Tracy Guzeman - The Gravity of Birds

‘Dad.’

‘I only mean I wish it had been with somebody you could’ve brought home to meet your mother.’ Stephen felt the weight of his father’s hand hovering just above his shoulder. He prayed for it to come down and rest there, but it did not. He looked up, and the pain and disappointment he saw in his father’s face worked on him like a slow-acting poison.

His father took a step back. ‘You think I’m being hard on you?’

The distance between them seemed cavernous. ‘Was it my fault Chloe kept her marriage a secret? No. Am I to blame for the unhappiness in their relationship? Hardly. Yet I’m the one who’s being punished here.’

His father studied his knuckles. ‘Really? And what about her husband? You think he’s not been punished?’

The way his father asked gave Stephen a twinge of panic. He sensed Dylan knew more about such a situation than Stephen wanted to imagine.

‘She should have left him,’ Stephen said. Meaning she shouldn’t have left me .

‘People who are married learn to make accommodations,’ his father said. ‘That’s the only way they manage to stay married.’

Stephen looked squarely at him, suddenly seeing an old man. Age had turned his father’s face into a study in tectonics—deep valleys and soft folds of skin butting up against each other, shallow divots, old scars, a peppering of brown spots; the tallies of crosshatched skin at the corners of his eyes, his frizzled, electric brows; the mouth that had become thin and pickled, losing some of its enthusiasm as well as its definition.

‘Honestly, I don’t care about his feelings.’

‘I hope you don’t mean that.’

Stephen turned away. He couldn’t stand to think of the situation any longer, or his part in it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I really do.’ Stephen tipped more whiskey into what was left of his coffee and reached for a tissue as he sneezed, then blotted at the papers strewn across the top of his desk. It had been a comeuppance of near-biblical proportions. When he was still a rising star at Foyle’s, his days had been spent traveling across Europe on the company’s dime, and oh, what days! He visited auction houses, private homes, and museums. He marveled at Old Masters and contemporary giants, advised on the restoration project at Lascaux, skimmed his fingers across Aubusson tapestries from the hands of Flemish weavers, examined expertly crafted furniture, even humbly proffered his opinion as to the value of a Meissen thimble decorated with the coat of arms of an Irish aristocrat. Now, four years later, he was trapped at Murchison & Dunne, occupying the lowest rung on the ladder, doing nothing but appraisals while interest piled up on his credit cards, his rent crept steadily upward, and his position grew increasingly precarious.

It was no coincidence they’d stuck him here, on the twenty-second floor. Simon Hapsend, the employee who’d previously had the office, was responsible for developing the company’s website and promoting the firm’s capabilities for forensic valuation work, an assortment of services running the gamut from expert witness testimony and valuations for insurance purposes to prenuptial assessments, bankruptcies, and trust and estate work.

But Simon had been abruptly fired when an FBI task force traced attempts to hack into the systems of several major financial institutions back to his computer. That the task force’s computer evidence had itself been hacked and could not be located was the only thing that kept Simon from an orange jumpsuit and a new address at Rikers. So Stephen inherited the office, along with the odd remnants of Simon he stumbled across: lists of passwords and user names stuffed into a gap at the back of a drawer, e-mails from an unknown sender requesting that Stephen delete the files that mysteriously appeared on his computer, and an olive drab T-shirt, the source of a rank smell, with a picture of a snake and the word Python in black script that was finally, and fortunately, discovered wadded up behind the file cabinet.

Stephen stared at the wall, wondering how long he could subsist on ramen noodles and beer. His confidence regarding his talent was receding at the same rate as his bank account. He studied his wavering reflection in the stainless-steel thermos. It seemed unlikely he’d age well. His black hair was already dashed with white around the temples. At six-three he’d been blessed with height in spite of having two parents of less than average stature, but a doughy paunch hugged his middle, the gym membership having been one of the first things to go. His eyes were bloodshot from a lack of sleep and an excess of bourbon; his skin had acquired the grayish tinge of a soiled dishrag. And he was sadly aware the primary reason he was kept on was his father’s reputation.

Dylan Jameson had owned the small gallery in SoHo for most of his life. Stephen’s childhood was spent running through those beautifully lit rooms, hiding behind oversize canvases; his playthings had been panel clips and L brackets, and exhibition catalogs that he stacked like pillars. He learned about perspective sitting astride Dylan’s shoulders as his father walked closer to, then farther away from the paintings in the gallery, introducing Stephen to a mathematical vocabulary: vanishing points and horizon lines, degrees and axes and curvilinear variants. His fingertips followed the flat sections of paint on a canvas, the channels where firm brushstrokes had tongued out the heavy oil, lipping it to one side or the other. He peered through a magnifying glass as his father quizzed him: glazing or scumbling? Alla prima or underpainting? Wet into wet or fat over lean?

But in spite of his father’s offer, working at the gallery, regardless of the lack of title, would have been a mistake. The airy rooms were colored with disillusion, the cheerful demeanor of the gallery manager an insidious reminder of his own lacking personality. Instead, at the beginning of the summer, Stephen had taken his meager savings and fled to Europe in a state of disgrace, slumming his way across the Continent, staying in fleabag hotels and cheap pensions, scooping the hard rolls and bits of sausage remaining from his breakfast into his knapsack for lunch, drinking cheap wine that gave him a headache, and smoking cigarettes that stained the tips of his fingers yellow. Everywhere, he imagined Chloe beside him. The steady pressure of her fingernails against his palm when she wanted him to stop talking and kiss her. The sound of her heels, pacing, as he studied Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in the Galleria Borghese. Her fleeting look of disappointment once she’d drained the last from a glass of pinot in a sidewalk café. And the rare expression he caught before she had the chance to substitute it with one more pleasing—a calculating hardness that froze him in his place.

In Rome, he hadn’t bothered answering the call from his mother when he’d seen the number displayed, certain she was calling with her wheedling voice, attempting to lure him back. He’d turned his phone off. Four months in Europe and there were still plenty of wounds to be licked. Then, days later, he’d turned his phone back on and seen the number of messages that had accumulated. It was late autumn, everything already skeletal and bleak, when he flew home for his father’s funeral. There he was, back in New York, more miserable than when he’d left; a pair of his father’s cuff links his most concrete evidence of ever having been Dylan Jameson’s son.

His father’s knowledge had been coupled with a poet’s soul, a deep appreciation for beauty in all its guises. Dylan’s understanding of what an artist hoped to convey, matched by a genuine desire for that artist’s success, won him legions of fans—new artists whose work had yet to be seen, established artists coming off a bad show or hammered by negative press, auctioneers who knew his father would have the inside track, appraisers who valued a second opinion.