by A. R. Taylor
PART FOUR
Winter, 2004
Tasha Clark, our esteemed leader and favorite kvetcher, has presided over us now for four years. We wish her good luck in the New Year and thank her for every kind note (and every nasty one) she has sent out on that distinctive stationery of hers. Here’s to four more years.
—Newsletter of the Chicago Foundation for the Betterment of the Lives and Health of Children, January 12, 2004
Thank you all for coming to Jorge Garza’s retirement party at Le Bernardin. Asked what he will miss most around here, he said, “Letters to the Editor.” About Vincent Hull Jorge remarked, “He was a great man trying to be a good man, even an ordinary one. This was not possible.”
—Retirement party for Jorge Garza, group email, NewsLink, February 10, 2004
ONE
Inside the dark, warm leather of the Lincoln Town Car, rolling through the dreary landscape of Queens, Jenna felt, in her woozy, jet-lagged way, that this looked a lot like the poorer districts of Ventimiglia, but without the red ochre and the brightly colored towels hanging off balconies. Instead front porch doors hung open, even in the cold. She needed a plan for this momentous visit, but couldn’t think about it and spent the ride into town compulsively rooting around in her purse to check for her cell phone, her lipstick, then the keys to her Italian apartment, the card naming the woman she was to meet at the hospital, all as if to avoid meeting the eye of the city. She had developed this nervous habit when she lived here, fingering crucial items about her in case she landed on the street or had to escape the place altogether, taking her worldly possessions with her, New York seemed that threatening. Who knew where her body might end up?
Who indeed? She tried to read the lawyer’s instructions again, but the movements of the car and the noise level of the big city outside made it difficult. She had read the letter several times in Italy, but now she reconfirmed that she had exactly twenty days here, no contact with anyone associated with NewsLink, no contact with the press, no activity that would call her identity into question with any living person, maintaining “Cate Myatt” as her only name. Upon arrival, she was to go immediately to her hotel, the next day to the Children’s Hospital on the Upper East Side, get her assignment, and set to work.
Exhausted, startled, like a fugitive who might be recognized any minute, Jenna hugged her knees while the livery car crawled through the clogged streets toward The Lowell Hotel at East 63rd Street. It was six hours earlier here, cocktail time, and she considered for a moment jumping out and just walking to some watering hole, like the old days when she abandoned cabs that went too slowly. But now she had her suitcase, and a cold, clear rain pounded the car’s metal roof. Yes, the worst time to get a cab, as she remembered from former days. Those days had not at all included The Lowell, an elegant, discreet venue, and as she waited to register, she noted a baggage trolley piled high with monogrammed brown suede luggage. A rock star, she was informed, had arrived.
Inside her suite, replete with blue silk and white lace pillows, she plopped straight down onto the bed, this after dismissing Robert, her personal valet for her sojourn. The bedclothes were heavy, covered in rich damask, comfy and deeply soothing. It was like sleeping in a stylish bank vault, as she snuggled beneath the pile and promptly fell asleep.
An hour later she awoke to shouts drifting up from 63rd Street. Harsh Bronx-accented tones blasted their way even through her closed window, and she rose to peer out. A cab driver and a truck driver stood beside their vehicles, screaming at each other. “Move the fuckin’ truck, move it now.”
“I can’t move forward or backwards, you asshole. Can’t you see that?”
“I can’t see nothin’ up ahead of you because your fuckin’ truck is in my fuckin’ way.” The two men dodged back and forth toward each other, gesturing, pointing fingers wildly, even while turning to avoid random vehicles trying to get around them, also honking.
Jenna perched on the banquette at the window, entranced by the drama. Everyone was so loud here; she herself had gotten loud, almost without realizing it. Once while trying to cross at the light on Lexington Avenue and 87th, she had spotted a big truck turning toward her. Instead of jumping out of the way, she had planted her feet and screamed at the driver, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, asshole?” People walking near her were startled. She had startled herself, and thinking of it now, she felt real shame at how distorted her personality had become while living here.
It was definitely time for her to eat, better yet to drink and forget all these regrets. She got up out of bed, changed her clothes, and then walked quickly south to the King Cole bar at the St. Regis hotel. The bartender noticed the delicious-looking woman in the black jersey dress, and so did several others. She warmed to the attention. She wasn’t dead yet, she reminded herself as she took a seat at the famous bar, and male lust could still change her mood. She requested a dry martini and watched as the bartender artfully handled the thin metal rod in the snifter. “I like your technique. No shaking or stirring.”
“That’s for amateurs. You have to twirl.” He handed her the frosty glass and stood back again to smile at her.
At this time of night, soft conversations circulated through the bar, steamy and subdued, and many bar-goers appeared as exhausted as she. She had that fuzzy, off-kilter buzz from jet travel and sipped her martini slowly, resolving not to go over and over in her mind the painful past. No one approached her, though a range of appealing men looked, they watched, but unlike Europeans in a bar, they did not enjoy easy camaraderie with women. An approach would signal intention, and in a certain sense this was a relief. Italian men had worn out their welcome with her, their boyish randiness ever present—”Si, Madonna, come stai, Madonna?” The winks, the nods, the too close flick of the hand so inappropriately used to signal interest, as if her availability were obvious and up-for-grabs. Where at first she found it encouraging, thrilling even, given what she had suffered in her home country, she now found it absurd, a way for men to expend their charms while wasting her time.
Not for nothing had these five years passed, and Jenna was now richer than before because she rarely spent much money, also more courageous because she had expertise in something, the restoration of fabulously valuable paintings. Whatever was going on with the survivors of the Hull family mess, somewhere over the cold, dark sea she had recently traversed, she resolved to find out what had really happened to Mr. Vincent Hull, and why she had been dragged into it. Her addled twenty-four-year-old self had just agreed to everything the powers-that-be said, but now in this more mature life of hers, she had prepared for the visit with an email address for Jorge, the New York Times contact for Inti, two home addresses, which of course she already had, for Sabine Hull, and the Chicago address of a children’s foundation Tasha apparently worked for. Jenna folded up her little Moleskine notebook and sighed, staring at the Old King Cole mural. It too had an antic leer in almost every face, and she felt a little antic herself. First off, she would get in touch with Jorge. A note through his personal email might work. Next, she would probably have to go to Chicago to talk to Tasha. Then Sabine Hull, whom she might encounter at the hospital. Finally, and as a big, fat gift to herself, she would arrange to meet up with Inti, he of the wonderful body and the strength to use it—coyote man indeed.
On a clean page of her little blue notebook she scribbled questions that needed answers. So Tasha was having an affair with Vincent while she was friendly with Mrs. Hull? Not that that was so evil, but it was pretty evil, even by New York standards. Jenna’s own affair she preferred right now to find accidental, because it was. Just a swimming incident, followed by a shower, and a bed, not much more than that. There was, of course, the night of the Plaza debacle, with Vince playing chef, and for one moment she teared up. He was wonderful in his way, so worldly, so entitled, and yet gentle and sympathetic when he wanted to be. Despite herself, she envied a man who could walk upon the earth as if he owned it. Of course, he did own a chunk of it, but still
. He had given megalomania a good name.
Jorge must have sent her the wine labels, so he knew where Jenna currently lived and presumably wanted to tell her something. When she did see him, of course, she would have to tell him that she had been sleeping with Vincent Hull, though he probably knew that already. Still, she would have to come clean in order to keep faith with him. No innocent in the midst of the carnage, but innocent in her heart, she thought, staring down into the olives at the bottom of the glass. As for Inti, she wanted to ambush him somewhere, somehow, so unlike her to do such a thing, and he would appreciate the irony. She knew his haunts, and she could always just hang around the door of The New York Times building. Were they watching her, evil lawyers every one? Could she manage all this on the sly? Whatever else happened, she’d gotten used to being rich, she liked it, and she didn’t plan on giving up a cent. Not one cent.
The hospital soared up between a dark red armory and a low flat row of expensive clothing shops on Madison and 89th Street. Jenna stopped at the front door, seeing through the glass a packed waiting room, suddenly uneasy at the thought of moaning children. She wasn’t good with this sort of thing. Happily, before she could even approach the front desk, a determined-looking woman in a brown suit strode toward her. “Ms. Myatt, I’m Holly Cavanaugh, the curator of our collection. I say collection—it’s a small one, but special, meant to cheer and educate our young patients.” She clapped her hands together and smiled.
“Art for the sick,” is what Jenna thought, but she stopped herself. It sounded so cold.
This woman, of that curious indeterminate New York age, thirty to sixty, coiffed and heavily made up, took her by the arm. She didn’t know anything about the person in front of her except that the patrons of the collection had insisted on her, “Cate Myatt,” and her qualifications seemed sound. While she guided Jenna through white doors, along a glassed-in hallway with a thick blue arrow pointing the way forward, she chattered on. “We take art seriously here and always have. Just keep going this way, yes that’s it, oops, where is my file?”
Instead of blank white walls and yellowing vinyl tile on the floor, the place was full of brightly colored murals, goofy faces from cartoons clustered together near certain departments, and the nurses wore green and yellow scrubs with happy faces on them. No hospital smell, and, momentarily heartened, Jenna wondered where all the really sick children were. After a few more twists and turns, during which they passed a child on a gurney and then a young boy making his way slowly down the hall, hooked up to an IV, Jenna encountered a door with a gold plaque on the wall beside it that read Hull Library and Art Collection. There it was, in print right before her. They, that amorphous, infinitely mysterious “they” had demanded that she return. She shuddered and turned as if to back away.
“Anything wrong?” The curator pushed on the heavy door before them.
Jenna gathered herself up and shook her head. No matter what the lawyers had told her five years ago while explaining the original contract—“You are explicitly forbidden from entering the United States for the next twenty-five years and then only with permission”—here she stood. Inside this little library, someone with distinctive taste had created a special world, a cozy one, with deep velvet banquettes for reading and mahogany shelves up to the ceiling. Perched on a round table was a sign, “Books of the Day,” before a pile of leather-bound volumes. A teenaged girl with a bandaged right arm lounged on a banquette and, with some difficulty, thumbed through a heavy picture book.
The curator turned toward the wall behind them, hung with four symmetrically arranged paintings, collectively worth maybe thirty million dollars or more. Jenna stepped forward to take a look, one original Andy Warhol Campbell’s soup can, a magnificent orange-and-red Mark Rothko, a Jim Dine heart painting in throbbing black, magenta, and green, and finally an exquisite old Dutch work by a painter whose name she didn’t recognize—a still life with a wine jug, two apples and a pomegranate. Despite all her cataloguing of the Hull collection, she had never seen any of these pictures. “These all look beautiful. I don’t see a problem.”
“No, I’ve put the one in need inside here, because it looked so awful.”
The Cavanaugh woman shoved her forward into what was basically a closet, dim and cool, where Jenna found herself looking at that one picture, during her long exile, that she had come to love more than any other in Vincent’s possession—Diver, the girl in a pool of water, shoulders wet, as she gripped her hair at the nape of her neck. That same pool had cradled her in its soft wet blue. How well she remembered the night she had seen it in Water Mill, had lived it out even while she herself swam naked, but the picture was horribly altered, like a grotesque caricature of the one she had seen years ago. The girl’s neck looked odd, and her hand had changed in shape. The hair, so beautifully modulated in thin strands now looked blurred and fluffy, as if clouds puffed out around her ears. The thick oils almost appeared to slide down off the painting, the edges blurred, the colors mixed, gooey. When she had catalogued the painting before, it had certainly not looked like this.
“It’s been this way for months. The paint just won’t dry or started to run or something like that. At first it looked lush and beautiful, such a perfect work, although a bit sexy for these children here, but the Hulls insisted. Mrs. Hull said she felt it represented what she called a ‘healthy sense of the female body.’ She’s French, you know. Naturally, I never worried about the surface until things began to slip a few weeks after we got it two years ago. As time went on, this. . . .”
Jenna leaned in to observe it more closely. “May I?
“Of course.”
Steadying herself to pretend detachment, she got out her small magnifying glass to examine the painting, tapping the sticky surface, and then she rubbed her finger over it gently. Yes, indeed, it was still wet.
“Bummer,” someone said beside her, the teenaged girl who had gotten up off the banquette to study the problem as well. “Looks like someone poured soup on it.”
“That’s a good way to describe it. We should take it out of the frame and inspect it more closely. I’m not really sure that it can be saved. It may be a corrupted medium, something we call inherent vice.”
“Sounds evil,” the girl said.
“Evil and not very fixable.” Jenna sighed. “The underlying medium used to meld the paints onto the canvas may have been infected somehow with another substance.”
“Call up the artist. He’ll fix it for you.”
“Good idea, except he’s no longer with us. Marc Bélange, that is.” Jenna knew that much about the work’s creator.
“Then why don’t you just leave it like that, make it sort of a performance piece?” The girl cocked her head. “We could watch it slide.”
Jenna smiled. “Hmm, not really what I would do. I’m here to fix something, stop time, if you want to call it that. Tidy it up. I’m a good tidier.”
The curator had grown impatient. “Come on, Sarabeth, don’t you have some school work or something? We’ve got a studio space set up for Miss Myatt down the hall, along with some supplies, and she needs to get started. But not until tomorrow. You must be exhausted from your flight.”
“Yes, I am.” Jenna patted her rumpled tweed skirt self-consciously, noticing her beautiful Italian shoes now dirty from the New York streets.
TWO
Having heard nothing yet from her email to Jorge, Jenna took fate by the neck and messengered a note over to him at the Hull building the very next morning, and now she awaited some word from him. She and Jorge had been somehow in cahoots, not quite knowing about what, nevertheless often conspiring like disgruntled subjects of the king. It was their bond, and she had broken it, so she expected outrage on that front, as well as on every other one, or maybe he would refuse to respond. Possibly it was dangerous, for him, too. But those labels—she had never exactly figured out what they meant.
As she walked up Madison from 63rd Street, aiming for the hospital at 89th Street
, she felt as if on a journey through her past. Most of the shops had just begun to open. She stared in at the textured velvets and brocades at Etro, where she had once spent a month’s salary on a skirt, the mannequins lounging in suggestive, impossible postures. Though the cold cut through her, she kept on, head down, until she passed by the famously elaborate drug store, its window consumed with a doll collection of impressive bling and shine, the very one where once she had picked up Mrs. Hull’s bath oil. On impulse, she went inside, knowing right where to find the stuff. Yes, Huile D’Automne, still there. She hadn’t even smelled it that day, but now she opened the top of the tester and inhaled a vibrant spicy scent, grassy, not sweet at all.
Quickly she bought a bottle and stuck it in her purse—to do what with? It had figured in the first real Hull drama she was forced to witness, Vincent’s wife no doubt crying over his affair, Tasha two-timing her with her husband, if she knew it was in fact Tasha, or just her husband cheating on her, period. Would a Frenchwoman have expected fidelity? She hadn’t seen much of that in France. Having a rich sexual history herself now, she saw these goings-on in the hazy, unfocused way that real life involved. No absolutes, no judgments without knowledge, and even then, sparingly. To herself she planned to be especially kind.
The curator had allotted her a good-sized corner hospital room as a studio, with big windows on each side, and only the nurse’s station stood between her and the library. The woman had provided a lab coat, an easel, a basic restoration kit, a mask, gloves, and a number of scalpels, scrapers, and brushes. Logically, this should be enough. She sat herself down before the Bélange, examining it closely, keeping in mind as best she could the last time she had seen it on the wall at Water Mill, and without warning she teared up. That night, those things she did, they did. How she wished for it all back—the innocence of it, the not knowing what would come.