CHAPTER ONE

1991

In my dream, the snow was falling all across my old Nebraska. The minister had come to tell me about my parents. A spot of blood appeared on his collar, and then another, and through the sheet I felt the coldness of his hand.

In the moment before opening my eyes, I was a boy in my bed again with the duck painting hanging over it, my mother calling up the stairs. Her voice brought a moment of incredible relief, but coming back to my life as it is, the emptiness almost made me cry out. Everything was just as I’d left it the night before: the empty cocktail glass, the book about the Roman shipwreck, the thick curtains gathered on either side of the window like two ball skirts trapped in a stiff-armed dance.

I wandered down the hall through the pale dawn light, a grown man in his pajamas searching for his mother’s voice. But the apartment was quiet with all its doors shut against me, Susan and the children tucked securely behind them. I put my hand on the brass knob of the bedroom door, tempted to turn it and push it open just to see how my wife looked, fast asleep with her hair fanned out over the pillow, her eye mask in place. In the past, it had comforted me to wake up in our bed and put my palm where her body had been, knowing she hadn’t gone far. But we no longer lived that way. Tom Osborne, our orange cat, eyed me suspiciously from the top of the bookshelf.

As the sun came up over the East River, I was on my way, and all that morning I hid in my office, staring at the walls, knowing I was supposed to be doing things. But I couldn’t quite remember what they were, and when my assistant, Francesca, came in, I’d smile, quickly open a book, or wrinkle my brow at a stack of papers I barely recognized. No appointments were marked on the calendar, though one could never be completely sure what that meant. Francesca and I both tended to write things down on envelopes or stick-ums, which we always managed to lose. We could often be found wearing pink rubber gloves, fishing through trash cans for elusive telephone numbers or dates.

“Ah, here we go!” she’d cry at the start of one of our crazed goose chases, as if she were dragging me onto the dance floor. Actually, I loved our wild searches; in fact, these days they seemed to be all that was keeping the office alive. Calls were few, appointments rare. Nobody wanted to buy, and most of the time it would have been easy to disappear, to walk over to the Met or just pay a visit to Jon Mondratti, who, like clockwork, would uncork the libations. Unfortunately, there was always the danger of falling in love with something at Mondratti’s, where it is easy to lose oneself in the red rooms at the top of that dark stairwell. I liked to run my fingers across the antique Tabriz carpets, carried across oceans in enormous sheaves, or drift among the scroll-backed Dutch Rococo chairs and nineteenth-century paintings from distant and altogether more beautiful times.

Mondratti’s oil sketch of a tiger, a Delacroix, has always been an obsession of mine. The animal seems to luxuriate in the shade of a rock shelf, the light playing over those sensuous stripes. There is something so human in its eyes. Sometimes I’d sit there for an hour or so, just fantasizing, trying to come up with a way to afford it. It didn’t matter what else was falling down around me, what other responsibilities I hadn’t met. At certain moments, my need for that painting was all that seemed important, and I would have sacrificed anything to have it. You see, I could no longer be trusted around beautiful things and my weakness was apparent. Suddenly everyone had realized I was missing something.

*   *   *

After Francesca left the gallery, I crept into the silent showroom and lay down in the center of the floor. Through my sport coat, I could feel the cool marble on my back. The humidifier hummed and the buses screeched down Fifth Avenue. I could smell the past on all my works of art, as if it were drifting through the large glass cases. Some pieces had been buried in the ground for centuries; others had lined forgotten tombs. I would have to part with all these objects someday. That was the heartbreaking nature of my work. I held history in my hand for one brief moment and tried to give it a price no one would ever pay. I didn’t ever want to let go.

When the phone rang, it was Susan.

“You’re still there, Lowell,” she said. “When are you coming home?”

“In a minute,” I said, holding a groan in my throat and fighting the urge to disappear. “I’m making a sale.”

*   *   *

The whole apartment was in shadows. Susan stood at the end of the hall by her bedroom in her bathrobe, though it was just early evening. My wife has a talent for going to sleep every time she is upset—a rare gift. In deep sleep she dreams incredible stories; when we were younger, and living year round in Port Saugus, she would tell them to me if I brought her tea and rubbed her feet. The house Susan had inherited from her uncle was a quiet place. Fog from the river softened everything.

“What did you sell?” Susan asked, putting her hands on her hips.

I didn’t answer, just shrugged my shoulders as she came into the foyer, unfolded a piece of paper, and held it out for me. The insignia at the top of the page looked familiar. “It was addressed to you,” she said, “but I opened it anyway because I could tell it was a bill, and if you haven’t noticed that’s what I take care of around here. Somebody’s got to maintain some sort of normal order.”

Ignoring her, I walked straight into the living room to pour myself a drink. When I turned around I could see her still standing by the front door, looking wounded.

“You can’t brush this off,” she said, as if it were some sort of cancer scare. “It’s a statement about a safe-deposit box at a bank near Port Saugus. We owe them three thousand dollars. That’s years of unpaid rent.” She sat down on the couch and leaned her elbows on her knees, holding the bill by her fingertips. “What’s in it, Lowell?”

I just shook my head. I couldn’t remember what I’d put in that box all those years ago. For so long, I’d been wanting the whole business, the past really, to just go away.

My wife pretended to study the bill further, as if she could pry some truth from it. Then, gathering her courage, she finally spoke. “I’m the one who keeps everything running around here. And I’m tired of it.” Sitting in her white robe among the dark velvet cushions, Susan looked less sturdy than usual; it was as if she were drowning in all that softness, an object in need of fundamental restoration.

My wife melting away in her nightgown was something I didn’t like to see. I drained my drink and put it down on the table. We were both, suddenly, getting older, and lately I had noticed something different about her shoulders. They were curving like the old ladies I used to see at church in Lincoln. Life was hurrying past us now. Our son, Hank, was about to leave for college, and Mary, it seemed, already had one foot out the door to follow. Susan and I had been together for some twenty-odd years, and I’d never been completely sure about marrying her, or risking love, which at times felt so uncomfortable. But she had a way of stepping in and I had a way of going along.

I grabbed at the bill.

“This is unbelievable. I don’t even know if we can pay it,” said my wife, resting her forehead in her hand.

“Not that there’s any point.”

“Well, I’ll never sell Port Saugus no matter how bad things get,” Susan countered. She tried to meet my eyes but I didn’t look up. “It could be something of value, you know,” she said. “Something you wouldn’t want to lose.”

“Why does it matter so much to you?”

“Because, Lowe,” she said softly, “it seems to matter so much to you.”

I made myself another drink, eyeing my wife’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar as the bourbon snaked over the rocks. “Listen here,” I said to her. “There isn’t a goddamn thing in that box.”