by Adam Mitzner
“It’s not?” he said, trying to hold back a smile. “In that case, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”
She laughed and then stopped in front of exam room three. Owen preferred exam room eight. The rooms were identical, but going farther down the hallway meant he got to spend another thirty seconds with Sasha.
She opened the door. “You know the drill,” she said. “Strip down to your shorts. The doctor will be in—”
“Whenever he damn well feels like it,” Owen finished for her.
“That’s about right,” she said, laughing again.
“Hey, how old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“Perfect,” he said.
“That’s enough for today, Owen. Now get in there and get naked.”
Jessica considered the fact that she was annoyed to be a good sign. When she and Owen first started going to these blood work appointments, they filled her with dread. After enough visits in a row ended with good news, they felt more like a terrible inconvenience. Why were the doctors making them hike out to Queens once every other month to check his blood for whatever they were checking it for when it was obvious to her that Owen was now perfectly healthy?
The waiting room contained the usual hodgepodge of child cancer patients in various stages of illness. Jessica still vividly remembered their first visit. Back then, Owen had looked so healthy, and they’d sat beside a boy a few years younger than him, bald as a cue ball. Dear God, she had prayed, don’t let that ever be Owen. And yet, within a matter of weeks, it was; then it was Jessica watching the other mothers with their hirsute children silently utter the same prayer. Weeks later, she saw that those other mothers’ prayers had not been answered either.
But then, the pendulum swung. Owen went into remission. Whereas he had once epitomized every parent’s worst nightmare, his presence in the waiting room today was a beacon of hope. With hair flowing past his shoulders, he had become the poster boy for answered prayers.
“Ms. Fiske,” someone said.
Jessica was used to being called Ms. Fiske, especially by Owen’s doctors and teachers. She looked up to see Dr. Goldman in the waiting room.
She hadn’t set eyes on the doctor in some time. He looked older than she recalled from the chemo days. A little grayer, perhaps. Maybe a few more wrinkles too, even though she didn’t think he was yet sixty-five. She took some comfort in the fact that enough time had passed since she’d last had an audience with him that he’d actually changed.
“Would you mind coming back for a moment?” he asked. “There’s something I would like to discuss with you.”
All Jessica’s alarms went off at once. She couldn’t imagine Dr. Goldman had anything to discuss with her that she wanted to hear.
The trip to East Hampton from Lower Manhattan took most people close to four hours, more if they hit traffic along the Long Island Expressway. But Reid prided himself in making it in three, although that required he keep his Porsche above ninety miles an hour and weave in and out of traffic.
Today, however, he abided by the speed limit. Not exactly, as he still went ten miles an hour faster, but the last thing he wanted was for his passenger to think he was reckless. He needed James to think he was the very epitome of responsibility.
Reid’s father had been part of the East Hampton art crowd, although he’d shown up at the tail end of the scene, in the late 1960s. By then, the most famous of its members—Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, not to mention the undisputed king of the New York school, Jackson Pollock, and his wife, Lee Krasner—were already name brands. But while Reid’s father might have missed the heyday of the art scene, he was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of the East End real estate market. He paid something like $35,000 for his “cottage,” which Reid had inherited a decade ago.
“Quite the party the other night,” Reid said. “That Sarah Ross is insatiable.”
“Roth,” James said.
“What?”
“The insatiable woman to whom you’re referring is actually named Sarah Roth.”
Reid shrugged. “I can only imagine Jessica was none too pleased with Haley’s one-woman show.”
“No, she was not. At least she didn’t blame me for it. But that reminds me, I do need to call my divorce lawyer and see if there’s anything that can be done to prevent another such performance in the future, although I highly doubt there is. Short of murder, of course.”
Reid laughed. “That, my friend, is why I’ve never married.”
“And here I thought it was because no woman would have you.”
“Sarah Roth had me. Twice, in fact,” Reid said, taking his eyes off the road to smirk at James.
“It’s easy to get into a woman’s bed for a night. It’s being allowed to stay that’s the challenge.”
“Not a challenge I plan on taking up in this lifetime.”
“You’ll be missing out then. I can tell you that there’s nothing like being married to someone you truly love.”
“Aww,” Reid said. “Check back with me in ten years and see if you still feel that way. Meanwhile, the woman I’ll be with then is in elementary school now.”
“You are truly disgusting.”
“Just speaking my truth.”
David Kaplan called a few minutes before noon. Haley was in her apartment, more or less waiting for her divorce lawyer’s call.
Even though it had been less than two years, she could no longer recall how she had come to retain her attorney. He must have been a referral from someone. She hadn’t found him on the internet, that she knew, although when she did google David’s name, she was pleasantly surprised to find that he was a Super Lawyer, whatever that meant. Then again, so was James’s mouthpiece, a woman whose name Haley tried to banish from all recesses of her brain, though occasionally it came through like scratches on a chalkboard—Angela or Andrea or Abigail. Some A name.
That was the way it went in divorce these days; the men hired women to make them seem more understanding, and the women hired men to make them stronger.
Then she remembered who’d made the introduction to David. It was her financial adviser, Arthur Cochrane. Of course, she’d asked him for the referral. The symmetry to it all had been weirdly pleasing, as it was Arthur who’d introduced her to James.
Four years before, her financial adviser had suggested that Haley spend some of her recent bonus money on artwork. “Even though I won’t see a penny on commissions for it, you might get some psychic satisfaction at seeing your bonus money hanging on your walls, as opposed to being digits in a brokerage account.”
He’d recommended James Sommers, claiming that he was one of the best art dealers in the city. “Trust me,” she remembered Arthur saying, “you’ll be in excellent hands.”
She met James at his office, which was actually an apartment that he worked out of on Madison in the seventies, a few streets north of the Met Breuer museum, which most New Yorkers still referred to as the Whitney, and a few blocks south of the Met and the Guggenheim. She had expected James to show her some pieces to choose from. But he told her that was how people bought furniture; buying art was more akin to falling in love.
“You need to date a little bit, see what you like, what you don’t,” he said. “Then, when you come upon that piece that you just know you can’t live without, then, and only then, are you ready to buy art.”
It felt a bit like a come-on, but Haley didn’t mind. She hadn’t had much time to date since joining Maeve Grant, the investment bank that employed her in its mergers and acquisition department. The men she did make time to go out with quickly proved that they weren’t worth it: man-boys who spent most of their time bragging about the things they owned and fretting about losing their hair. She could envision worse ways to spend an evening than in James’s company, looking at beautiful objets d’art.
He took her to a downtown gallery that specialized in photography. The show on display contained a lot of staged pieces, m
ost of which struck Haley as contrived.
“I gather you’re not falling in love with anything here,” he said after they had taken their first lap around the room.
“A few I might fuck, but none I’d marry,” she said.
“Well put. Because something you’re going to look at every day has to justify its existence every day. It’s easy to like something for a while just because it fills a blank wall, but over time, you’re going to resent paying so much for it if you’re not in love with it.”
“How can someone who knows so much about love still be single?”
“Precisely,” James answered.
“So you’re a cynic, are you?”
“Let’s just say that I’ve found my share that I’d fuck, but none that I’d marry.”
“Well said, James,” she replied.
That night, they fucked. Slightly less than a year later, they married.
She was twenty-seven when they tied the knot. James was forty-one. That should have been a red flag. Her mother made no pretense about expressing such concerns, wondering aloud how a man who was as successful and handsome as James had managed to stay single for all these years, then suddenly became eager to marry.
Needless to say, Haley saw her mother’s concern as an insult. Another way for her to convey that her daughter wasn’t good enough.
A little more than a year after their vows, James told her that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce.
By then, it had already become clear to her that her marriage to James had been a mistake. Her long hours at work were not always out of necessity but just as frequently to avoid facing that reality. When they were together, she could feel James drifting from her. Sex, which had always been plentiful, had become less so, and on those nights when she wasn’t working late, he often was.
Another woman might have been relieved that James was doing the dirty work of ending it, but Haley wasn’t that woman. She had never before failed at anything, and her marriage was not the place she intended to start.
She begged him to stay. She swore she’d do whatever he wanted to make him happy. She offered to quit her job, to start a family if that’s what he wanted. Anything.
James told her it was not about her. He would never love Haley in the way he loved Jessica. It was not her fault. It was just a fact. He actually used the words soul mate.
She had never believed that soul mates existed. But even worse, she didn’t think James believed it either. The fact he was invoking the term to describe his adulterous lover told Haley that this was a fight she could not win.
At that point, she’d figured that James leaving her for Jessica would be her rock bottom. Then she learned that there was actually no such thing. Given the opportunity, you can always descend further.
“David, to what do I owe the pleasure of a Monday morning phone call?” Haley said.
She imagined the scene playing out in real time. James had called his shark of a lawyer first thing, which for Manhattan lawyers meant 10:00 a.m. After receiving James’s call, Angela or Abigail or Applesauce must have spent the next hour and a half drafting a cease-and-desist letter. That letter had just arrived in David Kaplan’s email, and he’d wasted no time in calling Haley to start his meter running.
“One question: What could possibly have possessed you to show up at James’s house—at his anniversary party, no less?”
“I assumed he wanted me there and my invitation got lost,” she said.
Like all men, David was not immune to her charms. Of course, his professional life was devoted to helping women at their most vulnerable, so he was accustomed to clients flirting, and he’d never suggested he would cross any line with her. Still, men go the extra mile for women they want to sleep with, even when they know it’ll never come to pass.
David sighed. “Haley . . . we’ve been over this before. These types of shenanigans are serious. Not only does it cost you legal fees every time you engage in one of these stunts, which you no longer can afford, but sooner or later, James will take real action.”
“Is this one of those times?”
Another sigh from David, but louder. That meant no.
As Haley suspected, this was all for show. In order to placate Jessica, James could now report that he’d sicced his lawyer on Haley. But James must have also instructed Abigail or Angela or Artichoke to heel as soon as she delivered her threat.
“The impression I got was that if you send James an email promising to stop and apologize for the other night, he’ll drop this thing for now without a court filing.”
“Let me think about it,” Haley said.
She felt sure David knew what that meant—never gonna happen.
Reid had always struck James as something of a man of mystery. Part Jay Gatsby, part John Galt from Atlas Shrugged. Self-confident to the point of cocky, an incorrigible womanizer, and rich without a discernible source of income. That said, there were times in James’s life when the same description could have been fairly applied to him.
Reid’s East Hampton house was at the end of a long pebbled driveway, tucked away from the ten-thousand-square-foot behemoths that surrounded it on all sides. It looked as if it had been designed from a Beatrix Potter illustration, with shake siding and sloping roofs. The interior elaborated on the theme—grandfather clocks, English antiques, and large windows overlooking manicured grounds.
Reid led James into the first-floor study. A Louis XVI desk was in the center of the space, an English secretary standing against the wall.
Reid pulled open the center drawer of the desk, retrieving an old-fashioned skeleton key. “Not the greatest security system, I know,” he joked. He carefully lifted the few items that were on the desk and moved them to the floor. With his shirttail, Reid cleaned the desk of any dust, then made his way to the secretary.
From it, he removed four sheets of paper, careful to hold them from the underside so as not to mar them. Then he laid the pieces on the desk.
James excused himself to wash his hands. When he returned, he looked at the first, then the second, and finally the last two drawings on the desk.
“So, what do you think?”
“I think you’ve got one of two things here.” James lifted his eyes from the artwork. “One possibility is that your friend Tommy Murcer is a forger. Or that he knows some forgers.”
“They’re authentic. I know it.”
James thought so too. The genius of Pollock was both undefinable and unmistakable. How many times had he heard that someone’s kindergartener could create a piece that rivaled some modern masterpiece? He had always been tempted to respond that if they could, they should, because the world needs more beauty, and their five-year-old would be paid handsomely.
“That doesn’t completely solve your problem, though. Because if they are, in fact, Pollocks, then I’m pretty sure what you have here is some stolen art.”
“No way. Tommy’s on the up-and-up. He knew Lee Krasner. He’s got photos of the two of them together.”
“That may be, but it’s still possible that at some point in this lovely relationship—which by the way, assuming Murcer’s eighty now, means that he was having sex with a seventy-five-year-old when he was in his early forties—ole Tommy decided to help himself to some of the master’s work while Lee was looking the other way . . . or after she died.”
Reid shook his head. “Why can’t you just believe what Tommy says?”
James laughed. “Because I’m an art dealer. And if you did so much as a Google search on Lee Krasner, you’d know that she jealously guarded her husband’s legacy. She would never in a million years have gifted to anybody what seems clearly to be unfinished work. Much less four of them.”
“Then why did she keep them?”
“I don’t know. People keep gum wrappers their husbands left in their pockets, Reid. She was probably sentimental enough about his work that she didn’t want to throw them out. Or maybe she intended them to go to a museum or somethi
ng for study about his work. She died in the mideighties. By that time, she knew full well that her husband’s doodles on napkins were worth the price of a house. Maybe she gave one away to a friend. Hell, the Springs section of East Hampton is chock-full of stories about shop owners and tradesmen with original Pollocks they received as barter. But those were one-off deals. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way Lee Krasner gives anyone but a museum four unfinished pieces. On top of which, unless your friend Tommy lives under a rock, he would have been smart enough to know he’d need some type of authentication. Certainly Lee Krasner would have known that. So, at the time of the gift, she would have given Tommy a notarized letter or something to prove that they were a gift.”
“I asked him about that. He said that Lee didn’t want the tax implications of gifting it through her will, or any gift tax that would be associated with her giving them away before she died, so they didn’t do any paperwork.”
“I’ve heard that story before,” James said. “In fact, it’s the art-world equivalent of ‘the check’s in the mail.’”
“Well, that’s what Tommy said. And I believe him,” Reid said defiantly. “You going to help me on this or not? Because it’s just too big an opportunity for me to pass up. I thought, to be honest with you, that I was giving you a gift. But if you don’t want to do it, no worries. There are lots of other guys I know who would jump at the chance.”
Wayne taught biology at the Sheffield Academy, where the elites of New York City sent their offspring. For fifty thousand dollars a year, these princes and princesses could hobnob without interference from anyone whose parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Wayne had risen to become the chairperson of the science department, and from that perch he ruled over the biologists, the chemists, and the physicists, exercising all the fake authority with which high school teachers are imbued.
Wayne had attended an elite Manhattan high school too. Stuyvesant High School was the crème de la crème of the New York City public high schools. Acceptance was by test score only. Thirty thousand kids took the entrance exam, and about eight hundred made the cut, for a 2.67 percent acceptance rate. Harvard accepted 5 percent, for comparison’s sake.
