SoHo Sins (19 page)

“How convenient for her.” Hogan regarded his drink. “So she got you to opt for a wasted marriage instead?”

“It wasn’t a waste, not compared to living without her.”

Hogan got up. “I need to piss,” he said.

As he made his way through the crush of young execs, I thought how Nathalie and I came to our “pragmatic” arrangement back then. Having lovers, my wife argued, was simply a way of embracing the world.

“Do you think that if I sleep with someone else,” she asked, “I will love you any less?”

“No,” I answered dutifully. “Unless you get swept away. Unless some Parisian jerk steals your soul.”

“And what do you suppose? Is that more likely to happen the way we live now, free and sensibly, or if we imprison each other in some petit-bourgeois cottage? I know you, Jack. You didn’t marry me to gain a housewife.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. The fact is you wanted me for this—you wanted the cigarettes and the sarcasm, the traveling assignments for
Libération
, the Saint Germain wardrobe, even our little domestic melodramas. All this dark intellectual glamour,
mon amour
, and enough space for a few younger girls on the side. You imagine it’s quite sophisticated, don’t you?” She blew a slow stream of smoke. “It’s a very American view.”

Nathalie knew me, knew her stuff—but Hogan didn’t seem very impressed, then or now. He had thrown it all in my face once, urging me to toss her smarmy
copains
out of my life and hers.

“Just stand up, Jack,” he said. “Kick the goddamn Frogs down the stairs. It’s what she wants, too.”

I didn’t believe him at the time. All I could say was something insipid. “I can’t force her.”

“The problem isn’t Nathalie, Jack. It’s you.”

The night had been long; I had no fight left in me. “It’s not a creed, Hogan. I’m just telling you what I see around me.”

“What do you see? What do your smart, lovely friends show you?”

“The way we all are.”

“And how’s that?”

“Hopeless.”

Hogan reared back slightly, like a boxer preparing to counterpunch.

“Crap,” he said. “Don’t be such a weak-ass son of a bitch. Do something, Jack. Being a cuckold is a sin. A sin of omission—the laziest goddamn kind.”

“I’ve tried,” I said. “Look, Hogan, do you understand what it is to love a woman even though you know she’s betraying you? To watch her eyes as she lies to you—earnestly, suavely—while you still feel the merciless attraction overriding everything, even the loathing and the shame? Even the knowing?”

I felt like an idiot as soon as the words left my mouth.

“Yeah, I do,” Hogan said. “It’s one of the few things we still have in common, you and me.”

We let it go at that. Of course he knew.

Looking around the bar as I waited, I began to wonder if I was drunk. Probably so, given what I’d already put away at MoMA. My only drinking problem, as I told Hogan once, is that booze makes my mind race furiously until it blacks out altogether. It’s an interesting contest. So now I was off, thinking about big issues in a phony-swank midtown watering hole. Let’s see, fidelity is impossible to maintain, I decided, and infidelity is impossible to live with. So there we are—mentally crucified. Really, it’s enough to drive a guy nuts—or to drink anyhow. Only the more you hit the bottle, the more your own randy desire seems like God’s dirty trick. You want continuity, depth, and connectedness; yeah, sure, but you also want freedom, a game of wild chance. You can’t cure your disease, you can only manage its symptoms—sometimes well, sometimes badly.

Maybe that’s why Hogan turned to the church, why he knelt before a crucifix, that gory emblem of our psychic divide. You’d think a Marine, a private eye, would have a more realistic solution. Instead, he worshiped Christ on the cross, nailed to the shaft and the T-beam, torn between two conflicting commandments: to raise your eyes heavenward and love a pure, demanding God with all your heart and strength; and yet to open your arms and embrace your earthly neighbors as your muddled, sinful self. Show me a man who isn’t torn by that inner struggle and I’ll show you a corpse.

I needed another drink. As I leaned on the counter to flag the bartender, a woman sitting on the stool to my left half turned to face me. Her expression was a little brittle but her neckline plunged impressively, and she was reasonably attractive under an enormous mass of waved and curling brown hair. Attractive enough for that place and hour anyhow.

We nodded.

“That’s a beautiful suit,” she said.

“Thanks.” I looked at her gold bracelet and black Bulgari bag. “Beauty can be very expensive.”

She smiled, baring teeth so white they were like the flash from a lighthouse. By then, I was feeling pretty at sea.

“You look like you can afford it,” she said.

“Do I?” I smiled back. “I should.”

Suddenly a guy was between us, a young Wall Street type with his jacket off and his tie thrown back over one shoulder.

“What can I get for you, babe?” he asked.

“Another gimlet, I suppose.”

I couldn’t be sure whether the stock-jockey, the hulking fashion disaster, was a real date or just a john. Anyway, it wasn’t worth finding out. Every year it gets harder to distinguish between high-end hookers and the girls who just want to have fun—you know, some obscenely expensive Manhattan dinners, a few choice pieces of jewelry, and maybe a first-class trip to Europe, if they play their cards right. It’s all fine with me. Either way, you get what you pay for. Generally, the hookers are cheaper and less troublesome.

Hogan came back to the bar and rattled the ice in his glass. He looked over at me.

“This Oliver case sucks,” he said. “How are you making out with Paul Morse?”

“Just great. We’re bonding over high-class porn.”

“And that’s going to tell us if the prick is our killer?”

“It could. In the art world, everything is connected.”

Hogan drank slowly, waiting. I urged him to think how Amanda Oliver might have reacted if she found out her lover-boy was a totally sick bastard, a smooth schoolyard pervert. Then I told him that I had a method, an unorthodox one, for getting closer to Paul.

Hogan heard me out. “You’re convinced that’s the best way to get to him?”

“It’s what I can do.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That you have an instinct for it.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Meanwhile, I’m going to check the apartment buildings and shops around the Oliver place. One of them might have a security camera on the street. Maybe I’ll get to see the freak parade going in and out of Mandy’s door, with our killer in the mix.”

“Those are my friends and clients you’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” Hogan said. “Lucky for them, not every sin is a crime.”

“But now I have to delve into one that is—with Missy as my lure.”

Hogan put down his empty glass. “Just don’t tell me more than I need to know. I’ve got a P.I. license to protect.”

“OK, I’ll try to keep you at a distance.”

“You better. As far as I’m concerned, Jack, this Balthus Club stuff doesn’t even exist.”

For the plan to work, I needed Melissa on my side—even if the girl didn’t yet realize that, in the tangled adult world of Amanda, Philip, Claudia, Paul, and Angela, there was any good side to be on.

That Saturday, I left the gallery early in order to take her, as promised, to the Payard salon on the Upper East Side near the Bradford School. My young neighbor loved the luxurious pastry there, and the vanishing old-fashioned ritual of formal tea in the late afternoon.

When I stopped downstairs to pick her up, Melissa seemed somehow a very different creature. A music video was thumping from the TV in her room, and, although she was dressed primly in a black knee-length skirt and matching sweater, the rhythm of the pop song passed visibly through her as she dashed about grabbing her leather jacket and just the right purse.

“Not the soundtrack I imagined for Missy,” I said to her mother. Angela paused on her way out to the post office.

“You can’t imagine, Jack. It starts with them so young.”

“What does?”

“The vamp business. You think you can ease them into womanhood, teach them to be feminine in subtle ways—and instead they simply race ahead and wave back at you. They leave you feeling like a stodgy old maid.”

In fact, I had already noticed a small change in Melissa. Three months of summer languor can do things to girls at that age. Her clothes hung differently now, and she had learned how to cross her legs like a woman.

“She’s just at the stage where she realizes that she can get grown men’s attention,” Angela said. “Beyond the goony looks from boys.”

“Really? Do you think she knows what she’s doing?”

“You should see her with her friends. If I didn’t keep tabs on them, they’d be sashaying all over SoHo like bare-midriff streetwalkers.”

“They’re just kids goofing around.”

“Oh, Jack, you are such a male fool. It’s one of your more endearing traits.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “She’s going through a phase, that’s all.”

“Yes, a long one. I think I’m still in it myself.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

Angela grasped my bad arm and led me back through the loft to Melissa’s room. Through the open door, we could see the bed piled messily with clothes and, on a dresser top, the portable TV flashing and blaring. The screen displayed some young female singer, a hootchy-kootchy dancer with one name, shimmying in a different sparse outfit, in a new setting, every three and a half seconds.

“Before you turn it off, Melissa,” Angela called, “show Uncle Jack what you learned.”

“Oh, Mom, don’t be so
English
, OK?”

“Very well, call me what you will. Just show him.”

Sighing, the girl dropped her purse and let her hands hang at her sides. “You mean like this?”

She stood straight and stiff, but at the same moment a small movement began in her torso. First one hand then the other touched her pelvis, its sharp contours rocking back and forth as her weight shifted. Melissa’s legs seemed to lengthen as one foot slid almost imperceptibly forward. Her hip movement became more pronounced and she began turning lithely, her hands floating upward and slowly twisting, free of any contact. A smile came to her face, and at the same time something serious entered her eyes. She rotated, swaying before us, lost in the music.

“That’s quite enough,” her mother said, flicking off the TV. “Now go try to be a lady with your Uncle Jack.”

The spell instantly broken, Melissa picked up her handbag with a shrug. “Prude,” she said.

We went out into radiant sunshine, making our way to the corner through a thick Saturday crowd of bridge-and-tunnel shoppers.

Once we were in a cab, Melissa told me, “I didn’t even get to show you the coolest part.”

“What’s that?”

She ran her tongue unhurriedly over her lips and sucked in her cheeks until her mouth was a damp pout.

“Irresistible,” she said, in the flattened, husky voice of a model. “It’s more than a fragrance.”

I forced myself to laugh. “That’s pretty good. But watch this.”

I arched one eyebrow dramatically while keeping the other unmoved—a sinister vampire expression I had taught myself as a kid.

“Yuck, stop, you big creep,” Missy said.

Later, seated in the wood-paneled environs of Payard, my companion was much more ladylike. She sat very straight in her chair, addressing the waiter with great clarity, showing off her best prep-school manners. She had taken off the jacket, and her wide shoulders were squared. We had tea and finger sandwiches, and afterwards one large, lustrous pastry each. As the meal neared its end, Melissa grew increasingly serious.

“I thought about you a lot while you were away this summer, Uncle Jack,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll just bet. For whole minutes.”

“No, really, I did. Every day. I wrote things down in my diary.”

“What things?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The waiter came to clear our plates and pour the last of the tea.

“I gave you a different name, though. That way Mom won’t guess, if she snoops and tries to find out my secrets.”

“Do you hide a lot of things from your mother?”

“Only the important stuff. There’s not too much now, but pretty soon there will be.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s just how it is. Don’t you ever read books? When people get older, they always have more and more secrets.”

“Be careful,” I said. “Storybooks are written for all kinds of bad reasons.”

“Oh, such as?”

“Usually because some guy wants to make excuses for himself, or to pretend things worked out better than they actually did.”

“And people never do that in real life?”

“Actually, they do it all the time. It’s sort of the main thing they do.” I forced a laugh. “You see how messed up this all gets?”

“Well, I’m not confused.”

“You must be reading second-rate stories then.”

Melissa made a face. “No,” she said. “I’m just really smart.”

“Is that so? Tell me something smart you thought of recently.”

“All summer I thought about us. I decided you should be my first grown-up boyfriend.”

I put down my teacup with a faint clank. “That’s not smart, Missy. It’s not even funny.”

“Is too. It can be real if you let it be, you big dope. But first you have to pretend really hard. That’s the first step to anything.”

“You don’t even understand what it means.”

“Yes, I do. I’m very mature for my age.”

“You’re very mature for any age. That doesn’t make it right.”

“And you always know what’s right?”

“No, hardly ever. That’s why I have to go slow and think all the time. Haven’t you noticed?”

Melissa gave an exaggerated sigh. “Men are so retarded. So narrow.” She looked at me the way a child looks at a recalcitrant doll. “You think you know so much, but you don’t.”

I pretended to be shot in the chest. “Ow, you got me, kid. At least we agree on that one.”

Fortunately, I had to get on to a dinner party later that night. We took a taxi downtown, both of us fallen quiet. When we got to SoHo, I escorted Melissa as far as our building entrance. She pushed the fourth-floor button; Angela answered and buzzed the door open. As Missy slipped into the lobby, she looked back at me quickly.