more than eight months ago. The camera flash bouncing off all that blinding white—the walls, the marble floor, the sheer curtains in the gallery’s Palladian windows—had given him a throbbing headache. But when had Cranston asked for the appraisals? And where had he put the file? Nothing had been transferred to his computer yet; a quick glance at his directory showed an empty folder marked ‘Eaton.’ He pushed his chair back and flipped through the folders on top of his desk, on top of the filing cabinet, on top of the bookcase. Nothing. If he couldn’t locate it, he was done for. Cranston wouldn’t be inclined to give him another chance.
‘Stephen?’
‘Yes, Sylvia?’
‘The Eaton estate?’
‘Right. Just finishing up with it.’
‘Good. He wants to see you at four this afternoon to go over the paperwork.’
‘Uh, that would be difficult. I already have an appointment at four.’
‘I checked your online schedule. It doesn’t show you being out today.’
The woman was practically purring. He pictured himself tearing the phone out of the wall and hammering her with it until pieces of her chipped off, then reconstructing her à la Picasso: an ear attached to her hip, an arm shooting out from her head, lips springing from her big toe.
‘In fact, Stephen, I don’t show you with anything on the books for the next several days.’
‘My fault, I suppose,’ he said, sifting through a stack of conservation reports and greasy sandwich wrappers on the corner of his desk. ‘I haven’t synced my calendar. I was planning to do it this morning. So today would be difficult.’
‘He really needs this done.’
Stephen tried to visualize Cranston standing in front of her making this plea. I really need this done, Sylvia. Unlikely. Maybe she’d taken it upon herself to put this on Cranston’s agenda in an attempt to undermine his credibility. But Stephen detected a distracted quality in her tone that indicated her attention was flagging. Perhaps another unfortunate had crept into her field of vision. Please, please, please, shit, please. He bit down hard on his lower lip, drawing blood.
‘If there’s no way you can do it today, I suppose I could fit you in tomorrow morning.’
‘Let me just check.’ He flipped through the empty pages of his agenda. ‘Yes, that would be better for me, Sylvia. I’ll plan to see him then. Good-bye.’ He hung up the phone, waiting for a second before taking the receiver off the hook and stuffing it in his top desk drawer. He penciled a brief note on the legal pad on his desk: ‘Buy potted plant.’
Four years paying for a mistake that had taken him less than a minute to make. Stephen had obliterated his oh-so-promising career single-handedly. Perhaps not single-handedly. He hadn’t known Chloe was married; at least, he hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on the possibility. He certainly hadn’t known who she was married to. She hadn’t acted like a married person, though looking back he wasn’t sure how he’d thought a married person would act, aside from the obvious assumption of fidelity. Rather an unhappy omission, he’d told her on his cell phone, standing outside of his ex-office building waiting for a cab, his possessions crammed into a cardboard box.
He’d been in her husband’s office—her husband being the recently appointed head of acquisitions for Foyle’s New York, as well as his new boss—flipping through a portfolio containing photos of the material slated for the coming week’s auction, when he’d looked up from an image of a pair of Sèvres blue-ground vases, circa 1770, to see Chloe’s face regarding him sternly from a framed photo on the credenza.
That’s Chloe, he’d said.
You know her? the man had asked.
She’s my girlfriend, he’d responded automatically, unable to contain the satisfied smile that followed. At the man’s astonished stare, he’d ignored the nagging buzz in the back of his brain and fumbled on, unknowingly digging the trench deeper. He had assumed it was not the image but the frame that was the treasure—a Romantic Revival, circa 1850; brilliant gold leaf over gray bole; an oval of flowers and leaves with a deep scoop and a concave outside edge; in immaculate condition aside from one hairline crack in the scoop. A piece he might covet if not for the fact he already had what lay inside the frame. So he’d opened his mouth and sealed his fate.
Seeing the picture of Chloe had made him understand both the necessity of the superlative and the fateful pride associated with acquiring something of beauty. He could feel the soft swell of her cheek under his thumb, brush a finger over the freckles dotting her nose. He could smell the exotic scent she wore, frangipani, which made him slightly queasy, like being at sea. In Australia, they call it ‘Dead Man’s Finger,’ she’d told him once, before pressing her body against him under the starched hotel sheet that skimmed their shoulders. He’d shivered at the sweep of her dark hair across his chest. How had he defined happiness before her?
He’d watched other men’s eyes follow her when they made their way to a table in a restaurant, had seen the subtle turn of a head on the street, followed by the gaze sizing him up. They were wondering how he’d gotten so lucky. He’d wondered himself. When he’d asked her why she was with him, she’d simply said, ‘You’re smarter.’ If he’d thought to ask, ‘Than whom?’ he’d just as quickly squelched the idea, not caring to know whether the ‘whom’ in question was generic or specific. It was enough to be with her. He became more attractive by proxy.
But when they were apart, the feeling dogging him was a murky stew of incredulity, suspicion, and the numbing sensation of being struck dumb by his good fortune. So struck, or so dumb, his first thought hadn’t been to wonder why Chloe’s picture was on his boss’s credenza.
‘How the hell could you?’ she’d demanded, in a tone that alarmed him.
‘How could I? Can I just remind you, of the two of us, you’re the one who’s evidently married here? The man asked me a question. Was I supposed to lie? Besides, you’re missing the more important point. I’ve been let go. Fired. Three years building my reputation at one of the best auction houses in the country, gone.’
‘No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. Of course you were supposed to lie. Anyone else would have known that. How could you tell him I was your girlfriend?’
‘Well, clearly I didn’t realize who I was saying it to, for one thing. But now he knows. Is that a terrible thing? I hate to point out the obvious, but you are, after all, my girlfriend.’
The silence before she’d answered provided him horrible clarity. ‘Don’t you understand what you’ve done, Stephen? How could you be so unbelievably thick?’
At least that was explainable. His entire life he’d been blessed with an exceptional gift for misunderstanding, especially when women were involved—their desires, their needs, their way of thinking. Even his mother, on more than one occasion, had given him a studied look, as if he wasn’t her child but an alien species deposited in her house. ‘Why in the world would you think I meant that?’ she’d ask. Those were the times he wished for a sister instead of being an only child, longing for someone who might help him to decode the inexplicable language of women.
He dismissed the whispers that trailed after him, hissed at a decibel just loud enough to be heard—Used him. Knew someone like that would humiliate her husband. She was getting even—and focused on those memories that couldn’t be warped, in hindsight, into calculated, duplicitous acts: Chloe weaving her fingers through his as they walked in Central Park at midnight; Chloe biting down on her lower lip as she straightened his tie, a look that ruined him every time; Chloe stuffing his pockets with throat lozenges before they went into the movie theater, sequestering themselves in the back row, where his hand could wander across the top of her thigh, unseen.
The sacking (as he had come to refer to it) and subsequent breakup were followed by an equally humiliating nine-month