The Book of Jonah (40 page)

She handed him the two stapled pages. He glanced at the first page, flipped to the second, dropped them back on her desk. “So how much did they cost to make?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“These paintings. How much did it cost to make them?”

She hesitated—no one had ever asked her this before. “For the artist?”

“Sure, let's start there.”

The paintings were nonfigurative, oil on canvas: swirls and waves and jutting arcs of color executed in globs, in splatter-thin lines, in quarter-inch-high ripples of paint. In the exhibition brochure, she had written that these works “rendered the chaos and confusion of human emotion with subtle, perceptive beauty.” Whether or not this was true (Judith had her doubts), she was aware they had been made quickly, with an intentional sloppiness—the West Hollywood–based artist who'd painted them had told her so himself—and in terms of materials, their most expensive elements were almost certainly their frames. “Two or three thousand dollars, I suppose,” she said—knew this was being generous.

“For one of them?”

“For all of them,” she conceded.

He snorted through the broad nostrils of his nose. “That's quite a markup, considering you're selling the cheapest one for twenty grand. It makes you wonder why they call them ‘starving artists.'” He watched her, apparently waiting for her response. “But aren't you going to tell me you can't put a price tag on art?”

“You just saw the price list,” she answered.

His smirk deepened, and he narrowed his eyes, as if studying her in a new way. “A girl could get herself fired talking that way.” Judith shrugged—because she sensed that this, too, was a form of a challenge, and did not want to be seen as backing down from it. “Okay, then,” he continued. “You tell me why someone should pay a ten thousand percent markup for one of these … works of art.” And he tied this last phrase in a neat bow of derision.

Half-formed thoughts tumbled to her mind: explanations of the aesthetics of abstract art; a history of American painting as it evolved after World War II; a more general defense of nonrepresentational art as a means of portraying the nonmaterial dimensions of existence. But as she looked up at his burrowing eyes, at his persistent smirk, which seemed a preemptive contradiction of anything she might say, even at the American flag pin—composed, she now noticed, of tiny sapphires, rubies, diamonds—she could not muster these thoughts into a cogent reply. Glancing at the paintings themselves didn't help, either: They had always struck her as being a bit needlessly muddy. The pin he wore had more evident craftsmanship, if not necessarily artistry, to it. The truth was, she didn't like most of the works she sold. It occurred to her he made a good point.

When she didn't answer for another moment, he let out a loud, staccato laugh that seemed to strike and echo against the gallery walls. Sonya and the presumed celebrity had begun to stare at them, apparently having lost interest in their own conversation. It discomfited Judith, though, how easily he'd been able to wrong-foot her in an environment with which she was so familiar—felt she had to make at least some defense. “This isn't a hardware store,” she said. “It's not a question of pricing the materials.”

“No? What is it a question of?”

“It's a question of…” But again, under the force of the eyes, the smirk, the lambent pin—she trailed off.

He took obvious pleasure in seeing her lapse once again into silence—let her sit in it for a few moments before he said, “That's all right, I know exactly what it's a question of.” The smirk vanished, his voice became harsher. “It's a question of giving your customers what they're looking to buy. If it's not expensive, they can't brag about it at art parties, they can't put it on the wall to remind themselves that they're the sort of people who pay twenty grand for something that cost maybe two hundred bucks to make. That's why they're happy to pay whatever markup you decide to charge. You sell them something that tells them who they are.”

She sensed she had some objection to this—felt she must have had some objection. The best she could do, though, was, “The price also includes the gallery's costs.”

“Oh, I know,” he replied dismissively—implying he could both make her argument for her and undermine it in the same breath. “There's overhead: You have to pay the rent for the downtown gallery with the eighteen-foot ceilings. You have to pay the girl to sit behind the desk and hand people a piece of paper. Tell me something,” he said. “Where did you go to college to learn to do that?”

Now she felt the unaccustomed sensation of heat entering her cheeks. “Yale,” she said.

He smacked his hands together, laughed again triumphantly. “Yale! Beautiful. Your parents paid $150,000 so you could sit there and do a job a—”

“I'm sorry we don't have any more garish pins to sell you, but if you don't see anything you like, why don't you and your friend please leave.”

To that point, she had taken a certain pleasure in how uneasy he was managing to make her feel. The anger had risen so suddenly, so forcefully—as if it had taken its place undetected with the redness in her cheeks—that she spoke in almost the same moment she was aware of it. And as quickly as it had arisen, the anger vanished—leaving her stunned at her outburst, embarrassed enough that she finally needed to look away from his gaze.

When she looked back, he was smirking more sharply than ever—like this was an outcome that pleased him. “Clearly at Yale you weren't a marketing major,” he said. Then he added, “And who said I don't see anything I like?”

“Colonel,” the star said from across the gallery. “Are you going to buy any of these, or…”

“They're terrible,” he replied without turning to her. “They're all terrible. Even the girl thinks so.” But how had he known? Judith wondered.

The woman sighed behind her sunglasses. And now the man smiled fully at Judith: spreading his lips to reveal rows of small white teeth. This smile had an ominous quality—all his smiles were ominous, she would learn—and the ominousness fascinated her all the more. “You have a card?” She took one from the silver tray on her desk, handed it to him. He studied it. “Judith Klein Bulbrook,” he said. “That's a lot of name for such a spindly little thing.” He put the card into his jacket pocket. “I'm guessing you don't know who I am.” She shook her head. “Go out to Las Vegas sometime and ask who that hundred-story tower belongs to. That's who I am.” The casual pride he displayed in making this pronouncement, undiluted by any trace of irony, was more impressive to her than the fact itself. He turned to leave, then added over his shoulder—in a way that was still more ominous, and so to Judith still more fascinating—“I like that I can make you blush.” He walked out the door of the gallery, the woman in the sunglasses following behind.

When they had gone, Sonya immediately approached Judith's desk and said, “So can we talk about that? She was that actress, y'know, the one who's always topless on that HBO show. And he's a casino mogul or something?” When Judith didn't answer, she asked, “What did you two talk about?”

“Nothing,” Judith told her. “Nothing interesting.” It surprised her that she'd said this, because she knew it was a lie. This was the most interesting conversation she'd had in years.

*   *   *

The next morning, Judith got a phone call in her apartment from Edgar, the owner of the gallery. “So, Judith,” Edgar began uneasily. “I'm afraid … Well, you don't need to come in today.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Judith, so, here's the thing … We won't be needing you anymore.”

She had already dressed for the day—had her phone in her hand as she stood in the middle of her box-shaped living room, her purse on her shoulder. “I don't understand,” she said, confused.

“So there is good news,” Edgar said, brightening. “We sold out the entire Knauer exhibit! One buyer!”

Judith sat down on her couch, placed her purse on her lap, no longer confused. “I see,” she said.

“You know how the art world is,” Edgar went on. “Buyers are always … eccentric. It's the business we're in! I'm sure you didn't mean to say anything insulting. I mean of course you wouldn't. But the buyer was very insistent. You understand, don't you?”

“I do.”

“You're a cat with nine lives!” Edgar reassured her. “You'll land on your feet! This is just … it's just art, honey!”

“Will I get my commission for the sale?” She didn't really care about the money, was more curious about what he would say.

“Oh, Judith, you understand,” he answered. “The buyer really made it very clear.… Obviously you didn't exactly …
help
make the sale.…”

“Of course.”

“You understand.”

She hung up the phone. To buy out the entire exhibit would have cost close to $100,000. And she found that in addition to being stunned and shaken and angered—and, yes, fascinated—she was flattered.

Several days later, a courier arrived at her door. She signed for a small box wrapped in ivory-colored paper, tied with a black ribbon. She sat down on her couch and opened it. Inside, resting on a velvet pillow, was a golden butterfly pendant on a slender gold chain: art nouveau in style, very elegant, very lovely, the wings dotted with deep-crimson rubies. Beneath this was a card with a name embossed in the center, all in capitals: COLONEL HAROLD FERGUSON. She turned the card over; on the back, in spiky script, was written, “Something less garrish for you. —C.” He had spelled “garish” wrong—but she got the point.

As she held the butterfly in her palm, feeling its unexpected heaviness, it occurred to her that she must have understood something of the way he thought, because it seemed so clear what he was doing: seducing her. And, she thought as she now rested the butterfly gently on its little velvet cushion on her IKEA coffee table, he must have understood something of her, as well—because she found how willing she was to be seduced.

The next day she received a phone call—one that, when she answered it, she realized she had been expecting—from a woman who identified herself as “Mr. Ferguson's executive assistant.” She was informed, rather curtly, of a meeting she had with the Colonel that afternoon “at Mr. Ferguson's club.” She wore the black dress she used for openings, her only pair of high heels, and the butterfly necklace. A car had been sent to pick her up. She was driven to a glass-faced, rectangular building on Sunset Boulevard, its architecture of a refreshed mod style regarded as very hip at the time. She rode the elevator up to the thirty-second floor, came out into a reception area that interwove more refreshed mod with old Hollywood flourishes: dark-wood paneling, chairs upholstered in zebra print, mirrors in gilt-gold frames—all this also very hip, decidedly
au courant
.

She told the predictably lovely young receptionist whom she was meeting. The receptionist made a brief phone call and then asked Judith to wait. For the next hour and a half she sat in a great, high-backed leather chair, the dimensions of which made her feel a bit like a shrunken Alice. There was a salon wall behind the reception desk, covered in photographs and paintings—she spotted at least one piece that had been sold at her gallery. Members of the club came and went—Judith saw many high cheekbones, many luxury logos. A very famous movie star was permitted by the receptionist to smoke a cigarette while he waited for the elevator.

Finally, a woman walked out into the reception area: six foot in her high heels, wearing a heather-gray skirt suit, probably in her mid-forties but with the toned physique of a much younger person, her eyebrows plucked over her eyes in an arched shape that gave her face a look of permanent disdain. She greeted Judith with a perfunctory nod, followed by an almost imperceptibly brief up-and-down look of evaluation. “I'm Mr. Ferguson's executive assistant,” she said. “We spoke on the phone. You can follow me.” (This interaction would prove the high point of their relationship: This woman's enmity toward Judith would be unremitting, and progressively more severe. She would learn this was merely typical, though, of the way the Colonel's employees treated one another.)

As she led Judith up a white marble staircase—this another strand of old Hollywood DNA—she instructed her, “Remember, ‘Colonel' is Mr. Ferguson's given name. He has no formal military affiliation. While it's appropriate for his employees to refer to him as ‘the Colonel' in talking about him or as ‘Colonel' when talking to him, you should address him as Mr. Ferguson, or sir. If he invites you to call him Colonel, then call him Colonel.” This final injunction was the first indication—and there would be many—that this woman regarded Judith as incredibly stupid.

They came out onto a rooftop garden, with glass walls overlooking the green, mansion-pocked Hollywood Hills. There were tables and print couches spread beneath the leafy branches of olive trees; in the center of the space was a circular bar, behind which a bartender was grating ginger over a trio of martini glasses. A house reconfiguration of a Rolling Stones song thumped gently. Everywhere Judith looked, she saw blond hair crowning lustrous skin. She felt by now she was being escorted deeper and deeper through the nine circles of hipness.

The Colonel sat at a table by the wall on the western side of the roof. He was dressed as he'd been in the gallery, in a tailored suit without a tie, the American flag pin on his lapel. Spreadsheets and maps and blueprints covered the table before him; he held a phone to his ear with one hand, with the other clutched a red pencil, with which he occasionally marked one of the papers with a number, a line. He actually looked a little overlarge for the armless chair in which he sat, and the sides of several of the papers hung limp over the table's edges—but the effect was of a man whose surroundings were insufficient to his needs, rather than of a man out of place. He had that way, she would find, of redefining the spaces he occupied around himself.