A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Clay dropped his head at the mere thought of Freddy’s muddled finances. He read the watch on Daniela’s wrist. It was after one thirty.

  “Crap, I’ve got to run.” He spun around to find Nick just beyond the guest-room doorway. He’d taken off his green blazer and was squatting in front of his open suitcase. “Nicky, I’m leaving.”

  Nick’s face paled at the news of abandonment. He jostled out of the room with the tripping momentum of someone ejected from a subway car. “Already? Can’t you stay for a little longer? We could . . .”

  The unfinished suggestion hung there in a void of silence. It was Daniela with her superior intuition who knew what must be done. She grabbed her keys off the kitchen table.

  “I have to buy groceries. Clay, you stay a minute.” She turned to Nick. Although she was speaking to both of them, she must have felt that Nick was more in need of this lesson. “You’re so young. Be greedy with each other.” Daniela took a canvas bag from the doorknob and disappeared across the concrete garden.

  Clay pointed his thumb toward the blue square of light floating on the guest-room bed. He didn’t have to ask what Nick felt like doing in their time alone.

  Chapter 5

  Sex with Nick was the best kind of greediness, because every hungry move on Clay’s part was treated as an act of generosity. They’d tumbled around on the narrow bed for less than half an hour, and in that urgent blur of minutes there were no timid sorrys from Nick and no extra caution on Clay’s part in handling this fragile, tired visitor. Afterward they lay on the mattress, the sheets having snapped loose from their corners and bunched around their legs. Nick tucked his arm behind his head, a blast of sand-blond hair filling his armpit. Clay turned on his side to study his boyfriend. It amazed him what a young person’s body Nick still had at the age of twenty-five. There was only a two-year difference between them, and yet Clay’s own frame was sharper and severer, more muscular and defined, his hips narrowing at the same point where Nick’s seemed to widen. It was as if Nick were still swimming toward manhood while Clay was already waving from the shore.

  On Nick’s hairless chest, the cobalt skylight square turned the warm shade of a California swimming pool. Clay lifted himself on the whipcord of his spine, clenching his stomach muscles as he sat up. His fingers went purple when they entered the square of the light, and he softly pinched Nick’s right nipple. Nick’s arm shot up to block the squeeze, but he overrode the defensive instinct and smiled nervously, as if he were daring himself to withstand the pain. Clay let go and ran his fingers down Nick’s torso, more rib cage than stomach muscle, all the way to the spill of brown pubic hair. He leaned in to kiss Nick on the lips.

  “I have to get back to Il Dormitorio,” he said. “Take a nap and then explore your new neighborhood.”

  He climbed out of bed, balancing his hand on a bookshelf crammed with cardboard boxes labeled by the year. A vertical mirror hung on the back of the guest-room door, and Clay examined himself in it, appreciating his own nudity in an unfamiliar room. He noticed lately that his body was looking more and more like his father’s—not his father now, bloated at the stomach with pink stretch marks running across it like a marbleized bowling ball. His father had gone to pot, body and mind, when his mother died. No, he was thinking of his father’s body long ago when Clay had been seven or eight and had been allowed to shower with him in their Bronx apartment bathroom with its avocado wallpaper and its halo of fluorescent light. Nightly, the two Guillory males could be found side by side, father and son, inside the textured-glass shower stall. Clay had stared up with worship and wonder as his father scrubbed his strong West Indian arsenal of a body, whitened at the stomach and armpits with suds, his muscles flexing, his broad feet stepping in semicircles, the runoff dripping from his chest onto his son. Clay didn’t know if he’d ever gotten an erection during those showers. He only remembered being thrilled by the adventure of standing with his father while he bathed. It was later, in his teenage years, when every early memory is reinterrogated for sinister double meanings, that he realized how sexually confusing the experience might have been at that age. His father had put an end to their showers by the age of ten. You’re a big boy now, you take your own shower alone. He’d whined and cried but did as he was told. It seemed right about that time that they had begun to drift apart. Clay had often wanted to ask his father outright, Did I get an erection, is that the reason you put a stop to it? But there were some family memories you couldn’t ask a parent about.

  Clay pulled on his boxers and stepped into his pants. He would soon be able to pay his father back—every cent of what he owed him, if their scheme went off without a hitch. He found his shirt balled in the sheets. He removed the photo of their mark from the pocket and tossed the folded-up clipping onto Nick’s chest.

  “That’s him,” Clay said, sliding his arms through the sleeves until his hands reappeared as punches out of the cuffs. “Richard Forsyth West.” He watched as Nick unfolded the paper and stared at the white-haired American man grinning over a glass of yellow wine. Clay had purposely ripped Richard West free from the women flanking him at a party so Nick wouldn’t view him in a humanizing context: older white men looked more like assholes when they were smiling alone. The paparazzi-style photo was taken close-up, and it captured Richard’s wide Nebraska-shaped forehead with a mole dotting the left eyebrow, his falcon-like nose, his high cheekbones, and his unflappable smile. In the photo, he wore one of his trademark white suits, which Clay liked to think of as a flag of surrender. Unfortunately, Nick was studying the photo of Richard West under the skylight beam, which turned the entire image blue.

  Clay circled the bed, picking up the coins that had exploded from his pockets when he’d removed his pants. It struck him as embarrassingly cheap to be gathering up every last glitter of spare change around a bed after sex. But the truth was, European coins were more valuable than their American cousins.

  Nick spent exactly one minute looking at the photo before refolding it into a square.

  “You should study it more carefully,” Clay advised as he jammed his feet into his shoes.

  “I saw him,” Nick replied.

  “There are a lot of rich old American men with white hair in Venice.”

  “Don’t worry, I saw him,” Nick repeated. “Or do you want me to tack his picture up over my bed? Would that make you happy?”

  “Yes, that would make me very happy,” Clay answered half seriously. “The last thing we need is for you to target the wrong man.”

  “I won’t,” Nick promised as he rolled over and nuzzled the side of his face into a pillow. “I’ll get the right one.”

  “He’s a terrible person,” Clay said. “A devil. Remember that.”

  Nick tried for a two-fingered salute to his forehead but gave up and let his hand fall lethargically on the mattress. “You just text me when it’s time,” he murmured. His eyes closed tightly before softening into sleep.

  As Clay closed the metal gate to Daniela’s apartment, he was glad to be by himself again. It allowed him to contemplate every detail of Nick. It seemed to him that early on in a relationship the most intense feelings were experienced alone, the same way love songs always gutted the heart more deeply when the person you loved wasn’t in the room. Clay walked along the fondamenta thinking of his boyfriend, marveling at the young man who had traveled across an ocean just for him. Clay felt sure he could trust Nick, and it scared and exhilarated him to put so much trust in someone else.

  Freddy’s palazzo was located in the northern neighborhood of Cannaregio. It would have been quicker to cross Campo Santa Margherita and loop around the train station to reach it, but Clay couldn’t resist taking the winding alleys east toward the Accademia Bridge. It was a sentimental walk for him, another reminder of his eight months living in Venice. Even the triangular white sandwiches—i tramezzini—in the caffè windows were sentimental to him, because they’d served as his primary food source for his first weeks in town. Egg and tuna,
ham and artichoke, shrimp and olives—he’d sampled all their endless, mayonnaise-heavy combinations.

  Those eight months in Venice had been the happiest and perhaps the loneliest of his life. Venice was the single global art capital that lacked any gay bars or reliable nightlife spots. Clay had tried his share of hookup apps, but they were mostly filled with closeted middle-aged tourists cruising for Italian boys and finding only the sad compromise of one another. Most assumed by the color of his skin that Clay was a refugee from Africa—and who knew their real motivations once you let them into your hotel room? The scraggly scrub-brush dunes at the far southern tip of the Lido, the one alleged “gay beach,” proved more pudding-bodied nudist camp than testosterone-rich Fire Island pool party. Even after these early failures, lust drove him out into the night and hope kept him glued to a bar chair. Eventually he accrued two minor flings with locals, nothing with any real heat or noise. Clay drank a lot of wine that summer and fall.

  He walked past the white-marble facade of the Accademia Museum with its trove of Veroneses and Tintorettos and began to climb the bridge. The Accademia Bridge rose over the Grand Canal like the peak of a wood Ferris wheel. As he reached the top, he shoved through couples taking selfies and peddlers selling items—model airplanes, squishy balls, cell-phone batteries—that probably shouldn’t be sold at the top of a bridge. He managed to find a sliver of open railing to lean against and stared east beyond the Salute’s gray hawk hood of a roof and the sharp fin of Punta della Dogana as the canal opened into the wider basin. The water was blue-green and sparkling like sequins, and the surrounding palazzi looked like canapés at a party far too elegant for the clothes that Clay and his fellow sightseers wore.

  Clay concentrated on a low, white single-story house on the south side of the canal, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, otherwise known as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. That museum devoted to modernist masterpieces compiled by the late American heiress had been Clay’s life raft in the year that his family blew apart. Clay had studied history at Fordham University in the Bronx, but he’d taken a class on Renaissance art his sophomore year and became enthralled with the Italian paintings blown up on the lecture-hall screen. His professor, a southerner on loan from a Jesuit college in New Orleans, noticed Clay’s interest and pushed him into other art-history electives. At the start of his senior year, the professor encouraged him to apply for a prestigious paid internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. He’d already written Clay a glowing recommendation letter.

  That Venetian seed was planted in Clay’s mind right after his mother had been diagnosed with cancer but while she still appeared physically healthy. For a miraculous period, it seemed as if his mother’s body could be condemned to harbor a terminal illness without ever suffering any of its symptoms. She had been the family’s breadwinner, working in midtown Manhattan as the head of a dentistry journal’s subscriptions department. She was small in stature, thin in the upper body, sturdy in the thighs, and while she wore her short hair tied strictly back, her eyes and lips were definitions of latitude and forgiveness. Clay loved her so fiercely it stung—his mother, who had only gulped once when he came out at age fifteen and then smothered him with love and acceptance after that single wayward gulp.

  His mother had been especially delighted about the idea of her son, a graduate of a four-year liberal-arts college, living and working in Venice, Italy, for one of the most distinguished families in New York City—as if the Guggenheim heirs themselves were picking through the swamp of international applications and lifting up his envelope and saying, “Now who is this young Guillory?” Clay applied with zero expectations and, to his genuine surprise, was accepted. He hadn’t meant to go into the arts and had already accrued a stomach-turning amount of student debt. But even Clay agreed that the offer was just too beautiful—Who the hell gets the chance to be employed for a summer in Venice?—to refuse. If the internship had been unpaid, it would have been accepted as foolish and impractical. But in the crucial hairline distinction of being a barely paid internship, the whole dreamlike prospect transformed into a possibility.

  Clay was slated to fly to Venice in mid-May, two weeks after graduation. But during the last semester of his senior year, the dreaded abstract diagnosis finally presented itself in all of its horror. Even his resilient mother couldn’t overcome the pain and exhaustion that followed. She checked into the hospital in March, promising the family apartment that she’d return to it soon. She never saw it again.

  His mother insisted that he keep the internship. Clay balked. He wasn’t flying off to Italy while she was lying in a hospital in New York. “You’re going to Venice! End of discussion!” she griped right back. “I want you there, do you hear me?” These petty arguments actually seemed to stimulate and revive her during Clay’s visits, and they would usually conclude in their laughing together at the absurdity of it all. (How did she end up at age forty-six in a hospital ICU? How did her son end up being invited to work in a mansion full of art in a floating city on the other side of the planet?)

  Soon enough, nothing was funny about the absurdity of his mother lying in the hospital. As an oxygen mask was taped to her mouth, as the needles and tubes and blinking machines began to swallow her whole in her bed, it became too excruciating for Clay. His father had taken a leave of absence from his security job to sit with her in her room every day. But Clay began to make excuses: exams were looming; final papers needed to be researched; if he didn’t pass every single class, he’d have to take a summer semester, and that meant shelling out more borrowed bank money to the greedy Jesuits. He often rode the subway down to 110th Street and attempted to walk the single block to Mount Sinai, but his nerves would fail him and he’d swipe his MetroCard and wait for the uptown train. His father didn’t seem to resent the increasing rarity of his visits; he seemed to understand—although Clay’s absence would later be cited as the reason for their estrangement. On his last visit to the hospital, when his mother was still semi-lucid, she once again demanded he take his trip. Although now, his mother was mixing up Venice with Mexico, the place she’d always wanted to visit. Mexico had been her vision of escape. “You’ll learn so much there, and you’ll send me letters and pictures. It will be wonderful in Mexico. Promise you’ll go.” Dusk had begun to set outside the window, the soft purples of a late-spring sky in New York. Clay could just make out the faint outlines of their reflection in the glass, the two of them nestling creatures looking as if they were evaporating into the horrible beauty of a violet skyline.

  She died the week of his graduation. In the course of a single week he was handed a diploma and punched in the heart. When all was said and done and the hymns were sung, he did get on the plane to Venice. It was as if Peggy Guggenheim herself had risen from her palazzo garden grave, where she’d long been interred alongside her fourteen Lhasa apsos, to rescue him from grief.

  He loved the Peggy Guggenheim. Once he and Nick pulled off their con on Richard West, he would take Nick to the museum to show him his favorite paintings.

  The sky darkened with the threat of another downpour, and Clay donated his spot at the railing to a honeymooning Korean couple wielding selfie sticks. He descended the bridge and threaded the crowds toward the wide expanse of Campo Santo Stefano. Along one side of the square, lone black men stood as tall as palm trees on islands of counterfeit purses: Gucci, Hermès, Prada, Louis Vuitton. These men were migrants from West African countries like Senegal or Mali, one eye hunting for the police, the other for potential customers. The young men haggled passersby in tones of menacing temptation, but they never said a word to Clay—not once in all the time he’d lived in Venice with his brotherly smile cast in their direction. They knew he was not like them, and yet he was enough like them to be deemed a waste of their time. They had desperate families back home to support. Unsurprisingly, all of Clay’s friends in Venice had been white. Clay had been the only black intern at the museum that summer. Most of the interns initially treated him with a disconce
rting overabundance of kindness—the sort of kindness that calls attention to the uneasiness it’s trying to mask. Ultimately, though, the weirdness of living in Venice had leveled them all into allies. They worked together as gallery guards, as admission-ticket sellers, as tour guides, as coat-check clerks.

  The rain began to beat down on Santo Stefano, and the purse archipelago was quickly dismantled. By the time Clay reached Cannaregio twenty minutes later, the sun had reappeared, burning gold across the syrupy canals. Clay crossed a small bridge and took three turns before he reached the alley that led to Il Dormitorio. A green door stood at the end of the passage with iron-grated windows on each side. Perched in a tiny wall alcove above the doorframe was the sculpture of a turbaned man riding a lump of broken marble. According to Freddy, the lump had once been a camel; the palazzo’s original fifteenth-century owners had been merchant traders.

  Clay unlocked the green door that had originally served as the back entrance of the Gothic-style Palazzo Contarini. It was now the front and only door of the decidedly less spectacular van der Haar palazzino. Freddy’s great-grandparents, two well-dressed hemorrhages of money, had bought Palazzo Contarini in the 1890s during America’s obsession with the grand tour. Back then, the palazzo had a cavernous ground-floor androne and boat entrance nestled next to a lush rose garden, a spacious first-floor piano nobile replete with frescoes and stucco moldings, and arched Byzantine windows sculpted in Istrian stone. In the 1960s, Freddy’s parents, in a frantic need for fast cash, had walled up one corner of the palazzo to keep for themselves and sold off the vast remainder of the house to a mining family from Bolzano. Most families would have divided a palazzo horizontally by floor—as was the local custom—but the van der Haars were true New York eccentrics in their love of verticality. So it was that this odd, cramped, towerlike house passed on to Freddy (who simply adored Venice) and his sister (who simply did not). Freddy’s half now belonged to Clay. He was part owner of this slender slice of falling-down paradise. And, for the time being, he was able to keep his half of the home thanks to the Italian miracle of low inheritance tax.