Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

After a while Clare came back. Her face was pink and her hair was a tangle of gold. She leaned against me and put her mouth on mine. Her body was warm and firm and I could smell the ocean in her hair. “My hands are cold,” she said, and she put them inside my coat and under my shirt. We stayed that way until I spoke.

“Why do you do it?” I’d asked.

“Do what?” Clare whispered into my neck.

“Why do you see me, when you’re married?”

Clare stiffened in my arms and let out a long sigh and otherwise didn’t move for over a minute. Then she took her hands off me and stepped away.

“Why do I cheat on him, you mean?” Her voice was flat and empty. I nodded and a grim little smile crossed her face. “All of a sudden you’re curious?”

“I’m just looking for some insight.”

Clare snorted. “Into what, for chrissakes?” She put on her sunglasses and buttoned her coat and said something else that the wind snatched away. Her face was rigid and the sun flared on her black lenses.

“You want to hear all the desperate details? Fine. He’s twelve years older than I am; his first priority is his business; I’m wife number three; and my best guess is he’s been fucking other women since before we were engaged. No one in particular, but a rotating cast of characters.

“There’s a certain type he goes for, a kind of well-bred shopgirl type, young, nicely schooled, a little arty maybe, but impressionable and deferential, used to keeping the customers happy. The girl who manages the art gallery he buys from sometimes, the fund-raising girl on the hospital committee, the one handling PR for the museum benefitthat kind. I was surprised when I found out- hurt, even- but it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was working at Christie’s when I met him, appraising some prints he wanted to sell. He was married at the time and never made a secret of it.

“We don’t discuss it, but he’s discreet and I try to be too, and it is what it is- an arrangement that works well enough for both of us, at least for now. Not what I had in mind in high school maybe, but better benefits than at Christie’s.”

She’d stood with her hands in her pockets and said it matter-of-factly, like a slightly boring school recitation, and when she was through she’d turned up her collar and walked past me.

“I’ll be in the car,” she’d said.

“Shit,” I said to myself. My notes were stacked on the table from the night before and my laptop was still on, and for no other reason than that I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I took off my coat and started looking again for Holly Cade.

Despite my best efforts, and all the permutations of “Holly” and “Cade” and “Wren” and “Gimlet” I could think of, Google did no more for me this time than it had before. I made a peanut butter sandwich and went back to the MetroMatchPoint site and searched again for any postings from Wren. And came up just as empty. And then I thought about the names of the other characters in her plays, and about how many other aliases Holly might have used. I searched MetroMatchPoint for Robin, Lark, Helen, Cassandra, and Medea. There were no Medeas but plenty of the rest, though not one that sounded remotely like Wren. So back I went to Google.

It wasn’t quite dumb luck, but neither could I claim it was rigorous procedure or faultless logic either. It was a more oblique strategy that involved typing the names of Holly’s characters into Google and seeing what popped out. It took much sifting of chaff, but eventually I brought forth a kernel of wheat: Cassandra Z.

The connection was through Cassandra Zero, the doomed young daughter in Liars Club, and Orlando Krug, the man who’d owned the now defunct gallery in Woodstock where Holly had held her forgettable video show two years ago- the same Orlando Krug who now owned Krug Visual in the West Village, and who represented the work of a video artist by the name of Cassandra Z. Persistence and synchronicity- the detective’s best friends.

Cassandra Z had a low profile on Krug’s website: an entry on the list of artists that he repped, a one-line biography-“Cassandra Z lives in New York”- and a note, the only one of its kind on Krug’s site, that Cassandra’s videos were not publicly exhibited. “Viewing by appointment only, to qualified collectors.” Which perhaps explained why I’d been unable to find any reviews of her work. I wondered what qualifications Krug had in mind.

The handful of other references to Cassandra were in an art blog called Candy Foam, and in- of all places- Digital Gumbo: The On-line Journal of Emerging Video Arts. They were fairly recent, within the past eighteen months, and they started a ticking worry in me.

The first mention on Candy Foam was in the midst of a muddled, sophomoric thread on art and pornography, and whether these were mutually exclusive classifications. Someone calling himself BeatTilStiff offered up Cassandra’s work as an example of both, and triggered a long digression in which Candy and Beat- apparently the only parties to the debate familiar with her stuff- one-upped each other with bits of in-crowd arcana about the videos, all without actually describing what was in them. Candy and Beat were at it again a few months later in an exchange about the import of Cassandra’s work.

Candy wrote: “It’s her insight into sexual power politics, and her obsession with liminal moments and tectonic shifts- with those instances when control is abruptly transferred, when the dominant becomes the submissive, when denial becomes surrender, and language breaks down- when the whip changes hands, so to speak. And don’t get me started on the deconstructionist aspects…”

To which Beat replied: “Two words, Candy-‘forest’ and ‘trees.’ And as always, you miss the one while plowing into the other. You got the sex right, and the power, but the actual point escapes you entirely: Cassie’s doing noir porn, fucktard! It’s about hunger and voyeurism and inevitable doom and, above all else, PAYBACK. Check out her lighting! Look at her #5 and then at anything by Musuraca or Seitz. Go watch Out of the Past for shit sake! And BTW- you’re reading too much William Gibson again.”

To which Candy replied: “ESAD.”

The reference in Digital Gumbo was more straightforward. It was in a month-old issue, in a gossipy column called “Secondary Market,” and the columnist noted that two of Cassandra Z’s works-#3 and #8- were rumored to have changed hands recently, at six figures each. Whatever she was doing, people were paying good money for it.

I ran on Sunday morning, in a gritty wind I thought would sand the skin from my face. After a long shower and a bowl of oatmeal, I went out in it again and walked into the West Village. Orlando Krug’s gallery was on Perry Street, between an antique shop and a store that sold extremely expensive men’s pajamas, and behind a frosted-glass door with small black lettering on it. The inside was done in grays and whites and creams, and the interior designer had somehow made peace between the wainscoting and beadboard and William Morris rugs, and all the big flat-panel monitors mounted on the walls. There was footage of gray tenement rooftops playing on the screens, with pigeons that morphed occasionally into vivid tropical flowers. The air smelled of sandalwood.

A small, thin man sat behind a partners desk in the back corner. He was maybe twenty and his vaguely ferretlike face was covered in a neat three-day scruff. His hair was five shades of blond and arranged in careful chaos. He wore his French cuffs dangling but his blue shirt was well tailored and so was his look of boredom. He glanced up at me when I came in and went back to fiddling with his iPod. He looked around when I spoke, as if I weren’t the only one in the place.