SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

Philip nodded his head and did his best to get into the spirit.

  “You know, it’s bizarre,” he shouted into my ear. “I mean, look at Claudia up there. Don’t you think she’s superb?”

  “You don’t want to know what I think right now, Phil.”

  “Yes, well, there you have it. Claudia’s enough to drive any man crazy. I couldn’t be happier.”

  “You’re a lucky man.”

  “Oh, I am. Truly blessed.” He took an elegant pull from his beer bottle. “But do you know, the oddest thing happened tonight. After the UN, we stopped first at some fashion shop just over there across from the meat stalls.”

  “Jeffrey.”

  “That’s it. And while Claudia was in the changing room trying on skirts, I found myself flirting with the sales clerk. A girl from Mumbai, not even particularly pretty. Dark and done up with rings and piercings, you know. Exotic, if you go for that look. Nothing like my Claudia. It was the damnedest thing, though. I couldn’t stay away from her. Even took her phone number. How peculiar is that?”

  “Pretty normal, I’d say.”

  “Is it? Something similar happened when Angela was in the hospital giving birth to Melissa. I ended up having an affair with her OB/GYN nurse. I mean, what the hell, Jack?”

  “Forget it. You’re all right,” I shouted back over the clamor. “Just like the rest of us, only a little meaner.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re rich. You can afford to be.”

  Philip nodded, not hearing or understanding really, just trying to look as though he enjoyed the music. “Sometimes I wonder what ever became of that poor nurse,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Angela found her name in my address book.”

  “How’d she react?”

  “Went to the girl’s place and gave her quite a scare. I’m sorry I can’t remember the young lady’s name.”

  As the music grew louder, a terrible kind of relief welled up in me. At least Nathalie’s death had brought an end to certain grueling battles. I had no one to answer to now, and no one to care what I did. No one to welcome me, or to threaten me either.

  “Did Angela do that kind of thing often?” I asked.

  “Often enough to keep me on my toes.”

  “Pretty effective, I suppose.”

  “I never heard from the nurse again. She wouldn’t even answer my calls.”

  “Maybe she needed some time.”

  Philip shook his head. “I went back to the hospital to look for her once. No dice, as they say. It was as though she’d fallen off the edge of the earth.”

  “What would make her do that?”

  “Angela on her porch with a gun.”

  “A gun?”

  “Oh, yes, Angela used to belong to a shooting club in Westchester. Something to fill the long days up there, I suppose.”

  In its odd way, it was typical. Philip, a dedicated sportsman, liked his wives to share his hobbies, if not his soul.

  “Later, after I left, she even took Melissa with her sometimes. Signed her up for some youth affiliate. National Organization of Girls United for Feminine Firepower—NOGUFF. A lovely group, though the young things got a bit touchy at times. The acronym is more or less the agenda.”

  “They shared their mission with you?”

  “Oh, yes, insistently. It seems there are all sorts of awful female problems that we men are responsible for. Who knew?”

  “I’ve heard some talk.”

  “Are you aware, for example, that there’s such a thing as mental rape? Quite a traumatic experience, I gather.”

  “Did Angela ever forgive you—for the nurse and such?”

  “I never asked.”

  Silent, I contemplated my beer for a moment. “It’s been a while, Philip. A decade or so. Maybe you should.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know where to begin. For me women are a foreign country, Jack. Exciting to visit, useful to colonize, but that’s about it. You can’t let yourself go native. If you do, you’re doomed. Pussy-whipped and all that.”

  Just then the noise level went higher, and I glanced up to see several girls unhooking their bras under their tops and tossing the loosened lingerie in the general direction of the stuffed moose head behind the bar. A couple of the bolder ones, smiling, flashed their breasts. At that, Claudia looked at once delighted and perplexed—the artist in her, stirred by her comrades’ audacity, craving to invent some bold variation on the Stockyard ritual.

  Her solution was to hike her dress high and extend one leg, exposing a swath of pale flesh above patterned hose slung from an old-fashioned garter belt. At her beckoning, the fat biker stepped forward to unfasten the clasps for her, and that’s when things got truly rowdy.

  A whistle started blowing, and the music stopped. The barmaids, who enforced a strict no-touch policy, were not about to exempt an overdressed foreigner and her fat Harley Davidson swain. One of them trained a long-handled flashlight straight on the biker’s face, turning his beard a more ghostly gray. Two enormous bouncers moved swiftly toward him through the crowd.

  Acting quickly, I pulled Claudia from the bar and told the Viking to block for us, and somehow—thanks to his blond bulk—the four of us got through the crush and out to the night air, ducking swiftly into Philip’s limousine.

  “What happened to Mr. Pete?” Claudia asked. Curled in the far corner of the rear seat, she tried to peer out through the tinted glass.

  Philip covered her shoulders with his jacket. “I’m sure he explained it was all quite harmless.”

  The car pulled away smoothly, circling up to Fourteenth Street and cruising east toward the Village, where Philip knew a quieter membership bar.

  “Mr. Pete is a very nice man. Did you know his left leg is wooden?”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Oh, we do have a good time together, don’t we, amore?”

  “The best.”

  6

  With the full light of morning, the drive upstate—a very leisurely counter-commute—was a pleasant enough affair. I laid the dead weight of my left hand on the wheel and shifted with my right. The expressway curved gently from time to time, first through exurban clutter, then among spring green trees. Once out in the true country, cruising among the hillocks and new growth, I called the gallery to let my director know I would be coming in late.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked.

  “I’m on my way to Westchester to see Angela Oliver.”

  “As a friend or as a dealer?”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Jack, don’t do anything stupid.”

  “She’s actually quite a good sculptor.”

  “So what? She’s old.”

  “She’s a little younger than I am.”

  No answer came back for several seconds. “Just please don’t commit us to anything,” Laura said finally.

  “I thought I should give her new work a look, that’s all.”

  “This is getting worse.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t sign on to run a charity here.”

  “Angela doesn’t need money.”

  “No, but she needs shows and magazine ads and catalogues and collectors.”

  “I thought that was our job.”

  “Don’t be so last century, Jack. If she doesn’t have her own buyers to bring us, what’s the point?”

  “Do you think I’m such an easy touch?”

  Laura paused. “Just be careful, all right?”

  “Angela’s harmless.”

  “Not to you.”

  About twenty minutes later, just before my exit, I phoned Don to check on the buildings. There was a gas leak at the place on Thompson Street and low water pressure in the Sullivan Street brownstone. Meanwhile, our answering service was getting jammed with inquiries on the Oliver apartment, all from people who had read about Amanda’s murder and so surmised that the loft might be coming onto the market soon, at a bargain price.

  “Tell them it�
��s still a crime scene.”

  “I did, but they don’t seem to care. One guy even offered to re-do all the floors at his own expense.”

  After that, I was glad for the sunlight on the fields and the fresh breeze rippling the trees. Real estate affects people in peculiar ways. During my Institute of Fine Arts days, I used to work in the summers for a freelance carpenter who specialized in downtown rehab jobs that were too small and too cheap for most regular contractors. The cash-only deals weren’t exactly legal anyhow. No one was supposed to be living in the SoHo spaces back then, since the old commercial structures had been zoned for daytime business use only. The squatters had to develop a system of whistles to warn each other when the building inspectors came around. Beds would become couches, and stoves would disappear behind false cabinets. In fact, the officials didn’t care very much what we did. The city had been ready to condemn the whole area just a few years before, and the housing authority considered artists a small step up from the winos and hoodlums who usually hung out on the SoHo sidewalks.

  We were a happy little community, in a way—young men and women working in studios all day, trooping twenty blocks to the nearest grocery store, then partying with beer and weed in somebody’s loft before going out to the Mudd Club or the Tunnel for darker late-hour amusements.

  Ralph and I didn’t always get paid, or sometimes our compensation came in the form of recreational substances or works of art—the latter worthless mostly, except for the three or four that are now cultural icons and as pricey as a truckload of sturgeon roe. A few of our customers got famous, and they all got decent places to live.

  Ralph’s profits went up his nose, but I used the tax-free cash for grad school. Until, one day during Easter break, I took advantage of the price spike on a young artist’s paintings—two of which I’d recently obtained in trade for my skilled labor—to purchase a raw, disused, 3,000-square-foot space in one of the rat traps on Mercer Street. After doing a quick fix-up, I sold it for enough to buy an entire derelict building a few blocks away.

  So it went. Twelve years later, when my accident payment came through and I had a new gallery enterprise to divert funds into, I already owned seven up-to-code buildings in SoHo. And then the real estate frenzy hit.

  Once I exited the throughway, the land around me began to roll and I would catch occasional glimpses of grandly understated houses flashing white among the old trees and hedges. The county road passed through a little village with several antique shops, a bagel café, and a Lexus dealership. Half a mile farther on appeared the black mailbox that marked Angela’s driveway. Only with the last twist of the drive did I see the house whole—a broad, two-story, green-shuttered Victorian with a three-quarter porch.

  Angela, still puzzled by my morning call, stepped out to greet me. As soon as I glimpsed her—short and brown-haired, lilting down the walkway in designer jeans and a cambric blouse knotted at her half-exposed waist—I knew I had miscalculated. Apparently, without quite realizing it, I had been expecting to encounter, here on her own turf, the woman wronged, the freshly ditched housewife I remembered from a decade before. I should have known better.

  “Hello, Jack. I thought you might come round soon.” Angela kissed my cheeks when I got out of the car. “Did Philip send you?”

  “No, I came on my own. It’s been too long.”

  Over the years, we had kept in touch. Usually I saw her, once a season or so, for a multi-course lunch somewhere outside SoHo, with her young daughter in tow. I chose the restaurants carefully, knowing that Angela wanted, as a condition of our friendship, to avoid crossing paths with Amanda, the thief of her husband and life.

  “What brings you all the way up here? Besides checking to see if I have powder burns on my fingers, that is.”

  “You might say I’m looking for Philip.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? He’s not here.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be anywhere lately.”

  “That’s true, poor soul.”

  I had driven too far to be overly tactful. “You know him, Angie—better than anyone else alive. Do you think he could be faking?”

  She met my eyes evenly. “I think Philip could say absolutely anything, do absolutely anything, fake absolutely anything, if it would help him get what he wants.”

  “Even now?”

  “People don’t change that much.”

  It seemed an odd thing to say, given what she’d been through and done. I laughed. “Well, we’re all in a hopeless fix then, aren’t we?”

  We went into the house, passing through several carpeted rooms to the kitchen, where a sliding glass door looked out on the pool. Melissa, on the diving board, was being watched by a middle-aged nanny. Her mother waved vigorously, and the girl replied with a quick, convoluted dive. When Angela turned to me, she had a faint smile on her face.

  “So, how are you in the romance department these days?” she inquired.

  “All right, I suppose. Why do you ask?”

  “I rather thought sex might be the goal of your visit.”

  I must have looked perplexed.

  “Don’t you want to sleep with me, Jack? It seems everyone wants to have one off with me lately, now that I’ve started spending time in the city again.”

  “I hadn’t given it any thought.”

  “Really? Rude chap, you’re the exception.”

  I should have known. After Philip left, Angela told me in confidence long ago, she felt as though half her body had gone. She had to get it back bit by bit, wherever she could. Evidently, that covered a lot of territory—and a great many lovers.

  “It’s phenomenal really,” she said. “Chaps I scarcely know are ringing me up left and right. They all offer dinner, then maybe Tibetan throat singers at BAM or whatever, but what they’re really saying is ‘Let’s go for a drink and a quick shag, shall we, dear?’ ”

  “Sounds annoying.”

  “I don’t mind. It’s all in good fun, mostly.”

  “Thanks, Angie, I’ve had my fun.”

  “Haven’t you though?”

  “Enough for now.”

  “So what do you want, Jack? Now that the fun is over?”

  “Oh, just one pure and loving heart.”

  She laughed, then caught herself. “My God,” she said. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Melissa came in through the sliding door, shivering and wrapped in a towel.

  “Hi, Uncle Jack. Did you see me do the full gainer?”

  “I was mesmerized.”

  “Missy, please don’t drip.” Angela scowled at the droplets that splattered onto the kitchen tiles from the bottom of Melissa’s white one-piece.

  The girl blinked her eyes at me once and headed off, teeth chattering, to her room.

  “Cute kid,” I said. “How’s her French coming? Does she still order crème brûlée comme dessert?”

  “Don’t be fooled. She’s a little hellion, that one, in her own quiet way.”

  I hadn’t come to discuss childcare issues. “Tell me, what brings you into the city more often now?” I asked as casually as I could. “Besides your dating schedule, I mean.”

  “I’m having a show in the fall.”

  I tried hard not to reveal my surprise. “Good for you, Angela. Where?”

  “At Michael Loomis’s gallery in Chelsea. Do you know it?”

  “Second-floor space on Twenty-fifth Street? Sure.”

  “Obviously, it’s not the best. But it’s what I could get.”

  We both realized she’d done fairly well. At her age, having spent a decade as a small-town socialite, she was lucky to find anyone to take her art seriously at all. Even Michael Loomis.

  “I’d love a preview,” I said.

  “Would you really? My pleasure.”

  7

  Angela led me across the lawn to the white clapboard studio, a former carriage house. When she slid the door aside, a shaft of sunlight cut into the
darkness, illuminating scores of humanoid forms in the interior gloom. Some life-size, some smaller, many cast in fiberglass or resin or metal, a few carved in wood, the figures hung from the walls, held twisted postures in corners, crouched half-dismembered on platforms, spilling polyurethane entrails.

  “Best behavior, ladies,” Angela said into the dimness. “We have a gentleman caller.”

  “Your work has changed a lot.”

  “Yes, it had to.”

  “Just be careful with some of those materials you’re using. Polymers, resins, hot glue—they can be terribly noxious.”

  “Don’t worry, I know. Wouldn’t want to end up with a brain tumor like Eva Hesse. Or mad as a London hatter.”

  She flipped on an array of overhead lights, and the sculptures turned pale. We walked among them as Angela explained how her new process reflected the mental transformation—from self-abasement to mute pride to anger—that came over her after her fortieth birthday.

  “I’ve been working some things out,” she said.

  “So I see. How did it happen?”

  “It’s hard to say. You can’t control the things you create really. Motherhood taught me that.”

  “But you can manage your career at least.”

  “I’ve hired a publicist. She wants me to call the show ‘Asylum.’ ”

  “At last, a title we can all relate to.”

  “I know you don’t think much of publicists, Jack. But I have to make up for lost time. Playing coy doesn’t cut it at this stage.”

  She was right, in a way. The art world, like Moloch, consumes its young. Eager kids fresh out of grad school, ready to throw themselves into the searing arms of dealers like me. The younger the better, for our name-driven market, with the promise of a fresh vision now and rising prices for years to come.

  Angela’s artistic metamorphosis, a more self-motivated act, had begun with some transitional maquettes made from Melissa’s broken doll parts.

  “She was always managing to pull something off her Barbies or plastic baby dolls,” my hostess explained. “An arm, hair, legs, even a head now and then.”

  “No mercy, that girl.”

  “Once the dolls were damaged, Missy lost interest in them. So I started putting the odd bits together. I found that I quite admired the little freaks I’d created. Even more so once I set about using grittier materials and scaling the bodies up. Do you like them, Jack?”