Park Lane South, Queens (21 page)

“You have someone at the track passing you signals!”

“That's right.”

“That's illegal!”

“So's the grass you got growin in your mother's backyard.”

Claire stood up slowly. She walked to the back door and fiddled clumsily with the lock.

“Just flip the top part to the right,” he said.

She waited till the Mayor was beside her, then walked into the bright sunlight and looked into the startled eyes of a golden horse. She hadn't even gotten to the part about the near electrocution. The door slammed tight behind her.

CHAPTER 10

Carmela was ready for her, pacing the porch when she got back home. She was livid. “What the hell do you think you're doing with my car? You don't even have a license!”

“Here are the keys. I have such a headache. I'm sorry. I won't take your stupid car anymore.”

“That's right, you won't. You've got a lot of nerve.” She snatched the keys and went back into the house. Claire went in, too. Mary was sitting at the kitchen table and Zinnie was sprawled across the countertop. The Mayor, for one, was glad to be home before supper.

“My God!” Claire cried. “You've cut your hair!”

Mary looked up, frightened. She snatched apologetically at her neck. “Yes,” she whispered. “And your father hasn't seen me yet.”

“Mom! Your beautiful hair!”

“Dead on the hairdresser's floor.” She folded her hands and placed them in her lap. “I don't know what came over me.”

“It's your new look, Ma,” Zinnie said. “No big deal.”

“Next she'll be going on a diet,” Carmela said.

“And that starts with
d
and that rhymes with
p
and that stands for
pool,
” said Zinnie.

“All I meant was—”

“Just shut up. Nobody cares what you meant.”

“Oh, I've got that straight. That's nothing new to me.” Carmela's eyes filled with tears. “Nobody cares about me at all since the mystic marvel here ran out of luck and had to condescend to live with the likes of us!”

The telephone rang and Zinnie picked it up. “It's for you, mystic marvel.”

“I don't want to talk to him,” Claire shook her head. “And don't anyone use the bathroom radio. It's dead. And so, almost, was I.”

“It's that Stefan.”

“Oh. Oh, all right. Give it to me. Hello?”

“Good evening.” His accent was thicker over the phone. “How are you holding up in this heat wave?”

“Fine. You?”

“So la la. Listen, the reason I'm calling … I'm driving into town tonight … Soho. Julio Marble is having a show and I thought I'd have a look at his new work. Perhaps buy something for the entrance hall. Would you like to come along?”

“You couldn't have called at a better time,” Claire scowled at Carmela. “That's exactly what I'd like to do. Get away from everything for a little bit.”

“Pick you up at seven, then.”

“All right.”

“Ciao.”

“And tomorrow,” Zinnie was telling her mother, “we'll go up to the mall and get your ears pierced.”

Stefan drove along the Long Island Expressway with the top down. Claire's hair whipped unnervingly across her eyes but he was going so fast that she couldn't catch hold of it to anchor it down. Gladys Knight and the Pips blasted from quadriphonic speakers, Stefan yodeling along with staccato clumsiness. You could take the boy's soul out of Bialystok but you couldn't take the Bialystok out of his soul. By the time they got to the colorful, raggedy streets of Soho, Claire was ready for a calming drink and a cigarette, the hell with reform. Stefan left the red Porsche open and the top down. If he closed it up, he explained cheerfully, they would simply break the window to get the radio and that would be worse still, what with insurance costs and unreasonably long waits for import replacements.

“That's absurd!” marveled Claire.

“Ah, but true. Just look at the other cars.”

Sure enough, two other German makes had signs taped to their windows, letters to potential thieves: “Radio not here” and “No Radio.” It was so funny. These people had spent fortunes on exotic cars, and there the automobiles sat, with brown-paper-bag letters Scotch-taped to their windows. What an incredible city! Perhaps one day an inventive thief would break into one of these cars and leave a note himself. “Just checking,” it would read.

She followed Stefan into the gallery. The place was packed. There were playboys and models and agents, record producers and suntanned androgynes in from the Hamptons. The mayor and his entourage, Stefan whispered, were sure to come. Where, Claire wondered, would they put them? A crackling recording of Les Brown and His Band of Renown competed with the din. There was the cloying smell of everyone's perfume. “I'll get us some bubbly.” Stefan pressed her hand and joggled away through the swarm.

Claire tried to get a look at the paintings. All she could make out were the brown and red peaks of the canvases. Everyone was chattering about how marvelous they were: “eclectic” and “revolutionary” were the words she heard again and again, and so she dutifully wriggled her way over to the main wall. On a canvas as broad as a barn door was what looked like smashed rubbish. She narrowed her eyes and went right up to it. Crushed flowers were glued onto the canvas and covered with muddy spray paint. “You see,” the dowager beside her was instructing the undergraduate at her elbow, “what it means is the end of the world. The annihilation of all that is
vivre
.”

“Yes.” The young man in his expensive suit nodded, his sudden light dawning. “Yes, I see that. He's expressing his irrevocably disappointed self, isn't he? The conquering power of darkness! Gad, it's marvelous. More than anyone else, he has his finger on the pulse of decadence.” They gripped their heaving chest cavities, the both of them, overwhelmed by the wonder before them. Claire was inspired herself, only not by the painting. It was the two of them that got her. Had she brought along that Olympus she could have taken the two of them from the rear, the way they stood there bent, deferential and solicitously awestruck in front of the ill-looking painting, groveling meekly at the foot of some critic's approval.

There you go, she told herself. If you thought about work as much as your bloody pride and righteousness, you'd have a camera right here, wouldn't you? You wouldn't be worried about what a dishonest detective thought of you. You couldn't create art and worry about what people thought. This artist certainly didn't, and look where it got him: a show in trendy Soho.

“Having fun?” Stefan came up behind her. “Don't you love his work?”

Claire didn't know what to say. To voice the obvious cop-out, “Well, it's different,” would have been a lie. It was certainly no different than all the other current, atrocious mediocrities. But then, what did she know? “It's very big, isn't it?” she smiled.

Stefan paused. He was disappointed in her. “You don't understand it. I see that.”

“Hmm. I guess not.”

“What he's trying to say,” Stefan explained patiently, “is that there's no point to it all. All the effort. The miracle of birth … it just ends up in death. The beauty of creativity … goodness itself … it becomes polluted by society, … it wilts and it rots.”

“It certainly does.”

“It's very pure, you see. In its essence.”

“Oh.”

Annoyed with her, he scanned the room. “Uh-oh! Look who's here! Jupiter Dodd! Now the heads will roll.”

“Who's he?”

Stefan looked at her, appalled. “Only the biggest art critic on the East Coast, that's all. He's deadly.”

“Really? He looks harmless enough.”

“Don't let that docile demeanor fool you. He eats up artists and spits them out for the sheer fun of it. Once he even shot one of them.”

“Not really.”

“Yes. About ten years ago. This young artist was poking fun at him in a Village paper. Doing caricatures and that sort of thing … ribbing him. Dodd walked into the city room and shot him, point blank. Oh, there was the devil to pay. He was ruined of course. Had to leave town for five or six years and by then everyone had forgotten him.”

“How did he make his comeback, then?”

“Comeback? I'm talking about the artist. Jupiter Dodd was an overnight sensation. The toast of the town. Still is. And he hates women. Utterly. Where are you going?”

“I'm going to have a closer look at him.”

“Claire,” he sneered. “Darling. One doesn't just walk up to Jupiter Dodd and introduce oneself. You don't talk to him. He talks to you.”

“Is that right?” Claire disconnected his hand from her sleeve. She hadn't had the slightest desire to talk to the man, but the way Stefan put it to her irked her to no end. Got her Irish up. She approached the dapper little man and extended her hand. “How do you do.” She gave him a direct smile. “Claire Breslinsky.”

“Ah,” he said, looking past her at someone else and flagging them with his eyes.

“I wanted to introduce myself,” she groped. She could feel Stefan watching with vindictive triumph. “… because I'm doing a book on … um … faces. Faces in the art world, and I thought”—she had him now. Good God. Was there no end to people's vanity?—“well, I rightly thought that a face like yours ought to be included. That arch sense of aristocratic sensitivity. You know what I mean. Black and white, I'm afraid.” These fancy schmancy types always went for the subtle. She knew what she was doing, too. He was all ears. If there was one thing every snob believed, it was the manifest validity of his own importance. One of the prettier cosmopolitan sluts was dangling herself before Stefan. Annoying, but not fatal. Stefan's eyes were still on her. She had just been ready to find herself contemptible and stop the silly game. Now she felt fired up, in gear for the chase. She was running amuck with it, chattering rapid fire nonsense, but she was enjoying herself.

“Larson in Paris? You don't say,” Dodd said. “I thought he was dead.”

“Dead? I should say not. He's got the cleverest, glossiest printing setup in Europe.” All lies, of course. But it wouldn't hurt to throw in a little butter-up for an old friend. “He's who's backing me. Surprised you haven't heard anything about him lately. Strictly innovative stuff. You know.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well of course I had heard. Word gets around but then you never know. And you think it really ought to be just a one side, one face sort of thing? Not left page face, right page full length?”

“Yes, well one could. Only I think that would be too
Life
magazine. What interests me is a damn good face. A flamboyant face but a wise face—oh, shit. I've left my card in my other bag—a face that stands up to scrutiny and says I like me as I am and you can all go to hell.”

Jupiter Dodd had his brown leather agenda from Bendel's out now. He wasn't going to let her get away without a phone number. And Stefan. Stefan was going to pay her back for proving him wrong and being a success with Jupiter Dodd. He was going to like her more for it … admire her, at least, but he'd have to pay her back. Here it came. He was flirting blatantly now with the girl.

“I'll be in touch,” Claire smiled and walked away. Stefan, still peeved, pretended he didn't see her coming.

“Hi,” Claire said. “Remember me?”

Stefan looked right past her. It was Jupiter Dodd at her heels. He could hardly believe it.

“One more thing,” Dodd drew her close to him with an air of confidentiality. “I've got these bags under my eyes for crying out loud. Since weeks. So if you want to wait a little while before we shoot. Like till after a long weekend. I don't know. What do you think?”

“I think,” Claire grinned at Stefan, “that if you were any more interesting looking, I wouldn't be shooting you, I'd be painting you.”

“Ha, ha.”

“No, really. You look great. And if you're worried, put some Lipton tea bags on your eyes for twenty minutes. All right?” Jesus.

The gallery director scuttled up to Dodd. “Come, Jupiter. Andiamo! You've got to meet Julio Marble. It's his show, after all.”

They all stared at Julio Marble. A man, Claire thought, who looked suspiciously serene for one announcing the end of the world.

Dodd took Claire's hand into his own smaller one. “Will you be coming up to Laraine's later?”

Ashamed now of her little scam, Claire recognized him for what he was: a nice, successful, slightly demented but kind man. What was the matter with her? Was that why she'd become a photographer? To be the one in power? In demand? The poor man's Picasso? The guitar player who's indifferent to music but joins the band to get the girls? How stupid she was. If anyone was vain it was she.

“We'd love to come,” Stefan thrust his wine glass between them with an authoritative jiggle.

“Oh, good. Don't not come, now,” he scolded Claire. “
À bientôt
!”

“
À bientôt
?!” Stefan mocked her now with new respect. “What did you do to the man? Talking to Jupiter Dodd about his bags! I can't believe it! Put tea bags on them, she tells him! Five minutes in town and Jupiter Dodd asks her to join him at Laraine's. The girl is a marvel.” He was showing off for the glamorous girl at his side now but Claire didn't mind. Point made, she found herself wondering if the Mayor had had his late walk.

After the show they whizzed uptown. Stefan had a penchant for going faster than the speed of light in a town where pedestrians darted out from the curb just for the hell of it.

“Stefan, slow
down
!” she finally yelled.

“Can't talk!” he shifted excitedly. “Driving!”

“Yes,” Claire closed her eyes.

“Wheee!” Stefan's gorgeous sidekick giggled from the rumble seat. There was no reason why they shouldn't give her a lift up to Laraine's if she wanted to come, Stefan had told Claire. No reason indeed. It occurred to Claire that if he was trying to make a hit with her this was not exactly the way to do it. Or was it? Stefan hadn't seemed particularly attractive to her tonight until he'd draped the vile creature on his arm. Was he smarter than she'd thought? And why were women who looked like that inevitably named Nicole?