“Well, all I can tell you is I haven’t spoken to her since, what? Before Christmas? That would be Christmas fifty-nine. I’d given her an advance on a piece I’d commissioned but it never came through. Ran off with my wad. If you find her… Hell, don’t look at me like that. I don’t care about the money. She was a dame. We had a thing for a while. Did she ever mention me? You being friends.”
“Fifty-nine? Are you sure?” Claire asked. She must have disappeared only a short time after Claire knew her.
“I never forget a transaction with a beautiful woman. But you won’t find her. I’ve seen it before and I’ll never learn—never give an advance to an artist. She’s probably dead. Overdosed on something white.”
“Don’t say that,” Claire said.
“You need hope. That’s sweet. Someone said she changed her name and moved to India. Working as a shaman now. Imagine that.” He leaned his face in closer to Claire. She held her breath. “But take it from me, if you ever write that book: heroin sells best.”
The collector put Claire in touch with another subject of Nicolette’s, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd to receive her call, to suddenly be a part of a community of Subjects.
They met at the oyster lounge in Grand Central. He was sitting alone at the long cedar bar in cedar-colored lighting. When she spotted him from the doorway, she was so surprised by his good looks that all the blood rushed to her face; she could taste the crimson shade of it through her cheeks. He waved and she managed to make her way to him steadily enough. She guessed he was, like her, in his mid-forties. He wore a pinstripe suit a size too small and chain-smoked. His blond, sweptback hair was not unlike Freddie’s. He kept looking at Claire’s ears and jaw and eyebrows as he spoke, never directly in her eyes. He bounced his knee up and down to some song in his head, and seemed so excited to talk about Nicolette and his portrait that Claire could hardly get a word in edgewise. Sometimes his bouncing leg touched hers.
“She was strange, but I’ve met stranger. Right, but she was the real thing. She could be as weird as she wanted. She did a really funky painting of me. I was all covered in boils and lesions and my hair was falling out. I looked disgusting,” he said proudly. “I still have it. Hanging above the radiator.”
“Quite the conversation piece,” said Claire.
His knee paused briefly. “What’s your portrait like?”
Claire coughed and took a sip of her drink. She wondered what disease he might have had that only Nicolette could see. Or perhaps the artist had simply wanted to preserve his beauty. Nonchalantly, she said, “I tried to jump off my roof but couldn’t manage it.”
“You want another drink? Gin and tonic?”
“Tom Collins.”
“That’s what she painted?” He lifted a finger and searched the bar with his eyes. To the bartender he said, “Two gin and tonics.” To Claire, “So you hang it above your radiator, too?”
“Tom Collins,” Claire said. Then, “I don’t have it anymore. I don’t know where it is.”
“You don’t know where it is! It’s priceless!”
“It was stolen. It’s a long story.”
“You’ll have to track it down. I know my way around the scene. And under it.” He clicked his fingertips together in front of his face like a movie villain and Claire laughed. “Assuming that’s why you found me. And you want it back.”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I want it.” The bartender set her drink in front of her; it splashed over the edge and he wiped it with a towel. She waited until he left. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from her at all? Since she painted you.”
“Not a word. Makes me sound like a chump, but to be honest I thought we were friends. We went out a few times. Never saw her after.”
“Did you try to find her?”
“No.” He shook his head, then turned it into a nod. “Yes, I tried.”
“You liked her.”
“How could I not?” He looked down at his glass and shook the ice around. “You kind of look like her.”
“She’s half my age!”
“What would you say to her? If you found her at the end of this quest.”
“I don’t know. It’s not a quest.” Claire took a dainty sip of her drink through the small straw, then downed half of it from the rim. She had rehearsed it many times over the years, but the speech had morphed from hatred and revenge into something not altogether dissimilar to gratitude. She took another sip. “I suppose I’d say, ‘Thank you, now duck, because I may hit you.’”
“Really.” He smiled at her ears. “Me too.” It seemed he could control the number and placement of his dimples if he chose. He noted her glass and raised an eyebrow. “Another?”
Over the next hour, he ordered her two more. He said he could see why Nicolette would want to paint her. Claire wasn’t sure if this was a comment on her looks, or the ugliness that Nicolette could pull out of a person. But she didn’t care. Claire eyed herself in the spotted mirror behind the bar. When he’d paid the bill he said, “Let’s go make fun of tourists.”
They went up the staircase overlooking the enormous, dirty lobby of Grand Central. He lifted a flask from his jacket.
Claire laughed. “Are we allowed?”
“We don’t care.” He pulled her by the arm to the banister and they leaned over, looking below. “I love looking down at the crowds. Makes me feel bigger than them.”
“Of course it does,” Claire said, surprised by the coolness of her tone.
“So, you know me now?”
Claire took a pull of whiskey from his flask and looked at him over the bottom of it.
His eyes panned the floor below, the bustle of beggars and lowlifes rubbing ankles with families heading to their summer homes. He pointed out one man sweating in a trench coat. “You can always spot a tourist. See the way he tries not to check the clock? They’re so lost. But why pretend they’re not? They’d be much happier. Someone might even help them.” Then he wet his fingers by tipping the flask and sprinkled whiskey down on the heads of unsuspecting passengers. Claire gasped. He did it again, until finally one woman felt the drops and looked skyward. They turned around quickly. Claire covered her mouth to hide her delight. “You try,” he said. “Make sure it’s a fat one.” But he didn’t give her the chance. Under that immense domed ceiling, he grabbed her waist and pulled her against him. He kissed her ear, her neck.
“Not here.” Claire glanced at the strangers who brushed past without taking notice.
He took her hand and darted with her down the stairs. She let him pull her. Her body was loopy. As they ran across the lobby, Claire called to him, “Can you imagine we almost lost this building last month? How could they tear it down! Is that why we met here?”
He smiled mischievously and shook his head. “I’m about to show you why.” He pulled her through a wide door and onto a train platform. A train was waiting there, not yet boarding. Only a few people milled about, a conductor some ways off. Stepping to the edge of the platform at the very front of the train, near the doors they’d just come through, he turned to her and said, “Come on then.”
He grinned. Then he jumped.
Claire watched in amazement. He stood five feet below, between the tracks. He bowed his head slightly and, as she was standing above him, peeked theatrically up her skirt. He held his arms up, apparently to help her down. “No,” she mouthed. She glanced down the platform and back through the doors. No one had any idea what she was about to do. She squatted low, took his hands, and jumped down beside him. Her head whirled in slow motion. He backed her into the alcove.
In the tunnel where the trains pull up, where thousands of passengers walk by every day and never look down, they groped one another. Claire wanted to be horrified. Or she wanted to be hungry for him. They were tucked in a corner, mostly in shadow, the wide train engine looming before them. Only the conductor might see, if he were to board and peer down at a precise angle. Their private, public space. Kids had been h
ere before, the walls marked with graffiti and slogans:
BOREDOM IS ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY
OFF THA’ PIG
FREE HUEY
“We’re too old for this,” Claire said, helping him undo his belt. He kissed her mouth like he knew it well, had her lips sitting on his nightstand for years. “I feel old,” she moaned, “don’t you?” He mumbled something that sounded like “shut up” as he lifted her skirt. “You’ll help me find it? The painting?” she said, his blond hair in her mouth.
He ripped her stockings down and laughed insanely. He propped her up against the black, sooty wall. His shoulder hit her jaw. She kept her eyes open to keep from feeling like she was erasing Mary.
“Wild painter girl!” he laughed into her ear.
A single cold nail jutted from the wall close to her neck.
“I’m not her,” she said. It almost felt like a lie.
As he moved against her, she trained her eyes on the graffiti scratched on the adjacent wall:
BE CRUEL
PART VI: I WILL FIND YOU, FALLING WOMAN 2004
I’m on the roof of the gallery and they’re coming for me.
The din of the protest has faded away. The sun is nearly down now, hidden in a nook between two buildings, disguising itself like another window with another sun glinting off it. There’s a good breeze coming off the Hudson and I’m alone, waiting. I’m good at waiting.
Jill and the painting are gone. There’s a chance I’ll never see them again—but I don’t believe that thought. That’s a liar thought.
Footsteps sound in the stairwell. They’ll be here any minute. I can hear their numbers, the way they move in packs. The Hasidim. They’re finally here to take me like they took my sister. I wait for their canes against my back.
5.5 pills remaining, 4,313 surveillance cameras in the subway system (only 2,156 actually work), 250,000 war protestors reported, 500,000 actually gathered.
But you missed what happened. Sometimes you leave and I don’t know where you go. Let’s jump back in time half an hour. You’ll have to imagine your own whirling time-travel sounds.
When I found Jill—when I find Jill—he’s a flamingo in the alleyway off Twenty-Third, his usual stance, one leg bent up on the wall, smoking his cigarette—but the opposite of bright pink. In the shadow of the dumpster, he blends into the air and the building. There’s a big industrial garbage bag at his feet, like when I first met him. I guess I expected to see a whole entourage of paid-off thieves. I’m disappointed it’s only him. With his leather-gloved hands, he throws me a pair of cheap black knit gloves meant for kids and a salmon-colored ski mask.
“It’s salmon-colored,” I say.
“Is it salmon? I’d call it pink.” He shrugs. “Hard to find black. It’s summer.” I gesture with my eyes at his mask, which just so happens to be black. “Had mine a few seasons.”
“What if they catch me because of the color?”
He says there’s only one real camera on floor nine, where we’re heading, black and white—which he tells me I should have known from heist movies. He digs through the garbage bag and pulls out two Styrofoam bowls. “Put these on your shoulders. Under your shirt.”
I look at him as in, um…? He rolls his eyes like I should’ve known this, too. “On the off chance we’re actually recorded—which won’t happen because I know which cameras are fakes and which aren’t, and I’ve studied their directional and oscillational abilities—they won’t be able to recognize your body type. Get it?” He pushes them into my hands. “Trust me.”
I slip on the bowls and the gloves, which stretch just enough to fit over my hands, and am about to put on the pink mask, but Jill shakes his head and tells me to wait until we’re in the front door, that we don’t want to look suspicious to passersby.
“Did you bring the cash?” he asks.
I dig the five hundred bucks out of my front pocket and hand it over.
He shoves the money in an empty Marlboro pack. “Thanks,” he mumbles. He seems embarrassed. Then he pinches off the cherry of his cigarette, sticks it in his front pocket, and stands up straight. I take a breath so deep it hurt. He might have gotten me a girl’s mask, but at least he looks ready.
He nods. I nod back. The bricks are yellowing their faces in the early evening sun. Sure, there are words in me, like “What am I doing?” and “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done I’ll rot in jail and get raped by big hairy men,” but cottony fear suffocates them out, my lunch ticking in my stomach like a bomb. I want to ask for water. We edge out of the alley, and Jill looks up and down the street, like in the movies. Then he unlocks the big metal door and we’re in, just like that, as if we’re doing nothing wrong.
It’s surprisingly loud in the quiet of the closed-up building. We slip on our masks and I hear the sound of a washing machine coming from somewhere else, or maybe the sound of a very gravelly female voice humming a Bulgarian song? There are the words out of control and dumbass lameboy tapping out of the walls.
Jill wraps himself around the stairwell like he’s a blanket of snow-melt, silent, dripping. He’s obviously had practice with this—there’s a secret strength in him. I bumble up after. There are our staccato footsteps arguing with the static of the building, an old snore and hum. There is the battle in the walls—rats and other long-toothed animals. A city centipede crawling faster than me up the stairs. It slips into a crack where I can’t follow.
“So you’ve done this before?” I ask, out of breath by the tenth step.
“Shh.”
“So you’ve done this before?” I whisper.
“No. Sort of. I’ve done this before, yes, all right. Never galleries. Only homes.”
“You’re an art thief?”
“I prefer to think of myself as part of the growing field of art valuation. Fell into it in my twenties.”
His voice is being broadcast by the metal handrail I’m holding. I’m afraid my voice would do the same so I keep my answer brief. “Hm.”
“Yeah, so, what’s your day job?”
“I predict ideas.”
“Quiet down.”
Quietly, I tell him I work for a predictive marketing firm.
“Fancy,” he grunts.
“I make spreadsheets,” I say. “Were you at the protest today?”
“What’s another face in the crowd?”
“What about Vietnam? I read how you helped those people.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Simple Google search,” I tell the old geezer. “You were in the Village Voice like five times, and once in the New York Times.”
“Twice in the Times, I think. I thought twice.”
Between flights three through nine, Jill whispers to me the story of the painting. He says it lingered on the black market for a long time, then it was sold in auction since it was never reported as a theft. Bought by a woman is all he knows. Then there was a twenty-year gap when no one knew where it was, until one day the painting ended up here, apparently donated. They probably had it in a storeroom for years. Then he tells me about his own heists.
“I follow all my own cases online,” he says. “Good to keep tabs on that sort of thing. The Interpol website’s pretty comprehensive. The FBI’s okay. I mean, not all the jobs I’ve done get flagged. But it means something if a painting you grabbed gets posted under Recent Thefts, right up there with The Scream. Which, have you been reading about this? Stolen in broad daylight. Just like us, hey. It means something, to be monitored. Means I’ve touched something important.”
“So how did our painting get on the black market in the first place?”
Jill is suddenly out of breath and says he guesses it was stolen from Claire Bishop’s home. He tells me how sometimes there’s a buyer before you do a job, and you don’t want to mess with those guys. And if it makes the five o’clock news, they usually report the value and hence your percentage of the market sale and how can you turn your back on those dollar signs? But he says o
ur job here won’t make the nightly news, what with the GOP in town. And the authorities try their best to not let these things go public and show how easy it is to rip off fifty-thousand-dollar works of art.
We reach the ninth floor, me drinking my own linty sweat from my upper lip. Jill unlocks the gallery door and says he’ll keep a lookout and I nod solemnly because that was the deal—he wasn’t going to do the actual deed.
Inside the gallery, everything is ringed in salmon-colored fuzz—the hardwood floor, the walls, the desk-sans-gallery-sitter. There’s a siren in the distance. A clock that I never noticed before ticks so loudly my bones vibrate. The sounds of trying to be quiet. My own muscles berating me. It’s fine, I tell my muscles, I’m about to finally have something real to offer Nicolette. I’m helping her, taking it away from the Hasidim.
And there it is, waiting for me. The falling woman’s hair glows; I can almost feel it on my own scalp. Her arm drooping over the frame, glistening like she is sweating too. The whole thing shines out, its essence reaching for me, bright as lightning as I lift it from the wall.
Time falls around me. The gallery walls crumble brick by brick. Through the bouquets of mortar and dust, I see the ancient meadows of the city. They hover above the sidewalks, the traffic cones, running down to the estuary and the sea. I see the layered shinbones of our ancestors, and feel the soil between my toes, the wild marshes of the Manhattan. Beyond that is the liquid future, shimmering and proud. The high clouds. The satellites. All shot through with light.
Briefly, I crawl into the painting: the cobblestone street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the body of a woman falling. Every brushstroke an apology.
I am the little masked thief in the corner of the image, nearly invisible, walking down the painted street. I tap my foot on a cobblestone, smudge it.
This feels right, it doesn’t matter if it’s stealing. Me and the painting: forever.
The snap of a nail hitting the floor. A streak of lightning in my peripheral vision: the sound of the alarm. In the shape of a lightning bolt the gallery wall splits open. All of us, for a brief and infinite second, are sucked into the seam of the world. Slipped through the crack, disappeared like we never existed. And I don’t know who I am and no one will know us because there is no one to do the remembering but no one will forget us either, since there is nothing to be forgotten. The world is quiet because it is gone. In the end there is just me and the painting.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 20
