Restoration (38 page)

When Asmore was done Lowenstein held the finished painting out in front of him and studied it as he walked back to the car. Lowenstein laid the burlap on the backseat and it occurred to him that Asmore could import meaning to a picture without trying to, so great was his power as an artist. By now he realized that Asmore hadn’t followed him to the car. Lowenstein scanned the riverbank but he wasn’t there. Eventually he spotted him walking up the side of the bridge.

“I started up after him, but it wasn’t easy going. It wasn’t a walkway built to encourage pedestrian use. It was extremely narrow, only a few feet wide at most. I guess the bridge builders had emergencies in mind when they included it, but I can tell it wasn’t there to invite sightseeing. It seemed every other car that whooshed by me blew its horn. The draft from a couple of tractor-trailer trucks was so strong I almost went over the guardrail, which came up to only about waist-high. I was scared out of my wits and hoping the police would arrive and arrest us both.”

Until now Lowenstein had carefully avoided peering over the side, afraid that he’d get dizzy or lose his courage to continue. But presently he allowed himself to look and he saw the full sweep of the Louisiana low country, the nearby woods thick with old-growth cypress, tupelo and hardwood trees and the distant plantations etching geometric patterns in the earth. But most impressive of all was the river itself. Huge and dark, it seemed to Lowenstein to have no concern but for its own slow journey. Lowenstein opened his mouth and the cool air belled out his cheeks and made his eyes water. Asmore was standing a few paces ahead of him, with his hands on the rail, the wind blowing his clothes tight against his body and throwing his hair back. “I should’ve come up here a long time ago,” he said. “Why didn’t I come up here before, Low?”

“Why?” Like Asmore, he had to shout to be heard above the buffeting roar of the wind. “Because it’s crazy to be up here. People don’t do this.”

Asmore took the flask out of his pocket and drank from it. “You don’t see that?” he said, looking over at his friend.

“Don’t see what?”

“You don’t see how beautiful it is? Damn, Low, it’s beautiful.”

Lowenstein looked out again and it truly was beautiful, but it was hard to appreciate the beauty because he was so terrified. He began to see things he hadn’t seen the first time he looked. Ships docked at a port, for instance. And in the near distance in front of them great clouds of blackbirds moving in the sky. The blackbirds seemed to hover effortlessly in the wind.

“How do they fly like that?” Asmore said, gazing out at them, too, and drinking. “I just wish somebody would answer me that. How do they do it?” He took another swallow from the flask and set it on the pavement at his feet.

“I think we should be getting down from here,” Lowenstein said.

Asmore kicked the flask with his boot and sent it past the guardrail, tumbling out a ways and then dropping toward the water. “It’s beautiful. All of it is.”

“It’s dangerous,” Lowenstein said. “Come on, Levette. Let’s go back.”

“I mean the river,” Asmore told him. “I mean the river’s beautiful. I never thought so before, I always feared it before, but now I see it’s beautiful.”

He laughed and spread his arms out on either side of him. His hair whipped behind him and his eyes were closed and Lowenstein saw him sway ever so slightly.

“Levette? Please…”

Asmore glanced over at Lowenstein and a smile came to his face. He lowered his arms and leaned forward against the rail to regain his balance.

“I’ll take you home,” Lowenstein said.

“I am home,” Asmore told him. “Dammit, Low, I am home.” Somehow Lowenstein understood that he meant the river. “I need to clear something up,” he said. “Will Henry never wrote me no letter.”

“What did you say?”

“I said he never wrote to me. Will Henry? I made that up. I never had another way to get out here, either. I meant for you to take me.” The smile was gone from his face now. He turned away from Lowenstein and stared out in the distance, out past the blackbirds. And it came to Lowenstein that his friend meant to kill himself.

“I forgive you,” Asmore said. “You couldn’t help it, Low.”

“What are you saying, I couldn’t help it?”

“I forgive the others, too,” he said. “I forgive them all.”

Lowenstein stepped up closer with the half-formed intention of grabbing him by an arm and guiding him down from the bridge, but Asmore moved to avoid him and seemed to lose his footing—he might’ve tripped on a shoestring, the way he suddenly got tied up. He fell backward hard against the guardrail. “Low,” he said and gave a quick laugh to show his surprise. A spark of recognition flashed in his eyes and he reached out for Lowenstein’s hand and they touched briefly before Asmore followed the pull of his weight and went over the side without a sound.

“I couldn’t watch it,” Lowenstein said. “I didn’t see him hit the water. I was so traumatized that I sat at the foot of the guardrail clinging to it. I remember looking around and the cars were still coming and blowing their horns and out over the river the blackbirds still hung suspended in a swarm. The world was exactly as it had been a minute before except for the presence of that one man, and yet I knew that without him in it the world would never be the same again. After a while I was able to stand and I stumbled out into the road. I should’ve been killed then myself, I wanted to be, but somehow I succeeded in stopping traffic. A man out for a drive with his family was the first to offer help. The passenger door fell open and I looked in
and there must have been six or seven of them and they were all gazing out at me with the same expression.

“The man said, ‘You weren’t planning to jump, were you, son?’ I said no and his wife squeezed up closer to him, to make room for me on the seat. ‘Come sit,’ the man said. ‘We’ll drive you to the other side.’”

We were waiting when she arrived in the U-Haul and parked on the driveway that ran under the old hotel. Joe Butler raised the rear door and we unloaded the panels and lighting equipment and she gave the keys to one of the garage attendants and told him she wouldn’t need the truck again until later tonight. Each of the panels was fitted taut over wood stretchers and covered with butcher paper, and we carried them into a service elevator, then up past the lobby with its liveried door staff, Italian-inspired ceiling frescoes and crystal chandeliers, and stopped finally on the floor where she’d rented adjoining suites with four-poster beds in the bedrooms and Louis XIV furniture arranged on the fancy rugs. In advance of our arrival Rhys had asked the hotel to clear out the furniture in one of the living rooms. We removed the paper and stood the
panels against the wall and Rhys set up a photoflood lamp on each side and one directly in the middle, and when she turned them on we stood back and stared past the heat and the glare.

“It blows my mind,” Rondell Cherry said. “It really blows my mind this was there all that time.”

“Hiding,” Joe Butler replied.

Asmore’s signature, painted black, was in the upper-left corner. On opposite sides of the painting, positioned along the edges, I could see Paul Ninas with the girl and Alberta Kinsey in the nun’s habit. I had another close look at Lowenstein as a young man gambling his life away while all around him the Carnival celebration was going full steam.

“Tell me this dude’s name again,” Cherry said.

“Asmore,” Rhys said. “His name was Levette Asmore.”

“A black man?”

“Yes, he was black, as a matter of fact.”

“You can see that,” Cherry said, although he never did explain how.

Cherry had a butterfly bandage covering a closed wound on his face where he’d taken a punch thrown by one of two thugs who’d attacked him outside the Wheeler Beauty Academy the week before. In his fifteen years at the school it was the first time he’d been the target of a crime, and even after he’d pummeled the boys senseless, neither would admit that it wasn’t his wallet they were after but retribution for his having sold Tommy Smallwood a worthless piece of canvas.

Like Joe Butler and me, Cherry was wearing a suit with a clean shirt and necktie, as per Rhys’s instruction. It was strange to see him out of his usual canvas coveralls and I wondered where a man that large went to buy clothes.

“You look sharp, Mr. Cherry,” I said.

He shook my hand, the second time today. “I
feel
sharp.”

As for Joe Butler, his transformation was even more dramatic. He’d had his hair cut and his shirt collar covered the tattoos that usually
were visible on his neck. Most surprising, though, was the tan that browned his skin. He’d had so much sun that his forehead was flaking. “Have you been vacationing at the beach or something?” I said.

“Yes, I have. Did Rhys tell you?”

I had a good laugh at the thought, Joe Butler the scarecrow wearing a swimsuit and stretched out in the sand. “You’re a strange man, you know that?”

“Thank you, bro.”

Rhys opened the door adjoining the two suites and called for a meeting in the other living area. This room had furniture. I sat between the two men on a sofa and Rhys sat across from us in a wing chair with her legs crossed, a yellow writing tablet propped on a knee. She was wearing a tailored jacket with a velvet collar, a black skirt, hose and shoes that looked new. Her hair hung down and fanned out over her shoulders and her face held subtle touches of makeup that sharpened her bones and brightened the shine in her eyes. She glanced at her watch and I checked my own, somehow succeeding in pulling my eyes away from her for a moment. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

“Okay, listen up,” she said. “The first of them arrives in less than an hour. His name is Cedric Anderson. Mr. Anderson is the only visitor we’ll have coming today from Texas. He owns a computer software design company in Austin. Mr. Anderson collects American regionalist paintings and is reputed to own three excellent examples by Thomas Hart Benton, all of them bought privately in New York. He also owns a Levette Asmore cityscape, a view of Canal Street in the rain, for which he paid a dealer three hundred thousand dollars. He bid on
Beloved Dorothy
by phone, one of the last of the phone bidders to drop out. Like the others, Mr. Anderson will have thirty minutes to inspect the painting. He’ll be accompanied by his wife, Julie.”

Joe Butler raised his hand. “Should we be taking notes?”

“No notes. Just listen. I thought you might like a brief introduction to the collectors we’ll be meeting today.”

“Cedric Anderson,” Rondell Cherry said. “He’s not black, is he?”

“I can’t answer that,” Rhys said. “I spoke to him on the phone and we’ve exchanged e-mail. But I’ve never asked him his race.”

“Because his name sounds black,” Cherry said. “I grew up in Pigeon Town with this boy, name of Cedric Williford. Now he was black.”

“We need to move on, Mr. Cherry.”

He pushed back deeper into the sofa. “I just thought you’d like some input.”

“Thirty minutes after the Andersons leave, Taylor Dickel of Columbia, South Carolina, will be our guest. Mr. Dickel inherited his money and hasn’t worked a day in his life. His wealth is estimated at a hundred and fifty million. His mother is reputed to have sat for Asmore in 1938, but the painting’s whereabouts is unknown. Mr. Dickel attended the
Beloved Dorothy
sale but did not bid because he said he wasn’t feeling well after eating bad oysters at dinner the night before. Witnesses, however, observed Mr. Dickel drinking Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s that Friday evening, and in fact he failed to attend dinner with friends. Mr. Dickel has long included Asmore on a wish list left with Lucinda Copeland at Neal. He is an erratic but engaging personality, and a faithful client of the Guild’s. He will be alone today, and, I hope, sober. Joe?”

“Yes, boss?”

“I’m putting you in charge of serving beverages. If Mr. Dickel asks for a drink, please limit the amount of liquor you serve him to a jigger.”

“Will do.”

“Now he’s white,” Rondell Cherry said. “He is definitely white.”

Rhys ignored him. “After Mr. Dickel we’ll have Amanda Howard and her husband, David,” she said, referring to her notes. “The Howards, who live in Miami, own several hundred fast-food restaurants in the state of Florida and will be traveling to New Orleans this morning by private jet, their own. They collect southern art, mostly images of black people. They’ve been redecorating their home and
need ‘something large, busy and dramatic,’ as Mrs. Howard said it, to hang in a hallway. Mrs. Howard already owns a
Beloved
portrait,
Beloved Molly.
She’s hoping the mural’s colors will match those of the runner she and her husband intend to use in the hall.”

“I don’t have any idea what those two are,” Cherry said.

“Mr. Cherry, am I going to have to put you out in the hall?”

“But I was just saying…”

Rhys provided profiles for five other potential buyers, all of whom were coming from out of state but one, Tommy Smallwood, the last of the group scheduled to view the painting. His appointment was set for six o’clock.