Nightwork

'Not necessarily,' I said.

'You can be ungracious, can't you?' he said. 'Nevertheless - permit me to go on. You know me. You've tagged along with me through enough museums and galleries to have some notion of what I think about art. And artists. And not just what they mean in terms of money. I like artists. I would have liked to be one myself. But I couldn't. And the next best thing is to be mixed up with them, help them, gamble on my taste, maybe one day discover a great one.' Part of this may have been true, part pure rhetoric, for the purpose of persuading me. I doubted if Fabian could have distinguished which was which himself. 'Angelo Quinn is good enough,' he went on, 'but maybe one day some kid will walk in with a portfolio and I'll say, "Now I can give up everything else. This is it, this is what I've been waiting for".'

'Okay,' I said. I had known from the beginning I couldn't hold out against him. 'You've convinced me. As usual. I'll devote my life to the building of the Miles Fabian museum. Where do you want it—? How about down the hill from the Maeght Museum in St-Paul-de-Vence?'

'Wilder things have happened,' Fabian said soberly.

We had rented a bam on the outskirts of East Hampton, painted it, cleaned up the interior, and put up our sign - The South Fork Gallery. I had refused to put my name on it. I wasn't quite sure whether my refusal was influenced by modesty or fear of ridicule.

Now, Fabian would be waiting for me there at nine o'clock that morning, surrounded by thirty paintings by Angelo Quinn that we had spent four days hanging on the barn walls. The invitations to the opening of the show had gone out two weeks in advance and Fabian had promised free champagne to about a thousand of his best friends who were in the Hamptons for the summer and we had arranged for two policemen to handle the parking problem.

I was finishing a second cup of coffee when the telephone rang. I went into the hall and picked it up. 'Hello,' I said.

'Doug,' a man's voice said, 'this is Henry.'

Who?'

'Henry. Hank. Your brother, for God's sake.'

'Oh,' I said. I had called him when I got married but hadn't seen or spoken to him since. He had written to me twice to say that the business still looked promising, which I took to mean that it was about to go under. 'How are you?'

'Fine, fine,' he said hurriedly. 'Listen, Doug, I've got to see you. Today.'

'I've got an awfully busy day. Hank. Can't it...?'

'It can't wait. Look, I'm in New York. You can get here in two hours... .'-

I sighed. I hoped inaudibly. 'Not possible. Hank,' I said.

'Okay. I'll come out there.'

'I'm really jammed...'

'You're going to eat lunch, aren't you?' he said accusingly. 'Christ, you can spare an hour every two years for your brother, can't you?'

'Of course. Hank,' I said.

'I can be there by noon. Where do I meet you?'

I gave him the name of a restaurant in East Hampton and told him how to find it.

'Great,' he said.

I hung up. This time I sighed aloud.

I went upstairs and dressed.

Evelyn was just getting out of bed and I kissed her good morning. For once she wasn't cranky at that hour. 'You smell salty,' she whispered as I held her. 'Deliciously salty.' I slapped her fondly on her bottom and told her I was busy for lunch, but that I'd call her later and tell her how things were going.

As I drove toward East Hampton I decided that I could give Hank ten thousand dollars. At the most, ten thousand. I wished he had chosen another day to call.

* * *

Fabian was prowling around the gallery, giving little touches to the paintings to straighten them, although they all looked absolutely straight to me. The girl from Sarah Lawrence we had hired for the summer was taking champagne glasses out of cases and arranging them on the trestle table we had set up at one end of the barn. The champagne would be delivered in the afternoon by the caterer Fabian had hired. The two paintings from our living room were on the walls. Fabian had put little red sold tabs on them. 'To break the ice,' he had explained. 'Nobody likes to be the first one to buy. Tricks in every trade, my boy.'

'I don't know what I'd do without you,' I said. 'Neither do I,' he said. 'Listen, I've been thinking.' I recognized the tone. He was coming up with a new scheme.

'What is it now?' I asked.

'We're underpricing,' he said.

'I thought we'd been through all that.' We had spent days discussing prices. We had settled on fifteen hundred dollars for the larger oils and between eight hundred and a thousand for the smaller ones.

'I know we talked about it. But we set our sights too low. We were too modest. People will think we don't have any real confidence in the man.'

'What do you suggest?'

Two thousand for the big ones. Between twelve and fifteen hundred for the smaller ones. It'll show we're serious.'

'We'll wind up the proud owners of thirty Angelo Quinns,' I said.

'Trust my instinct, my boy,' Fabian said grandly. 'We're really going to put our friend on the map tonight.'

'It's a good thing he won't be here,' I said. 'He'd swoon.' 'It's a pity the young man wouldn't come. Give him a haircut and a shave and he'd be most personable. Useful for lady -art lovers.' Fabian had offered to pay Quinn's way across from Rome for the show, but Quinn had said he wasn't finished painting America yet. 'So,' Fabian said, 'two thousand it is, right?' 'If you say so,' I said. 'I'll hide in the John when anybody asks what anything costs.'

'Boldness is all, dear boy,' Fabian said. The breaks are coming our way. I was at a party last night and the art critic from The Times was there. He's down for the weekend. He promised to look in tonight.'

I felt my nerves grow taut. Quinn had only gotten two lines in an Italian paper for his show in Rome. They had been appreciative, but they had only been two lines. 'I hope you know what you're doing,' I said. 'Because I don't.'

'The man will be stunned,' Fabian said confidently. 'Just look around you. This old barn is positively glowing.'

I had looked so hard and so long at the paintings that I no longer had any reaction to them. If it had been possible, I would have driven out to the far edge of the island at Montauk Point and stayed there looking at the Atlantic Ocean until the whole thing was over.

There was a tinkle behind us and I heard the girl say, 'Oh, dear.' I turned and saw she had dropped a glass and broken it. I supposed they didn't have any courses on the handling of champagne glasses at Sarah Lawrence.

'Do not grieve, dearest,' Fabian said as he helped pick up the pieces. 'It's a lucky omen. In fact. I'm glad you did it. It reminds me we have a cold bottle of wine in the fridge.'

The girl smiled gratefully at Fabian. In the three weeks she had been working for us, he had won her over completely. When / spoke to her, she seemed to be trying to catch a weak message being tapped through a thick wall.

Fabian went back into the little room we had partitioned off as an office and brought out the bottle of champagne. He had insisted upon having the refrigerator put in as an essential piece of the gallery's furniture. 'It will pay its keep in the first week,' he had said as he told the workmen where to install it.

I watched him expertly tear off the foil and unwind the wire. 'Miles,' I said, 'I just had breakfast.'

'What better time, old man.' The cork popped out. "This is a great day. We must treat it with the utmost care.' His life, I had discovered, was replete with great days.

He poured the champagne for the girl and myself. He raised his glass. 'To Angelo Quinn,' he said. 'And to us.'

We drank. I thought of all the champagne I had drunk since I met Miles Fabian and shook my head.

'Oh, by the way, Douglas,' he said, as he filled his glass again, 'I nearly forgot. Another of our investments will be represented here tonight.'