Restoration (3 page)

As it happened, I was living only about a mile away from the Lowenstein house, in a rented cottage by Whole Foods Market on Esplanade Avenue. And I knew the place well because I ran in front of it every afternoon on my jog along the bayou. After learning that a vast collection of Drysdales resided there, I made a point of stopping each day and looking up past the trees. I ran in place and studied the windows, but I never saw a thing—never a painting, let alone a human face. Then the day came when something at the house did engage my eye: a High Life Realty sign hanging on the fence.

I’d endured so much change recently that a move didn’t seem like a bad thing. Dad was dead, I’d quit my job, and the latest girlfriend had decided I wasn’t her soulmate. Others might’ve been paralyzed by so much upheaval, but I was beginning to find adventure and romance in challenging the bounds of my own comfort. How much could one retired newspaperman take? Welcoming the opportunity to find out, I sprinted home and called High Life as soon as I got in the door.

Patrick was famous around town for his dinner parties, or so he told me just minutes after I arrived at his apartment. “They don’t call me
Hurricane Patch for nothing,” he said. “We’ll eat and drink and then, for your added viewing pleasure, I’ll tear the place apart.”

He lived in a big Queen Anne Victorian at Coliseum Square in the Lower Garden District: the Loeber Mansion, architectural historians call the place. Patrick prepared the meal himself, and his longtime girlfriend, Elsa Dodd, a CPA from a nearby town, poured the drinks. There were twelve of us—not counting Boots, Patrick’s cat—and everyone crowded in the kitchen and watched as Mr. High Life himself cooked on his old red Chambers. Tonight’s menu included fried hush puppies and sweet potato wedges, fried shrimp, fried oysters, and fried soft-shell crabs covered with lump crabmeat. “Dessert won’t be fried, too, will it, Patrick?” Elsa said.

“Since when you got something against fried?”

Rather than a Jell-O salad, I’d brought a bottle of Jägermeister, the same stuff Patrick and I had enjoyed a few days before. “Oh, man,” Patrick said as he inspected the gift. “Hurricane Patch has now officially been promoted to a Category Five. It won’t be only my apartment that gets flattened tonight. Elsa, go warn the neighbors, sweetheart.”

As was his custom, he didn’t start cooking until each of his guests had consumed a few cocktails, and by the time he finished, everyone was so miserable with hunger it didn’t matter that half of his dishes were either burned, undercooked or unrecognizable.

“God, Patrick, it’s so good I could cry,” I stated in too large a voice, after biting into one of his fat, crusty oysters.

I’d been drinking Scotch from a plastic go cup emblazoned with a picture of a Carnival parade float, and it was only the first of many declarations I would make this night. One couldn’t overstate the amount of pride Patrick took in his cooking. His eyes watered as he thanked me for the compliment, then he bounced to his feet, retrieved my plate and stumbled into the kitchen for another large helping.

“Jack, better be stingy with the praise, my friend,” Elsa said. “If you’re not careful, he’ll have you over tomorrow night, too.”

“Dinner on Saturday, as well?”

“Yes, and like tonight every bit of it fried on the Chambers. For the continued good health of your heart you would be well advised to keep your enthusiasm in check.”

It was a struggle to consume the second serving, though not because the quality of the food had slipped. I found that I couldn’t stop looking at the woman seated directly across the table from me. I’d hardly paid attention to her earlier when we were introduced, and I couldn’t recall her name. But now candles were burning in the space between us, and I was having a devil of a time resisting an urge to reach between the flames and place my hand on her lovely, golden face.

I leaned forward, my shirt absorbing grease from the plate, and waited until she surrendered and acknowledged me with a glance. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I forget what you said your name was.”

“I don’t remember telling you my name.”

“Was it Roberta?”

“It’s Rhys,” Elsa said. “Rhys Goudeau. Now be a gentleman, Jack, or we’ll demand that you eat another plateful.”

Like me, the woman had come without a companion. The threat of more to eat worked to snap me out of my spell, but I did watch her when she walked to the buffet for another bottle of wine. And I watched her when she returned to the table. It struck me that she was the only one of the guests who was not dressed entirely in black. Rhys was a mix of colors: yellow turtleneck, pink skirt, red clogs. Her hair, a dizzying assemblage of whorls and corkscrews, shone a brassy gold. Hard as I tried, I could not determine whether her eyes were blue or green, as they seemed to change as the night went on, and as the light in the room changed.

“Jack,” said Patrick when he and Elsa were clearing the table, “it might interest you to know that Rhys recently worked on one of your landlord’s paintings.”

“One of Mr. Lowenstein’s paintings?”

“Rhys restores damaged artwork. Have you heard of the Crescent City Conservation Guild? Rhys is the director, aren’t you, darling?”

It seemed to pain her to have to nod. She cleared her throat.
“Paintings, frames, pottery. People bring me their broken things. I fix them.”

Hoping to improve on the impression I was making, I didn’t speak again until Patrick and Elsa returned from the kitchen. This time I was careful not to slur. “Rhys, was the painting of Mr. Lowenstein’s a Drysdale?”

“Yes, it was, as a matter of fact.”

“And how was it damaged, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“He put his foot through it.”

“You mean it?”

“He’d taken it off the wall for dusting and placed it on the floor.” She laughed for some reason. “An accident, he said.”

“The Guild amazes me,” Patrick said. “Put your foot through a sheet of canvas and when they’re done, you could never tell it underwent such trauma.” Now he was addressing the rest of his guests. “Ready for a story, everyone? My great aunt dies and we’re settling up her estate, dividing property. In a closet there’s a cardboard box holding what once was a piece of pottery. The thing—whatever it was—is broken in a million pieces. Well, I look up ‘Art Restoration’ in the Yellow Pages and find the Guild’s number and give the place a call. Next day a fuzzy, tattooed boy pulls up in this antique van with magnetic signs on the doors advertising the Guild. He takes the box and leaves. Weeks go by and I’ve pretty much forgotten about it. Then I hear a knocking at my office door and I open it to this ravishing young woman. This is how Rhys and I meet, the first time. She’s holding a large Newcomb College vase: the pieces from my cardboard box, restored so that you could never tell it had been broken.”

“Marvelous,” said someone at the table.

“Marvelous until she gave me the bill,” Patrick said. “When I learned the charge was fifteen hundred dollars I nearly smashed the vase to pieces all over again. You remember how upset I became, darling? My face was the color of the wine I’m drinking.” He held up his glass. “But then I placed the vase for sale with the Neal Auction Company and the most incredible thing happened.” Patrick paused and
sipped his Merlot. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s what it fetched—this box of
garbage.
Rhys, what was the guy’s name who bought the vase?”

“Tommy Smallwood.”

“Yes, Tommy Smallwood.”

“He’s the most voracious collector of southern art of his generation,” Rhys said. “And by southern art I don’t mean southern California or southern Indiana or southern France. But the South, the real South.” She looked at me. “The
American
South.”

“The underbidder,” Patrick said, “was one of those dotcom billionaires who only yesterday shaved his face for the first time. I talked to him after the auction and he said he was out shopping for something to buy his girlfriend. He’s driving along Magazine Street and he sees a sign that says AUCTION TODAY. They’d just given him a paddle when my Newcomb vase came up.”

“Two people who possess as much ego as they do money and who insist on owning the same item,” Rhys said. “This is what creates the perfect climate for a runaway auction. And that is what happened to you, Patrick. That vase, in mint condition, is worth fifty thousand dollars. None of the museums or serious collectors wanted it, however, because it had repairs. To them it was worthless. They want the pristine item, the undamaged one. But you were lucky. Two determined and like-minded individuals with more money than sense just had to have it.”

“A runaway auction,” Patrick said. “I do like the sound of that.”

“Yes, and they’re more common than you might think. At the right auction even the most common lot can sell for many times more than its appraised value. When a bidding war erupts, logic is the first casualty.”

“Hold your hands up,” I said. “Let us have a look at them.”

Rhys sat glaring at me. She never did show us her hands.

For dessert Patrick served Angelo Brocato’s lemon-flavored Italian ice, a local favorite, along with meaty chunks of overripe mango. By
now my tongue was so saturated with grease and whisky I could barely taste what I was eating.

Elsa invited us to move to the living room, and once there I lowered myself to the floor and lay flat on my back gazing at a chandelier. I recall hearing the music of Louis Armstrong on the stereo, and Patrick’s laughter as he and his guests proceeded to dance around me. Someone fell after tripping on my leg, and this was greeted with a loud, happy roar. I don’t know how long I slept; it might’ve been hours.

When I awoke, the house was quiet but for the sure, deep voice of Rhys Goudeau. Despite the mix of throbbing and ocean sounds, I managed to lift my head off the floor, and there she sat with Patrick on the tufted red leather of a Chesterfield sofa. Nearby Elsa was sleeping in a plantation chair, a leg draped over each arm, her short skirt failing to protect her from view. Everyone else had left. A group of candles was burning, their deep yellow glow repeated in the high polish of the mahogany-paneled walls.

On the floor between Patrick and Rhys a painting was leaning back against the antique cypress tool chest that served as a coffee table. It was in such bad shape that at first glance it was hard to tell much about it, other than the fact that it was dark and dreary and looked ready for the trash pile. “Patrick, did the canvas come from your great-aunt’s estate as well?” Rhys was saying.

“Yes, it did. From the attic.”

“What a great eye she had. Patrick, tell me her name again.”

“We called her Aunt Dottie,” he said.

“Dottie Marion?”

“You got it… well, her real name was Dorothy, Dorothy Marion. She was my grandfather’s baby sister. She also was an old maid who lived alone in a big, weird house on Ursulines down near where it intersects with Broad. She used to talk about being a flapper and shooting pigeons for supper with her boyfriend William Faulkner from the roof of his French Quarter garret. Sometimes, when she’d had a few, she’d talk about rejecting Faulkner’s marriage proposal, but it was only
the crème de menthe talking. I’d done the math, you see: Faulkner had lived in the Quarter in 1925, when Aunt Dottie was all of three years old. She was never a flapper—she was still in diapers when the flappers were having their day. She’d made it all up, but then she made everything up. By the time I knew her she was an eccentric, wig-wearing old bat who lived alone in a house full of cats.”

Rhys seemed mesmerized by the painting, which, now that I inspected it closer, looked to be a portrait of a woman. “I won’t be able to authenticate the painting before I run some tests at the studio,” she said, “but I think… Patrick, I’m very excited because I think you’ve discovered something very special here.”

“Oh, Rhys, I love you for saying that.”

“It’s too dirty to locate a signature, but I think… I hope you’re ready for this. Patrick, I think your painting could be the work of Levette Asmore.”

I sat up and felt my head clear suddenly, even as my heart began to hammer away at the walls of my chest. I squinted trying to see the painting better.