“Oh, this is unbelievable,” John said.
“‘Tell your friend in Art to meet me Saturday at 8.30 a.m. outside his building. I have his address from personnel. If he can spare a few hours, I would greatly value his expertise, and a fresh pair of eyes. Osbourne.’”
“This Saturday?”
“I guess. Why, did you have something planned?”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Oh, please, please, don’t be mad at me,” Vanessa said, and John, mad as he was, was nevertheless abashed to see that she was actually in tears. The theatricality of her nervousness had been more for her own prompting than for his; real remorse was hard for her. “I had no way of knowing this could happen. I was just trying to talk you up. And besides,” she said, trying to smile, “is it necessarily a bad thing? I mean, if you make a good impression on him, it could really help you out, don’t you think?”
This was true, but John felt it would be immodest to let on that this had occurred to him; besides, the reverse proposition was equally obvious. “Osbourne is, what, forty? And he’s already probably one of the ten or twenty biggest collectors in the city. In other words, he’s a lot less likely to be bowled over by my expertise, such as it is, than you are, bless your heart. And if he decides I’m a moron, well, that’s not going to give my career prospects here a big goose either. Oh, Vanessa, what have you done to me?”
She wiped at her eyes and nodded. “It’s all so fucking whimsical!” she said.
Later, John called Rebecca at work, but she had a client in her office and had no time for a long conversation; so they arranged to meet for dinner at Mahmoun’s, the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from their apartment in Brooklyn. They ate there often — neither John nor Rebecca liked to cook. Mahmoun’s delivered as well, but lately the two of them felt that maybe they had been ordering out too much: the endless garbage, the white cartons with their metal handles which lingered in the refrigerator for days, could begin to seem like a small joke at the expense of their new home, as if they weren’t really committed to the idea of it, as if they hadn’t made up their minds to stay. Dining out was at least nominally social. The owner nodded contentedly at them when he emerged briefly from the kitchen and saw them in their usual booth by the window, in their wrinkled business clothes.
“This is scandalous,” Rebecca said, though she seemed more annoyed than actually worried. “I can’t believe Vanessa would do this to you. Put you on the line like that, just to look good. What’s the matter with her?”
“She apologized,” John said. He wanted Rebecca to focus on Saturday, but she seemed determined to extract from him a condemnation of Vanessa, whom she had met at a few parties and did not like or trust.
“So she crosses her legs and apologizes and that makes it okay. Not to mention that she’s doing one of the partners. A real traditionalist.”
“Well, whatever,” John said impatiently, “it’s done. I mean, I can’t get out of it. I can’t refuse to go.”
Rebecca shook her head. “Of course not,” she said.
He was disappointed, and somewhat alarmed, by the way she kept agreeing with him so completely when what he really wanted was for her to tell him he was making too big a deal of it. “Vanessa got my major wrong, too, which is a problem. Osbourne probably thinks I’m still painting, still going to galleries. Wait’ll I tell him I wrote my thesis on Goya, and even that was eight years ago.”
Rebecca, her mouth full, put her hand to her head as she remembered something, and patted the leather tote bag on the seat beside her. She swallowed. “At the end of the day I did a Lexis search on Mal Osbourne,” she said. “There’s not as much as I would have thought. But there was one good article about him as a collector, talks about some of his recent acquisitions. Give you some idea of his taste. Where the hell is it?”
John smiled at her gratefully, even though she was no longer looking at him. Rebecca had an abrupt, distracted way of speaking, when he called her in her office, that sometimes left him wondering if she was paying attention to what he said. Even in the conservative, dark, A-line suits she wore to work she was dramatic-looking, with broad eyebrows, full features, a face that was somehow most naturally alluring when she frowned. Her fingers flipped a second time through a fat accordion file.
“Well, it’s in there somewhere,” she said, annoyed with herself. “I’ll find it when we get home.”
“No rush,” John said calmly. He knew how she obsessed if she thought something was lost. “I’ve got five days.”
They ordered two cups of the bitter Turkish coffee and watched each other in mannerly silence while their dishes were removed.
“So how much do you know about this guy?” Rebecca said.
“Not much more than anyone else. I met him when I was hired, just shook his hand really. I’m sure he wouldn’t recognize me. He doesn’t even come into the office anymore — just stays in touch by email, fax, messengers. Which I understand has pissed off the other partners considerably. Though I only hear that kind of stuff secondhand.”
“From Vanessa, you mean. Hey — do you think Osbourne’s the one she’s sleeping with?”
“Well, that would be good and weird. I’m pretty sure he’s not married. But it’s hard to imagine. Osbourne’s famous for hating parties; I heard a story that he RSVP’d no to Canning’s daughter’s wedding a couple of years ago. He did go to this thing at the Modern, but that must have been just because of the art connection — he’s mostly kind of a hermit from what I understand. I can’t see Vanessa going for that. She’s out six nights a week. I mean, this is a guy who people in the office have disagreements about what he even looks like.”
“He’s a young guy, though, isn’t he?”
“Relatively. I think he’s forty-two, forty-three, something like that. The youngest partner, certainly.” John shook his head. “He did some groundbreaking work, boy, when he was a writer. He was in on the Apple 1984 ad. He once got a client, a vodka importer, to use their whole promo budget to hire actors to go into trendy bars in New York, LA, Miami, and just order the stuff. Just order it. Performance advertising, I think he called it.”
“Does he really know anything about art, or is it just one of those rich-guy affectations, so we won’t think he’s like the other rich guys?”
John cocked his head. “Beats me. A better question is whether I know anything about art, and if he decides not, do I start looking for another job.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about you,” she said flatly. “You’re the real thing. I just don’t know if you have it in you to be as fake as he is, if it comes to that.” She fumbled in her bag for her purse. “Can we get out of here? I have to have a cigarette.”
At home, a second-floor walk-up, Rebecca made straight for the bathroom without even turning on the light. John stood in the doorway for a few moments, looking at the silhouettes of the scarce, new furniture, the cocked squares of ambient city-light on the white wall, the patient, minuscule blink of the answering machine.
On Saturday morning, John, too nervous to eat, came down the steps of the brownstone a few minutes early to wait for Osbourne, but Osbourne was already there. At least that was the conclusion to be drawn when John saw the black livery car idling directly in front of his stoop, an opera light just visible through the tinted rear window, alien to the weekend quiet of the narrow side street. It wasn’t an ostentatiously big car by any means. Still, uncertain about approaching it, John had halted instinctively on the brownstone’s bottom step; the driver’s door opened and a pale-complected man in his sixties in a shirt and tie walked briskly around the grille of the car, curtly nodded, and opened up the rear door for him.