Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  On the other hand, I had undeniably blown it with Cynthia’s lover, and I wasn’t eager to repeat that scenario.

  Not only that, but there was so much baggage weighing down midlife love affairs. His children. Your children. His ex-wife. The insults of time on your aging body.

  Exposure.

  Still, I remembered what it was like to feel my pulse racing. To feel love so tangible that it warmed my feet in the bed. To feel my bones turn to water and my skin to fire. To let go.

  My pulse hadn’t raced for a long time.

  13

  Baby boomers are the future of the matchmaking and dating industry. Men are in the catbird’s seat; they call the shots. If a woman wants to meet them, it’s almost a given that she’ll have to resort to outside help…

  Buyer, beware.

  —Cynthia Weatherford’s research notes from Dating Demographics magazine

  The Livingstons lived in one of Manhattan Beach’s nicest neighborhoods, but I’d pictured them as San Marino or South Pasadena types—more old-money grandeur—so I was surprised. Manhattan Beach hadn’t started out as a haven of the exceptionally affluent, like Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills, and it was filled with a lot of postwar beach houses, with three bedrooms and a single tiny bathroom originally built with hideous maroon or turquoise tile. Michael and I had lived in one of those, and while they weren’t bad, there was no closet space, and the master bedroom was smaller than the size of a Rolling Hills maid’s quarters. Much smaller.

  Still, because it was not an uncomfortable commute to downtown (unlike the hill communities, which were far from the freeway), the town’s property was worth a small fortune, and beach houses had been bought up beginning in the seventies and eighties, torn down, and replaced with minimansions that sometimes extended from corner to corner over the total area of two lots. There was no yard, hardly even a garden, but the houses were impressive. The zoning laws weren’t quite as tight as they were on the hill, so Mediterranean villas consorted with starkly modernistic gray battleships.

  If you didn’t count the three-car garage and the palm trees, the Livingstons’ house would not have looked out of place nestled on a Tuscan hillside, hosting drop-in visits from Lorenzo de’ Medici. It was very imposing but not forbidding. The outside windows were tinted almost to opacity, which was fortunate, since you were practically nose-to-pane with the glass as you walked down the public sidewalk. The roof must have supported an acre of tile, and the house descended in cream-colored layers down the slope of the street. A two-lot house, maybe three. In the old days, fifteen people could have lived comfortably in the same space, with room to play.

  Julia had much the same scrubbed-down plainness she had affected at the Jensens’ party. She was dressed in a white shirt and khaki slacks with woven leather sandals that looked just right for the beach, but she was wearing pearls. Very, very big ones, and not fakes, either. As she swung back the door, I could look straight through the living room to the ocean view. I was used to that, but the sweep of the windows was at least three times the length of mine. I took a quick, professional assessment and decided that the strong light would make it difficult to place the art.

  “What a beautiful house,” I told her, as she ushered me in. It was, too, professional difficulties aside. There’s a reason that the majority of museums consist mostly of closed-off rooms with artificial lighting, but you wouldn’t want to live there, as the saying goes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not actually fond of the beach, but we wanted to move someplace neither of us had ever lived to start our lives together. Bruce wanted to be close to both downtown and Newport Beach, so this seemed the perfect compromise. He loves it here.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I told her.

  “Would you like to have lunch first, or would you like to see the house?”

  “The house, please.” Actually, I was starving, but I knew an overenthusiastic interest in sustenance would not be professionally appealing. Too bad.

  “Fine,” she said coolly. “Why don’t I show you what we’re starting with in terms of a collection?”

  I followed her into a hall and down one level. I gasped.

  “Wow,” I said. “Amazing.”

  They had two really good paintings, both variations on female nudes. One was unmistakably a Tamayo, a work outlining a woman’s body behind half-lowered blinds. The other looked like a Fernando Botero, a Colombian painter whose subjects, if they had come from another culture, might charitably be described as plump. Clearly, the woman in the portrait had consumed one too many empanadas, but she didn’t care. They were both very fine works, complementary in their subject and quite distinct in style. “Wow,” I said again.

  “You recognize the artists?”

  “Tamayo and Botero, right? They’re very nice. Better than nice. I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you like them. Not everyone does.”

  “No.” Frankly, I was surprised, because her husband had implied that her taste was much more traditional. “May I ask where you got them?” Since they already had the taste, knowledge, and connections to buy works like these, I wondered what she needed me for.

  She smiled, the first real one since I had arrived. “My father was an early collector of Latin American art. He was a friend of Olga Tamayo’s back in the sixties. These works were painted in the late sixties and early seventies, when you could get them relatively inexpensively.”

  “What did your father do?” I asked. It was a little gauche, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Among other things, he was at one time an ambassador to Mexico,” she said. Her voice held an unmistakable note of pride. She looked at the paintings fondly. “Now these works are part of my inheritance.”

  The tax bite must have been pretty hefty. I was not so lost to the magic of art that I didn’t consider issues like that. It was second nature. Nevertheless, the paintings clearly represented something much more than money to her. I thought that Latin American art, with its drama and vibrancy, was an unusual passion for such a closed-off, secretive woman. I wondered, suddenly, if people might have the same thought about me.

  “And so I’ve given the Botero to Bruce as a wedding present,” she continued.

  “I’m sure he was very pleased,” I murmured. It was a striking painting, and works by Botero could nudge the million-to-two-million-dollar range. It was out of my league, so I couldn’t be sure. But I wondered about the message involved, if there was one. The big, exuberant woman with pillowy hips and an attitude to match bore no resemblance to the way I suspected Julia imagined herself. The slender, stripped-down, quiet woman in real life was more in line with the Tamayo figure, behind the shade and ultimately unknowable. Still, who could tell? If you started to second-guess subliminal messages, in art or life, you could end up with a lot of nothing to show for your time.

  “Yes, Bruce was pleased. He’s very interested in art as an investment, and in fact we have some things we aren’t particularly interested in displaying. One or two of them he acquired through Natasha Ivanova.” Her voice was perfectly colorless, but I suspected she didn’t like the idea much, or maybe it was just the person.

  “Was that why you—”

  I was going to ask if that was why she had been interested in my inquiries about Ivanova at the Jensens’ party, but she cut me off. “Why don’t we see the rest of the house, and then we’ll talk about it over lunch?”

  “Whatever you like,” I told her. I took a last look at the Botero and wondered if there was anywhere I could get a reproduction of it for Mark. It was a much classier variation on his favorite theme.

  We had lunch on the patio, the sole space on three lots that hadn’t been filled by the house. Julia went into the kitchen and came out with two perfectly arranged scallop, endive, and walnut salads two minutes later. I wondered if she had a chef.

  “It looks delicious,” I said sincerely. “What’s the dressing?”

  “I’ll ask,” she sa
id. She looked at me and apparently decided this required further explanation. “I have a caterer for entertaining,” she said. “We don’t need her all the time, but when we have a busy week, like this one, she provides a succession of entrees or whatever we want. It saves a lot of time.”

  I bet it did. “Wonderful,” I agreed. I didn’t ask for the name. I doubted that she’d noticed the omission. I wondered what it would be like to have a perfect life so seamlessly organized. I lifted a bite to my mouth, prepared for pleasure.

  I didn’t get it. Despite its exquisite appearance, the salad had almost no flavor at all. I am sorry to confess that the discovery gave me a mean little thrill.

  Julia appeared not to notice. “Tell me about yourself,” she said.

  I interpreted this, correctly, as an invitation to present my credentials rather than my Life Story. I put down my fork. I gave her my educational history, my gallery experience, a rundown of some major corporate clients, and the names of one or two private parties who’d given me permission to invoke them. I offered Karin as a reference.

  She nodded. “Very professional,” she said. I wondered what she’d been expecting.

  She was silent for a few moments. In these situations, you don’t get to reciprocate and ask for a CV in return, so I just sat there chewing quietly until she was ready to say something more.

  What she said was, “Are you married?”

  I had to finish swallowing a rubbery scallop before I answered. “Not any more.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s not like that,” I told her. “He died.”

  She looked up quickly. “Very young.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.” She paused. “Were you happy?”

  I hesitated. There are some questions clients don’t have the right to ask, no matter how valuable their business. But I looked at her; it was costing her to ask me. I wondered what the true agenda was. “Yes,” I told her. “Yes, we were happy.”

  She smiled briefly. “You were lucky, then. I think happiness is largely an accident, don’t you?”

  I looked into my iced-tea glass. I remembered how Michael had made my coffee every single morning of our married lives, until he couldn’t anymore. I thought of my mother, giving away her child. “I’m not sure,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “Neither am I, actually.” She straightened, and I knew she wasn’t going to tell me anything personal. “Are you still interested in Natasha Ivanova?” she asked.

  “Whatever you can tell me,” I said. “I don’t have a sense of her personally at all.”

  She touched her lips with her napkin. “A phony,” she said succinctly.

  “In what respect?”

  “I don’t mean that her business dealings weren’t straightforward or that her art connections weren’t perfectly genuine,” she said. “But the woman herself invested a great deal of time hinting at an aristocratic background and pretending a class she demonstrably didn’t have.”

  “You thought she was making it up?” I asked her.

  “One can tell,” she said.

  I laid down my fork gently, hoping there was nothing about my demeanor that screamed “inappropriate,” since it so clearly mattered to this woman.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a snob,” she said.

  “No.”

  She laughed. “Well, perhaps I do. But really, I met a man at one of her parties who had bought a peerage in England. I suppose that’s all right per se, but she actually introduced him around as Lord So and So.” She shuddered. “He was a Texan.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” I told her.

  “Also, she looked as if she’d been dressed by Liberace. Her clothes weren’t suitable for the occasion at all.”

  “Ah.” I was already getting tired of hiding in my clothes, but I was glad that for this occasion, at least, I was wearing neutral colors. I wondered again about the restrained, elegant way Natasha had been dressed the night she was killed. There seemed to be a lot about her that was contradictory.

  “After the first gathering,” Julia continued, “I had no interest in going anymore, but Bruce thought it would be good for business. And I must say, some of the art she had was interesting, but I didn’t sense that she selected it. She had no feeling for it at all, and she wasn’t able to answer questions coherently.” She shrugged. “She might have had a consultant, someone like you. I’m perfectly aware that it is possible to buy good taste, or at least the outward appearance of it.” I wondered if she meant anything more by this, but her face was expressionless. “In all events, she clearly enjoyed thinking of herself as some sort of high priestess of culture.” She looked at me. “Does this help you at all?” she asked.

  “It’s certainly interesting. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m looking for. There’s just something about her life story and her death that troubles me. I don’t know how any of it could possibly connect with her being killed by a burglar, though.”

  “Nor do I.” She looked away. “Was it very bad, being on a jury like that?”

  Her question surprised me. I wondered if the rich and connected could avoid jury duty altogether. I decided the answer was probably “yes.” “It wasn’t so bad, except that you worry about doing the right thing. Well, and there was one nasty incident after the verdict.” I told her about the phone call, paraphrasing the message.

  She looked aghast. “Those people…how terrible. Weren’t you frightened?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “But nothing happened.”

  “And you still want to look into this, even after that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think there’s any danger,” I said, with a smile. “After all, the person who did it is in jail.”

  She looked at me seriously. “If you should find out anything relevant, I would appreciate it if you would let me know. Personally.” She stressed the word slightly. “Bruce is confident that the art was an excellent investment, but if you should uncover anything that might cast doubt on any aspect of it…Well, I would never interfere with my husband’s business dealings, but if—” She broke off helplessly. “I’m sure you understand.”

  I wasn’t sure I did. What was clear was that this intensely private woman was unhappy about something, but I didn’t think I was going to find out what it was. There was one other thing I wanted to ask her.

  “I wonder if you could tell me…,” I hesitated.

  She stiffened. “Yes?”

  “Whether it was Ms. Ivanova who introduced you?”

  She shook her head in relief. What had she thought I was going to ask? “Oh, no. It was a decorator, of all people. One of my friends was using this man, and I tried him out when I was redecorating my condo in Beverly Hills. He was competent, but his style was very austere, so I didn’t use him when we bought this house.” She paused, remembering. “I can’t recall how it came about, but I believe he was doing work for Bruce at the same time. I must have mentioned that I was looking for an investment counselor, because my former adviser had just retired. Somehow, this man gave me Bruce’s name.”

  I was a little disappointed. I was hoping that Natasha had played matchmaker to the Livingstons, too.

  “It’s odd,” Julia continued, “but I can’t remember his name.” She looked at me. “Oh, but of course you’ll know him anyway. He did the Jensens’ home. I believe that all-white look is his trademark. And quite frankly, his personality is a bit chilly as well.”

  “Valentin introduced you?” I asked her, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer. There couldn’t be that many decorators answering the description. Still, I was surprised that it had never come up before.

  “Yes, Valentin,” she said, with sudden conviction. “Just the one name. That was it.” She looked at me. “Wasn’t he at their party?”

  14

  I needed time to think, but I didn’t have any. What I did have was a full work schedule, despite two mysterious cancellations from clients who had suddenly decided they
wanted to “review the situation” before buying any more art. That wasn’t good news; I hoped it didn’t herald a recession or something unpleasant in the local economy. I didn’t take it personally. Maybe they’d just overinvested in Waterworld and had a cash-flow problem. I had never lost a client because of something I had done, at least not that I knew about.

  Besides, I had to turn my attention to my two appointments with the Mega-Matchmakers. I needed to prepare a convincing persona if I wasn’t going to be booted out of the inner sanctum as demonstrably from the wrong side of the tracks. I remembered Julia’s assurance about spotting a phony and hoped I would pass muster as the authentic possessor of a snug little trust fund and a cache of fading debutante photos. At least the phony bank references from the magazine would help. It was far too late to revamp the family archives.

  I wondered if I should go shopping.

  Before I could indulge my fantasy of a daylight raid on Neiman Marcus, a package from my brother arrived and brought me down to earth.

  Dear Ellen, he wrote in such a thick pen stroke I could hardly read it. Like so much else about him, his handwriting was unfamiliar to me. Here is the information you were asking for. As you can see, there isn’t much.

  The call regarding the burglary at Ivanova Associates came in at 5:05 A.M. It came in over the regular police number and not 911, so there is no recording or verbatim record. The caller was asked to identify himself but refused. The “himself” is speculation; the operator couldn’t remember/determine for sure if the caller was a man or a woman. These things happen.

  He had underscored the last sentence twice, defensively.

  The caller stated that he had reason to believe a burglary had taken place at Ivanova Associates. He named the business specifically. He described the suspect generally and the car he was driving.

  Pretty good for the dark of night with no possible vantage point that could afford that kind of view. I read on: