SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  “May I help you, sir?” a young woman said in English.

  “Yes, thanks, I’m looking for a birthday present.”

  “For your daughter?”

  “No, for a friend.”

  She regarded me for a long moment.

  “For the daughter of a friend.”

  “Of course.” She laid a well-manicured hand on one of the racks. “What is the size of the girl?”

  “I’m not sure exactly.” I raised my good arm to the level of my sternum. “About this tall. Slender.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  She showed me several choices, each more brightly elegant than the last. I settled on a solid-color jumper, pale green, with a plain bodice and thin shoulder straps.

  “It’s very fetching,” the sales girl said.

  I wondered where she had learned that mildly arcane English word.

  “Your friend will be quite happy, I’m sure.” She handed back my credit card. “And her mother as well.”

  22

  For dealers, Art Basel is a work pit. I met Laura at the fair, and for the next five days all we did was sit in the booth and pitch deals to collectors and chat up magazine editors and case other dealers’ wares and stay out much too late in restaurants currying favor with curators and museum board members. We sold well—about three and a half million dollars worth over the course of the four-day event—but our plane tickets, shipping, space rental, installation fees, hotel bills, meal checks and bar tabs were higher than ever before. Once the artist cuts were deducted (I have a quirk of always paying my artists promptly and in full), I felt I could have done as well working for a week in a stamping plant.

  After the fair, Laura departed immediately for New York. Left on my own, I couldn’t get the image of Paul Morse out of my head. In my tainted and restless dreams, he was talking again and again to the Viking’s blond, open-faced young Anna, who was also somehow Melissa, while the figure of Amanda Wingate hovered in the background, watching and listening. What did Mandy know? What did she say to Paul once the girl vanished from my dream and the two adults drifted toward the hulking Prince Street building together?

  “This Morse punk,” Hogan said when I checked in by phone again. “Can you get close to him?”

  “I can pretend to be interested in his work. That usually does the trick.”

  “Good. I need something. Bernstein is all over my ass.”

  “He’s a lawyer,” I said. “It’s his favorite position.”

  “Yeah, tell me. So when do you get back?”

  “Around the end of August.”

  “That’s over two months from now.”

  “I need a vacation.”

  “Your whole life is a vacation, isn’t it?”

  “Compared to yours, I suppose.”

  Later, I spent a few days in Lisbon, arranging a museum show for a Portuguese artist, and a couple weeks with friends at a broken-down villa near Siena. Every evening we sat out at a long wooden table with a view down the hills to the darkened valley. We ate and drank wine and talked endlessly. None of the Italians had any firsthand knowledge of Philip and Mandy, though some of them had heard of Claudia. When I asked them about her father’s family, their expressions grew defensive. She had an uncle whose name was known with respect, especially farther south.

  “And he has friends and relatives in New York?” I asked.

  “Certainly, many,” someone answered.

  “Dangerous friends?”

  My host lifted his hands, palms up. “All friends are dangerous,” he said, “if you offend them.”

  That night, after one of the local village’s erratic mail deliveries, I retired early to watch a tape that the Viking had sent me—the documentary short that Paul Morse had made for him the year before in New York.

  It began with a row of steel beams lying in a gravel pit in New Jersey: a long anticipatory silence punctuated by insect sounds and the distant passing of planes, then dust and a tremendous walloping explosion and the bent, puckered beams raining down. Later, after the pieces had been trucked to Madison Square Park, about a hundred people gathered under the tall, aged trees to watch four “movement artists” slink and sway through the tangle of fractured metal.

  Near the end of the tape was a brief party segment with the ten-year-old Anna, ice-eyed and blond, looking straight into the lens and singing “I Will Survive.”

  I gave the Viking a call in Reykjavík.

  “Laura says you know Paul Morse pretty well.”

  “Ah, Laura, the great American beauty. How do you keep from falling in love with her, Jack?”

  “She makes it easy.”

  “For you, not for me. Unfortunately, I have no great riches.”

  “I know, it’s a tragedy. Have you heard from Morse lately?”

  “Me, no. Only Anna. She used to get e-mails from him now and then.”

  “About what?”

  “Coming back to New York for a visit. He offered to pay her way, to be her private guide.”

  “How’d she feel about that?”

  “Anna loves New York, but Paul Morse gives her the creeps.”

  “And you?”

  “I told him what I’d do if he didn’t back off. Anna hasn’t heard from him since.”

  “What was Paul like?”

  “A cool guy. Too good-looking for his own good. My girlfriend dug him, though. A little too much.”

  “Did you talk with him?”

  “Only technical things about the shoot. He was excellent.”

  “Any problems dealing with him?”

  “No, not after I got him to take the camera off Anna.”

  It was odd. The Viking’s young daughter was very telegenic, but I couldn’t guess what she had to do with the Madison Square Park project.

  “Anna felt a little left out,” the Viking explained. “Paul made it a point to treat her like someone special, a little star. He even let her sing a song at the end.”

  “That’s not exactly a little girl’s tune.”

  “My Anna is very grown-up in her head.”

  “I know the type.”

  “Ha, yes. You know all the female types, don’t you, Jack?”

  “I don’t suppose Paul ever mentioned his love life?”

  “You’d have to ask my ex-girlfriend about that.”

  “Did he come on to her?”

  “More likely Svava made some play for him, the foolish girl. That Morse fellow is a babe magnet, Jack—but dodgy.”

  “How so?”

  “Sometimes, when he talked to Anna—too softly, too long, leaning in too close—I just wanted to strap him to one of my I-beams and light the fuse.”

  “Did he try anything?”

  “No, not that I know.” The Viking was silent for a moment. “The guy’s still alive, isn’t he?”

  23

  At summer’s end, I came back to a torrent, a cascade, of New York show announcements and dinner invitations. The Lower Manhattan Arts Festival was starting the second week of September with sixty-five simultaneous gallery openings, and the major museums were not far behind with their fall exhibition debuts. After our new intern had sorted the mailings and printed out the e-mail notices, I spent an hour and a half entering the chosen events into my calendar and sending back the appropriate RSVPs.

  Meanwhile, Laura plied me with questions about our own September show—her way, no doubt, of making me feel that I was still in charge. We were opening with Jorge Garcia Ramirez, an installation artist known for his over-the-top recreations of Puerto Rican domestic interiors. He had everything a dealer could ask: “authentic” origins in the street culture of Spanish Harlem, low material costs—how expensive could silk flowers and a few polychrome plaster saints be?—and increasing market cachet after his appearances in the most recent Lyon and Gwangju biennials.

  “Besides,” Laura pointed out, “it never hurts to start the season with a roomful of Latinas in clear plastic heels.”

  September is al
so a prime month in New York for residential moves, which had Don scrambling from building to building to inspect damage and oversee apartment cleanups and rehabs. That fall, neither of us worried very much about the maintenance and upgrade outlays, since rents were notching ten percent higher on new leases and commercial ground-floor spaces in SoHo had tripled in value over the past two years. Don’s one complaint was about my loft “giveaway” to Angela Oliver.

  I ran into Angela in the building lobby on the day she moved in. The workmen were wheeling padded chairs into the freight elevator while she counted and watched. Her young daughter, all business, was checking items off a list.

  “Everything OK upstairs?” I asked.

  “The space couldn’t be better. Don did a beautiful job.”

  “And you’re all set with the Bradford School?”

  “Melissa had her orientation yesterday, and we bought her school uniform. A plaid skirt, blue blazer, knee socks. She starts a week from Monday.”

  The girl did not look up from her clipboard.

  “Missy, the people at Bradford had best teach you some better manners. Say hello to Uncle Jack.”

  “It’s not fair,” the girl answered. “Why me first? He’s the one who went away for three months.” She checked another box on the form. “Hello, Uncle Jack.”

  “Only two and a half months. And I brought you a present.”

  “You did?”

  “What on earth for, Jack?” There was a note of forced wonder in Angela’s voice. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “For her birthday, of course.”

  “You see, Missy,” Angela teased. “Now don’t you feel ashamed for being so rude?”

  “No, it’s late. My birthday is way past. I’m practically old already.”

  Angela half-smiled at me and shook her head.

  Later that afternoon, when I stopped downstairs with the black Italian store bag (an item faintly out of place amid the scattered furniture and bubble-wrapped maquettes), Melissa was a little more tolerant.

  Granted, she did complain, “There’s no card, and it’s not even wrapped.” But she quickly pulled the Valentino box out of its gold-lettered sack and ran to hold the shift up in front of a bedroom mirror, returning with a broad smile despite her petulant act.

  “What do you say?” Angela prompted.

  “Thank you, Uncle Jack. For not buying me some stupid kid gift.”

  “You’re entirely welcome.”

  “It’s pretty cool, in a grown-up way.” She glanced imploringly at Angela. “Mom, can I try it on now?”

  “All right, hurry up. And show us, so we can see if it fits.”

  The girl was already halfway to the rear of the loft by then. Once she started to fuss and primp out of earshot, I asked Angela if she’d seen anything of her ex-husband that summer.

  “Quite a lot, sadly. Philip’s spending much less time at the office, and starting to drive young Claudia crazy. She has three gallery shows to get ready before spring, and now the man who used to make life easy for her is becoming a terrible burden. It’s not what she signed on for, I’m afraid.”

  “No. But why should you step in—given how Philip treated you?”

  “I don’t do that much. I take him to the park once in a while. I meet him for coffee at Il Mondo, so that Claudia can get her materials at Pearl Paint or whatever without enduring his endless pestering questions. You can’t believe how Philip repeats himself these days, like a child.”

  “It’s kind of you to take an interest in his latest girlfriend. You weren’t so keen on her before I left.”

  “I’ve seen what she goes through now. She’s not made for it, poor thing. What am I going to do—let Philip rot?”

  “Some ex-wives would.”

  “I don’t mind helping Claudia. She’s a sweet girl, really, and she never did anything vile to me.”

  “She wasn’t so kind to Amanda.”

  “Amanda didn’t deserve much kindness.”

  Angela looked at me squarely. There was no false sentiment for the dead, no backing down. Mandy was simply the woman who had stolen her life.

  “She was a Wingate,” Angela said. “She never gave a thought to anyone else.”

  “And Philip did? He was pretty heartless to you in the end.”

  “He was, indeed, except for the Westchester property. He couldn’t help himself, I suppose. What can you expect from a young man getting rich way too fast? Girls are everywhere, and he didn’t know enough to be kind. I probably didn’t either, at the time. You remember how it goes with monogamy, Jack. It’s not a thing most people are good at.”

  “No, not anyone I know.”

  Angela looked away. She seemed to see something there, in the unfocused distance.

  “Anyway, it’s not as though my own record were spotless, is it?” she said. “After the breakup, I mean. We were all a bit wild back then. You most of all.”

  I tried not to let my mind go there. Certain nights and places and people are best forgotten, or held apart in the realm one reserves for unhealthy dreams. Over the years, forgetfulness has proven the best policy for my emotional stability and my friendships.

  I do recall, however, asking Philip once—after the divorce—how he felt about Angela’s sexual revenge.

  “Awful,” he said, “just sick. Though, oddly, it doesn’t cut down my own desire for her.” He laughed. “On the contrary, in fact. It stirs my lust.”

  “And beyond that?”

  “I’m not sure there is much beyond that, for people like us.”

  Melissa interrupted my reverie, zipping out of the bedroom and prancing toward us like a two-week-old colt.

  “Look, Mom, I’m ready for the runway.”

  She imitated a model’s sulking, exaggerated walk. The long-waisted shift hung surprisingly well, exposing her high wide shoulders, smoothly aglow.

  “Don’t you look cute?” Angela said.

  “Not cute, Mom.” Missy went up on her toes in white socks. “Fabulous.”

  Angela watched the girl cautiously. Melissa, her cheeks sucked in, gave a quick pout and turned.

  “Well,” Angela said, “I suppose it will be nice for the school dance at Christmastime.”

  “Yay!”

  Melissa started to run to the changing area. Then, apparently remembering her Ps and Qs, peeled around and charged back to us again.

  “Thank you, Uncle Jack. It’s a totally wicked birthday present.” She pulled on my limp arm until I bent forward. Her lips brushed quickly on each cheek.

  “That’s how the French do it,” she explained.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  She was gone in a flurry of limbs, leaving Angela and myself suddenly alone again, irrelevant and slightly spent. “To think, this is only the beginning,” her mother said.

  “The beginning of what?”

  “All the girly-girl stuff. I just hope I can handle it.”

  “Well, you’ve made a lovely start.”

  “Twelve years and a long way to go.” Angela suddenly looked her age, a wisp of dry hair slipping over one ear. “It takes so much to get a child decently civilized. With so much to fret about—school projects, dance lessons, clothes, music classes. Now boys.”

  “Don’t worry. Melissa is gifted, and she has you—like a mother and sister in one. She’ll do fine.”

  “Good is not good enough anymore, Jack. The kids today have to do better than we did, in every way. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  Melissa came back out to the living room, wearing old jeans with fringed cuffs. Her T-shirt read “Peaches.”

  “Uncle Jack was just telling me how special he thinks you are,” Angela said.

  “He probably says that about all the girls.”

  “Maybe they all are to him.”

  “Well, I want to be different.”

  “You are, dear. You’re special to both of us.”

  Missy rolled her eyes. “Oh please, Mom. That’s so fakey.” The girl gathere
d her hair and snapped it into a ponytail with a blue elastic band. “Sometimes I think the only one who isn’t a phony around here is Uncle Paul.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Paul Morse,” Angela said. “A young artist friend of Amanda’s. He’s been very nice to Melissa. The three of them used to pal around together when Missy came in on weekends. They needed a man around. Philip, you know, was always at the office on Saturdays.”

  I felt something like food poisoning enter my system.

  “Do you know this Paul well, Missy?” I asked.

  “Pretty well. He takes me to Tower Records sometimes. We both like Rocky Road ice cream, and he’s fun to talk to.”

  “Where do you talk?”

  “At the library. A couple of times he was at the computers when I went in with Aunt Mandy. They don’t let you talk too much there, though, even if you whisper. So sometimes we hang out at the Internet Cafe on Lafayette. He really knows how to zoom around on the Web.”

  “I’ll bet he does. Did he show you any strange stuff on there?”

  “Sure, that’s part of the fun.”

  “Did he ever take you to his house to show you things?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t, Melissa. It’s not cool.”

  “We just go to the park sometimes. We talk back and forth online every day. Instant messages, chat rooms, games—he’s great at all that. Anyway, what do you care?”

  “Uncle Jack is being possessive, Missy,” Angela said. They both seemed relieved, even glad. “It means he likes you a lot.”

  The girl crinkled her face. “Does not.”

  “Tell her, Jack.”

  “You’re my fairy-tale maiden—the only girl I bought a present for. No one else, not even your mom.”

  “Well, good. You made the right choice.”

  “I didn’t choose. It just happened.”

  “Like a proper knight,” Melissa said. Her right arm swept the space before her, and she walked back to her room quietly this time, with a regal tilt to her head.

  “She’s a charmer,” I said to Angela. “You should be very proud.”

  “Thanks. It’s been a hard adjustment for her, with the move and my fall show coming up.”

  “You’ve been distracted?”