The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Paire flinched. Lobsters. How far did she have to move to get away from lobsters? “So?”

  “So, I haven’t had it for a while. What do you think about a couple of lobsters? Seafood night. It’ll make you feel like you’re back in Maine.”

  She supposed it was her fault. Paire didn’t talk about Maine, and Rosewood never asked much about it, possibly because he himself never talked about Virginia. She was too ashamed to speak. Everyone had idiosyncrasies, and this was one of hers. Lobsters. The scourge of Maine. She’d never mentioned how much she hated them, or the particular reason why she hated them, but why should she? When did the opportunity present itself? Everyone has something weird they’re afraid of, she told herself. Even Oprah is afraid of balloons. But if she explained why she hated lobster, it would require talking about her parents. Talking about Lake and Cissy Novis would mean talking about their crime, the trial, all of it. Rosewood still didn’t know about any of it, and she had no intention of telling him. Instead, she stated flatly, “I don’t like lobster.”

  Rosewood tried to keep things light, to distract her from what she had been through today. “How can you not like lobster?” he teased. “You’re from Maine.”

  “I just don’t.” Her tone said leave it alone. He might not have cared one way or the other about lobster, but once she rankled, he could tell she was hiding something. On another day he might not have pursued it, but today he was curious. Perhaps now that this girl had moved into his apartment, he wanted to know more about her. When they were making polite conversation during their first dates, he’d asked about her family and she had lied and told him that her parents had died in a commuter train wreck. Signal failure. Other than a few superficial details, she’d never had to delve that deeply into the specifics.

  She could see how frustrated he was now. After bathing her, after listening to her go on about the sad man and the painting, his jaw tensed when she wouldn’t divulge anything behind the banal topic of food choices. Just as irked, he said, “Maybe I’ll just order lobster, and you can have whatever you want.”

  “Please don’t.” She thought about high school, even as far back as elementary school, when the kids used lobster baby as an insult. Out of context it sounded ludicrous, but after years of torment these tender places remained raw. After what happened this afternoon, she would be more prone to outbursts.

  “You don’t have to eat it.” Somehow, behind a guise of politeness, this was evolving into a fight.

  “I don’t like lobsters. I don’t like eating them, and I don’t like watching them being eaten. I know it’s weird, but it’s important.” Two other tables sandwiched theirs, and the patrons inches away from them sensed the heat in their conversation. Table right masked faces with menus, while table left pretended to watch the street traffic on Montague outside the window.

  “How about this—I won’t order the lobster, if you tell me why you don’t like them.”

  Paire wouldn’t look at him. She brimmed with rage and shame, that he would have the balls to snoop into her secrets, and that she still couldn’t divulge them.

  “Please just order something else,” she fumed.

  “Just tell me,” he insisted, just as angry, eyeballs bulging.

  Her temper popped. “They’re my natural fucking enemy, all right? What the hell do you want from me?”

  “Christ, Katie—”

  “Paire!” This split the air like a firecracker. Chairs around them skidded on the floor.

  “Paire…” Rosewood’s disappointment made Paire shrivel, mainly because he sounded so much like Aunt Gilda. He reached for her hand but she slipped hers below the table. “Just tell me something.”

  The more he nudged, the less she wanted to give him. Her affection for Rosewood could be mercurial. Maybe she didn’t trust Rosewood, and that made her wonder if she should start looking for a new sublet. Crossing her arms, she asked dismissively, “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me something about your parents.”

  The patrons to the right took their eyes off the street and glanced at them with interest.

  “You already know about them. They’re dead.” This was only half true. Her mother was dead, and her father might as well have been. Prison had left him a breathing corpse.

  From the few truths she’d told him, he knew their names were Lake and Cissy Novis. Lake was Jewish, Cissy Episcopalian. How a Jew had ended up in Maine was a matter of odd luck. When Paire was critical of her looks, she would lament her Jew nose.

  “Before the train accident, did something…bad happen?”

  Leave it to Rosewood to ask something that invasive in a public place.

  “No one touched me in a bad place, Derek.”

  He hated being called Derek, and frowned when he heard it.

  A few of her dates leaped to the next conclusion, the one Rosewood was forming. She saw him thinking about her dead mother, and the epiphany glossed over his face. “Did something happen between your parents?” Like this was a quiz show. At least he worded it more artfully than others.

  “My father never hurt my mother.”

  Some boys had continued to the next logical thought, that if she hadn’t been abused, and one parent hadn’t killed the other, she was simply a rotten girl who didn’t appreciate her family. They assumed she had abandoned her filial duties, and then wondered if she lacked the capacity to love anyone. The way Rosewood looked at Paire cheapened her.

  Rosewood must have sensed she was close to a tantrum. Whenever they got close to these subjects at home, especially on the rare occasion when she knocked back a few cocktails, she might turn on him. The girlfriend who moved out six months ago would apparently huck stuff across the room when they fought, but that wasn’t Paire. She curled up like a sleeping fox, quaking with anger just visibly enough that he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep next to her. When he would try to talk her down, she murmured with the same vitriolic tone that she used now. “Please order something else.”

  Tonight, he would not placate her. He ordered the lobster. “It’s my choice,” he said, now just as tense as Paire.

  She didn’t hide her anger. “Well, you’ve got your autonomy, I’ll give you that. Now look where it gets you.” Paire got up and left the restaurant, and Rosewood dined alone.

  When he came home an hour later, Rosewood found her in the bedroom. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall, madly scratching at her sketchbook with a pencil. They looked at each other without saying anything. Rosewood slid down the wall and sat next to her, looking over her shoulder as she scribbled. She had scribbled the profile of an old man.

  “Is that what he looked like?”

  “As close as I can get it.” It was very close. She rendered his sad, shrinking face in exquisite detail as she remembered it, his eyes squinting from the pain as steel punctured his heart. Heavy shadows hung under his cheekbones. She successfully captured the depth of his frown lines.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Paire stopped and laid down her pencil, flexing and stretching her cramped fingers. She reached behind her and brought out the gun she’d found, its dark barrel pointed near but not at Rosewood. She worried that the weapon might discharge by accident, sending a bullet through the plaster wall and maybe a next-door neighbor. She might shoot herself in the foot while pointing the barrel to the floor—if she blew off a digit down there, that meant a life without open-toed shoes. She kept her finger off the trigger. Paire was fascinated by its weight and the shine of metal.

  “Fuck!” Rosewood pushed the barrel away from them both, so if it went off, it would shoot across the room, and probably pick off one of Takashi Murakami’s Mr. DOB characters, which resembled anime versions of Mickey Mouse. “Don’t play with that.” He’d never shown her the gun, but didn’t accuse her of rifling through his possessions.

  “It’s not loaded. At least, I don’t think it is.” She was calm, but the fact that she held the gun made Rosewood tense, and edge a few
inches away from her.

  “What are you doing?”

  She asked plainly, “Where did this come from?”

  Rosewood quickly explained, “It’s my grandfather’s sidearm. My dad gave it to me because he thought I might need it in New York.”

  “This is part of your family heritage. Why would you keep it hidden?”

  “Because it’s dangerous,” he said.

  Paire rested the revolver on the floor. She wrapped her arm around his, wanting to feel safe with this man, her intoxicant in their relationship. A deep breath later, she said, “That’s why I don’t talk about Maine.”

  Chapter 4

  By Rosewood’s opening reception the next evening, someone had cleaned most of the blood off the sidewalk. A faint smear remained, something that might be more obvious in daylight, Paire thought. The Fern ended up choosing HERO, and Perseus proudly held up Hussein’s severed head in the front window. A small crush of people gathered outside to admire it before entering the reception.

  While she would never say this to Rosewood, especially tonight, when they arrived, Paire was disappointed that the woman in the red kimono wasn’t still on display. She’d been thinking about the portrait all day, and wished she had taken a shot with her phone yesterday. Details of the painting stayed with her—the lushness of the crimson, the faint craquelure on the surface of the pigment. She wanted to see it again.

  She and Rosewood timed their entry late, so they could walk into a crammed room. They locked elbows and entered the muggy warmth of the Fern together. The gallery looked different in the evening. Mayer Wolff had trained moody spotlights on each of the hanging works but dimmed the overheads, and cast green accent lights toward the ceiling to give the room the atmosphere of a parlor. The place was a forest of bodies. A DJ spun beats in the corner, and some of the girls Paire’s age danced in stilted movements within the limited floor space available. Paire had difficulty skirting past without rubbing some part of her body against them. Standing a half head shorter than most, she felt like a pinball. Even in their finery, she smelled a few sour armpits.

  They’d both dressed up tonight. Rosewood wore a trim-fitting navy suit, and he’d bought Paire a fitted black gown with embroidered embellishments. They made frequent stops as Rosewood shook a lot of hands and hugged people he knew. While he made small talk, she looked around the perimeter of the room at the works on display.

  Paire recognized some of Rosewood’s pieces, but some were new to her. All Rosewood’s work had a consistent voice and feel, so she could have picked them out at an invitational. He liked primary colors and used a checkerboard palette of red and black for many of his pieces. Most of his images were inspired by war propaganda posters. The men’s faces had square jaws and cliffs for cheekbones.

  Her favorite Rosewood series was his least political. In five images, he explored the theme of laughter. All of his subjects were caught in various stages of laughter, from shy tittering to hysterics. They were silkscreened and printed in red, white, and black. The concept was simple, accessible, and to Paire, inspirational. At times, an artist found the sweet balance between authentic self-expression and commercial marketability, and this was it. Rosewood had once explained the work to Paire, saying, “Every person has what’s known as mirror neurons that allow us to empathize with people based on their facial expressions. When someone’s crying in a movie, we feel sad, right? We absorb the emotions that people wear on their faces. So, when someone sees this series, they have to love it. They smile back. They can’t help themselves.”

  Hearing him dissect it took away some of the magic. Still, it worked. The portion of the crowd who stood in front of his LAUGHTER prints all smiled as if they’d been injected with vitamin B boosters. Paire felt like the series was his most honest work, because the lack of inhibition in the laughing men and women manifested Rosewood’s own desire to be free of constraints.

  In a space between bodies she glimpsed Mayer Wolff from across the room, embroiled in an argument with Abel Kasson. Mayer looked the way she remembered, tallish and thin, dressed in a silhouette-shaping check suit with a purple necktie. His adversary in the argument sported a bland wool suit that stretched around his middle and wrinkled at the joints. Kasson’s face looked bloodshot, and he sweated at the temples. The two men argued by the rear wall, where one piece of work had been mounted and veiled with a blue velvet curtain—the only piece of work that wasn’t on display tonight. Guests milled about it, trying to peek around the edges, only to be shooed away by Kasson.

  “What do you have tucked behind there?” Paire asked Rosewood.

  “No idea. We didn’t talk about doing any kind of reveal. It might not even be mine.” Rosewood kissed her forehead and gently tugged her toward the two bickering men. “Might as well get this over with.”

  When they reached the back wall, Kasson broke off his argument and bear-hugged Rosewood, who kept his hands in his pockets during the embrace. A beat later, the businessman stared at Paire. Perhaps owing to the fact that the last time he had seen her she had been in her underwear, he regarded her with a distant familiarity, and didn’t immediately place her face. Mayer was the one who asked the couple, “You two know each other?” For the first time, Paire introduced herself to Mayer. They shook hands. His were warm. She didn’t offer hers to Kasson, but he didn’t seem to expect a handshake or a hug.

  Kasson seemed amused. “I’ll be damned.”

  Mayer looked unsettled. She wondered if he might have been just as disturbed by yesterday’s events, or if he were simply agitated from the argument with Kasson. He asked, “How are you feeling?”

  She gave him one of the smiles she’d perfected in the mirror. “Fine.” What else was there to say, especially at an occasion like this?

  He said, “We threw away your clothes. They were too…” Bloody was the word he probably wanted to use. “We thought you wouldn’t have wanted them.”

  “No one thought we’d be seeing you again,” said Kasson, likely implying that he would have preferred not to see Paire Anjou tonight.

  Mayer said, “It was brave that you tried to save him.”

  “Some people are beyond saving,” Kasson commented.

  Mayer said, “If it makes you feel any better, I went out for a long night of drinking. I’ve never seen anyone die before.”

  “Me either,” she confided.

  “You call yourself New Yorkers,” Kasson huffed.

  Paire tried to ignore him and stepped closer to Mayer, so that it might seem like she, Mayer, and Rosewood were speaking in an intimate triangle, with Abel Kasson eavesdropping from the outside. “Do the police know who he was?”

  “As it happens, yes. His name was Nicola Franconi.”

  The art world thrived on dropping names. She was afraid to admit that she didn’t know it, and looked at Rosewood to see if her boyfriend was familiar with it.

  “I’ve heard the name, but never met him,” said Rosewood. Paire could tell by his falter that he had no idea who this man was either.

  Mayer said, “He was the executive director at the MAAC.”

  Just a few blocks away, the Museum of Asian Art and Culture, otherwise known as the MAAC, was a museum that constantly fought to encourage more attendance in a town dominated by American and European art. She’d heard great things about it, especially the architectural feat of the building design. The collection spanned several centuries and several civilizations, from artifacts such as Japanese samurai suits of armor to modern painters from the People’s Republic. She kept telling herself she needed to go one of these days. MSAD students even got in for free, and she hadn’t yet made the time.

  “So he ran the museum?”

  “That would be the director. But he was the second in command. He’s been around for a while. I’ve come across the name, but I never met him. We don’t exactly work with the same artists.” To Abel Kasson, Mayer said, “I’m surprised you didn’t know him.”

  “Don’t be so surprised,” Kasso
n shot back.

  “He was getting up there. Seventy-eight years old. I spoke to the folks over at the MAAC, just to connect. They said he’d already tried to retire a few years ago, but after taking nine months off, he came back. He was one of those people who couldn’t stay idle. When I told them what happened, everyone was shocked. No one saw it coming.”

  “You think it was because of this?” Paire pointed to the curtain, envisioning the woman in the red kimono. “She’s behind here, isn’t she?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “It’s the only thing that could have been back there.”

  Kasson bullishly inserted himself into the group, shouldering Paire to one side so he could fit into the circle. In Paire’s esteem, he was too sure of himself. In a room full of lithe twenty-somethings, he should have felt like an outcast. Instead, he postured like an old gangster, the Godfather of the lot, who would remain long after the young crowd around them had evanesced. “Here’s another casualty in the making. Get in line, miss.” Paire did her best to smile, but that sheepish half smile came out of her, recalled residue from Abenaki.

  “Mr. Kasson,” warned Mayer.

  “You know it’s a fake,” said Kasson, speaking to Mayer and Rosewood, now taking his turn to ignore Paire.

  “Pretty sure the executive director of the MAAC would have disagreed with you,” said Mayer.

  “A crazy man in a position of authority is still a crazy man. It isn’t a real Qi.” He pronounced it chee.

  Paire clarified with Mayer, “That’s the name of the artist?”

  “Short for Qi Jianyu. But he just went by the single name. Qi.”

  Rosewood perked up. “Not the Qi?”

  “There’s only one,” said Mayer.

  Paire felt like she was trying to comprehend a foreign language.

  “Shit,” said Rosewood, starting to sniff around the edges of the blue velvet curtain. “Why would you want to hide something like that? That’s like finding the Holy Grail and keeping it in the pantry.”