Misfortune

by Nancy Geary

  She focused her attention on the caller as the game progressed.

  “Bingo! He’s got bingo,” a woman shouted from the back corner of the room. A black woman in a green dress with a white lace collar pushed a wheelchair with an elderly man in it. He wore what appeared to be a flannel bathrobe and carried his winning card on his lap. Although his head hung forward, shaking slightly as the woman maneuvered him around the tables and folding chairs, Frances could see his smile.

  May 20. She suddenly remembered.

  “Frances, it’s Clio,” the voice at the other end of the telephone had said. It had been nearly three in the morning when the ringing pierced her sound sleep.

  “What happened?”

  “Your father’s in the hospital. He’s had a stroke.”

  She drove the two hours to New York University Medical Center in the foggy darkness, her eyes transfixed on the windshield wipers sweeping rhythmically back and forth over the glass in front of her. Clio waited in the visitors’ lounge for the intensive care unit, sitting with her feet tucked under her and a cashmere blanket draped across her lap. Her dark hair was pulled back from her pale face, and her eyes looked sunken. Frances could see her hands tremble as she held a paper cup of tea that had long since cooled.

  “How is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was flat, soft but steady. “They still don’t know.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes. Briefly.”

  “Was he conscious?”

  “I’m not sure he knew I was there.”

  “I should let Blair know.” Frances remembered for the first time since Clio had called that her sister was on a business trip to Japan, selling art to Honda executives for their headquarters.

  “I spoke to her. She’ll be on the first flight back.”

  Frances could think of nothing else to ask or say. She settled herself on the opposite couch to wait, glancing periodically at a well-worn copy of People that someone had abandoned. The articles on movie stars, rock singers, and celebrity models blurred into a sea of triviality. Clio stared ahead blankly, moving only slightly if voices were heard in the hall. Hours passed.

  “We’ve got a winner,” Mrs. Flanagan announced. The crowd clapped politely, then cleared their cards for the next game.

  “Are you all right?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Just wondering. You seem kind of quiet.”

  “Well, this is hardly the place to chat. This is serious competition.” Frances tried to sound lighthearted.

  The waiting had stretched for hours. At one point, sometime late in the afternoon, Dr. Handley had appeared. He’d removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Richard’s had what’s called an intracerebral hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of his brain. A blood vessel ruptured and there’s been extensive bleeding in the brain tissue. He’s still in surgery.”

  Afterward Richard Pratt remained in intensive care, heavily medicated and sedated. He didn’t move or speak and opened his eyes only for a second every so often. Clio stood sentinel, rubbing his hand, wiping his face with a warm washcloth, whispering words Frances couldn’t hear, kissing him gently on the cheek. Although Frances offered to spell her, Clio left the hospital for only the briefest intervals to shower and change, returning quickly to resume her post. Frances managed to walk around the block, to stop at a nearby delicatessen for a tuna salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper along with thick slabs of pickles, to call into the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to check her messages.

  Seated in a vinyl chair by the window, Frances watched as Clio hummed Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me,” massaged Richard’s feet, and refluffed his pillows several times each hour. Although Frances was moved by Clio’s affection, the intimacy she shared with Richard even though he was too ill to notice, her attentiveness left little room for Frances or Blair, who returned from the Far East. Only when Clio left for a brief moment to summon a nurse or make a cup of tea could Frances approach her father’s bedside. She stared down at the veins in his eyelids, the gray at his temples, the collarbone protruding from his loosely tied hospital gown. She rested her hand on his shoulder, leaned over close to his ear, and whispered that she loved him. Whatever else had passed between them, in the few moments she had alone these words seemed the only ones worth speaking. The rest didn’t matter.

  After a week the three women met with Dr. Handley at his office across the street from the hospital. “There’s widespread damage to the brain tissue surrounding the site of the rupture. He has virtual total hemiplegia, or paralysis on the right side of his body, his face, his arm, his leg. His motor skills, coordination, and speech are certainly impaired and, I expect, his brain function is, too, although we haven’t completed all of our testing.”

  “Is the damage permanent?” Frances asked.

  “It’s too early to say what improvements he might make with proper rehabilitation.” Only time would tell.

  “Fanny, Fanny, you’ve got a bingo.” Sam tapped her arm.

  Frances looked down at her card where chips made an X through the free space in the center. She forced a smile.

  “Pretty great given the odds. Look at the size of this crowd.” Sam’s face was animated with excitement he assumed she shared.

  “Do me a favor?” Frances asked.

  “What?”

  “Take it up for me.”

  Sam looked confused.

  “Please.” Frances couldn’t explain to him that the thought of being watched by this crowd was unbearable. The rush of memories brought on by the anniversary of her father’s stroke made her feel vulnerable. At least for tonight, she wanted to hide among the other nonwinners.

  “Whatever you say.” He nodded, then stood up. Before leaving his place with her card, he bent over and murmured, “Maybe this will be your lucky summer.”

  Blair Devlin stretched her lean legs on the chaise longue, wiggled her toes, and flopped her head back on the blue-and-white toile pillow. “So, what is it you needed to tell me?” She yawned and twirled a strand of straw-colored hair around one finger.

  Jake, her husband, sat at a mahogany captain’s table in the corner of their bedroom. An array of papers, spreadsheets, and inventory lists covered the polished wood surface in front of him. He couldn’t bear to face his wife. He looked again at the ledger numbers in front of him, wishing somehow that they would change, that he had made an error, that the debt would shrink. He prayed for a miracle.

  Although the last ten years of Jake Devlin’s life had been spent building the Devlin Gallery for Modern Art in Chelsea, the gentrified neighborhood of former warehouses on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, he recognized with a mixture of reluctance and pride that Blair was the gallery’s biggest asset. She had an eye, a talent for separating mediocre work from true inspiration, and an ability to understand artists. She had been right about their last undertaking, a woman whose odd assortment of oil paintings looked to Jake like the work of a deranged adolescent, a single dried leaf on a silver plate, an assortment of sheet music burned at the edges with a fish skeleton strewn across them, an apple core underneath a wooden table. Blair made sense of the images. “It’s a new approach to death, death in its simplest, purest form,” she explained. The New Yorker coopted her clever perceptions in a positive review. The show sold out.

  Even more important than her interpretive talents, public relations savvy, and social flair, Blair’s specialty was sales. She charmed cash out of clients’ pockets. Jake chuckled, remembering last Tuesday’s $50,000 sale to the plastic bucket manufacturer from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, in town for a hardware convention. The overweight man stuffed into his Nantucket red khakis could hardly stop from drooling as Blair explained the subtleties of an artist’s lateral brush stroke by running her fingers across his thigh. Jake might have been jealous had he not loved the money as much as she did.

  Although the paperwork in front of him documented every step of
the gallery’s financial downfall, Jake still couldn’t accept that it had happened. He rested his forehead in the palms of his hands. Where had all the money gone? He had taken out a second mortgage on their Central Park West apartment, withheld money from artists whose pieces had been sold months before, and still there wasn’t enough to cover the bills. Worst of all, Blair had no idea. At first he convinced himself that he could rectify the problem, but no amount of juggling could remedy the acute situation. Then, he couldn’t bear to confess. Each time she took a potential client to the Four Seasons for lunch, sent a bottle of Perrier-Jouët to an interested curator, bought an Armani suit for an opening, he wanted to explain that sales had been less than anticipated, that he had cut deals to move inventory, that the expenses of their lives couldn’t be sustained. Each time he failed. Her anticipated reaction seemed far more ominous than financial ruin would ever be. That he could not give her everything she wanted negated all that he had accomplished.

  Jake Devlin took a deep breath and turned to face his wife. He was struck, as always, by her beauty, her shiny hair now billowing over the pillow, her pale complexion, the hue of her full lips. The slightest shift of her toes, their pale pink polished nails wagging back and forth, was enough to arouse him.

  What would she think of him now?

  Jake had waited until the last possible moment. In thirty-six hours, with the start of the Memorial Day weekend, Blair planned to settle herself for three months in Sag Harbor, Long Island, in a cottage on the water they had rented for the past several years. Although Sag Harbor on the Peconic Bay lacked the panache of the ocean side, it was a charming town built around a lively marina. Most important, it was still affordable to wannabes who cherished its proximity to the artery of the Hamptons: Route 27.

  The Devlin Gallery’s best clients summered in the Hamptons, and Blair was unwilling to let them slip far from her sight. That left Jake to run the business alone and commute back and forth amid the traffic of the Long Island Expressway every weekend. The Devlin Gallery faced the summer season, historically its slowest time, with a large inventory, little cash, a default notice on its operating loan, a stack of unpaid bills, and several unhappy artists threatening to take their work elsewhere. Tonight was Jake’s last chance.

  “Well, are you going to say something, or are you just going to sit there?” Blair asked. Her voice teased. “Because I wanted to talk to you about Marco. He’s agreed to have us represent him.”

  Marco, an Argentinean sculptor, was Blair’s recent obsession. She first had heard of him when the Chicago Tribune reviewed a show of his eight-foot bronze nudes. The article reported that Marco remained unrepresented by any gallery because, according to his interview within, he “failed to find spark, someone who really understands me or my work completely.” That had been enough bait for Blair. After their initial contact, she had gone to his Brooklyn studio. Alone. Upon her return, Jake listened to her animated stream of accolades. Blair’s mind was made up to lure Marco to the Devlin Gallery.

  “Marco says he needs a hundred-thousand-dollar advance, as a show of our commitment to him,” Blair continued. “I said that wouldn’t be a problem. My concern, though, is that we need more space, probably two thousand square feet, minimum. His work is so gloriously big.” Blair seemed oblivious of the rising barometer of her husband’s anxiety.

  “What do you expect for selling prices?” Jake tried to sound calm, but his voice seemed timid. He wanted to be distracted by indulging her schemes.

  “He’s still unknown, though that’ll change.” Blair furrowed her brow. “Maybe seventy-five, eighty thousand.”

  An $80,000 sales price meant the gallery could take forty in commission minus advertising and other related expenses, Jake calculated. He turned back to his papers, momentarily absorbed in the possibility of a new success.

  “Anyway, I invited Marco out to Sag Harbor next week—Tuesday, I think it is—to go over details.”

  “Tuesday? But I won’t be there.”

  “Did you want to be? I never expected you would.”

  “You were planning to negotiate his terms without me?”

  “Well, I suppose we can rearrange, although with his schedule, it might be difficult.”

  “Forget it.”

  Blair ran her forefinger along her bottom lip.

  Jake forced himself to continue. “We have to talk. I have a bit of discouraging news. Discouraging isn’t accurate. I have bad news.” He exhaled, relieved that the words hadn’t stuck in his throat. “It’s about our finances, or rather the gallery’s finances.”

  “What about them?”

  “We don’t have enough money.”

  She laughed and waved a hand toward him. “That’s what you always say. Don’t be such a worrier.”

  “Listen to me.” The raised volume of his voice surprised him. He took a breath, not wanting to sound panicked. “We have a very real, very large cash shortage. This is serious.”

  She sat up.

  His voice softened. “I don’t know how to explain this to you, except to say that our profits don’t cover our expenses, not the gallery’s expenses and not our living expenses.”

  “What?”

  Her harsh tone triggered a raw nerve and radiated down his spine.

  “I’m saying we need a substantial infusion of cash, and we need it soon. We’re behind on the lease, our mortgage, our taxes, our bills, you name it.” He paused, trying to compose himself. The articulation of all his worries left him with an odd feeling of euphoria and despair. “I’m sorry.”

  “Arrange to borrow more,” she ordered.

  “I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. The bank won’t extend our operating loan. We don’t have anything as collateral. Everything is borrowed against alr—”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Blair interrupted. “We’ve got plenty of equity in our apartment. A second mortgage is tax-deductible anyway.” She seemed to dismiss him as an idiot for not thinking of such an obvious solution.

  Jake felt sweat moistening the front of his shirt. “I did that already,” he almost whispered.

  “You what!”

  He felt himself gasping for air. “I did that already,” he repeated.

  “How could you?”

  Jake’s throat burned. “Blair, listen to me. I had to. Before year end, to pay our taxes.”

  “I own our house, too. How could the bank agree to loan us money?”

  “I signed your name to the application.”

  “You forged my signature?”

  “I assumed it would be short-term, more like a line of credit that I could repay. I didn’t want you to worry. I didn’t think you would ever have to know.” He wanted her to hold him. He needed to feel the touch of her skin, but he didn’t dare move. He had never seen her this angry.

  “It was my down payment. The equity in the apartment is mine.”

  “Blair, please.”

  “What else haven’t you told me?”

  Jake was silent.

  “Well, Mr. Money Manager, Mr. ‘You don’t have to worry about the business end of things, dear, I’ll take care of it,’ ” she mocked, “what do you propose to do now? Are you telling me we are going to lose our house, the gallery? Is that what you’re saying? Have you thought of a solution, or should I just start packing?”

  “I thought maybe you could talk to your father.”

  He watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. When Blair finally spoke, her voice was low. “You want my father to bail us out again?”

  The Devlin Gallery had relied on Richard Pratt’s extraordinary wealth and generosity before. The year Jake and Blair married, Pratt Capital, the privately held venture capital firm that Richard had built over four decades, contributed $170,000 to cover the first year of a long-term lease for a new showroom. Six months later the company guaranteed Jake’s $5 million operating loan to allow for their considerable expansion. Then, two years ago, Blair asked again. That time Pratt Capital came up wi
th $750,000, enough to pay back taxes and renovate their apartment with state-of-the-art lighting, marble bathrooms, and a new kitchen with soapstone counters and German appliances. They were even featured in Architectural Digest, a photo shoot of their designer apartment accompanied by a story on living with contemporary art.

  Richard had never lectured Jake, never doubted his business skills, never asked for an explanation or accounting. He wrote checks without question and was gracious enough not to mention the money again, as if the transaction had not happened. Richard Pratt made it easy.

  “Not a bailout. More like an investment.” Jake tried to sound cavalier. “We could offer a generous return, especially once Marco gets off the ground.”

  “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

  Jake was silent.

  “Are you wanting me to talk to Miles about a deal?” she asked, referring to Miles Adler, Richard Pratt’s longtime employee and adviser, who had bought 43 percent of Pratt Capital after Richard’s stroke the year before. “I hardly know him.”

  “I thought you could talk to your father.”

  “My father doesn’t make decisions on his own anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  She was right. Since Richard’s illness, Clio seemed intimately involved in his financial affairs. At the very least, nothing could be done without her approval.

  “You could still talk to him, make him understand our situation. It’s not like he wouldn’t understand. He could convince Clio that it’s the right thing to do. Or maybe you could talk to Clio directly. They could loan us the money personally. Pratt Capital wouldn’t have to get involved.”

  “I suppose.”

  Blair closed her eyes. Jake knew what she was thinking. Asking her father had been one thing, but the idea of begging Clio for help was entirely different.

  “If he had never married that…that bitch…” Blair’s voice drifted off.

  Jake had heard the story of Richard and Clio’s wedding, now nearly thirty years ago, more times than he could recall. Blair had been five, her sister, Frances, eight. Blair’s eyes sparkled as she recounted how handsome her father had appeared, his lean frame outfitted in a morning suit.