SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  He favored me with a look that held a question, a cautious one; I tried to keep my expression blank, or mostly so. In previous decades, gay men might have glanced at each other this way, neither wanting to be the first to speak up. Today, nobody cares much about man-on-man sex. Only certain other practices—both illegal and politically incorrect—entail elaborate codes and secrets.

  “You should come around to the gallery sometime,” I told him.

  “Believe me, I will.”

  I gave him a card with my direct number. “Call me next week.”

  Penny broke in with a complaint. “There’s far too much commerce going on here. Out, out. The real art, gentlemen, is about to transpire upstairs.”

  She was right. We followed the group up to the large room, now jammed, where Penny mounted the stage like a prison-camp commandant and launched into several Velvet Underground covers, soulfully channeling Lou Reed in drag.

  The gallery girls, on their third round of drinks, had been joined by two male artists from Dumbo. They all waved and nodded across the crowded space. At the end of the first set, Hogan said he’d had enough and would call tomorrow to work out a plan. That meant that I would have to continue getting chummy with Paul—a disquieting prospect.

  But right now I needed to pay my tab and pass the girls on to their slacker studs, before I got stuck supporting an entire Brooklyn art commune at the table. As I waited for my credit card to come back, I leaned against a pillar, watching Hogan thread his way to the red-lit exit past a couple of embracing dykes and a bisexual Guggenheim curator.

  27

  The first time Paul came to the gallery, he brought a sample of his work. They always do. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have looked at anything in front of him, since it’s a position you don’t want to be in. React to an artist’s work too little, or a shade negatively, and you risk crushing a soul; react too positively and you end up with a house pet.

  Paul loaded the tape into the VHS player in the back office, an alcove lined with art books. The screen ran blue for a few seconds, then suddenly bloomed into a series of downtown images—shots from clubs, bars, and galleries, with conversational voiceover and occasional spurts of visual narrative. Barbara Gladstone’s director talked about a young artist who had just made a tremendous New York debut with Vaseline sculptures and a nude performance in which he worked his way, rock-climber-fashion, across the gallery ceiling. A transvestite hooker from the Chelsea piers enthused about a sex slave at the Vault who crawled from table to table kissing feet, but only those clad in Italian shoes. A writer for Arts magazine, leaning on the bar at Boom, riffed on the “posthuman” import of a new-media survey at Cooper Union.

  I asked Paul how and when he got into video.

  “It was a real fluke,” he said. “After I finished NYU undergrad, people I knew started going off to, like, Prague or Berlin to hang out and make a start. Those were supposed to be the cool scenes. I wanted something different. Then I met Cao Fang, and she took me to Shanghai. For two years it was heaven.”

  “For a guy like you, it had to be.”

  “You know China, man?”

  “That’s a long story. A sad one.”

  “Yeah, so what can I say? Fang’s friends liked my style. I liked what they had to offer.”

  “What was that?”

  “Anything I wanted. Cheap.”

  On the monitor, Wigstock contestants sang Motown tunes from a stage in Tompkins Square Park.

  “And that led you to a career in performance art and video?” I asked.

  The monitor shifted to shots of police rousting homeless people from their cardboard shelters under the trees.

  “I developed some specialized tastes in China.”

  That sly dance again. Something told me that Paul wasn’t talking about a penchant for roasted duck tongues or shrimp plucked live from a bowl of spiced broth.

  “The place will do that to you,” I said.

  “You travel, you learn,” Paul smiled. “I discovered that weird things become a lot more respectable when you rename them art.”

  “More lucrative, too,” I said. “It’s one of the keys to my success.”

  “You know Zheng Bao? He’s one far-out artist. You could find his performances on pirated tapes on the streets—eating the flesh of a live pig, spending three days locked in a bank vault with a thin breathing tube. I met him at the triennial in Guangzhou. ‘An act recorded,’ he said, ‘becomes strong like a dream.’ ”

  Judging from the work I’d seen at P.S.1, my guess was that Paul’s dreams ran like a foul ditch through Neverland. The Viking’s account of his attentiveness to Anna suggested just how treacherous they might be. To test my hunch, I’d laid out a volume on Balthus’s paintings before Paul came to the gallery. When the tape ended, I switched on a table lamp, its light falling softly on the cover image of a young girl splayed across the lap of another female, slightly older, who was lifting the child’s skirt. I saw Paul’s eyes go to the book, and dart away.

  “Where did you train?” I asked him.

  “Back in the States, at Cal Arts.”

  “You didn’t opt for film school?”

  “I thought about it, but they don’t really teach my specialty there. So instead I came to New York and slogged around the gallery circuit for three years. Begging for shows, basically. You know the drill. A regular artist—a sculptor—goes into a gallery, they might hold his slides up to the light for thirty seconds before they say, ‘Nice work, but not for us.’ Those guys are the lucky ones. Just try to get a dealer to look at a twenty-minute performance video on a Tuesday afternoon. No way. Finally, I decided to wise up and start my own production company. Let other people squirm for the camera, I thought. I’ll do the editing.”

  “You could make a hell of a lot more in commercial work. Music videos, TV ads.”

  “Not my interest. Even a whore doesn’t take every john.”

  “But you clearly have a penchant for—what should I call it?—a certain degree of luxury.”

  “Sure. We all need a few goodies to get us through the night. Mine are minor.”

  The pun was like a secret knock, a handshake of brotherhood in the gathering dark.

  “In that case,” I said, “you might like to meet a few of my friends. We have an informal discussion group—and an occasional boys’ night out—with pictures and a bit of amateur philosophizing. We call it the Balthus Club.”

  “Sounds promising,” Paul said, still being cagey. “I like that old perv’s work, even though he’s just a painter.”

  “Take a look over here.” I led him to the book I knew he’d been dying to open. We went through the pages slowly, lovingly. A fake count’s rapt images of languid and sensuous female adolescents. Girls, half nude, stretching like cats in rooms filled with slant sunlight. Girls in shorts, hiking among the overwhelming rocks of an Alpine pass.

  “Righteous,” Paul said. “Really well done. But I’m more of a photo guy, myself.”

  “Who do you like?”

  “Let’s look at some Bellmer next time.”

  That was the thought he left me with. Hans Bellmer’s life-size female doll, headless, bound and jammed into a staircase or hung inverted from a tree. The work of an artist, spurned by the Nazis, who depicted his human lover, an eventual suicide, bent double and wrapped in flesh-creasing cords like some infernal unopened gift.

  28

  That Thursday, Hogan and I attended an Anselm Kiefer opening at the Museum of Modern Art. I thought it would be a chance to see Philip in operation again, and maybe Hogan would even enjoy the high seriousness of the show’s esoteric Kraut.

  I was right, on both counts. Threading among the artist’s enormous landscape paintings dappled with straw, his Nazi salute photographs, his pedestals bearing huge books with lead pages, we encountered at least half the people of note on the New York art scene, gathered back then in the older, smaller, better MoMA, before it became an art mall.

  “This Kiefer guy seem
s pretty damn ballsy,” Hogan pronounced, confirming my theory that crime-solving sharpens all one’s critical faculties, provided the artwork on view is butch enough.

  We came out of the galleries just in time to see a strained meeting between Philip and his second ex-mother-in-law. A tall collection of aristocratic bones, Livinia Wingate stood chatting with friends in front of one of the improvised bars manned by a catering staff in white jackets. Her black Dior sheath was set off by swept-back silver hair and a single teardrop diamond at her throat. Somehow Philip had gotten two steps ahead of the bare-shouldered Claudia. Radiant in red taffeta that night, the bella donna had paused to return a hello from a fellow artist—a printmaker, clad in faded black jeans and a black linen jacket—who had somehow finagled his way into the museum patrons’ preview.

  Even without Claudia’s cues and guidance, Philip seemed to realize he should know Livinia, though he was no longer sure why or how. He went straight up to her and announced, “Hello, my name is Philip Oliver, and I believe I murdered my wife.”

  Livinia’s friends, embodying gasps that I could well imagine though not hear, drew back half a step. Mrs. Wingate, however, faced Philip unblinkingly, and without recrimination.

  “Good for you,” she said. “More men should have the courage of their convictions.”

  Philip seemed pleased with the response, though a little befuddled. “Did you know Amanda?” he asked.

  “Yes, Philip, your wife was my daughter.”

  He considered this for a moment. “Both at once. Isn’t that remarkable? People are so complicated.”

  “That’s right, the best people are. And also the worst.”

  Claudia swooped in at that moment, apologizing profusely.

  “Don’t worry yourself, Miss Silva,” Livinia said brusquely. “I’d rather hear a muddled version of the truth from poor Philip than a string of pointless excuses from his Italian strumpet.”

  Claudia hesitated, uncertain for a second what the outdated term meant, unsure exactly who was the object of the older woman’s scorn. Then, once the point registered, she uttered an Italian phrase that I did not recognize but that made Hogan half snort with surprise.

  “I beg your pardon?” Livinia said.

  “Now I see where came from the things that made Philip leave your Amanda.”

  “The things that made him leave,” the grand lady answered, “are barely contained by your dress. Philip will abandon you, too, once they start to shrivel and sag.”

  So it went with the Wingate women. They were knowing and wise, and it made not the slightest difference when it came to keeping a husband at home.

  “You can’t deceive me, darling,” Amanda said to Philip once, “because I never had any illusions about you. It was all too evident the day you walked out on poor Angela. I knew then that you’re a pitiful man-whore and I can’t possibly change you. But at least I can make you cheat by my rules.”

  She told him this one afternoon in Cologne, when we were all a little blitzed from the white wine at lunch. During our private tour, Philip had been a bit too forward, in too obvious a way, with the svelte new curator at the Ludwig Museum. Mandy scanned her up and down and turned away.

  “Straight out of grad school,” she said.

  “Yes,” I answered. “One of the best.”

  “My rival is not another woman, Jack. It’s an entire way of life.”

  “So why do you put up with it all?”

  “Because I can predict every move, I suppose. Credit Philip with consistency.”

  “Does that make it easier?”

  Philip was trailing after us now, within earshot, but his proximity only sharpened Mandy’s tongue.

  “Easier to fight about, yes. At least Philip is true to form, especially about age. My husband is an utter lout, Jack. Boringly so. But there’s a certain comfort in that—a marital coziness.”

  “I remember the feeling.”

  “It’s like one long rehearsal—for what I don’t know. But the repetition, the scripted arguments, let me refine my threats and ultimatums quite well.”

  “That’s one way to preserve a marriage.”

  “Oh, who can say really what keeps two people together or tears them apart?”

  Now, as I stood drinking with Hogan on the second-floor landing at MoMA, Amanda’s mother moved ceremoniously toward us. There was no escape. We were caught in a herd of soigné museum trustee candidates—mostly men who, like Philip, had risen fast on a single very salable business idea.

  “Hello, Jackson,” Livinia said. “Let’s slip away from this dreadful company and go down to the garden.”

  I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to escape Philip and his déclassé Claudia, or the newer cultural schemers with their designer-label tuxedos and second-place trophy wives.

  When I introduced Hogan, Livinia seemed very pleased to learn that Bernstein had a man hard at work on the case.

  “Are the police going to arrest Philip soon?” she asked.

  “They can’t make anything stick,” Hogan said. “The Homicide boys are frustrated as hell because they haven’t got a good lead on anybody else either.”

  “Such incompetence,” Livinia said. “You’d think any fool could solve something so obvious.”

  “Any fool,” Hogan said, “is exactly what no cop wants to be.”

  “And no wife,” Livinia answered.

  I leaned between them to replace Mrs. Wingate’s drink. “You don’t think Philip’s responsible, do you, Liv?”

  “Philip is a sneak,” she said. “But not a killer. Murder, I believe, requires standing up and looking your victim square in the eye.”

  “Not the way it was done here.”

  “No, not literally—but in principle. And principle is just what Philip has always lacked.”

  We went down the escalator with Livinia and into the starkly beautiful garden. The night air was warm, and waiters went by with trays of hors d’oeuvres and wineglasses. Crossing the arched footbridge, we sat under the small trees, looking at the discretely placed sculpture intermingled with tables bearing white cloths and single short candles. Through the glass wall of the museum we could see people milling near the door, or being lifted and lowered on the moving stairs.

  “I can’t blame Philip for what he says now, poor man,” Livinia sighed. “Shooting your partner must be a common enough desire. God knows I’ve had it. And I’m sure my dear Harry has, too. Who could blame him?” She looked away. “Occasionally I wish he’d worked up the nerve. Anything is better than being alive to bury your only child.”

  I was out of my league. We sat quietly for a moment.

  “Plenty of real murders begin with a fantasy,” Hogan said.

  “Yes, I suppose,” Livinia replied. “But Philip couldn’t do it from three thousand miles away. Not himself, anyway.”

  “And you’re sure he was three thousand miles away?” I asked.

  “He called me the afternoon of the murder. He’s been doing that quite often lately, ever since his mind went to pot and he took up with that Claudia person. He rings up again and again to apologize for what an ass he’s become. Like a naughty boy who doesn’t remember his own silly plea from one time to the next. I suppose he wants absolution. As though I could grant such a thing—or would. All I can do is listen to his voice, small and whining and distant.”

  “You can’t be sure how far away he was really,” Hogan said.

  “I can when I look at my telephone log. He rings me on his new—what do you call it?—mobile phone. There’s a record of each call. That police acquaintance of yours, Mr. McGuinn, showed me a list.”

  “And on the date of May fourth?”

  “Definitely from Los Angeles. Something to do with signal beams and tower sites and whatnot.”

  “McGuinn gave you a copy of the call list?” I asked.

  “Please, Jack, don’t you think I can get my own account information from a telephone company—especially one that Harry more or less owns?”
>
  Hogan and I left Livinia in the garden with several members of the exhibitions committee. Due to the size of her contributions and the importance of her private collection, Liv had been the head of that august body for the last decade or so. She was likely to stay in charge till her death, given the family connections and her spouse’s legendary financial exploits. Consequently, art people paid court to Livinia as they would to a dowager queen. Chief among her attendees, once, was the ambitious, fast-rising Philip Oliver. Marrying Amanda had guaranteed him a place on the museum board; leaving her for Claudia was a kind of social suicide. The split must have been a product of mad lust or his incipient brain disease—if there’s any functional difference.

  29

  Hogan and I went back upstairs to see how Philip was doing. We found him and Claudia exactly where we had left them, in the midst of a crowd grown denser as the evening progressed.

  “Jesus,” Hogan said. “How can they stand each other, these rich people?”

  “Oh, you get used to their ways,” I said. “If you don’t expect too much from them.”

  “Like a conscience?”

  “The wealthy have no shame, Hogan, least of all about money. That’s why they’re all so baffled by Philip and his accounting mania.”

  I saw Hogan’s eyes dart over my shoulder, as if focusing on an approaching threat.

  “Well, if it isn’t Jack the one-armed pirate,” a familiar voice said behind me.

  I half-turned to smile at Paulette Mason, swathed tonight in a caftan of maroon silk. Each passing year has been a little bit crueler to the once-glamorous dealer, who now had a considerable quantity of fallen flesh to hide in those expansive, diaphanous folds.

  “You two look like jackals waiting for Philip to stumble,” Paulette said. “So you can make off with the delicious young Claudia.”

  At my side, Hogan tensed, no doubt ready to go at her like a mouthy perp.

  “Relax. It’s nothing,” I told him. “An old friend with a bad sense of humor. We go way back.”