... and...
... and then agreed with her when she suggested that the word “misses” sounded like what someone would expect at a school for girls somewhere in the Berkshires, but not here in the heart of New York, in a place full of sophisticated, smart...
“Gee, thanks,” Luretta said, and flashed her wonderful smile.
Alone in the office, the two tossed around several new approaches, all of them rotten. The wind outside rattled the windowpanes, whistled and howled in a hairline crack where the window didn’t quite meet the frame. It was Luretta who finally came up with the notion of telling what impact the exhibit had had on the girls; the story, after all, wasn’t announcing future outing, it was reporting on a past excursion.
“Well, what impact did it have?” Sarah asked.
“I personally found it awesome,” Luretta said. “And I don’t mean awesome as in Valley Girl, I mean goddamn awesome!”
“In what way?”
Get them to think, get them to explore, get them to...
“The way all his life he kept finding new ways of doing things,” Luretta said. “Even when he was an old man, he was still saying, ‘Look at me! I’m alive!’”
“Can you put that in a headline?”
“Wouldn’t work,” Luretta said.
They both fell silent.
Out of the blue, Luretta said, “Matisse Lives!”
“Good,” Sarah said, and nodded.
“’Cause he does, you know,” Luretta said. “He still lives, that’s the thing of it.”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
They worked silently for several minutes, each bent over their separate pasteups, the clock on the wall ticking, the wind rushing the window.
“I wish some of the kids where I live could see that show,” Luretta said. “Make them want to live, too.”
“Why can’t they?”
“They’re too busy dyin’,” Luretta said.
Sarah looked up.
Their eyes met.
“Dope, I mean,” Luretta said. “It’s all over the streets up there. They make it so easy.”
Sarah kept looking at her.
“No, not me,” Luretta said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t need that shit, excuse me.”
“I’m glad,” Sarah said.
“But it’s tempting, I’ll tell you that, Mrs. Welles. It bein’ there all the time. Easy to get, cheap as dirt. Makes you want to try it, you know? Everybody else up there is doin’ it, you say to yourself, ‘Why not me? Why not go fly with all the others?’”
Sarah said nothing.
“But you know, you go see this work the man did, and you realize he didn’t need crack to get high, did he? Matisse. He found all the high he needed right inside himself.”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“Right in here,” Luretta said, and tapped her clenched fist over her heart. “Right in here.”
The bell sounded, shattering the silence.
“We got a lot done here, didn’t we?” Luretta said.
“Yes, we did. Will you be back this afternoon?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Look for you then.”
“Matisse Lives!” Luretta said, grinning, and threw a black power salute as she went out the door.
The clock on the wall read twelve ten.
Time for lunch.
Sarah didn’t feel like the teachers’ lunchroom today.
Despite the weather, she thought she might walk over to the coffee shop on Lex and Fif—
She thought suddenly of Andrew Farrell.
Of not wanting to take him to the coffee shop so close to the school.
Went instead...
The smell of strong coffee...
The taste of rich chocolate on her lips.
Andrew leaning over the table to kiss her.
Quickly, she put the thought of him out of her mind.
His uncle looked worse each time Andrew saw him.
He would always wonder if Uncle Rudy had turned down the job because he truly hadn’t wanted it, or because he knew he had such a short time to live. He was next in line, everyone knew that. But cancer was in line ahead of him.
Best-kept secret in the family.
Never act from a position of weakness, his father had told him. Never let anyone know weakness is the reason for any decision. Always move through strength. Or make it seem that way.
Succeeding his father merely because his uncle was sick would have been taken by others as assuming control by default. Andrew did not have his uncle’s seniority, was not a made man like his uncle, in fact had none of his uncle’s experience or training. But when Rudy Faviola, moving through strength, said he did not want the job and named his nephew as rightful successor, the announcement had all the force of an irrefutable royal command.
Whether Andrew would in the long run be accepted was another matter. His own father had taken control of the Tortocello family by eliminating its leader. Andrew was well aware of this. He had read all the newspaper accounts of Ralph Tortocello’s murder, and he knew the same thing could easily happen to him if someone disputed his assumption of power. He was hoping the Sino-Colombian deal would go a long way toward dispelling any such doubts. He and his uncle were here to discuss that today.
“Willie’s been in touch with Moreno again,” Rudy said. “I got to tell you, Andrew, he’s shitting his pants down there, Willie. Moreno can do him in a minute and he knows it. He likes the Caribbean, he doesn’t want to come back up north to live. But if this thing we’re attempting doesn’t work, then we have to yank him out of there or he’s shark meat.”
“I realize that.”
“Moreno now has the message that he won’t be able to do business anywhere in the U.S., he don’t play ball with us. New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, he’s fucked wherever he tries to sell the shit ’cause our people will be knockin’ off dealers like they’re rats in a sewer. The message’ll be, you do business with Moreno, you have to answer to us. He don’t particularly like being threatened, Andrew, but fuck him, we made him a good offer, he’s playin’ hardball. He knows you’re runnin’ this now, you weren’t just an office boy went down there to do some fishin’. He also knows you’re your father’s son, and there’s no fuckin’ with Anthony Faviola wherever he may be, Kansas or wherever the fuck. He knows all this. What he’s holdin’ out for I don’t know.”
“What do you think it might be?”
“A bigger slice. He knows we’ve got him by the balls, he can’t deal with people who are scared we’ll be comin’ after them, it’s simple as that. He can shove his cocaine up his ass, he can’t sell it to the people who put it on the streets. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s letting us into his action in return for a third of what may turn out to be a tremendous market. But it ain’t a true market yet, Andrew, it’s what your father would call a perceived market, a prospective market. It’s nothing certain yet, you follow?”