‘And if you get pregnant you get a fortune cookie.’
‘If I get pregnant it will be a miracle.’
‘You’ve had one miracle last year. You got out of the Sahara alive.’
‘So why should the gods smile on me again?’
But they did – on the third try.
It’s a deeply lonely experience, having your legs up in the stirrups of a doctor’s examination table, watching a nurse approach you with a tube filled with the sperm of your chosen donor. Lonely and immensely modern. No need to establish a rapport; to dance around each other at the outset, deciding whether to cross the frontier into sex; working out whether there is the chance of something more promising; the decision to set up house together (or not); the decision to reproduce (or not). There will never be a memory of the intimate coupling that led to this conception. But I had no doubt whatsoever that I was making the right decision in going this route. Too much emotional debris in my past. Too much trepidation about trying to get involved with anyone right now. Maybe, in time, that would change. Maybe there would be a point in the future when I wouldn’t be so closed off to that possibility. But for now . . .
The first artificial insemination didn’t take. Four weeks later I was back for Round Two. When my period arrived two weeks after that the disappointment and despair I felt were acute. But dogged as ever I returned another fourteen days later for Round Three.
This time . . . bingo.
When my period was one day late I bought a pregnancy test. At home that night I peed onto its chemically treated strip . . . and watched as it gradually turned blue.
So there it was: positive proof that I was pregnant. But being ever conscious of checks and balances I ran a second test five days later. When it turned blue again I called Dr Hart. A week later she gave me the official confirmation – and hugged me at the end of our consultation.
‘I know this has been your dream for so long.’
And most dreams can only be fulfilled by yourself. It’s a bit like happiness: you can never depend on someone else for that elusive state of being. In the end we are all directly responsible for our own happiness . . . or lack thereof.
I told nobody else but Ruth for the first three months of my pregnancy, reading up extensively on everything and anything to do with baby and child care. When twelve weeks had passed – and I was out of the initial dangerous miscarriage zone – I decided the time had come to inform Morton and my staff that I was expecting a child. And that after the birth I was planning to take some time off work. Because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t be flying solo any more.
But I forestalled that announcement for a few days, as I suddenly had urgent business in New York. Business to do with my missing-presumed-dead husband. A week previously Jasper Pirnie, the owner of the gallery which showed his work, got in touch, telling me he knew about Paul’s disappearance from the Internet and regretted not contacting me before now.
‘I won’t give you any sort of mealy-mouthed excuse about being too busy,’ he said. ‘It was bad form on my part, and you have my apologies for only contacting you all these many months later. But the reason I’m calling you now is because I have some interesting news.’
The news was that one of Jasper’s clients – a wealthy Korean industrialist – had, while on a visit to Manhattan, paid a visit to the gallery and spied one of Paul’s early drawings – a Maine seascape, shaded by omnipresent cloud. He loved it.
‘He asked me what I wanted for it, and when I said twenty thousand he agreed on the spot. So congratulations – you’ll be receiving fifty per cent of that.’
As if reading my thoughts he added:
‘Or, at least, Paul’s estate will be receiving that. But here’s the thing – this gentleman is quite the collector. Since returning to Seoul he’s shown off the drawing to several of his high-spending colleagues. There is now a market for Paul Leuen’s drawings. So my question to you is—’
Now it was my turn to jump in. I told him about the sketchbook of Paul’s final work which he left behind just before disappearing, and how the thirty or so drawings were, in my opinion, absolutely extraordinary.
By the time I’d finished my spiel I could almost hear Jasper palpitating at the prospect of something significant and lucrative about to come his way.
‘Might you be able to FedEx the sketchbook to me overnight?’ he asked.
It went out that afternoon. By the time he got back to me thirty-six hours later, Morton and I had already put into action a plan devised some months earlier for dealing with any possible sales of Paul’s future work: a trust in his name that would revert to me after seven years from the date of his disappearance, at which point he could be declared legally dead. When Morton brought this up, we thought that maybe a few thousand dollars might trickle in over the years for Paul’s remaining work. But now . . .
When Jasper rang the next night he was no longer masking his excitement.
‘You have given us a treasure trove. The brilliance and uniqueness of the composition, the absolute assurance of his line, the exceptional density of detail, the fascinating contrast between the representational and the abstract . . . and, dare I say, the tragic nature of his story which will be a fantastic selling point when it comes to generating press and critical interest in the exhibition we plan to mount of these final works . . . I think we are looking at a major public triumph, and one which will, of course, translate into a significant escalation of our asking price per drawing.’
‘Any sense of what that asking price might be?’
‘At this point, I would probably be conservative about it and say, once we have drummed up the journalistic and collector interest I know we will generate . . . perhaps, forty thousand per drawing.’
I sucked in my breath. Fifty drawings at 40,000 apiece . . . $2 million. Half to the trust set up in the name of Paul Leuen.
‘That’s impressive,’ I said.
‘Might there be more of Paul’s work left behind?’
‘There must be a good sixty to seventy drawings in his studio upstairs.’
‘Could you get those packed up and dispatched to us immediately, please? And were I to offer you a flight and a hotel room and an excellent dinner, might you be willing to come down and meet with me early next week?’
I had my iPhone out and was already scrolling through my calendar.
By the time I flew down on Tuesday afternoon to meet Jasper I already had in place a Manhattan lawyer who specialised in art contracts. Morton, meanwhile, having been fully appraised of this windfall in the making, had found a super-smart trust and estates attorney who was finding a wholly legal modus operandi by which the funds from the sale of Paul’s work could be made accessible to me. If, as suspected, I was coming into $2.5 million net of Jasper’s commission, besides setting up a trust for the child growing within me and perhaps moving house, I wanted to honour Paul’s desire to buy an apartment for his daughter in Casablanca. Only this time I would be sidestepping Ben Hassan.
But talk is cheap. And talk about serious money coming your way is even cheaper. So until the drawings started to sell I was not doing or promising anything. One thought did strike me as the town car sent to collect me from LaGuardia airport emerged from the Midtown Tunnel and cruised into the epicentre of Manhattan: what was about to happen to Paul Leuen – his posthumous discovery as the major American artist I always knew him to be – was the reverie he always carried within himself. He had such exceptional talent. But when it came to that other crucial ingredient – having the talent to have talent – he was living proof of a great central truth: the biggest impediment we all have in life is ourselves.
I was checked into a hyper-stylish boutique hotel located diagonally across from Jasper’s gallery. The room was a monument to minimalist chic. There was a bottle of champagne awaiting me which I would take as a gift for Ruth, as alcohol was currently off the cards for me.
I surveyed the room, and the cityscape beyo
nd its immense windows. I thought how he should be here, revelling in the fact that, after decades of silently accepting his status as a creative also-ran – someone who had never achieved the critical or commercial success he knew he deserved – the door had finally swung his way. He was now being summoned inside, with all the attendant fanfare accompanying his entrance into the realm he so craved.
But instead of being here with me, he was out there, in the endless void that is the Sahara. The beckoning infinity into which he had run. A vanishing act from which there is no return.
I blinked and felt tears. I went into the bathroom and washed my face, reapplied my make-up, grabbed my leather jacket and headed out into that upscale hipsterish quarter known as the Meatpacking District. Once I reached the pavement I could glimpse Jasper’s gallery just yards away on the opposite corner. I awaited the changing of the lights. And that’s when I saw him. On the other side of the street. Dressed in a white shirt, loose canvas pants, his grey hair cascading to his shoulders. I gasped. I told myself: This is not real, this is not him. I blinked again. Several times. And then focused my sight even more acutely on the man standing on the pavement directly opposite me. A man in his late fifties, six foot four inches tall, lanky with a distinctive French pencil in one hand, a sketchpad in the other. Without thinking I shouted his name.
‘Paul!’
He turned and stared directly at me. And smiled. So happy to see me.
Out of nowhere a cab shot between us, blocking my view for a second or two. When it raced away Paul was gone.
I stood there, scanning all four corners of the immediate horizon. No sign of him. I dashed across the street, thinking he might have ducked into a shop or an apartment building. But there were no immediate entrances into which he could have vanished. Again I visually raked every niche and recess of the area, running back to the hotel in case he had crossed when I wasn’t looking, then racing across diagonally to see if, indeed, he could have headed down the street or into Jasper’s gallery.
I ran right into the gallery. There was a woman at the reception desk: hip glasses, a too-cool-for-school demeanour.
‘Did someone just come in here?’ I asked her.
She surveyed me wryly.
‘Not unless he has a double act as a ghost,’ she said.
‘I’m here to see Jasper.’
‘Oh really?’ she said, not buying that line. But when I told her my name her attitude shifted. She became nervously respectful, telling me I was awaited inside.
‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
I rushed outside, certain that as soon as I hit the sidewalk he’d be there in front of me. Smiling. So happy to see me. So happy to embrace all the good that was to happen to him, to us.
But the street, though brimming with an early-evening crowd, was not harbouring Paul. I looked east, west, north, south. Only a minute ago he’d been right in front of me. And now? Back into infinity.
It wasn’t a delirium. An apparition. A mirage. He was there. I’d seen him. With my eyes wide open.
But when do we ever fully open our eyes?
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Extract from ‘Thalassa’ by Louis MacNeice from Selected Poems (Faber, 2007). Used by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd.
First published by Hutchinson in 2015
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780091953720
The Heat of Betrayal Page 34
