Taking Lives (3 page)

Silver starts talking too loudly. He needs a new assistant, so he says - part-time, afternoons, then Christmas, maybe summer.

Arkenhout says, ‘Mr Silver.’

The two stand like two screens opposite each other; all anyone will see is what they project. ‘You want the job?’ Silver says.

The artist’s house is a mansion, behind shade trees on a quiet street, with a courtyard and a bare glass studio that mysteriously is without heat or glare. Among the spindles and towers of apartment blocks that surround it, it seems arrogant.

Silver is working on huge blind canvases in which, like a puzzle, there’s a figure hidden: the critics find some kind of leper from an altarpiece, a spectre of death or disease. Arkenhout thinks it’s the artist himself, hiding in his work. A bit later, in a sensational piece in ArtForum, a Canadian critic will say the hidden figure is Seth Goodman, and pick apart what that means for the story of David Silver. Silver, as usual, will refuse to explain or even talk.

There are three other assistants. Very quickly, Arkenhout figures out his importance: he’s not responsive like the great artist’s other arrangements - Jeff, Raoul, Henry - so he makes the whole household more opaque. But he’s wrong and cheap about that.

‘He’s queer, isn’t he?’ the roommate says.

‘I don’t know.’

The roommate looks sceptical.

Arkenhout reckons something different, based on the books and the profiles he has studied: that Silver sees a bit of himself in Arkenhout, the self that came out of Arizona at the same age because there was nowhere to go but New York, the self that is discreet as a mirror.

‘I’ve been invited to work for David Silver,’ Arkenhout tells the Goodmans.

‘Oh,’ his father says. ‘That’s good. If you still have time to study. Your mother took me to that big show of his in Washington, once.’

Arkenhout is relieved they know the name. He says, ‘It means I won’t be able to come home for Thanksgiving.’

‘Your mother,’ says his father, ‘will be very disappointed.’

He’s grateful that Silver has just enough celebrity to excuse anything Arkenhout does, that the name is big and gilded in the Goodmans’ minds. The Goodmans send him, UPS overnight, a pumpkin pie which arrives cracked. There’s also a letter from his father: love, prefaced by oblique talk about the great city, and how a boy shouldn’t grow too far away from his parents. Arkenhout knows it is a begging letter.

In mid-December he’s up at Silver’s house, copying some articles that Silver claims he won’t ever read, when Raoul passes him the phone.

‘Your father’s coming,’ his roommate says.

‘Coming?’

‘He’s on the New Jersey Turnpike now.’

But -

‘He’s coming to some meeting in New Jersey, and he’s coming to take you to dinner or something. He’s an hour away, two hours if the tunnels are really bad.’

Arkenhout puts down the phone. He catches Silver’s eye. He doesn’t have the right to bother Silver, but he hasn’t any choice.

‘My roommate says my father’s here.’

Silver says, ‘You want to see him?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I could talk to him. Say you’re out of town on an errand for me. Taking something to the National Gallery in Washington, maybe.’

‘But he’ll want -‘

Silver remembers evading a father; he sees his own story in Arkenhout. ‘There’s work here, housesitting for the vacation. You could pay for spring break that way. I didn’t think you’d want to come to the Caribbean -‘

Arkenhout stays in the studio that night, on a futon on the floor, in a garden of high painted canvases.

Mr Goodman sits on Arkenhout’s bed, in Arkenhout’s room, trying to sense the presence of his son. He shouldn’t have surprised him. He shouldn’t have come to New York at all. The place is a kind of afterlife, an altered state.

He takes down a book from the shelf. His eyes water. He counts the pens in the coffee cup, twice. He won’t invade the boy’s privacy by turning on the laptop. He sees clothes in a clean laundromat stack on a shelf and he takes the top T-shirt. He holds it up before him. He smells the good domestic smell of soap and artificial freshness.

The roommate stands in the doorway. ‘Sir,’ he says. ‘Sir, I’m afraid it’s a bit difficult for you to stay here.’ His girlfriend is hanging back, between giggles and annoyance. ‘Sir?’

Mr Goodman looks as though he would bury his face in the T-shirt. But he gets up slowly and says ‘Thank you’ with mechanical manners and goes heavily down the hallway.

The Goodmans’ Christmas card plays ‘Joy to the World’ when anyone opens it, as Arkenhout does in David Silver’s empty house.

Seth Goodman is a success: a social creature, in a world Martin Arkenhout never expected to know, which doesn’t seem narrow and self-righteous and beery like that of the Amsterdam artists he used to read about in the magazines. Seth Goodman wants to live on, if he can.

The Goodmans write letters now. They don’t call much. There doesn’t seem any point. The letters are sometimes brief, and sometimes they say much too much about life back home in Jackson, Michigan, as though they were trying to pull Seth back with detail. At first, they’re angry Seth does not tell them more. Then they seem to get scared they’ll push him away; they write about ‘growing pains’.

Just once, they talk about cutting off the allowance unless Seth comes home.

Arkenhout is on a subway train out to Park Slope. A black woman in a pose of sad tiredness, sitting sideways, face rolled up. A dapper Sunday suit and a pink Sunday dress on children travelling with shiny prayer books. There’s a very small, thin, blank Chinese man with a bag of windmills.

He gets it, suddenly: an F train epiphany. The other passengers think he’s waking up from drugs or sleep; they pull back from him.

He can’t be just Seth Goodman. That’s a trap, too. These people out in Michigan want to see a Seth Goodman, and they’ll start to get literal soon, and ask what happened to their real son.

He’s supposed to visit people who live above a Chinese takeaway on Seventh Avenue, in a second-floor cave of chocolate wood. Instead, he goes to the Botanic Gardens and sits on the lawn among the early lilacs, running the circuit of his situation over and over again.

Seth Goodman mustn’t be missed, or else there will be questions. He can never go back to Martin Arkenhout. But he can’t be Seth Goodman any more, so he must become somebody else. In the papers, he’s read how easy it is to steal someone’s name and credit; but that doesn’t seem quite safe. A living person may notice what is done in his name. So he needs papers, but he needs more than papers: he needs a life to inhabit.

He watches the families parade past: the Japanese in knots, the wide shoulders of West Indians, the occasional old ladies in twos or threes, a few Hasidic Jews so dazzled by their children they hardly see the flowers. They’d be missed, he thinks, even if they had lives worth taking.

This doesn’t seem terrible at the time because he’s busy finessing the situation. Not being Arkenhout, not being Goodman, he’s all concentration. He can read the little gaps and shifts in people with senses they don’t know he is using: taste, say, or smell, like a cat, or a prickle like fever on his skin.

‘You work for David Silver?’

He is in some photographer’s apartment past Tompkins Square, at a party for someone’s unemployed black art administrator boyfriend: there are many large women, who treat the gay men like cabaret and the straight men like treasure. Arkenhout now brings a powerful seriousness to these events. He feels the sheer efficiency of his own body, as though he were always running a short race.

‘I said, you work for David Silver?’

The man asking is dome-headed, with a stick body, jointed awkwardly, which is sad because he is also young and insistent.

‘Sometimes,’ Arkenhout says.

The man is impressed. He’d like to ask what Silver is really like, but he wants to seem sophisticated enough to know Silver some day; so he says, ‘I’d like to own a David Silver.’

‘They’re for sale.’

‘You have to deal. There’s a short list. I sent a cheque last time and -‘

Arkenhout calculates. A Silver drawing is a half-million, a painting one and a half; it’s a reality you can’t miss in Silver’s house, that gives the corporate hush to the marble hallways.

He wonders about being rich.

Besides, this dome-headed man, free of physical grace, still can’t be more than - what? - early twenties. It’s time Arkenhout fast-forwarded his life, strode out of student days into real life. He’s not preparing for some douce career. He might want to tour the world, and Seth Goodman doesn’t even have a passport.

‘Someone said you lived in his house.’

‘Over Christmas. He was away.’

‘With all the pieces -‘

This guy must know people, or he wouldn’t be here, but he’s no social magnet; he foists himself on talking groups, then shuffles out of them. He’s not cute, sharp, or with someone. From his anthropology of art, Arkenhout deduces: the man is here because he’s money.

‘The Museum of Modern Art show,’ he’s saying. ‘I thought that kind of missed the point.’

Very soon, it’s going to seem significant that Arkenhout does not try to get away. He’ll get dinner out of it.

They eat at a Vietnamese place in SoHo, which would be like an Edward Hopper cafe except for the paper lanterns, and the green lights in the fish tanks in the window. The man’s name, Arkenhout now knows, is John Gaul.

He has an accent Arkenhout doesn’t know, odd long vowels. He talks about wanting to be a collector as though it were a career, but how dealers won’t somehow take him seriously. He wants the fine pieces, the great pieces, but he’s marked down for works on paper, minor drawings, paintings by people who don’t get covers in ArtForum. He’s an unconvincing buyer, as he’s an unconvincing man.

He invites Arkenhout back for a drink, and it’s early, so Arkenhout goes. The doorman says it’s good to see Mr Gaul again, and will he be staying long?

Arkenhout half expects a pounce, but Gaul just frets around his apartment finding bottles of wine. And Arkenhout stares: at glass walls, puffed-up sofas, room after room, a corner cabinet of ladylike porcelain, a pair of old oils of bright, open autumn that might suggest taste but more likely are spares from a family house. The man isn’t poor. What’s more he bitches at dust in corners, at the state of the heat, as though he hardly used this weirdly over-gilded empire of an apartment.

‘I’m going to the Bahamas,’ he says, as though it is another worry in a burdened life.

Arkenhout never, ever acts impressed. He knows better. He makes Gaul keep raising the stakes.

‘My uncle left me a house there. Big and pink, my parents say. I never saw it.’

‘Really?’ Arkenhout has worked to get his ‘really’ just as vacant as anyone’s in New York.

‘It’s real estate. You have to check out real estate. You never know.’

‘You know people there?’ Arkenhout says.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Gaul says. ‘You don’t have to know people. You pick them up as you go along.’ He’s starting to sound angry.

Arkenhout says nothing. He hates to fill up useful silences.

‘I hate to be bored,’ Gaul says. The phone rings and he goes to answer it.

A bored man, always in motion, about to go somewhere he never went before;

Arkenhout sees the promise in this. Gaul’s jacket is slung across the shiny, stripy couch. He can hear Gaul’s voice in the next room but one.

He doesn’t touch the jacket. He stands looking out of the windows across to the islands in the East River. He thinks about touching the jacket, checking the cards, the signature Gaul uses. In the restaurant it looked like a half-circle for the G with the rest trailing away like a fine hair. Credit cards get you almost anything, ATM cards get you money around the world.

There is a credit card slip on the side table, tucked into a book. Arkenhout doesn’t think; he acts on instinct, stuffing it into his pocket. He has a bit of Gaul now. There may even be information.

Gaul isn’t talking any more. He is standing at the door.

He knows something has happened. He sees satisfaction on Arkenhout’s face, that’s all. But Arkenhout isn’t furtive, isn’t hiding anything. Besides, he’s not some hustler. He’s David Silver’s assistant, a kid with entree. John Gaul really wants to say nothing at all.

‘The doorman will get you a cab,’ he says, coldly.

The next afternoon, Arkenhout hangs out at the house of David Silver, shifting canvases out of the cool hall into the sharp summer light of the studio. Jeff and Raoul don’t help. Since Silver will soon be back from some German junket, they’re playing away the last hours that feel free.

They have their passports out; a cartoon of Bugs Bunny with his mouth full, not of carrot; and the laser copier in Silver’s clinical white office. They have glue, fine blades, a small machine for laminating. They’ve brought Bugs down to a postage stamp, a perfect colour miniature, and they’ve produced page after page of the inside page of his passport, the one with birthdate, state of birth, all on a tasteful watermark.

‘You could slip the plastic off the page,’ Raoul is saying. ‘The photograph bumps up a bit, so that’s not a problem. And you use the thing a few times, it looks wrecked anyway. Then you just put the plastic, the page, and the cover back together.’

‘Just,’ Jeff says. ‘That’s all we have to do.’

‘It’s technique. Like they teach you at art school.’

Arkenhout watches carefully.

‘You could spoil someone’s trip that way,’ he says.

Raoul and Jeff are still discussing where Bugs Bunny was born: Burbank, or Brooklyn.

‘There’s this guy who keeps chasing me,’ Arkenhout says. ‘We could fuck up his passport -‘

Raoul and Jeff look up, interested. They like things to be discreet about.

‘Get the passport when you see him,’ Jeff says. ‘You can do it.’

Raoul has the laminating machine, the neatly cut rectangle of plastic, Bugs Bunny’s in-flagrante picture, the faked-up version of his particulars. He brings them all together and, a few minutes later, shows Arkenhout the result.

‘The type looks wrong,’ he says, ‘where it says place of birth.’