Unknown - The Genius

“Your siblings get along with him?”

“Well, my brothers work for him, so whether they like him or not, they kiss his ass. Amelia lives in London. I don’t think they have much of a relationship, but it isn’t overtly hostile.”

“That’s your specialty.”

“Correct.”

“You know anger shortens your life expectancy.”

“Then enjoy me while I last.”

She smiled wryly. “No comment.”

AFTER FOUR WEEKS IN MARILYN’S HOUSE the situation had become intolerable. Taking me in was incredibly kind of her, considering that things had already been tense between us before the attack. Although, looking back, I have to wonder if she didn’t extend the invitation primarily to keep an eye on me. If there were clues I missed them. When I returned home late at night, having spent the evening with Samantha, nothing Marilyn said or did indicated that she was silently building a case against me. And really, she had nothing to build on; even if she had somehow been able to eavesdrop at the warehouse, she would’ve come up with nothing concrete to hold against me. Everybody flirts, don’t they? If I flirted with Samantha while we worked, I did so under the assumption that it wouldn’t produce results. She had made that plain. So then what was Marilyn thinking, those nights when she greeted me in a kimono, pulled me up to the “boudoir” (her word), and threw herself on top of me? Did she think she would catch a glimpse of me with my eyes closed and learn the truth? She may have a keen nose for betrayal, but she’s not a mind-reader.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable. But I can’t help thinking that she set up the whole cycle of guilt and expectation in order to trap me, to make me ruin us, so that she could stand back from the wreckage and accuse me. The longer I stayed with her, the more indebted I felt; the more indebted I felt, the more resentful I felt; the more resentful I felt, the harder it was for me to pretend I was excited when we made love, and the more obvious my detachment became, the more petulant and biting she acted—which in turn fueled my guilt, resentment, detachment, etc.

It’s amazing how fast things can collapse. For the longest time, I had been unable to imagine anybody better suited to me than Marilyn. Now, though, I had basis for comparison. When Samantha and I talked I felt better—about myself, about the world. She was no Pollyanna; perhaps more than anyone, she was familiar with the awful things people did to one another. But she believed that not giving up the fight was what kept us from devolving; she believed that right and wrong had no expiration date and that five dead boys were worth giving up her lunch breaks and evenings and spending them with a man who made her uncomfortable. She was her father’s daughter, and you know how I felt about him.

With Marilyn I found myself repelled by the effect we had on each other, the way we feasted on scorn. Irony has its place. But it can’t be everywhere. And it disturbed me greatly that I could not recall a single unironic conversation between me and Marilyn. Everything that had transacted between us—seven years of dinners and sex and arm-in-arm appearances and talk, reams of gossip—started to feel artificial. I never wanted to look stupid in front of Marilyn. How well could she really know me? How well did I really know me? I never wanted to feel stupid, either. And that’s simply not realistic, not unless you turn everything into a joke.

Thanksgiving dinner was atrocious, the two of us sniping at each other across the table while the rest of her guests—all art people—kept trying to steer the conversation back on track. Marilyn got very drunk and began to tell ugly stories about her ex-husband. I mean truly savage; she mocked his inability to sustain an erection; she imitated his pillow-talk; she railed about his three daughters and how stone-dumb they were, how none of them had scored higher than eight hundred on their SATs and how he’d had to bribe their way both into and through Spence, piling detail upon humiliating detail, all the while staring at me, so that if you’d walked into the room midway through her speech you would’ve likely figured me for the buffoon in question. Finally I couldn’t stand any more. “Enough,” I said.

Her head swiveled loosely toward me. “I’m boring you?”

I said nothing. “Am I?”

I said—I couldn’t help myself—”Not just me.”

And she smiled. “All right, then, you pick a topic.”

I excused myself and left the table.

Knowing she’d be hungover, I got up early the next morning and told Isaac that I wouldn’t be needing his services anymore. I packed my things and went downstairs to catch a cab back to TriBeCa. The clothes from Barneys I kept.

AS I MENTIONED, work wasn’t going so well, either. I shouldn’t say that; I actually have no idea what the gallery was like during those months, because I was seldom there. While it was true that I had been gone a lot longer dealing with the Cracke drawings, at least then I’d been working for the gallery. Now what could I say? Mornings when I should have been able to step into a suit, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment. At the time I told myself that the cause of my lethargy was physical. I was tired; I needed to rest; I had just gotten out of the hospital. But by December I was feeling mostly fine, and I still didn’t want to get back on the floor. Having missed Alyson’s opening, I had a hard time getting invested in her show; and at moments, I couldn’t even remember what was hanging, let alone muster the energy to sell it.

This surprised me, most of all because I had so recently felt better than ever about my job. Victor Cracke’s work had reawakened my love of art and made the exercise of buying and selling seem worth more than the dollars involved. But I suppose that that was the very essence of the problem. Without the kind of charge that Cracke provided, I was back to pushing work that I didn’t fully believe in, lots of cleverness and allusiveness that now rang hollow. And since I couldn’t count on a Victor Cracke coming along very often, I looked at my future and saw one big blank.

So there you have it, a neat dichotomy: Marilyn and my gallery and my day job on the one side; and on the other side Samantha and Victor and five dead boys. I’ve wrapped it up neatly in story and served it to you on a bed of symbolism. You’ll never really understand how profoundly that winter changed me, though, because to this day I don’t understand it myself.

With time I have come to see that these changes were lying in wait longer than I realized. When people we know do something radically out of character, we force ourselves to revise our impressions; we look back and the insignificant becomes illuminating. It’s hard to look at yourself critically, objectively; but as a narcissist, I’ve spent a lot of time examining my own life, and I know now that I had been dissatisfied longer than I realized. When I entered the business I thought I had found the place for me. Until that point I was half a personality, unformed and uninformed by anything except my desire to distance myself from my father. He was cold and art was hot. Art was—so I told myself—as different from real estate as possible. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I thought that. You might be laughing at me; I know Marilyn would. But the fact that I tell you what I thought and not worry whether you’re laughing is, I think, a pretty good indication of how far I’ve come.

IT WAS THE THIRD WEEK OF DECEMBER before the DNA results started coming back in, and we met with Annie Lundley to review the forensics reports. It was a frustrating afternoon: none of the evidence allowed us to draw firm conclusions. All of the hair recovered from the room, for example, matched samples taken from the excluded group—including me.