SoHo Sins

by Richard Vine

  “And where are we, anyhow?” I prodded her.

  “You should know, Uncle Jack. You live it every day.”

  “That’s not the same as understanding it.”

  “But you do understand. And so do I.”

  “Do you? You know what art is for these days and what it means?”

  “Of course. It’s for the rich, and it doesn’t mean anything.” She laughed. “All my teachers are impressed by my insights now. Because you taught me so well when I was young.”

  As you can see, my position as godfather and legal guardian is something I take very seriously. Over the years, it has made me attentive, in ways I had never dreamed possible, as Missy slowly evolved from a surrogate daughter to my regular “plus one” at openings and receptions to the indispensable hostess at my Wooster Street parties.

  There were a few difficulties along the way, of course. The cyber-economy went bust and the value of O-Tech stock plummeted, costing Andrews and his top executives—the ones who hadn’t already been booted due to the porn distribution scheme—their plush jobs in a shareholders’ coup. But over the years before Melissa turned twenty-one, the company recovered and the Oliver fortune grew again.

  Amanda’s family, as Angela had anticipated, did indeed put up a fierce fight to keep the bulk of Philip’s wealth from going to Missy—the daughter of the woman who had murdered their loved one. The Wingates had a superb team of lawyers and a rather compelling case, but not one that could stand up to Bernstein and his associates. The transfer of assets took place on schedule, the same year my lovely ward completed her undergraduate studies.

  Melissa hardly seemed to notice. Apparently, it had never occurred to the girl—a sleekly curved young woman by then—that she might not get what she wanted.

  I, on the other hand, made quite a fuss over Melissa’s landmark birthday. The two of us had a long, elaborate celebration that evening. Afterwards, I took her to dinner at Daniel and later for drinks—completely legal at last—at a sedate ninth-floor lounge with a glass wall overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park. As we sipped our Armagnac and tried to identify the spot, near the Sherman Monument, where Paul Morse had once photographed her in a school uniform, I asked Melissa how it felt to be a woman finally, and a rich one. She looked at me, then out over the streams of red taillights, the vast rolling park, the tall sentinel buildings lining its edges, guarding the city’s dark heart.

  “It feels like justice,” she said.

  I suppose we might have feared for Paul’s eventual return, but by then he had already been killed in prison, as Hogan half-foretold. Grown pudgy and considerably less handsome, he bled out in a laundry room corner, still protesting (according to the guards who arrived a few foot-dragging steps too late to aid him) that he had never forced or harmed anyone, child or adult. Meanwhile, Sammy—never the made man he wished to be—resigned himself to serving one long prison sentence after another, without hope of parole.

  And just as quietly, for years, I have watched the young men come and go downstairs, even while continuing to visit Missy from time to time myself—the good landlord, the kind uncle. That is the role that has fallen to me, or that I have fallen to. During her college days, when Melissa shared the space with friends—she was always “the girl with the awesome loft, the tech heiress”—we remained regular dinner partners and traveling companions.

  Angela, resentful, raged at me in letters from a succession of prisons, each one more high-security than the last. My life with Missy, in this vigilant mother’s view, was an offense against nature. She harangued her daughter, but the girl, even after becoming financially free, ignored the frantic protests and stayed on.

  Yet I have paid a price for my minor triumph. Melissa still lives downstairs, but with a young husband these days—a nice, sandy-haired Wall Street junior analyst who has not yet learned how to wear his Brooks Brothers suits. The young couple has been married for two banal years.

  When she introduced us, I felt as though I might have seen her spouse somewhere once long ago, in a dark after-hours bar, with his tie flipped back over his shoulder—a young Goldman Sachs bull.

  Ever the proper guardian, I gave Missy away at their wedding, leading her down the aisle on my good arm one furiously bright May afternoon at a Presbyterian church on Park Avenue. What else could I do? Marriage is a mistake nearly everyone makes at some point in life. Melissa, too, must take her grueling turn and grow wise.

  The ceremony was the kind of civilized ritual that her Aunt Mandy would have approved. As the organ played, Howard received his dream girl like an untarnished prize. Still, he never seems quite comfortable around me—perhaps because, as Melissa said when we first met in the elevator, he feels embarrassed by my needless rent-charity and prefers “to work for a so-called living.”

  This prideful Howard, for some reason, seems to distrust me and the whole Wooster Street arrangement. Probably he is wary of any deal that is out of line with the market, and he is prudent to be. SoHo has pitfalls that even the boardrooms of Wall Street can’t match.

  Soon enough, I’m sure, this stalwart fellow will haul his bride off to a safe little town on the Metro North line. Yes, the day is inevitably coming for Melissa to think about good schools and top soccer leagues, not for herself this time.

  Last fall I noticed a swelling of her midriff, and she said, with a blush, that things would be changing around here very soon. In a few months, I could expect to find a stroller on the landing; maybe I would even learn to change diapers.

  When she told me, she pressed against my torso for a kiss, her body momentarily brushing my left arm. Her husband, shifting his weight, stood by with his eyes averted toward the doorjamb.

  “The child is quite a surprise,” Howard said. “We hadn’t been planning this yet.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  Why do we do these things to each other? For all my time spent with Hogan, I still wonder where crime begins. Does it creep upon us through circumstance? Is it purely our own doing? Or does it spring from some inborn evil for which we are, though roundly punished, paradoxically blameless?

  No, forget that. The idea of original sin lets us off the hook too easily—as I once let Melissa off.

  65

  “I didn’t know how to tell you,” she said to me a few days after the joyful announcement, once her Howard had gone off to work one bright September morning.

  “It’s fine,” I replied. “Wonderful.”

  Missy touched her belly. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes.” I looked around at my paintings, my closets, my loft, my elegant home. “I’m very happy. And your mother will be thrilled.”

  “I can’t stand this.”

  I remained still, devoid of words.

  “Can’t you say something, Jack? Can’t you hold me?”

  “You’ve got your husband for that now.”

  “That’s right, thank God.” She drew back slightly. “And the baby? You don’t even want to know?”

  “Would it make any difference?”

  “I suppose not,” she said. Then, after a moment, shaking her head: “No, it definitely wouldn’t.”

  “So there we are, Missy. All of us where we belong.”

  “It’s too sad, really. You know there were times when I truly cared for you over the years. A lot of times.”

  “I do know. You mentioned it once or twice, although I was a bit distracted, back in your college days, by the blow jobs.”

  “Please, Jack. Don’t. Please.” She drew a long breath. “Not everything is a joke.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Can’t you please be real—just this once?”

  “I tried reality, Missy. It didn’t work out.”

  “Stop, please.”

  “Nathalie in her hospital bed was as real as anything gets. How’s that for you?”

  Melissa was crying quietly, her face lowered. I wanted to feel something, the way I did a long time ago. Just about anythin
g would have done, I think. Love or jealousy or rage. Anything. But wishes don’t always come true.

  When Missy looked up, her face seemed to have broken into a thousand pieces, like a shattered doll’s head.

  “I have to leave here,” she said. “All of it—you, SoHo, this sickness.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes flashed at me. I had not seen such an expression since that distant day at the Darger show, when I asked her once more about Amanda’s laptop. She said now, standing pregnant in the Wooster Street loft, what she must have thought then: “For Christ’s sake, Jack, don’t be entirely dense.”

  But I was. I couldn’t help but be. Then one day, weeks later, when Melissa was in her second trimester, yet another letter came from her mother.

  I kept the unopened envelope on my table for a day or two, glancing at the return address when I passed. Melissa, too, ignored it, uninterested. Finally, one night after she left to go downstairs for the evening, I slit the letter open. The message was in black ink on three plain white sheets of paper, scrawled at great speed.

  Dear Jack,

  I know you hate me. That scarcely matters now, since I rather hate myself, too—for what I did to Philip and you. What matters is the truth.

  Beware of Melissa. This newest game with her—the marriage, the three of you housed together, the duplicity—it just can’t go on. I forbid it. You have to put an end to all this genteel depravity, Jack. If you know what’s bloody good for you.

  Some things are just too vile. You can see that, can’t you? Or you will when I tell you.

  Melissa is a killer. A murderer—even though she’ll never admit what she’s done. Yes, your dear, sweet little girl.

  That day riding home in the car, with the rain falling, she was simply blank. “Mandy is dead now” is all she would say. “Mandy is dead now. I killed her.” It had no meaning to her. It was a statement, not a reality. I couldn’t get her to tell me why. I had to beg the details out of her, over weeks, just to be able to cover up properly.

  You probably don’t believe me even now. You heard me confess to everything after the police came. But you knew, you should have known, what was really happening: I was saving my child. I did what I had to do—I lied, I accused myself—to give her a free life. I did it without a second thought, as mothers do. She never thanked me, and she never will. Not Melissa. So much for your “one true and loving heart.”

  Can you imagine my own life since then? I’ve had to think of you—the pair of you—all these years. Living in SoHo, steeped in sin and arrogance, while I pace here and scream.

  Fortunately there were compensations over the years: Melissa’s progress at school, her boyfriends, her inheritance, her husband.

  But now this. This abomination. It’s too much.

  That’s why I’m telling you, Jack. Go and look. Missy pried a floorboard loose in her bedroom. She told me once, when she came for one of her rare visits—in a whisper, so the guards couldn’t hear. You know what she hid there? A gift from your friend Hogan: a copy of the security tape, the one from the boutique. The one that shows her leaving the car, going in, coming out with Mandy’s laptop.

  I had no idea. I thought she was just picking up the computer for some school project. I sat in the car, double parked, clueless, while she shot her stepmother twice in the head.

  Hogan described the whole sequence to me, frame by frame. It was the first thing he did when he took me into Melissa’s room that morning. He had me picture Paul Morse arriving at eleven in the morning and leaving an hour later. Amanda coming out for a brief shopping trip afterwards, returning with a Morgane Le Fay bag.

  Then he made me sit on the bed, where I could see all the clutter. He told me to look carefully at every item—Melissa’s clothes, her CDs, her jewelry, her shoes, her brushes and combs, her books. He asked me to imagine her life without them, locked in a prison cell one third the size of her bedroom, my beautiful young daughter with no one to talk to or meet, except dyke thieves and arsonists and killers, all of them strung out on smuggled-in drugs. What would years of that do to my baby?

  There was no doubt, he said. With the premeditation, then the attempt to pin the murder on Paul—the prosecutor would be sure to try her as an adult. “If Melissa is not a mental adult, then we’re all minors,” he said. “All lost and dangerous children, every one of us.”

  Either way, she was doomed, unless I took her crime on myself, unless I sacrificed myself.

  Years later, before she graduated from Bradford, Hogan gave a copy of the tape to Melissa. He told her, “This is to keep you honest. Jack is my best friend. I have another copy. Don’t ever make me use it.”

  That’s when Missy stowed the tape under her bedroom floor. She’s half forgotten it, I’m sure. The same way she’s half forgotten me.

  But I won’t be forgotten, Jack. I exist. I demand to be recognized. You have to hear and see me; you have to remember Angela Oliver—as a woman, an artist, a mother. Yes, and a murderer—of poor Philip. But not of Amanda! No, I won’t make it easy for you, and I won’t go away. You can keep me in prison, but you can’t keep me out of your mind. I’m too much a part of your life. I gave birth to the woman you love.

  Oh, don’t deny it. Not to me. I watched the pair of you for too many years. I saw. You can’t hide any longer behind that suave disguise, that good uncle mask. Not now. You’ve gone too far.

  Damn you, can’t you see who Melissa really is?

  You can watch the tape, Jack. Anytime. Black and white—as plain as words on paper. All you have to do is go downstairs and look.

  But you won’t, will you? No, you don’t want to wreck your fairy-tale Wooster Street setup, your playhouse. You don’t want to botch the little make-believe life you’ve constructed for yourself. For yourself and your precious Melissa.

  Well, I’m botching it for you. Because I can’t stand it. Because it can’t go on anymore. I’ve told Melissa that you know everything. What she’s done, what she is. I wrote to her yesterday. It’s over now.

  You don’t want to read this any more than you want to see the surveillance tape. You don’t want the truth, Jack. Not the whole of it.

  That’s why you’ll never be Hogan.

  God knows if you’ll ever be a man at all.

  Yours righteously,

  Angela

  After I read the letter a couple times, I set it aside and walked to the liquor cabinet for a scotch. I wanted to sit for a few minutes to decide exactly what to think. Holding my drink, I settled into the armchair—the same one I sat in the night of the Crosby Street bust, the night that Melissa lay sleeping behind a narrow door on the far side of the loft.

  The rantings of a madwoman, a confessed killer, locked up for years in a cell. That’s what I thought. Angela could not give up control, or the attempt at control, even as she sat in her orange jumpsuit in a maximum security prison. Unable to strike out at us any other way, she would try to poison us with her words. We didn’t have to let her. We could go on. Other things were pressing on me. I was preoccupied with the new art season and the preparations for Melissa’s childbirth—a baby present to buy, the electrical sockets to childproof. I had exhibitions to mount and bills to pay.

  “You stupid bloody fool, Jack.” I could just hear Angela saying it. Well, if she thought I was obtuse, she had only herself to blame. The damage she did to my brain, the legacy of her resin-laced morning espresso, is slight but irreversible. My doctors are quite clear, quite ruthlessly honest, in their prognosis. They say the deterioration could soon accelerate, leaving me at first a single beat—one mental half-step—behind my former self, behind all less afflicted thinkers. How will I know if it happens? My unnamable feelings for Melissa—whatever they are, if I’ve ever known what they are—may have a similar effect. Just as a man’s failing eyesight makes all young women lovelier.

  It may be, in fact, that a gentle forgetfulness, a slight vagueness about what is happening now, is the best state in which to begin the jou
rney of advancing age. I’ve only just stepped out onto that long avenue, in the first dim hour of evening, but I already know where it leads. Where all streets lead.

  “I opened the letter from your mother,” I told Melissa the next day. “She accuses you, rather graphically, of killing Aunt Amanda.”

  “So, what’s new? Mom accuses everyone, blames everyone. Except herself.”

  “That’s true; she always did.”

  “Every time I visit, she has a new conspiracy, a new culprit. You might be next.”

  “What reason would I have to kill Mandy?”

  “If she knew half as much about your art dealing as I do, you’d have lots.”

  “Maybe.” I stepped closer to Missy. “Then you’ve given up on Angela, have you? Whatever happened to ‘me and Mom against the world’?”

  “That was a long time ago. My mother is so over, Jack.”

  Melissa was wearing a maternity dress from one of the best SoHo shops, its long swoop disguising her distended stomach. When she turned her eyes to me, her blond hair shone radiantly around her face—almost blindingly.

  “Did you try to cover for her back then?” I asked. “Is that why you played Paul Morse for a fool?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Or did Angela actually put you up to it? Did she teach you to shoot so that you could be her living weapon, her revenge?”

  Melissa shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe I thought it all up myself. Maybe it was my idea from the first, and she was just the good mom trying to save me. Who knows? Who even cares anymore?”

  “I do, Missy. Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Did you play me, too?”

  “Oh, you mean did I make you have dirty thoughts, Uncle Jack?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Well, maybe those naughty ideas were there in your head all along. Maybe you just got lucky and found me.”

  “You call that luck?”

  “Most men would kill for it.”