SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

All the way to my gallery apprenticeship and many mornings, long ago, when I shared Paulette’s bed and her “breakfast of champions”—a blend of champagne and croissants, reefer and coffee.

  “Hello, doll,” I greeted my former boss. “Sold any good fakes recently?”

  She hooted. “Maybe, but I’ll never tell which is which.”

  “You never did.”

  “That’s right. It’s one thing to know the truth, quite another to share it promiscuously, don’t you agree?”

  “Whatever you say, Paulette. I always defer to your expertise on lies and wantonness.”

  “A wise choice, my dear. Superficiality like mine is underrated; it may be the purest way to live. Shallowness frees one from any silly pretense to meaning.”

  “So how’s business?”

  “Don’t remind me.” Paulette tossed a light, bright scarf over one shoulder. “Art dealing has simply gone to hell, Jack.”

  “I see. And where was it before?”

  She gave a smirk and a roll of her eyes.

  “I swear people have no moral sense anymore,” she said, “no social finesse. They’re liable to blurt out their real thoughts at the most indelicate moments. Like our ridiculous Philip. He has the modern pathology. Just watch him.”

  Smiling, Philip was moving about like a well-groomed automaton, greeting old friends and strangers alike. Meanwhile, Paulette retailed the gossip that had recently spread through the art world.

  As much as Philip’s guilt or innocence, it was his idiosyncrasy that now fascinated our crowd. The tycoon had come to dread the very idea of indebtedness, even the momentary lapse between the time an invoice was received at O-Tech and a remittance was made by electronic transfer. This completely exasperated Andrews and his colleagues, Hogan had learned. Most businessmen—including my own wealthy clients—consider the standard turn-around interval a float period, when they can, in effect, use other people’s money as an interest-free loan. But not Philip these days. No matter that his payments were now routinely posted ahead of their due date, or that the company’s assets perpetually exceeded its liabilities. Nothing was fast enough or safe enough for Philip’s peace of mind.

  “Can you imagine?” Paulette said. “Every dealer from here to Istanbul would kill to have him for a client now.”

  In Philip’s personal life, she told us, it had gotten to the point where he insisted on prepaying—in cash—for restaurant meals, receiving his change at evening’s end instead of a bill. Otherwise, the minutes that the food sat unpaid-for on his plate, or in his stomach, tormented him like an interlude of theft. The anxiety had once caused him to vomit into a tableside planter at Nobu. Only cash could appease him. He had a vivid horror of checks and credit cards, with their interminable delays between purchase and actual disbursement.

  “I could die in the meantime,” he said.

  Claudia, for her part, was determined to keep anything else untoward from happening. That evening at MoMA, she stood beside her faltering lover, prompting him from time to time with the name of an approaching friend, intervening at critical moments with little potted scenarios that would give him something to go on.

  “Hello, John. How have you and Daphne been since we saw you last summer on Taki’s boat?” Hints like that.

  Such mental aids enabled Philip to muddle his way through a brief, light conversation. Sometimes everything came back to him perfectly, and he would be hilarious or charming or reserved, as the moment warranted.

  It must have been an intriguing pastime for him, talking about events that were like episodes in a movie seen decades before, placing himself imaginatively in the narrative and hoping the plot would play out without disaster. Clearly a very sick fellow, Philip missed no opportunity for financial and ethical inquiry.

  “Have you made the right investments?” he would say to all and sundry, while Carl Marks hovered wordlessly behind him. “Do you know what you’re worth? Is it more today than it was yesterday?”

  The oddest aspect of his dementia was that it was not entirely unreasonable. Checks came in the mail—large denominations with no discernible connection to his efforts, or lack thereof. Financial advisers allocated the funds and made him wealthier still. To Philip, this was clear evidence that he was part of a vast criminal enterprise, or that some cosmic error was unfolding around him. Many associates, apparently, had profited from Amanda’s death. The money kept pouring in, as the attentive Carl continuously reminded him.

  Thus, to his own ravaged way of thinking, Philip was caught up in a bizarre fraud, a vast conspiracy. Either he was a murderer or somehow he had been made a patsy, the Oswald of a domestic assassination—richly rewarded, so long as he maintained his oddball cover. Therefore his private inquiry had to be conducted in secret, obliquely. He sometimes called me, day or night, with stealthy questions. Who had gained from Mandy’s murder, and how much? Why did they choose such a conniving method? How had such evil thoughts gotten inside his head?

  30

  After a couple of hours, with Hogan growing restless, we left the museum and walked over to a new hyper-designed restaurant in the basement of the Seagram Building. You had to enter the place down a long ramp, for the visual delectation of your fellow diners. That was fine when you came in with someone like Laura, swaying atop endless thighs, but less of a joy with Hogan in a checkered sport coat and brown wingtips.

  A row of video screens above the bar offered a time-lapse image sequence as customers maneuvered through the revolving door at street level. Each scene passed from one monitor to the next until it finally disappeared. My buddy and I sat on fancy stools at the bar, woefully out of sync with the young midtown pickup set. Hogan ordered our drinks—straight whiskey for him, gin and tonic for me—and leaned forward to study the videos.

  “Cameras everywhere,” he said. “Here. In SoHo. All over the damn place. Just not in your buildings.”

  “I told you my marketing strategy, Hogan.”

  “Yeah, boho chic. What you didn’t mention is that your tenants have too much to hide. The daily tapes would look like a soap opera.”

  “Fortunately you don’t need a video to eliminate Philip, not now. The DNA, the calls to Angela and Livinia—they clear him.”

  “It still might be someone he sent.”

  “I have to tell you, Hogan, I don’t buy that anymore. Philip is—or used to be—a sharp player in business. But, like a lot of smart guys, he’s a dunce at romance.”

  “How bad?”

  “He tried to tell me once that all his affairs just made him feel closer to Mandy. ‘Straying actually helps me realize how exceptional she is,’ he said. ‘I come back to her calmer and more appreciative, and ready to do whatever she wants.’ ”

  “Christ. What’d you say to that?”

  “I told him not to do her any more favors.”

  We turned to our glasses. “Maybe you should have told him how calm and appreciative it feels on the receiving end,” Hogan said.

  “Don’t be too hard on him. He’s just a regular guy, with excess cash.”

  “All the more reason to straighten him out.”

  I stared at my drink, not wanting to meet Hogan’s eyes. “You ask a lot, my friend.”

  “Do I?” Hogan took a long slug of his bourbon. “Infidelity is a kind of murder, Jack. It kills your faith. After that, we’re not worth very much—to ourselves or to anyone else. Look what your wife did to you.”

  Hogan never cared much for Nathalie, or for her French theory of marriage. I couldn’t really explain how dealing with that tall, intractable woman, fighting with her, tallying up her betrayals, gave me the illusion that, after all, I was not alone in the world. Or why, for the sake of that feeling, I was willing to pay an exorbitant price.

  “Nathalie didn’t believe in guilt,” I said. “She thought it was a waste of moral energy. She saved up her remorse for more important causes. The refugees in Chad or whatever.”

  “How convenient for her.” Hogan regarded his dr
ink. “So she got you to opt for a wasted marriage instead?”

  “It wasn’t a waste, not compared to living without her.”

  Hogan got up. “I need to piss,” he said.

  As he made his way through the crush of young execs, I thought how Nathalie and I came to our “pragmatic” arrangement back then. Having lovers, my wife argued, was simply a way of embracing the world.

  “Do you think that if I sleep with someone else,” she asked, “I will love you any less?”

  “No,” I answered dutifully. “Unless you get swept away. Unless some Parisian jerk steals your soul.”

  “And what do you suppose? Is that more likely to happen the way we live now, free and sensibly, or if we imprison each other in some petit-bourgeois cottage? I know you, Jack. You didn’t marry me to gain a housewife.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. The fact is you wanted me for this—you wanted the cigarettes and the sarcasm, the traveling assignments for Libération, the Saint Germain wardrobe, even our little domestic melodramas. All this dark intellectual glamour, mon amour, and enough space for a few younger girls on the side. You imagine it’s quite sophisticated, don’t you?” She blew a slow stream of smoke. “It’s a very American view.”

  Nathalie knew me, knew her stuff—but Hogan didn’t seem very impressed, then or now. He had thrown it all in my face once, urging me to toss her smarmy copains out of my life and hers.

  “Just stand up, Jack,” he said. “Kick the goddamn Frogs down the stairs. It’s what she wants, too.”

  I didn’t believe him at the time. All I could say was something insipid. “I can’t force her.”

  “The problem isn’t Nathalie, Jack. It’s you.”

  The night had been long; I had no fight left in me. “It’s not a creed, Hogan. I’m just telling you what I see around me.”

  “What do you see? What do your smart, lovely friends show you?”

  “The way we all are.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Hopeless.”

  Hogan reared back slightly, like a boxer preparing to counterpunch.

  “Crap,” he said. “Don’t be such a weak-ass son of a bitch. Do something, Jack. Being a cuckold is a sin. A sin of omission—the laziest goddamn kind.”

  “I’ve tried,” I said. “Look, Hogan, do you understand what it is to love a woman even though you know she’s betraying you? To watch her eyes as she lies to you—earnestly, suavely—while you still feel the merciless attraction overriding everything, even the loathing and the shame? Even the knowing?”

  I felt like an idiot as soon as the words left my mouth.

  “Yeah, I do,” Hogan said. “It’s one of the few things we still have in common, you and me.”

  We let it go at that. Of course he knew.

  Looking around the bar as I waited, I began to wonder if I was drunk. Probably so, given what I’d already put away at MoMA. My only drinking problem, as I told Hogan once, is that booze makes my mind race furiously until it blacks out altogether. It’s an interesting contest. So now I was off, thinking about big issues in a phony-swank midtown watering hole. Let’s see, fidelity is impossible to maintain, I decided, and infidelity is impossible to live with. So there we are—mentally crucified. Really, it’s enough to drive a guy nuts—or to drink anyhow. Only the more you hit the bottle, the more your own randy desire seems like God’s dirty trick. You want continuity, depth, and connectedness; yeah, sure, but you also want freedom, a game of wild chance. You can’t cure your disease, you can only manage its symptoms—sometimes well, sometimes badly.

  Maybe that’s why Hogan turned to the church, why he knelt before a crucifix, that gory emblem of our psychic divide. You’d think a Marine, a private eye, would have a more realistic solution. Instead, he worshiped Christ on the cross, nailed to the shaft and the T-beam, torn between two conflicting commandments: to raise your eyes heavenward and love a pure, demanding God with all your heart and strength; and yet to open your arms and embrace your earthly neighbors as your muddled, sinful self. Show me a man who isn’t torn by that inner struggle and I’ll show you a corpse.

  I needed another drink. As I leaned on the counter to flag the bartender, a woman sitting on the stool to my left half turned to face me. Her expression was a little brittle but her neckline plunged impressively, and she was reasonably attractive under an enormous mass of waved and curling brown hair. Attractive enough for that place and hour anyhow.

  We nodded.

  “That’s a beautiful suit,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I looked at her gold bracelet and black Bulgari bag. “Beauty can be very expensive.”

  She smiled, baring teeth so white they were like the flash from a lighthouse. By then, I was feeling pretty at sea.

  “You look like you can afford it,” she said.

  “Do I?” I smiled back. “I should.”

  Suddenly a guy was between us, a young Wall Street type with his jacket off and his tie thrown back over one shoulder.

  “What can I get for you, babe?” he asked.

  “Another gimlet, I suppose.”

  I couldn’t be sure whether the stock-jockey, the hulking fashion disaster, was a real date or just a john. Anyway, it wasn’t worth finding out. Every year it gets harder to distinguish between high-end hookers and the girls who just want to have fun—you know, some obscenely expensive Manhattan dinners, a few choice pieces of jewelry, and maybe a first-class trip to Europe, if they play their cards right. It’s all fine with me. Either way, you get what you pay for. Generally, the hookers are cheaper and less troublesome.

  Hogan came back to the bar and rattled the ice in his glass. He looked over at me.

  “This Oliver case sucks,” he said. “How are you making out with Paul Morse?”

  “Just great. We’re bonding over high-class porn.”

  “And that’s going to tell us if the prick is our killer?”

  “It could. In the art world, everything is connected.”

  Hogan drank slowly, waiting. I urged him to think how Amanda Oliver might have reacted if she found out her lover-boy was a totally sick bastard, a smooth schoolyard pervert. Then I told him that I had a method, an unorthodox one, for getting closer to Paul.

  Hogan heard me out. “You’re convinced that’s the best way to get to him?”

  “It’s what I can do.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That you have an instinct for it.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Meanwhile, I’m going to check the apartment buildings and shops around the Oliver place. One of them might have a security camera on the street. Maybe I’ll get to see the freak parade going in and out of Mandy’s door, with our killer in the mix.”

  “Those are my friends and clients you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah,” Hogan said. “Lucky for them, not every sin is a crime.”

  “But now I have to delve into one that is—with Missy as my lure.”

  Hogan put down his empty glass. “Just don’t tell me more than I need to know. I’ve got a P.I. license to protect.”

  “OK, I’ll try to keep you at a distance.”

  “You better. As far as I’m concerned, Jack, this Balthus Club stuff doesn’t even exist.”

  31

  For the plan to work, I needed Melissa on my side—even if the girl didn’t yet realize that, in the tangled adult world of Amanda, Philip, Claudia, Paul, and Angela, there was any good side to be on.

  That Saturday, I left the gallery early in order to take her, as promised, to the Payard salon on the Upper East Side near the Bradford School. My young neighbor loved the luxurious pastry there, and the vanishing old-fashioned ritual of formal tea in the late afternoon.

  When I stopped downstairs to pick her up, Melissa seemed somehow a very different creature. A music video was thumping from the TV in her room, and, although she was dressed primly in a black knee-length skirt and matching
sweater, the rhythm of the pop song passed visibly through her as she dashed about grabbing her leather jacket and just the right purse.

  “Not the soundtrack I imagined for Missy,” I said to her mother. Angela paused on her way out to the post office.

  “You can’t imagine, Jack. It starts with them so young.”

  “What does?”

  “The vamp business. You think you can ease them into womanhood, teach them to be feminine in subtle ways—and instead they simply race ahead and wave back at you. They leave you feeling like a stodgy old maid.”

  In fact, I had already noticed a small change in Melissa. Three months of summer languor can do things to girls at that age. Her clothes hung differently now, and she had learned how to cross her legs like a woman.

  “She’s just at the stage where she realizes that she can get grown men’s attention,” Angela said. “Beyond the goony looks from boys.”

  “Really? Do you think she knows what she’s doing?”

  “You should see her with her friends. If I didn’t keep tabs on them, they’d be sashaying all over SoHo like bare-midriff streetwalkers.”

  “They’re just kids goofing around.”

  “Oh, Jack, you are such a male fool. It’s one of your more endearing traits.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “She’s going through a phase, that’s all.”

  “Yes, a long one. I think I’m still in it myself.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Angela grasped my bad arm and led me back through the loft to Melissa’s room. Through the open door, we could see the bed piled messily with clothes and, on a dresser top, the portable TV flashing and blaring. The screen displayed some young female singer, a hootchy-kootchy dancer with one name, shimmying in a different sparse outfit, in a new setting, every three and a half seconds.

  “Before you turn it off, Melissa,” Angela called, “show Uncle Jack what you learned.”

  “Oh, Mom, don’t be so English, OK?”

  “Very well, call me what you will. Just show him.”

  Sighing, the girl dropped her purse and let her hands hang at her sides. “You mean like this?”