“Freddy’s family had one of the most extensive silver collections in America. A lot of it disappeared over the years, but he held on to a few last pieces. I thought you guys might want to take a look before I offer them to the auction houses.”
“Absolutely!” Nick nodded before giving up the illusion that he’d be able to evaluate a collection’s worth. “You should really talk to Ari. It’s beyond my depth.”
“That makes two of us!” Clay rasped. “Well, maybe I’ll see you when I stop by the shop.”
“I hope so,” Nick replied too eagerly.
The choir started up in the church, muted by the two sets of doors that separated them from the rest of the mourners.
“I better go,” Clay said. He spun around and hopped down the steps with his hands punched into his jacket pockets. Nick watched his leg muscles clench with each stride. “I was just checking on the flowers.”
Nick held up his hand to the fleeing back. When Clay reached the street, he turned around and received the gesture with another smile. As he crossed into the park, a wave of loneliness overtook Nick, so sudden and bewildering he closed his eyes to wait for it to pass. Long after he lost sight of Clay to the yellow traffic of Fourteenth Street, he remained sitting on the stone wall, nursing a flicker of heat in his chest.
For Nick, though, Clay had existed as a rumor before he’d become an actual person. When he stood up to go inside, it occurred to him that the same young man in charge of spreading Freddy van der Haar’s ashes might also be his murderer.
Chapter 3
Ari predicted a bad year for silver.
In fact, there hadn’t been an exceptional year for silver in decades. Once the bread and butter of auction houses that held silver antique sales on a daily basis, the Halfon family’s decorative specialty had fallen mercilessly out of favor. Experts had several working theories for silver’s popular decline: the loss of the dining room as a domestic institution; the preference for the cheap and the disposable rather than cumbersome utensils that you had to polish before they turned chimney-soot black; the soaring interest in contemporary art as the new status symbol of the global elite. Nick developed his own theory in the twelve months he’d been working as a poorly paid, highly perked underling at Wickston Antiques. He felt that semantics should shoulder some of the burden. There was a special medieval language for the glittering artifacts that filled the metal shelves in Wickston’s climate-controlled basement storage room. What the hell was a salver, a porringer, a cann, a monteith? They were plates, bowls, and cups, for Christ’s sake! Nick believed the problem was not that the world had fallen out of love with sparkling objects, but that the terminology had dated the whole enterprise out of relevance. Customers yawned before they ever touched sterling; they saw it as a tired history lesson. Nevertheless, Nick kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket to record the proper vocabulary (i.e., the difference between repoussé and chasing for ornamental effect). In lonely afternoons sitting at the front desk of Wickston’s Park Avenue storefront, Nick’s head felt heavy with metal, overloaded with fine-antique descriptions that had so far failed to transmute him from mere apprentice to passionate connoisseur.
When he’d begun dating Ari sixteen months ago, Nick had been working as a waiter at an upscale West Village steak house. He also shared a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with three roommates—a mathematical problem of a living situation that encouraged staying out as late as possible and/or jumping into a long-term relationship. But when Ari entered Nick’s life—he’d been seated one evening in Nick’s section at the steak house and after two courses had gathered the nerve to ask for his phone number—he appeared as so much more than a temporary escape hatch. He was clever and handsome and hairy from head to toe, which for the twenty-three-year-old Nick registered as the apex of maturity. More to the point, Ari seemed as stable and secure as the Central Park West apartment building in which he’d been raised. Four months into their relationship, Wickston’s longtime assistant moved to Scotland for grad school. Ari suggested that Nick fill the vacancy. “I’m tired of you smelling like cows and curly fries,” he’d joked. Nick saw it as a chance to be delivered from the purgatory of mid-twenties aimlessness. Maybe silver could be his thing too. In early stages of love, all transformations seemed possible.
It didn’t take Nick long to realize that no matter how many arcane terms he memorized, he’d never acquire Ari’s innate feel for precious metal. His boyfriend could close his eyes, select a vessel at random, run his fingers across its hammered surface, and by density and texture alone discern its date, style, and maker. Ari had an uncanny gift; in a heartbeat he could tell you a real from a fake, French American from American Huguenot, Boston from Philadelphia, 1770 from 1785. The flourish of an engraving on the side of a chafing dish could send Ari into an aesthetic-historical mystery spiral that ended two days later with the pronouncement that the chafing dish was produced in 1721 in New York by silversmith Peter Van Dyck as a gift for one Ethel Schuyler’s wedding to Abraham Lodell. “Bad marriage, gorgeous result,” Ari quipped, sucking on a nicotine lozenge while tilting the chafing dish so it caught the starry overhead lights. Nick did not confess his embarrassing historical blind spots: he couldn’t begin to picture New York in 1721; he often got the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence mixed up; he could never remember the fuss that started the War of 1812. But Nick figured he had time to learn all of those collisions of American history. Ari was eighteen years his senior.
What Nick had learned most from Ari, though, was not sprawl but specificity. It was a thrill to tour a museum’s silver collection with him. Most of the visitors ran straight to the lions and tigers of the gallery rooms, the enormous World’s Fair punch bowls or British ceremonial swords. But Ari knew what all wise zoologists did, that the miracles of evolution were best observed in the smallest and oddest of creations. Ari taught Nick the beauty of details: the rolling curve of a handle, the scalloped bend in a plate rim, the minute scrolls on the serifs of engraved initials. It was magical to shrink the whole world down to a faint mark on a piece of metal.
Most mornings, after a half hour devoted to professional jealousies—which dealer sold a Neoclassical caster for how much?—Ari would sit at his mahogany desk in the back of the store, strap on his magnifying goggles, and study every inch of an antique brought in by some harried inheritor. Nick’s workstation consisted of the narrow glass-topped desk by the shop’s front door. Patrons had to ring the bell and be admitted by the press of a button under that desk. Nick was Wickston’s official greeter, office-supply stocker, phone answerer, package accepter, security guard, and appointment booker. Those disparate duties congealed into the label ASSISTANT printed across his Wickston business card. Most of Nick’s hands-on contact with silver comprised of polishing it with a special patina-restoring foam at the basement sink.
Wickston might have aspired to an address in the blue-blood blocks of upper Seventies Madison Avenue but had long ago settled for East Sixty-Third and Park. Across the street loomed tinted-glass corporate towers that shone in the sunlight like black ice and glowed at night with the pearly fluorescence of an alien mother ship. The shop’s decor tried for old-world majesty. Swirls of plaster molding garlanded the walls. The floors were oak herringbone, and Nick couldn’t resist the compulsion to fit his feet into the rectangular tiles every time he crossed the shop—pigeon-toed from the front to the back, penguin-footed from back to front. The sidewalk window read in silver gilt: WICKSTON FINE ANTIQUES, EST. 1908.
What that sign didn’t mention was that its current owners had carried the Wickston name since 1969. Ari’s grandparents had fled Morocco in the late 1960s, holdouts but eventual escapees of the mass Jewish exodus from Muslim North Africa. Once the couple arrived in Manhattan, the Halfons bought into a flailing Wall Street antique store called Wickston Idyll. They cut “Idyll” but kept Wickston. Like the shrewdest of immigrants trying to move up in New York, they managed to get close but not q
uite into the red-hot center of the privileged city inside of the privileged city. That goal was left to Ari’s parents, and they mostly succeeded by lasting. They focused the store’s interest on early American silver and watched as the market constricted and the competition shuttered. Eventually, the remaining collectors descended into the East Sixties by cane and wheelchair to buy, sell, or authenticate. The cane and wheelchair reference wasn’t hyperbole: the average age of the Wickston client was somewhere in the mid-eighties. Ari joked that they had one “sprightly young client” in his seventies who managed to walk into the shop unaided.
No question, antique silver was a dying trade—“The silver trickle,” Ari called it. Occasionally while sitting alone at the front desk, Nick wondered if he were apprenticing in a field that would disappear before he ever mastered it. Worse, he imagined the opposite outcome: a future where he was forced to keep the shop running long after Ari died, a Brink ensuring the legacy of the Halfons under the name of Wickston.
Ari’s parents, Haim and Deirdre, rarely set foot in the shop since retirement, but they were a constant presence everywhere else in Ari’s New York. Nick had never understood the cult of a family before he met the Halfons. He assumed all families on the planet mimicked his own—a collection of loosely allied strangers forced to share a house until any member was legally allowed to escape it. The Halfons reveled in their time together. They spoke French and only grudgingly switched to English as if to accommodate Nick’s special needs. As a rule, parents of boyfriends made Nick exceedingly nervous because he never felt sure how much they approved of his existence. That wasn’t the case with the Halfons, that family of manic huggers. They swallowed Nick whole the moment they met him with their slim, cashmered arms. There was never a flinch from Haim and Deirdre about their son’s gayness, no liberal resolve masking genetic disappointment, no plangent “Well, as long as you’re sure it’s what you want . . .” Ari told Nick that he came out back in the mid-1990s when he was a freshman at Brown. His mom had responded, “Duh! And we’re so happy you’ve realized it!”—as if his parents had been waiting for the good news to reach them from Providence. Any open exchange of warmth between Nick and Ari—a kiss on the cheek, a quick pat on the ass—activated pleasure receptors in the Halfons. Their son was happy!
Nick liked Ari’s parents, particularly Deirdre, with the pretty raised moles under her eyes. But the Halfons’ absolute, unquestioning acceptance of their son had an unexpected side effect: it made Nick feel like a coward for never admitting the truth to his own family. Maybe if he had only spoken, the Brinks would have unleashed a hurricane of love too. Maybe the unhappiness that collected with the dust in their suburban Dayton house was due to his failure to come clean, and that unspoken truth had hung over all of them like a pressure front as they sat at dinner and steered the conversation away from anything near to the heart. Maybe that whole gray world back in Ohio had been of his own making. Nick knew he wasn’t brave, at least not where it counted, not yet.
“You must marry my son!” Deirdre had blurted out to Nick in her kitchen that past Thanksgiving. It was after dinner, and she was tipsy on the cognac that Nick had misguidedly brought and no one else dared to touch. Deirdre was leaning against the stove with the yellow light of the oven’s hood chiaroscuroing the shadows on her face. For a second, Nick felt he could have been in any kitchen in America, with its purring fridge and the efficient peace of its steel appliances—only this kitchen looked out onto a street of deflating cartoon balloons where some three million spectators had gathered that morning to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and beyond that comic thoroughfare lay the frostbitten greens of Central Park. “You really should marry him,” Deirdre continued. “You’re perfect for each other. The whole family adores you. Who cares about the age difference? Ari is probably too shy to ask, so you should!” Ari had entered the kitchen right then, and Deirdre pretended to be scrubbing the stovetop with a community-theater actor’s subtlety. Ari raised his eyebrows suspiciously, and they all snorted in laughter.
A month before Nick started at Wickston, he moved into Ari’s apartment. The official excuse for their accelerated cohabitation had been mice. Nick’s Greenpoint apartment was besieged with rodents, and it wasn’t due to the inherent sloppiness of four gay twentysomethings bedding down together. The elderly Armenian woman across the hall spent practically her entire day cleaning her apartment, and she complained that every time she walked into her kitchen, there was a whoosh of fleeing mice. Nick had a healthy midwestern phobia of inner-city vermin; Ari pronounced his spacious two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive rodent-free, and that was all it took for Nick to agree to move in. But the real reason was that three months into dating, the world seemed less interesting apart than together.
Ari’s apartment was not only rodent-free but rent-free. It had long cherry-wood planks that Nick walked across as if they were Olympic diving boards. To Nick’s surprise, no silver antiques cluttered the shelves. Instead, Ari had pilfered some of his grandmother’s Moroccan rugs and batiks and left the rest of the six rooms an echoey, minimalist white broken up by canvases gifted by painter friends; they weren’t hung but left leaning against the walls, giving them the transient air of commuters on a subway platform. The apartment was on the sixth floor of a massive marble-stone pile on the corner of 104th Street, and the windows looked onto the trees of Riverside Park. As the year progressed, the leaves fell to reveal glimmers of the slate-blue Hudson River, and for the most brutal months of winter, they had an epic river panorama right outside their bedroom. Then killjoy spring came along and hid it again.
Their upstairs neighbor wore designer stilettos that echoed like thunderclaps from above, but their other neighbors had lived in the rent-controlled building for decades and were mostly orchestral musicians: violinists, cellists, concert pianists, a needling saxophone player down on the second floor. In the mornings, their individual practicing collected together to create an airshaft symphony. Ari’s biggest regret was that he’d never mastered a musical instrument, but he played Schubert on the record player whenever he could. It was all Schubert all the time in the Halfon-Brink apartment. Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major; Schubert’s Violin Trio in E-flat Major; Schubert’s heavy strophic melancholy of Goethe’s “An den Mond.” Nick suspected the constant Schubert was part of his taste education, much like the books that Ari plied him with on New England redware pottery or the Basque cooking classes he’d signed him up for. To friends, Ari often described Nick as “very American,” with its hidden implication that Nick should try harder to be a bit “somewhere else.” Nick had already learned that gifts from older boyfriends were to be read as veiled demands—I bought you this green sweater because I like you in green, understand? But Ari was never a bully about it; he stammered if one of his presents appeared unappreciated: “Is it a misfire? Please don’t feel any need . . .” But Nick did feel a need, mostly because he too loved the version of himself that Ari seemed to want. The Nick who could hum Schubert while stirring a spicy piperade in a redware vessel did feel like the right next Nick. That man would marry Ari.
Even if Ari occasionally called Nick out on his flirting, monogamy between them was a given. They’d gotten the awkwardness of sex out of the way on date two and the awkwardness of “I love you” on date ten. By the time Nick moved into the apartment there were few secrets between them, no former lovers texting dangerous memories in the night. Nick found sex with Ari to be set on medium heat; they rarely fucked, which didn’t matter much to Nick because so far in his experience the act had only been clumsy or painful. Nick preferred kissing Ari and nuzzling his neck while jerking him off in bed. They were similar in size, Ari just a bit thicker, which excited Nick as he tugged and jerked and his elbow galloped against his own hip bone to bring Ari off. Nick enjoyed watching the storms grow and fade on his boyfriend’s face.
Night set early in winter, especially when you were accustomed to gallons of daylight pouring through the apartment, si
x floors up. They didn’t go out much at night anymore. Ari put on Schubert and stretched out on the sofa in the living room, reading the latest novel or biography. Ari read every night, chapters and chapters, while sucking on an after-dinner nicotine lozenge. Nick watched his brown eyes weave down the pages. He wondered how many miles Ari had read in his life when the lines were totaled up. How many times around the world? How far past the moon? Tonight Nick sat on the windowsill and watched the black disc of Schubert revolve. Nick hadn’t seen friends his own age in months, nor had he danced or fallen down drunk. Before Ari, Nick had gone out almost every night, and each one of those nights had been a chance to set a world record for the most fun a human could have in New York. He’d once suffered almost daily hangovers, but he now couldn’t remember how he’d fit those suicidal headaches into the corners of his days. Leo had long stopped asking him about his evening plans. The last time Nick met up with him at a bar in Chelsea, Leo had greeted him with the crack, “Nick, so great you’re visiting! What brings you back to town?”
“Why are you opening the window?” Ari asked from the couch. “It’s twenty degrees out.” He crossed his feet and wiggled his hairy big toe that shot upward like an exclamation point.
“It’s too stuffy in here.” Nick yanked up the window. He thrust his hands out and felt the wind whipping off the water, hurtling southbound along with the car lights on the West Side Highway, everything outside in a hurry to get downtown.
On Sundays, in the Protestant tradition, Wickston was closed. On Mondays, Nick spent the morning running household errands. They were mostly Ari’s errands, which Nick had initially enjoyed—there was something grown-up about picking up shoes from the cobbler or paper-wrapped halibut from the fishmonger on Amsterdam Avenue. It was exotic to Nick in the way that grocery shopping in a foreign country is exotic—the first dozen times at least. A year in, these chores had lost their sheen of romance. The Monday morning after Freddy van der Haar’s memorial service, one of Ari’s favorite suits had gone missing at the dry cleaner. It took an extra forty minutes of scrolling through the whirling wardrobe of the entire Upper West Side to locate the misplaced tartans. Nick took the crosstown bus and didn’t reach his desk at Wickston until a few minutes after 2:00 p.m.
A Beautiful Crime Page 5
