And West Is West (14 page)

CHAPTER 27

New York City

Outside Medusa Gallery a queue, held back by a doorman with a clipboard, snakes down the sidewalk. The crowd, Zoe is guessing, is lined up for some art star's opening. She takes out her phone to recheck Alex's e-vite.

She had holed up in Marla's apartment for almost all of August—turtle-sitting Harry, ignoring Porter's emails. She was ready to break her solitude, and not in the least because Alex's invitation signaled the end of a general communications embargo. After her grandparents' funeral, after she had slept with Ethan and then raced back to Washington, after the reprimanding email from Alex, she'd become a persona non grata to both of her ex-lovers.

The address in the e-vite, she sees,
does
say the Chelsea Medusa. The subject line had even been personalized with a “Please come, Zoe.” Her address hadn't just been swooped up by mistake from one of Alex's old email lists. Still, she is wary as she approaches the doorman.

“Leston . . . Zoe,” she says quietly.

“Uh-huh,” the doorman says, but he checks his list.

Medusa's glass maw parts for her. Zoe's mouth opens nearly as wide. She sees people whom she recognizes from movies and music videos. Then her eyes rise to the pretext of this vanity fair—the art. The walls are hung high with monumental paintings—some collision between Matta and Twombly if she is accurately recalling her freshman art history. But what she sees next just cannot possibly be. And then she is grinning in pleased amazement. She has not slipped down a rabbit hole. The exhibition's title, in foot-tall letters, proclaims
ALEX CARR—NEW WORK
. Alex has
made it
.

Zoe had always taken Alex to be three-quarters the hustler leavened with one-eighth the charmer. She had granted a mere eighth-part of him, a mere patina over the pretense, as having anything to do with artistic ability. But here he is, not in his person for she has not yet glimpsed his corporeal self. Zoe means, here
he
is, alive and transcendent in his work.

“Champagne?” a man asks, and suddenly Zoe is holding a flute while experiencing a deeper thirst for the line and color of Alex's painting. Her eyes drink and drink, like camels watering after a trek. And then she feels shaken.

Why had she not seen Alex's potential before this? Was her vision deficient, her brain ossified, her heart unreceptive? Or was what her art professor had argued true—that “it is the occasion of true art to make its need felt most desperately only after repeated encounters.” Those paintings that hung in Ethan's apartment must have been preparing her for this moment of aesthetic hydration.

“I just bought that,” the man says, pleased with her attention to the canvas. It is not one of the biggest in the show, but it might be the most seductive. The man and Zoe part the crowd before the painting and it alters. Zoe can no longer see the large
S
or dollar sign that centers the image from afar. This close up she sees glistening shards of impasto licking up from an elsewhere flat surface. The brushstrokes, rising in small bloody wavelets, seem a critique on the commodification of this painting, of art in general. Then she pushes aside all this interpretation—the influence of her professor's astute but distracting theorizing—to soak up the image as image. She is even able to ignore the painting's title,
Money Shot
, which she hates. She inhales the smells of turpentine and oil paint and worries that the image is already hardening, mutating away from the wet, liquid perfection of its birth.

“What he's done with the red impasta is something,” says her drinking companion. He moves nearer to the canvas and raises a hand toward it as if to push through a door. Zoe notices he has a long lacquered thumbnail and for a moment she fears he will dig it into the paint.

“Impas
to
,” she says sharply, noticing his overlarge but handsome face, his broad shoulders and chest. Her mouth twists into a half smile as she realizes that he is famous and she doesn't recall his name.

“Dean Cato,” he says and offers her the hand with the strange nail.

Zoe stares but doesn't otherwise react. Her expression might be a frown.

“Sorry. The nail's for a role I'm playing,” Cato says. “Some kind of warlock. But a good one.” He holds out the thumb like an artist sizing up a tree for a landscape. “Creepy, isn't it?” Cato looks about thirty, both boyish and manly, and she wonders how much of an act he is putting on—the pretense of being a regular guy.

“If you're Dean Cato, where's your entourage?” she asks.

Cato's grin grows. “I'm here alone.”

“So you're here to hook up.”

He tilts his head. “I love art lovers,” he admits.

Zoe's eyes drift from Cato's, passing through and over the noisy crowd, which has left the two of them a circle of space as if they are a pair of street fighters being wagered on. But this crowd is not betting on Dean Cato's attempt to score. Why would they be? They are the famous and celebrated and are engaged in their own small duels—all except one who is famous only to Zoe. Her heart speeds a bit upon seeing him.

“Eth,” she calls, though he has already disengaged from the man with whom he was speaking, a man in a windbreaker. Her ex seems ready to dissolve backward into the crowd.

Ethan is not smiling. He never did when it did not come naturally. Clearly he still has no concept of how important dissimulation is for making others give a damn about you. What's more, he's no longer following the UIB dress code—he'd kept the manual on their dresser. Now with his uncut hair camouflaging his ears, the stretched-out Izod pullover, the ill-fitting jeans and scuffed dress shoes, he radiates an unfamiliar shabbiness. He holds himself apologetically stooped and then lurches forward. She rises onto her toes and Ethan awkwardly accepts her kiss on his cheek.

“You came,” he says, less in gladness than like a man relieved of a burden.

“I was surprised Alex invited me. Isn't he supposed to be your best friend?” Zoe says through a smile. But she is being too glib. Ethan has a tendency to extract meaning from small talk.

“Alex doesn't really hate you,” he says, confirming to Zoe that Alex probably
kind of
hates her. But this is not really news.

Zoe keeps her smile. “Anyway, it's nice, not being
really
hated enough to get an invitation.”

Ethan looks away. “I'm the one who undeleted you from his list.”

Her smile fades. “Why?” she asks. If anyone has a right to hate her, Ethan does.

“Maybe for the same reason you came tonight?” he says with a faint upturn of his mouth.

“I was in town,” Zoe says, afraid Ethan will imagine that her presence here has a hidden meaning.

In the silence that follows, Dean Cato pops back into Zoe's periphery. “So, like, you two were an item of yore. Or still are?” he asks.

“Of yore?”
Zoe says meanly.

“Did I say yore? I'm still half in character. It's difficult to turn off,” says Dean, marking his territory as a somebody, probably for Ethan's sake.

“Acting must really be hard. Dean, this is Ethan. He's in finance,” she says even as she realizes that Ethan's derelict appearance is embarrassing her.

Now the two men face off—Cato grinning upward self-confidently, Ethan looking down like a pilot circling in a fog and unable to land. Zoe can't help but compare the two men to Ethan's disfavor.

“
Bonsoir
, Dean!”

Cato does an about face into an open pair of toned forearms. “Juliette!” he responds.

Zoe sees a glittering face, a face as taut as a Greek mask depicting ecstasy, above Cato's shoulder. “You have bought
Money Shot
! Congratulations.”

Cato lifts the woman, spins about and lands her.

Juliette is older but obviously flogged daily by the whip of a personal trainer. Her dress is a brief costume—a silver halter that exposes the wings of her back and, below, reveals a tanned thigh through a slit. Gladiator platforms augment her height, show off her sculpted calves. This is a woman Zoe would hate to confront in any arena—especially dressed down as she is in the waistless black dress and thong sandals she'd found in Marla's closet.

Nearby a camera fires and Zoe and Ethan, bit players, retreat from the photo op. For a flash, Zoe regrets that she won't be finding out how spectacular Dean Cato's apartment might be.

“You're up from DC?” Ethan asks her, the scruff on his face shadowing his cheeks. This or they are hollow from lost weight.

“No. Washington is over for me.”

Ethan leans forward, just short of pressing his folded arms into her breasts. Or is someone pushing him from behind? The art crowd, closing in on them, makes him glare to the left and right as if fearing a stampede. “Let's get out of here,” he tells her.

AROUND THE BLOCK
in a diner booth, Zoe forks disinterestedly through a plate-size waffle. Meanwhile Ethan pours sugar into his third refill of black coffee. Zoe checks his shaking hand to stop the cup from overflowing.

“Still the sweet tooth,” she says and Ethan eyes her as if they had never lived together and she should not know this detail. Yet he has already updated her about losing his job, his UIB lawsuit, his money woes, the days he spends helping Alex, and Juliette, who is supplanting him in his friend's life.

“She's even trying to get me a job to get me out of Alex's studio. That guy I was with when I saw you wants to hire me.
Sergei
. He's been courting me for months.”

“But that's great,” Zoe says.

“I don't want to work on Long Island. I've got things to do here.”

“And what if you don't get a judgment against UIB? You'll have sold your apartment for nothing and not even have work?”

“At least I'll have fought.”

The obvious stays behind her lips—that Ethan should stop tilting at windmills and take the offered job. Zoe stares down at Ethan's hands, which are strangling his coffee cup. His fingernails are stained and grimy.

“Paint,” he says apologetically and relaxes his grip on the ceramic. “From cleaning Alex's brushes.”

“That's nice of you,” Zoe says, thinking that Alex should do his own dirty work.

He reads her disapproval. “I don't mind. Repetitive tasks are like Zen.
Ommm
,” he hums briefly then coughs. “Still working on the circular breathing.” His humor, poor though it is, reveals a seed of sanity. Zoe feels herself relaxing.

Zoe understands that Ethan's state is a mirror of hers, that though apart they have been traveling similar downward paths. She tallies her obvious wrong turns—sleeping with her boss, moving in with her boss, denying that this course was unsustainable, losing her career because of the bribery mess. The loneliness of where she has arrived is killing.

“Don't,” she tells Ethan, whose eyes emit a compassion she had never received from them before. Maybe he wasn't joking about the Zen and has begun working on his karma.

“
Zo
e,” Ethan breathes, and she feels herself choking up.

“I've completely screwed up my life,” she blurts.

Zoe's tears are not quite welling but it won't take much—silence or the touch of Ethan's hand across the table.

Unexpectedly Ethan's face lights up. “You need a reboot,” he says. “That's what I'm doing. What my lawyers are helping me do. Wipe the slate so I can start over. Prove that my supervisor moved that decimal point, not me.”

Zoe cannot completely follow Ethan's burst of talk. Nonetheless the idea that, just like a machine, all she needs is a reboot, douses her in ice water. The old reductive Ethan has returned and he has broken her mood.

“Start over from the very beginning? You mean like
reincarnation
?” she is able to quip.

WHEN ZOE ARRIVES
in front of Marla's building, Sun Wah grocery is closing its sidewalk produce stand for the night.

“Half price,” Mr. Wah tells her. He offers a box of raspberries that look overripe.

Ms. Wah, toting a crate of peaches, speaks sharply in Cantonese at her husband or brother. Shrinking, Mr. Wah turns a tea-stained grin on Zoe. “Free for neighbor,” he says, bowing in apology. Zoe bows back.

Upstairs she finds Harry awake on his terrarium's island and she places a mushy raspberry in front of him. He pulls his head into his shell.

“Hey, mister, it's the way you like them.” Zoe stares at the turtle's patterned back, but Harry refuses to come out. “Do you want to hear more stories?” Her grandfather's folder is by Harry's tank. She's read aloud to him the news clippings about her mother. “Well, maybe this will get your interest,” she says and pulls off her dress. Then she uncovers the nearby bathtub, an old tenement tub, opens its hot tap and plugs the drain.

While the water rises, Zoe burrows into Marla's liquor cabinet, comes out with a fifth of raspberry vodka, a wood box stamped
PROSECCO DI VALDOBBIADENE
, a Dewar's miniature, a sticky bottle of amaretto. She opens the miniature and swallows. The liquor burns her throat like arctic air. She inspects the Prosecco box. Two bottles remain and she removes one.

From higher cabinets, she takes down a tall tumbler and a coffee can of candles and incense sticks. She pops open the Prosecco, fills the tumbler, and immediately half drains it. With matches from Balthazar, a restaurant where once she ate ceviche with Ethan, she lights a candle and drips wax on the rounded rim of the tub, getting a few candles to stand on the rim. She surrounds the tub with incense, mounting the sticks in the seams of the wood floor. She lights the candles and incense and turns off the kitchen lights. She gazes at her handiwork, which has some similarity to an altar. But she is not quite ready yet.

In the weeks that she's been living at Marla's she's resisted digging through the medicine cabinet. But now she starts to rummage among the sulfur salves and sleeping pills, the antihistamine tablets and acid-reflux chewables, the creams for wart control and yeast infection. At last she locates Marla's Vicodin and Soma. In college Marla used them to manage her scoliosis spasms, though sometimes she and Zoe abused them recreationally. The dusty labels have expiration dates from early in the Obama era, which possibly indicate that the yoga Marla practices has helped her spine. Zoe gathers up the old drug booty and, taking along a fresh bath towel, returns to the kitchen.