Cheyney Fox (5 page)

Cheyney was learning fast that Sebastian Cohen, son of a wealthy West Virginia industrialist, with his Harvard education, New England accent, and hesitant speech combined with an upper-class stutter, who dressed, J. Press and Brooks Brothers, Savile Row, Lobbs, and Herbert Johnson, was nothing more than an intellectual, intercontinental lounge lizard. But,
like everyone else, she also saw him as a harmless creature who meant well.

So, Cheyney, who needed all the capital she could raise to get the gallery off the ground, agreed to take Sebastian in as a very junior working partner. She stood before him now, and hoped that had not been a big mistake. So far, all Sebastian had done was wine and dine every closet-queen in the art and literary world who would accept his invitation and clash with her on the artists she had chosen to represent.

Sebastian put on his hurt look and reinforced it with a disapproving silence. He actually found it distasteful when Cheyney spoke in business terms.

“Why do you look at me that way, Sebastian? Why do you find the word
customer
crass? This is a business venture. I’m not in this for ego, or to shine in artistic circles. I have a job to do. I cannot afford not to think customer, sale, profits. We are going to need to place every painting we possibly can to stay afloat. You know that.” She said it as mildly as she could and yet tried to make her point clear to him. Then she felt foolish for her apologetic manner. But it seemed to work. Sebastian’s face relaxed. And Cheyney for one fleeting moment thought, It’s going to be all right, he’s listening.

“Truman might bring Auden and Chester. And I am sure we will have two curators, one from the Metropolitan and one from the Museum of Modern Art. I’m taking an old Harvard friend out to lunch. He says if Tennessee Williams is in town, he will bring him along.” Cheyney was appalled. He hadn’t listened, not one bit.

“Sebastian, we must have a talk. Not necessarily now, but we must.”

“I couldn’t agree more. I am not very happy with the direction the gallery is taking.”

Cheyney seized her opportunity and pinned Sebastian down right then and there. “Sebastian, so far your contribution to the gallery has been anything but constructive. The fact of the matter is that not one of the artists you introduced me to was available. All of them had commitments elsewhere. Embarrassingly for me, every one of them suggested that in future, if I am interested in their work, I should buy through their own dealers. I don’t need you to place me in situations like that, or
to find me bad deals, Sebastian. All your work was fruitless, and it cost the gallery.”

Enraged, Sebastian started to walk out of the office. Cheyney stopped him. “Sebastian, please, we’re friends, trying to work together. We have too much at stake for you to get huffy and walk out. This is an exciting time in New York for art, and we can make it. But I need you to work and not play at being in the gallery. This is not one long cocktail party, a teddy bears’ picnic, you are involved in. This is a hard, creative, and tough business. And you need this job, if you want to gain any measure of respect from your ‘friends.’ ”

An awkward moment of silence. Then he asked facetiously, “Who do you want to exhibit? Picasso?”

Cheyney tried to hold her temper. “Of course. And Rothko, and Motherwell, and Barnet Newman, and Miró, and Calder, Kurt Schwitters, and Mondrian, and, and, and … And don’t be bitchy with me, Sebastian. I spend eight, ten hours a day looking at works of art, trying to find artists who have in them that little something that is special, and who are available for me to handle. I am discovering, as I am certain is every dealer in this city, that something is rumbling, looming large on the art world’s horizon. Something that’s new, and very different from the American art of the fifties we’ve been told to admire. I fear
it
— whatever
it
is — is going to leave the art market in a turmoil. It’s almost as if American art doesn’t know where to go next. And that’s exciting, but could be unhealthy for us as a new gallery, because collectors and art institutions don’t like to buy unless the market is stable and knows where it’s going.”

“You have an interesting viewpoint. Why haven’t you spoken to me about this before, Cheyney?”

“Oh, I have been trying, Sebastian, and you haven’t wanted to listen. I would have thought that you recognized by now that I am having a difficult time of it, trying to put together an exciting and relevant gallery. Sebastian, I have poured everything I have into this gallery, have changed a life for it. And if you want to be a part of it, you have to open your eyes, forget the booze-and-chat parties, and get into this thing with me. I need you, not just your money. So get your brain working, and your eyes, and put your ego to bed for a while.”

Cheyney and Sebastian stood looking at each other until the
silence became awkward. She was embarrassed for both of them and turned away from Sebastian to make herself busy at her desk.

“I’m taking Jeremy Weintraub to dinner this evening. You know they think he will be made curator of drawings at the Met. It will be a big jump for him from the position he holds at the Brooklyn Museum. I went to Harvard with him. The last time I saw him was in Paris at Caresse Crosby’s. Or was it Mary McCarthy’s? No, it was at Caresse’s. I don’t think you know Caresse, do you?”

Cheyney turned around to face Sebastian, speechless. There was just nothing more to say to the man. She had to face the fact that Sebastian was the gallery’s first deficit. And they hadn’t even opened the doors yet.

“He’s very well placed you know, invited everywhere, very talented, and could be very helpful. I would ask you along, but it will be an old school, all boys together supper. When he hears I am working with you in our gallery, he will be very surprised. I’m certain I can get him to come to the opening.” Cheyney sensed a note of bravado in his voice, a kind of one-upmanship because he had rankled her and remained calm cool, the perfect gentleman, steadfast in his opinion. He had said
our
gallery, something he had never before dared to say to her face. It was the bitchy look in the eyes behind the round, slim-edged, tortoiseshell eyeglasses, worn affectedly low on the nose, that said “Cheyney Fox, you are stuck with me. And, for better or worse, you
will
accept me as I am, and take my contributions more seriously.”

She was shocked, she had never seen that side of Sebastian before. She decided not to pick him up on the
our
gallery. Though it simply was not true. There were enough escape clauses in their business agreement, inserted solely to protect Sebastian in the event the gallery failed, to prove it. She wanted only to be rid of him so she could get on with her day.

“As it happens I am not free. Christopher Corbyn is arriving from Paris tonight. I’m having dinner with him.”

“You didn’t say!”

“I have not had the chance.”

“How long will he be in the States?”

“I’m not sure. A few months, anyway.”

“He never stays that long.”

“He will this time.”

Something was very wrong, and Cheyney didn’t understand what it was. Sebastian had gone pale at the news of Christopher’s arrival. His speech was a wreck, all stutters and hesitation.

“Where is he staying and why has he come?”

“With me, Sebastian. And he’s here in New York for an exhibition of his work.”

“He and Kostas can’t possibly stay with you. I won’t have those scroungers taking advantage of your hospitality. And I certainly will never allow him to have an exhibition in this gallery, you can be certain of that.”

“Sebastian, you’re out of line. Kostas is not coming with Christopher, and taking advantage does not come into it. And,
never, ever
tell me whom I can or cannot exhibit in my gallery. You don’t have that right. Read your contract.”

That did not stem the tide of venom rising in this usually harmless, quiet man. His face changed. Twisted with anxiety, contorted more by a sick destructive will than anything evil, he gave off the scent of danger. Cheyney thought of Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray
. She tried, “Sebastian, please, this is getting out of hand.”

“Out of hand! I hope so. It should be. You deceived me, you never let me know he would be involved here. He has charmed his way into every chic salon on both sides of the Atlantic. Well, he will be banned from this one, I can promise you that. And if he thinks he can flirt his way around me, he is sadly mistaken. You have yet to see him in action. Man or woman, he doesn’t care which. He’s a whore, my dear, a gigolo. He danced attendance on me when I first met him at Harvard, and then again years later in Paris. But I never fell for his charm. They say he made love to his mother-in-law, one of the most powerful aristocrats in Spain, and only married the daughter to get a castle. The palazzo in Florence Kostas and he say they own — well, not quite. Stealing it away room by room from the old woman is more the real story. Give me your word he will never enter this gallery, or I will walk out now and demand my money back.”

Cheyney felt her body turn cold. She was trembling. She
looked past Sebastian through the open double doors to the ground-floor room of the gallery. Sebastian’s attack had been so violent it had brought Dora, Max, and Morris to stand there. She saw them, but she was so upset their presence hardly registered.

“Well?” demanded Sebastian.

“Sebastian, this has nothing to do with me or the gallery, and obviously has everything to do with you and Christopher — of which I know nothing and don’t care to. But you will destroy our relationship, maybe even ruin the gallery, by reneging on your contract and withdrawing your financial investment now. Are you sure you want to do that?”

“You have heard my conditions. I want an answer.”

“An answer to blackmail, Sebastian. You leave me with no choice. I reject your conditions. I could never live with myself if I submitted to them. I have never been exposed to blackmail before, Sebastian. It’s a foul experience, and I don’t believe I will ever forgive you for it.”

Cheyney turned from him. Trembling with rage and a degree of fear for what she was about to do, she tried to steady her hand as she opened the gallery checkbook. “I am making out a check for two thousand five hundred dollars, and postdating another for thirty days from now for the same amount.” Placing the checks in front of her, she swiveled the chair around. She wound a sheet of blank paper into the typewriter and hammered out:

Cheyney tore the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it with a pen to Sebastian. “We can do it this way, or we can go to lawyers. I would have thought you’d rather not do that, since it’ll be costly and very embarrassing for you to explain why you have decided to break your contract. Which,
by the way, I doubt is even legally breakable under the circumstances. Sign here.”

Cheyney knew she was being much too generous in returning the money to Sebastian. But the possibility of his making a scandal to get every last cent back was something she simply could not cope with. She watched him read the document carefully, twice. He signed it and handed it back to her and she in turn handed him the two checks.

“Now, Sebastian, get out.” She fought back tears.

He offered his hand. “I think we should at least shake hands and agree to be civil with each other. Maybe after a time we can become friends again.” He stuttered and stammered in between long pauses.

“Now why would we ever want to do that, Sebastian? Dora, would you please show Mr. Cohen out? He is no longer working here, so there will be no reason to let him into the gallery until it is open to the public. At that time we will turn no one away.” She stood in silence as he walked out.

Collapsed in her chair, depressed over what had just passed, she was nonetheless certain that she had done the only right and honorable thing under the circumstances. How had she and Sebastian been so foolish as to allow the incident to escalate to such an unfortunate climax?

Cheyney’s deliberations were interrupted by Max and Morris. They presented her with their bill and left the gallery. Alone, she opened the envelope. The invoice was correct, but it gave her a jolt:
Money
. “Severely undercapitalized” came to mind. Only then did she realize how really disastrous it was to have written those two checks. They represented ten months’ rent for the gallery. Another pressure she hadn’t expected to have to deal with.

Cheyney felt sick, she raced up to the privacy of her bathroom and only just made it to her knees over the toilet where she retched uncontrollably. She bathed her face and tried to calm herself. Cheyney was frightened: she was rarely sick. She lay down on her bed, trying to tell herself it was anxiety over the dreadful scene Sebastian had made, and money. But she knew she was fooling herself. She fell into a disturbed sleep.

Chapter 5

T
en o’clock, and still no word from Christopher. Cheyney went to the window, pulled the sheer silk curtains back and looked up and down the street. It was very black outside, except for the two pools of light swaying gently from the lampposts, one a few feet from her window and another much farther down on the opposite side of the street. The occasional lighted window among the brownstone town houses. It was eerily quiet. No sound or sight of a taxi or a car, shooting east across town from Fifth Avenue. No driver cruising the line of bumper-to-bumper cars on either side of the street, looking for a space to squeeze a car into. No one was even walking his dog.

Dog. Zazou. Her faithful, spoiled Lhasa Apso. Her best friend, constant companion, sent home with Dora because Cheyney couldn’t bear to share this reunion with even her canine Cleopatra. And now she wished her flirtatious, demanding Zazou and she were down there below in the deserted street taking their evening walk.

Cheyney made herself a promise not to look at her watch or through the window again. This was to be her
final
time. She was driving herself crazy with anticipation over Christopher’s arrival. But, much as she willed it, she was unable to pull herself away from the window. She was certain her anxiety would pass if she could see his taxi pull up, or him walking up the street, or hear the doorbell. But for the moment, she was feeling something close to desperation.

She tried to distract herself. Still looking out of the window,
she took note that there was no light on in the Segovia apartment, on the first floor, diagonally across the street from her. She wondered if Vladimir Horowitz, in his apartment almost directly opposite Segovia’s, was at home playing the piano. That stirred a memory of several months earlier, when the city was in one of its torrid heat waves. Approaching her apartment, she had heard the sound of the classical guitar. She had looked up and seen there, sitting on a chair in the window, Andrés Segovia trying to catch a breath of air while he played. Several people stood in doorways listening to the maestro. When he stopped, several people applauded Segovia, including someone from the first-floor window above her head. She caught sight of Vladimir Horowitz sitting discreetly behind a drapery, absorbing every nuance of the Bach adaptation for the guitar.

The next day, the heat was even more oppressive. All her windows thrown open, she heard the faint sound of exquisite piano music. She leaned out the window to listen and saw, this time, Andrés Segovia sitting quietly and savoring the genius of Horowitz. She had rushed into the street, better to hear the impromptu concert. The three windows of the Horowitz flat were fully open and the sound filled that part of the street. You could see nothing of Horowitz — he was hidden behind the piano — only Segovia’s face opposite looking blissful. It was another of New York’s special vignettes that made her love that big bad city and inspired her to push on and be a part of it.

Cheyney let the curtain slip from her hand into place. The view through the curtain was diffused by the silk, hazy, dreamlike. After a few minutes Cheyney finally gave up and went to sit on the sofa in front of the open fire. She sat staring into the leaping flames.

Why, she wondered, do women in love, sensible, intelligent women such as she hoped she was, suffer the sorts of anguish she was going through right now while waiting for her lover? While the minutes ticked by, she could sense a closing of the physical and emotional distance between Christopher and herself. And that was both frightening and thrilling at the same time. Reunion after a long absence, based on a relationship with only free love to hold it together, is a tough scene to play. So many unasked questions, so much emotional baggage left
over from other times, other loves, has to be discarded.

Here-and-now love can die an instant death from insecurity, expectations, demands of any kind on a couple as uncommitted yet in love as Christopher and Cheyney. Will he find me beautiful? Like my hair, me in the color mauve, the cut of my caftan, the crystal beading around the arm openings and down the front and around the hem? The scent of my skin, the feel of me in his arms? Cheyney asked herself. What about me? Will I still find him handsome, tremble under his touch? Was he a romantic illusion, nothing more than a European holiday fling? Questions that tore at the heart, shredded confidence, and triggered that devilish emotion, fear of loss.

Cheyney thought of their sexual life together. They had even laughed about it, labeling themselves “the reluctant lovers.” In spite of their hesitation to let themselves go, overcome a sexual bashfulness even, it had been an instant attraction, where they had been helpless to hold back their passion for each other or the waves of orgasm they succumbed to during their intercourse, more natural and intense than they had ever achieved with other partners.

The last time, more than three months ago, in that small, first-floor hotel room on the rue de Rivoli, whose walls and French window were draped in a romantic blue-and-white toile — a pattern of a shepherdess and her lover, in eighteenth-century costume, lying together under a capacious chestnut tree, wolfhounds by their side, sheep gamboling on a faintly etched hillside. The memory was exquisite. So vivid. The sex, the unstoppable, breathtaking orgasms of that night. It had been the first time Cheyney had ever been lost to all else in the world but lust. It had been the same for Christopher, and that night they swept each other to the outer edges of passion and erotic love.

Cheyney bowed her head and covered her face with her hands, and to herself she whispered, “Oh, God, please give me strength never to abuse what I have with Christopher, always to do what is right for both of us.”

Cheyney felt a flush of warmth course through her body. She tried to hold back the rush of orgasm and sensed the moistness that gave her that special pleasure like no other she experienced. She tried to ignore it, embarrassed at the joy she
felt in her newfound lust. She lowered her hands from her face and was lost in the memory of one moment during another orgasm. It had been in that room, that last night, but it had been a shared orgasm with Christopher, so intense for both of them that together they cried out to the gods in thanks for their plunge into oblivion.

Cheyney rose from the sofa and went to stand by the fireplace. It came to her in that moment of remembering. The sleepiness, the sickness that afternoon after her confrontation with Sebastian. “Oh, no. It can’t be,” she said aloud. But in her heart she sensed that she was pregnant. She was stunned by the sudden possibility and the consequences if it were a fact. She must know and gather her response.

A baby! Christopher — how might he react? What would he say? She guessed that he would not be very gallant about it. She knew in her heart that he was not the man to be the father of her child. And there was something else: it was not in her nature to trap a man into anything, least of all marriage and the long grind of parenthood. Disturbing thoughts. They did, however, make her face the fact that an illegitimate child with no father to help bring it up, if that were to be the case, was out of the question for Cheyney.

Thinking in those terms, she managed to block out of her mind what she knew was possibly the most important decision in her life. To abort a baby was no easy thing. “Strong men and stronger women have balked at it. Oh please, please, let it not be true,” she said to the indifferent room. “Let there be no baby, not now. I know I can’t carry another huge commitment at this time in my life. Maybe there is no baby. Forget it, at least for tonight. Don’t ruin this lovers’ reunion.” She willed the fetus out of her life.

What more, she wondered, could happen to shatter her joy at Christopher’s return? She was pondering the ups and downs of her seesaw day: Christopher’s cable, a definite up. Sebastian and their unfortunate confrontation, a definite down. Lunch with Betty Parsons at her gallery — a significant figure among the contemporary dealers in art, who happened to be a nice person — another up. Cheyney’s simultaneous agreement to give Betty Parsons the artist her first one-man show of paintings and take her on as one of the Cheyney Fox Gallery’s stable of
painters — more than an up, a positive coup. A meeting with her bookkeeper to listen to a convoluted scheme for reorganizing the gallery books, her industrial-design company books, and her personal accounts. The predictable heat over that pair of checks totaling five thousand dollars to Sebastian without consulting him — the seesaw striking rock bottom.

That had left her terribly disturbed and prompted her to make a call for an appointment to meet and consult with Bernard Reiss, a well-known patron of the arts, modish and respected accountant for several top galleries in the city, and the financial adviser to many famous artists. She had to drop four names of considerable importance before she could get him on the line. In fact she found it all a bit embarrassing, since she had met him half a dozen times. She had twice sat next to him at dinner, when he had chatted her up most of the evening. She knew he was coming to the opening of the gallery. She had a negative premonition about that conversation that should have told her something about him and art-world people, something about Toni Caletti, the wretched bookkeeper.

Back at the gallery in the afternoon and early evening the highs and lows had continued. She and Sally Wichell, her part-time secretary, worked out an arrangement for Sally to become full-time. With the loss of Sebastian as backup in the gallery, that became essential. An immediate problem solved. But another one loomed: the additional cost to the gallery in wages, not included in the already tight budget. Neither was a consultation with Reiss — and he didn’t come cheap. Sebastian had really dropped her in it. An aftershock of rage against him swept through her.

Then two hours of hanging the last of the paintings for the opening exhibition with Henry Stover, the gallery’s odd-job man, a Columbia University art major. That was a thrill, a constructive high — to watch your choice of someone’s work go up for the first time on the wall of a gallery that is yours, the moment of what may be your first impact on art in New York.

Cheyney turned from the fireplace and looked across the room. An impressive and elegant room with its eighteen-foot ceiling and its bay window facing onto the street. The square, eighteenth-century French provincial table standing in the bay,
dressed for an intimate
dîner a deux
, made her smile. It was perfect: the crystal, the linen, the Limoges china, the silver, the white stargazer lilies in the low bowl in the center of the table, the tall cream-colored candles. And Christopher would be sitting there with her soon.

Cheyney looked away from the table and used her eyes like a camera. She wanted to capture a picture of every beautiful detail of her living room; the pair of Georgian wing chairs, covered in a plum-and-silver Fortuny fabric, flanking the fireplace, the sofa, matching the one already moved into the gallery, the period tables of peach and pear wood, the soft light that filtered through cream-colored silk lamp shades over Chinese pots of a certain age in celadon-green porcelain, the gilt mirrors, and the walls lined with books and gilt-framed drawings. It had all been sold, given up to finance the gallery. That and all the consultancy fees from her industrial-design work. The smell of Dora’s cooking teased, and she felt a pang of hunger and a fearful need for Christopher.

Cheyney was quick to make light of it to herself and check the lapse. There was something in Christopher’s character that she knew would make him bolt if he caught any hint of it. And she couldn’t bear that, not now anyway.

In the kitchen, Cheyney opened the oven door and the sumptuous odor of roast lamb, boned and stuffed with mushrooms, apricots, prunes, and sausage meat, gusted out on the escaping air. She checked the rice boiled in a chicken stock and mixed with pine nuts and tiny shrimp, cooking in a wrapped package of thin phyllo pastry. It was crisping nicely. She was admiring the
crème brûle
decorated with fresh-peeled litchi nuts standing in readiness on the kitchen counter, Christopher’s favorite dessert, when the doorbell rang. Her lover had come home.

There was no intercom, just a buzzer to release the downstairs entry door. She pressed it. How many times had she imagined this meeting, and where she would stand, what she would say? She had no idea, but for the moment it felt like a thousand, and she was frozen behind the apartment door, trying to compose herself and to recall just one of her welcomes on cue. She could hear him taking the stairs two at a time.

Cheyney went into automatic and opened the apartment door. She felt unable to meet Christopher on the stair landing, or to
greet him over the curved balustrade winding down to the ground floor, or in the barren empty hall outside her flat. All too impersonal, frightening even. And so, leaving the door ajar, she retreated into the center of the living room and watched and waited for him to come to her.

He held a suitcase in one hand and carried, over his shoulder and across his back, a large and heavy roll of unstretched canvases wrapped in a waterproof sailcloth cover, more like a cross he had to bear than an artist’s unmounted exhibition. He wore no hat, and his hair fell to one side over his forehead. Christopher sported a well-worn, black wool dress coat with a tan velvet collar. He was so very good-looking and elegant in his fine coat, but there was something else about him, a cool yet dangerously sensuous air. And then there was, too, that ostentatious ambience he cocooned himself in. It did not hint but shouted, “I am an artist. Handle with care.” It made him appear
very
vulnerable, in need.

If he saw Cheyney, as he walked the length of the hall to her apartment, which he could easily do, or when he entered the vestibule and placed his things on the floor, leaning the heavy sailcloth roll against the wall, he made no sign of it. She watched him turn and close the door, then turn around again and walk toward her, opening his coat. He entered the living room and dropped the coat over the back of the sofa, still walking toward her, and at last they were face-to-face. She realized at once that they were nervous with each other.