This Must Be the Place: A Novel (20 page)

“Well . . . why else would I be asking?” Eugene said, his voice squeaking.

“Obviously, because you know I know.” Patricia narrowed her eyes. “What’s her name? Ono?”

“Oneida.”

“The hell kind of name is
Oneida
? Never mind. What’s the first thing you think of when you think of her?”

“Hair,” Eugene said. Patricia’s unblinking gaze made it hard to think. He looked down and away. “Uh . . . big hair. Dark. Glasses.” He rubbed his eyes, trying desperately to come up with associations that didn’t have anything to do with sex, the female anatomy, or bodily fluids.

“Big hair. Dark glasses, I can see the attrac—”

“Raw,” said Eugene, and Patricia froze. “She’s like a raw nerve. She’s a mess, and she’s probably super smart and messed up, and when you look at her you think she might snap and . . . bite you, or something.”

“Kinky,” said Patricia, and pointed at the door for Eugene to get out. “Seriously, go steal some shit from Astor’s office. Every fucked-up girl likes a piece of work.”

Astor Wendell’s office was a museum. It had once been a spacious two-car garage, but since the Wendells only had one car, an all-weather
tank of a vehicle it would have been inhumane to contain indoors, it had been reappointed. The walls were painted pristine white and it was brighter than daylight, thanks to the specially filtered overhead fluorescents Astor ordered direct from the wholesaler. There were two easels set up for Astor’s business partner Terry, who played rhythm guitar and had a face you both trusted implicitly and forgot twenty seconds after he left the room. The floor was a mess of paint and gesso, of little bits of wood shaving and glops of varnish. Eugene loved the sloppy chaos of the floor and had spent many hours as a kid staring into its patterns the way other kids lie on their backs and stare at clouds. He thought of it as the physical proof of his father’s genius, saw, in the colorful lumps and splatters, years of hard, brilliant labor.

Against one wall was a slotted rack that had held, briefly, Warhols and a Basquiat; a Chuck Close; Dalís and a Balthus; a Magritte and a Gauguin, and one time, memorably, a Munch. The only piece that had never left Astor’s shop for a private collection on the other side of the world was a small Miró that hung over Astor’s desk, which Astor was particularly proud of because the painting hadn’t even been in storage when he swapped it for the forgery. Eugene never found out how he’d managed to get the original off the wall and out of the frame, but Eugene suspected it was even more illegal than Astor was usually comfortable with.

Eugene’s father was a professional art forger. He used his position as a security guard to scope the art in museum storage, and, depending on what style of painting he felt like mimicking at the time, borrowed a piece for a week or two and replaced it with a copy before anyone knew the difference. Terry, his partner, was the point man, moving the originals through a mysterious organization of contacts Eugene variously imagined as either leggy and brunette or coldly Russian. Astor usually completed two or three forgeries a year and, depending on how quickly Terry could move the originals, they earned enough for both families to live comfortably, though not extravagantly. No need to attract too much attention, Astor said, not when you’ve already banked enough to send your kids to college three times over.

The fact that his father was a forger did not trouble Eugene. It didn’t seem particularly dishonest to replace one painting with an exact copy,
especially since it meant he got the Christmas presents he asked for. In fact, when the young Eugene fully understood what his father and Terry were up to, he thought it was hands down the coolest thing ever. The first time he recognized one of his father’s forgeries in the real world he was on a school field trip, and he stood and listened to the wandering crowd until his frantic teacher found him and dragged him to the school bus idling outside. Some people had passed by without a word, a few stuck their faces up close to examine the brushstrokes, one little girl said it was the prettiest thing she’d seen all day, but none of them knew it was a fake. And so Astor’s philosophy clawed deep into Eugene’s brain: as long as you saw what you expected, it was real enough. And you better believe Astor Wendell wasn’t going to let that inefficiency in the marketplace, so to speak, go without being exploited.

Eugene, for the bulk of his childhood, was insanely, stupidly happy. The Wendells had plenty of money and plenty of time to spend together; there were no bedtimes, no asparagus and Brussels sprouts, no forbidden movies. Everyone he loved was unbelievably cool, which made him unbelievably cool by association; which in turn made the fact that he had few friends in school their loss, not his. He never doubted his father’s livelihood, nor that the Wendell nuclear unit was of a similar mind.

Until Eugene was ten and Patricia fourteen, and the Wendells went on vacation to New York City. For a week over summer break, they stayed in a renovated warehouse studio in Brooklyn that belonged to a friend of Astor’s from his aborted stint at art school (where he’d also met Terry, and where, Eugene suspected, the wide web of leggy brunettes and calculating Russians originated). The four of them took the train into the city and ate souvlaki in the Village. They ran giddy laps around the plaza at Rockefeller Center, and a tall man walking a Great Dane through Central Park let them play with his dog for a while.

They went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it wasn’t until after dinner—when his parents got into a fight that started, as far as Eugene could tell, when Astor knocked over a carton of fried rice—that Eugene thought of the way they’d been hurried out of the modern art wing and how odd it had been. He and Patricia had been standing in front of a giant painting of three people on a grassy mountain, trying to figure out whether the girl in a red jacket, lying on her side, was dead or
just napping, when Astor gently pressed his palms against their backs and steered them toward the exit. “Your mom feels like she’s gonna barf,” he said, but when they walked down all those steps to the street, their mother didn’t look sick at all. She was eating an ice cream cone and handed everyone orange popsicles before they got into the first cab that pulled up.

For people who hardly ever fought, they sure knew how to do it well: the main studio, a huge empty room with high ceilings and exposed brick walls, echoed and rang. Eugene had closed the metal fire door that separated the kids’ room from the rest of the loft, which had the unpleasant effect of making the fight muffled and tinny, like it was happening in the soundless black of deep space. Patricia rested her chin on her knees, her thumb in a paperback copy of
Flowers in the Attic
. The windows were open on Brooklyn. Night had fallen and the air was humid and hot, and strangely silent whenever their parents’ voices dipped too low to hear. The lingering odors of renovation, of fresh paint and sawdust, made Eugene’s nose itch. They both sat in silence on their inflatable mattresses until Patricia said, “You know we’re all completely screwed, don’t you?”

Eugene, already tensed by the argument, jumped at the sound of her voice. “No, we’re not,” he said.

“Oh, yes, we are,” Patricia said. “What do you think they’re arguing about? Mom just said something about looking over her shoulder
waiting for the hammer to fall
—doesn’t that sound screwed to you?”

Eugene shrugged. Patricia sat up on her knees, the air mattress bobbing across the concrete floor.

“I bet the cops are tracking him,” she said. “I bet Javert’s got the scent.”

He shrugged again. They had rushed for tickets to
Les Misérables
the day before, but he had fallen asleep shortly after intermission.

“Eugene, think about it. What he does is
illegal
. If he gets caught, what happens? Do they send him to jail? Maybe he runs away, goes on the lam; what happens to Mom? She loves him like crazy. I bet she’d run away with him. What happens to us then?”

Eugene’s head felt fuzzy and far away, sour with paint fumes. “We’d go live with Terry,” he said.

“Don’t you think if they knew about Astor, they’d know about Terry? So now Terry has to run, too. Do we go to a foster home? Do we get split up? Shit, Eugene, our entire family would be
gone
.

“You know, I remember, when I was your age I thought he was a god. Like Robin Hood or Billy the Kid, some kind of superhero.” There was a spike in the argument, and they both turned to the door instinctively. “It isn’t normal,” Patricia said, “what he does and who we are.
We . . . are . . . so . . . fucked.
”

And then Patricia was crying—sobbing, really—and Eugene was genuinely afraid. Patricia had been like this for the past six months or so, quick to cry and cry violently, and Eugene had made a conscious effort to keep out of her way whenever she looked volatile. He didn’t understand where this well of emotion came from and what triggered it to overflow so furiously. It sounded now like Patricia blamed it all on their father, which—was she crazy? Asking what would happen if he got caught was beside the point, because he
wouldn’t
get caught: he was Astor Wendell. He
was
Robin Hood; he
was
Billy the Kid; he
was
a superhero. If anyone was fucked, it was Patricia, and Eugene was just scared and confused enough to tell her so.

Patricia stopped crying instantly. Her face froze mid-wail, her mouth still open, her eyes wide and red, and her cheeks damp with tears. “What did you say, you little asshole?”

“I said
you’re
the only one around here who’s fucked up, Patricia,” Eugene said.

Afterward, Eugene could only partially reconstruct the events of that muggy night in Brooklyn, in the old loft where the Wendells stayed on their last family vacation. He remembered his sister standing up and throwing her copy of
Flowers in the Attic
at his head; he remembered deflecting it and the tiny slap as it hit the floor. He remembered Patricia hauling him up by the collar of his T-shirt, remembered her shouting at him,
Wake up, Wendy, wake up and grow up
, and then he remembered she let him go and he fell. The rest was gone completely, but when he opened his eyes in the hospital, he had ten stitches snaking through his eyebrow. He’d smashed his forehead on a can of paint left over from remodeling, before hitting the concrete floor. He had nothing to worry about; he would recover completely. But Eugene Wendell
didn’t come home from that vacation whole. The germ of Wendy came with him, and over the next five years Wendy woke and grew up.

He couldn’t will himself to forget what Patricia thought of their father, even though he tried to do just that—with a small degree of success—for a full year. It made him feel jumbled and panicky to consider that either his awesome sister or his awesome father was wrong; if it turned out to be the former, he lost a sister. If it turned out to be the latter, not only did he lose a father, his father was a criminal. Astor was no better than a thief in Patricia’s eyes, a few lucky breaks away from getting caught and thereby annihilating the only life Eugene had ever known, with the only family worth being a part of.

But was it, anymore? His sister was making it easier to dislike her every day. His mother and his father hadn’t fought since Brooklyn, but Eugene could sense a strange static between them. Even Astor was acting differently, had stopped boxing and scuffling with his son and started asking, if Eugene so much as sighed, if he was
all right.
For the first time in his life, Eugene spent hours alone in his room, listening to music and trying to convince himself it wasn’t necessary to decide whether his sister or his father was the crazy one.

He was dangerously close to siding with his sister when Astor stepped in and tipped the scales, permanently, in his favor. In the three days that had passed since his eleventh birthday, Eugene had been unable to stop playing Patricia’s gift, an album called
Doolittle
that went a long, long way toward convincing him his sister deserved to be first in his heart. He was obsessed with the first song, which he didn’t understand at all: it was a lot of shouting and then something about slicing and eyeballs. But its innate awesomeness was impossible to deny, and he cranked his stereo as high as it could go, set the track to repeat, and thrashed around his bedroom like a little lunatic.

He was sweating and gasping for air when Astor opened his door.

“Good song,” he said. “Turn it off. I want to show you something.”

Astor led Eugene down to his office, where an ancient movie projector was already set up, and asked him if he knew what that song was about. Eugene, still winded, could only shake his head and suck in a shaky, painful breath. “Black Francis is screaming about this movie, son,” Astor said, starting the projector and joining Eugene on the ratty
couch. He had a funny expression, halfway between pride and anxiety, and Eugene had a sudden, strange intuition: that this moment was going to change his life, to solidify what had started in Brooklyn, and scar more than his eyebrow.

He was right. For a black-and-white movie with no sound that lasted all of fifteen minutes, it was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. Eyeballs were carved in half with straight razors. There were breasts and butts and dead donkeys on pianos and armpit hair and ants crawling out of holes in people’s hands, and he made Astor show it to him three times, but each subsequent viewing failed to make any more sense than the first. In fact, the less he understood it, the more he loved it.