A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Nick had already learned the failure of first impressions. He’d completely misjudged Freddy van der Haar’s finances by falling under the spell of his gilded last name. Far more crucially, he’d completely misjudged Clay’s relationship with both Freddy and Freddy’s finances. There was a growing stack of unopened mail in the foyer of the dilapidated brownstone, and there was a cassette tape on the antique answering machine filled with live and automated threats (finally the landline was disconnected and simply became another mailed bill). Sometimes when they were sitting on the couch Nick and Clay had to freeze until the persistent knocking at the front door stopped.

  When you live and work with the same person, a secret affair isn’t easy to coordinate. The excuse that Nick fed Ari for leaving Wickston at 4:30 p.m. instead of 6:15 three afternoons each week was a fictitious rock-climbing class in Brooklyn with his old pal Leo. Rock climbing seemed ludicrous enough to be believable, plus it offered a piggyback excuse for the reason Nick was refusing to have sex with his boyfriend (“Ouch! I’m too sore! Don’t touch me! Everything hurts!”). Nick was dishonest and selfish and he hated himself to the core, but he found that he was emotionally incapable of having sex with Ari while doing so with Clay. That was the only point he accrued those months on his personal scorecard of dignity.

  “From everything I know about Leo, I’m shocked he’s going back for another week of classes,” Ari exclaimed while brushing his teeth one morning. “Is there a go-go dancer at the top of the rock wall? An ecstasy dealer? Tell me, what makes Leo keep climbing?”

  Nick laughed as he chalantly stuffed workout clothes into a gym bag. “Ari!” he sang in the faux aggrieved key of happy coupledom. “It’s important that I see my old friends. Leo’s the only one I’ve got from my early days in New York.”

  Ari peeked his head out of the bathroom. “You have my full support! And I’m looking forward to admiring your climbing muscles at the house we rent this summer in Pennsylvania.” Everything about that reply from Ari said: I love you, Nick.

  Nick began experiencing panic attacks. He locked himself in the Wickston bathroom to sit on the toilet and cry while punching the sides of his head. Then he unlocked the bathroom door and ran work errands with fresh gusto. He sweetened his voice when he answered the office phone. He assembled Ari’s weekly calendar with the prowess of a teenager playing a brick-building video game. Lunch Monday, 12:30 at Michael’s with the curator of Winterthur; conference call 2:45 with Bonhams; 3:15 appraisal of 19th century shagreen-and-silver cigar cases. For the months of February and March, Nick became a model employee and a model boyfriend. But three times a week when the silver hands of the wall clock by his front desk overlapped, he grabbed his gym bag and ran off to another world.

  The reason he was falling so hard? Around Clay, Nick could stop feeling like an eternal apprentice. He felt, instead, like someone with his own interesting opinions. Clay did that—he made him matter; he made him feel rare. And he managed that feat without buying Nick a single present or telling him which color he looked best wearing. In the crumbling brownstone on Jefferson Avenue, Clay listened to him and asked questions, and when they disagreed, Clay didn’t try to bully him over to his side. On those winter afternoons sprawled across Clay’s bed, Nick was afflicted with an unbearable sense of his own youth—not youth as in amateurish or yet-to-be-trained, but bold, limitless, and thirsty for the world. More and more, Nick pictured a fantasy future where he and Clay were figuring that world out together, free to move around in it as they pleased.

  In reality, though, Clay was even less free than Nick was. He was steeped in the kind of debt unimaginable even to members of a generation that had already leveraged their adulthoods to American banks. Clay’s debt scared Nick. The depth and intensity of it was like being carried along in a shark’s mouth, bleeding profusely but still alive, brought up to the surface to draw just enough air before being brought under again. “I don’t regret it,” Clay said. “It was to keep Freddy alive. You might think I was stupid, and maybe I was. But I couldn’t abandon him. I’d do it again if I had to.”

  Clay planned to get jobs—two or three or four of them—once he finished settling Freddy’s estate. Settling, in this case, meant selling. Everything would be sold in order to bring down the debt. But certainly, Nick posited, the Victorian brownstone was worth a small bundle. Bed-Stuy was no longer the geographical crime wave of decades ago. It was a gentrified, in-demand neighborhood where dog walkers and their mobile petting zoos had become the predominant sidewalk fixture. Unfortunately, the sale of the brownstone would barely cover the back property and income taxes that Freddy had been dodging for decades, along with hospital bills, pharmacy bills, credit-card bills, outstanding bank loans, long-term loans from Freddy’s gallery—loans of all kinds jumping out from every direction. The worst of it was that Clay had taken out personal loans to help Freddy, and those collectors were knocking the loudest.

  “Ironically, the only thing I can’t sell is the most valuable,” Clay told Nick. He’d inherited an equal share of a tiny palazzo in Venice, the other half belonging to Freddy’s invisible sister who would never, under any circumstances, sell her stake. “Believe me, Freddy tried. He once asked her to sell when he was flush with money and wanted the palazzo all for himself, but she turned him down. And then he tried when he was destitute and badly needed the cash but she turned him down again. She hates Venice and hasn’t been to that house in thirty years, but she keeps it, I guess, out of spite.”

  “At least you’ll come out with something in the end,” Nick bright-sided. “Half a palazzo isn’t so bad.”

  “Oh, man,” Clay moaned. “As much as I love Venice, right now I’d rather have a bill shredder.”

  In the end, it wouldn’t have helped Clay had those last remaining van der Haar forgeries passed for authentic relics. If they had, Freddy would have sold them through Dulles Hawkes years ago to purchase more ridiculous trinkets and gewgaws that Clay would now be uploading to eBay. He planned to have the counterfeits melted down so he could sell the silver for scrap.

  Nick and Clay were half-undressed, kissing in bed—Clay’s silver belt buckle ice-cold against Nick’s stomach—when an idea struck Nick with the force of a tidal wave. He pushed Clay off him and sat up.

  “What if I appraised them?”

  Clay stared at him funny. “Appraise what?”

  “The counterfeit castoffs. What if, as a Wickston representative, I convinced someone they were legitimate? Privately. Away from the auction houses. Like how Dulles Hawkes sold them. Since he’s retired now, it would make sense that you’d use a new dealer.”

  Clay shook his head.

  “Just listen,” Nick said. “We’d need to find someone rich who has no connection to Ari or the silver trade. Someone not in New York. This could work! I answer the phones at Wickston. I print out the appraisal reports. If we do it right, Ari would never find out and neither would the buyer. Everyone’s happy.” Clay was still shaking his head. “Hundreds of fakes are sold every year, they just have the right stamp of approval. Why should yours be any different?” Clay was now emphatically shaking his head. “It would have to be someone who believes in the van der Haar name. My god, a million people do. This could save you. This could get you out of debt. You could pay back your father!” Nick knew that last incentive would stop the head shaking. He just wasn’t certain what other effects it might induce.

  Clay leaped off the bed. He located his sweatshirt on the floor and dug his arms and head through its holes.

  “No,” he said, his glare fixed on a corner of the room. “I can handle my own situation. This has been fun, but I think it’s time for you to go.”

  Nick scrambled off the bed. “Don’t be like that,” he begged. “I’m just trying—”

  Clay yanked his arm away. “I’m not going to cheat someone, even if they’re too stupid to realize it. Freddy did that, fine. He was an adult child. But I won’t. Bringing them to Wickston was a mistake. And you shou
ldn’t be lying to your boyfriend for my benefit. He’s your boyfriend, Nicky. You seem to have forgotten that.”

  “I didn’t forget.” In truth, the world of Ari and the world of Clay were so separate in his mind that Nick couldn’t even conjure an image of his boyfriend while standing in this Bed-Stuy bedroom. “Okay, it’s a total fantasy. Maybe it’s a dumb idea. But think about it, will you? Think about what it could get you out of. Think of the prison of the next decade paying off those debts. And Ari will never find out if we choose the right target. You can’t be that good, Clay! Isn’t there anybody you wouldn’t mind screwing over? Isn’t there anyone from Freddy’s life that might want van der Haar antiques, no questions asked?”

  “If I wanted to go that route, I wouldn’t need you,” Clay retorted. “Freddy had plenty of friends with criminal backgrounds. He had a crazy black marketer in Paris who could forge the right certificates if I wanted to sell those pieces. I don’t need you to help me, Nicky. I’m good on my own. I’m—”

  Nick risked grabbing his shoulder. “I want to help you, okay?” He let the silence float between them. “Just think about it, all right?”

  One afternoon in March, on the very day that Ari had driven out to Connecticut on a consultation job for a longtime collector, Deirdre Halfon stopped by the store. “How about lunch?” she asked Nick at the front desk. “My treat.”

  “I can’t. I’m the only one here today.”

  “Just tape a note to the door. ‘Out to lunch, back at two.’” Deirdre wore a patchwork sweater and a long pony-skin skirt that she would have been shocked and perhaps annoyed to learn was back in fashion. “Let me guess, Ari doesn’t allow notes taped to the door. He’s such a stickler.” Deirdre’s criticism also served as a brag about the son she’d raised. “Well, he can’t blame you if his own mother does it!”

  Nick reluctantly fetched his coat as Deirdre penned the note. Recently, he’d started to think of Deirdre less as a surrogate mother and more as an enemy spy.

  They walked twenty blocks north through the Upper East Side, remarking on the recent urban blight of empty storefronts in the Seventies, and then, conversely, on all of the cloying new shops congesting the Eighties. Deirdre guided Nick into a brick-walled pub with tables covered in white butcher paper. She pointed toward a table in the corner. As Nick followed her through the restaurant, she said, “This place has been here forever. Jackie O. used to come for lunch!”

  They both ordered Cobb salads, no bacon. For most of the meal they kept to safe topics like Haim’s new obsession with birding and jogging (“No, I’m talking about birding while jogging,” Deirdre elucidated), and the latest travesties protected under the Second Amendment. When their salads were reduced to lettuce scraps, Deirdre performed a theatrical survey of the restaurant, as if fearful of eavesdroppers, and leaned across the table. “Ari would kill me for telling you this. But I think he’s going to pop the question by the end of summer.” Nick’s stomach dropped, and he stared into his salad bowl as if over a cliff’s edge. “Maybe you like surprises, and I shouldn’t have said anything.” Her eyes were reddening at the corners. “Do you love him, Nick? Do you love my son?” She seemed to be overwhelmed at the thought of someone loving her son. Or perhaps she was overwhelmed at the thought of someone not loving him. Nick’s lips quivered and his eyes began to leak. “Yes, I love him,” he assured her. “I love him so so so much. Please know that!”

  They were both crying now, and Deirdre steered her hand around the obstacle course of the salt and pepper shakers and the water glasses and the ramekin of pink sugar packets to squeeze Nick’s fist. “We all want you in this family so badly!” She made the Halfons sound like a sorority into which his admittance would be decided by group vote. Nick excused himself. Hunched over the men’s-room toilet, he vomited up his Cobb salad into the bowl.

  How had this happened? Nick was making plans for the future in two very different worlds. Ari had narrowed down the summerhouse rental to one of three Pennsylvania cabins. “We get it May first to Labor Day. I can’t believe I’m saying this—so bouge of me, what have I become?—but it really depends on the kind of pool we want. Salt, slate, or a plastic kidney bean with a diving board.” The toddler in the apartment above them was growing at an astronomical rate, gaining an obscene amount of weight, judging from his constant heavy footfall across their ceiling. The clumsy pounding was worse than the stilettos and drowned out the airshaft symphony that Nick loved to listen to in the morning. “Also, Nick, in the fall, you should start coming with me to some of the appraisal appointments. We can hire a person to work the front desk, and you can sit in the back with me. It’s time you took on more responsibility so you don’t get bored.”

  On the other side of the river, Clay had selected the target for their scam, a despicable American zillionaire in Venice with a creepy fixation on the van der Haar name. He had a track record of trying to acquire Freddy’s silver. “I can’t stand this asshole. But you’ll be able to sleep at night, Nicky, knowing the fakes will bring him a great deal of joy.” The Venetian plan was mutating like a virus—Nick would no longer need to forge an appraisal report on Wickston stationery; he’d no longer have to cold-call Richard Forsyth West to peddle five miraculous eighteenth-century van der Haar antiques; Nick could be renting a room at Il Dormitorio and just happen to spot the treasures in the palazzo and . . . scratch that, too complicated and coincidental. Venice was a tiny town. Nick could bump into West on a vaporetto, give him his business card, and at the right moment lend him some pro bono advice. Nick got the sense that Clay was purposely minimizing his role in the silver scheme to protect him from any criminal culpability.

  “And in the end, if you don’t come to Venice,” Clay said, “maybe you could talk to West on the phone. Or Skype. He’ll want to see that angelic face of yours.”

  “I am coming!” Nick swore. “I told you, I can’t stay with Ari. It’s over. You’re flying to Venice and I’m meeting you there a few days later. It’s our plan, not yours. You’d better not look shocked when I step off the boat!”

  They went up to the third-floor bedroom and undressed. Clay lay on his back and milked a condom over his erection. Clay always made sure to use protection: a condom when they fucked, a lean blue pill swallowed every morning that reduced the possibility of HIV to a near flat line. Nick wished he could take that lean blue pill too—hell, he wished he could walk around with a condom in his wallet. But those safeguards were prohibited for members of monogamous, lifelong relationships. In some insane, current-world logic, the people in monogamous relationships were now the ones most susceptible to STDs, while the most promiscuous went around unscathed. Nick straddled Clay’s waist and flexed his biceps, because Clay said it turned him on to see the light-blue veins cobwebbing his muscles. Nick took a moment to appreciate how the bones of Clay’s neck drifted into a concert of muscle, the hairless ridges of his stomach, and the pink, protruding knot of his belly button. Nick reached behind him, slipped his fingers down his own ass crack in preparation, and, with one eye anticipatorily squinted for the impending jolt, guided Clay inside him. Clay nestled his head into a pillow as if preparing for a long voyage. Staring down, Nick felt the kind of love that was too early to be named; naming it might destroy it. And beyond that feeling floated others that were just as elusive: Nick felt as young as his age, twenty-five, and the world itself felt real and round and unending.

  “I prefer the slate pool,” Nick told Ari that evening. “I hate kidney beans. And the slate pool is right above a barley field, which will be pretty in summer.” Ari had brought Nick to his favorite bar in Morningside Heights, where brave opera amateurs climbed the stage to butcher arias. Right now, a middle-aged woman with a shaved head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl was failing to transport the room with her rendition from Così fan tutte.

  “The house with the slate pool is my favorite too,” Ari said with warm eyes. “That one’s perfect for us. What’s more, the owner is interested in selling. If we lo
ve the place, maybe we can talk him into counting the summer rental fee as part of the down payment. It’s forty acres, and it’s in a fantastic school district.”

  “Wait a minute! Stop! If he’s selling the house, does that mean it isn’t furnished? I don’t want to spend half of May running around buying furniture.” Nick was perfectly aware that in his other life he’d be far away from rural Pennsylvania in May—according to the plan he’d either be in Venice finishing up with their con or already traipsing through Europe with Clay and all the money in their pockets. But that other world was so disconnected from the one Nick shared right now with Ari in an opera bar on the Upper West Side that he didn’t see it as a conflict.

  Ari stroked Nick’s back. Nick understood right then that what kept him attached was not the furious hunger of early love so much as the stable, unshouting promise of being loved—and maybe that feeling was infinitely more valuable. Nick stared at his boyfriend, who was sipping his beer as the singer aimed for a note as reachable to her as the moon. Generous, trusting Ari, who had given him a home and a job and an education. Nick knew he would never be able to put the bullet of abandonment into that forehead. He couldn’t—it would be like killing himself.

  “You look like you’re about to cry,” Ari said softly. “Why don’t you? Come on, the poor gal is singing her heart out. It would make her night to see some tears.”

  Ultimately, time forced his hand, the silver wall clock ticking at the Wickston entrance. Clay told Nick that a lot of clocks in Venice had no hands: Napoleon’s army had stripped as many precious metals as they could from the public monuments. While most had been returned—Clay pulled up an image of the four bronze horses in Piazza San Marco—the restoration of precise time hadn’t been all that important to the Italians. But time mattered in New York. In fact, Nick had purchased a ticket with an exact end time stamped on it: a one-way economy ticket to Venice leaving on the evening of April 4. It was nonrefundable. He’d made his decision, and now he needed to come clean. But still Nick went to work every morning and existed as a man of umpteen smiles, and not a squawk of discord passed his lips. Instead, he pigeon-toed across the herringbone floor to discuss where his new desk would go. Meanwhile, Clay had finally found a buyer for Freddy’s brownstone. It had been the last hurdle to their Venetian con. A part of Nick had prayed that the brownstone would remain on the market indefinitely.