A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  “So you forgive me?” Nick asked with an anxious smile.

  “Yes. But, Nick, listen. You’ve got to—” and here Clay stumbled because he couldn’t find the right words to warn him about West. Nick seemed particularly susceptible to the approval and affection of older men. But Clay wouldn’t risk saying that outright. In their two months together, they’d managed to stride boldly through a field of touchy subjects—money, sex, monogamy—where others would have inched on tiptoe. But there had been one ugly argument between them. It had been back in New York when Clay mentioned how crazy it was—this late in life, this early in a brand-new century—that Nick hadn’t come out to his family. “Why don’t you just talk to them?” Clay had asked flippantly. “Is it even a big deal anymore?” Clay had hoped a hard push would encourage Nick to take the necessary leap. But Nick’s face went red and he took a choppy breath before replying with the counterpunch, “Why don’t you talk to your father anymore?”

  Clay measured his words carefully now. “I’m just saying, you have to be on your guard. West can fool you with his warmth and invitations, and you’ll end up blowing the whole thing because you decide he’s your friend. He’s a manipulator. I was fooled by him once.”

  Nick nodded through the warning. He stepped closer, his warm breath spilling over Clay’s face. “I’m not worried,” he whispered. “Look, I won’t lie to you. I don’t hate him. I hope he never finds out he’s being cheated. But he’s not someone I care about. Can we go back to Daniela’s for a little while?”

  Clay snorted. “We can’t use Daniela’s apartment as a sex den all the time.”

  “Just for a half an hour. We’ll be super quick.”

  Clay was about to risk another kiss when he heard an approaching squeak behind him. A tobacco-skinned old woman with a wedge of peroxide-yellow hair was pushing a similarly colored and peroxided man in a wheelchair. Both of their faces were sharp and pointed, but it was the wheelchair that struck Clay as fantastical. In Venice, it was nearly impossible to get around by wheelchair—there were pedestrian step bridges every ten feet. Clay knew there were other humans like him, so addicted to this city that they would go to miraculous lengths to stay as long as they could. The wheelchair stopped, and the intruding couple gazed apologetically. The woman struggled to turn her husband around.

  Nick ran over to help; one of the wheels had gotten stuck in a doge’s crypt. Clay was awed by Nick’s endless reserve of kindness to strangers. It was one of the things he loved most about him. How had seven years in New York City not leached that quality out of him? Maybe kindness explained why Nick hadn’t told his family the truth, and maybe it also explained why he was in Venice right now trying to save Clay from his quicksand of debt. Kindness was unrealistic and probably dangerous and certainly insane. And yet, as Clay watched his boyfriend free the chair and push the old man smoothly forward, he was certain it was the most beautiful trait in the world.

  “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time,” Clay said when he returned. Nick tried to respond, but Clay spoke over him. “You leave now. I follow in five minutes and meet you in the garden. But only if Daniela isn’t home. And we have to be super quick.”

  Whenever Clay’s keys clattered in the lock of Il Dormitorio, any interns who happened to be home scattered like cats. He could hear them scurrying to the sanctuary of their drywall bedrooms before he made it up the steps. From his perspective as landlord, the house seemed to be inhabited by a congregation of international, adolescent ghosts. Concert flyers, gutted care packages bearing postage-stamp quilts, and discarded pharmacy boxes littered the kitchen table. The dishes were never washed, juice bottles were tossed from well beyond the three-point line in the direction of the trash can, and foreign phrases punctuated with smiling or frowning faces crowded the refrigerator’s dry-erase board. The interns were obedient only when it came to the single long-standing house rule: they managed to keep their mess off the ceiling. Everywhere else, it spread like a suburb.

  Clay could have hated them for their clutter, just as he could have taken their avoidance of him as a personal slight. But he’d once been on the other side of this peculiar landlord-renter relationship, and he knew that the higher-ups at the Peggy Guggenheim had driven the fear of the very old, unnamed American family into each one of them. The interns were clearly wary of Clay, even after their initial surprise of finding that the heir of this very old, unnamed American family did not appear in the shape, color, or age that they’d imagined. In truth, Clay would have liked to take his tenants out for pizza. He would have willingly offered them advice on their museum tours or how to skip the line for vaporetto tickets. He was, after all, only a few years older than they were. But it was probably best to keep the relationship formal and remote. Only Clay had managed to cross the chasm between renter and owner, and he still wasn’t sure it had been worth the price.

  As he reached the door to Freddy’s private quarters, he found a sealed red envelope wedged into the frame. One of the interns must have brought it in from outside. There was no indication of the sender, and only Clay’s first name was hand-printed on the envelope’s top corner. Nevertheless, Clay recognized the stationery. In fact, he knew from a brief stint working for its sender that the stationery came from a little shop on the Zattere, and that the sender stowed the sheets in a Florentine wood box in his desk drawer.

  Clay unlocked the door, pulled off his jacket, and sat on the bed. He noticed that his shirt was misbuttoned. He’d dressed quickly after sex to leave Daniela’s apartment before she returned. He didn’t want to annoy her by adding to the intrusion upon her personal space. Nick had been predictably uncooperative, wrapping his arms around Clay’s thighs as he was trying to climb into his pants. “Come on, stop,” Clay told him. But eventually he’d relented and tumbled back onto the bed to collect as much of that inordinately long body as he could in his arms. Now, an hour later, Clay’s body carried the achy reminder of those twenty extra minutes; his limbs felt as if they were moving underwater. Still, Clay could think of Nick naked right now and grow hungry for him all over again.

  Clay slit the envelope open. West’s gold initials crowned the top of the paper as they always had. The note was written in black ink, the scrawl a fluid, continuous forward tilt like a cresting ocean wave.

  Clay,

  Happy to be back in Venice? I again want to extend my condolences for the loss of our beloved Freddy. [Our, Clay reeled; there was no worse sin than inventing a close friendship with the dead.] I’d love to invite you over for a drink this week. We haven’t had a real talk in years, my friend. [Friend!] Also, there is a matter, a proposal, I’d like to discuss with you, one that might be mutually beneficial. It might even make life easier for you in dealing with Freddy’s estate. I know we’ve had our differences. But as neighbors, it’s time to put them behind us. Let me know if you’re free this week—tomorrow, or even this afternoon?

  Sincerely,

  Richard

  Clay particularly appreciated the twin underlining of “this week.” It might disguise itself as an eagerness to make peace, but Clay knew the real reason for the expedience: West’s secret silver appraiser was only in town for a short time. He’d want to get those pieces in front of his new Wickston coconspirator before he left for Milan.

  Could it really be this easy? Could West feel like he was pulling one over on him while all along Clay was doing him one better? Clay could forgive Nick for not wanting to hurt West with their scam. But for him, watching West fall victim to his own greed felt like justice. After his mother had died, he assumed he couldn’t suffer any further. Nothing else could touch him, large or small, because he’d filled his quota on pain. But the loss of a parent doesn’t immunize a person from betrayal any more than surviving a shark bite protects its victim from a car crash. West had cheated Clay when he was at his most vulnerable. Why should it bother him to settle that score?

  Clay didn’t wait another minute to answer West’s letter. After all, it was essential th
at West get those pieces in front of his secret silver appraiser as soon as possible. Clay took out his phone and dialed. He couldn’t hear the rings through the walls, but he liked imagining West rushing through his ornate rooms to reach them.

  “Hello?” the familiar voice squawked.

  “It’s your neighbor.”

  “Clay!” West all but screamed. “You got my note. I handed it to an intern. But you never know whether . . . Well, it got to you.”

  “It got to me,” he confirmed.

  “I’m glad you called. How about a drink tonight at my place? Shall we say seven?”

  Man, he was eager. But Clay wasn’t going to make it too easy for him. He had promised himself never again to set foot on West’s side of the palazzo. So, for once, they would meet on Clay’s terms.

  “I’m curious about your proposal,” Clay said coolly. “But this evening’s no good for me. How about you stop over here tomorrow around one p.m.?”

  “Oh,” exhaled a man unaccustomed to accommodating other people’s schedules. “Okay. It’s a bit early for a drink, but why not? Shall I knock four times on the connecting door?”

  “There are too many boxes in Freddy’s bedroom,” Clay lied, simply to make the proceedings one degree more difficult for Richard West. “Come to the front door and ring the bell.”

  When they hung up, Clay unzipped one of his suitcases from New York, its handle still wrapped in the sticky tag marked JFK TO VCE. Freddy’s ashes hadn’t been the only contraband Clay sneaked through Italian customs. Digging through an outer layer of sweaters and an inner layer of Bubble Wrap, he excavated the five silver vessels that remained of Freddy’s forgeries. As he set them around the room—on a bookshelf, tucked behind the lamp on the nightstand—he quietly recited his mantra for tomorrow. I will not feel guilt or shame. I will not be sympathetic to him. I will take as much as I can get. He will lose. I will win.

  Chapter 9

  Whatever one’s particular opinion on the subject of horse statues, erect penises, or the Italian artist Marino Marini, very few visitors could argue that the bronze sculpture adorning the terrace of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was not a thing of joy. The bulky body of a man, fully aroused, his dick pointing toward the basin of the Grand Canal, straddled a horse with arms outstretched and his head proudly lifted to the sky. The work is a hug to the sun, a giving over of individual life to the idea of life, the freedom of the flasher offering his imperfect body in the marketplace of human desires. Not a single day of Clay’s internship went by without his drawing inspiration from Marini’s Angel of the City. He wasn’t alone in his appreciation. It had become a ritual among the museum’s interns—whether straight or gay; female, transgender, or male; American, Portuguese, or Hong Konger—to give the erection a quick tug for luck when passing along the terrace. The Marini was, Clay felt sure, the most jerked-off artwork on the planet.

  But there were other works inside the low-sitting, Istrian-stone palazzo that pulled with more ferocity on his soul. The lonely de Chiricos, the LSD-laced Max Ernsts, the chimpanzee trapped in a void of magenta in the nightmarish Francis Bacon painting. “I hope they give you long breaks,” many visitors whispered to Clay when he was on guard duty in one of the museum galleries. “It must get so boring to stand in the same place all day!” They couldn’t have been more wrong. Clay adored his days cycling through the rooms. He got to know every individual artwork as intimately as a heartbeat, every stroke of paint, every sharp ascending line of a polished Brancusi, every scrap of a Cubist collage. Clay was a freak even among the art freaks of the internship: Clay loved guarding duty. He also loved selling tickets at the front desk and checking bags and coats at the guardaroba. He could practice his Italian; he could give suggestions on special exhibits; he could dash off gossip about Peggy G. and her wayward, suicidal daughter, Pegeen, as well as Peggy’s scandalous affairs with artists; he could promote his own twice-a-week tour of the grounds—all to spread the Good News of this nirvana-like institution that had saved him: saved him from America, saved him from what to do after he graduated from college, and, most of all, saved him from the gutting loss of his mother. Her death had taken on a geographical dimension. All that heartbreak existed across the ocean in New York. Here in Venice, and more specifically inside the marble walls of the museum, he was safe from it. Don’t listen to therapists: it is entirely possible to run away from yourself.

  His internship was supposed to last three months. His return ticket had him flying home on September 1. But Clay Guillory stuck out among the crop of summer interns, partly for his impressive grasp of the Italian language, and partly because his curious, unspoiled, ever-eager disposition made him the favorite of the senior staff. The shaggy-haired Italian supervisor reported back every time he received a visitor compliment. And the museum’s venerated director, a quiet, erudite man with bushy, metallic-gray brows that hung like bunting over his eyes—a man who seemed to move phantomlike through the museum because he was rarely sighted by the interns—stopped Clay twice in the courtyard to praise him when he’d overheard a snippet of his tour speech. Clay had proved himself a dedicated member of the Peggy Guggenheim family, and he would have done anything—really almost anything short of murder—for the museum. When the supervisor asked if he’d like to extend his internship by three months—they’d pay for a new return ticket—he practically wept. Six months in his favorite museum in his favorite city! Six months in his tiny bedroom in Il Dormitorio and eating breakfast under the Blue Madonna fresco! Six months masturbating the Marini and pushing audio guides on culture-starved Nordic couples who had just been unpenned from their cruise ships! If asked, he might have agreed to sign on for life.

  Clay deserved the praise as star intern. Most of his peers arrived in Venice with twenty cocktail outfits and not a lick of practical Italian. Clay had trained like a marathoner for six months before he landed. In Italy, his tongue caught fire. He was the intern to order for everyone at restaurants and to organize their weekend trips to Tuscany and to write down their exact hairstyle preferences so they had only to slip the stylist a piece of paper to make their instructions clear. Clay also became something of a guidance counselor for the new arrivals, many of whom, like himself, had never lived in a foreign country before. He discovered that his generation was particularly prone to homesickness. Clay, who wasn’t homesick, who in fact associated home with sickness and who never wanted to go back, would take these misanthropes under his wing until they too discovered the Good News of Peggy.

  Clay wasn’t the only success story that summer. A twenty-two-year-old Swiss intern named Bridget Messmer had also been asked to stay on for three months. Bridget had white-blond hair that curled angelically across her tiny forehead. She had a very sweet smile and said very sweet things in Italian, French, German, and English. The other women on the internship hated Bridget for her prettiness, her Sorbonne education, and her indifference to fostering friendships with any of them. Bridget was the kind of person who didn’t seem to want more friends; there were no reports of her ever displaying a sense of humor. Even the supervisor stopped bothering to invite her to the Friday-night intern pizza party in the downstairs break room. Bridget did not live at Il Dormitorio but in some unnamed piano nobile that her wealthy parents had secured. Clay really couldn’t say a mean word against her, which, in his estimation, was a mean word against her. In retrospect, it seemed predestined that Bridget Messmer would prove the catalyst of his downfall.

  Clay hadn’t spoken to his father once since he left New York. He had not called nor emailed nor under any circumstance would he conjure his face in the watery portal of Skype. Clay felt bad about the distance, but every time he resolved to make contact, his stomach would spin on tumble-dry. He couldn’t field questions about his mother just like he couldn’t go back to that hospital room with its darkening view of Manhattan—not even for a few minutes over a telephone. Italy was his escape. Here, he was no one’s son.

  Instead, he wrote his father postca
rds, one each week, all sunrises and sunsets over the Grand Canal, with humdrum descriptions of his job at the museum. He included one lie. He told his father he’d found a boyfriend, a Venetian architect he was crazy about. Clay invented the architect so that his father wouldn’t think of him as lonely; he might let go of his son more easily, knowing he had someone else. The truth wouldn’t have paired well with the romantic postcard shots of gondolas slipping under the Rialto Bridge: Clay was lonely. Outside of the museum, he didn’t have anyone at all. Then, in September, on a precarious rooftop ledge, he met Richard Forsyth West.

  Looking back, West must have been haunting Clay’s periphery in the Cannaregio neighborhood for months without his noticing. As dashing as West appeared to Clay once he knew him, as a stranger he would have been just another wealthy, well-dressed American retiree. They shared a wall, a canal, and a street that fed into their separate entrances. But they met at Clay’s work.

  Six days a week, the Peggy Guggenheim opened itself to all visitors who shelled out the twenty-euro ticket price. On certain nights, however, after the catering companies docked at the museum’s slip with their coolers of food and racks of wineglasses, the museum’s interiors and gardens were accessible only by invitation. Occasionally the roof of the palazzo was made available via a side staircase for drinks. There had been several such private parties over the summer, and Clay had been invited to none of them. But with his new status as favored intern, he had finally been asked to attend. “Smile, be respectful, talk to anyone who seems alone,” his supervisor instructed. “And please, please let them know you’ve enjoyed your internship!” Clay was nervous, twenty-three years old, and unfamiliar with patron cocktail banter, but he was eager to exploit his privileges. Naturally, Bridget had also been invited. As he stood stock-still on the museum’s rooftop, he watched pretty Bridget move like a veteran among the important guests. She wore a long cornflower dress and sipped prudently on club soda, and Clay suspected that this rooftop party hadn’t been her first that summer. If Bridget exemplified the internship program’s international sophistication, Clay supposed he embodied its diversity, a fact he loved and abhorred in equal measure. But he would do his internship proud tonight. He would smile. He would talk up the program. He would rescue the lonely from themselves.