Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “I didn’t tell her what you asked me to do.”

  “So what are we talking about here, Marcus? Or did you just subtract a week out of my life expectancy for the fun of it?”

  “We’re talking about Joe Whack, Dad. The paintings. I told her what I knew. That the paintings are worth some money.” Marcus waits for Hart to attack him, or at least start swearing at him, but he just sits glaring, and after a minute even the glare isn’t there any more.

  “I haven’t looked at that fucking agreement in years. I didn’t think I gave her the paintings. I had no place to store them, and she did. She got the washer, the dryer, the car. My Trollopes! Now this.” His eyes narrow. “How did you find out?”

  “I did some research. What does it matter?”

  “It matters because I want to know how you fit into all this.”

  “Dad, you asked me to kill her! That’s how I fit in.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “There was no way I was going to kill her!”

  “I knew that.”

  “What?”

  “Give me a break, Marcus. What do you take me for?” Hart looks at him the way he used to when he saw that Marcus had finished the Saturday Times crossword puzzle: If the kid is so smart, why doesn’t he know anything? “I didn’t know what to do. I needed the money. I thought you’d probably figure it out and come up with something. You always were a bright kid.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I can’t imagine how it happened, since you hardly ever went to school, but somewhere there are tests that prove it. I’m sure Summer saved them all—”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean you really didn’t want me to do it?”

  Hart squeezes out something that passes for a smile. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” There is a pause. Hart sits staring into space, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  Marcus sips his coffee, thinking: Can it be true, that the whole thing was some sort of test? Like a fairy tale, or an opera. Or is Hart simply lying to him? He says, “Hey, Dad?”

  Wearily, Hart looks at him. “What?”

  Marcus studies his father’s face: putty-colored, morose, unshaven. His hair is, as usual, greasy and in need of a wash, and it occurs to Marcus that maybe Hart greases it up with some kind of gel in an attempt to make himself look younger and hipper. Actually, Hart looks older than he did a couple of weeks ago at the Botanic Garden. He seems to be aging rapidly, like a bad case of time-lapse photography.

  “Why did you want the money so badly?”

  Hart sighs and gazes out the window, where people in down coats and woolen hats are hustling down Crosby Street. An occasional snowflake drifts in the air. “This weather,” he says. “I’ve had it with the weather. My arthritis is no joke. It’ gets worse every day. And my fucking allergies. I’ve got a chance to relocate to Tucson. A guy I know is out there, selling cowboy art. He wants me to go in with him. I need money for that.” Hart sips at his coffee. “It’s big, Marcus. The cowboy stuff. That whole market is crazy, out of control. There’s money to be made. This guy needs a partner, I need a change.”

  Marcus has no desire to know exactly what cowboy art is, but he wishes he knew where, on the spectrum of absolute fact/wishful thinking/blatant lie, Hart’s plan should go. He finds himself hoping devoutly that, if there is a deal, his father doesn’t blow it, whatever it is. Hart two thousand miles away in the desert sounds perfect.

  “So you closed your gallery here?”

  “You could put it that way.” Hart exposes his canine. “Let’s just say it closed. Over a year ago now. And some of my more recent endeavors haven’t panned out. I do believe my long and checkered career in the New York art scene is officially over, Marcus.”

  “What exactly have you been doing in the art world, anyway?” It’s a question Marcus has always sensed he shouldn’t ask. Now, though, the issues between him and his father have subtly shifted, and he feels he can ask Hart anything—not caring if he answers or not, just enjoying his slight edge. “Like all that time in Honesdale. And before you opened the gallery.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Sure,” Marcus says. “Don’t I?”

  “Maybe you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway. What the fuck. I’m out of here, one way or another.” He sits back in his chair and laces his fingers together; immediately his face seems younger, smoothed out, less crabbed and gloomy. “Okay. I can put it pretty simply. For years, I was a fence. Back in Honesdale Pee Ay? Fence.”

  “You mean—”

  “You know what I mean. Stolen goods, Marcus. Art. There was a guy in Allentown I used to work with. Buy and sell. I had a couple of collectors in Manhattan, plus one guy in Cincinnati. Fanatics. They didn’t care where they got the stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Not the big boys. Little stuff. I wasn’t about to fence the fucking Mona Lisa. Drawings, watercolors, prints. Keep it low-key, that’s my motto.”

  “Did Summer know?”

  Hart gives him a look. “Be serious, son. Did Summer know who was president? Did Summer know it was Wednesday?”

  Marcus ponders this.

  The evening before, he had called Tamarind to tell her he was coming home. Tamarind has checked on the house every week or so since Summer died, mowing the lawn, having the driveway plowed. It will need a new roof one of these days, she said. And a paint job. And he might want to have the chimney pointed. Otherwise, it seems all right. “She’s still there,” Tamarind said before they hung up. “The whole place is Summer. You’ll see. The little labels she printed for all the drawers? Not even faded. There’s one in the kitchen that says: CORKSCREW, CAN OPENER, MELON BALLER, CHEESE KNIVES, MARCUS’S AVOCADO PITS.

  “I was always going to plant them,” Marcus said.

  “Well, there’s a couple dozen in there, Marcus. Labeled. In her beautiful fancy printing. It’s going to break your heart.”

  It already has. Marcus wants to defend his mother to Hart—a true innocent, Tamarind called her—but he knows it’s pointless. He also doesn’t want to hear Hart’s response. Even now that she’s dead, when Hart says Summer’s name there’s always a little sneer behind it, as if he never loved her at all.

  Or else can’t face it that he did and she’s gone.

  Or something.

  Marcus realizes he doesn’t want to figure it out any more. All he feels for his father is a kind of wounded aversion, the same thing he felt when he was ten years old. Now, though, it is overlaid with something resembling pity. “So why did you quit fencing, Dad?”

  “Because I’m not really a crook at heart,” Hart says. “At least I don’t think I am. Maybe I was for a while. I’ll be frank with you, Marcus. I liked the life. The crazy rich guys, the risk—the art, for Christ’s sake. I liked the art. And I liked having money.”

  “I think probably everybody does.”

  Hart looks dubious. “I mean, I really liked having money.”

  “There’s a difference between liked and really liked?”

  “You bet there is. I do not thrive on poverty,” he says in an aggrieved voice, as if it’s something he can’t help, like an allergy. “I’m a thing person. I like things. I like good things. When I lost the old Volvo in the divorce settlement, I bought myself a Porsche. Used, but still—Jesus, what a car!” Hart looks off into the distance, smiling reminiscently. “Silver-gray 911 Carrera Coupe. And how long did I have it? Exactly two years. Christ. It damn near killed me to sell that sucker. But what the hell.” Hart spreads his hands in a gesture meant to encompass his helplessness in trying to explain why he abandoned the life of crime that enabled him to drive a Porsche for two years. “Things were getting hot. It was a question of survival. I didn’t want to end up in jail.”

  Marcus is reminded of the scene in murder mysteries where the hero, in the clutches of the killer, gets him to brag about his crimes. “So what did you do next?”

  “I had some pretty good money, and s
o I opened the gallery. A big mistake. The art market was in free fall, but I thought I could beat it. I thought Selma was foolproof. Merlin Wolf. Harold Watkins. You know their stuff? People loved that shit. Blood, gore, internal organs, roadkill. But I made some bad decisions. Maybe I’m not that good a judge of character. Whatever. Anyway, since then, I’ve been a kind of consultant, handling a guy who specializes in the Fauvists. Dufy, Vlaminck, Derain.”

  “A guy who—what? Steals them? You’re fencing again?”

  For a moment, Hart looks affronted. Then he shakes his head. “No. That’s over. These are fakes, basically. For collectors. Not copies. Fakes. Half the time these dingbat collectors know exactly what they’re getting, and they don’t care. We’ve done pretty well with the Fauvist guys. You don’t want to mess with the really famous names, even in this game. Only a fool would work with Picasso or Matisse. And drawings. Not paintings. Drawings and prints.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What? Oh. Alex. My artist. The Michelangelo of fakes.”

  “Your faux Fauvist.”

  “Ha ha! Very good! Well, unfortunately, he’s getting married. His girlfriend thinks he’s a designer or something. So he had to go get a design job. He works for some magazine, designing their website. And he likes it! Says he’s making a lot more money as a Web designer than a real artist. Can you imagine? We made one last deal a couple of months ago, to finance the wedding. Honeymoon in Thailand. The whole bit. We made a killing, actually. That money I gave you was part of my cut. A series of late Dufy drawings.” He almost chuckles. “Very late.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, laddie. The game is over. It’s back to the old drawing board. Out to the desert, far from the madding fucking crowd.”

  Marcus looks across the table at his father. He has never, really, known what to think of Hart. He wasn’t a good father, he was mean to Summer, he was never there when they needed him, and God only knows what happened with Phoebe. What does his father enjoy? What makes him happy? He realizes with a jolt that, after this morning, he may never see Hart again, and he has no idea how he feels about this possibility. Marcus takes another sip of his coffee, lets a few more seconds go by, and then he says, “Emily’s giving you half.”

  “Come again?”

  “She’s in the process of selling the paintings, and she thinks you’re entitled to half—morally, not legally. She says Joe would have wanted you to have it. You wouldn’t believe how many people have tried to talk her out of it. Lawyers, friends, relatives. But she insists. Fifty-fifty, Pop, right down the middle.”

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  “I am not fucking with you.”

  Hart looks at Marcus for a long time, then transfers his gaze back to the window. In the harsh, wintry light, his father seems old again, tired, broken, and Marcus wonders if he is entirely well. The bags under his eyes make him look degenerate but also infinitely sorrowful. Slowly, Hart reaches into his pocket, brings out a grimy handkerchief, blows his nose, and slowly, as if he’s an action toy that needs new batteries, puts the handkerchief back. Then he sighs and says, “Jesus.”

  “It’s going to be a lot of money.”

  “Who’s handling it?”

  “A gallery on Madison. A place that specializes in twentieth-century Eastern European art.”

  “They think they can sell the stuff?”

  “Are you serious? They’re going crazy.”

  “It’s the Polacks, right?”

  “Partly. Not entirely. The Polish angle is driving up the value, of course, but the paintings are pretty valuable commodities in their own right. I think it’s pretty generally accepted that Whack was a modern master.”

  Hart shows a canine again, the old familiar sneer. “Where did you learn to talk the talk? All of a sudden the kid’s an expert.” His teeth are so stained by years of cigarettes and coffee that they are almost beautiful—striated in ivory and ocher, like some semiprecious stone. Marcus has the feeling that his father could use the services of both Dr. Demand and Dr. Wrzeszczynski.

  “I’ve spent some time with this gallery guy. Emily did the negotiating, but I went with her.”

  “What? Negotiating?”

  “Yeah. She was pretty cool. She’s into it.”

  “Emily? Jesus.” Hart lapses back into his melancholy staring, then rouses himself. “So who’s the guy?”

  “Mr. Ptak. Charles Ptak. He’ll be getting in touch. There’s some stuff you need to sign. He’ll tell you all about it.”

  Hart puts his elbows on the table and sinks his head into his hands. “There was a thing in Art News a couple of months ago. Little bitty two paragraphs, about how he’s hot in Poland, and there are only a dozen or so known paintings.”

  “Now there’s over seventy.”

  “Plus those self-portraits.”

  “And some notebooks.”

  “I forgot about the notebooks.” He lets out another sigh. “We grew up together, you know. In Wisconsin. Me and Joe Wakowski.”

  “He was gassed in Poland.”

  “Yeah.” Hart looks up at Marcus again. “He wasn’t even eighteen when he went over there. It was some kind of poison gas, when he was rioting against the Commies in Warsaw. When he got back, he was sick. Nobody knew what it was—just me, I think. I don’t think he had any family left in the states. And he never told Emily. He hated pity. Hated people fussing over him. He always tried to pretend he was okay. He used to ride his bike around the neighborhood. He’d bike up to Greenpoint for pierogies and borscht—I think it was the only food he could keep down. Every time he sold a painting, he sent most of the money to some second cousin of his in Poland. After a while, though, he didn’t want to sell them. Didn’t have the energy or something, I don’t know. Lost interest. He just got sicker and sicker. But he kept painting. Those strange still lifes. I always liked them. I thought they were great. But hardly anybody else did.” Hart shakes his head and takes a sip of his coffee. “Shit. I wish he was alive to see this money. He was my best friend.”

  “I know.” Your only friend, Marcus thinks, and wonders why Joe had liked Hart. Maybe the same reason Emily did, whatever that was.

  “So—let me get this straight. She’s selling the paintings.”

  “There’s going to be a small exhibit after Christmas. A dozen of the paintings, to whet the appetite. That was Emily’s idea, actually, but Ptak really went for it. Then, probably in the spring, a bigger one. I’d say by summertime you’ll have some real cash.”

  “Real cash. What does that mean?”

  “Talk to Ptak. What about this guy in Tucson? Can he wait a few months?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call him,” Hart says, but he is clearly thinking about something else, frowning, pursing his lips, tapping his fingers on the table.

  Marcus wonders why these things are the traditional signs of impatient thought. In more primitive periods of human existence, were they warnings to an enemy that those fingers might pick up a rock or a club? That those eyes were narrowed in order to focus in on someone’s jugular?

  “Hey, Marcus?” Hart says finally, and his tone is slightly belligerent. “Let me ask you a question. Were you one of the people who tried to talk her out of it?”

  “No.” Marcus is surprised that his father cares. He is also pretty certain that, if he had told Emily about Hart’s evil intentions toward her, she wouldn’t have changed her mind. She would have laughed and said that was ridiculous. “I agreed with her,” he says. “That Joe would have wanted it.”

  “Do you get a cut or anything?”

  “No.”

  Hart sighs. “Then here. Take this.” He picks up the stack of money and counts out some bills. A woman at the next table glances over at them, wide-eyed. “Take half. And if I really do get some money out of this, I’ll send you a check.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Dad.” Marcus takes the cash and stows it in his shirt pocket. He looks at the woman, and he
r gaze falls quickly back to her laptop.

  “How is she, anyway?”

  “Emily?”

  “Yeah. She doing okay?”

  “She is now. She was having a pretty tough time until this came along.”

  “Hah. Well.” Marcus waits for more questions. He is reluctant to tell Hart anything much about Emily: The image has never left him of the innocent princess and the ravening beast. But Hart only says, “I’m glad it’s working out for her,” and after another moment, “Tell her I said that. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Marcus lies.

  They sit for another minute in silence. Marcus can feel the lump of bills against his heart. For the second time since that fateful morning when Hart told him to keep the change from the ten, his father has given him money, out of sheer niceness, no other reason—well, niceness and guilt, most likely. Still, it’s a gesture Marcus appreciates. Suddenly he remembers that he has a dog at home who needs to be taken out, and he gets up and puts on his coat. “I gotta go.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to get home.”

  “Hey, you don’t have a piece of gum, do you, Marcus?”

  “No.”

  “I’m trying to give up smoking.”

  “Oh. Good. That’s great.” Marcus sticks out his hand. “Well. Good luck, Dad. With everything.”

  “Thank you, son.”

  Marcus is tempted to tell his father he’s leaving town, going back to the precise spot Hart advised him to get out of, when he has a sudden alarming premonition of Hart turning up on the doorstep, just as he used to, and so he keeps his mouth shut. What’s the point? They shake hands. He half-expects his father to say something else, but Hart is still Hart and he doesn’t, and finally Marcus goes out into the cold.

  On his way to the subway, he looks back.

  Through the window he can see his father, still sitting at the table, slowly dragging out his handkerchief, and slowly blowing his nose.

  17

  Mix a maxim

  “The heel is a nice height,” says the saleswoman. “Very becoming to your slender foot.”

  Emily is in a store on Bleecker Street trying to decide between the red shoes with black trim and the black shoes with red trim. The shoes cost more than she has spent on clothes in the last five years, and she wants both pairs. Of course, the saleswoman would say that to anyone.… On the other hand, never have her feet—which though long are indeed slender—looked more fetching.