The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  The big man answered for Paire. “Found him? She watched it all. Did everything but kill him herself.” His voice was so much louder than everyone else’s. “Sure you didn’t know him?” he asked Paire, taking over the role of interrogator.

  “She didn’t know him,” Mayer said. “No one here knew him.” He crossed his arms and kept his distance.

  Lucia stood behind Mayer, even further removed.

  Ignoring the police, the pink man asked Mayer, “What are you going to do about Georgia?”

  Paire heard herself ask, “Who’s Georgia?”

  Mayer said, “The woman who quit.”

  “Leaving you minus one employee the day before the opening. How’s that going to work?”

  The officer with the notebook felt compelled to ask, “Did this Georgia know the man outside?”

  The banker answered as if all of this bored him. “She didn’t know him. Mayer didn’t know him, Lucia didn’t know him, and whoever this is didn’t know him. No one here knew him. If you want to know why that man killed himself, look into his background and you’ll probably find a long history of emotional distress.” He turned back to Mayer, about to speak, when he realized that the officers hadn’t gone anywhere. “We’ve said everything we have to say on the subject. You have our contact information. You can leave us.”

  One of the cops pointed at Paire. “We don’t have her information.”

  The banker looked at Paire. “Well, give it to them!”

  Mayer gritted his teeth at the banker, but didn’t protest. Lucia found a stack of Post-Its and a pen, and Paire scribbled a name and cell number.

  One cop led her aside and asked her to describe the incident while his partner took notes. Steps away, Mayer engaged in heated whispers with the banker. Lucia busied herself across the room with the shipping crates, pulling out more framed Rosewoods for the exhibit. They tried to pretend a man hadn’t just died in front of them.

  Paire told them what she could remember. She asked what the man’s name was, but they hadn’t found any identification. She showed the officers her phone images, and emailed them to one of the cops in case they could use them.

  As they spoke to her, Paire slipped a hand into her purse and felt the condom between her fingers as if it were a charm. She’d never fainted, so she didn’t know how her body would feel before going limp. But it might have felt like this—the chilly sweat on the forehead, the weak hands, too weak to make a fist even if she tried. Surreptitiously, Paire sniffed herself, and even in the new clothes she smelled briny from the blood.

  When they were finished, one of the officers said, “I’m sorry you had to see this, Katherine.”

  Paire cringed. They called her by the name on her Maine license.

  The police left her at the side of the gallery, away from Mayer and the banker as they volleyed heated words, and on the other side of the room from Lucia. Paire pulled out her cell phone, and on the sly took a photo of the big man. His face had the hue of boiled ham. She sent it to Rosewood with the message: At the Fern waiting for you. Get me away from this man. She didn’t want to say much else, especially about the dead man. She just wanted to leave, and she couldn’t just walk out. The two cops were combing over their notes by the front door to make sure they’d asked all the right people all the right questions.

  Lucia circled the room, keeping as much distance from the banker as possible. When she got to Paire, she said, “You can go home soon, and this will be over. I promise.”

  Paire was grateful for her warmth. She thought that when the braces came off, Lucia would have a beautiful smile. “I’ve never seen anyone die before,” she said. Even with her family history, this was true.

  “I know, honey,” Lucia said, rubbing her back.

  Paire asked about the man arguing with Mayer. “Is that your lawyer or something?”

  Lucia smirked at the notion. “His name is Abel Kasson.” She said his name hesitantly, as if repeating a curse. “He’s not with the gallery.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Money. And that’s all he is.”

  “Where the hell is Rosewood anyway?” Abel Kasson asked Mayer, loud enough to hear from across the room.

  Paire wondered herself.

  The two police officers excused themselves and stepped outside the gallery, where they commenced talking to the bystanders who still clustered around the window. A few of them stared at the painting instead of the bloodstains on the sidewalk.

  With the Fern free of law enforcement, Abel Kasson raised his voice to Mayer. “You know why that person killed himself? All you have to do is stare into that painting for five minutes to figure it out. I’ve told you for weeks to take that thing down.”

  Mayer’s voice strained to remain calm. “You don’t own this gallery.”

  “For the next month, I might as well own it. Now take it down before it kills someone else.” Kasson gestured to Paire from across the room as if she were a prop. “I saw the way she was looking at it. She’ll be next.”

  This stirred up serious ire in Paire. Abel Kasson might be the first bully she had met in New York. His combination of contempt and dismissal reminded her of the vermin she’d encountered in Abenaki. Her spine straightened, and for the first time since she arrived at the gallery she found the clear, bold voice she had adopted in Manhattan. With Paire Anjou’s voice, she called to Kasson, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Her brashness made the man smile. Perhaps he thrived on conflict. In her experience, some bullies needed adversaries. He said, “Tomorrow night, a new exhibition of the acclaimed guerrilla artist Derek Rosewood will delight critics and crowds alike. And I’ll be the one who made that happen.”

  “A man just died,” Paire said.

  “Not my business. Not your business.” He pointed to the shipping crates. “See those? That’s my business.”

  Her mouth twitched as she considered that this man might have some connection to Rosewood. Her phone pinged.

  Rosewood had texted her back: Meet me towards Seventh. Idling.

  She was confused. Rosewood was supposed to be here, but he wasn’t. Nor was he going to come and get her. Just the same, this was an excuse to leave, and she would have taken any.

  Kasson spoke to the gallery owner. He pointed out the window at the lingering crowd. “In an hour or two, all those people will be gone, and by morning, with a little pressurized spray, so will the stain on the sidewalk.” Mayer glanced at Paire, and when Kasson caught him looking, the big man said, “This person isn’t worth consideration.”

  Rosewood pinged Paire again. At a hydrant.

  Paire took this moment to bid her farewells. She walked to Mayer and grabbed his hand before hugging Lucia one more time. “Thank you for the kindness.”

  Third ping from Rosewood: Don’t tell anyone I’m here.

  “No thank yous for me, I suppose,” said Kasson. When Paire curiously cocked her head at him, he explained, “For the clothes.”

  Of course she’d seen Kasson snatch the receipt, but she hadn’t fully considered that he’d paid for her dress and shoes.

  Paire Anjou had been blessed with the art of defiance. Facing Abel Kasson, she kicked off one shoe at a time. They rested on the floor straight on their heels, perfect as a store display. She slipped the dress off her shoulders, unzipped the side, and let it tumble around her ankles. Without taking her eyes off his, she stood in her ivory underwear, the tops and bottoms still stained with a few spots of blood. With the banker struck mute, she turned and proceeded out of the gallery, clutching her purse beneath her arm. Her barefoot steps were inaudible, and she felt somnambulant as she passed through the crowd to Rosewood’s idling taxi.

  Chapter 3

  On the ride back to Brooklyn, Rosewood had given her his T-shirt, so he was nude from the waist up and she below the hips. Rosewood was thin without being skinny. Only the tiniest fold of flesh rippled against the top of his trousers, where a wispy trail of sandy hair continued from where his zipper ended
up to his navel. He cradled her head in his hand, and his touch stopped her from trembling.

  This chivalry had been part of Paire’s immediate attraction to Rosewood, because he was so different from the boys she knew in Abenaki. New Englanders were predisposed to a raw-edged rudeness, and Rosewood was painfully polite, greeting her with a “Ma’am,” or sometimes more cheekily, “Good morning, Miss Anjou.” Rosewood had spent the largest chunk of his childhood in Virginia, and he still carried a bit of the accent. When he was playful, the accent thickened.

  She liked that he didn’t sound like a boy from Abenaki. There were no rude taunts, no compliments that seemed like threats about her tight ass, certainly no waggling his wormy cock at her like the captain of the lacrosse team had in her junior year. Rosewood’s manners seemed all the more alien to a girl like Paire, who expected some degree of cruelty from boys.

  Paire rushed through the blunt details of what had happened at the Fern Gallery. Rosewood occasionally diverted his attention to the blood on her underwear and the smudges on her skin that hadn’t come clean. He reached out to touch her leg, and she pulled it away at first, then gradually extended it to let him place warm knuckles over her knee.

  Rosewood smiled easily with a large Anglican grin, the kind of horse-toothed smile she associated with tabloid photos of Prince William. When she saw his teeth Paire’s heart quickened, and she was throbbing now something awful—part pheromones, part adrenal overload from the Fern. Possibly the lingering memory of that painting as well. Whatever brought them on, pheromones got to work in the back of the taxi, surging as their skin brushed and eyes met. She could be angry that he hadn’t been at the gallery when he was supposed to be, but she didn’t bring it up. Paire was new at boys, and thought a show of temper might jeopardize the relationship.

  “You just let the dress drop,” he said.

  “It’s not a big deal. I’m au naturale when I do studio modeling.”

  Their jowly driver peeked into the rearview at her, but there was nothing to see now that Rosewood’s shirt covered her.

  The taxi drove past the midpoint of the Brooklyn Bridge. Rosewood squeezed her knee, and her fingers crept on top of his as she looked out the window at the river and blurred thatches of riveted steel.

  When she turned back to admire Rosewood’s profile, she considered him prettier than she. He didn’t have her high-bridged nose, and he looked so young for his age. He was thirty-two, but his satiny skin had made her think he was twenty-five when they met. With luminous hazel eyes and plump lips, his features seemed feminine. Even his cheeks were smooth. When he stopped shaving he tended to grow whiskers around his chin and a few on his upper lip, but not enough to scratch her when she kissed him. He dressed in T-shirts that he designed, which also made him look young. When she got him naked she found bruises from all the slips and scrapes he endured during his installations. She gravitated toward these imperfections when she probed his body with her fingers and tongue.

  “He killed himself over that painting?” Rosewood asked.

  “You’ve never seen it?”

  “I’ve never been to the gallery, Paire.” Now she was shocked. He shrugged. “It’s a big city, and I’m never around there. It’s not like it’s in Chelsea, and it’s not a major exhibition space. The show got thrown together pretty quickly, and Kasson chose the space. Honestly, I didn’t want to show there, but he said we could do more with a small space.”

  “So you know Abel Kasson.”

  “Everyone’s got a debt.” He stroked her scalp and stared out the window.

  “You didn’t come inside because you didn’t want to see him,” she said, more confrontational than usual.

  “You just met him. Would you want to run into Abel Kasson if you didn’t have to?”

  She repeated what Lucia had told her. “He’s the money.”

  “He’s funded a lot of shows,” he said. “He’s from an old money family in New York. You ever hear of Kasson and Kasson?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s an investment bank that was around for a hundred years. I think they call them bulge bracket companies, but basically a multinational bank. They specialized in carbon emission trading. I guess you can trade on carbon emissions now.”

  “So he runs a big company.” Because of her own family, Paire was repelled by affluence.

  “He ran a big company. It went bankrupt in 2009 when all the other banks folded. So now he’s just a crazy rich guy who fills his time pretending to be a curator. He’s bankrolled a lot of artists. You should see his collection. Shit, you should see his apartment. It’s like Tut’s tomb in there.”

  She watered down her opinion. “I got a strange impression from him.”

  “He’s a horrible person, that’s why. He paid a hundred thousand dollars to get out of a rape trial a few years ago.”

  The taxi driver looked over his shoulder at them. Paire was surprised he could hear them through the Plexiglas. “Why would you take his money?”

  He grinned. “So he doesn’t have it.”

  There went her endorphins again.

  Rosewood’s grin fell, and he amended himself. “I wish I’d never met the man.”

  They cut through Brooklyn Heights and pulled down Pierrepont Street, a quiet block within walking distance of all the stores on Montague. Rosewood lived in a brick three-story brownstone with proud brown slab steps and a teak door that looked as if it had been carved from a single hearty slice of tree. He’d bought the place two years ago, after Macy’s decided to carry his clothing line. To Paire, he confessed that the pristine brick reminded him of the military housing he grew up in. Now that it was April, the window boxes sprouted daffodils, yellow as the taxicab.

  When they got out the cab lingered longer than it should have, and Paire pulled Rosewood’s shirt down over her ass.

  Inside, the place was sparse and tidy to a fault, a legacy of Rosewood’s army breeding. All the books were shelved as vertical as the Chrysler Building. They reflected in the gloss of the wood floors. The art on the walls—not all of it his—served as the primary decoration. The entryway had been custom painted by a compatriot of his, an anonymous street artist in the UK. Although it had been rendered in spray paint and stencils, it recreated the elaborate pattern of a cathedral’s rose window.

  Rosewood didn’t display much family memorabilia. Despite framed photos with friends and a large photo of him and Paire looking goofy—her in a tuxedo and him in a wedding dress—he didn’t showcase photographs of his parents.

  Other than his lingering traces of Virginian dialect, not much about him hinted that he was the son of a southern general. Paire had to forage for evidence of this connection. In the walk-in closet he had given Paire for her things, he’d left a few boxes of his own. She rummaged one night when she was alone and discovered a collapsible spring baton, the sort that riot police use to beat back angry mobs. One flick of the wrist and the black wand extended to a sixteen-inch spring coil, weighted at the tip. She slapped her palm with it lightly, and it hurt as if she’d caught a softball barehanded. The right snap would shatter bone.

  More alarmingly, she found a black revolver with a long thin muzzle and a walnut handle, some war relic, which she might have thought was a harmless replica except for the scattering of brass bullets that ran loose in the box. It was the only direct link she’d ever found to his military ancestry.

  Paire couldn’t complain. She’d moved in a few months ago and there wasn’t anything in plain sight that might connect her to Maine. In her closet she kept a sealed box with memorabilia from her time with Gilda, mostly sketchbooks and photographs. In another she kept a hat that Gilda had bought her. She didn’t wear it, but last winter when the snow had reminded her of Maine’s harsh winters, she had taken out the hat and held it under her nose. She sniffed for traces of a wood fire from the house where she had lived. They weren’t comforting, just familiar.

  Paire trudged up the stairs and into the bathroom. There, Rosewood r
emoved her final garments and drew a lavender bath. While she soaked, she sponged off the blood and sour sweat. The warm water enveloped her, steam floating across the surface.

  “I can’t smell him,” she said, relieved. The lavender purged the scent of the old man.

  Rosewood brought her a glass of ice water to drink. “Water on the outside, water on the inside. Water cleanses throughout.”

  At last she was able to rinse off the discoloration on her skin from the blood.

  Rosewood kept her company as the water cooled, sitting next to the bathtub with his head resting on the porcelain. They sat for a time, holding hands over the rim. The drain leaked around the plug, so the water level sank until eventually Paire was naked and damp in the empty tub. When she closed her eyes, she savored the warmth of his skin. She felt safe.

  “Is there someone from home you might want to talk to about this?” Rosewood asked.

  She withdrew her hand from his. He knew she didn’t talk about Maine.

  “Not your dad. But your aunt,” he urged. Paire covered her nipples with her forearms and sank down. Rosewood got the hint and changed the subject. “What did the man look like?”

  “The way he looked at that woman, it made him seem so breakable.”

  “You mean the painting.”

  “What did I say?”

  “The woman.”

  She nodded and heaved herself out of the tub.

  Once she got dressed, they went to an upscale restaurant on Montague. Corniche. They both liked it because a muralist had painted the walls so it appeared that diners were overlooking a cliff above a glacier canyon. Over drinks, she could almost forget about what she’d seen that afternoon. But when she looked at her fingernails in the glow of the table’s flickering candle, she thought about the painting. That woman’s hands and feet. The red dress.

  While they read over the menus, Paire predicted what Rosewood would order: a filet, prime rib, or flank steak. Sometimes she’d chide, “You’re going to have a heart attack when you’re forty,” even though his body metabolized red meat the way a coyote digested garbage. He surprised her when he said, “They’ve got lobster.”