Vincent Macklin Hull had been having an affair for close to a year with someone he should not have been. This struck him vividly, and he had been trying to sort his way out of it. Up until now, most of his romantic involvements had been short-lived adventures that he kept hidden in the most compulsive, meticulous way. For the absurd scandals of his fellows, he felt only contempt, and ruining his life for a woman did not figure in his playbook at all. This latest involvement, however, actually demanded his attention; it was getting out of hand. He didn’t know if he loved her or just occupied himself with overheated fantasy, but he spent more and more time with his mistress. Alas—time—there just wasn’t enough of it, nor of space, either psychic or real. He wanted to craft it, to remold it to his liking, but time fought back at him and resisted.
About his wife, he felt not so much guilty as annoyed. In the past, Sabine Hull had ignored various lapses, swimming along as she did in their mutually prosperous sea. During their fifteen-year marriage, Vince had provided her with four homes, each crafted in a restrained but opulent way: the townhouse in Manhattan, a weekend house in Water Mill on Mecox Bay, their Hawaiian island getaway on Lanai, to which they rarely went, and a ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, their “hunting lodge nouveau,” as Sabine called it. Unfortunately, his current dalliance could prove expensive, and a huge cloud of absolute impossibility hovered over his head, as in not allowing himself to think about how bad things could get. Because of his age and wealth, he had counted on the benefactor role to smooth over any marital lapses on his part; he thought his wife would love him for all he’d given her, and she had for a time, but lately he had grown anxious. He could feel the molecules vibrating asymmetrically, as if a whole new world of energy pulled them apart.
Sabine came from a middle-class family with its roots in Villefranche on the Côte d’Azur, and when Vince Hull first met her sixteen years ago, she had been comely and funny. And younger, only twenty-seven at the time. In the early days, he had needed her, because he wanted to stonewall his own forty-three years. He had enjoyed her French coolness, her unflappable gentility, her European maturity, and with her swaggering bob of short dark hair, often in motion, she seemed always about to applaud some imaginary triumph; but now, at fifty-nine, he just felt older than the world. She too had changed.
Of late, she protested her treatment because Vincent didn’t sleep with her much any more, and he was longer and longer away from whatever house she occupied. For him this posed problems, as he wanted to be near his two daughters, but he did not want to make love to his wife, and so between the time issue and the love issue came a blockage of a most confusing sort. About her he had moved from passion to clarity to tolerance, poised for anything that might slip out of her voluble French mouth. She talked. A lot. She loved to talk, she had a ball talking, as if she could consume the world with words, and Vincent finally decided the French needed three words for every English one. Inevitably he had retired to a listening attitude, not wanting to have to respond. In the larger scheme of things, and this he knew, Hull was the kind of man who would have been bored with an uncomplicated, unchallenging personal life.
Vincent Macklin Hull came from a long line of seriously competent bastards. His celebrated grandfather Malcolm Erskine Hull, an engineer from Edinburgh, had discovered and worked copper mines in Chile, subsequently inventing several very useful drill bits, but in his spare time he cursed humans and kicked dogs. Vincent’s father, Myron Hull, had grown the business to include an array of drilling companies, along with pipeline manufacturers, all the while acquiring pipeline rights across several other Latin American countries, and while the family empire continued to expand depending on the whims and character of these men, it came to include serious money losers in the United States, among them three tabloid newspapers, two radio stations, a publishing company of scientific journals, even an amusement park, all to give work to a host of dull-witted relatives.
The first family home was in Chicago, currently occupied by his 102-year-old aunt, along with five caregivers. His father, two uncles, and yet another aunt had long ago owned lavish residences in New York, the hub of the Hull empire. All dead now, they still whispered in his ear random curses in the night. In 1962 Vince’s father announced to his beleaguered family, “I want to control the lines of talk, so I can control the national conversation,” and that had led him first to acquire NewsLink, a rival then to Time and Newsweek, but with more gossip and bigger, more vivid photographs. In his later years, he bought into telecom, his single most spectacular bet, but he remained an uncouth, loutish roustabout, despite his many donations to the world of culture. He badgered Vince relentlessly and got drunk on Saturday nights, often raising a hand against both son and wife.
As an only child, Vince hid himself away when the family battles raged, then tried to enlist the help of neighbors. In the worst incident, his father tried to strangle his mother, at least that’s how he heard it from the safety of his own bedroom. The twelve-year-old had opened the door to find his mother cowering on the floor, his father clasping her neck in one hand and holding a drink in the other. They had both stared up at him, momentarily lifted out of their battle, and he had backed out, terrified about what to do next. He had run to the kitchen, finding refuge in the broom closet.
Vincent was only too glad to see the mean old man go, and when he finally did “cark it,” his son was grateful right down to his soul, if he had a soul, relieved at the vast fortune the man had passed down, though it was a legacy accompanied by harrowing burdens. All through his youth, Vince had had both great regard for himself and a fair amount of self-loathing, yet for the failings of others he had no tolerance whatsoever, and this bled into his relationships at work. Still, as his current life stood, he could indulge any and all of his feelings from behind the protective wall of inherited money, only emerging to talk to his two girls’ schoolteachers or to his very sociable wife’s friends. When he got too upset, he went to the gun range downtown on 20th Street, or he bought things.
On this day in early June, he wanted to get home quickly to check out a present he had just given himself, a very big present. Pausing for a moment outside his townhouse at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 71st Street, one of the largest single-family residences in Manhattan, he hoped to find no member of his family at home, only the help, wanting privacy with his purchase. Sure enough, as he entered the foyer—and what a foyer, of carved stone and marble, inconspicuous little television screens scanning the four levels of the house—there stood a Mark Rothko painting from a series done in 1969. It leaned against a table across from the carpeted winding staircase that led up to the living room, and, wrapped in plastic and masking tape, it had the homey aspect of an ordinary package.
Vince was tempted to snip the tape apart but then thought better of it. Instead, he sat down on the last step of the stairs and simply stared at it. Through the filmy covering he glimpsed the feathery black wash that bled down onto the turbid, much larger gray rectangle that lay beneath. One of a group of works that seemed to explore successive levels of despair, Rothko must have painted it with the calm, sure knowledge that peace would be upon him whenever he too merged into the darkness, as he did one year later when he committed suicide. Vince wanted to savor the complexities of the object and its maker before he could even think of getting the housekeeper to deal with the plastic, but he couldn’t think very long because his eleven-year-old daughter burst through the front door, heaving her backpack onto a chair, grabbing her friend, as the two prepared to raid the kitchen.
“Daddy,” Amelia cried and ran to kiss him. The friend hung back, intimidated by the house and the truly enormous object propped up on the floor. “What’s that?” his daughter demanded.
“A new painting. Do you think you’ll like it?”
“How should I know? I can’t see it. Want us to pull off all that stuff around it?” The two girls giggled, then held hands, threatening to jump on it maybe, while Vincent still observed them from his seat on the steps.
“Absolutely not. It’s a present I’m waiting to open.”
“You’re silly.” She kissed him on the top of his head. “It’s not Christmas.”
“I want every day to be Christmas.”
“It’s summer. Can’t you tell? I’m going to sleep-away camp or maybe France, so you have to unwrap it before I go.”
“Of course I will.” The girls scampered off, leaving a trail of noise and laughter. Vince could hear their chatter as the refrigerator door opened, and in that moment he felt comforted. Despite the contempt he felt for all the toadies and sycophants in his life, such feelings conflicted with his very real neediness. He told himself that he craved privacy, but actually he wanted to be surrounded with people. He needed noise, action, family, phone calls, plans, purchases—the works.
By dinnertime two maids and a house manager had unwrapped the painting, but still it remained lounging against the table in the foyer. When she came home, Sabine Hull stopped in her tracks to look at the thing, displayed in all its glory. The size and the opaque bleakness of it, at least to her way of thinking, had her stunned. It was dull, it was dark, it was depressing. Where would they put it? There weren’t any more blank walls, even given how many walls they had.
In point of fact, the Hull mansion housed a priceless art collection, American and European works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Vince now preferred the moderns. In his younger days, he had wanted some validation by buying well-known, accepted names, but later on he bought whatever he wanted, and he wanted the greatness of experimentation, the lustful energy that cried out for incomprehension or annoyance, or some major emotion. The safety of chaste and charming pictures no longer attracted him, and this was surely his most important purchase as well as his most expensive.
At dinner Amelia and her friend, now revealed as “Thea,” huddled next to each other whispering and giggling, while Vince’s older daughter, Claire, a quiet, exotic blonde with almond-shaped blue eyes and a lot of hair, three years older than her sister, kept listening distractedly for the phone in the hall. “Why do you listen for your calls all the time, Claire? I don’t encourage people to call me at home.”
“You don’t encourage people at all, Dad.”
“I talk to people constantly.” His older daughter looked away, while her mother sipped her wine and picked up another piece of bread, buttering it carefully as she framed her words.
“What does this painting mean, Vincenzo?” She had started to use this mysterious nickname just recently, and to him it sounded demeaning, as if he were an Italian lounge singer. “Why did you buy it?”
“It’s magnificent. One year later the painter killed himself.”
“Charming.” She stuck her fork into another chunk of the beef stew before her. “It’s completely blank, just dark colors. Anyone could do that. I don’t see how it has any value whatsoever.”
Neither of the girls listened to what she said, and as her husband threw back his head, savoring a finely roasted potato, neither apparently did Vince, but after dinner he insisted his wife come with him to observe his magnificent purchase. As they stood before it, he put his arm around her shoulder, and she responded by touching his hand.
Vince said nothing but pointed to the center of the painting. “See how the dark and the light blur together, so beautiful, Japanese almost, a nightmare or a point of rest.”
“Yes, I do see that,” she said and held onto his arm. “Who’s the new girl?”
“Which girl?” No, he shouldn’t have said this.
“A girl from the office called today.”
“Probably just one more of these floater-types. Let’s see if she can figure anything out. They come, they go, and my executive assistant just keeps telling me to fire them.” But he wasn’t sure what to say, as he didn’t know which girl she referred to and was not prepared to learn more. Out of nowhere, suddenly, Vince murmured, “I need you,” and pulled her into his arms. She opened her beautiful mouth and kissed him, caught up in his embrace.