The Love of My (Other) Life (15 page)

“Better talk to him about head again,” said Fishnets. “If you want him to stay.”

“Wait, Frances, please,” I cried.

He paused and tapped his foot, then stared at the time on his iPhone.

“What if you do a show about me, as Cliff’s model, student, forger, and protégé.”

“A show about you?” Frances snorted.

“His influence on me. You have the Warhol prints. I’ll remake the skull. And I have photographs of the other forgeries. It can also be an exposé on the forgeries.”

Frances stepped closer. “How would you recreate the head?”

“Same way I did it in the first place,” I said, shrugging. “Sculpt it in clay, make a mold, cast it in resin. Patina it and glue on the rhinestones with Elmer’s.”

“I couldn’t get a million dollars from that.” Frances looked doubtful.

“You’d get a million dollars worth of PR,” I noted, baiting the hook. “Worldwide attention. Cliff is an international figure. There was a lot of gossip about the forgeries. Everyone was titillated and appalled at the same time. Viciously appalled.” I winced. “I found that out the hard way.”

Frances bit. “I would be the gallery who revealed the untold secrets.”

“It’s a great angle,” I sang. “Everyone would cover it, general media and arts media. Vogue, Arts and Antiques, W, Fine Art Connoisseur, American Arts Quarterly, the morning show … ”

Frances’ face actually paled with glee. “People would come from everywhere to visit the gallery.”

“People would talk about it for years. You’d be famous.”

“Not famous. Infamous.” Frances smiled. “I always wanted to be infamous.”

“You would show my work, too,” I said, lightly, but pointedly and carefully.

“Ugh. Everyone’s an artist. Sorry, sister, no.

That I can not do.” Frances made a dismissive hand motion.

I reached under my skirt, which brought a chorus of approval from the girls, and pulled out the rolled-up papers. I passed them through the bars to Frances.

Frances made a moue of impatience, but he opened them up. First he saw the handwritten letter from Cliff, and he was crestfallen all over again. He kind of moaned.

Then he saw the painting. His head lifted and his eyebrows raised and the light of dawning pleasure radiated over his face.

So help me God, homeless, broke, discredited, starring in Internet porn, and locked up in jail, I had the best moment of my entire life right then: seeing Frances captivated by my painting.

It was worth everything I’d been through just to see the true pleasure on his face as he beheld my work.

“You did this?” Frances asked with some disbelief. “Oil on paper?”

“Oil on eviction notice,” I clarified.

“Turner influence,” he noted. “Interesting use of color. Almost old masterish, in a good way, the palate. Florentine. But absolutely contemporary, too.”

The ladies crowded around me, trying to see.

“I have dozens of canvases,” I said. I was suddenly aflutter with nervousness and excitement. Was I really going to show my work to an important gallerist? Was I really setting up a show for myself?

Was I really going for it, finally?

“All landscapes?”

“Yes. I have figure drawings, too. I always thought they were just doodles, but recently I was told they were good. They could be framed and shown.”

“Hey, baby, let us see,” pleaded Fishnets.

Frances held up the painting.

The girls fell silent, then oohed and aahed with admiration. They were now, officially, my new best friends.

Frances squinted at me fiercely, then shook his head and marched out.

I collapsed onto the bench and cradled my head in my arms. “Oh crap. Well, I tried.”

“Honey, your painting’s real good. He’s coming back, you’ll see,” said Fishnets.

“You ain’t a forger, you’re an artist,” said Adam’s Apple reverently. “You should be proud.”

But I was past that kind of pretension. I was just me, same ole screwed up Tessa, now jailed Tessa.

“I’m a forger, all right. And a kind of art thief, sort of. I took something I shouldn’t have, even if it was rightfully mine.”

“I’d steal something beautiful like that,” said Slinky Gold Frock. “Usually I only steal money from my guys, but I’d take that painting. It kinda gets you in the gut, makes you want to own it.”

“Really?” I asked, gratefully. “You mean that?” It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said about my work: that it elicited the lust for acquisition. They all three nodded.

“If you can paint something beautiful like that, what’s all the commotion about the head and forgery?” asked Adam’s Apple.

I slumped again. “That’s the sad part. I can paint like that, and instead, I forged really, really ugly stupid crap. How pathetic is that?”

“We all done sad stuff,” said Fishnets. “The secret is to say you’re sorry and make amends if you can. Then you shake it off and move forward as best you can.”

● ● ●

A few hours later, Fishnets was painting my toenails while I sketched my new friends’ faces on the cell wall with a tube of Nars Shanghai Red lipstick.

The sketches were remarkably poignant, if I said so myself. The girls certainly did.

Adam’s Apple wanted to take pictures of them and was hollering for her cell phone.

But when the cops returned, Frances trailed them. I dropped the lipstick and we all scrambled upright.

“Turns out there’s a lot of paperwork when you drop charges,” Frances said.

A police officer unlocked the holding cell door.

“Come on, Picasso. You’re sprung.”

“Raphael, not Picasso!” I said. Then, because I couldn’t help it, I pulled a Brian. I launched myself at Frances and squeezed him in a giant hug.

“Get off me,” wheezed Frances. “There’s no telling what diseases you picked up in there!”

“You won’t regret this, I promise!” I said. “I’ll make you lots of money.”

“I’m taking 65 percent on your canvases, and all the profit on the new head,” Frances said.

“Give him all the head he wants,” called Adam’s Apple.

I giggled. Then, because Brian would kill me if I didn’t stand up for myself, I patted Frances and shook my head. “You can take 65 percent of the first couple of sales. Then we go to fifty-fifty. And you can take 60 percent of the head.”

“First ten sales,” Frances said. “Seventy-five percent of the head.”

“First three,” I responded. “Sixty-five percent.”

“Five, sixty-five,” he countered. We looked at each other and grinned, and then shook hands. “I am sorry about the original skull,” he said with some regret. “Even if it does belong to you and I can’t sell it. It was something special. I’d love to show it.”

“Well, I do have an idea about how we might get it back,” I drawled, having a flash of inspiration.

For once, it was practical inspiration. I almost didn’t recognize myself.

“Now you’re talking,” said Frances.

“I’ll call Guy and say I’ve got a buyer willing to pay $750K. We’ll set up a sting.”

“More paperwork,” rumbled the cop.

“I think I’m starting to like you,” Frances said.

“But don’t breathe on me. Ugh.”

“Bye, ladies,” I waved. “Call me for those portraits. But I do have to charge you.”

“No freebies,” called Fishnets. There was a chorus of assents.

“I’ll text you the name of the lady who waxes me,” said Adam’s Apple. “Your guy in the video will appreciate it. He seemed like a real sweetheart. Eager to make you happy, you know. He put your pleasure first. That would make anyone enthusiastic.”

“Brian,” I said. Where was he?

He wasn’t at my place, where I retrieved my cell phone. Nor was he at Ofee’s apartment.

He wasn’t at Central Park, which was lit up and full of people streaming toward a concert on the great lawn. He wasn’t at Rat Rock.

He wasn’t at Riverside Park. I was standing by the tree where I’d seen him hiding that day I walked Mrs. Leibowitz. Oh, Mrs. L. But I couldn’t dwell on heartache right now.

Then my cell phone rang. It was Ofee, bursting with information that he just had to share with me immediately. But I already knew, because my heart knew.

“Ofee, I love you!” I said. “I know. It wasn’t Brian Tennyson who took the pictures and wrote that stuff and was put away in an institution. It was some other professor. I figured that out.”

But where would Brian go?

● ● ●

It came to me in a flash of obviousness once I stopped to think deeply about Brian. And I knew he was nearby because I could feel him as I ascended the steps to the great marble plaza at Lincoln Center, where masses of people milled about, surrounded by the Opera House, the theaters, the ballet halls, and Juilliard. The plaza was bathed in white lights. The scene was festive, lush, and vibrant.

There was Brian, a solitary observer of the panoply of people and traffic. A twinkly sphere of light seemed to play around him, distinguishing him from everyone else here in our world. Our rich, bursting, imperfect but wonderful world that was more beautiful because he had visited it.

I crossed over to sit next to him.

“She wanted to play here,” he said, softly. He paused for a few beats. “She played at Carnegie. But she wanted to play here. The cultural institutions all in one place. It was a thing with her.”

This was Brian: in love with his wife, that other Tessa. Not with me. With her, always her. It was bittersweet, and I felt a pang of sadness. But he had done so much for me that I wanted to help him.

Maybe I could ease his sorrow. “You must have been so proud of her.”

“Proud. Spellbound. Awed. I never told her how much. I told her I loved her, but I didn’t really say how much she meant to me. That’s why it’s so hard to let go of her. I still have so much left to say to her.” His eyes were suddenly shiny with a slick of tears.

I thought of his wife as I had glimpsed her that once, like a wraith in his aura: gaunt and dying in his arms. It must have been unimaginably painful for him. He had built his entire world around her.

He smeared at his eyes with the back of his hand.

All at once, because I was filled with new hope and new promise, I knew what to do for him. I stood.

“I can help you with that.”

Brian gave me a somber, quizzical look. “What do you mean?”

“You came to this world to see her again. To tell her one last time that you love her. That’s why you followed me around.”

“Yes, so?”

“So, I’ll be her.” I felt a connection to her, felt her nearby. “I’ll be her right now. So you can say all the things you want to.”

“Tessa, you’re not my wife!”

“I look enough like her to play her,” I said, smiling crookedly.

“She’s a completely different person.”

“I’ll imagine who I’d be if I hadn’t quit the cello and started drawing when I was twelve. If I’d succeeded in seducing my brother’s tutor. If I’d gone to Yale instead of following David to Columbia.” I would imagine myself after every decision that she had made until she slipped into me, like a hand taking on a glove.

Brian, sweet man, was imbued with native effervescence the way deep reds are saturated with blue.

He rose to his feet, warming to the idea. “If you hadn’t studied art but had come to New Haven and met me!”

“Ooh, that’s a hard one: you or Renaissance art,” I teased. “Just kidding. Give me a moment.”

I stepped away, and passersby instinctively gave us a wide berth. My eyes mostly closed, except for a thin slit. I imagined another life, other choices. It was easy for me because I spent so much time in my imaginal world. But the stakes were high—Brian’s happiness—so I went deeper into it. I gave my whole being over to the exercise, every heartbeat.

A pale blue light shimmered around me. In transparency, like a ghost, another me, another Tessa, softer and more confident, stepped up beside me. I continued to concentrate on those other paths, the ones not taken.

My breathing deepened and slowed, and time stopped. The blue light around me pulsed. It intensified. The space between heartbeats stretched into an eternity, and the other Tessa walked into my body.

For a moment, we smiled at each other.

Then I stepped out.

“Hello, Professor,” said Tessa, in a teasing voice.

Brian jumped. “Tessa! It’s you!”

“Silly boy. I’m always around you,” she said.

“Always.”

Brian grabbed her hands and clutched them to his chest. “Why did you leave?”

“It was my time. My life had run out, kind of like the joke at the end of a Haydn piece. The loud chord in the Surprise Symphony. You don’t expect it, and there it is,” she said, squeezing his hands back.

“It wasn’t funny to me,” Brian said raggedly.

“You always became humorless at just the wrong time.”

“You’re always so smug and sure you’re right.”

“Am I here to argue with you?” she asked with a fake yawn to show how boring that would be. “You know how that’s going to end. I win, because I’m the superior wordsmith.”

“I want you back to argue with me every day,” Brian choked out. He put his arms around Tessa and held her tightly.

“I’m not coming back, Professor.”

“But I love you, I love you so much.” Brian’s voice was raw, undefended.

“I know, and wasn’t I good? I planned it that way.” Tessa leaned her head to rest her cheek against Brian’s.

“I was the one who chose you!”

“Silly. I knew you were going to love me the first day I saw you at Freshman Orientation,” Tessa’s laugh was silvery and sweet, as he remembered it.

“But you said we could only be friends. I thought I was the consolation prize because perfect David broke up with you.”

“You were never second best, Brian. I wanted you. I wanted what we had. I love you, too. I always will. In every universe.”

Brian couldn’t speak. He struggled to hold in his tears but they spilled down his face. He clutched his Tessa to himself, feeling her every bone and muscle, every molecule, against his being. He engraved her into him. “You are the most amazing woman I ever met. The most amazing person.”

“You don’t have to say that. I already knew you felt that way.”

“I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss holding you.”