Kim’s existence was not even mentioned. One assumed that Jon had not told the reporter that he had a daughter. And judging by Barbara’s behaviour on the matter to date, she would scarcely have brought the subject up herself. I found myself hoping that Kim hadn’t seen this article.
“Hey!” Suzanne said from behind me. “You want to do some data entry forme?”
I swivelled round on the chair, taking her in. Only Suzanne could carry off a tweed two-piece suit without looking like a pudding in a sack. She was carrying a big box file, shiny and new, which she dropped on the desk next to me.
“Updating Barbara’s cuttings,” she said in explanation. “I had to do it anyway, but there’s so much coming in now I’m getting swamped.”
“Oh really?” This recurring press motif was becoming ever more insistent, like a snatch of melody heard for a fleeting moment in the first movement which, by the third, had turned into the theme. “I forgot to get the New York Times this morning.”
“Be my guest.” Suzanne retrieved it from the bookshelves behind her and let it fall heavily in front of me.
“Jesus.” It was nearly the same size as the UK Sunday Times. “This is just the normal weekday edition, right?”
She looked surprised.
“Yeah.”
“It’s just so huge.”
“It’s all ad space,” she said dismissively, extracting one of the many sections with the ease of long practice and handing it to me. “There you go, page three.”
“‘Imagine: Death in Strawberry Fields,’” I read. “God, what a headline.”
“The Post has ‘Who Killed the Redhead?,’” Suzanne said grimly. “Enough to make you want to do some strangling on your own account.”
I dropped the paper for a moment and stared at her.
“Suzanne, who do you think killed her?” I said, unable to stop myself from asking.
Her face hardly changed. Laurence’s reaction to the news of Kate’s death had been to go to pieces, but Suzanne was made of the opposite material. She was as groomed as ever, the blond hair pulled back into a smooth pleat, her nails perfectly French manicured. Now she looked me straight in the eyes, her own clear and focused.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I will.”
“Do you mean—”
But just then a door opened and closed, and footsteps could be heard on the parquet floor. Laurence came out of the back part of the gallery. On his heels was Stanley, and looking at him I was irresistibly reminded of the dupe in a Ray Clooney farce, the one who, unaware that his wife is cheating on him with the vicar and the village policeman simultaneously, is forced by her to hide in cupboards, jump out of windows and dress up as his own sister visiting from Australia under a series of increasingly bizarre excuses. He had exactly the same dazed expression.
“Oh, Sam!” he said, catching sight of me. “Nice to see you! Glad to see you haven’t been—what I mean is, that you still feel comfortable coming in here—well, that sounds strange—that is, you’re quite safe here, you know.”
Laurence and Suzanne stared at him as incredulously as if he had just been beamed down from Planet Gaffe. I had a good deal of difficulty keeping my own face straight.
“Thank you, Stanley,” I said demurely. “So you don’t think I need to get a handgun?”
Stanley looked horrified. “Oh no, absolutely not. No need. An isolated incident. The park is still very rough in places.”
“What about the graffiti in here?” Laurence said coldly. “Are Sam’s sculptures going to be as safe as she is?”
“We’re stepping up security. You know that, Laurence,” Stanley said firmly. Beaming at me reassuringly, he smoothed back his hair with both hands. They came away shining slightly with grease, making its resemblance to butter still more pronounced. His silk tie was dotted with a bright pattern of tiny paintbrushes which stood out prettily against the dull charcoal of his suit, and the polished shoes on his small feet shone as black and glossy as a pair of beetles. Next to his impeccable tailoring, Laurence looked like he had been sleeping rough for days. I noticed that the latter’s eyes were rimmed with red.
“Well, I must get on,” Stanley said. “So much to do. Au revoir.” He flashed me a smile, showing perfectly capped teeth, and bustled away towards the staircase. Laurence’s expression was sardonic.
“Au revoir,” he mimicked. “That’s about a third of the entire French Stanley knows.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Bonjour, mais oui and encore du vin,” Laurence snapped, taking his glasses off to polish them.
“That’s a pretty good French accent,” I approved.
“Went to school in Paris for my formative years. Dad’s a diplomat,” he said shortly. “You still want to get some coffee?”
“Just let me have a look at this first.” I skimmed the article about Kate. It was padded out with statistics about the success of the famous zero-tolerance policy: Central Park was much safer now; New York’s murder rate had fallen drastically in the past few years. It managed to reduce Kate to a mere blip in the figures. A quote from Carol informed us that it was a shocking tragedy and that Kate had been a wonderful person and valued employee. A large picture of this paragon, her hair falling in a torrent of curls around her face, looked out at me from the centre of the page, her smile candid and confident. Police were pursuing their investigations.
The graffiti attack at the gallery was alluded to, but rather obliquely. Maybe they were worried about Bergmann LaTouche filing a lawsuit.
“They don’t mention Kate’s tattoo,” I said, handing the paper back to Suzanne.
There was a crash beside me. Laurence had dropped his glasses.
“How did you know about the tattoo?” Suzanne demanded as Laurence stooped as clumsily as a stork to pick them up. Without them his face looked as exposed and defenceless as a perplexed child’s, his eyes blinking fast without the glasses to shield them.
“Don told me.”
Suzanne’s grunt of disgust was covered by Laurence, who exclaimed, straightening up:
“The tattoo! Shit! Don’t you see, Suze? It was a strawberry!”
“So what?”
“Strawberry Fields!” Laurence said impatiently.
“My God.” She stared at him. “You think it was deliberate? I mean, killing her there?”
“Who knew about the tattoo?” I asked.
Suzanne looked at me. “Practically everyone at the gallery,” she said. “Well, maybe not Carol and Stanley. But she showed most of us when she got it done. And Don would have known, obviously, because of…” Her voice tailed off. “Please God, let no one who knew her leak that to the papers,” she said finally.
“Fuck someone who knew her, what about the autopsy?” Laurence was inexorable.
“Oh God …”
“And Don told you?” Laurence said to me. “People tell you things, don’t they?”
“Mother confessor,” I said lightly.
“Yeah, right.”
“Or maybe you just ask the right questions,” Suzanne said.
I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. Looking up, I realised why. I didn’t like the way Suzanne was staring at me.
“You ask a lot of questions,” she commented. It wasn’t a statement; there was something interrogative about the way she said it which indicated clearly that an answer was required.
“Do I?” I said rather feebly, hoping to stall her.
“Yes,” she snapped back.
I shrugged. “I’m just trying to get a fix on things here,” I said, determined not to let it sound like an excuse. “Wouldn’t you, in my place?”
Now it was she who shrugged, and I had to admit she did it a lot better, that Gallic background paying off big-time.
“Whatever,” she said, turning away. It was a dismissal, and not a friendly one. Apparently I had trodden on Suzanne’s toes. Well, if that were the case I couldn’t blame her for getting cross. Those snakeskin courts must have co
st a fortune.
“I feel buffeted by life,” I said to Laurence. He had taken me a couple of streets along from the gallery, to a little coffee shop where we perched on high stools at a bar running along the window, watching a series of eccentrically dressed people go by. I was working my way through a mini banana cheesecake which was one of the best things I had eaten in my life, accompanied by a hot cider toddy which was just as good. Laurence seemed to consider this place nothing out of the ordinary. New Yorkers were as spoiled as trustafarians when it came to eating out.
“Me too,” he agreed dourly. Every so often he would take off his glasses and rub his eyes violently with the backs of his hands till they were red and sore. It wasn’t the best method for releasing tension. “What did you say a couple of days ago? It’s like being on a rollercoaster. Just as I’m feeling really down, Stanley or someone’ll come out with a blasting piece of idiocy. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Yesterday,” I corrected. “It was yesterday I said that.” “Sweet Jesus. Is that all? It feels like a lifetime. The phones won’t stop ringing, Carol’s going nuts trying to cope with everything—and she’s had to go off to DC today. …”
“Should you be here?”
“No way,” he said frankly. “But I needed a break.”
He sighed. I liked Laurence a lot.
“You must think you’ve stumbled into a barrel of nutcases,” he said. “I guess I could have put that better, but I’m too tired to think straight. And don’t worry about Suzanne. Of course you’re asking questions. I mean, Jesus, I’d probably be suing by now for mental distress.”
I shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m used to nutcases,” I said lightly.
“I haven’t been sleeping,” he said in parentheses. “And now this tattoo thing! Talk about terrible coincidences! Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse. Well, no, it’s obviously worse, because that means it was someone who knew Kate instead of a random maniac—or is that better? I mean, which would she have preferred?”
“Laurence, if you keep rubbing your eyes like that they’re going to come out the back of your head,” I informed him.
He looked at me blearily through the knuckles crammed into his eye sockets.
“They’re pretty sore,” he conceded, lowering his hands reluctantly.
“Shit, I’m not surprised. You should see how bloodshot they are. You look like an Alsatian with a stinking hangover.”
Laurence grimaced, picking up his glasses. “I’m blind without these,” he said, pushing them back on his nose. “Mind you, it’s kind of nice not to be able to see anything right now. Everything’s this big fuzzy cloud.”
“Is that what your antidepressants do? Put you on a big fuzzy cloud?”
“No, I couldn’t work if they did that. Actually they kind of sharpen everything up, but you don’t care about it so much.”
“Nice one,” I said rather ironically.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he agreed. My sarcasm had gone right over his head; proof, if any were needed, of how exhausted he was. “Let’s not talk about the gallery right now, OK?” he said unexpectedly. “I could do with some distracting.”
“Just don’t say ‘Tell me about yourself,’” I requested. “I hate that like the plague.”
He smiled. It was a weak effort, but we were moving in the right direction.
“I know!” I said suddenly. “You were going to tell me about the difference between seeing someone and dating.”
“I was?”
“Well, is there a difference?”
“Sure,” Laurence said easily. “Seeing someone means it’s not exclusive. Dating is more serious.”
I blinked. “Could you run that by me again?”
“God, you Brits,” Laurence said, baffled. “Don’t you know anything?”
“Obviously not.”
“OK.” Laurence pushed his glasses back up again, moving them up the bridge of his nose with one bony finger. All around us, thronging the coffee shop, hurrying past on the streets outside, black-clad SoHoites pushed and clamoured, overheard snatches of conversation alien and yet flooding past my head. One of those washes of disconnection swept over me, where people are speaking the same language and yet have such a different set of values they might as well have come from a parallel universe.
“Seeing someone isn’t too serious, OK?” he said as seriously as if he were giving a lecture on Jane Austen’s subtextual critique of social mores. “Like, say I meet this girl and she’s seeing someone, I could still ask her out. I mean, I would consider her single, for all intents and purposes.”
“But she’s seeing someone!” I was baffled. “I mean, obviously she isn’t single.”
“Uh-uh. If she’s seeing someone, she can see other people too. But if she tells me she’s dating someone, then I would back off. Look, I know it seems crazy. When I came back to college in the States I kept fucking up, OK? It took me two years to work it out. Everyone else knew it already from high school.”
“Work what out?”
“The dating rules,” he explained impatiently. “There are all these rules you have to follow. Otherwise the dating machine spits you out like a faulty piece of crap. So, OK. Let’s imagine I’m seeing someone.”
“Which means you can see other people too? I mean, it works both ways?”
“Oh sure. Absolutely.”
“But do you know the other person is seeing someone else?”
“No way!” Laurence was shocked. “That would never happen! You never, never talk about what you’ve been doing in too much detail at first. It’s basically don’t ask, don’t tell.”
He sighed. “It’s really hard to make people understand. And you know what? Americans don’t talk about this. I don’t know whether they’re embarrassed at how stupid it is, or they take it for granted, or what. But when I came back from Paris, I tell you, I was drowning. And no one helped. The first girl I was dating here—I really liked her, she was very tough and together, which is what I go for—” He looked momentarily wistful. “So we meet up to go see a movie—on Saturday night, right, this is good—and I asked her casually as I was buying the tickets what she’d been doing the night before. She nearly bit my head off. How dare I ask her what she’d been doing, was I trying to snoop around her private life, etc. etc.”
I stared at him, the last bite of banana cheesecake frozen halfway to my mouth.
“Laurence,” I said, “can I ask, how, um, intimate were you with this chick? I mean, had you, you know, shagged or what?”
Laurence rolled his eyes. “And over here we have this image of the English as refined and beautifully spoken…. No, we hadn’t got it on, but we’d done plenty and I thought I was in with a pretty sure chance that evening, OK? So I get all confused, and I blurt out in the middle of the cinema, ‘But I thought you were seeing me! I mean, I didn’t think you were seeing anyone else!’ And she says, ‘Hey, buddy, we haven’t had that conversation yet.’”
“My God. What conversation?” I finished the cheesecake.
“The conversation,” Laurence said, adjusting his glasses, “where after you’ve been seeing each other for a while you decide together that you’re going to take it to the next stage. That is, you’re going to see each other exclusively. But you know,” he said with great seriousness, “the whole thing is really about power. It’s all codified. It’s a big topic of conversation here—how long it should take you to ring someone, how many days you wait after the first date before getting in touch again. I know guys who swear by a week at least. The aim is to make the point that the other person likes you more than you like them. And there’s always this high tension because no one wants to put all their eggs in one basket, it isn’t safe. This city eats up relationships and spits them out. People play major head games,” he said rather sadly. “That’s why I’m single right now. I’m always too keen. If I like someone I don’t want to fool around. Which really fucks you up in New York. Yo
u show them you like them and they walk all over you.
I clicked my tongue in sympathy. “It’s not so complicated in London,” I said. “I mean, we have all the usual neuroses, but once you’re seeing someone you’re seeing them. Then if you cheat on them you’re a bitch. I mean, I couldn’t turn round and use the excuse that we’d never said we were going to be exclusive.”
“How did you meet your boyfriend?” Laurence asked wistfully.
I winced at the word. “Urn, he was in this play I did some mobiles for. Actually I thought he was gay at first. He’s pretty camp. He likes to present himself as a sort of effeminate Oscar Wilde type.”
“And you find that attractive,” Laurence said blankly.
I grinned. “Yeah.”
I saw no reason to add that Hugo’s effeminacy went only so far and no further; it pleased me to be thought eccentric. Besides, if I told people how good he was in bed everyone would want a piece. As they said over here.
Suddenly I remembered that I ought to be ringing Kim. I looked around me for a payphone.
“What is it?” Laurence inquired. “You’re jittering as if you had DTs.”
“Oi, keep your tongue off my alcohol consumption, Prozac Boy,” I retorted. It was nice to see Laurence back to his normal bantering self. “I was looking for a phone. I need to ring a friend.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was boring you that much,” Laurence said courteously. “There’s one on the corner.”
“OK.” I fixed my gaze on him meditatively. It had occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to score some Barbara ‘n’ Jon gossip, were there any going. “Guess what? Do you remember that I used to know Jon Tallboy from London? He was the father of my best friend.”
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