The Genius (29 page)

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.

Samantha looked at me. “You know what this means.”

“What.”

“It means your hair is falling out.”

The old pair of jeans yielded two DNA profiles, one from the bloodstain and the other from the semen, the latter presumably belonging to the perpetrator. Although the state crime lab still hadn’t gotten back to Samantha about her request to check the profile against CODIS (see how fast I was learning?), Annie had been able to scrounge up dead skin cells from the sweater found in Victor’s apartment. That profile did not match the profile taken from the jeans. Although we had been assuming that the sweater belonged to Victor, we had no proof; and we furthermore could not rule out the possibility that the wearer of the sweater (if it was in fact Victor) had been present at the crime scene but failed to leave DNA.

The most promising lead was the partial fingerprint taken from the inside of the weather journal. At my request, Annie had tried to be as noninvasive as possible when handling the art; and, going slowly, she had page by page examined the journals for usable evidence. The print had also been sent to the FBI, request still pending. As Samantha and Annie talked it once again became clear to me how much of what they did was paperwork, how much time got wasted in leaving messages and sending follow-up e-mails. In that sense, our jobs had a lot in common.

When Annie left, Samantha and I turned our attention to the group of comparison cases. She had whittled it down to three, one of which left a surviving victim. The two other murders were cold, their evidence in storage, and we planned to get those boxes out of storage once the holiday had passed. The survivor was a boy—a man now, assuming he was still alive— named James Jarvis. At age eleven he had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and choked, and left for dead in a park four miles from Muller Courts; this happened in 1973, six years after the presumed final murder. So far, Samantha had been unable to locate Jarvis, but she was determined to keep trying. When she told me that, she got the little familiar bulge in her jaw.

It was December 21. We were in a booth at the Chinese restaurant, tired of talking about homicide, content to watch the traffic. It was dark out, the sidewalk slush painted red and green by the stringlights in the window. I never found Queens beautiful, but at that moment it seemed realer than any place I had ever been.

“ ‘You will endure a great trial,’ ” she read.

“In bed.”

“In bed.” She chewed loudly. “Your turn.”

“ ‘You have many friends.’ ”

“In bed.”

“In bed. Please,” I said, holding up a hand, “don’t even bother.”

She grinned and reached for her wallet.

“On me,” I said.

She studied me. “Is this a ruse?”

“Consider it a gift to the working class.”

She gave me the finger. But she let me pay.

Outside we stood shivering and talking about the upcoming holiday. Samantha was headed to Wilmington with her mother and sister and their respective spouses. “I’ll be back on the second,” she said. “Try not to miss me.”

“I will.”

“Miss me, or try not to.”

I shrugged. “You decide.”

She smiled. “And what are your big plans?”

“Marilyn’s having a party this Thursday. Yearly thing she does.”

“That’s the twenty-third,” she said. “I meant Christmas itself.”

“What about it.”

“Are you going to be somewhere?”

“Yes,” I said. “At home.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You can hang on to your condescension just a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you call your father?” she asked.

“And do what, exactly.”

“You could start by saying hello.”

“That’s it? Say hi?”

“Well, if that goes okay, you could ask how he’s doing.”

“I don’t see this scenario playing out in a way that leaves anyone happy.”

She shrugged.

“We never celebrated Christmas,” I said. “We never even had a tree. My mother used to give me presents but that was the extent of it.”

She nodded, although I sensed something vaguely accusatory. I said, “If I called him up and said hi, he’d expect more. He’d start asking why I hadn’t called before. Trust me, you don’t know him.”

“You’re right, I don’t.”

“No thank you,” I said.

“Whatever you say.”

“Why are you doing that.”

“Doing what.”

“You’re making me feel guilty for something I haven’t done.”

“I’m agreeing with you.”

“You’re disagreeing with me by agreeing.”

“Will you listen to yourself?” she said.

I walked her to the subway.

“Enjoy the canapés,” she said. “I’ll see you next year.”

Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I remained standing there long after she’d gone.

TO CALL MARILYN’S ANNUAL WINTER BASH a “holiday party” verges on sacrilege, insofar as that term implies drunken co-workers standing round the punchbowl, fondling one another to the strains of Bing Crosby. The event that takes place at the Wooten Gallery the week before Christmas is more like an opening par excellence. Everyone comes out for it, even when weather makes getting there a misery. Whatever the theme—“Underwater Cowboys” or “Warhol’s Shopping List” or “Yuppies Strike Back”—Marilyn always hires the same band, a thirteen-piece ensemble made up entirely of transvestites whose songbook never deviates from note-perfect Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald covers. They’re called Big and Swingin’.

Busy as I’d been with the case, I’d forgotten to get my costume. For the life of me I couldn’t find my invitation, which meant that I didn’t know the theme. (I couldn’t very well ask anyone without making it scandalously clear that Marilyn and I weren’t talking, which at that point I still believed was a matter between the two of us.)

When I arrived at the gallery in a suit, however, I found myself improbably appropriate, wading through a sea of revelers all dressed like members of the newly reelected Bush cabinet. Without a mask, I attracted a lot of attention, as people tried to guess my identity. It’s a real test of one’s patience to listen to someone insist that you look exactly like Donald Rumsfeld.

“I’m sure he meant that in the nicest way possible,” said Ruby.

“What way would that be?”

“He has nice cheekbones,” Nat offered.

I mingled. Some people asked if I was feeling well; I touched the one remaining Band-Aid on my temple and said, “Minor brain damage.” Other people tried to involve me in conversations about artists and shows that I hadn’t heard of. The pace of the contemporary market is such that you can be away for a little more than a month and find yourself completely out of the loop. I didn’t know what people were talking about and I didn’t care. After two or three minutes of group banter I would find myself drifting, my attention drawn by the surreal spectacle of a kickline consisting of Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney. When I did try to follow along, I could not help but get annoyed. Regardless of who or what was under discussion, the true subject was money.

“I hear your murderer’s developed a strong following.”

“How much of that stuff do you have in a vault, Ethan?”

“More than he’s telling.”

“Have you sold any more?”

“Have you sold any more to Hollister?”

“I heard he unloaded his.”

“Is that true? Ethan?”

“You went to the house, didn’t you? I know someone who’s been there, he said the place is
too
tacky. He hired Jaime Acosta-Blanca to paint all these tacky copies but he gave him seventy percent up front and Jaime ran off with the money to Moscow where’s he defrauding neo-oligarchs.”

“Who’d he sell to, Ethan?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Ethan, who did Hollister sell to?”

“Rita said it was Richard Branson.”

“Does that mean you’re going to get shot into space, Ethan?”

After two hours Marilyn was still nowhere to be seen. I made my way through white rooms covered in red canvases, white rooms covered with pink canvases, white rooms ready to be filled. As the Wooten Gallery has grown, it has gobbled up its neighbors, left and right and upstairs and downstairs. It takes up nearly a fifth of 567 West Twenty-fifth Street, not to mention the overflow space on Twenty-eighth or the Upper East Side prints gallery. As I fought through a clutch of John Ashcrofts, it struck me that I’d never be as big as Marilyn; even had I the ambition, I lacked the vision.