He looked at her as one might at a small child who persists in fibbing.
She shrugged, hoping to convey indifference to his opinion, although, in fact, she did want him to know she wasn’t as straight and as predictable as he imagined. She could be bad—she was bad, and sometimes she felt like such a fucking impostor. She didn’t want to be the perennial good girl, the doting mother and faithful wife. Washington would understand. She almost wanted to tell him about Luke, that she wasn’t just some prude in a plaid skirt and penny loafers. She, too, had her secret desires and sins. Who better to confide a crime to than a serial criminal? But of course she couldn’t.
“Where’s Veronica?” she asked, seeing her husband slaloming awkwardly toward them through the crowd.
“At the office, I expect. And here’s your husband. The phrase ‘bull in a china shop’ yet again comes to mind,” Washington said as they watched Russell apologize to an art lover in a fedora whom he’d elbowed sideways.
“I prefer to think of him as puppyish,” she said.
“It’s getting a little late in the day for that fucking analogy,” Washington said before gripping Russell’s hand. “Don’t see you at many art openings, Crash.”
“A lot of Tony’s art has captions,” Corrine said. “Russell prefers his art with text.” Actually, she knew, it was Duplex’s connection with Jeff that had sparked Russell’s interest. When he died, they were supposedly working on a project together.
Washington led them all into the second, slightly less crowded room of the gallery, where the older paintings—the ones that they’d seen and taken for granted in their youth—were hanging. The earliest had been rescued, or stolen, from the street—from lampposts and windows and the boarded walls of construction sites. Colorful figurative cartoons complete with captions.
“I used to see these fucking things plastered all over the subway stations,” Russell said wistfully.
Corrine didn’t herself remember any such thing, but she recognized some of the images, including the iconic EAT THE RICH painting, which featured a skeleton attacking a top-hatted pig in a tuxedo with a giant knife and fork. And three versions of the ENJOY COKE series, showing a young man with a Colt .45 jammed in his nostril. Duplex’s iconography and his technique had become more subtle and refined as the eighties progressed and his work moved indoors to the walls of galleries and collectors’ lofts without necessarily losing its exuberance. The captions became more enigmatic, at least for a while, the brushwork more nuanced, the palette more complex. And suddenly she came across a canvas depicting a man and a woman separated by the words YOU WERE RIGHT. SORRY. It was similar to the canvas Jeff had given her long ago, which was presumably still in the closet at her mother’s house, and which, it seemed, might actually be worth something.
Standing in front of the painting, she registered a disturbance in the buzz of voices in the next gallery, a spike in volume and intensity, and turned to look just as a man with a bandanna covering his face like an outlaw in an old Western movie charged into the room and looked around before running toward them, holding some kind of cylinder in front of him, taking aim at the first ENJOY COKE painting, which suddenly exploded with a new color scheme—and seemed to bleed as he sprayed an unreadable cursive symbol on the painting. She realized that the cylinder was a can of spray paint and that the man was marking the canvas, appropriating it for himself, that the lightninglike mark was his signature, his tag, if not his name.
He dodged around Corrine when a beefy blazered man lunged for him, using Russell as a human shield, shoving him at the security guard and breaking for the exit. A second guard suddenly appeared in his path and wrestled him down below her sight line.
“Well, that seals it,” Washington said. “Tony Duplex is back, baby.”
“Was that part of the show?” asked a young woman behind them.
“It is now,” Wash said as the two security guards hustled the spray painter into the main room.
“You don’t think it was planned?” Corrine said.
“Well, far be it from me to be cynical, but whether it was or whether it wasn’t, I’d guess that Arkadian’s not at all unhappy about it.”
“How much are Tony’s paintings going for, anyway?”
“After this, probably twice what they were going for yesterday.”
—
It soon became apparent that they’d shared front-row seats at the event of the season. Somehow Russell ended up getting interviewed by Entertainment Tonight. Facts and rumors were being traded like especially tasty canapés. The party had acquired a new energy, at once both festive and valedictory, but except for the artist himself, who appeared genuinely upset about the defacement of his painting, the former note seemed dominant, the crowd reacting in a manner that might have reminded an outside observer of hometown fans who’d just witnessed a great sporting victory, although a different observer might have guessed that the giddiness of those in the gallery resembled the relief of witnesses who had been passed over by a catastrophe, a tornado, say, that had wiped out several buildings without casualties, and the party certainly would have lasted well into the night if the Pinot Grigio and Prosecco hadn’t run out after an hour. Eventually it flickered out, only to flare up again at Bottino, the art-world cantina on Tenth Avenue, and later just a few blocks away at Bungalow 8. Russell and Corrine returned home to the kids, but he got a call from Washington a few hours later, summoning him to the after-party, which he pretended to be reluctant to attend, before eventually deciding that his friend probably needed the company, then returning finally at two-thirty, smelling of booze and cigarettes, just like in the good old days.
16
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS HOURS AFTER Corrine fell asleep, she assumes it’s Russell, calling from the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the voice on the other end is Jeff’s, raspy and tense, telling her he really needs her help. She reminds him it’s two in the morning.
“I’m in kind of a jam, here, Corrine. I need money like yesterday.”
“How much money?”
“A thousand as fast as you can get here.”
She doesn’t ask him if it can wait till morning, knowing that, at least in his mind, it can’t. It’s a lot of money—a month’s rent. She knows he’s in trouble, or he wouldn’t have called. She focuses on practicalities, reminding him of the two-hundred-dollar limit on ATM withdrawals and discovering, on searching her purse, that she has less cash than that on hand.
“Where are you?” she asks.
He gives her an address on the Lower East Side, a quadrant of Manhattan she’s never set foot in during her three-year tenure in the city.
But she does have her rainy day fund, an emergency stash of twenty-dollar gold pieces her grandfather had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He’d told her not to tell anyone, to save them until the day she really needed them. She gets dressed, descends in the elevator, and nods at the startled doorman; it’s a crisp October night adorned by a gibbous moon. At the Chase Manhattan on Second Avenue, she withdraws her limit. The first cab refuses to take her. “Ain’t going down there this time of night,” the driver says. “That’s the fucking DMZ.”
The second cabbie is skeptical, but he sets off without comment. Eventually he asks, “What’s that address? You going to that club, what’s it called, Kill the Robots?”
She shrugs. “I don’t think so.” They finally find the number they’re looking for on a block of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. At street level the boards and the bricks are festooned with colorful graffiti. The sidewalk is buckled, the street deserted. The address is painted on a piece of plywood covering the windows of a downstairs storefront, which, like the rest of the block, appears desolate and abandoned except for the anomaly of a shiny heavy steel door. The driver shakes his head and looks at her ruefully, as if giving her a chance to change her mind. She almost loses heart; it’s the most frightening corner of the city she’s ever seen and she can’t imagine walking out of here unmolested. The cabbie te
lls her he’ll wait while she tries the door.
She pushes a buzzer beside the door, sees a shadow cross the peephole from within. The door clicks open and she takes a last glance at the cab before stepping inside.
A wiry, twitchy young Hispanic guy wearing a red bandanna nudges her forward down a darkened hallway and raps on another door. The second door swings open, revealing a murky expanse, shrouded in smoke, illuminated by the glow of a television tuned to a Spanish-language station. Jeff and his friend Tony Duplex are sprawled on a ratty sofa, one of several that look as if they’ve been dragged in from the street. Sitting beside them in an armchair, watching the TV, is a middle-aged Hispanic man in a wife beater with multiple tattoos covering his neck and arms. He seems to be on easy terms with Jeff and Tony. A figure of indeterminate race and gender is passed out on another couch, covered by a quilt. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, infused with some kind of acrid chemical smell.
Jeff nods at her, though he seems reluctant or unable to move.
“So this is your friend?”
Jeff nods again. “Did you bring the money?”
This time, Corrine nods, not trusting her voice. But she realizes she has to explain. “I have a hundred fifty in cash,” she says, seeing the man’s eyes flash, the sense of stoned camaraderie suddenly evaporating. “And I have twelve hundred in gold.”
She hands him the cash and three twenty-dollar Liberty gold coins. “Gold closed today at four hundred and nine dollars an ounce. In case you’re wondering how I know this, I’m a broker at Merrill Lynch. Each of those coins weighs just under point nine six ounces of gold, so you’re looking at almost three ounces, which in bullion is worth about twelve hundred and thirty, although a collector would pay a lot more than that for the coins.”
For a moment the man looks confused, and Corrine fears that she’s blown it, but suddenly he laughs.
“What da fuck, dis one, she da fuckin’ secretary da treasury,” he says, hefting the coins in his palm.
Amazed at herself for having produced this speech, she coughs and rubs her eyes, which are burning from the acrid smoke; when she opens them, the tattooed man is fiddling with a triple-beam scale that has materialized on the table in front of him, placing the coins on the tray. She feels light-headed and nauseous and all of a sudden she can’t stop coughing, and she isn’t sure if any more is said, but the next thing she knows, Jeff’s clapping her on the back as he leads her out of the room, and only as she’s leaving does she see that the man at the door has a silver pistol in his belt.
The air outside is only slightly less funky and fetid, the street dark and deserted. Jeff takes her hand and walks her west, toward civilization.
“Pyramid,” Tony mumbles.
“I should get her home.”
“Think we all need a fucking drink.” The last thing Tony needs is a drink, she feels certain, watching him stumble up the sidewalk, tacking like a leaky sailboat to port and starboard in his forward progress.
A few minutes later they’re standing outside another tenement storefront, the door guarded by a hulk in a pink sequined halter. He does a complicated handshake with Jeff and waves them into the din: a smoky room with a stage at the far end, where a drag queen in a gold lamé jumpsuit is prancing and singing “Let Me Entertain You.” Many in the audience are also cross-dressing men. She wonders how it is that Jeff, who looks so out of place in his Brooks Brothers shirt, seems so at home here, receiving and returning greetings as he tows her toward the bar. She’s sort of furious at him for bringing her down here and exposing her to drug dealers and armed thugs, but also sort of mesmerized by these delicate pretty boys carrying lunch boxes and the broad-shouldered divas in poofy blond wigs, by the topless woman dancing virtually unnoticed beside the bar. For a moment she understands that impulse, feels the urge to experience that freedom. But it’s fleeting; she could never do such a thing.
She wants to talk to Jeff, to demand an explanation, an account of the earlier proceedings, get an apology, perhaps, but the music’s too loud to talk over, so instead she quickly drains the vodka tonic he places in her hand and asks for another. He introduces her to people with unlikely names and improbable hairstyles and they watch two more acts take the stage, the second culminating in several minutes of shrieking that’s billed as an homage to Yoko Ono.
Finally, she walks out in a huff.
Jeff catches up with her on the sidewalk.
“Can you find me a cab?”
“Can we talk first?” He lights a cigarette, hands it to her, then lights one of his own.
She searches for a cab, but for a moment the street is empty.
“You’ve got to start taking care of yourself,” she says.
“I like it when you take care of me,” he says.
“I don’t ever want to get a phone call like that again.”
“Noted.”
“Can you please get me a cab?”
“Come home with me.”
“You know I can’t. I’m married to your best friend.”
“That hasn’t stopped us before.”
“I wasn’t married then.”
“It’s not too late.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“ ‘Come live with me and be my love/and we will all the pleasures prove.’ ”
“I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“I was just quoting Christopher Marlowe.”
“Jeff, I love Russell.”
“I think you love me.”
“I do, but that doesn’t mean I need to be with you. It certainly doesn’t mean I want to be married to you.”
At that moment a dirty Checker cab rolls up to the entrance of the club, and several gaudily attired passengers clamber out.
“Don’t go,” Jeff says.
She kisses him before climbing into the taxi, waving to him as he stands there smoking on the curb.
The next afternoon, a Tony Duplex painting is delivered to her apartment with a note: This painting reminds me of us. Tony says thanks. Love Jeff.
—
She’d never spoken of the incident to Jeff or anyone else and had sent the painting off to her mother’s house, asking her to stash it in the closet, where it had remained these many years. At least she hoped it was still there. It had occurred to her even at the time that the painting was worth far more than the coins she’d parted with, but she’d never considered selling it then, and later, Tony had more or less disappeared, along with the buyers once clamoring for his art.
She’d never told Russell about that night, feeling that it was part of her secret history with Jeff.
Every marriage, she convinced herself, can bear a few secrets.
17
RUSSELL HAD FINALLY MANAGED TO BOOK a reservation at Gaijin, the underground restaurant, after getting referred by his friend Carlo, having first heard about it from Washington, who had so far been unable to get them in. There was no listed number, no reviews and so far only a few cryptic references online.
When he called, Russell was asked, by a woman with a heavy Japanese accent, how he’d gotten the number. “From Carlo Russi, the chef.”
“And what is his phone number?”
Russell gave her Carlo’s cell number.
He’d almost concluded that he’d been disconnected when the woman came back on the line and asked him how large his party was, then told him they would be expected at seven o’clock on the following Thursday.
“Please to not be giving this number to anyone.” Apparently if you were Carlo, you could refer someone, but not if you were Russell Calloway.
She gave him the address and told him the restaurant was behind an unmarked door beside a clothing boutique. He should ring the buzzer three times.
After hanging up, he’d immediately called Washington to gloat, and to invite him and Veronica to dinner. Washington pretended to be only mildly interested.
“How can it be a secret restaurant?” Corrine asked when they were en rou
te in a cab. “What does that even mean?”
“Well, basically that they don’t have a listed phone number or address or a sign or even a name on the door and in order to get in you need to be referred by somebody who’s already been there.”
“Do we know anything about it?” Corrine asked. “Such as what kind of food they serve?”
“I think it’s kind of Japanese avant-garde.”
“How can food be avant-garde?”
“If it’s really, really fresh? Anyway, Carlo said it was brilliant.”
“It all sounds deeply pretentious. And Carlo weighs three hundred pounds, for God’s sake. He’d eat his own children if you dunked them in Bolognese sauce.” Corrine could happily subsist on green salad and canned salmon and had limited patience for culinary adventurism.
“Actually, he’s lost a ton of weight,” Russell told her.
“Ah, the cocaine diet.”
“No, he stopped that after his heart attack.”
—
At the corner of Lafayette and Bond, they found the Lees, who’d been searching for the place. Russell had been less precise with his directions than the woman on the phone, but after locating the clothing boutique, he tried the buzzer one door to the west. Just as they were about to try the door on the other side, they were admitted by a slim young man in a tight red suit. After a brief interrogation, they were led through a long hallway into a small room furnished with a heterogeneous mix of tables and chairs—from a store on Fourth Avenue dedicated to fifties design—all of which were for sale here. The walls were adorned with framed book covers—Japanese manga featuring pop-eyed schoolgirls and ninjas, as well as the equally lurid and stylized covers of Avon paperbacks from the forties and fifties—The Chastity of Gloria Boyd, I Married a Dead Man, Six Deadly Dames.
It was blessedly free of the standard tchotchkes of the typical sushi joint. Only two very young couples were already seated, leaving four tables vacant.
“I hate it when I feel like I should whisper,” Corrine whispered.