Arno sat in his living room with his parents. They were picking at a plate of aged smelly cheese. The house was warm and there was a Bach cantata playing low, and because the speakers were hidden in places where nobody could see them and, subsequently, nobody could remember where they were, the house felt haunted with the music.
“The truth is it’s been this way for a long time,” Allie said to her son. They sat together on a low couch. Alec, Arno’s dad, paced in front of them. As usual, he was dressed in an impossibly well-cut blue suit. He was frowning and he had a glass of champagne that he sipped from occasionally. Arno and Allie had glasses too, but they weren’t drinking.
“I think I already knew,” Arno said. “But it was really weird having to hear it from Jonathan at a party at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Sorry about that,” Alec said. “We have had what was called, in very different times than these, a marriage of convenience, and clearly it’s wildly outdated. We’ve tried everything—as you saw just a few weeks ago in Miami. Nothing works, so now we will extract ourselves from each other, but neither of us will come apart from you, if you see what I mean.”
“I guess.” Arno sighed and cut himself a piece of the blue-streaked Royal Stilton. To Arno, it just sounded like they were going to go on as before.
“But we’re going to officially divorce.”
That got Arno’s attention. He looked up at his father.
“If you’re going to make me go to therapy because of this, one thing you ought to know is that I absolutely refuse to go to David’s dad. That guy is bonkers.”
“I’m going to stop seeing him too,” Allie said.
“Will you also stop seeing Mickey’s dad?” Arno asked, quickly. But Allie only stared at the river of antique rug that covered the great length of the living room floor.
“I don’t know about her, but you can be assured that I will,” Alec said, “but we will continue to represent and sell his work, so maybe that’s not even true.” And then Alec sat down, suddenly, in a chair across from his wife and son.
“This is hard,” Alec said. “Really hard. This will take some time.”
And after a few minutes of silence, the three Wildenburgers got up and went into the dining room to have Thanksgiving dinner with their fifteen guests, who had been sitting there the entire time waiting for them and whispering about all they knew that could be the matter. Alec took his place at one end of the long table and Allie sat down at the other end, and the Thanksgiving dinner began with the guests chattering at each other in German and Swiss and Italian about what would happen to the great Wildenburger art dynasty now that the troubles on the domestic front could no longer be hidden.
Arno, meanwhile, ate a bit of turkey and then got up from the table and went to make some phone calls. Everyone had agreed to meet at Man Ray at ten if not before, since everyone had also agreed that the real home was wherever the other four guys were, and certainly not among all the squabbling adults.