Picture This

by Tobsha Learner

  She stared at him, both appalled and in awe. ‘Felix! People have written theses on your childhood.’

  He laughed. ‘Best piece of art I’ve ever sold. Now you own the original. You, and you alone, a priceless piece of truth. No one else knows except my parents, and they both died five years ago. So you see, I must trust you.’ He edged closer, his hand creeping up her leg again, caressing the soft skin of her inner thigh, teasingly close to her sex. She closed her eyes like a stroked cat, wondering at the layers that made up the psychology of this man, yet recognising the same need for reinvention in herself, and with it the constant terror of being found out.

  ‘For all our differences, we are the same,’ she told him, then let him touch her.

  *

  By the time Gabriel got back to Koreatown it was coming up to 4am. It was the second night he’d hardly had any sleep, and the edges of doors and shadows had started twisting into shapes and creatures that seemed to dance teasingly at the periphery of his vision.

  He let himself into his apartment block, the bluish spill of a TV creeping out from under Chung’s apartment door, the grunting soundtrack of a martial-arts movie audible in the dark, pungent corridor. Gabriel tiptoed past, not wanting to get into conversation, and made his way up the narrow stairs, careful not to stub his toe on the stroller parked at the bottom.

  Inside his apartment the pool of the blinking neon light playing out on his floor was a comfortingly familiar oasis. Gabriel collapsed in the battered leather armchair and stared out at the collage made by the signs outside the window. Chung had once told him the three separate Korean words on the three corners of the neon signs collectively spelt out: Love Fortunate, Spicy – or, more positively, Spicy Fortunate Love. At the time Gabriel had seen this as a good omen; now he wasn’t sure. The black giantess had cursed him, he felt it in his bones, in his very muscle tissue; worst of all, she had made him doubt himself.

  He got up and went to his laptop and booted up. Then, after a short prayer (in which he addressed his own personal gods – Marx, Goya and Jean Cocteau), he googled the artist Maxine Doubleday as he had done dozens of times in the last year and found an old YouTube posting.

  It was shot in black-and-white, and looked as if the camera had been hand-held. The footage was of the sculptor holding a small wooden mannequin in her hand, talking directly to camera. Gabriel peered down at the title running underneath; it was dated 1999, some six years before her death, and she appeared impossibly young, younger than himself; a blonde waif, with large blue eyes in a narrow, cat-like face hollowed out by pain and some inexplicable grief.

  To my generation… (here her voice faltered slightly, a silvery well-spoken English accent which, to Gabriel’s blue-collar Chicago ears, sounded like filigree) ‘to my generation of artists, this is my manifesto. Do not let the establishment bully you or force you to contort into so-called originality for the sake of commerce, for the shock of the new. Stay true to your natural expression, the intuition we carry as artists, as a sixth sense. Fight the branding, the intense pressure to adopt a persona they, the gallerists, the curators, the art commentators and the market, now promote and sell more than the art itself. Resist the packaging. Fight the box. Create what you truly believe in, do not create what you think will make you rich; do not create contrivances for history. If you do, know that eventually she will twist around and bite your head off.’

  Captivated, Gabriel watched as she pulled the head off the small wooden statuette held in her hand as illustration and threw it across the room.

  ‘This is my manifesto… ’ A symbol of a winged serpent with the initials MD flashed up in lieu of a signature. The video blinked, then started over again on a loop.

  It was naive, powerful and raw, her voice joltingly familiar to him. They were comrades in the same quest; he’d known it the first time they had spoken by phone – not joined just by the love of the same man but also in spirit. She too had been disillusioned, had fought for authenticity. He watched the YouTube footage again, this time with the sound switched off; there was an intensity to her gestures that he related to. If they had actually met they might have become friends and she would have understood why he did what he did: the political motivation, the intense satisfaction he got when one of the Hoppers was sold for millions; how one day it would be seen as a transgressive comment on the obscene amounts of money the art market generated and how he would be remembered as the author. They could have worked together, made more of a political movement of her manifesto, become the Art Bandits – that would have been a good name for a fifth column of disillusioned young artists. They could have become powerful in their own right. Taken New York, then London, then Cologne, blown the hypocrisy of art being the most fashionable trading stock; they could have become famous…

  Watching the huge eyes staring out of that pale face, Gabriel envisaged a whole different past for them both, but when the footage blinked to black and started over again, he switched the screen off. Next door a woman screamed and there was the sound of furniture thumping against the wall. Somewhere someone was frying rice. His imagination crashed back into the present tense. Maxine was drowned, having either been thrown or fallen off Brooklyn Bridge, and he was living in a rent-controlled apartment in Koreatown with a lot of money in the bank he couldn’t touch for fear of imprisonment.

  Gabriel sat back in the armchair; Felix was morally perverse, and Gabriel was well aware of his lover’s complex psychology, some of which had driven Felix to emotional sadism. Until that moment Gabriel had always forgiven him, assuming the need to lash out was the result of an abusive childhood not unlike his own. This was one of their unspoken bonds, and paradoxically he loved him all the more for it. But could Felix really kill? Gabriel glanced over at the battered alarm clock perched on the bar fridge. It was 5am. Time to get a few hours’ sleep, after which he knew exactly where the gallery director could be found.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was a bright spring morning, the clear blue of the sky crystallising the edges of the buildings into flat planes like an abstract, Felix observed, his hangover muted by a cocktail of acetaminophen and codeine – a real Mondrian. The café crowd was the usual motley group of artists, wealthy, hip business types, actors, tourists and the occasional minor celebrity. They filled the long communal tables in the beer garden under the Highline, the abandoned elevated railroad track already semi-landscaped in preparation for being made into a public park. The fashionable diner was his regular Sunday-morning haunt; it was famous for its brunches, but he liked that it was open-air, respite from the relentless urban verticality of New York. Besides, it was a good place to be seen. And he wanted to be seen this morning.

  ‘Hash browns, bacon, fried eggs, pancakes… with maple syrup. Fuck, I don’t know whether to gorge myself or throw up.’ Susie, hangover pounding over each temple, squinted at the menu through her Prada sunglasses. She resembled, he thought, a grand piece of architecture that had undergone a minor bombing raid the night before – still beautiful, but crumbling a little. Her red hair, still styled from the ball the night before, was half-down, half-up, and her skin was scrubbed clean of make-up, which made her look as if she were in her twenties. The only artifice was a dramatic slash of red lipstick that made her lips the most prominent feature of her face. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, a deep-blue one, which completely engulfed her and made him want to take her to bed again just so he could slip his hands down the sleeves and cup her breasts and nipples: the latter were erect and visible through the thin cotton. She was also wearing a pair of cut-off jean shorts of his, with a belt tied round to keep them from slipping off her narrow hips.

  Susie had decided she’d wear the eight-inch Union Jack platform shoes with the rest of this ensemble; it was bizarre, yet somehow she managed to appear infinitely more stylish than the far more conservatively clad New Yorkers (many of whom were a good ten years younger) around them. Confidence and utter indifference, Felix guessed, marvelling at the intensi
ty of emotion he felt looking at her. Was this what normal people felt? Finally, at thirty-eight, he could begin to understand some of the absurdities he’d watched his peers get involved with over the years: the love affairs, the crazy things people did in the name of such an emotion, the divorces, the conceptions, the breakdowns – could there be a more powerful drug? The way he’d revealed himself last night would have been unthinkable a week ago. Neither of them had mentioned the conversation since, but he knew Susie had absorbed every word.

  ‘What do you reckon? I think I’ll have the full catastrophe – pancakes, hash browns, two eggs sunny-side up, bacon, mushrooms and a side of spinach… Felix? You listening?’ Short-sightedly studying the menu, she resembled a gorgeous wayward overgrown child.

  ‘I’m listening.’ He reached under the table and ran his hand up her thigh. ‘Only I can’t concentrate because all I want to do is eat you, not food.’

  A couple of people down the other end of the communal table reacted to his gesture and he knew they’d been recognised. Good. Let the buzz spread a little. The photographer he’d organised to be there was due in 15 minutes.

  ‘Really?’ Susie grinned. ‘You’ll change your mind once my bacon arrives. I know you will.’ She took her hand back, then picked up the copy of TheNew York Times from the table while Felix got the waitress’s attention.

  *

  Gabriel stepped into the beer garden wearing a hat and sunglasses. Careful to stay well out of Felix’s sight line, he positioned himself behind a pillar and waited, studying the couple. Felix and Susie Thomas. He was touching her in that way Gabriel knew so well; territorial, sexual… They have to be lovers; they have to be. It was torture to watch, but he felt he had to. He glanced back towards the East River, his gaze falling on the Brooklyn Bridge. Would you know you were falling? Or would you think you were flying?

  *

  While Felix ordered, Susie flicked through the paper and then studied the social pages. After a minute of reading she glanced up.

  ‘Felix, we’re in here.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ She pushed the page across the table. There was a photograph of herself and Felix emerging from the ball arm in arm. I look, Susie thought, as if I’m about to topple down the stairs. She was holding up the skirt, exposing a good length of leg and thigh; the raven did still have the cigarette butt in its beak, and her make-up made her look as if she had two black eyes. Worst of all was the headline over the accompanying article. ‘Baum takes the bloom off the English Bloom: notes from the art front,’ she read out loud. ‘Fuck, does that pass for wit in this country?’

  ‘Don’t sweat it. That will be by Curtis Henning. He loathes me.’

  Ignoring him, she continued to read the article out loud: ‘Felix Baum, l’enfant terrible of the gallery world and one of New York’s most eligible and notoriously single bachelors, was seen leaving the annual Met Ball with British artist Susie Thomas, the latest celebrity artist to join his stable. Ms Thomas, who appeared a little worse for wear, will have her first solo American show at Baum #2 in May – one of the most-anticipated exhibitions of the year. Thomas, famous for her sexually provocative and explicit installations, has been tight-lipped about the subject matter of the upcoming exhibition. One can only hope Felix Baum is not part of her research. Although since his record sale of Hopper’s Girl in a Yellow Square of Light, Baum can certainly afford to fund Ms Thomas’s artistic peccadilloes, whether either of them can afford an emotional dalliance is a whole other question.’ She put the paper down. ‘I’ve lost my appetite. They’ve made me sound like Medusa,’ she told him.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you. It’s just white noise and it’s fabulous for the show.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Hey, if you care, they’re winning.’ But he could see that she did, and a seed of panic started to bubble up in the pit of his stomach.

  Susie reached into the pocket of his shorts that she was wearing and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She lit up.

  ‘Susie, it’s no smoking.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on a side plate anyway.

  The coffees arrived, then two plates of food, piled high. Susie reached for the container of maple syrup and poured it generously over the pancakes and bacon. Now the young couple at the other end of the table were openly gawking at them. The young woman (braided hair and nose piercing) leaned over with her menu in her hand.

  ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Susie Thomas?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Susie replied. Shooting Felix a withering look, she pointed to him: ‘And he’s the most notorious bachelor in New York City.’

  ‘I am totally crazy for your work. I hate to ask, but I’d really love an autograph – yours, not his,’ the young woman specified, indicating a bemused Felix.

  Stony-faced, Susie picked up the plastic container again and wrote her signature in maple syrup all over the menu. The young couple watched reverently as she finished with a full stop, then licked the nozzle of the container.

  ‘That is so-o-o radical,’ the young bearded man murmured. After sliding the menu back to their side of the table, he turned to his girlfriend. ‘We can freeze it,’ he reassured her.

  Over Susie’s shoulder Felix noticed the photographer he’d tipped off standing at the entrance of the restaurant. As she turned back to her food, he took the opportunity to catch the photographer’s attention. In seconds the man managed to install himself on the table behind them and, unnoticed by Susie, began clicking away.

  On the other side of the restaurant Gabriel waited until he saw that Felix had asked for the bill, then got up and walked over to the counter. Sometimes it paid to be a great forger. This was one of those times.

  *

  The waitress placed the bill on the table. Susie reached for it before Felix had a chance to.

  ‘I’m paying. No argument,’ she insisted, smiling, then unfolded the bill. There was a pause as she read it, then her face fell in sudden horror.

  ‘C’mon, it can’t be that expensive,’ Felix joked, thinking she was being funny. He took the bill from her. Drawn next to the amount, with a characteristic flourish, was a winged serpent with the initials MD – and the words You owe me. He instantly recognised Maxine’s handwriting.

  *

  Gabriel’s stomach tightened as he watched Felix’s expression. His shock was unmistakable. He’d never seen the other man look so exposed. So Felix had understood the threat explicitly. He had to be implicated in Maxine Doubleday’s death.

  For the first time in their relationship, Gabriel felt the power shift back to him.

  *

  Susie pointed at the winged serpent scrawled on the bill. ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so.’ Felix answered cautiously, praying she hadn’t seen his initial reaction.

  ‘It’s Maxine’s signature. Felix, you knew her better than you claimed.’

  He tried to take her hand. ‘Susie, I haven’t lied to you, I’d never lie to you. Didn’t I risk everything by telling you the truth last night?’

  ‘So why is this happening?’

  He stared at her, his own fear rising up like bile at the back of his throat. He wanted to tell her about the lock of hair, the presence he thought he’d felt in the private rooms at his gallery, the disturbing sense that, since they became lovers, he’d felt as if his every move was being shadowed by a presence so out of context in his very material world he couldn’t even bring himself to name the possibility: I am haunted.

  ‘Wait here.’ He leapt to his feet, looking wildly round the café for someone who might have set him up. There was no one, only couples engrossed in each other, a few families and tourists. Yet there was something deceptive about the tranquil scene that was deeply disturbing. He headed over to the waitress who’d handed them the bill. She claimed to know nothing. By the time he’d returned to the table Susie had left.

  *

  Lati
sha didn’t need to announce her arrival. Still dressed in her Sunday best, hat and white gloves, she lumbered into the panel-beater shop, sat down heavily on an upturned oilcan and waited patiently, fanning herself with a pamphlet entitled Judgement Day Is Nigh, Repent All You Sinners or Die!!! that she’d picked up from a Jehovah’s Witness who’d been handing them out outside the church earlier.

  Patiently she watched the men soldering and hammering, sweat beading on their foreheads and upper lips, an easy male camaraderie between them, sweet to observe. She watched the beauty of their young bodies moving with such purpose, and found a lack inside her filling with a sadness she didn’t care to put a name to.

  Finally, Henry Firestone, wiping his face with a towel, sauntered over.

  ‘Miss Latisha?’

  ‘It’s a sin to be working on a Sunday.’

  ‘It’s a bigger sin to make your family want for money. But you ain’t here to preach.’