Martin Sloane (12 page)

They’d sit silently in their seats, looking down at their papers.

“It’s okay,” I said. “But do you see how Euripides fools us? We think he’s telling us a story of sacrifice, but he’s telling us one of cowardice. That’s the mark of genius. To get you to put your faith in the wrong place in order to be shown your own failure of nerve.”

We went back to the beginning, with a new understanding of the play, and I handed out the roles. It was a delight to have the old words spoken aloud. But then the alarm went off and everyone began bundling their things up. We went out into the quadrangle, following the stream of students in other classes, and I watched with dismay as most of them simply disappeared through the archway and into the street. But when I looked around me, my entire class was still present, looking at me for guidance, the dozen or so of them as sweetly helpless as ducklings. I rounded them up near a spruce in the corner of the quad and we all sat down and took our books out again. The alarm continued, dully, to sound. “Go on then,” I told one of the boys. We were at the part where Admetus sends his wife off with poetry and tribute.

“My heart/ shall be against your heart,” he read, “and never, even in death/ shall I go from you. You alone were true to me.”

“Bullshit!” murmured someone else knowingly, and everyone laughed, in on Euripedes’ game now.

“Right,” I said, “nice send-off, buddy. He’s telling her the consolation prize is that when
he
finally kicks, he’ll let himself be buried with her! What a creep.” I noticed then a man leaning, shoulder against the wall, about ten feet from us. He wore a brown suede jacket, his long hands hanging out of his coat-sleeves. I continued, “Anyway … Alcestis goes. She does her husband’s bidding. And it is a brave thing, a dutiful thing, to die. But what is the duty, and why is it brave?”

A young woman raised her hand eagerly. “Because if she says no, the children are next.”

“Thank you, Alison. The children are next. What an incredible story is under the one we’re being told.” We’d gotten to the kernel of the play, and I knew they felt what I felt: Euripedes was alive. His mind was alive and we were talking to him. An aura of intimacy had joined us to him. Now, finally, the alarm had stopped and it felt like the air around us expanded to fill the silence. But we’d run out of time anyway.

“Too bad,” I said. “We’ll finish the play next week.”

They gathered up their things, murmuring amongst themselves, and they thanked me (to be thanked for teaching!) as they filed out under the archway. I slung my handbag over my shoulder. The man was still standing against the wall. “You a fan of the classics?” I asked him.

“Not really,” he said. He pushed off the wall and strolled down the little incline toward me. “Unless you mean Otis Redding.”

“He’s a little after Euripedes,” I said, and began walking toward the street. The man walked beside me. It was an easy thing. Without so much as introducing ourselves, there was an agreement that we would walk now for a little while together. I slowed my step. “You teach here?” I asked him.

“Yeah. A photography course.”

“Which one?”

“‘Someday My Prints Will Come.’ You know it?”

I laughed. “That’s clever. Did you make that up?”

“No, it’s true. I teach here. Although the course is called ‘Taking Pictures Is a Snap.’” He smiled, enjoying himself, and walked with his hands in his jacket pockets now. He was a little younger than me, maybe not yet thirty, with warm eyes and a handsome, square face. His hair was messy, in a studied kind of way (I imagined him mussing it until it was right). “I know you,” he said.

“Really? Where from?”

“U of T. I took your Milton and Donne courses.”

I skipped ahead a step and walked backwards, trying to see if I remembered him. “You look a little familiar,” I said.

“Daniel Silver. It was a few years ago.”

“It would have to be. I haven’t taught there since 1996. What kind of mark did you get?”

“I passed.”

“Mm.” I fell back in step with him, squinting up at him. The streetlamps were coming on.” How tall are you, Daniel?” His face creased a little at that. “Careful how you answer.”

“Five eleven.”

“Were you going to ask me out for a drink? Talk about how you could have improved your mark?”

“I got an A. Must have been one of your weaker moments.”

“This is probably another one.”

I slept for two hours and woke with my nerves jangling, a bolt of fear as I took in the room and remembered where I was. Molly had been back while I slept: there was a sandwich on the desk and a business card for the Hofstaeder Gallery on Dawson Street lying on top of the
Dublin A-Z
. I got dressed and went down to the lobby, looking desultorily for Molly in the lounge, but she wasn’t there. I went out into the street, devouring the sandwich as I walked toward Dawson. I carried a vague memory of some of the streets I was walking in, and as I passed down York toward St. Stephen’s Green, it felt as if the place shimmered in outline, like someone was lowering one rendition of the place over another. Flickerings of a dream glowed in the back of my mind (strange how some dreams remain impressed on the mind like books, while others seem like distant memories of places visited in childhood).

There wasn’t much that would have matched this Dublin against the one I held in trust. That other Dublin rumbled with trams, street-sellers hawked flowers and fresh fruit; it was full of cobblestone and horses, a dozen daily newspapers sold by competing newsboys with their cries —
Ir -ish PRESS! Heggald here! In-ep-IN-en!
— everyone, including the children, wearing hats.
Little stores with knick-knacks on offer, all the boys on the street trading little lead cars, wind-up figures, soldiers made by Britains, the best toymaker in the world.
This Dublin was cleaner and brighter, although I had no doubt that
that
Dublin was clean and bright too, but in a way that was completely inaccessible to me. Dublin, to Martin, was all the world for the first ten years of his life. Its streets the sum of his longitudes and latitudes, its river the only river in knowledge, and its parks the wilds of the world. No, this Dublin was bright in the way shiny things are bright; reflective not pervious. There were tourist malls with American brandnames, streets closed to cars, and the reek of European money and fast food. Nostalgia was being sold in the shops along the Green, the bright windows of the boutiques full of images of a rustic past. A pet store had Celtic crosses to be hung from your cat’s neck; tourists came out of another wearing Guinness T-shirts over their sweaters.

I walked to the corner where the Hofstaeder Gallery sat above the street, a bright space with glass on two sides. I got partway up the wrought-iron steps and saw Molly sitting at the top. She looked down at me, completely composed. “Did you sleep all right?”

“I looked for you,” I half-lied, “but you were gone.”

“I thought it might be helpful for me to be here,” she said, smiling. “So I decided just to come. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” I said, flatly. “It’s fine.” We went through the door. Inside, a girl in a black dress nodded to us hopefully. There were two paintings up, on opposite walls, giant flowers glistening with dew. Clumsily erotic pictures, or blithely unaware, perhaps. In failing to follow the trends of art, I thought them blunt and stupid, but maybe they were cutting edge. We asked for the gallery owner, and the girl, who must have been mute, nodded again and went through a door in the back. A man came out. He wore a brown velvety suit jacket that looked like it had been made from a worn-out couch.

“Leon Hofstaeder,” he said.

Molly reached forward before I could say anything and took his hand. “Molly Siddons. This is Jolene Iolas.”

Hofstaeder shook my hand, looking disinterestedly at us both.

“What can you tell us about this show,” said Molly, and she pulled a program out of her purse.

“Can I see that?” I said, but Hofstaeder took it, then handed it back to her. He opened his arms and gestured in a wide circle around the room.

“As you can see now, the illustrious show of Mr. Sloane is now gone.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “Where can we find him?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. It was a rental,” said Hofstaeder. “Mrs. Bryce paid the money, I cleared the walls, they went up, they came down, and that was all. I was in Derry the entire time eating chocolates and reading Patricia Highsmith.”

“Mrs. Bryce?” I said.

“She arranged the show, brought it round, paid in valid tender, and took it all away.”

“So you never met him.”

“Never laid eyes on him. But I’m guessing he wouldn’t have wanted to show his face. Mrs. Bryce paid five hundred pounds for the two weeks, and they didn’t sell a thing.”

I tried to clear the muck out of my head. Even being in a room Martin may have stood in made my head muzzy. “Why, uh …?” Hofstaeder turned to me and raised his forehead. “Why would it have been a rental?”

“It’s always a rental here, my darling. Eleanor over there is the author of these magnificent flowers.” Eleanor nodded once again. “It’s like vanity publishing, someone with the means selling for someone with product. Very simple, and mutually beneficial.” He narrowed his piggy eyes and smiled. “Usually.”

“Why are you here for this show instead of in Derry, then?” Molly asked.

“You can pay a little extra for the presence of the owner. It can help sales.” He pointed at a red dot under one of the two giant flowers and hooked his thumbs under imaginary suspenders. He spoke in the voice of an official arbiter of taste. “No doubt earlier examples of photorealism, especially those of unusual dimensions, will appreciate more in value over time without falling prey to the whims of taste. And more to the point, flowers will always be in, and very big, very cunty, excuse my French, flowers even more so.”

“I didn’t know photorealism was in,” I said.

He pointed at the red dot and said nothing.

“Mr. Hofstaeder,” said Molly. “Do you think Mr. Sloane didn’t want to sell his work?”

He put on a look of deep concentration, then inhaled sharply. “I always look at the art before I decide what to charge. Often I just do a commission and a minimum rental. Other times I opt for a flat rate, no cut. That seemed best with your friend’s work. Whether he wanted to sell them or not is moot. They weren’t going to, and they didn’t. Sculpture yes, three-D no. That’s all.”

I looked at Eleanor. She was smiling like someone had a gun to her back. I asked him, “Did you know of Sloane before he showed here?”

“No,” said Hofstaeder. “Never heard of him. Best ask this Francine Bryce. If she hasn’t dropped him from the roster.” Then, surmising he’d told us everything we needed to know, he shook Molly’s hand again and walked straight back into his office. After a moment, she followed him in. I was alone with Eleanor, who looked like she’d been dressed by her great-grandmother. Frills stuck out at her wrists and neck from under a velvet waistcoat. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

“Well, at least you sold this one,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not sold actually,” she said.

“How come the dot then?”

“Mr. Hofstaeder says if you’re going to beg for money, it’s best to have a couple of coins in your hat already. It’s encouragement.”

“But what if I came in and this was the one I wanted to buy?”

“We move the sticker back and forth,” said Eleanor. “Give them both a fighting chance.”

Molly came back out, holding the catalogue out to me. “You wanted to see this, right? Don’t lose it, it has Mrs. Bryce’s address on it.” She strode out into the street. I turned back to Eleanor, and not certain of the protocol, took two big steps forward and shook her hand.

By the time I followed her out, Molly was not in view, so I resolved to sit at the bottom of the stairs until she came back. She’d left charged with purpose, like she’d just remembered seeing Mrs. Bryce sitting at a café table a few doors down. I wasn’t sure what to make of Molly’s courteous intrusiveness, but I decided the best thing to do was wait until the shape of everything became clearer. If all this was in the service of something unattainable, there was no point in putting up any opposition. But at the same time, I felt it would not take much to make me feel like I was being dragged into someone else’s mania.

It was true I’d already begun to have flashes come to mind unbidden. Being in a hotel room inevitably reminded me of the good days at the beginning of my relationship with Martin, driving from Bard to the little inns throughout the state. Long weekends drinking coffee in bed and talking. I kept receiving flares of that other life — which I almost saw as the past now — as if I were walking by a window where someone I used to know was sitting, looking almost like their old self. Martin turning a plate of food so whatever he wanted to eat was closest to him. Head up high in the mirror, shaving his throat. The way, when reading a book, he’d have the page half turned before he’d gotten to the bottom of it, his head angled, like he was trying to get to the end before his hand flipped the page.

I took out the catalogue to examine it. The front featured the box called Everybody’s, a vision of a store window full of toys and magazines. Martin had set it against a backdrop of the moon’s surface, although you couldn’t see the sides or the back of the box unless you came at it from an angle. It seemed like an innocent memory of a childhood shop. The artist’s name was given as “A. Sloane, Antrim.” Martin had no middle name, so the anagram left an orphaned “a,” which was both careless and alarming, a forewarning that not everything was going to come together. I folded the catalogue in half and put it in my pocket.

Molly reappeared with two water bottles. “I thought you’d gone to round up the usual suspects,” I said.

“My mouth was dry from talking to that jerk. Here –” she handed me one and I cracked the cap, took a long cold slug of water. Then I pulled the catalogue out and turned the cover up to her. “I’ll tell you this,” I said. “It’s not possible that this piece was on display in this gallery. It’s in a permanent collection in Houston.”