skin, I guess you could say. His easy charm, his reckless good looks, the way he didn’t have to work for attention like everyone else did; they flocked to him and women, well, he never had a problem there. And he never even rubbed my face in it.”
“That’s it? That’s why you saw fit to—”
“He never used it, Valerie. He let it all go to waste. The guy had everything I never had, everything most people never have, all the tools to get out of the ghetto and to make it big. He didn’t deploy it in the right direction. He always had to make some kind of statement. I was tired of always seeing him squander his potential, on some principle. He thought he was better than all that.”
“What if he was better?”
Cabeza’s look was that of a college professor toward a campus activist, whose ideals he’s too busy to humor. “You have a tendency to get swept away with big romantic notions, Valerie. You should be careful.”
“Why does everything you say sound like a threat?”
“Relax, darling. You’re getting all worked up today.” Cabeza stood up again. “May I move around? Is that allowed? Believe me, you’re fine. Your editor won’t be able to connect you to anything. I swear, you’d think you were completely in the dark about all this.”
“I am completely in the dark.”
He walked toward the foot of his bed and looked out the high window. “It’s sweet that you’ve taken to Malcolm’s memory the way you have. He was a rare person. But he was one of these false messiahs, linda. He started out for himself and he stayed out for himself. Just like all of us. I know you’re feeling more like a crusader today than you did yesterday, but isn’t it true that you’re basically the same girl who wants to be a big famous reporter? We got you that.”
“So you think this corrects it? The fact that you and Jeremiah get rich off this sale? Who else? Is Darla in on this with you? Who else gets rich?”
“Oh, no, no. Darla really had nothing to do with it. She was trying to get rid of those paintings because she didn’t want them anymore. Malcolm wanted them back because he had a sentimental attachment to them. Jeremiah wanted to buy them. He knew he could pull a few strings and get the market moving—it’s not that hard to make a market move if you know the right people. It takes only a few high-profile bidders out in front of the auctions.”
Cabeza seemed to watch something moving outside the windows, a bird or a butterfly. “It’s a lovely day out there,” he said. “It’s too bad we can’t go for a stroll.” He turned back to face me. “Malcolm kept getting in the way, because he wanted to make a stink about the pictures. Darla told Jeremiah, as a joke really, ‘The only way that work is going to be worth anything now is if Stain dies a fast and well-publicized death.’ It was an offhand comment, but it was actually also a way to solve it all at once. We were a little bit off, though. We figured Stain would get a big spread when he died, but that didn’t happen. I guess times are different now. Only pop stars get really big
obituaries. So a few people tried to convince your friend over there, Curtis Wright, but he was busy. Then, of course, our stroke of good fortune: you wrote the obit and made that mistake. We had a second chance.”
The queasiness was now turning to bile and it was coming up the back of my throat. “What did Jeremiah tell you about me that made me so easy to manipulate?”
“Oh, sweetheart, if I told you it would make you blush.”
There was a rumble in the back of my head and a rush of anger so powerful I closed my eyes. I didn’t know I was screaming until my lungs were empty. I had thrown the film reel at Cabeza and I’d missed him. He was laughing softly. It was then that I realized how far I’d removed myself from civilization. At Cabeza’s warehouse, no one would hear my screams. No matter how many film reels I threw at him, no one would hear them clatter to the floor. I could kill him and no one would know. But, more likely, he would kill me. He’d committed murder—maybe with his own hands and if not with his own hands then somehow—and I didn’t doubt he’d do it again. I picked up another film reel off the editing table and held it tight to my chest like a life jacket. I took a few more steps back and my spine hit the editing table. I looked behind me for scissors, a razor, something that could cut.
Cabeza dropped his voice. “Valerie, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I know right now it seems like I’ve been double dealing, but the truth is, I’ve been protecting you all along. No one can connect anything to you. Also, honey, the relationship, what’s happened between us, that’s all genuine. I didn’t need any encouragement from Jeremiah to want to get close to you. But I did. That happened all on its own. Once this is over, we’re going to have the kinds of lives we’ve both always wanted. You and me, we’re in this together, don’t you see?”