by Lucy Ives
The public is advised that THE ELYSIA CLUB is à la revanche. It will not be stymied, knows all, and is one of the most haughty and unique, if not best, feminine institutions known to this or any other city built by man, and how odious this term is. (Men, how disgusting!) We are beyond maleness. It is unnecessary.
I winced at this satire of feminist discourse. Previously I’d thought this style of critique, such as it was, didn’t show up until the later 1960s, but now I supposed I could state with some conviction that I’d been wrong about that. This was obviously not friendly writing. I wasn’t exactly sure what the adverts were meant to accomplish, but I did not think that one was meant to feel fuzzy in the general direction of TEC after digesting them. Possibly the use of the adjective “insufferable” included a sneering pun in the direction of women’s recently obtained ability to vote? I imagined Otto “Boy” smirking to himself as he typed up these unpleasant apostrophes, hunt and peck. One thing was certain, the ladies had gotten under his skin.
I rubbed my eyes and took an image. I emailed the image to myself.
The voice of a nonplussed Dani came on over the library PA. “Hello, patrons. The Central Museum’s library will be closing in five short minutes; yes, that’s just five minutes. I regret that circumstances have prevented me from advising you as to the library’s closing at an earlier juncture, and then at subsequent regular intervals. I hope you will understand and behave as if you had known this twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, as well as ten, minutes ago. Thank you, one and all.”
I made my own preparations.
—
ON MY WAY BACK UPSTAIRS I realized that maybe the thing I wanted to do now was pay a visit to Caro. This had nothing to do with my most recent discoveries. Rather, my desire was entirely tied to the mezzotint depicting the singer “Étoile” that had appeared to me yesterday, by way of the Gaypoole commonplace book. Something, i.e., our ongoing cold war, made me really want to know what Caro thought of this. You see, I like to observe her when she’s forced to interpret evidence on a dime. I also can’t lie. I don’t hate putting pressure on the woman. I packed up my office things, went back downstairs.
I mention this portion of my trip only because, as I came out onto the top of the museum steps and surveyed what was left of the pinkly dying day, I happened to see, below me on the street, a pair of familiar figures. A young blond woman wearing a short mink cape that basically made no sense over her additional getup, which was tight and black, was being helped into a similarly tight, black vehicle by a slim man of grace, who was Fred Lu, and he closed the door and waved as she was driven away and then turned and commenced strolling downtown with his oxblood murse.
If I tell you that there was a feeling in my heart as of its being impaled by a short, sharp stick, and then slowly and deliberately beaten against the ground until it was absorbed into the unfeeling earth, please do not think I am exaggerating. There was no line of reasoning, social, moral, aesthetic, or historical, that could convince me that I had not suffered a second great loss in the confusion of the implosion of my marriage, in losing Fred Lu, if ever I had had Fred, which indeed maybe I did. In spite of Whit’s deception, I could not wholly blame Whit for what had happened here. Here I was on my own. Besides, Fred wasn’t even the one wielding the pointed stick.
I was.
[ 21 ]
I knew early on with Fred, or, rather, I knew very suddenly, what was in store. It is possible, too, that what I at the time construed as being “in store” was something that had already happened and which had already hurt me, and yet I waited. I waited to be hurt, because this was a form of hope. If I waited, I was not yet living in the event. This was what I did during my week of meditation, or pseudomeditation, after our brick-hut congress. I tried to keep the event off me.
I think about that time with a shortness of breath. You have to understand how little I wanted, then, to be sure that my actions had meaning. I wanted to feel that there was some other material force in the world guiding my life. I shut my eyes and attempted to empty my mind and invite it, whatever “it” might be, to be present to me. This procedure was not a success. Whit’s face was, meanwhile, as I recall, increasingly scary to behold during this strange week, during which the implications of my own actions, if not Whit’s, slowly dawned on me. I think Whit’s outrage was not even produced by some intuition that I had been unfaithful to him. I think he was mainly furious that I still had not recognized his own inattentiveness, if not the long-term cheating itself. Any normal woman, Whit felt, would have been more careful about, would have been more attentive to, even obsessed with, his attentions. No normal woman could stand being ignored as he was ignoring me. She would die from it. And not only did I not die, I viciously attacked him by refusing to give him the pleasure of my jealousy. I gave him no pleasure. I was distant, distracted, cold.
During that week, I sat on the floor with my eyes shut and knew nothing. I stipulated, with a version of myself that kept track of events in the present yet was not exactly part of present time, that I did not know yet and was waiting. The event would someday come.
But how can I say it? Even then the time was beautiful. Perhaps I should have leveled with myself and left my husband. But perhaps then the time was more beautiful than it had ever been before. I remember how I got in my car that Sunday after Fred and I had slept together and I drove back from Delaware and it was a thick, dying, gorgeous afternoon, with dark gold and then orange light. Inside, I was exploding. Someone was shouting inside my head: “You are alive!” I did not know where I was. Inside my mind I was on my knees. I whispered, “Please tell me what to do.” No one said anything. I tried to repeat what Fred had told me. “Trust yourself,” I said aloud. I pulled over and sat in the car and wrote this phrase down. But whom, I asked, would I trust? What was “yourself”? Reading a contemporary Buddhist tract later that week I came to the conclusion that doubt of this kind is due to a lack of consonance between mind and body. I found that I had emphasized my own connection to the earth excessively. I could even feel this, or so I thought, in the lack of certainty in my shoulders and in my head.
—
NOW ENTERING BASSET’S PRINTS, I corrected my posture, lifted my chin. This would be, at the very least, a more revelatory week than that one had been. Caro was at her desk, a little figure.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?”
I tried to smile.
“Are you off from work? You came over to see your mother? You should be careful, Stella, because your mother might get the impression that you don’t hate her.”
“Ha!” I said, trying to imitate Caro’s tone.
“What?”
“I just mean, hello, it’s great to see you.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen you this much in one week since you were about five years old.”
“You make it sound like I was kidnapped.”
“No, Stella, I am trying to say that you have always been extremely independent. As soon as you could walk you were off to see what Stella could do for herself in this world.”
“Not to mention, self-interested.”
“Well, dear, one must survive. Now, what was it you wanted?” Caro was wearing a pair of purple, blue, and red “mock” tortoise reading glasses, and now she poked these down a bit lower on her nose. She seemed to be in the middle of cooking her books.
I took a moment. “I actually wanted,” I began, grasping my phone inside my bag, “to show you something.”
“Really?”
I removed the phone from my bag, brought up the image of “Étoile, the Singer from Paradise.”
Caro received the device. She switched on a lighted magnifier she kept on her desk and allowed its lens to intervene between her face and the screen. “Well,” she said, handing the phone back.
I waited for some response.
“That’s very interesting.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Does it”—I paused—“remind you of something?”
> Caro blinked. “I saw the obituary,” she said.
Because I was unsure what her admission betokened, I remained silent.
“I wondered how long it would be before you brought this up. I wasn’t sure if we would need to discuss it directly. But now you’re here, making that demand.”
“What exactly are we talking about?”
Caro pushed her glasses farther down. “We are talking about the same thing we were talking about at lunch the other day. We are talking about your friend and mine, Paul.”
I tried to keep my tone dispassionate. “We’re talking about Paul Coral?”
“Yes, we are most certainly talking about him, dear. We are talking about him because he played an important role in my career, and I don’t see, at this juncture, why you should not be aware of that. In fact, in order to avoid any potential sloppiness, it seems essential that you know some things, since you continue to require answers. Lord knows what you will come up with if I don’t set you straight. And/or, what sorts of damage you will inadvertently wreak upon your own inheritance in your supposedly admirable quest for truth. Sit down,” my mother told me.
I sat.
“Paul and I met in 1980. It was when he first got his job and he wanted to know everything about everything. He started coming into the shop.”
“I thought you didn’t know him.”
“Goodness, Stella, you take everything I say so extraordinarily literally.”
“Because,” I shot back, “words have references?”
Caro removed her glasses. “First of all, words have ‘referents.’ Second, I’m not really sure why you assume that everything you encounter must be limited to those qualities discernible at very first sight. Often what we see on first glance is merely a trick expressly designed to deceive us.”
“Great,” I told her.
“You think I’m being arch or paranoid, but really I am attempting to offer you some useful advice. So you’ve shown me an image of a commercial mezzotint, circa 1820, perhaps earlier. You recognize, of course, that I am in possession of an uncannily similar print, a finer and more complex intaglio item reminiscent of the etching revival of the 1840s in France. It is an American work and hangs in my home. The etching revival, as you know, did not reach the United States until the 1880s. But never mind that, you think. You think also of Francis Seymour Haden, who studied Rembrandt and brought Rembrandt’s ideals back into the benighted world, but Haden lived in Britain and was not at the height of his powers until the 1860s. You think, What a fine image you have hanging in your hallway, Mother. How wonderful to have such a fine revival print, which yet manifests American subject matter, which has a whiff of the fun of commercial culture and yet so much of the romantic panache of the revival. No print such as this can exist, am I right? And yet I am in possession of one such print, that rarest of all rare things, something which cannot exist.”
“OK,” I said.
“And what can this mean, you ask. You search your mind for every possible explanation, in the process conferring more and more value on my excellent print. Even if you know nothing about prints you would feel a certain frisson, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess. But that’s obviously a red herring.”
“Very good, Stella. Occam’s razor. If something’s too good to be true, it isn’t. A useful point, alas, when it came to your marriage.” Caro did not miss a beat. She rattled on, “And how, then, did I come to possess this ravishing print, which hides its inauthenticity so intriguingly in plain sight?”
I had already for a while been unwilling to sign on for this particular language game. “I don’t know,” I informed my inquisitor.
“But of course you know! I have a counterfeit. It’s not even a good one. No, no, it’s a great one, because it imitates something even better than the actual history of printmaking. In its own way, it’s a kind of masterpiece.”
“This sounds like a eugenics project.”
“Stella, my darling, you cannot just waltz in here and expect me to elucidate all of human history for you at the drop of a hat.”
I sighed. “So Paul made that, is that the idea? And he worked for you. And I imagine he made others.”
“He did. And the reason this is important is that for nearly a decade he kept me in business. It may not surprise you to learn that les nouveaux riches do not always want vrai de vrai. Sometimes they would like something a bit better than the genuine article, they expect that, they expect that that’s what money can buy, and Paul and I learned over the years how to supply what they wanted. He had fertile ground. What, after all, is your department at the museum but a physical record, a kind of syllogistic proof, even, of the development of the tastes of a class of Americans with more money than sense? Before I had a refined command of the international market, it was an extremely convenient thing to do. And we did it.”
“Paul used items in the collection?”
“Yes. And what you may not know about him is that when he was young, when he was up in New Hampshire as a student, he had studied with a master printmaker, an expert in engraving, etching, and aquatint, and he understood the techniques. I would never have gone along with it if it were not for that, that he had traditional knowledge.”
I raised my hand, which still contained the cell phone and therefore looked slightly ridiculous. “I’m sorry, but are you suggesting that what the two of you did was OK?”
Caro blinked.
“I’m just saying, Mom, this seems potentially illegal.”
“Oh, I don’t really know about that. I’d estimate that about ten percent of circulating works on paper aren’t genuine. They’re quite tricky to authenticate, particularly if they were originally produced as multiples. Any dealer worth their snuff will tell you that right away. Then again, I’ve seldom been asked to authenticate anything I was selling! I chalk it up to my customer base, quite solvent but really a bit desperate, in some cases.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Do you, really? I imagine you are hoping to do some damage here, at the very least privately rake me over the coals. Perhaps you even want to expose your own mother as a fraud! For starters, my dear, a private school education is not free!”
I thought about this for a moment. “Some people get scholarships,” I offered.
“Yes,” Caro all but shouted, “but those people do not live on 89th Street!”
There was, as ever, a certain tautological tendency plaguing Caro’s thought, but I’d never known how to release her from the care of the ouroboros she’d long ago made into a cherished spirit animal, and I wasn’t about to attempt that particular philosophical jailbreak on this day. What I said was, “It’s a nice print.”
Something moved. “I think so, too,” Caro pronounced. Then, “Paul was really very talented. I think he was very nearly, in his own way, a great artist.”
“Have you read his books?”
“Oh, I don’t go in much for poetry. What I did see seemed extremely pleasant, but, you know.”
“You can’t judge it?”
“Precisely. I can’t really assess it. Not the way I can something graphic.”
I nodded. “Did Paul ever, as far as you know, create any maps? Did you ever sell anything of that nature?”
Caro appeared to consider this query with genuine uncertainty, to the extent that this was possible for her. “No,” she said at last. “That isn’t something we ever did, not that it would have been a bad idea. Stella, perhaps you have a mind for this business, after all.” Caro smiled, thinly, in my direction.
“Thanks,” I told her. “That’s interesting to hear. But no maps?”
“No maps. No maps for poor Paul.”
—
I GOT ON THE SUBWAY at 77th. It had been, I reflected, a full enough day. The air in front of me was sort of swarming with something or other, but my body felt relaxed. Farther down the car, someone, a girl in green pants, I saw, was crying, and I watched a woman with two very young children reach across th
e aisle and hand her a package of Kleenex. The girl accepted this small piece of assistance. I looked away. I didn’t do anything on any of the trains I was on for the next thirty minutes. I just sat there, letting it sink in, whatever it was.
At home I decided to force myself to check my personal email for fallout from the most recent Whit debacle. It was possible there would be, fun now over, some screed of threats or even a lawsuit, considering Whit’s particular skill set. There was, however, radio silence from the Ghiscolmb sector. It was Marco who alerted me. “Is there any chance this is you?” was the alarmingly foreseeable subject of his email. Included in the body text was a link to a popular gossip site. One of the site’s editors had posted a video, taken, by some act of cosmic mercy, at sufficient distance from the scene that my face was not legible. Two distant figures, one recognizably male, the other a near-midget female, stand together in intimate conversation. Then one of the pair—this is the female—abruptly further reduces her height with respect to the other and pops her fist violently up into his crotch. The other, pain hilariously evident even under crackles of wind and running commentary by the videographer, drops to the ground and commences writhing, as the female stalks impassively off, climbing the museum steps like the angel of vengeance she has become.
I replied to Marco, “Absolutely not!” I then forwarded Marco’s message to Cate, adding, “If anyone asks, it’s not me ;-)” I went to seek some water. When I returned, Cate had already replied. “You are such a good shot,” she said. “This makes me so proud.”
I smiled. It occurred to me that assault charges from Whit would necessitate his admission that he was not honoring the terms of our separation agreement, and, not only this, that he was harassing me at work. There were literally hundreds of witnesses who’d seen him with me on Monday night, and at least one or two of them could easily be convinced to embroider the tale of how scared I’d been when I confided to him/her that I did not know how to shake my creepy estranged husband, though of course decorum had had to be maintained for the duration of the party. And then there was the fact that he probably didn’t want his name associated with an Internet meme celebrating his emasculation for the rest of his life. I took a few screen caps at choice moments and considered creating my own choppy GIF to help get the ball rolling.
