Unknown - The Genius

All of a sudden my life was back to normal, and the drudgery crushed me. The phone was leaden in my hand; a client in the doorway gave me the beginnings of a headache. My mind wandered, and I found myself unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone hold a sparkling conversation.

“Ethan.”

Marilyn put down her cutlery, for her a grave gesture. She had been going on about something someone had done to someone else in Miami, could I believe the audacity. “Can you at least pretend to listen, please.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where are you? Are you sick?”

“No.” I paused. “I was thinking about McGrath.”

Notice that I hadn’t lied. I had merely failed specify which McGrath.

“Who? Oh. Your policeman?”

Of the three or four—or maybe I’m misremembering, maybe it was five or six—digressions I’d taken since Marilyn and I got together, I had never once bragged to her afterward. But I’d also never lied.

Your policeman.

I lied, then: I lied with a nod.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s very, very sad. Are you too sad to eat that?”

It came quickly, then, a stab of hate for her. Many times in the past I had been annoyed with her, but this was different, and I had to excuse myself.

I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and slapped myself a couple of times. Pay attention. Common courtesy. I resolved to put the McGrath family out of my head and to be civil. And then—not tonight, but in a few days—and in a vague way—I would hint to Marilyn that I’d been with someone else. I didn’t have to say who. She’d be fine. I’d get it off my chest. I’d get over it, and so would she. I dried my hands and returned to the table. Marilyn had paid the check and left.

THE END OF MY QUIET WEEK came with a phone call—again a phone call—from Tony Wexler.

“Your father would like to see you. Before you say no—”

“No.”

Tony sighed. “May I speak, please?”

“You can try.”

“He wants to buy some art.”

That was a new one. My father owned plenty of paintings, but his taste ran rather toward seascapes and bowls of fruit. To be fair, I hadn’t been to the house in years, and in the meantime he might have assembled a preeminent collection of twentieth-century art; he could have hired Julian Schnabel to design his wallpaper and Richard Serra to do the flatware. But I had the distinct feeling that Tony was struggling to sound serious.

“You can laugh,” I said. “I give you permission. I won’t tell.”

“The offer is one hundred percent genuine.”

“I thought you’d run out of pretexts. Well done.”

“It’s not a pretext. He wants you to come to the house. Think of him, in this context, as a customer.”

“If he’s a customer then he can come by the gallery like everyone else.”

“You know as well as I do that not all your clients come into the gallery.”

“I bring work to clients when I have a prior relationship with them.”

He gave a tired chuckle. “Touche.”

“If he wants to buy some art I’ll gladly set him up with someone who can better suit his needs. What’s he in the market for?”

“The Cracke drawings.”

That caught me off guard. It took me a moment to reply: “Well, in that case, he’s out of luck.”

“Look, why don’t you come by the house tonight?”

“I already sa—”

“You don’t have to see him. You can deal directly with me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Just come by the house. If you’re unhappy you can leave. Or—forget the house. I’ll meet you someplace of your choosing. You can send someone ahead and make sure I’m alone. It’ll be like a spy movie. Name your terms, name the circumstances.”

“You come here.”

“I would really rather keep it private.”

“You said name my terms. Those are my terms.”

He stopped and started several times, and his fumbling confirmed my suspicion that the deal hinged on my coming to him, and not vice versa. Either he was trying to get me in the same room as my father, or he had been ordered to make sure that I understood who was working for whom in this transaction.

“This is childish,” he finally said.

“What’s childish is calling me up and demanding that I conduct my business according to someone else’s rules.”

“He’s serious. It’s a serious offer. A serious and committed offer.”

“How many.”

“Pardon?”

“How many does he want? I don’t make house calls except for my most serious and committed clients, so let’s see how serious and committed he is. How many does he want to buy?”

“All of them.”

I sighed. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, Tony, but I don’t have time for it.”

“Wait a minute, wait. I’m being straight with you. He wants them all. He wants the ones you’ve sold, too. You’ve sold some already, am I right?”

“Tony, for God’s sake.”

“You answer me now. How many have you sold?”

“A few.”

“Ah? Ah? You tell me.”

“A dozen.”

“Exactly a dozen.”

“Give or take.”

“Well which is it, give or take.”

“They’re already sold. They’re not coming back.”

“How much did you sell them for?”

I told him.

There was a silence.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Yes. Now, you can make offers on them, but I don’t think anyone’s going to want to part with them that fast, not unless you pay through the nose.”

“We’ll worry about that later. How much do you want for the rest of them.”

“You had the pieces. You could have kept them without paying a cent. Now you want to buy them back? Excuse me when I say that this doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“He didn’t want them before. He wants them now.”

“It’s an impulse buy?”

“Call it that if you want.”

“Bullshit. My father’s never done anything impulsive in his life. He’s a calculating son of a bitch and I’m sorry that he’s put you up to this. Let me ask you something, Tony: how do you work for him? Doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it drive you nuts, having to go work for that son of a bitch every day?”

“There are things about your father that you don’t know.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s life. Thanks for calling.”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER HANGING UP I regretted the way I’d spoken to him. Tony had been the one to hand me Victor Cracke, after all; and he’d borne my ingratitude for far too long already. I felt the urge to call him back and agree to a meeting—not at the gallery, not at the house, but at a museum or restaurant—an urge that I fought off, fought off repeatedly throughout the rest of the day, so that by the time I went home I had grown downright indignant about the entire matter.

Who the hell did my father think he was? The decision to throw the art to me had obviously come down from him, not from Tony; Tony was acting in his capacity as capo. Typical of my father; so typical. Make a deal, then change the terms. Give a gift that becomes an obligation. I had no reason to feel guilty telling Tony to get lost, no reason at all; no more reason, at least, than all the other times I had shunned my father’s warped attempts at intimacy. I owed them nothing. Victor Cracke’s art had come to me as though out of the void, like I’d found it in the trash. I had done the work. Alone.

I’d nearly come to convince myself of this, two days later, when I got another letter in the mail. Like its predecessor, it was written in Victor’s neat, uniform hand, on white, 81/2-by-11-inch paper. Like its predecessor, it had a simple message, repeated over and over and over. I AM WARNING YOU.

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