The Genius (20 page)

“Fucking bitch.” She stood for a moment with her face in her hands. When she looked up again, her expression was sober and purposeful. She stared at a blank spot on the far wall as she unbuttoned her shirt, shook it off, let it fall to the floor. “Help me with this, please,” she said, turning around.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO GO ON THE TOP BUNK?”

“It’s all right.”

“I don’t think this was made for someone your size.”

“Probably not.”

“How tall are you, anyway?”

“Six-three.”

“You must be uncomfortable. I can go up there.”

“Stay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good, because I don’t want to go up there. That one’s Julie’s.” A silence. I felt her smile. “How does it feel to take advantage of a vulnerable woman?”

“Fantastic.”

“This isn’t really what I do,” she said.

“Grief makes us do strange things.”

“In bed.”

“Yes.”

“No: in bed. You never played that game?”

“What game.”

“The fortune cookie game.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“You read your fortune cookie and then you add ‘in bed.’ You’ve never done that?”

“I think you’re saying that I sound like a fortune cookie.”

“You did just then.”

“When.”

“When you said, ‘Grief makes us do strange things.’ ”

“It does.”

“Okay,” she said, “but it’s still silly to talk like that.”

My first instinct was to be offended, but then I saw how she was smiling and I had to smile, too. For years Marilyn had been telling me that I had to lighten up; how irritated would she be to learn that all it took was a single goofy look?

I said, “Your lucky numbers are five, nine, fifteen, twenty-two, and thirty.”

“In bed.”

“In bed. I don’t remember the last time I had a fortune cookie.”

She said, “At my office we get Chinese twice a week. It’s horrible but it’s better than peanut-butter crackers.”

“I could buy you lunch sometime.”

“That might be nice.”

“Well all right.”

“All right.”

A silence.

She said, “But, I mean, really. I’m not used to this.”

“So you said.”

“I don’t know what this is.” She turned onto her elbow. “What is it?”

I said, “I don’t know,” and she burst out laughing.

“What?”

“You should have seen the look on your face.”

“What.”

“You were like, ‘Oh shit, now she thinks she’s my girlfriend.’” She fell on her back, laughing. “ ‘What have I done!’ ”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t.”

“Okay, I believe you. You just had a funny look.”

I smiled. “If you say so.”

She finished laughing and wiped her eyes. “I feel better now.”

“I’m glad.”

She nodded, then fixed me with a serious look. “I don’t really want to think about this right now. All I want is to not be crying.”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.”

I nodded again, still unsure of what’d been gotten out of the way. “You and my dad seemed to get along.”

“I liked him,” I said. “He reminded me of my father, except not an asshole.”

“He could be an asshole, too.”

“I’m sure he could.”

“What’s wrong with your dad?” she asked.

“A lot of things.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Nope.”

“All right,” she said. Then she said, “I know who he is, you know.”

I looked at her.

“I Googled you. You’re hanging out with my dad, I wanted to make sure you weren’t one of those guys who scams old people.”

“As far as I could tell, Lee McGrath was not the easily scammed type.”

“You can never be too careful.”

“Fine, then, you know who I am.”

“I know a little bit. Enough not to worry about you going after my dad’s retirement fund.”

I laughed. “If you think I’m as rich as my father you’re sorely mistaken.”

“Darn.”

“What.”

“I was hoping I’d get, like, a morning-after present in the mail. Like a diamond necklace or something.”

“I can give you a lithograph.”

“That’s it. I don’t even get a painting.”

“For preferred clients only.”

“Aw,” she said. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Please,” she said. “Where do you think I learned it.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry about when I called her a bitch. She’s not.”

I nodded.

“We’re all a little on edge right now.”

“That’s understandable.”

“She was angry that I brought you here.”

“I can apologize to her, if you’d like.”

“Are you kidding? Absolutely not.”

“I will if it’ll help.”

“She’s not angry at you. She’s angry at me. And, you know, she’s not even angry at me, either. She never drinks. This is the first time I’ve seen her that way in my entire life. She used to hate my father’s drinking.”

“I didn’t know he drank.”

“You didn’t know him most of his life.” She sniffled. “He smoked, too. You don’t get esophageal cancer at sixty-one unless you’re trying pretty hard.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll never get them,” she said. “She loved him. I don’t think she ever stopped. You know what she said one time? Julie told me this. My mom was visiting her in Wilmington. They were driving along, and she goes, ‘Other than the fact that Jerry’s a total moron, he’s a good husband.’” She shifted; I felt her smile against my arm. “Can you believe that?”

“Easily.”

“I’d get upset except I agree with her.”

“You and Jerry don’t get along.”

“We have nothing to say to one another.”

“So I gathered.”

She smiled again. “Did Annie tell you that, too?”

“I figured it out myself. She did tell me about your mom and Jerry.”

“She really gave you the goods, didn’t she?” She turned over and our faces were close. I brushed the hair out of her eyes. She said, “Anything you don’t know?”

“Plenty,” I said and kissed her again.

And then nothing happened.

For a week my life became as quiet as it ever had been, pre-Victor Cracke quiet. At the gallery we began hanging a new show. For the most part, the frantic phone calls had tapered off; after a big fair, everyone needs time to recuperate, to make sure they’re still solvent and still care about art. I had lunches and dinners with clients and friends. A totally ordinary, totally empty week, and in trudging through it, McGrath’s void loomed unexpectedly large. I kept picking up the phone to call him and then standing there dumbly, holding the receiver and wondering who was in charge of the case now.

The answer, of course, was no one. The mystery of Victor Cracke would remain exactly that.

I had to ask myself if that was such a bad thing. The show had come and gone; the sales had gone through, the checks cleared. I stood very little to gain by asking more questions. It’s true that we are, by design or by fluke, a curious species, and ignorance grates inside us like sand in an oyster. But I had long trained myself to accept and love ambiguity. Why should five boys, four decades dead, matter to me when every day I read about murder, war, global injustice—without being moved to act? Any obligation I felt toward McGrath was strictly my own invention. I had not known the man long enough to feel guilty letting his last wishes go unfulfilled. The sense of loss that overtook me, then, was as surprising as it was overwhelming.

As I mentioned, my reasons for helping McGrath were purely selfish. So I had told myself every time I got into a car and went to Breezy Point. With him gone, though, I had to admit that I actually missed the old bastard. Going back to work made me realize the degree to which he represented the polar opposite of everyone I normally dealt with. Without pretension, unafraid to admit ignorance or to show his hand when he wanted something. He had never attempted to keep up appearances, even as he fell apart; and in his physical frailty I discerned a profound honesty, verging at times on beauty. He became in my mind a walking work of art, a human Giacometti: sanded down by illness to within an inch of his bare essence, radiance peeking through the cracks.

And I began to wonder if there hadn’t been something else motivating McGrath, as well. Why had he trusted me to begin with? Surely he had believed I had a vested interest in proving Victor innocent. (If he’d known the truth—that Victor’s popularity had tripled following the rumors—he might have suspected me of bias toward guilt.) By putting off his requests for a copy of the drawings as long as I did, I had made my caginess clear enough. And then—freaking out over the phone, turning up with that letter—I could hardly have seemed rational and levelheaded enough to be of any use. I was going to either conceal or exaggerate.

Maybe, as Samantha had implied, I was the only person willing to help him.

Or maybe he liked me, too.

In any event, the idea that the case would simply return to some slush pile, never to be resolved, depressed me immensely. I’ve already mentioned that I hate to fail. You might find that amusing now that you know a little bit more about me and how much my early years consisted of failure. But here’s the thing: I always took my self-debasement very seriously. Once I had committed to becoming a fuckup, I strove to be
the best
fuckup around: a prince of debauchery. That drive is part of my character, as much a gift from my forebears as my inflated sense of self-worth—one is probably an outgrowth of the other, although I’m not sure which is which—and having reopened the case, I did not want to believe that it had bested me.

The easiest opening move would have been to call Samantha. But I couldn’t very well do that. The fact that she hadn’t called me I took as a sign that she regretted our night together. Who was I to argue? But that couldn’t stop me from thinking about her. It had been one of the more physically awkward bouts of lovemaking of my life, the bedframe seemingly about to collapse into splinters and the sheets curling off at the corners—and for that, all the more exhilarating.

All of a sudden my life was back to normal, and the drudgery crushed me. The phone was leaden in my hand; a client in the doorway gave me the beginnings of a headache. My mind wandered, and I found myself unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone hold a sparkling conversation.

“Ethan.”

Marilyn put down her cutlery, for her a grave gesture. She had been going on about something someone had done to someone else in Miami, could I believe the au
da
city. “Can you at least pretend to listen, please.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where
are
you? Are you sick?”

“No.” I paused. “I was thinking about McGrath.”

Notice that I hadn’t lied. I had merely failed specify which McGrath. “Who? Oh. Your policeman?”

Of the three or four—or maybe I’m misremembering, maybe it was five or six—digressions I’d taken since Marilyn and I got together, I had never once bragged to her afterward. But I’d also never lied.

Your policeman.

I lied, then: I lied with a nod.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s very,
very
sad. Are you too sad to eat that?”

It came quickly, then, a stab of hate for her. Many times in the past I had been annoyed with her, but this was different, and I had to excuse myself.

I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and slapped myself a couple of times. Pay attention. Common courtesy. I resolved to put the McGrath family out of my head and to be civil. And then—not tonight, but in a few days—and in a vague way—I would hint to Marilyn that I’d been with someone else. I didn’t have to say who. She’d be fine. I’d get it off my chest. I’d get over it, and so would she. I dried my hands and returned to the table. Marilyn had paid the check and left.

THE END OF MY QUIET WEEK came with a phone call—again a phone call—from Tony Wexler.

“Your father would like to see you. Before you say no—”

“No.”

Tony sighed. “May I speak, please?”

“You can try.”

“He wants to buy some art.”

That was a new one. My father owned plenty of paintings, but his taste ran rather toward seascapes and bowls of fruit. To be fair, I hadn’t been to the house in years, and in the meantime he might have assembled a preeminent collection of twentieth-century art; he could have hired Julian Schnabel to design his wallpaper and Richard Serra to do the flatware. But I had the distinct feeling that Tony was struggling to sound serious.

“You can laugh,” I said. “I give you permission. I won’t tell.”

“The offer is one hundred percent genuine.”

“I thought you’d run out of pretexts. Well done.”

“It’s not a pretext. He wants you to come to the house. Think of him, in this context, as a customer.”

“If he’s a customer then he can come by the gallery like everyone else.”

“You know as well as I do that not all your clients come into the gallery.”

“I bring work to clients when I have a prior relationship with them.”

He gave a tired chuckle. “Touché.”

“If he wants to buy some art I’ll gladly set him up with someone who can better suit his needs. What’s he in the market for?”

“The Cracke drawings.”

That caught me off guard. It took me a moment to reply: “Well, in that case, he’s out of luck.”

“Look, why don’t you come by the house tonight?”

“I already sa—”

“You don’t have to see him. You can deal directly with me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Just come by the house. If you’re unhappy you can leave. Or—forget the house. I’ll meet you someplace of your choosing. You can send someone ahead and make sure I’m alone. It’ll be like a spy movie. Name your terms, name the circumstances.”

“You come here.”

“I would really rather keep it private.”

“You said name my terms. Those are my terms.”

He stopped and started several times, and his fumbling confirmed my suspicion that the deal hinged on my coming to him, and not vice versa. Either he was trying to get me in the same room as my father, or he had been ordered to make sure that I understood who was working for whom in this transaction.