on fire, at least not today.
Rebecca says, “Should we call Bea before you go?”
What kind of father would want to put off calling his daughter?
No one has hacked you to death with a machete. But still. “Let’s call her when I get back,” he says.
“Okay.”
Hard to deny it: Rebecca is just as happy to have a few hours at home without him. One of those long-marriage things, right? You want to be home alone sometimes.
It’s a warm April afternoon suffused with bright gray glow. Peter walks the few blocks to the Spring Street IRT. He’s wearing beat-up suede boots and dark blue jeans and a light blue unironed shirt under a pewter-colored leather jacket. You try not to look too calculated but you are in fact meeting someone at a fancy restaurant uptown and you want—poor fucker—you want to look neither defiantly “downtown” (pathetic, in a man your age) nor like you’ve nicened it up for the dowagers. Peter has gotten better over the years at dressing as the man who’s impersonating the man he actually is. Still, there are days when he can’t shake the feeling that he’s gotten it wrong. And of course it’s grotesque to care about how you look, yet almost impossible not to.
Still, always, there’s the world, which conspires constantly to remind you: no one cares about your boots, pilgrim. There’s Spring Street on this spring day—is it a false spring, though? New York has a habit of squeezing out one last snowfall even after the crocuses are out—the sky so blank you can imagine God forming it with His hands like snowballs and tossing them out, saying, Time, Light, Matter. There’s New York, one of the goddamnedest perturbations ever to ride the shifting surface of the earth. It’s medieval, really, all ramparts and ziggurats and spikes and steeples, entirely possible to see a hunchback cloaked in a Hefty bag stumping along beside a woman carrying a twenty-thousand-dollar purse. And at the same time, overlaid, is a vast nineteenth-century boomtown, raucously alive, eager for the future but nothing rubberized or air-cushioned about it, no hydraulic hush; trains rumbling the pavement, carved limestone women and men—not gods—looking heftily down from cornices as if from a heaven of work and hard-won prosperity, car horns bleating as some citizen in Dockers passes by telling his cell phone “that’s how they’re supposed to be.”
Peter descends the stairs into the roar of an oncoming train.
Bette is already seated when he arrives. Peter follows the hostess through the dark red faux Victoriana of JoJo. When Bette sees Peter she offers a nod and an ironic smile (Bette, a serious person, would wave only if she were drowning). The smile is ironic, Peter suspects, because, well, here they are, at her behest, and sure, the food is good but then there’s the fringe and the little bandy-legged tables. It’s a stage set, it’s whimsical, for God’s sake; but Bette and her husband, Jack, have had their inherited six-room prewar on York and Eighty-fifth forever, he makes a professor’s salary and she makes mid-range art-dealer money and fuck anybody who sneers at her for failing to live downtown in a loft on Mercer Street in a neighborhood where the restaurants are cooler.
When Peter reaches the table, she says, “I can’t believe I’ve dragged you up here.”
Yes, she is in fact irritated with him, for … agreeing to come? For thriving (relatively speaking)?
“It’s fine,” he says, because nothing cleverer comes to mind. “You’re a kind man. Not a nice man, people tend to get the two mixed up.”
He sits opposite her. Bette Rice: a force. Silver crew cut, austere black-rimmed glasses, Nefertiti profile. She was born to it. Jewish daughter of Brooklyn leftists, may or may not have dated Brian Eno, has a good story about how Rauschenberg gave her her first Diet Coke. When he’s with Bette, Peter can feel like the not-quite-bright high school jock putting moves on the smart, tough girl. Can he help having been born in Milwaukee?
She laser-eyes a waitress, says “Coffee,” doesn’t care that her voice is louder than it needs to be, that a sixtyish Perfect Blonde glances over from the next table.
Peter says, “I hope you’re willing to talk about Elena Petrova’s glasses.”
She holds up a slender hand. One of the three silver rings she wears is taloned, like an obscure torture implement.
“Angel, it’s sweet of you, but I’m not going to put you through the preliminary chitchat. I have breast cancer.”
Did he think that by anticipating it, he’d protected her from it?
“Bette—”
“No, no, they got it.”
“Thank God.”
“What I really want to tell you is, I’m closing the gallery. Right now.”
“Oh.”
Bette offers him a slip of a smile, consoling, maternal even, and he’s reminded that she has two grown sons, neither of whom is particularly screwed up.
Bette says, “They got it this time, and if it comes back, they’ll probably get it next time, too. I’m not dying, not even close to it. But there was a moment. When I first heard what it was, and you know, my mother—”
“I know.”
She gives him a level, sobering look. Don’t be too eager to be good about this, okay?
She says, “I wasn’t so much terrified as I was pissed off. The gallery’s been my whole life for the last forty years, and frankly I’ve been sick of it for the last ten. And now that it’s all going to hell, and everybody’s broke … Anyway. One of my first thoughts was, If this doesn’t kill me, Jack and I are going to change our lives.”
“And so—”
“We’re going to go live in Spain. The boys are fine, we’re going to find a little whitewashed house somewhere and grow tomatoes.”
“You’re kidding.”
She laughs, a dense, throaty sound. She is one of the last living American smokers.
“I know,” she says. “I know. Maybe we’ll be bored out of our minds. Then we’ll sell the goddamned little whitewashed house and go do something else. I just don’t want to do this anymore. Jack is sick of Columbia, too.”
“Blessings on your journey, then.”
The waitress brings Peter’s coffee, asks if they’ve had time to consider the menu, which they haven’t. She says she’ll check back. She is a sweet-faced, sturdy girl with a Georgia accent, some-body’s much-loved daughter, probably newly arrived in New York, determined to sing or act or whatever, extragenial, eager to seem as much like a waitress as she possibly can, not to mention the fact that anyone who can afford to come to a place like JoJo at this moment in history is something of a celebrity by definition.
Bette says, “I want to love art again.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Who doesn’t? The money thing—”
“I know. And now, all of a sudden, there isn’t any more. Money, I mean.”
“There’s still some.”
“Well,
