Mel drew his feet inside the covers and moved his knees up, toward his chest. His eyes darted left and right, behind closed eyelids. Like little fish, Jody thought. She was propped up on one elbow, looking at Mel. The aspirin she had taken was slowly dulling the thud in her head that was the result of too many drinks too late at night. Now Mel’s REMs had subsided, though she still looked sleepily at him in the gradually brightening bedroom. A line from “The Waste Land” came to her: Those are pearls that were his eyes. She had read Keats and Auden to Will, but did not think “The Waste Land” would hold his attention, even though a few of the lines had end rhyme. What was the line before that line? The world could indeed be a perilous place, she thought as she was falling asleep, if you could not remember those things that came first. She remembered that someone had drowned but not the line itself.
EIGHT
Lord Haveabud raised his glass — topheavy, so that it was easier to curve his fingers under the bowl and forget about the stem — and swooshed the blue margarita through the air like a courtesan about to make an elaborate curtsy. The toast was all eye contact and no words. The deal had been decided on (though Jody, who kept forgetting his last name, didn’t know it was a deal), the deed as good as done (though Haveabud wanted to see the entire shoot, not just the enlargements Mel had shown him at Palio), and now all that remained was for Haveabud to buy a tie — lately, he didn’t like what Alexander Julian was up to — to wear to the opening. Photographic galleries, like Witkin, were showing paintings, so why shouldn’t he show photographs? Haveabud believed that new ties brought him luck. Also, whenever he flew, he carried with him in some pocket a small geode he had bought in a previous life, when he and his second wife visited a gift shop near the Grand Canyon. Being an agnostic, he recited silently to himself, in times of stress, a litany of introductory adverbs, in alphabetical order: after, again, also, as, before, besides … He fancied himself something of a character, wearing a Swatch instead of a Rolex, but spending more on Missoni socks than most people spent on an entire outfit. Haveabud bought his ties well in advance of openings and put them, still in their boxes, in his filing cabinet under the artists’ names.
When he first came to New York he had been married to his high school sweetheart and had worked as a clerk in a store specializing in art books. He became so trusted that he was left behind in the store to take inventory and to create his impressive displays after the others had left. When he was done, he threw two switches to activate the alarm, then got out the front door and locked it, all within fifteen seconds. Those few seconds were never a problem until he started drinking champagne after hours. The champagne came to him as gifts from women — daytime browsers who were searching for more than oversized books on Monet’s water lilies. It was classier to meet someone in a store such as the one Haveabud worked in than to go to a high-class bar. And if the women didn’t meet anyone else, or if they just took a fancy to the earnest young man with a body he imagined to be better than it was (now he worked out four days a week, swam on Thursdays, and jogged on weekend evenings around the reservoir in Central Park), they were likely to ask him over for a drink after work — the husbands were always away on business — or to try to please him with enough gifts of bubbly so that he’d ask them out for a drink. Much to Haveabud’s surprise, you could often have a beautiful woman lusting after you just because you had special-ordered a book on Christ’s sexuality or a biography of Courbet. In fact, Courbet was Haveabud’s favorite painter, but he would not reveal this to anyone. He had his secrets: his geode, his visions of Courbet’s landscapes, his package of French ticklers in the file under S. He might never have been in the position he was in today if he hadn’t been fired from the bookstore. In the good old days, he and a few of the other employees (now they hired clerks who looked like people in a Grant Wood painting. Where did they find them?) had opened bottles of champagne and played baseball in the buff on the second floor of the store, using the handle from the toilet plunger to bat rolled-up wads of duplicate inventory slips. This had never been discovered, but a jealous husband had had a tête-à-tête with the owner, and Haveabud was fired. “You don’t want to hear whether I deny having an affair with her?” he had asked the owner. “No,” the owner said. “I knew that anybody as knowledgeable and personable as you was too good to be true.”
There had been months of anguish after he was fired, but finally he had gotten a part-time job proofreading, and the excellent job he did with one manuscript resulted in an admiring call from an editor at the publishing house who, when she heard Haveabud’s plight, called a friend who owed her a favor, and zip, Haveabud began working part-time in a gallery on then-still-unfashionable West Broadway. The rest was history. History was personified in the form of Luther, a.k.a. Jake Markson from Brooklyn, an overweight overachiever from the Queens College art program whose talent Haveabud knew he could market. He put Luther on a protein diet and called twice a day to make sure he was drinking the daily gallon of Poland Spring. By the time showtime rolled around Jake Markson didn’t exist anymore and Luther, twenty pounds lighter, pores cleansed at Dr. Mario Badescu’s for extra radiance, stood in the gallery in his jeans and white shirt — a shirt that had cost Haveabud two hundred dollars — to start a new tremor in the downtown art scene. Around him were hung photorealistic paintings of enlarged cash-register receipts, including the smudged thumbprint of the clerk who ripped one out of the register, or the spot where it had been slightly torn, the numbers in black ink or purple, some so pale they could hardly be read. The Tx./Tl. show was the rage of the moment, pronounced upon even by Andy Warhol, who said, “Money is very important, but usually artists don’t keep good receipts.” After the opening the two-hundred-dollar shirt was handed from Luther to Haveabud the way a bullfighter folds his cape and gives it to a worthy lady. Haveabud’s cut of the sold-out show was fifty percent, and he and Luther did a pas de deux to Dean Witter Reynolds to find out about shelters. As anyone might imagine, fame went to Luther’s head. In trendy restaurants he offered to autograph the bill for the dinner he and his hangers-on had eaten, in lieu of payment. Though many places would not go for this, Luther found that star-crazed waitresses themselves would often foot the bill for the dinner in exchange for a fuck. One of those waitresses nabbed him, of course: a nobody from Lyme, Connecticut, who had come to New York to study acting — a young woman who dyed a green streak in her hair long before it was fashionable and went by the name Thalo. She became Luther’s Yoko, and eventually he was lured from Haveabud into instant obscurity, after doing a recording with Thalo that consisted of the sound of whips cracking, punctuating a two-way whispered argument, as a boys’ choir soared to high soprano in the background. The bitch got pregnant instantly and had twins. When she and Luther divorced, Luther attempted to work his way back into Haveabud’s affections, and when he could not — Haveabud believing that those who turned their back on people who had helped them did not deserve a second chance — ended up working in his brother’s restaurant, though later Haveabud heard that he had gone to Paris, to the Left Bank, where he made take-out ceviche that was praised in Le Figaro and French Vogue. Quel dommage, Haveabud said, with malice instead of sincerity.