“Not here,” Clay whispered. “Don’t talk amounts.” He looked down, blushing, as if discovering himself unexpectedly, and publicly, naked.
There was plenty of room between tables for private conversation.
“You’ll need to think about it,” Fred said.
He walked out past the bowing help. He tipped the startled harpist, who was taking a breather at the bar. Her long black strapless gown packaged a cleavage that would easily accommodate five bucks.
15
Molly was awake, reading in her living room. The kids were in bed. School tomorrow. Molly had something she wanted to talk about.
“It meant a lot to Sam, your taking time to be with him yesterday,” Molly said. “I can tell him forever how handsome and smart and responsible he is, and how he has to take a shower, but he needs a man to take him seriously enough to play with him.”
It pleased Fred, hearing Molly tell him this.
“You’re not a man who sets out to hurt people, Fred. But you do approach life like an act of God. You’ve got Clayton’s work to worry about, and the other matter. That’s your business, Fred. But you’re not good at thinking about more than one thing at a time.
“Both the kids have been hurt before, by their father. I’m not telling you because I’m afraid it’s going to happen, but you should know. If it develops that you hurt me, that’s okay. It’s a risk I’ll run, and I won’t mind retaliating. But I won’t see either of the children hurt again, and the more vulnerable at the moment is Sam.
“Terry thinks the world of you. Your sex is an advantage. If you’re going to make a commitment to Sam, don’t forget it’s important.”
They’d come into the kitchen, where Fred was warming a can of beans and making toast for toast and baked beans as an antidote to Clayton’s dinner.
“You want bacon with it?” Molly suggested.
Good idea.
“Did I hurt Sam?” Fred asked, defensive. For God’s sake, he’d spent yesterday afternoon with the kid.
“On the contrary. You gave him reason to try some trust and affection on you.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Fred got out a beer to go with his late supper, offering one to Molly, who refused it.
“It’s good unless it’s betrayed. If that happens again, I won’t forgive you. Not even if it’s not your fault.”
A good thing about Molly was that she would give clear expression to so unreasonable an emotional proposition. A bad thing about her was that she’d do it while you were trying to have supper and unwind after an uneasy day. Even if Fred took time in advance to think about it, he couldn’t predict what the proposition was going to be, so he couldn’t have an answer ready.
Molly’s opening gambit could lead to one of two ultimate resolutions: either Fred’s sleeping on the couch, where the kids could find him in disgrace in the morning, or a more satisfactorily intimate exchange, to be achieved only by fancy footwork on the part of them both.
Fred could not, himself, opt successfully for either resolution. The conversation would go where it had to, and then he would go where he had to.
Fortune smiled on him this time, and he found himself in Molly’s bed after all, with Molly crying and taking comfort, and then one thing leading to another in the happy, random plunge of the juggernaut of unlogic.
In the morning the kids kvetched and noodled in anticipation of school, and Molly whirled around preparing to go to work at the library, where she could be found behind the reference desk.
Important issues arose concerning the Red Sox game of the previous evening, in the form of a shouting match between Terry and Sam. Sam had the paper and Terry the urgent opinion that contradicted the paper, and Fred was called on to arbitrate. Terry was dressed for school, holding tight to the homework that she was not forgetting this morning and eating Froot Loops out of the box—“for the vitamins, Fred.”
“Roger Clemens has milk with his,” Fred said, pouring her a glass.
“If I put down my homework, I’ll forget it,” Terry protested. Fred had to pour the milk into her, Sam watching with envious disdain. To keep a balance, Fred sided with the Globe and Sam, and Terry stamped off to the bus mad but still clutching her homework. Sam went upstairs to dress. He would ride his bike today; he liked to skid into the school yard as the bell rang.
Molly was wearing a bright red dress this morning, feeling good. Fred was not fully dressed yet since he’d be the last one out of the house and had to straighten things up before leaving.
“Watch your back, honey,” said Molly—her exit line as she headed for the garage and the Honda and the day at work. Sam went out with her, the two of them a couple.
“Won’t be long before you’re driving your old lady to work,” Fred called. Sam didn’t look back. He had another fish to fry: his mom.
* * *
Start anywhere in the maze and you finish either at the start, or at the heart, or in one of the blind alleys. The best place to be, with regard to a maze, is directly above it, but that was a luxury far from Fred’s present circumstances. Despite the threat of attachment to Smykal’s ugly body in its bath of violence, he nonetheless determined to keep his attention on Clay’s main objective—at least this morning.
He had to find a way through the local crop of professors, scholars, and graduate students in art history and figure out if someone existed who might have put the Heade and the Vermeer together and taken the package to Finn. If this person turned out to be at Harvard, whether grad student or professor, he, she, or it was probably holding a clutch of books concerning Heade, or Vermeer, or—preferably—both.
Academics are trained to despise commerce. The idea of being a merchant is the antithesis of aesthetic intellectual idealism. Take money for things? Horrors! No, no, take money for words, ideas: mouth-temperature air. Live, travel, hump, and defecate in warm tranquillity, supported by money laundered by the sanction of the institution.
Let pirates give their money to Harvard, and Harvard pass it along to scholarship. That way all can console themselves that the ivory tower has nothing to do with dead elephants.
So far were they from recognizing art’s proximity to commerce that not many graduate students in the area even knew Doolan’s existed. It was outside of town. Students might be aware of what was happening at the museums, if it was in their own particular field, but they spent more time with words than with things, were more familiar with prints of photographs of objects than with the objects themselves. Conversely, brilliance in commercial instinct would not drag a youngster to the drudgery of the graduate student’s life and the prospect of an ill-paid career spent counting objects bought by someone else’s manipulation of the world.
It was what made Finn so brilliant an anomaly. He continued with one hand to grasp academia by the short hairs while keeping the fingers of his other hand tightly curled around the testicles of commerce.
If a mature Finn existed, Fred reasoned, why not a larval form as well, slowly devouring the bland pap of the academy and looking even now for a safe corner in which to secrete the chrysalis where he or she could blossom into something rich and wonderful?
Fred left his car in the garage under the Charles Hotel. He might be in Cambridge all day, and he didn’t want to run back and forth feeding a meter.
At the entrance to the fine-arts library Fred told Joan good morning. She was standing, as usual, behind the desk, looking severe, her rimless glasses glaring, her black ponytail frisking in an independent way, as if it did not know that the rest of the animal was in dead earnest. Joan was as tall as Fred was. Whenever he came in, it seemed she was lying in wait for him.
“Come here, Fred,” she said. “Don’t be so fast. I want to tell you a joke about Teddy Kennedy.”
Fred submitted to the joke, an awful one that could survive only in the forgiving groves of academe. He went back past the reference desk to the card catalog.
It was a Tuesday morning. So late in the academic yea
r, the place was almost deserted, as it had been the previous Saturday. Fred looked first, on the computer, for recent theses about Vermeer or Heade, but nothing local was cooking in this regard.
It would be hard to sell the idea of a thesis on either Vermeer or Heade. The subjects were already well covered. Harvard wants you to study odd, neglected corners of art that have long since kissed their ninth lives good-bye, such as the persistence of the Roman funerary-portrait formula into Byzantine decoration, or how Pontormo’s figures can be explained by inferring an extra joint in each limb and digit. The idea is to find something that hasn’t yet been said about a pot and say it at enough length to call it a thesis.
It was partly on account of this enforced attention to the inane that Fred had lasted less than a single term at Harvard, whose main contribution to his early career had been to make it impossible for him to go back to the Midwest.
The quiet plan, the first plan, was to go downstairs to the stacks, find a gap around either Heade or Vermeer, and then go back up and ask at the desk who’d taken those books out.
He found no such gap or gaps, no hole in Vermeer’s section. Higginson’s mentor’s book on Heade was safe and well on the shelf with the others, not recently checked out, according to the sheet in back.
As long as he was here, Fred looked around. The place was so deserted that he thought he’d check on what the graduate students were actually up to. This meant simply strolling along the carrels, seeing what books they were using, what little clippings and Xeroxes they had taped to their humble work places.
Someone was studying Scythian influences on the working of leather in medieval Poland. Was it not at this desk that Fred had seen the rotund student dozing so profoundly last Saturday? Another student was apparently seeking to establish how many of Venice’s different canals could be identified in all the Canalettos, if you discounted the fakes.
Another, harder project on one desk sought to deal frankly with the question of whether or not surrealism could have existed as a school of painting had it not been 85 percent literature and 10 percent illustration.
Someone was evidently doing a comparison between Celtic bronzes and William Merritt Chase. If Harvard’s fine-arts department was letting that happen, it had got a sense of humor suddenly.
Maybe the student just liked Chase and was doing the Celtic bronze for real, or vice versa.
Or …
Shit!
Something other than bronze began gleaming in the back of Fred’s mind. He sat at the desk and looked at the absent student’s collection of books. There were two shelves. On the top was what you’d expect of a normal student’s interest: volumes exhausting methods of bronze casting; Roman influences; Celtic influences; trade roots; Iberian history; and Sardinia and Carthage and the Phoenicians.… photocopies of twenty or more bronze and clay horses were taped around the area, annotated, all looking pretty much the same.
Shelf two was all William Merritt Chase. Here was the catalog of the sale of his studio’s contents and his personal collection of paintings after he died. There were books done during his lifetime and after; collections of works by his students; semi-definitive works by the Chase guy, who was keeping his options open.
Chase was a serious side issue for this Celtic bronze student.
Fred looked around, the back of his neck prickling. He remembered now, when he was down here on Saturday, prepared for bolts of lightning that would reveal who had painted La Belle Conchita. He’d noticed that, in the stacks, there wasn’t much on Chase. This was why.
The place smelled of decayed plaster and incipient mold. He turned on the student’s lamp that was clamped to the upper shelf and started leafing through the Chase books. He felt that tingle you feel when, half the time, you’re on to something.
Chase.
Why not?
Fred picked up one of the books, the way you do, and started through it.
He remembered how the guy had been sitting here, the one he’d seen last Saturday, nervous, tearing his long blond hair—and how he wasn’t here any longer when he looked up again. It was a young guy with a mustache, drinking like a bird out of his book.
The books were marked here and there with yellow Post-it notes.
Jesus Pete. Here it was, at carrel sixteen. The painting of Conchita was by Chase. Fred knew it even before he flipped to a marked plate in one of Pisano’s books—the 1890 nude, Study in Curves, almost the mirror’s version of La Belle Conchita. Very Velázquez in its feel.
It made absolute sense. Clay’s unsigned painting of La Belle Conchita, from its style, manner, and subject, was a Chase. Chase had been in Paris at the right time; he’d been in Munich already. He knew Whistler, and Duveneck. In fact, he had done a portrait of Whistler, aping Whistler’s own work (its reproduction was also marked with a Post-it note), in 1885, before the two had a falling-out. Chase was American. He would have known the other Americans. Chase could paint a hell of a good nude when sufficiently moved, and he didn’t like paint so much as to forget flesh, or vice versa. And as far as robbing from Velázquez, Chase had loved Velázquez so much that he saddled one of his kids with it as a middle name. Helen Velázquez Chase.
“Jesus!” Fred said aloud, wanting to crow, so bemused by the accuracy of his inference about the painting’s authorship that he did not pick up immediately the other implications of the blond kid’s obsession. In spite of murder and danger in the wings, he was seduced by joy at finding the answer to the puzzle, What dead man long ago painted Clayton’s picture of a dead woman?
The blond kid knew Clay’s painting, had known it when it was Henry Smykal’s: Conchita in the raw, red in tooth and claw. All the marked pages showed the triumphant researcher reinforcing his conclusion as to the painter’s identity. If the kid knew Smykal’s painting, the kid had been at Smykal’s place.
Fred gazed across the dusty stacks.
“Shit,” he said.
He realized he was jealous and disappointed. The kid had scooped him—figured it out first. What else did he know?
“What can you tell me, little man?” Fred whispered.
16
Fred started looking among the scraps and notes that lay on the desk to see if its occupant revealed his identity easily. Nothing on the table betrayed the name of its user.
If he asked Joan who used carrel sixteen, he could in time find out not only the kid’s name but even his address—it would all be on their computer. The trouble was, Joan was an absolute stickler for routine, and for propriety, and she was also an incurable busybody. There was no way to ask her without setting off a chain reaction that Fred didn’t want to risk. Ask a question, leave a record.
The student would come back. He’d have to. Sometime.
Fred went upstairs and emptied his bladder, picked up a couple of magazines to look through, took them back down to the stacks, and chose a place to wait where he could keep an eye on the kid’s desk.
He’d dressed that morning in unostentatious academic fashion, in sport jacket and plain green tie with blue button-down shirt. He sat at carrel eight, leaned back, put up his feet, and waited for four hours.
Enforced inactivity can lead to strange expansions in one’s fund of knowledge. A long period in a Greyhound bus terminal had once produced, for Fred, an understanding of the relative merits of seven different methods of depilation. After his magazines were exhausted, he occupied himself with the chosen subject of carrel eight’s tenant, studying the reserved copy of The Shoulder Bust in Sicily and South Central Italy: A Catalog and Materials for Dating. As it turned out, you could date the shoulder busts according to hairstyle.
At two forty-five the blond student came down.
Fred lifted The Shoulder Bust and looked at the student from behind it. The book was big and red, perfectly designed for the purpose. His quarry was one of those men who had grown taller faster than they expected in their youth and who try to make up for it by tiptoeing flat-footed, using the walk that goes with loafers
. He was tall but skinny, with a bow tie fluttering in advance of his throat. Papillon. Otherwise he dressed like Fred in his academic mode. Perhaps his natural look was furtive, obsessive obeisance. Furtive he surely seemed.
He shouldn’t be a hard man to corner. But Fred found that cornering, like guilt, was seldom the best way to get an eager flood of information from a person. He’d wait and watch. He had the advantage; why waste it by making himself known?
Carrel sixteen’s occupant did not sit, wasn’t settling in today. Fred would have a chance, then, to stretch his legs. If the gods were merciful, the kid would go for lunch.
Fred watched him. What the kid did next was gather together all the Chase books from his desk, think a moment, then take the pack of books to the stacks and arrange them on the shelves as if they’d never been out. He made sure to put them in order by call number. Obsessive he was also. Then he headed for the exit. He was nervous, looking like a guilty songbird with hawks around.
Fred scribbled a note, which he dropped on the kid’s desk as he followed him out of the stacks.
Carrel 16, would be interested to discuss the Chase with you.
Fred
The kid took off down Prescott Street toward Mass. Ave. Going to Bartley’s? Fred could join him in a burger. But the kid turned left, walking hastily. He was still on foot: a graduate student with no vehicle, poor but honest. He was heading toward Central Square, therefore in the direction of Turbridge Street.
But no, the kid, moving right along as if he had a plan, an appointment, crossed to the other side of Mass. Ave. Fred trailed behind him, on the other side of the street.
Harmony In Flesh and Black Page 11