The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  When the remaining jewelry had been packed back up, when the art had been replaced in its rubber bands and envelopes (Bill had neglected to bring anything better for storage), the general counsel was still not there. It was 11:20. Debra was spinning the key ring again.

  Roman said, “Should I phone someone? At Northwestern?”

  They sent him to call the bed and breakfast from the lobby to see if there’d been a message. He came back shaking his head.

  But meanwhile, Nora had opened the shoebox of papers, started sorting them into stacks. She said, “There’s more than I remembered.”

  “The more the better,” Bill said.

  “Yes, but I wanted to go through it with you—really I have to—and I don’t see how we’ll get it done.” Stanley leaned over and pulled out half an inch of papers with bare hands, and Bill inhaled sharply. “Sit down,” Nora said, and Yale and Bill and Roman all did, on the cold metal folding chairs. Yale sat at her left elbow. Debra paced. “This one here,” Nora said, “now you see it’s signed ‘Fou-Fou,’ and I’m sure you could figure out that was Foujita, but look.” She showed them a small sketch of a ragged puppy next to the signature. “You wouldn’t know that this was because he called me ‘Nora Inu.’ Nora means ‘stray,’ you see, in Japanese, and he thought this was wonderful, that I was a stray who’d found my way across the ocean. ‘Nora Inu’ is ‘stray dog.’ That sounds like an insult, I suppose, but it wasn’t.”

  “Amazing,” Yale said, and he met Bill’s exuberant eyes. “That—details like that, I think, will help a great deal with authentication. Maybe we could record you, what you’re saying—”

  “Well yes, someone should be taking it all down. Isn’t that what you’re for?” This was directed at Roman.

  “I have a notebook in the car,” he said, helplessly. And when they all kept looking at him, he bounded from the room to fetch it.

  “Well,” Nora said, “my point is you’re going to need these stories. And I don’t see how we’re going to do that if you take this all back to Chicago. And I’m going to want to sort things too. I can see now they’re out of order. Couldn’t you stay up here a week or so?”

  But they couldn’t, not right now. They had meetings, they had a gallery to run—plus as soon as the papers were signed, they wanted to get the art away from Frank. They hit on the idea that Roman could take the shoebox to the public library that afternoon, along with a load of dimes, and Xerox everything. The originals could remain in Wisconsin for now. “Not in the house, though,” Yale put in. “So much more could happen to them there.”

  “Yes, yes,” Nora said. He didn’t need to spell it out.

  They’d leave it all at the bank, and next week Yale and Roman would come back up, help her sort through.

  When Roman returned, out of breath, Yale felt a knocking on his knee. Knuckles. He understood that he wasn’t to jump or ask what Nora wanted. He looked down as subtly as he could at her closed fist. When she raised it slightly, he put his palm beneath it. She was passing him something. She let it drop into his hand, and he closed his fingers around a complicated object, metal and pointy. He could feel a chain. A necklace.

  He didn’t understand, but he shoved it into his trouser pocket, shifted so the sharp part dropped next to his groin.

  She said to them all, “Listen, I feel dandy today, but I don’t know how I’ll feel next week, and if nothing else I want you to take this down.” She pointed at Roman. “Everything I read about Modigliani says he drank himself to death. That’s bunk. He died of tuberculosis. The drinking was only to cover up the illness, because there was such a stigma. He’d be at a party and start coughing, and he’d pretend to be falling-down drunk and take off. Now, he really was a bit of a drunk, that’s why it worked. He was trying to save his dignity, isn’t that funny? I don’t think he imagined that decades later people would still be saying he drank himself to death. It makes me terribly angry. Did you write that down?”

  Roman read from his notebook: “Modigliani died of tuberculosis, not alcohol.”

  “Ha. Well, you missed a bit. Next time, a tape recorder. Now I need to tell you about Ranko, because you won’t find anything in a book.”

  But the teller was back at the door. She said, “There’s a man here who’d like permission to join your party.”

  Yale stood. His adrenal glands did strange and unwelcome things.

  But the man stepping into the room was not Frank. It was someone Yale had never seen before—a tall, older black man brushing snow from his trench coat and looking horribly peeved.

  “Herbert!” Bill said, and rose to shake his hand, a big, manly shake.

  And while everyone was turned that way, Nora tapped Yale’s arm. “For Fiona,” she said. The necklace.

  Yale nodded and rose to greet Herbert Snow. “This is our general counsel,” he said to everyone, to himself, to the universe.

  * * *

  —

  Yale and Bill and Roman whooped and sang all the way back to Egg Harbor.

  At the inn, Yale called Charlie.

  “That’s good,” Charlie said. “I’m really happy for you.”

  “You’re really happy for me? Come on, this is huge! That’s like what you say when you see your ex on the street, Oh, you have a new boyfriend, you lost weight, I’m really happy for you. This is a huge thing! Like, the art is literally in Bill’s room. I’m taking you out to dinner. Tomorrow, because we have to stay one more night. We have Xeroxing to do, and the roads are bad. Where do you want to go? For dinner?”

  “I’ll think about it.” There was a pause, and then Charlie said, “I really am happy for you. I’m just tired.”

  Yale almost said something then about the house, about how there was this house he’d been wanting Charlie to visit, and this was the sign, this was the right time—but that could wait. He’d bring it up tomorrow, when they’d had some wine.

  He called Fiona next, and she shrieked gratifyingly. He told her he had something for her, told her to come by the gallery to see the art. She said, “Oh, Yale, this was supposed to happen, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  —

  On the ride back the next morning—art packed and padded in the trunk, sheaves of Xeroxes on the backseat, papers signed and dated and witnessed—the three of them talked at full speed.

  “I do feel bad for the family,” Yale said. “We’re not terrible people, are we?”

  Bill said, “That man would take the pieces to the wrong restorers, the wrong appraisers, he’d get ripped off, and nothing would ever get authenticated, let alone into the catalogs. A lot of the world’s great art has been lost thanks to folks exactly like Frank.”

  “And this will make the gallery,” Yale said. “I mean—I’m sorry, the gallery’s already in tremendous shape—”

  Bill laughed to reassure him. “But we don’t yet have four Modiglianis.”

  Roman spoke from the middle of the backseat: “This is a hell of a first week.”

  * * *

  —

  It hit Yale halfway home: If Nora weren’t donating everything, she might well have willed a piece to Fiona. A single sketch could have paid Fiona’s way to college. And certainly Fiona knew it. And she’d never said a thing.

  2015

  When Fiona got back to Richard’s, Jake Austen was on the couch talking to Serge. She wanted to be angry at the invasion, she let herself be angry, but maybe she was a little relieved too. No one would ask her, yet, how her day had gone. Still: She hadn’t imagined this guy would embed himself. His eyes were red, his shirt undone one button too low.

  She put her purse on the counter, slid her shoes off. Both men waved, and Jake pointed dramatically to his phone, which lay on the coffee table. He was recording. Fiona made herself tea as quietly as she could.

  Serge was saying, “He finds the space between the action an
d the resting. He doesn’t want the photo of action, and he doesn’t want the photo of rest, okay? Yes? He looks for the moment between.” Fiona was unclear about whether Serge worked as a publicist for anyone else anymore, or if giving interviews about Richard had become his life.

  Jake tapped his phone, and the two men relaxed. “How’d it go?” Jake said. “They, ah, they filled me in, I hope you don’t mind. Is everything okay?”

  “Christ,” she said. “I don’t know.” Well, there went her little fantasy of looking like a normal person on a normal trip. Poof.

  Fiona hadn’t had dinner yet, but she wanted to go straight to bed. She should call Damian, though, and not forget to ask after Karen with something like concern. She ought to call Cecily and tell her that yes, Kurt was definitely in Paris, even if Cecily wouldn’t want to hear it. Or maybe it could wait. Was it even Fiona’s responsibility to tell her? She’d always had a bad sense of who fell under her jurisdiction and who didn’t. Cecily had known why she was coming here, wished her the best. Fiona hadn’t told her, though, about the little girl in the video. Why do that, when nothing was certain?

  She said, “I think I’m done for the day.”

  “This is perfect,” Serge said, “because you can come to the party! I convinced Jake to join already.”

  “Party?”

  “At Corinne’s, remember? We take the Métro to Vincennes at seven, okay? We get you home early, don’t worry!”

  “Oh. I—”

  “Lots of important artists there. And you need to meet Corinne’s husband. You need to see his beard.”

  “His beard?”

  Serge laughed. “Trust me. Just trust.”

  * * *

  —

  Fiona called Damian from her room, and he wanted every detail repeated three times. It sounded less hopeless in the retelling, more like progress.

  “This is great!” he said. “This is huge!”

  She pretended, for his benefit, that she believed him.

  Karen’s radiation started on Monday; otherwise he’d hop on a plane, he hoped she knew that. “I haven’t been to Paris since that conference in ’94,” he said.

  “And you left me home with a baby. I never forgave you.” But she knew he could hear her smiling. “I don’t know what to do with myself,” she said. She told him about the party.

  “Go!” he said. “You get to hang out with artists in Paris! Go and have a good time.”

  “It’s not exactly hanging out with artists,” she said. “We’re not sketching at the café.”

  He said, “Listen, try to retrace your great-aunt’s steps while you’re there. Didn’t you always want to? What about her boyfriend, the dead one?”

  “Ranko Novak?”

  “Try to track him down.”

  “What, his grave?”

  “I don’t know. Sure.”

  “You’re sweet, Damian.”

  “Go to the party.” And then, “Ciao,” which was something she used to find charming, back when he was her professor and she didn’t know better.

  Well, getting ready for a party was an excuse not to call Cecily. And she really didn’t have it in her to call Cecily yet.

  * * *

  —

  Fiona wished Jake weren’t with them, weren’t holding the Métro bar with two fingers and looking down at her. Richard and Serge sat behind her speaking rapid French, so Fiona had no one to talk to but Jake, and no way to talk to him but quasi-flirtatiously. The one dress she’d brought, a pale blue wrap, was low cut—and although she had a light coat, the buttons were broken and it hung open. Jake was staring straight down her cleavage.

  When they disembarked in Vincennes and walked through the dark, quiet streets, past shops and restaurants and then beautiful, narrow houses, Jake got close to her ear and said, “So is this the Evanston of Paris?” and she couldn’t help laughing. She stopped herself, though, so he wouldn’t think he’d earned it.

  He smelled of gin, and she wondered if he’d been drinking at Richard’s or before.

  She checked her phone, although she’d just checked it two minutes ago and the ringer was on. And there was no reason Arnaud would be calling yet. But she couldn’t help refreshing her email, clicking on her empty voice mail.

  It struck her that she could get rid of Jake by fucking him. It would be fun, she’d get it out of her system, and then he’d do the inevitable and graciously disappear. If he lingered, if he showed up tomorrow, she could always pretend she was in love, ask when they could see each other back in Chicago. “You know,” she could say if the situation got desperate, “there’s a chance I’m still fertile.”

  Would he even be able to perform, drunk as she assumed he was? He held each syllable a bit too long (“Check out that mooooon”), held her gaze too long, moved his feet too slowly. Not enough for Richard or Serge to notice, apparently, but enough to irritate Fiona. Why was he allowed to go through life drunk? Why was he allowed his boomerang wallet?

  * * *

  —

  And then she was stuck with him at the damn party. Both of them hung by Richard and Serge in the entryway at first, where Corinne (in a yellow tunic dress and a necklace of enormous wooden beads) greeted them warmly, made sure they had drinks, beckoned her husband from the next room. Fernand Leclercq’s beard was, as Serge had promised, prodigious: chest-length, as snowy and curled as the beard on a Claymation Santa. Importance radiated off him, a buzz that filled the foyer. “Feel free to look around,” he said, and she couldn’t figure out why she’d need or want such an invitation until she realized the house was filled with incredible art, that guests were sticking their necks into corners and back halls and even upstairs to glimpse Fernand and Corinne’s acquisitions. A Basquiat hung outside the bathroom; a Julian Schnabel plate portrait dominated the dining room.

  People made an effort to speak English to her at first—Corinne, Serge, the German writer they introduced her to—but soon everything was a whirl of French, and she was left talking to Jake. They wound up in a sunroom at the back of the house, a room that filled and then emptied every few minutes as guests popped in to make sure they hadn’t missed any trays of food, buckets of champagne, seminal works of cubism.

  He said, “I’ve been studying his work online. Richard’s. It’s weird how many photos I didn’t even know were his. Like, famous ones. That triptych thing, I’ve totally admired that before. No idea it was Campo. And I saw one of you, I think. Yeah?” Despite the drink in his hand, he seemed soberer now than he had on the Métro. She wanted him to disappear.

  “Was I wearing a flowery dress?”

  “No, you were next to a guy—you were curled up next to someone in a hospital bed.”

  Fiona attempted to drain her champagne, although it hurt her nose when she swallowed. “You’re asking about private things,” she said. “It’s art, but I was there. Those were my friends.”

  “I—hey, I actually didn’t ask anything. I don’t think I asked a question.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What were you afraid I was going to ask?”

  She thought. “You were going to ask me who that was, in the bed.”

  “Hey, do you want to sit down?”

  “No.” She looked at the group hovering in the sunroom door, but they were speaking French and hadn’t glanced her way.

  “Can I—listen, I just have one question, and it’s not about that picture, it’s about the triptych.”

  “Christ. What.”

  “Sorry! Sorry. Let’s find food.”

  She was stressed about things that had nothing to do with Jake Austen and his invasion, but he was a convenient punching bag. And so she stepped too close to him, spoke too loud. “That was Julian Ames. In the triptych. He was a beautiful person, an actor, and Richard took the first photo when everything was great, and he took the second when Julian
was freaking out because he knew he was sick, and then he took the third when he weighed like a hundred pounds.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I—”

  “My brother died in this stupid hospital where my parents put him, this place where everyone was scared of him and no one knew what the hell they were doing, and Julian came up there every single day. He wasn’t the smartest guy, but he was loyal and he felt things more than other people. You, you numb out with alcohol, right? Some people actually feel things. And there was this nurse who’d come around with the menu, but she wouldn’t bring it into the room. Not that he could eat anything anyway.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Shut up. So half the time it didn’t matter, because Nico was out of it. What we realized at the very end was he had lymphoma of the central nervous system, and these idiot doctors missed it and gave him steroids, which was the worst thing. But it reduced the brain swelling at first, so for a couple days he had these lucid windows. He’d reemerge for ten minutes, and then he’d be gone again. So he’s lucid one day and the nurse comes and stands there, and she’s got this smug little face, and she starts reading the menu from the doorway. Julian’s in there with me, and Nico’s alert, and the nurse goes, ‘Spaghetti with meatballs.’ So Julian stands at the foot of Nico’s bed and repeats it in this theater voice, like he’s playing a Shakespearean king, and then he does—it was somewhere between pantomime and an interpretive dance. This whole thing about spaghetti, twining it around his fork, slurping the noodles. And the nurse just has this look on her face, like, This is why you’re all sick, look at this faggy behavior. Julian goes right up and peers over her shoulder at the menu, and he announces the next thing, which is chicken salad, and he does a chicken dance. He does the whole menu like that while the nurse stands there.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “No. It was sad and awful. It was the last time my brother was awake.”