The Genius Page 22

  “Yeah. Pens and markers. Pencils. What are you, the goddamned paper gestapo?”

  “I’m concerned about his safety.”

  “How the hell is knowing about a bunch of pens going to help him stay safe?”

  Despairingly, I thanked him for his time and handed him a card, asking him to call if Victor came in.

  “Sure,” he said. As I left, I glanced back and saw him tearing the card into confetti.

  • 18 •

  Because Samantha worked during the day, I did most of the footwork on my own. This, of course, implies that I did not work during the day, which was increasingly true. I felt restless and trapped at the gallery and kept inventing excuses to leave. Even when I didn’t need to go to Queens, I didn’t want to stay in Chelsea. I would take long walks and ruminate about Victor Cracke and art and myself and Marilyn, fancying myself a private investigator, narrating to myself. He stumbled into the coffee shop and ordered a cuppa joe. Cue saxophone. These self-indulgent fantasies, these stirrings of dissatisfaction, were all too familiar to me. I had them on average every five years.

  Samantha’s job was to go down Richard Soto’s list of old cases. Right off the bat she concluded that the majority of them were irrelevant to us—the victim was either female or older or had been murdered without any sign of sexual assault—but she followed them up, just in case. Listening to her, I began to understand that the most outstanding feature of policework is its tedium; throughout November and December there were plenty of idle days, plenty of blind alleys, plenty of conversations that went nowhere. We groped blindly, crushing together hunches to form theories that we then discarded, trial-and-error but mostly error.

  The week of Thanksgiving we began meeting at night at the storage warehouse. Samantha would take the train in after work, and we’d select a box at random, have Isaac lug it to the viewing room, and spend three or four hours flipping pages in search of bloodstains. The task went faster this time around than it had before, as I was looking now with a single criterion, rather than to evaluate the work. Nevertheless, I still had trouble focusing for more than thirty or forty minutes at a stretch. My headaches, though diminishing, still made squinting painful. At those moments, I would surreptitiously watch Samantha as she worked; her delicate fingers hovering over the surface of the page, her lips extruded in that beautiful pout, concentration coming off her in waves.

  “I can’t tell whether he was sick or a genius,” she said.

  “They’re not mutually exclusive.” I told her about the phone calls I’d received after Marilyn began spreading rumors.

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually,” she said. “It’s like those women who write love letters to serial killers.” She set aside the drawing she’d been looking at. “Would it bother you if he was guilty?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.” I gave her my mini-lecture on artists misbehaving, concluding, “Caravaggio killed a man.”

  “In bed,” she said and laughed.

  Eight weeks might not sound like very long, but when you’re spending much of that talking to or sitting alone with the same person—we essentially learned to forget about Isaac—often engaged in an extraordinarily monotonous activity, your sense of time begins to distort, much as I imagine it does in prison. No matter how hard we tried to stay on point, we couldn’t talk only about the case. I can’t tell you exactly when the thaw began to accelerate. But it did, and we dared to make jokes; we chatted about nonsense and about important things, or things I’d forgotten were important.

  “Jesus,” she said when I told her I’d been expelled from Harvard. “I’d never guess.”

  “Why.”

  “Cause you look so…”

  “Boring.”

  “I was going to say normal,” she said, “but that’ll work.”

  “It’s a façade.”

  “Evidently. I had a rebellious phase, too, you know.”

  “Did you, now.”

  “Oh yes. I was into grunge. I wore flannel and played the guitar.”

  I laughed.

  “Don’t laugh,” she said gravely. “I wrote my own material.”

  “What was the name of your band?”

  “Oh, no. I was strictly a solo artist.”

  “I didn’t know one could play grunge on one’s own.”

  “I wouldn’t describe my own personal music as grunge. I would say that I was more inspired by the grunge lifestyle. Everything I sang sounded like the Indigo Girls. One time this friend of mine—” She started giggling. “This is actually really sad.”

  “I can tell.”

  “It is, but I”—giggling—“I’m sorry. Ahem. This friend of mine junior year had to have an abortion—”

  “Oh, that’s hilarious.”

  “Stop. It was sad, it was really sad. That’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is that I wrote a song about it, and it was called—” She broke up completely. “I can’t.”

  “Too late,” I said.

  “No. Sorry. I can’t.”

  “ ‘The Procedure’?”

  “Worse.”

  “ ‘The Decision’?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that there was a lyric comparing a woman’s body to a field of flowers.”

  “I think that’s very poetic.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Although,” I said, “Dalí said that the first man to compare the cheeks of a woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it may well have been an idiot.”

  “In bed.”

  “In bed. Well,” I said, “I think your parents got off easy.”

  “By the time I was old enough to rebel they were too busy imploding to notice. It really pissed me off.”

  “Did you write a song about it?”

  “About their divorce? No. I wanted to write a poem, though.”

  “ ‘The Separation’?”

  “I’d call it ‘A Pair of Assholes.’ ”

  I smiled.

  “I took photographs, too,” she said. “God, what happened to me. I used to be so creative.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  She got very quiet.

  “What,” I said.

  “What you said. Ian used to tell me that.”

  I said nothing.

  “When I complained about my job he would tell me that.” She paused. “It’s not like that’s a very unusual thing to say, but I remember him saying it a lot. Maybe because I complained about my job a lot.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I can think about him now without getting hysterical. That’s a positive step.”

  I nodded.

  “I think about him now and it’s warm, rather than hot. You know? Like he was a really good friend. He was. You don’t want to hear about this.”

  “I do if you want to talk about it.”

  She smiled, shook her head. “We have work to do.…”

  “What was he like?”

  She hesitated, then said, “He and my dad were good friends. I think my dad took it harder than I did. I sort of expected that something would happen to him eventually. That’s the nature of the job. I didn’t expect that, though. Who expects that?”

  I said nothing.

  “Anyway, that’s that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Now I’m on the rebound.” She grinned at me. “You were just a temporary stop on my road to recovery.”

  “Whatever I can do to help.”

  She smiled, started turning pages again. I watched her for a little while. Eventually she saw me staring and looked up. “What.”

  “I don’t know why you’re unhappy with your job,” I said. “To me it’s way more interesting than what I do.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “It is.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What would you do, if not this.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had a good answer to that p
art of the question. I wanted to do this and now I’m here. I had an idea that this was going to distinguish me from my dad. His father was a cop. My uncle is a cop. My mother’s father was in the Secret Service. Naturally, I didn’t want to become a cop, so I thought, oh, yeah, well, but a DA—now that’s different.” She laughed. “That was my final attempt at rebellion. I’ve accepted my fate.”

  I said, “I think I felt the same way about my father.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Growing up I saw him as basically soulless and profit-driven—which he is. Unfortunately I chose the one line of work possibly more soulless and more profit-driven.”

  “If you really feel that way, then why don’t you get out?”

  “Lately I’ve been wondering. I don’t know what else I would do.”

  “You could become a prosecutor.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a little old to start over.”

  “I thought it was never too late.”

  “For me it is,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Why do you resent him so much?”

  “My father.”

  She nodded.

  I shrugged. “I can’t give you one single reason.”

  “Then give me a few.”

  I thought. “After my mother died, I felt like a pet that belonged to her, and that he got stuck with. He barely spoke to me, and when he did it was to give me an order or to tell me I was doing something wrong. She was the only wife that he didn’t divorce, and whether or not they would have lasted—I have my doubts—when she got sick, they were still getting along. That’s why he’s hasn’t gotten married since: he idealizes her. I feel bad for him. I do. But I’m not going on Oprah or anything to make up with him.”

  “Your siblings get along with him?”

  “Well, my brothers work for him, so whether they like him or not, they kiss his ass. Amelia lives in London. I don’t think they have much of a relationship, but it isn’t overtly hostile.”

  “That’s your specialty.”

  “Correct.”

  “You know anger shortens your life expectancy.”

  “Then enjoy me while I last.”

  She smiled wryly. “No comment.”

  AFTER FOUR WEEKS IN MARILYN’S HOUSE the situation had become intolerable. Taking me in was incredibly kind of her, considering that things had already been tense between us before the attack. Although, looking back, I have to wonder if she didn’t extend the invitation primarily to keep an eye on me. If there were clues I missed them. When I returned home late at night, having spent the evening with Samantha, nothing Marilyn said or did indicated that she was silently building a case against me. And really, she had nothing to build on; even if she had somehow been able to eavesdrop at the warehouse, she would’ve come up with nothing concrete to hold against me. Everybody flirts, don’t they? If I flirted with Samantha while we worked, I did so under the assumption that it wouldn’t produce results. She had made that plain. So then what was Marilyn thinking, those nights when she greeted me in a kimono, pulled me up to the “boudoir” (her word), and threw herself on top of me? Did she think she would catch a glimpse of me with my eyes closed and learn the truth? She may have a keen nose for betrayal, but she’s not a mind-reader.

  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.