—The kindness of strangers.
—I assume you are talking about Robert? If I saw a glimmer of kindness from someone matching his description, I’d know he was an impostor. Robert only helps himself. And like a spoilt child, he helps himself to whatever he wants.
—My only virtue, Lady Percy.
—Robert lured you to Basel with the promise of fortune and fame?
—Something like that, ma’am.
—And you believed in your talent enough to play along?
—I automatically trust passionate people.
—How quaint! I’m assuming you are American?
—Yes.
—Oh, don’t say it like you’re ashamed of being a member of art’s ruling class. Do you think Jasper Johns blushes when someone asks him if he’s American? I can tell you from firsthand experience, he does not. Your generation has no sense of self-promotion. But you have our attention; now tell us what’s valuable in your work.
Altberg interrupted Owen by pulling back on his arm.
—His work is very athletic. One would even say primal. Very raw. Very physical.
—Why does everyone feel compelled to use the word very when explaining art? Some of us have learned to make do with moderation. Others of us . . .
She gestured with an open hand to Altberg’s midsection. The backyard tittered.
—Let the boy speak for himself, Robert. I saw those pictures in the catalogue. He’s certainly striking, but I can’t decide whether he’s the artist or the art.
—I’m neither, ma’am.
—The esteemed Robert Altberg disagrees—though for him disagreement lies somewhere between a hobby and a profession.
Lady Percy’s subdued volume meant the public castigation had ended. With the hope of droll anecdotes removed, the guests resumed their murmur.
—He means that he isn’t showing this year, but he will be in attendance Wednesday night. This is completely entre nous, but a certain artist from Berlin owes him more than an acknowledgment and a handshake.
—Wednesday we’ll be away. And that won’t do. I look forward to seeing you at the preview tonight. I’ll leave a pass for you at Will Call.
Lady Percy lowered her voice to Owen:
—Now if you’ll excuse us, you really can’t stay here wearing that, dear. And I can’t very well have every handsome young artist in Basel flinging himself over my wall.
—Of course not. Thank you for not throwing me back over.
Altberg ushered Owen from the hostess’s table to the bar on the deck. Its elevated position over the party did much to deflect stares. A waiter offered a champagne tray. Owen thought the knife in the bartender’s hand looked tempting, but took the champagne flute instead. Altberg slurped, as if whistling backward:
—Blanc de blancs. Lady Percy really never misses a detail. The mid-palate almonds and that unforgettable carnal pear suggests . . . Ruinart?
The waiter smiled and lifted the champagne bottle by the punt: Ruinart.
—I’ll stop while I’m ahead. My vintage charts are ajumble. This autumn will need to be devoted to intensive study, cramming as it were for holiday exams.
The bartender revealed it to be a ’73.
—I’d like to say I would have guessed that. Ruinart was the very first house to produce champagne, yet curiously . . .
Owen grabbed Altberg’s wrist.
—He’s in there.
Altberg ripped free from the grip as if he were being accosted by a vagabond. Then he looked around to make sure no one but the staff saw. He spoke in a low voice:
—Kurt won’t be back until Wednesday. Two of the models backed out, supposedly from the flu, so he took the night train to Paris to find replacements. Meanwhile, Kurt’s eight assistants have been working in overlapping ten-hour shifts for the past week to build everything Kurt had envisioned. They’ve been spilling beer and putting out cigarettes on the table so that every detail of the Bar piece is right. Their work was made more challenging because someone, let’s not mention any names, destroyed the video feed from Berlin.
—Oops.
—That’s a million-dollar oops that demands at the very least a pantomime of contrition.
—Or?
—Or I get to play lawyer instead of oenophile.
Owen opened his hand with a gesture that both apologized and said never mind.
—He needs you at the opening on Wednesday, Thursday at the latest, for the press. Before you object, note that you are contractually obligated to a month of promotional talks. We’re just asking for one day. There’s a pass in your name at Will Call that gets you into the Wednesday preview—I seriously doubt, by the way, that even Lady Percy can get you in tonight. I wouldn’t even bother. Rest up. Those marathon interviews are brutal. I’d sleep today and tomorrow. These people matter, and you must appear to them as untarnished, or at least artistically tarnished. Otherwise you’re a nobody, and the work isn’t art, it’s exploitation.
—See, here I’m at a loss. If I tell everyone those pictures were exploitative, then I give Kurt’s work an element of truth. If I play along, then he is trivializing something horrible. So I’m sorry if being here and being ragged made the work true, but I couldn’t care less about fucking up your sales.
—You’re not listening. We want you here. The stronger you become as an artist, the more those photos sell for. I have sizable equity in Spooky Action. Right now, there is no one in the world more invested in your career than me. In fact, you popping in like this saves me the trouble of sending my courier.
Before the sweep of Altberg’s fat paw Owen spotted her through the sliding glass door.
Stevie was reading Auden in a chambray shirt and cut jean shorts. White flip-flops, dangling over the arms of a wingback chair, were the only concession she’d made to Lady Percy’s rules of attire.
Owen looked behind him. Late afternoon light had made the whites glow.
His neck hair bristled at someone’s breath. He had left Altberg talking cuvées to a Russian oligarch. Someone else must have followed Owen inside. Someone was behind him. A very gentle hand touched his elbow. He turned around to find the shorn-headed, heavily made-up couple from outside. They were both smiling ear to ear, ready to talk to Owen and Stevie before they could talk to each other.
—I’m Eva.
—And I’m Adele.
Stevie had already met them and tried to explain:
—They’re from the future. From Berlin in the future.
—Our spaceship landed there. We are Futuring.
—Futuring, her partner echoed.
Owen had never been so lost.
—Futuring?
—Futuring.
—Futuring.
Stevie broke the awkward silence.
—In the future it just so happens that people are really, really nice. Who would have guessed, right?
Neither Eva nor Adele stopped smiling. Adele, the shorter of the two, seemed more comfortable with English. She sounded like Owen’s first-grade teacher:
—There is strong emotion in this room, which is good. It is the most important thing to feel something. Feelings are yours alone. No one else will ever have them.
They both stared at Owen, again seeming to communicate something without language or even movement. A theremin should be playing, he thought.
Eva couldn’t help but add one more.
—Futuring.
Stevie was now standing. She led Owen to the kitchen, marking her place and then dropping Auden’s poor wrinkled mug in her beach bag.
—Let’s get out of here; those two were the only ones I liked. And I think you weirded them out.
Stevie pulled the door shut behind them. A half dozen cars were parked on the cobble drive between the front door and the security gate: the four black SUVs were hired. He could easily see Lady Percy driving the green roadster. The sinuous red exotic, the type of car with letters and numbers that are supposed to mean something—G4, X9, M7A, V10—always
left Owen feeling like he’d wandered into a game of Battleship. This red car, mere inches from scraping the ground, had to be Altberg’s, regardless of the demands his weight would put on the suspension. Owen stopped.
—Don’t tell me that’s Altberg’s.
—Oh, you mean Veronica?
The slick black sidewalls of the tires made him wish he had a pocketknife.
—You’re shitting me. He named his car?
—I had to hear about it on the drive down. Some Italian woman he saw once.
—And you rode down here with him because . . .
—I saw your bag just sitting by the door and I knew something was up. I called every hospital and police station in Berlin asking if they picked up Owen Burr. No one knew anything, so I came here. Altberg was my only ride.
—This just keeps getting better.
—I saw the ticket and read the letter. I came here to stop them. And maybe stop you from doing something stupid.
Stevie pushed a button, sliding the iron gate to the side.
The Guesthouse’s motion-activated security lights ticked on when they crossed the threshold, halogen arresting the incandescence of Basel’s streetlamps. They walked past St. Alban’s church, made a left toward the paper mill, and then met the river. She took his hand.
—You’ve just got to focus on something else. Right now, that’s getting as far away from Kurt as you can. You can’t do anything about the pictures hanging up in the booth. We all have a gallery of mistakes.
—Gallery of mistakes? They drugged me, at least twice, and took a bunch of pictures like it was no big deal, like I was some guy who passed out at a frat party. I almost died. You ride down here with Altberg to make sure I’m in Basel, and now I can’t stay? What am I missing here? My foot’s in a trap, and you’re telling me to run. I’m sorry, but no.
—I’m trying to get you out. Just go. We’ll go to Paris and stay at L’Hotel, which I’ve always wanted to do, and have lots of cheap wine in cafés.
Owen squinted into the vanishing sun. He saw a thought flash over her. She was nervous for the first time that she might have actually done something wrong.
—I came back to the tower twice. The first time you were with those girls.
—I don’t know what you think you saw, but I was literally about to die from meningitis.
—Whatever it is Kurt’s angling for, you need to keep a safe distance. Just point to a map. The tickets are on me. I’m thinking Prague or Paris.
—Those pictures come down today. And if Kurt tries to do something, I’m going to kick him in the teeth.
—Get a court order.
—How long would that take? A month?
—You’re right. They’re already in the catalogue. But if you make a scene about it, you’ll just draw more attention to them. And that’s what they want. We need to cut our losses and run.
Owen considered what she was saying.
—Have you heard of the Mann Gulch fire?
—You’re not setting Art Basel on fire.
—That’s not what I’m suggesting.
—I’m talking about real things, like getting on a train in the next hour. When we’re on the train you can tell me all about fires, hurricanes, whatever.
—Let me explain Mann Gulch. It’s the best story I know, and it just so happens to be the key to this whole situation.
Stevie took his hand, her fingertips exploring the soft pads of his fingers and the calluses ridging the tops of his palms. She opened her eyes and told him to go ahead.
—Mann Gulch is this place in Montana where a huge wildfire broke out in 1949. Fifteen firemen, smokejumpers, parachuted in farther down the gulch and carried out the foreman’s plan of attack. The terrain up there makes everything seem historic, like Thermopylae: mountains sliced by a river into a V-shaped valley, a perfect channel for fire. So these particular smokejumpers parachute into a raging wildfire and decide their best bet is to steer the fire into the Missouri River.
—I thought we were in Montana.
—We are. It’s a big river. So they’re trying to steer the fire back toward the Missouri, but it sucks up the cool air over the rushing water, gets a shove from the wind coming down the eastern ridge, and leaps over the little stream they were using as a firebreak. When the fire jumped the gulch, they were cut off in an ever-narrowing ring, a C that was quickly becoming an O. There was nothing left to do but sprint up the ridge. Two problems: the Gulch ridge is very steep; and fire spreads even faster uphill.
—What does this have to do with anything?
—I’m getting to that. The foreman, a man named Dodge, ironically enough . . .
—Why is his name ironic?
—You’ll see. Dodge, fire singeing his eyebrows, had a moment of genius: fire needs fuel to burn—no fuel, no fire. In this case, the fuel was dried-out late summer cheatgrass. So Dodge gets on his hands and knees and starts lighting all the grass around him, he lights a fire then stomps it out, lights another fire, stomps it out, until he has a totally burned-out little circle. He’s yelling at everyone to join him in this charred ring, but his men either can’t hear him or think he has totally lost it. They run right by him, charging up the ridge with a hundred-foot wall of fire at their backs. Only two of those fifteen survived. Meanwhile, Dodge lies flat on his back in the center of his scorched circle, rolling back and forth because the wildfire is blazing in his face and the smoldering soil is cooking his back. But the flames danced over him and left his little circle untouched, skipping over his scratch of earth as the fire overtook the entire gulch. He was fine. Everything else burned. They teach firefighters to do that now. It’s called an escape fire.
—So Kurt and Hal are the smokejumpers who ran?
—No. They’re the wildfire. And now that I’m surrounded by the flames, I’ve got to light a little fire, step forward rather than run away; otherwise this is going to burn me up.
—The problem with your analogy is that we aren’t surrounded. Name a city on a rail line and we’ve got two tickets and a snack car feast, my treat.
—This has to happen. I am going to burn all of that fuel, and Kurt should know to stand back.
—Sounds a lot like your plan to move in with Kurt in the first place. That worked out well, right?
Stevie shook her head and looked at the river.
He watched the hollow above her lip for a twitch that might turn into a smile. No smile. It was hard to tell if she was even breathing. Her lips looked stuck, as if it would hurt to part them. When he spoke, she looked away. He reached a finger for her hand.
—Do you ever have days where your vision shifts?
Without context it sounded like a horrible pickup line. She started walking away.
—That came out wrong. Let’s take as a starting point that people see colors differently at different points in their lives.
—Let’s take as a starting point, “I’m just kidding. I don’t want to get thrown in prison. We’re on the next train out of here.”
—No, listen. People see things differently at different times. Nothing groundbreaking there. Maybe you have one year where you appreciate yellow more than usual. Or whatever. So that’s our starting point. What I’m talking about is maybe two steps from that. I’m talking about when every color you perceive is shifted. A couple of days will be slightly red or light-green or yellow or blue, like someone is holding a gel over the sun.
—I’m not sure I agree with any of that. And I’m not sure what you’re saying. Is this a metaphor?
—No.
—Can we at least pretend it’s a metaphor, because otherwise you’re completely crazy, which really is a shame. To be fair, I’m only interested in guys who are at least seventy percent crazy. I’m willing to go as high as ninety-two percent crazy if the guy has tapered obliques and original opinions. But I can’t go full crazy. So. It’s a metaphor, right?
—It’s a subtle thing, but it was always there. Apparently I’m cured now. So I may not eve
n meet your threshold seventy percent. The color shift happened every day growing up. Now everything is just . . . normal.
—Oh, yeah, normal like this.
—Everything used to have a . . . mood. The world was tinted a particular color, as if I were looking through a colored film, a laminate. There would be this green flash, then an afterimage of gemlike green that lasted for days. I’d wake up in the morning, see that the wood beams on the ceiling looked sapling green, and know my day was going to be different. It wasn’t just a sensory thing. It’s like the inside of my head was lit with a strange light; my intuition, my thinking, it would get shifted. When I was little, before I knew enough to think I was crazy, the world was a sacred place.
—What did your parents say?
—My dad’s a classics professor. He teaches Greek. I grew up thinking that Hermes and Athene and Ares and Apollo were real things—and I made colors into Gods. And I had to know what I was seeing. Other kids skated to the beach. I biked to Home Depot to see if they had any new paint cards.
—The colors never changed, when you grew up or moved or whatever?
—We lived at Mission my entire life. The colors a year ago were the exact same ones I saw when I was five. I used to never talk about this stuff because I thought talking about it was a form of betrayal, and it would go away. But it’s been gone for a while now. The names are pretty obscure—I don’t know if you’ve come across these words. Peridot, which is a light green gem—it’s the only gemstone found on comets. That was the one I named Hermes. Which ended up fitting when I learned later about the comet connection—a lot of these things I’m going to say just ended up fitting, there’s no real way to explain it. The next color was gamboge, Apollo. Gamboge is this Buddhist-monk-robe orange. I thought the gamboge days were this deep mystical thing, but it was pretty much like being drunk. I don’t even know the difference now. There was no me on those days—to the point where essay grades were a lottery, like I was handed back some random student’s paper. I took a failing grade sophomore year when a professor accused me of plagiarism—I couldn’t defend the paper because I had no fucking clue what I had written. Carmine is blood red. That’s Ares. It’s the part of me I’m not going to try apologizing for. My eyes turn completely white, apparently. Ultramarine is this crushed mineral blue that goes with Athene. I went entire months seeing white as a light blue. Ultramarine has been the dominant mood of my life—which makes it tough to say that those days are different. Without that blue, I have no claim on perspective. I used to know how to see with topsight and know how things are linked. It’s like I used to be a mason with all these secrets, and now I’m just a brick.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 22