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She never mentioned those hidden pictures again and the next time I tried to find them there was no secret drawer. When I
asked about it, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about, it must have been something I dreamed. After I started
school our Ladies’ Days grew less and less frequent, finally ended altogether. By then I had forgotten.

Though it was barely six o’clock when I arrived, the gallery was already full, bodies three-deep by the bar that had been
set up across from the staircase. From the center of the room came frequent, social shrieks, many in elaborate foreign accents.
It was a typical New York gallery opening except, instead of the usual assortment of slouching artists and trendy middle-aged
collectors, tonight’s crowd consisted of
what Henry calls end users. Not the people who make art or broker sales, but the ones in whose homes the procured products
hang.

They were, for the most part, over fifty, elaborately coiffed, perfectly manicured, and expensively (though not always tastefully)
dressed in soft pastels. The women carried largish purses, the men small ones, and both favored a certain weight in both perfume
and jewelry. I suspected that Elizabeth and the Queen Mum would have felt right at home.

The guest list for tonight’s event was dictated by the paintings concealed behind the bodies. Over the past twenty years Mum
has gradually shifted the New York gallery’s main emphasis from traditional surrealism to works by newer artists, including
her photographers, whom she’s selected, cultivated, and persuaded Foucault to buy. For the past few years the balance sheet
has left the old man no choice but to go along with Mum’s picks, but he insists on one annual show of the surrealist work
that he continues to buy himself. To this opening only an elite group handpicked by Foucault—the end users—are invited. My
mother prefers to call them the living dead. They turn out not because they are particularly fond of surrealism themselves,
but because Foucault is a little like a geriatric Gatsby, a largely invisible presence who has managed, against all the art
world’s conventional rules, to retain both great wealth and mystique. People come on the chance that he will make an appearance,
which he does, at random and usually without notice, every few years.

Tonight as I entered I heard his name whispered, caught several women craning their heads in search of him. I hoped he’d pull
one of his infamous no-shows. Then I could give my mother the satisfaction of my appearance without paying her price. Though
that might make it more difficult for me to accomplish what I’d come to do.

I was standing in line by the bar when I spotted her across the room, next to a Redon portrait of a man with flowers for hair.
She wore a black Dior cocktail dress that my father bought years ago at the St. Barnabas Church thrift shop. I remembered
because she said it was the one bargain he’d ever found that really had never been used. He told her it made her look like
Audrey Hepburn. Which was true, then and now.

She checked her watch, peered over my head, but didn’t see me. A tall, elegantly dressed man spoke to her, and for an instant
I thought he might be Foucault, but since no one else paid him any attention, I decided he must be a customer. She smiled
at him, tossed her head, and dipped her lashes.

Something in her expression made me think of the spring she redecorated her and my father’s bedroom. Draped striped chintz
over the windows, laid a matching throw rug over the old black carpet, and hung two Tchelitchew lithographs of barren landscapes
to “unify” the room. She pushed the twin beds together and covered them with a single king-size spread.

“I am sick to death of patterning my life after Rob and Laura Petrie,” she said. “Dick Van Dyke may worry about what umpteen
million viewers think when he goes to sleep in the same room as Mary Tyler Moore, but your father and I don’t have that problem
and it’s high time we stopped conducting our married life as if we did!”

Later that week I found a two-volume
Marital Companion
wedged, spine backward, on Mum’s bookshelf. Henry, who had already read it cover-to-cover, said Mum was trying to save her
marriage through sex. Too embarrassed to actually read the book, I did leaf through it and was relieved it had no pictures.
I preferred to think of Mum and Dad swirling around the dance floor at the Rainbow Room. What was wrong with separate beds?

Perhaps it was a credit to my mother’s plan that I walked in on them for the first and only time just a few days after she’d
finished redecorating. On a Sunday morning. Not that early. I’d been watching TV, had seen a machine that sliced and diced
and creamed and frappéed and looked exactly like one on my father’s drawing board. I thought maybe Dad had sold the idea and
was about to make a million dollars (I’ assumed that any product advertised on TV must be worth millions of dollars to its
inventor), or that someone had stolen his idea and he’d have to sue to get it back. In either case, I thought it worth waking
him to see the commercial.

The door was open a crack. Silence within. The first thing I noticed
was my father’s side of the bed—empty. The second was the mountain of sheets loaded up on my mother’s side. Nothing moved.
No one made a sound. All I could see was my father’s hair, black on my mother’s white pillow.

I backed out and shut the door, soundless and tight, vowed never to enter that bedroom again when both of them were in there.

The advertised gizmo went clean out of my head until the next time I saw it on TV, nearly a month later, while Dad was sitting
safely next to me. He said the device was neither a theft nor a bonanza but only the usual competition.

“Can I help you?” The bartender looked as if he’d been waiting awhile.

“Oh. Wine, I guess.” I glanced at my mother, still chatting with the elegant man. She lifted her glass possessively and sipped.
Red liquid. Red stain from her lipstick on the edge. The bartender handed me my wine and looked to the person behind me.

The liquid in my glass was the color of bleach. I left it on the corner of the bar and moved against the wall. Tanguy on one
side, Ernst on the other. New old art, as Mum once called it.

She turned her head and caught my eye, immediately broke off her conversation and came over.

“Why are you just standing here?”

“I was admiring the work. No one else is.”

“These people acquire art. They don’t look at it.”

She broke off to greet a mildly desiccated couple with a gracious-hostess smile. They reciprocated, appraised me in one querulous
glance, and moved on.

“Is Henry
here yet?”

She nodded through a break in the crowd. Across the room my brother was leaning over a life-sized Madame Alexander doll.

“Looks like true love.”

“I hope so. Then he can move in with her.”

“He’s back with you again?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’ve heard some small towns are buying their homeless people oneway tickets to California. He could stake his claim in Silicon
Valley.”

“I’m afraid he’s already staked his claim on West Ninetieth Street. But if he sticks to Coralie, he might expand his territory
to France.”

“Henry told me Foucault has a new girl. That her?”

But more people were arriving, and she began to get the edgy, officious look that meant she was feeling compromised.

“Come,” she said. “Come meet Gerard.”

“That’s the other half of your plan, isn’t it?”

She scooped her tongue around the front of her teeth. “You didn’t come just to look at the paintings, did you?”

“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”

Gerard Foucault was hiding in the back office. Perched on the edge of Mum’s huge walnut desk (which was really, of course,
his own), he did indeed look like a screech owl. The requisite hooked beak and protruding eyes, bushy white eyebrows, and
colorless hair that sprouted in two wild tufts on either side of a pale scalp dome. But in spite of his ramrod posture and
pin-striped suit, I was surprised to feel a stab of sympathy. The image of this old bird coupling with the little cover girl
outside was as pathetic as it was grotesque.

My mother made the introductions and asked Foucault if there was anything he needed, to which he gave an ambiguous shrug.
She smoothed her dress down over her hips, threw me an encouraging glance, and strode back outside.

“Please be seated.” Foucault indicated an overstuffed armchair opposite the desk.

I sat.

His gaze roamed the Delvaux, Roy, and De Chirico paintings that, at his insistence, adorned the office walls. It was the gaze
of a jealous child checking to see that no one had played with his toys.

“Your mother tells me you have great talent.” He pronounced mother “moth-her.”

“Everyone has talent. The trick is to figure out how to use it.”

The great tufts lifted, and for the first time, he looked directly at me. His eyes were a queer purplish color, like eggplant.

“You are an optimist,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“To think that everyone has talent. That is the most sublime optimism I know.”

“I didn’t say genius. Talent is more like potential. We all have it, but most of us squander it. Or run from it.”

“That is you?”

“Running?”

“From your own potential.”

Potency-al. It was as if this conversation were a series of trapdoors, and every time I opened my mouth, another door shut
behind me. I didn’t answer.

“De Chirico knew about terror,” he said. “All the surrealists did. They used it to focus their talent. You look at a Magritte,
you enter another world full of ideas and emotions and humor. You look at some of these new paintings, what do you enter?
Nothing! A white square. Drips. Dots. Pencil marks on a blank wall. Bah! They have taken art and reduced it to bullsheet.”

He eased himself off the desk, walked over to a Delvaux painting of multiple dead-eyed girls who reminded me of the Stepford
Wives.

“Some people would say that painting pictures of nightmares is a form of bullshit.”

He spun around. “You know what is my favorite book in the world? Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece,
Through the Looking-Glass.
Good art should be like a magic looking glass that pulls you inside, to a place where you will discover things you never
could have guessed. A place beyond
nightmares.
No?”

“A place where it’s easy to lie.” What I remembered of my father’s work took me to the heart of his nightmares as well as
my own. They were not representations. They did not interpret or try to tell more than the truth. That they did not go “beyond”
was a testament to their accomplishment. They did not lie.

“People who have talent can create such worlds. You think everyone has talent? If you do, my dear, I would certainly consider
you to be an optimist. Or a fool.”

Dad used to say he’d been a fool.

“What about you?” I asked. “Do you have that kind of talent, Gerard?”

Foucault ignored both the archness and the familiarity of my question. He casually strolled about the office picking up a
paperweight here, straightening a painting there. When he arrived at the door to the gallery, he stopped and stared as if
he could see through it.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I believe I have talent. Not the same as a great painter, of course, but I have created something
worthwhile, a kind of a world. With beauty and uncertainty, intelligence. Anxiety. Age and youth.”

He turned to face me, and I noticed how his pants, impeccably tailored though they were, hung slack from his narrow waist
to his shoes as if there were nothing inside.

Suddenly all sympathy, all tolerance, evaporated in the recognition of this old, pathetic man as an enemy. I remembered the
one and only other time I’d seen him, on a blazing hot day in Chinatown. Around the same time that my mother redecorated her
bedroom.

He’d had his driver pull up to the curb outside our apartment, and Henry and I watched from the doorway as Mum slid into the
car—a silver Bentley with heavily tinted windows. She wore a white suit with a miniskirt that rode up her thigh as she sank
back into the seat. She waved goodbye and, in that split second, I froze on her one naked reaching hand, her stockinged calf
ending in a pale pink heel and, beyond, the dim outline of a man’s pant leg. I couldn’t see his face.

Now, as I caught Foucault’s purple gaze, what I saw instead were those legs. His. Hers. Splitting like wishbones.

The old man turned, stroking his chin. “Do you agree, Maibelle? Do you think it takes talent to develop one of the most important
galleries in New York?”

Far from arrogance, he was begging for precisely the approval and
encouragement my mother had sent me to collect from him. He can make the kind of promises only the very rich are equipped
to keep, she’d once told me. But she had never spelled out what he expected in return.

“Yes, Mr. Foucault.” My voice sounded as if I were talking through a tin can. I’d ventured into my mother’s world here, crossed
a forbidden line. He was a deal she’d made for herself. A bargain with the devil maybe, but not
my
enemy. I needed to cross back.