SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  Well, I found myself thinking in avuncular fashion, bless their hearts, bless their young, solemn hearts. You had to admire the performers in a way. They all seemed so earnest and, to their own minds, so daring—even though their ritual ordeal probably produced less blood and injury than an average high-school football scrimmage.

  “Really something, huh?” Paul wanted to know afterwards. “Athey has one powerful message.”

  “Sure,” Hogan answered. “Guys who take it up the ass have a tough time in life. You’ll get no argument from me.”

  Paul laughed uncertainly and stepped away, taping crowd reactions and comments.

  “And what about detectives who play around with their suspects?” I said to Hogan.

  “The way I’m playing with Morse, you mean?”

  “No, with Angela.”

  He was quiet for a second. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m not like you. Or this weirdo crew.”

  “No?”

  “I never let sex impair my judgment.”

  “Is that right? What makes you so sure?”

  “I know what I’m doing, Jack. I don’t call it art, or group therapy.”

  “But do you stop?”

  “When I can.” He paused. “Or when I have to.”

  “When is that, when you’ve had enough?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Once I’ve learned enough to crack the case. Murder trumps everything, even screwing.” He slipped on his overcoat, plunging his hands deep in the pockets. “We’ve got our different ways of getting close to a suspect. At least sex with a grown woman is legal.”

  I lowered my voice. “You don’t think I like Paul’s party games, do you?”

  “What the hell do I know about what people like? Me, I wouldn’t much care to stick needles in my face or pump salt water into my balls.” He looked around at the crowd. “Just be careful, Flash. These people you’re hanging out with…It would be easy to lose touch.” He glanced back at me, held my eyes.

  “When you believe in nothing,” he said, “you’ll fall for anything.”

  36

  Personally, I was glad to learn that Claudia wasn’t our killer. Murder would have been a waste of her talent. Her social talent, I mean.

  Not long after the Athey show, she had her latest opening at Patricia Knowles Gallery—a thronged affair with envious artists milling from group to group under the slashingly stroked canvases. Many stopped repeatedly at the open bar, where myriad art world nabobs—museum curators, magazine editors, name critics, and several collectors (the type whose choices bestowed both market value and social election)—mixed with the usual hangers-on and general civilian populace.

  Claudia looked ravishing, in an offhand way, her figure subdued in a bohemian uniform of black jeans and black leather jacket. Philip was with her, or at least in the room, muttering to himself after someone had dressed him in a dark sport coat and propped him up in the archway between the atrium and the main gallery space. He spoke to anyone who came near, though very few did and most retreated quickly from the encounter.

  “How is he?” I asked Angela.

  She had come, unable to resist the pull of witnessing commercial and critical success, even Claudia’s, and unable to abandon Philip in his premature dotage to his increasingly negligent young paramour. You couldn’t fault her. Angela was slowly becoming the ex-wife we all wish for, a selfless caregiver who would never abandon her beloved, errant man, no matter how deeply he had once wronged her in the mindless exchanges of sex.

  “Oh, he’s still harping on the bloody ‘I think I killed Amanda’ theme,” she said. “As though wishing made it so.”

  I had an idea what the poor bastard was going through. There were times when I could almost believe that I had willed my own wife’s death, because when I thought of Nathalie thrashing in the arms of another man—and what is an art dealer if not someone who can grasp visual details more readily than holy commandments?—I wished indeed that she were dead to me, a thing that had never mattered or never lived.

  I went over to say hello to Philip.

  “Are my accounts in order?” he asked me immediately.

  Carl Marks had left him recently, galled by the ceaseless repetition of this question and others, but Philip seemed not to notice his absence—or quite to remember that the accountant with the data-streaming laptop had once been his constant companion.

  “They’re just fine,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “How much am I worth?”

  “Plenty, old dog. A thousand times more than the rest of us.”

  “Is that enough?”

  I straightened the handkerchief that he had pulled from his breast pocket and crudely stuffed back. “It has to be,” I said. “We’re a bit short of options.”

  “And my daughter, my dear Melissa? Is she all right?”

  “Don’t worry, Philip, I’m taking care of her.”

  “She’s a good girl, you know. Confused sometimes, but really very good.”

  “It seems to run in the family.”

  Claudia came up, flushed and trailing a covey of admirers, two or three of them women.

  “Ciao, Jack.” We kissed cheeks. “You’re so kind to come to my opening. And to look out for my poor, lonely loved one.”

  Philip peered at us with blank contentment, evidently pleased that this strange, beautiful woman was now touching his shoulder.

  “He’s not so lonely,” I said. “He still has some very good friends.”

  “Ah, yes. But when we’re alone, when he visits to me in Williamsburg, it’s sadness. Every night he walks through the loft, for searching his Amanda—trying to make goodnight. No matter how many times I tell to him that his wife is gone, dead. He says, ‘Yes, I know.’ But after he always asks me again. Many times. No, truly, Jack, you hold no idea.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  She turned and regarded Philip gently, brushing a bit of lint from his shoulder.

  “Some people will never desert him,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s certain.” Her tone shifted, soliciting relief. “And tell me, dear friend, what do you think of my show?”

  “I think it will sell wonderfully.”

  She leaned close against my good arm, the one with all sensation intact. “Keep my secret,” she whispered. “All is sold already. Before the opening, everything.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Grazie. Come to the afterparty.”

  “Of course. Where?”

  “Gilbert Lowe’s place. He’s on the sixth floor at…”

  “I know the address.”

  Later, at the party, Claudia was surrounded again—swarmed by gay boys, called after by women, eyed hungrily by married men.

  As the guest of honor was drawn farther away and deeper into the crowd, Angela edged over toward the befuddled Philip. Soon she was standing beside him, coaching and distracting him, keeping him happily engaged. For a moment, she told me later, it was much like the old days, except that she was in charge now. He still knew her name and still greeted her as a foggy acquaintance. But the memory of their marriage and his adultery, of their ten years together, of the divorce—all that was gone. Nevertheless, she seemed determined, and pleased, to reinsert herself in his life.

  “Aren’t you letting yourself in for a world of pain?” I asked her.

  “I don’t seem to be able to help it. I’m still so absurdly in love with him, despite all I know.”

  Philip fussed with his shirt cuffs beside her, oblivious to our conversation, smiling.

  “It’s not so absurd,” I said. “Maybe it’s the only thing here that isn’t.”

  The party was the kind that made you wonder why you ever left home. All around stood members of the bicoastal success set—celebrity artists, well-known designers, an architect or two who would be recognized by the readers of Vanity Fair, several powerful dealers, a few fashion models, a number of curators who were more courted than four-star restaurant maître d’s.<
br />
  Gilbert Lowe, our host, had made a big splash—literally—in the preceding decade. Physically grand, operatic in manner, he had smashed his way overnight to the center of the international art world with a series of geometric steel sculptures drenched, in flaring nighttime performances, with buckets of molten lead. At one time or another, every cultural publication in the U.S. and Europe had referred to him as “a force of nature.”

  “Jack,” he said now, or nearly sang, “how wonderful to see you here. We’re all going to the Sydney Biennale next week. You should join us. I’ll have Janice send you a ticket. She’s found a fabulous hotel with a floor of rooms ordinarily reserved for the Sultan of Brunei. Afterwards, we’re going into the outback in a truck caravan. We’ll be sleeping in tents and drinking Mumm’s.”

  “Takes me back to my old Boy Scout days.”

  “Come then. Come, you derelict. Get in touch with the earth again, the environment.”

  I thanked him and said I’d check my schedule. Taking a canapé from a tray that floated by, I began to wander the immense space, chatting here and there with colleagues, strangers, and friends.

  37

  When I got home later that night, I made the mistake of turning on the desk lamp beside Nathalie’s picture. The image made me remember what Melissa had said the first time she saw the old photograph: “She looks really gorgeous—in a mean kind of way.” The young girl had raised her head haughtily. “I want to be like that.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” I told her. “In the end, Nathalie’s beauty cost her everything.”

  I sat down at the desk. In a box that Hogan had shipped over were printouts of all the e-mails that Mandy had sent out from her laptop. My job was to check for references that only an art world insider, or a close friend of the Olivers, could interpret. The stack included countless messages to family and friends, to politicians and cultural leaders, to museum trustees and curators. Then there were the memos to credit card companies, caterers, store managers, tailors, housekeepers, cooks, and repairmen. These generally ran:

  Let’s have no more unpleasantness. My accountant tells me that I do approximately X dollars of business with you each year. I believe this entitles me to a modicum of respect, even deference. Surely I’m entitled to—what do you call it?—“preferred customer status.” My purchases, in short, pay your rent. Therefore, kindly stop dunning me for payment, which will be forwarded to you in due time and in full, as all my expenses are systematically paid, at the next quarterly disbursement. Four times a year is quite enough for service personnel and shopkeepers.

  This sounded like trouble in paradise. It must have disturbed Philip horribly—especially the new Philip, gripped by Wolfsheim’s Syndrome—to find that his domestic accounts were in constant arrears. But was it a motive for murder? An aggressive prosecutor might try to sell it as one. With a little luck, he might even succeed.

  I could face the notes (more like field orders than items of correspondence) only a few dozen at a time. Each day, I rifled through several more sheets. The reading procedure had been, on and off for about two weeks now, my new way of filling the vacant hours of the night.

  This time, with the sleeping pills taking quick effect, I decided to skip ahead, just for relief, to the message that Mandy had sent me on the day of her death. I thought the complaint about Erich Tennenbaum and his lowball Rauschenberg offer would cheer me up before I started to dream, reminding me of Amanda in full humor, when the old gang was buoyed by her whooping laugh.

  Things didn’t turn out that way. Instead, as I was skimming chronologically, I came across scores of e-mails to Paul Morse. Some were loving, some nearly obscene, some desperate. Together they left no doubt that Amanda and the artist had been lovers, or sex partners at least, ever since they met at a benefit auction for Art in General the previous December.

  The pair’s early messages were, by turns, conspiratorial, sentimental, ecstatic. They plotted how and when to meet—most often between six and eight PM at galleries, followed by a “dinner” at Paul’s digs in Tribeca.

  “Isn’t it divine that we’re both living downtown?” Mandy wrote. “Even if the distance does seem daunting sometimes, as though an ocean stretched between SoHo and Duane Street. How I long for you at night. And during the day, too, when I should be arranging a party or giving Krystyna her cleaning instructions for the week. The truth is, you haunt me.”

  She called Paul “my lightning bolt” and other pet names. The two were truly flush with passion for a while.

  After six weeks or so, however, laments and reprimands began to creep into the correspondence. Paul didn’t call when he should. He sometimes left her apartment abruptly. He wasn’t always at home when she slipped into her bedroom to phone him late in the evenings. Near the end, they exchanged little else but reproaches, punctuated by bursts of self-pity, effusive endearments, and profanity.

  So Mandy had it, too, I thought, the great sickness. Just as bad as Philip or Angela or myself. Maybe even as bad as Nathalie. A hex was on us all, a disease nearly every soul shares in this city. Not AIDS, not syphilis—these are only its shadows. No, the great curse is our urge, our blind fervor, to seduce and depart, adore and betray. We exhaust ourselves in pursuit of the best lay, or the next, hoping vainly for what? A brief denial of aging and death? A transient escape from dullness, safety, and the staggering hardships of genuine love?

  Above all, Mandy came to despise Paul’s PM Videos work. It took him away at key lonely hours and yielded only “smut and drivel.” It made him, or revealed him to be, another creature—no longer her golden young god but merely a pale voyeur, peeping through his camera lens, and a pimp of sorts, peddling the illicit images. Just when she thought she knew the worst, she caught an episode of Virgin Sacrifice. After that, her tone became insistent and shrill, sometimes hysterical. She would not rest until he was free of “those foul tapes, that abominable program, those criminals.”

  Then, as if composing her own death warrant, Mandy wrote—on the very night before she was killed—“I will stop this at any cost, even if I have to notify the police.”

  I stood up and went for a drink. Death was in the room with me now, like a lurking thief. I could picture Paul coming to Mandy that next morning—his arms open, his lips smiling, and his mind on the gun she kept in the bedside drawer.

  But at least, while I drank, Mandy remained alive in her messages. Reading her lilting jibes was vastly different from the grim experience I had once of finding an old note from Nathalie, tucked in a volume of Pascal’s Pensées. It bookmarked one of the philosopher’s most famous reflections: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” In the margin, next to the underlined sentence, my wife had written a single word: “Coward.” More mundanely, on the slip of medium-weight paper addressed to me, she had recorded certain common sentiments, bits of domestic business, a column of figures—the everyday chatter of marriage, gracefully penned in her elite lycée hand. Then the signature.

  I stared at her name, the chain of indecipherable ink traces. A strangeness came over me. I had been inside this woman’s body, faced a thousand household chores and crises with her, been nursed by her through fevers and nausea, fought with her in the depth of the night, suffered at the mere thought of losing her brilliance and beauty. And now this same Nathalie’s name sat inertly before me like a word from some extinct language. It was then that I knew she was truly gone, beyond any recall. And that is the one thing I have known continuously, with certainty, ever since.

  I got up and phoned Hogan.

  His response was matter of fact. “Tomorrow I’ll look through her received messages for Paul’s answer. Now go to sleep. It’s almost three.”

  At ten the next morning, he called me with the result of his search.

  “Got it,” he said. “The prick’s answer reads: ‘We need to talk. I’ll come to your place tomorrow before noon.’ ”

  38

  The following night, my life changed. I woul
dn’t feel that subtle, irrevocable shift for quite a while yet, but already my once free and elegant existence had begun to alter in small ways. All because I said too much to a child, all because Melissa came to know me too well.

  When I got home from the gallery that evening, I sat back in my reading chair and saw a flashing red light that urged me to play my phone messages. One of them was from Angela.

  “Jack, if you get this before ten, could you be a dear and come down? Philip’s been hospitalized. I need to go, and I don’t want to leave Melissa here alone.”

  By the time I went down to her place, Angela was wearing a light raincoat, ready to head out into the early autumn chill. Melissa, in tights and a T-shirt, perched on a chair in the kitchen area, her long legs drawn up under her chin.

  “He fell,” Angela said. “They say vertigo is part of the progression—strange word—of Philip’s disease. Claudia is there, but she can’t handle this on her own. She asked for me. With Amanda gone, I’m practically his next of kin.”

  “Don’t worry, go. Missy and I will be fine here. Say hello to Philip for me.”

  “He won’t understand now.”

  “Just let him hear the words.”

  Angela kissed my cheek. “You are a dear,” she said. “As soon as this awfulness is over, I want you to have a drawing. Anything you choose.” She turned to Melissa. “Be good with Uncle Jack. I’ll give Daddy your love.”

  “I want to tell him myself.”

  “You will, sweetheart. When the time is right.”

  The girl walked over and stood helplessly by the door as her mother went out. When she finally came back toward me, her face was blank.

  “What shall we do, Missy?” I asked. “Watch a tape?”

  “I’ve seen them all. They’re lame.”

  Without another word, she strode to the rear of the loft, going into Angela’s room instead of her own. A few seconds later, she came back out.

  “I guess she really is going to the hospital.”