Burn (12 page)

“Will you come?” he asked. “I’ll be working, but I can make sure you have the time of your life.”

His eyes seemed bigger than they ever had. As if he really wanted me to come and would be devastated if I didn’t. As if our relationship hinged on a trip to Asia.

“Monica.” Darren spoke up from behind me, interrupting a gaze a hundred feet deep and a million years long. “Come on.”

“We’ll talk later,” I said to Jonathan.

“See you tonight.” He smiled as if nothing in the world was wrong.

                                                  
CHAPTER 24. 

MONICA

Feran, a handsome Middle Eastern guy in a black jacket and pants, was waiting in the navy blue Audi sedan. I didn’t know Audis came that big, but the equipment fit in the back, with one of the back seats folded down. I told Darren to sit in the front, and we were off to the museum.

Vancouver was huge in a different way than Los Angeles, more vertical. The towering glass buildings clumped together like schoolchildren lining up for home room. The lower architecture was old, with brick brownstones backed by narrow alleys. Parking lots were few and far between. I guessed that posed a problem people were willing to live with because the streets were wall-to-wall humanity, even at eight in the morning.

About a minute passed before both my and Darren’s phones dinged.

—He never checked into the Marriot—

“Shit, Darren,” I said.

“Yeah, I got it. What could have happened to him?”

“Why are you asking me?” I had an unjustified defensive reaction, as if somehow it was my fault he was M.I.A. because I didn’t sleep with him.

“I’m not asking you.” Darren twisted to face me. “I’m asking generally. What could have happened? He doesn’t
miss
shit like this.”

I said what I wouldn’t have said if he really had accused me. “It’s not because of the other night? Do you think?”

He pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled around. “Get over yourself. Let me make some calls.”

And call he did the whole way to the museum. A virtual glad-hand and polite, warm ends to conversations allowed him to make four calls in fifteen minutes.

We pulled up to the loading dock behind a blond stone building. Though the museum itself was new, the old warehouse in the center of town was a hundred years old if it was a day, gutted and repurposed to save it from extinction. That was when Darren got through to someone who knew something.

“Geraldine, hey, man,” Darren said as we got out and Feran started unloading. “Have you heard from Kevin?”

I ignored the pause because I already expected the call would be a dead end.

But Darren bent his neck to the sky and closed his eyes, mumbling, “Oh fuck.” Then he put his arm around my shoulders. That did not bode well. “Did you get him one?” I heard her voice through the phone, with its New Yawk twang and fast talk. “Why didn’t you call us? We’re sitting here—”

He obviously got cut off. Geraldine’s voice came through loudly in a machine gun fire of clipped consonants. “Fine, fine. No, it’s okay… We don’t blame you. Can you call me if you hear anything?” He hung up soon after. “We’re fucked.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s alive. He called Geraldine for a lawyer since she has family in Idaho.”

“He’s in
Idaho
?”

“He got himself on some international watch list. When he was stopped at customs, they found out he had open warrants and shipped him to the state where the crimes were committed. Back home.”

“Crimes? Watch list?”

“He was on parole. He skipped when he came to L.A. We’ve hit the end of my knowledge. ”

I was glad he was okay, at least. Not hurt or dead. Not drunk in an alley. And though it was egotistical and narcissistic to even consider it, I was glad he didn’t stay away because of what had happened between us.

“We can do it. Right?” I said, taking a box from Darren.

“He has the diagrams.”

“Do you remember how it goes together?”

“I want to say yes,” he said without confidence.

“Me too. We can do this.”

“Yeah.”

We were relieved of the boxes of equipment as soon as we got into the guts of the building. Four men in dark blue suits and badges opened the boxes, checked them, checked our ID, and asked a ton of questions.

“Unnamed Threesome. Where’s the third?” asked a bald guy who looked as if he was made of lead.

“Late,” I auto-lied. “We need to check on the rest of the piece? It was coming through L.A. Special Transport?”

“Do you have the tracking numbers?”

“No.”

“Commercial invoice?”

“No.”

“Customs transfer certificate?”

“Look,” Darren cut in, “the guy with all the paperwork got held up with an immigration mix up. We have the sound equipment and specs for it, but that’s it.”

“Mister Rivers!” A man in a black turtleneck and wire-framed glasses approached us. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, with a close-shorn head of grey hair. Darren recognized him. They shook hands.

“Monica, this is—”

“Samuel Kendall, your curator. You must be the lady without the passport.”

“I fixed that.”

“Obviously.” What could have been an insult actually wasn’t. He said it with a slight bow of his head and a little play of a smile. “I heard what happened to Kevin. We actually have a problem far more serious.”

As if a mask had been removed without him moving a muscle or changing his expression, I saw that Mr. Kendall, under his veneer of jolly intelligence, was livid.

“How serious?” I asked.

“Career-ending serious.” He smiled again in that same way. “Please, follow me.”

Darren and I walked down a long hall with him. He spoke with his head half-turned, his words echoing against the cinderblocks. “We allocated space for this piece, and a ton of it. We have financiers who expect a full show, and collectors waiting to see a whole piece.”

We entered a larger, unfinished space with exposed ventwork and sprinklers. Crates and boxes stood everywhere. Kendall found three crates close to the loading dock and indicated them. Two were eight-feet tall. One was as big as a kitchen table.

Kendall stood by them and smiled, tilting his head. “What the fuck is this?”

Darren picked up a clipboard from the short crate and flipped though the paperwork. I never realized how brave and unflappable he was. At least in situations that didn’t involve me or his sister. Or his sexuality. He was as easy to throw as anyone, just not in matters of his career. Bless him, that was the only place I felt as though I had the wrong time signature.

“We’re missing four crates.” He flipped through the pages. “A page of the commercial invoice is missing.”

I inspected the tall crates. They’d all been labeled and numbered to match the assembly instructions. Kevin had reviewed it with me for no other reason than to sate my curiosity.

“They’re currently in customs, thank you,” said Kendall. “Even if they’re released immediately, they won’t get here for the preview. Sir and Madame, I cannot express to you the financial impact this will have on the museum if we do not have this piece installed. Allocation of space is eighty percent of our concern, and to have a gallery empty is unacceptable.”

“The gallery won’t be empty,” I said. “We’ll have to figure out the sound system, but I think we can get this to work. It won’t be a complete piece, and it won’t match the catalog, but the space will have something in it.”

“If it sells, there will be financial repercussions.”

“If it doesn’t, it’ll be worse,” muttered Darren. He looked up from the clipboard. “Can we get these moved?”

“Right away,” Kendall replied. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest in this piece.” Darren and I looked at each other as Kendall hailed down a guy with a forklift.

                                                  
CHAPTER 25. 

MONICA

My idea was simple. The installation had four walls. Two had been delivered. A bunch of carefully indexed detritus was in the kitchen table-sized box. That was enough for half a piece. If we placed it against a corner of the gallery, we would at least have four walls.

“Two of them will be plain white,” Darren said. “The whole meaning of the thing was about the overwhelming nature of emotional vulnerability.”

“Think about the overwhelming nature of telling
that guy
his gallery’s going to be empty.”

We didn’t know what we were doing. We’d made something using Kevin’s expertise, and though we tried to learn all we could while contributing to the visuals, Darren and I had essentially designed the sound. We placed the speakers, deciding which types to use and where. We conceptualized it, recorded it, mixed it, and made it work. We talked with Kevin about how the sound would work within the scope of the piece, but anything that could be seen was his. He had the last word.

So the assembly design had been up to him, and it concerned us only insofar as the speakers needed a place to be hidden.

The galleries were packed with artists hanging their work, and when they heard about our plight, we found volunteer helping hands and working minds who understood how to put up an installation. The front of the house, with the doorway, and the adjacent wall. The bug inside was a whole, finished asset. The thing didn’t look entirely broken. Darren and I decided how to get the sound to work by using the museum’s walls, which we decided to leave white. Darren could have drawn something on them, but it wouldn’t have matched Kevin’s artistry. We placed the glass and broken cinderblock as we remembered it. When it was as good as it was going to get, with the walls stabilized, the top part hovering over the gash, and the layers of my voice filled the room, the artists that had helped us stood back and applauded themselves and us for pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Though we’d make a success of the show if it killed us, the talk around the galleries was that Kevin’s career was jeopardized. Non-delivery of work was such a dead serious infraction that even the craziest artists didn’t get away with it. Non-delivery was a loss of space. It was a loss of prestige and face. It was apologies and returned money.

When he got out of whatever hole he was in back home in Idaho, Kevin would have to dig himself out of an even deeper hole in the art world. I didn’t envy him. As a matter of fact, I felt very, very sorry for him.

                                                  
CHAPTER 26. 

MONICA

We were very close to being late. The piece had gotten up and the music turned on as the caterers finished the buffet and bar. Feran had been at our service the whole time, even shuttling Darren around to pick up a cable he needed to reconfigure the sound. He sped us through the city, around side streets and highways, and got us back to the hotel with seven minutes to spare.

“Dude,” Darren said, “thanks.”

They shook hands like only men can, and Darren and I ran to our rooms.

The door between our suites was open. I peeked into Jonathan’s space and found him in a tuxedo shirt and tie, setting in a cufflink. Clean-shaven, hair neatened for the event, wearing a suit sexier than any lingerie, he silenced my reproaches about the open door just by looking as though he’d stepped out of a magazine.

“You look nice,” I said.

“Thank you. I had some things sent from Yaletown,” he said. “They’re in the closet.”

“I brought my Eclipse dress.”

“No doubt you did.” He tapped his watch. “I’m leaving. But you guys are going to be late if you don’t move it.”

“I have to close this.” I indicated the door.

“Shoo.”

As painful as it was to cut him out of my vision, I closed the door. Of course, I had no intention of wearing any dress he had sent from wherever he said they were sent from. I got out my Eclipse dress, which was the most beautiful thing I owned. I loved it. But next to it in the closet hung a wide garment bag designed for multiple hangers. In this case, seven.

I hung the Eclipse dress in the bathroom, behind the door, so the steam would relax it, and ran the shower. As I undressed, I made it a point to not think about the seven dresses. In all likelihood, they didn’t go with my shoes. I didn’t have the right accessories, and looking at them would only hammer home what I already knew. The dresses had been picked out by someone who didn’t know me, didn’t know my taste, and obviously shopped with an eye to making that gorgeous man’s female interest look like a wet dumpling.

The shower wasn’t the right temperature. Not quite too cold. Maybe it was too hot. That was it. I inched the handle a quarter inch toward cold and ran to the closet as though the bag held candy and opened it so fast the zipper screamed.

“God help me,” I said. “I am not made of stone.”

Seven dresses. Four black. I pushed those to the side. Everyone was going to be wearing black, and time was ticking by. Darren would knock in minutes.

One tonal print. Out.

The last two fell just below the knee. A sparkly, flesh-colored halter with a handkerchief bottom, and a red, low-cut power suit that screamed
don’t fuck with me.
That was it. And it went with the shoes.

I showered fast, keeping my hair dry. Quick shave. Soap all over. Dried like lightning and out to the closet.

Right. Red dress.

I pulled my underwear out of the bag, and of course, though I intended to wear my regular cottons, the lace and garter were right there. The set was white with gold hooks and clasps. The suspenders were satin with overlayed lace, and the rings holding the straps were as big as quarters. The front was held together with tiny gold hooks. Fuck it. At least I had an outside chance of getting laid in it.

When I pulled the dress out of the bag, I saw another, smaller bag was attached. I opened it to find a pair of red-soled shoes inside. Oh. Could it be?

Removing the cream halter dress, I found a pair of five-inch stilettos in a matching cream. Fuck, they all had shoes. Which meant I needed another hour. I had to look at every dress in the bag, every pair of shoes, and God help me, two of the black ones had scarves.