“I know where he lives now,” she said. “The guy, the one who roped her into the cult. We’re going back there.”
“We?”
“You’re bigger than me. You’re not as big as him, I should warn you. But he’s not an athlete or anything.”
“Oh. Great.”
But he followed, got in the cab.
She said, “So you’re really not an alcoholic?”
“I don’t know. I’ve taken some of those online tests. Here’s what it is: In America, I’m considered a heavy drinker. In France, I’m completely normal.”
She laughed, felt her pocket to make sure she hadn’t left her phone at Richard’s. “If I dropped you into the eighties, into my group of friends, you’d be a monk.”
“Lots of parties?”
“We all had drinking problems. Every single one of us, except some of the ones with drug problems.”
“And you survived!” he said. “You’re still here!”
God, she hated him right then.
She said, “Listen, when we get there, don’t talk. You’ll be scarier if you’re silent.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m the muscle.”
She brushed his hand away before it even made contact with her knee.
* * *
—
Fiona hoped, as they knocked, as her stomach did painful gymnastics, that the wife would answer. That she’d invite them in, and Kurt would return from work to find them all on the couch, drinking tea. But it was Kurt who answered, stared blankly. He looked more at Jake than at Fiona until, finally, he turned to her and his eyes went wide, his hand went to his ponytail.
“Ohhhhh,” he said. “Hey. I— Oh, wow. Hey. Fiona.”
Fiona said, “We’re coming in,” and she ducked under his arm and into an apartment that—with grocery bags on the counter and an open laptop on the couch—looked significantly fuller and warmer than it had yesterday.
Fiona had spent an inordinate amount of her adult life engaged in two different ongoing fantasies. One, especially lately, was the exercise in which she’d walk through Chicago and try to bring it back as it was in 1984, 1985. She’d start by picturing brown cars on the street. Brown cars parked nose-to-tail, mufflers falling off. Instead of the Gap, the Woolworth’s with the lunch counter. Wax Trax! Records, where the oral surgeon was now. And if she could see all that, then she could see her boys on the sidewalks in bomber jackets, calling after each other, running to cross before the light changed. She could see Nico in the distance, walking toward her.
The other fantasy was the one where Nico walked beside her everywhere, wondering what the hell things were. He was Rip Van Winkle, and it was her job to explain the modern world. She’d done it at O’Hare on her way here. Focused as she was on Claire, on getting to Paris, she’d suddenly had Nico beside her on the moving walkway as it rolled past a sign advertising “a firewall for your cloud.” How could she even begin to explain why a cloud needed a wall of fire? And once he was in her head, he was following her all around the terminal—ordering food with her off the iPad at the pizza counter, jumping at the autoflush toilet, reading the scroll at the bottom of CNN and asking what Bitcoins were. He asked why everyone was staring at calculators. “You’re living in the future,” he whispered. “Feef, this is the future.” And when she saw something he’d fully understand—a baby crying for a dropped pacifier, a McDonald’s, a whole wall (was it still possible?) of pay phones—she felt the world had been set right.
And there were times, too, when she simply narrated for herself what was happening around her, things that sounded as if they could have come from another era. Right now, for instance, she told herself she was sitting here with Kurt Pearce, that she and Kurt Pearce were having a conversation. That Richard was off at his studio, and she needed to give Cecily a call later. A description that would have made perfect sense in 1988.
Except Kurt would be an adolescent, not this enormous man sitting opposite her, his legs reaching halfway across the floor. Jake wouldn’t have been standing against the wall, arms folded across his chest in an attempt to look like a bodyguard.
Kurt seemed sober, lucid. He spoke quietly, his voice impossibly deep. “I don’t know how much I can tell you. I don’t know if you’re going to try something.”
“Try something!” Fiona said, and then stopped herself. She shouldn’t get emotional.
“I always thought she was way too harsh on you. You did the best you could. And you’re making an effort. I get it.”
He seemed so young. This whole time, she’d hated him for being closer to her own age than to Claire’s—and he was just a kid, a hippie doofus.
He said, “Look, I wish it had worked out differently. I messed up pretty bad for a while. But everyone’s fine. We’re all doing okay. Hey, what happened to your hand?”
“Are they here in Paris?”
“I can tell you everyone’s safe and healthy. But beyond that—it’s not my place to tell you stuff. I’m lucky to be back in their lives. I’m lucky Claire allows that.”
It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult would understand an affair (such a garden-variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now?
She had too many questions for Kurt, and no good starting point. And she couldn’t give away that she’d spied on him, been in this apartment yesterday. She said, “I understand you’re married.”
He looked back and forth between Fiona and Jake, and then he said, “Yeah, she’s a good match. It’s healthy.”
“Well, I’m happy for you. I’ve always wanted the best for you, and I just wish—” She wouldn’t be able to express how much fondness she’d always felt for him, or at least for his memory, at the same time that she loathed him with all her being for taking her daughter away. She said, “You’re clear of the, the group, right? The Hosanna people?”
Kurt laughed. “You can call them a cult. That’s what they are. Yeah, I was happy to put an ocean between us.”
“So you soured on them.”
“Hey, can I get you a beer?” Fiona shook her head. “Can I get you a beer?” he said to Jake, and thank God Jake said no. He wouldn’t have looked nearly as effective with a bottle in his hand. Kurt got up and fetched himself one, sat back down.
“She soured. I was never that big on them, but I was in love.”
“How does being in love mean you have to join a cult?”
“It was what she wanted! She—at the beginning, she cared more about them than about me, that was obvious. If I made her choose, I knew who she’d choose, and it wasn’t me.”
Fiona glanced at Jake, but he was still just standing there. This made no sense. “You were the one who lived in Boulder,” Fiona said. “You were the one who—you found the cult.”
“Nope. Nope, nope, nope. She met this guy in the kitchen of the restaurant where she was working, and at least I knew it wasn’t romantic, because he had this terrible skin and he was sort of emaciated, but he invited her out to a party at the compound, and she brought me along. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Tambourines and drums, right? There’s this girl named Fish, I swear to God, who just latches on to Claire and talks to her all night. They give me this tea that’s laced with something. They weren’t into drinking, but man, would they lace your tea. And we end up crashing on the floor. It seemed like a laid-back place, until they got their claws in. And Claire wanted to go back, night after night. She was about to lose her apartment at the end of the month, and I’d offered to let her move in with me, but then Fish told her there was a
room we could both stay in. It really—I mean, they got to me, too, after a while, don’t get me wrong, they have a way of doing that, but Claire’s the one who pulled me down the rabbit hole. I’m not just trying to make myself look good here.”
Fiona found that she believed Kurt, but still she wanted to scream that he was lying, that her daughter would never fall for something like that, because the people who got suckered by cults were the ones who’d never really had a family to begin with, the ones who, under other circumstances, might have joined a gang. Or at least that was the thing you told yourself to explain why bad stuff happened to someone else’s kid, but your kid would be okay. But a battered woman, she could understand. A woman so under the sway of a domineering man that she had no choice but to go along with it. Although she’d never wished that on Claire, wasn’t it the story that let Fiona herself off the hook?
Fiona said, “And you gave them all your savings?”
“I didn’t really have savings. And actually they helped me close out my credit cards. I only owed a couple thousand dollars, but they paid it all off so I could shut them down. Which, at the time—I was like, I’ll take it.”
The bill for Claire’s MasterCard had continued to show up in Fiona’s in-box, and she’d kept paying the annual fee this whole time, hoping sooner or later Claire would charge something, giving a clue where she was. She never had.
Fiona was ready to ask it now. “Why did they pick her? How did they know it would work? Because you could try that on a hundred people, and ninety-nine would walk away.”
Kurt shrugged. “I guess they have practice. Listen, if we get all psychological about it, she was already drawn to an older man, right? She was looking for parent figures.”
Fiona had wanted him to say it out loud, so she could hate him. She said, “Damian was a big part of her life. Look, you were a child of divorce, too, and back when it was less common. It doesn’t mean you walk around damaged.”
Kurt stood. He stretched and put his palm flat on the ceiling. He said, “I can’t judge, but one of the first things she ever told me, in Boulder, was that the day she was born was the worst day of your life. She told me you said that to her.”
“That’s not true.”
Was it possible that this was the stone in Claire’s shoe? That it wasn’t about Fiona’s affair, the divorce, at all? Her hand was throbbing, taking all the ache that should have been in her head, her gut.
“She grew up knowing she’d ruined your life,” Kurt said. “What do you think that does to a person?”
Fiona stood, too, and Jake took a step into the room, like he was getting ready to dive between them. “First of all, I never said that to her. It was something Damian told her, in the middle of the divorce, to poison her against me. Second, yes, that was one of the worst days of my life, although lord knows I’ve had lots of them, but it had nothing to do with Claire. This isn’t some huge secret. It was a terrible day, a shitshow. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want her, and it didn’t change the way I raised her.”
“Hey. I’m not saying—I remember that day too. I was—”
“You don’t think that’s more than a little fucked up, that you remember the day your girlfriend was born?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” He held his hands up, an unattackable Buddha. “I’m trying to help you out here. You want to make things right with her, this is the swamp you have to wade through, okay? Claire is—she’s not a happy person. I don’t think she’d ever have been happy, no matter what you did. It’s like bad astrology or something. She’s just a fundamentally angry human. You weren’t a bad mother.”
But why did it hurt so much, if it wasn’t true?
“Listen, I need to ask you to get out of here before my wife gets home. She’s not a fan of the Claire drama.”
“Does she know Claire?” Fiona said.
Kurt opened his mouth but then stopped. He’d caught her trick.
She said, “Can you at least pass a message on?”
He shook his head slowly. She had fully expected him to say yes. “I’m barely in her good graces. I bring this to her, and maybe she takes it out on me. If she finds out I talked to you, let you in . . .”
Jake said, “What about an email address?” Fiona didn’t mind him talking; it was time to team up.
Kurt went to the door, opened it for them, though Fiona didn’t move. “Here’s what I can give you: Everyone’s okay, everyone’s safe. You want to leave me your number? I can promise I’d call you if anything bad ever happened.”
“You’ll tell me if she dies? How thoughtful.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Look, what about the little girl? Is she yours?”
Kurt put an enormous hand not on Fiona’s shoulder but on Jake’s, and steered him effortlessly through the doorway. Like guiding a toy boat. Fiona quickly fished a pen and her old boarding pass from her purse, wrote her number down.
She said, before she walked out the door, “You’re a father. Think about what this feels like. Use your imagination. I know you used to have one.”
* * *
—
Out on the street, Jake wrapped Fiona in a hug, pressed his beard and lips to her forehead. He said, “I can tell you’re a good mom.”
Fiona worried he would ask where she was going, ask if he could tag along, but she told him she needed to be alone—she was well practiced at shaking men—and she got in a cab and asked the driver to take her to Montparnasse. She didn’t want to go back to Richard’s, she knew that much, even though her hand felt like it was touching a live wire and she’d forgotten to bring the painkillers. “Promise me you’ll practice self-care,” her shrink had said to her before she left, and she didn’t imagine Elena had meant fucking vagrant former pilots. She could have a nice dinner; that was one thing she could do.
She wound up at La Rotonde, the place Aunt Nora used to talk about, the place, if Fiona remembered right, where Ranko Novak lost his mind. Or was it Modigliani? In any case, she sat inside where it was warm, and she ordered soupe à l’oignon gratinée and wished she weren’t surrounded by so many English-speakers. There were no scruffy, drunk artists, no absinthe-drinking models, no great expat poets.
Well, how would she know? Maybe that table in the corner was full of them.
She’d asked Nora once if she’d ever met Hemingway, and Nora had said, “If I did, he didn’t make an impression.”
But she imagined that in the intervening decades, the avant-garde had changed its meet-up spot.
If this was really where Ranko Novak had lost it, it seemed an odd place. Everything was warm and red and magical, and the soup was so good.
Well, if you were going to be miserable, you could be miserable anywhere. She’d known that for years: the way one person could starve to death at the banquet, the way you could sob through the funniest movie.
The waiter asked if she would like dessert. She ordered another soup instead, exactly the same as the first.
1986
After the gallery closed, Yale brushed his teeth in the bathroom. He shaved again so he’d look okay in the morning, and he changed his shirt. He left his things under his desk.
Evanston was not a town where places stayed open all night, and he thought he’d have a better chance in the city, so he went back down on the El. His plan was to stay pretty south on Clark, where Charlie wasn’t as likely to be. He started down at Inner Circle, which was dead, and then he headed up toward Cheeks to see if the cute bald bartender was working. He was a block away when he saw, in front of him on the sidewalk, the back of Bill Lindsey, his loping gait. Yale froze and figured he’d backtrack, but then Bill looked over his shoulder and stopped and called to Yale, gave a giant wave that Yale couldn’t pretend not to have seen.
When Yale caught up, Bill said, “You live near here, yes? It’s not an area I know too well.”
“Bit north of here.”
“Well, this is serendipity! I have something in my car that I forgot to bring to the office today. You’re going to be thrilled.”
And so Yale found himself following Bill to his Buick, the same car they’d all ridden triumphantly back from Wisconsin in. Bill was parked right outside Cheeks. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all, except that he was talking faster than usual.
“Look!” Bill said, and thrust an enormous book at him. Yale rested it on the car’s hood.
Pascin: Catalogue raisonné: Peintures, aquarelles, pastels, dessins. The second volume. Bill said, “Page sixty. Tell me what you see.”
“Oh.” A woman in a chair, blonde waves parted far to one side, a nightgown falling off her shoulders, pooling in her lap. The pose was exactly the same as in Nora’s supposed Pascin study. The face was the same. The only difference was that here she wore clothes. Yale said, “That’s great news.” He felt like laughing. That his luck should be so good only at work.
“I can ask her about it,” Yale said. “I can take this up there with me.”
“What I want you to do—before you get all her stories, and I know that’s what she wants—is to see if she can remember what paintings might’ve been done from the sketches. Because this one, for instance—Yale, this is in the Musée d’Orsay! Maybe they’ll have interest in the sketch, you know? Display it beside the original. Not to sell,” he said, seeing Yale’s face, “but a loan or exchange. I can send the catalogs with you to Wisconsin. Of course there’s no Hébuterne catalog, or Sergey What’s-His-Face. And no Ranko Novak catalog, ha! But we’re going to load your trunk with books.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to come?”
“I have so much to do for the Polaroids.” The Polaroid show didn’t open till August, but Bill was dealing with loaned Ansel Adams and Walker Evans pieces, and every time he talked about the exhibit he wound up flapping his hands in frustration. “I want you back up there very soon. You and Roman. He’s a fine specimen, no?”
The Great Believers Page 27