Back upstairs, the speeches had finished and Charlie was holding forth in the middle of an attentive group, gesturing wildly. Yale said to Cecily, “That’s my partner, right there.”
“Oh, the Brit! I met him earlier!”
“I’m not surprised.”
“What a perfect couple!” she said, although it made no sense; she hadn’t so much as seen them stand next to each other.
And of course they weren’t a perfect couple. There was no such thing. Really—and this was a drunken thought, Yale knew—Charlie was right about what was keeping them together. On some level, at least. If there weren’t this monster out there, snatching up guys who played the field, wouldn’t Yale and Charlie have gone their separate ways? There were fights that would have done them in. There was the stress of the past few months. But no, no. They’d have reconciled. They always did. Charlie would have buried his face in his hands and asked what he could do to change, and his eyes would be desperate, and Yale would only want to hold him, keep anything else from hurting him ever again.
Charlie was saying: “The reason we don’t know all the names, the hundred and thirty-two who’ve died in Chicago, is, listen, half were married, closeted blokes from the suburbs. They picked it up at, you know, the bathrooms at the train station. Commuter gays. They convince their doctor in Winnetka to tell the wife it’s cancer. Okay, we don’t know them, and me personally, I’m fine with that. They’re hypocrites, yeah? They vote against their own bloody interest. But they’re still dying. Suffering is suffering. And they’re still spreading it.”
Another beer had materialized in Yale’s hand, the last thing he needed.
The people around Charlie looked like puppets: nodding, nodding, nodding. If someone pulled the right string, they’d clap their little hands.
For the rest of the party, Yale silently seethed at Charlie for no good reason at all. For not magically knowing he’d been outside crying. Or maybe he resented that Charlie had been right about Julian. Or maybe Yale had been mad at him a long time, an anger that only surfaced when he was already weepy and drunk, like earthworms after heavy rain.
The party wound down, and as they walked home he was stewing still.
Charlie said, “I thought it was a success, no?”
“Absolutely.”
“I mean, it was.”
“That’s what I said.”
At home, Charlie collapsed on the bed. He said, “I should go through ad sales.”
Yale said, “Not drunk, you shouldn’t.” He changed into his jeans. He said, “I didn’t get enough to eat. I might see what’s open late.”
He half expected Charlie to interrogate him, to make sure he wasn’t going to meet up with Teddy or Julian or the both of them or the entire Windy City Gay Chorus. But Charlie just made a noise into the pillow.
And come to think of it, what was to stop him from going to Julian’s? Yale walked up Halsted till he was just a block from Julian’s place on Roscoe. That pull, knowing someone wanted you, was a powerful thing. He could duck into Sidetrack—he could hear the music out here—but he didn’t need to be drunker. He turned onto Roscoe and there was Julian’s building on his right. He might go back around the corner to the pay phone, call him. Say, I’m outside, are you still up? He was pretty sure he knew Julian’s number. Or he could just ring the buzzer. But then what would happen?
Well, he could think of a few things.
He knew he wouldn’t do it. He was only standing on the cliff edge to see what it felt like. He remembered in high school, sitting in assembly and becoming convinced that he might, at any second, stand up and scream. Not because he wanted to, just because it was the one thing he wasn’t supposed to do. But he hadn’t. And this was no different, was it? He was only entertaining a dangerous thought.
He kept walking.
He got a cheeseburger and walked back up Roscoe eating it. He went right past Julian’s door again, and he thought he was going to do it after all, and then he knew he wouldn’t.
2015
Fiona was jittery and she wanted to head back out, to comb the Marais, but it would be a terrible idea. She said to Richard, “Do not let me leave the apartment. I’ll mess things up.”
“We’re locking you in,” he said, “and we’ll force-feed you.”
Serge was cooking for the journalist who was coming to dinner, a woman from Libération. Fiona volunteered to chop something, and Serge set her up at the cutting board with a knife and six small onions. He said, “Women always like no-good men. Why is this?”
“Maybe there aren’t any good men,” Fiona said. And then she said, “I don’t mean that.”
Serge asked if she was surprised Kurt had been arrested. She supposed she was. She said, “I’m happy, actually. Is that odd? It’s—maybe it’s gratifying. That he got in trouble.” Not that she cared if Kurt was unhappy, but she wanted Claire to see it, how she’d hitched herself to the wrong adult.
Richard excused himself to nap, and Serge put on some Neil Diamond and poured Fiona a glass of red wine she hadn’t asked for.
Fiona prided herself on never tearing up over onions. A Marcus family ability, according to her father, and indeed Claire had proved impervious as well. Maybe the only thing the entire family had in common. Nora always claimed there were two distinct genetic strains in the family—the artistic one and the analytic one—and that you got one set of genes or the other. It was true that Fiona’s father, who had probably wanted to hand down his orthodontic practice one day, had absolutely no idea what to do with Nico, even before his sexuality came into play. Lloyd Marcus tried to turn his son into a chess player, tried to teach him to keep score at baseball games. All Nico wanted was to trace the comics out of the Sunday paper, draw spaceships and animals. It was their mother who’d tried, in her ineffectual way, to remind Lloyd that his Aunt Nora was an artist after all, and hadn’t there been a poet on the Cuban side of the family tree? But it fell to Nora to send Nico a camera for Christmas, a set of fine-tipped artist pens, a book of André Kertész photos. Nora would look at his work and critique it.
Fiona herself had no artistic skill—her strength was in the thousand logistical necessities of running the resale shop—but when Claire came along, when she started sketching realistic horses at age five, when she sat at nine to draw the downtown skyline from memory, Fiona understood she was that kind of Marcus. The problem was that Nora and Nico were gone, the alleged poet long forgotten. There was no one to send her to for a weekend drawing lesson. Fiona did her best, buying her charcoal pencils and gummy erasers, taking her to museums. But she couldn’t give her what Nico had gotten from Nora. If Richard had stayed in Chicago, maybe he’d have filled that role.
Serge said, “Richard is glad you’re here. He thinks you’re good luck for the show.”
Fiona scraped the chopped onions into the bowl by the stove. She said, “I think you’re the good luck, Serge. He seems happy.”
“Ha! Never happy. You ask him about his work, you’ll see. Never happy.”
“Maybe,” Fiona said, “but he seems content.”
She wasn’t sure Serge understood the difference, but he nodded. He was making a stack of plates now, a stack of silverware. He said, “You can grab five placemats?” and indicated the drawer by Fiona’s hip.
“Five?”
“Richard added one more journalist, someone who called today. He only does this when I already buy ingredients. American guy, I don’t know.”
Fiona said, “Crap,” because she suspected she did know.
* * *
—
It was another two hours before the doorbell rang—what Serge had been cooking was a Moroccan stew that apparently took years—and yes, oh boy, it was indeed Jake, handing Fiona a bottle with a shit-eating grin, as if he’d hunted the wine down himself in the woods. She wanted to say that she wasn’t the host, this wasn’t her
idea, this wasn’t what she’d meant when she gave him Serge’s number, but soon enough she was hosting, because Serge had to stir and Richard was still getting dressed and the other woman was running late.
She set her phone under her thigh on the chair, so she’d feel if it buzzed. Arnaud hadn’t promised to call tonight, had in fact implied that he’d be in touch tomorrow morning, but surely he’d call if he saw something good or something bad, wouldn’t he?
Jake—“Jake Austen, like the writer, but, you know, with a K. My mom was an English teacher”—had accepted a clear cocktail from Serge, and Fiona sat as far from him as possible on the couch, pointedly sipping water. She wasn’t going to flirt with Jake Austen, if only on principle. She didn’t want him to think he could waltz in here and expect her to be thrilled to see him, to go all girly over the way he complimented her necklace. “Are those birds?” he said. “On the sides?”
“Oh, it’s deeply symbolic. Speaking of English class. Well, no. It’s for luck.”
He said, “You don’t wear any other jewelry.”
So he’d been looking at her ears, her hands. He might be referring to the absence of a wedding ring.
If she’d been in Paris for any other reason, if she’d had the time and boredom, she might have entertained the possibility of a fling. What did it matter if he was a drunk, a con artist, if she was only going to use him? And the way he kept staring at her legs, he didn’t seem to mind the difference between their ages.
After the divorce, Fiona had dated so much that her friends had joked about getting her a reality show. But that was a long time ago. She’d gotten busy with the shop, with other things. And after Claire disappeared, she and Damian spent a good deal of time on the phone. It wasn’t romantic, but it filled some need. A shoulder, albeit two thousand miles away, to cry on. She still dated on occasion, but the dates were rote now, and so was the sex.
It was pleasant enough, she’d grant, that Jake was sitting here talking to her about how he needed new hiking boots. It was nice that he believed she was here on vacation. And as Serge came out and almost forcibly removed the water glass from her hand, replaced it with the glass of wine she’d left on the kitchen counter, as she looked out the window to the darkening walls of a Parisian street, she could almost believe it was true.
It was seven p.m. A decent chance Arnaud would be staked out by now. Fiona took off her watch and stuck it in her pocket so she wouldn’t stare at it all night.
Jake said, “Tell me the story of your life.”
“My life,” she said, and laughed. She’d never been good at that. Her life had been tumultuous, but the basic rundown always sounded boring.
She told him her degree was in psychology, that she’d started college when she was twenty-four, that she’d married her professor and then divorced him. That she ran a resale shop. She left out that it benefited AIDS housing; this was not part of the romantic, carefree version of the story, and she really didn’t care to hear his follow-up questions.
He said, “Does the psych degree help you run a shop?”
She thought she felt the phone, but when she looked her screen was blank. A phantom buzzing, the vibrations of her own nerves.
She said, “My daughter was born when I was still a student. So I finished school, but things got away from me.”
“Got it,” he said. “Got it.” Although he couldn’t have.
When the buzzer sounded again, Richard rushed out to answer.
The journalist—Corinne—had brought a bouquet of dahlias and an apple tart. She had silver hair, a bracelet of smooth green beads. The kind of woman who seemed made entirely of scarves. She already knew Richard and Serge, kissed their cheeks warmly. She had a digital recorder, but otherwise you’d have thought this was a purely social engagement.
“We’ll speak English,” Richard said to her. “Partly for Fiona, and, ah, Jacob here, but mostly—you know, if I’m going to be quoted, I want to sound smart. I’m still sharper in my native tongue.” He winked at Fiona.
Corinne laughed and said, “Yes, but what then, when I translate you back to French? You’re at my mercy!”
“There are worse things, are there not, than to be at the mercy of a beautiful lady?”
“You see how he does!” Serge said. “He flirts himself to a good interview!”
As they gathered at the table, as Serge carried out a basket of rolls, Richard explained that Corinne’s husband was a major art critic, and that her piece for Libération was openly personal as well as reportorial.
Corinne said, “Only because I love you so much!”
Jake, thank God, was quiet. Fiona would have felt personally responsible if he’d made a fool of himself. He was still nursing his cocktail, she was relieved to note.
Fiona had snuck the phone with her, tucked it under her leg again. It was nearly eight o’clock now. Across the room, the balcony door was cracked open. It had warmed up late in the day, and now a pleasant breeze swept through.
Corinne asked Richard about his most recent work, the large-scale images that would apparently comprise half the show. A photograph of a mouth, Fiona gathered, would consume an entire wall. Fiona was surprised; she’d assumed this was a retrospective.
Serge’s Moroccan stew had lamb and apricots, and its spiciness didn’t hit you till after you’d swallowed.
Jake, who’d brought a notebook but left it on the couch, piped up to ask questions—smart ones—about Richard’s age, though not in so many words. How his work had changed, physical limitations, the scope of his career. “It’s funny,” Richard said, “when I was your age, I assumed it would all be downhill after fifty. Well. Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?”
Under the table, Fiona flicked open her email. A message from Damian, asking if there’d been any news in the past four hours. An update from the dogsitter.
Jake went quiet again, listening to Richard talk about his preparations, listening reverentially to Richard and Corinne reminiscing. Jake was the one person in the room to whom this was Richard Campo, the man from the documentary, the talent behind that iconic photo of the little girl atop the Berlin Wall, the scandalous presence behind the Defiling Reagan series. It was so different when you’d known the person first.
Fiona wondered what Damian would say if he saw her sitting here relaxing—if he’d wonder why she wasn’t out searching, or if he’d be glad she was taking care of herself, letting the detective do his job. Progress was being made this very moment, even if she wasn’t the one making it.
She tuned in to Richard joking with Jake. “You want to be my assistant? I’m constantly looking for new assistants.”
“Because he’s impossible to work for,” Corinne said.
“And I promise you the pay is terrible. Even worse than journalism!”
Serge explained to Fiona that Corinne would give a party for Richard tomorrow night—or rather, her husband would, at their home in Vincennes.
“You’ll come,” Richard said to Fiona. Fiona nodded, but she didn’t mean it.
“Can you tell me,” Corinne said to Richard, “about the video installations? I do want to write about those. The world doesn’t know you well for video.”
“This is the fault of the world,” Serge put in.
“Well,” Richard said, and he looked straight at Fiona, as if she were the one who’d asked. “The irony is, the raw material’s quite old. These are videos I recorded on VHS through the 1980s. In Chicago. You know, VHS was a nightmare to work with.”
Fiona caught his meaning, finally, and tilted her head. The eighties in Chicago. Video.
To Corinne he said, “They’re optimistic, I believe. They’re full of life. I’ve edited them with a contemporary eye, but the subject is twenty-five, thirty years ago. The—” He faltered, and Fiona was reminded, uncannily, of Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, choking
up onstage in front of those Nazis, trying to sing about his homeland. He said, “You should interview Fiona while she’s here. You can interview me anytime. But her brother and those other boys, they’re—” and he stopped, blinked rapidly, waved a hand in front of his face. He went into the kitchen, called from behind the counter, “Who’d like apple tart?”
“He wanted to tell you,” Serge said to Fiona.
She said, “There’s, what, footage? There’s footage?”
“No, is not footage, is art.”
“Okay.” But Fiona felt her pulse in her cheeks. She’d come here to find Claire, but a recovered minute with Nico, with Nico and Terrence, with— That was something. Wasn’t that a rescue, too, of some kind? She said, “I want to see it.”
Corinne laughed. “So does the world! More than a week, we have to wait. And you too.”
It was nearly ten o’clock, and Fiona resigned herself to the fact that Arnaud had been serious about not calling till morning.
Richard served the tart with vanilla ice cream, and the five of them carried their little plates out to the balcony railing and ate standing up, looking down at the barricaded street.
1985, 1986
The university and gallery would be closed through the New Year, but both Yale and Bill Lindsey were eager to take advantage of the Sharps being in town for the holidays. Allen Sharp was on the gallery’s board of advisers and, after the Briggs themselves, Allen and his wife, Esmé, were the gallery’s biggest donors. Lovely, down-to-earth people who’d rather have dinner at Bill’s than be wined and dined at Le Perroquet. Yale had known them since his days at the Art Institute, where they were always keen to sponsor a party or an educational event, and he suspected they’d put in a good word for him when he applied at the Brigg. They’d insisted on Charlie’s presence tonight, and so on December 30, the temperature hovering around zero, Yale and Charlie stood on the doorstep of Bill’s house in Evanston with a bottle of merlot, ten minutes early. They’d walked here from the El. Charlie said, “Let’s just circle the block again,” but Charlie was the one with a warmer coat, thick gloves. Yale vetoed the trek, and they rang the bell.
The Great Believers Page 14