Once I agreed to go to the taping session, everything else started to feel slightly irrelevant, a waste of my time. Certainly Angela’s opening proved—to put it kindly—an underwhelming affair. Yet her failure enabled me to put the next part of my plan into motion.
Even though Michael Loomis Fine Arts was not large, too much space separated the few unimportant visitors, most of them Angela’s personal friends. Each looked as lonely as her isolated sculptural figures, and only a little less contorted. No drinks were served. For once, information would be my only intoxicant until the afterparty.
“What should I say to Angela?” I asked Laura, who was sleek and deadly looking that evening in a new Gemma Kahng skirt.
“Tell her the show will be well received critically.”
“She knows what that means.”
“Then make up a smooth story about how recognition builds over time, how Michael will sell things out of the back room for months to come.”
“I’m supposed to be her friend.”
“So be one.” She scowled at my plodding reaction. “Why tell nice people the truth, Jack? Isn’t there enough grief in the world already?”
I looked around the room. “I half expect to see Phil here,” I said, feeling foolish. I was still a long way from accepting my friend’s bleak condition, even though I’d seen some of the devastation for myself. Laura gave me a reality check, reminding me that our former client never left the hospital anymore, could not care for his own daily needs or engage in more than the simplest verbal exchange.
“It’s too strange,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“How they work the same way basically—sex, age, disease.” Laura fingered her glass. “Beyond a certain point, your body just does what it’s going to do.”
I still couldn’t quite grasp it. Philip had been fully cogent at the time I lost Nathalie. Yet the breakdown that began only two and a half years ago with negligibly small slips—writing “soon see you” at the end of his e-mails instead of “see you soon”—worsened at a vicious rate, until now it had ravaged him totally, leaving the former magnate only nominally human. In the past few months, with increasing rapidity, memory loss had invaded his brain like an alien cell-killing substance, spreading wildly until his troubled, once-agile mind was obliterated. His thinking had suddenly passed over into a simpler, more blissful dimension, like Dante stepping through the wall of flame to embrace his lost Beatrice.
No one could say exactly when the last trace of guilt left Philip, when the final synapse gave way—the one that formerly connected the image of a dead woman, his wife, with the emotional oddity we call remorse. At last, irreversibly, he had entered into a pathological beatitude. Philip was far past crime and punishment now, beyond good and evil.
I could have used a little of his oblivion that evening, as the scene grew even more painfully subdued at the loft gathering after Angela’s show.
She had invited a bevy of old acquaintances, mostly third-rate artists, and a few junior-level museum people. Two catering tables were overloaded with wineglasses, liquor bottles, smoked salmon, and cheese—enough for a crowd twice the size. The few attendees passed each other at awkward distances, like mutually distrustful scavengers at an accident scene. Only when the drinks took effect did the conversations start to rise in frequency and tone.
I poured myself a vodka tonic and went to see how Angela was doing.
Pretty rotten, it turned out. She was standing alone in the kitchen, scooping unneeded ice cubes into a silver bucket. “This isn’t working,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“This bloody party, the show, my so-called career.”
“Give Michael a chance. You’ve been away for a while.”
“Too long, I know.” She stared down at the mound of ice. “There are times when I just hate art,” she said.
“You don’t mean that, Angela. It’s about all we have—the likes of us.”
“That’s the worst of it. My work was supposed to make life just dandy again after Philip left. Well, it didn’t. And now what? I can’t pray like your friend Hogan, and all I have to show for my efforts are those damned fiberglass witches.”
“That’s quite a lot, actually.”
Angela shook her head. “A dozen wretched, oversized dolls—do you know what they tell me, Jack?”
“No.”
“Art is no match for flesh and blood. Only love is love; only Philip is Philip.”
Suddenly, I wanted to touch her, to put my good arm around her waist as we stood by the softly humming refrigerator. But I didn’t dare.
“He wasn’t exactly sweet to you after he took up with Mandy,” I reminded her. “And he’s not exactly Philip now.”
“No, he wasn’t sweet. Not at the end.”
“Was he ever?”
“Wonderfully, in the first years. I can’t begin to tell you. But he’s a man like any other. He threw away the best thing he had. Sometimes I think that’s how we all keep ourselves going.”
“Why not just move on yourself, then? You certainly don’t lack for options.”
Her head shifted minutely, slowly, from side to side. “After Philip left, I tried to cut him out of my soul like a cancer. Later I realized the cells had metastasized.”
“Are you really that far gone, Angela?”
“All the way. What I felt for him—what I feel—is not a thing I can control.”
“I just hate to see you go through this misery for a second time,” I said.
She looked straight ahead, past me, past everything. “It’s hell to live without hope, Jack.”
“I know.”
Angela’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I wouldn’t wish that on Philip. So don’t wish it on me.”
“All right, whatever you say.”
Her eyes returned, powerfully. “I want the right, real thing, that’s all. Nothing less. I’m tired of everything else, and I’m too damaged to fight anymore—damaged nearly to death.”
“You deserve whatever you want.”
“I’m no fool, Jack. I know that someday—not so very long from now—this ridiculous pain, these crazed thoughts and feelings, will slowly end. I’ll be myself again, calm and reasonable and rather dull. But in the meantime, I have to think them and feel them. There’s no shortcut, no exemption for being smart.”
“No, I don’t suppose.” I finished my drink, placing the glass on the countertop. “At least you have Melissa.”
“Yes, I have my daughter.” Angela seemed to find herself again. “We have each other. The two of us, no matter what.”
Angela picked up the ice bucket and forced her thin lips into a party smile.
“Missy’s been looking for you, by the way,” she said. “She’s in back by the stereo, waiting with something quite important to ask you.”
“That’s funny. She never likes my answers very much.”
At the rear of the loft, I found Melissa cross-legged on the floor, flipping through her mother’s old albums.
“What are these things?” she asked. “Like clay tablets or something?”
“Nothing you recognize?”
“It’s all super-ancient.”
“Angela said that you wanted to see me.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Just good practice. For our future.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
“Did you think about me at all today?”
“Every moment.”
“No, you didn’t. Phony talker. Pretender.”
“Am I?”
“Fake, fake, full of cake.”
“It’d be better for us both if I were.” I sat on the edge of an ottoman near her. “Actually, I was thinking today about an adventure we could go on together. A secret party. Would you like that?”
“Can I wear my birthday present dress?”
“No, they want to see you in your school uniform.”
“They who?”
“Paul and his friends. They want you to dance.”
“You told them? It was just for you that day.”
“I know. But if you make Paul like it too, maybe we can find out who hurt Aunt Mandy. Then your dad won’t be in trouble anymore.”
“And the police will stop bugging Mom with so many questions?”
“That’s right.”
“Why doesn’t Paul just help us, without any dancing?”
“He’s a little bit selfish.”
“I know.”
“Was he ever selfish with you?”
“In a way. He told me about that other kind of kissing. The one men really, really like.”
“He just talked or he showed you?”
“We looked at pictures on the Internet. I thought they were pretty rank.”
“Paul makes video shows like that. That’s why he wants you to dance for his friends. I want to bust them, so the cops can get them to tell us what really happened to Mandy.”
“Will Paul go to jail?”
“He might. If we learn enough.”
She seemed to contemplate the prospect at length while a Roy Orbison song played.
“How do you know his friends will even like me?” she asked.
“They’re men. They won’t be able to help it.”