NE AFTERNOON EIGHT YEARS later—after I’d left school and gone to work for Hobie—I’d just come out of Bank of New York and was walking up Madison upset and preoccupied when I heard my name.

I turned. The voice was familiar but I didn’t recognize the man: thirtyish, bigger than me, with morose gray eyes and colorless blond hair to his shoulders. His clothes—shaggy tweeds; rough shawl-collared sweater—were more suited for a muddy country lane than a city street; and he had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong, like someone who’d slept on some friends’ couches, done some drugs, wasted a good bit of his parents’ money.

“It’s Platt,” he said. “Platt Barbour.”

“Platt,” I said, after a stunned pause. “Long time. Good Lord.” It was difficult to recognize the lacrosse thug of old in this sobered and attentive-looking pedestrian. The insolence was gone, the old aggressive glint; now he looked worn out and there was an anxious, fatalistic quality in his eyes. He might have been an unhappy husband up from the suburbs, worried about an unfaithful wife, or maybe a disgraced teacher at some second-rate school.

“Well. So. Platt. How are you?” I said after an uncomfortable silence, stepping backwards. “Are you still in the city?”

“Yes,” he said, clasping the back of his neck with one hand, seeming highly ill at ease. “Just started a new job, actually.” He had not aged well; in the old days he’d been the blondest and best-looking of the brothers, but he’d grown thick in the jaw and around the middle and his face had coarsened away from its perverse old Jungvolk beauty. “I’m working for an academic publisher. Blake-Barrows. They’re based in Cambridge but they’ve got an office here?”

“Great,” I said, as if I’d heard of the publisher, though I hadn’t—nodding, fiddling with the change in my pocket, already planning my getaway. “Well, fantastic to see you. How’s Andy?”

His face seemed to grow very still. “You don’t know?”

“Well—” faltering—“I heard he was at MIT. I ran into Win Temple on the street a year or two back—he said Andy had a fellowship—astrophysics? I mean,” I said nervously, discomfited by Platt’s stare, “I really don’t keep in touch with the crowd from school very much.…”

Platt ran his hand down the back of his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure we knew how to get in touch with you. Things are still very confused. But I certainly thought you would have heard by now.”

“Heard what?”

“He’s dead.”

“Andy?” I said, and then, when he didn’t react: “No.”

Fleeting grimace—gone almost the moment I saw it. “Yes. It was pretty bad, I’m sorry to say. Andy and Daddy too.”

“What?”

“Five months ago. He and Daddy drowned.”

“No.” I looked at the sidewalk.

“The boat capsized. Off Northeast Harbor. We really weren’t out so far, maybe we shouldn’t have been out there at all, but Daddy—you know how he was—”

“Oh my God.” Standing there, in the uncertain spring afternoon with children just out of school running all around me, I felt pole-axed and confused as if at an un-funny practical joke. Though I had thought of Andy often over the years, and just missed seeing him once or twice, we’d never gotten back in touch after I returned to New York. I’d felt sure I’d run into him at some point—as I had Win, and James Villiers, and Martina Lichtblau, and a few other people from my school. But though I’d often considered picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had.

“Are you okay?” said Platt—massaging the back of his neck, looking as uneasy as I felt.

“Um—” I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

“Gosh,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to say.”

“Sorry to blurt it on the street like that,” said Platt, rubbing his jaw. “You look a bit green around the gills.”

Green around the gills: a phrase of Mr. Barbour’s. With a pang, I remembered Mr. Barbour searching through the drawers in Platt’s room, offering to build me a fire. Hell of a thing that’s happened, good Lord.

“Your dad, too?” I said, blinking as if someone had just shaken me awake from a sound sleep. “Is that what you just said?”

He looked around, with a lift of the chin that brought back for a moment the arrogant old Platt I remembered, then glanced at his watch.

“Come on, have you got a minute?” he said.

“Well—”

“Let’s get a drink,” he said, pounding a hand on my shoulder so heavily I flinched. “I know a quiet place on Third Avenue. What do you say?”

ii.

WE SAT IN THE nearly empty bar—a once-famous oak-panelled joint smelling of hamburger grease, Ivy League pennants on the walls, while Platt talked in a rambling, uneasy monotone so quietly I had to strain to follow.

“Daddy,” he said, looking down into his gin and lime: Mrs. Barbour’s drink. “We all shrank from talking about it—but. Chemical imbalance is how our grandmother spoke of it. Bipolar disorder. He had his first episode, or attack, or whatever you call it, at Harvard Law—1L, never made it to the second year. All these wild plans and enthusiasms… combative in class, talking out of turn, had set out writing some epic book-length poem about the whaling ship Essex which was just a bunch of nonsense and then his roommate, who was apparently more of a stabilizing influence than anyone knew, left for a semester abroad in Germany and—well. My grandfather had to take the train up to Boston to fetch him. He’d been arrested for starting a fire out in front of the statue of Samuel Eliot Morison on Commonwealth Avenue and he resisted arrest when the policeman tried to take him in.”

“I knew he’d had problems. I never knew it was like that.”

“Well.” Platt stared into his drink, and then knocked it back. “That was well before I came along. Things changed after he married Mommy and he’d been on his medicine for a while, although our grandmother never really trusted him after all that.”

“All what?”

“Oh, of course we got on with her quite well, the grandchildren,” he said hastily. “But you can’t imagine the trouble Daddy caused when he was younger… tore through worlds of money, terrible rows and rages, some awful problems with underage girls… he’d weep and apologize, and then it would happen all over again.… Gaga always blamed him for our grandfather’s heart attack, the two of them were quarreling at my grandfather’s office and boom. Once on the medicine, though, he was a lamb. Wonderful father—well—you know. Wonderful with us children.”

“He was lovely. When I knew him.”

“Yes.” Platt shrugged. “He could be. After he married Mommy, he was on an even keel for a while. Then—I don’t know what happened. He made some terribly unsound investments—that was the first sign. Embarrassing late-night phone calls to acquaintances, that sort of thing. Became romantically obsessed with a college girl interning in his office—girl whose family Mommy knew. It was terribly hard.”

For some reason, I was incredibly touched by hearing him call Mrs. Barbour ‘Mommy.’ “I never knew any of this,” I said.

Platt frowned: a hopeless, resigned expression that brought out sharply his resemblance to Andy. “We hardly knew it ourselves—we children,” he said bitterly, drawing his thumb across the tablecloth. “ ‘Daddy’s ill’—that’s all we were told. I was off at school, see, when they sent him to the hospital, they never let me talk to him on the phone, they said he was too sick and for weeks and weeks I thought he was dead and they didn’t want to tell me.”

“I remember all that. It was awful.”

“All what?”

“The, uh, nervous trouble.”

“Yeah, well—” I was startled by the snap of anger in his eyes—“and how was I supposed to know if it was ‘nervous trouble’ or terminal cancer or what the fuck? ‘Andy’s so sensitive… Andy’s better off in the city… we don’t think Andy would thrive with boarding…’ well, all I can say is Mommy and Daddy packed me off pretty much the second I could tie my shoes, stupid fucking equestrian school called Prince George’s, completely third-rate but oh, wow, such a character-building experience, such a great preparation for Groton, and they took really young kids, seven through thirteens. You should have seen the brochure, Virginia hunt country and all that, except it wasn’t all green hills and riding habits like the pictures. I got trampled in a stall and broke my shoulder and there I was in the infirmary with this view of the empty driveway and no car coming up it. Not one fucking person came to visit me, not even Gaga. Plus the doctor was a drunk and set the shoulder wrong, I still have problems with it. I hate horses to this motherfucking day.

“Any how—” self-conscious change of tone—“they’d yanked me out of that place and got me into Groton by the time things really came to a head with Daddy and he was sent away. Apparently there was an incident on the subway… conflicting stories there, Daddy said one thing and the cops said another but—” he lifted his eyebrows, with a sort of mannered, black-humored whimsy—“off went Daddy to the ding farm! Eight weeks. No belt, no shoelaces, no sharps. But they gave him shock treatments in there, and they really seemed to work because when he came out again he was an all-new person. Well—you remember. Father of the Year, practically.”

“So—” I thought of my ugly run-in with Mr. Barbour on the street, decided not to bring it up—“what happened?”

“Well, who knows. He started having problems again a few years ago and had to go back in.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Oh—” Platt exhaled noisily—“much the same, embarrassing phone calls, public outbursts, et cetera. Nothing was wrong with him, of course, he was perfectly fine, it all started when they were doing some renovations on the building, which he was against, constant hammers and saws and all these corporations destroying the city, nothing that wasn’t true to start with, and then it just sort of snowballed, to the point where he thought he was being followed and photographed and spied on all the time. Wrote some pretty crazy letters to people, including some clients at his firm… made a terrible nuisance of himself at the Yacht Club… quite a few of the members complained, even some very old friends of his, and who can blame them?

“Anyway, when Daddy got back from the hospital that second time—he was never quite the same. The swings were less extreme, but he couldn’t concentrate and he was very irritable all the time. About six months ago he switched doctors and took a leave of absence from work and went up to Maine—our uncle Harry has a place on a little island up there, no one was there except the caretaker, and Daddy said the sea air did him good. All of us took turns going up to be with him… Andy was in Boston then, at MIT, the last thing he wanted was to be saddled with Daddy but unfortunately since he was closer than us, he got stuck with it a bit.”

“He didn’t go back to the, er—” I didn’t want to say ding farm—“where he went before?”

“Well, how was anyone to make him? It’s not an easy matter to send someone away against their will, especially when they won’t admit anything is wrong with them which at that point he wouldn’t, and besides we were led to believe it was all a matter of medication, that he would be right as rain as soon as the new dose kicked in. The caretaker checked in with us, made sure he ate well and took his medicine, Daddy spoke on the phone to his shrink every day—I mean, the doctor said it was all right,” he said defensively. “Fine for Daddy to drive, to swim, to sail if he felt like it. Probably it wasn’t a terrific idea to go out quite so late in the day but the conditions weren’t so bad when we set out and of course you know Daddy. Dauntless seaman and all that. Heroics and derring-do.”

“Right.” I’d heard many, many stories of Mr. Barbour sailing off into “snappy waters” that turned out to be nor’easters, State of Emergency declared in three states and power knocked out along the Atlantic Coast, Andy seasick and vomiting as he bailed salt water out of the boat. Nights tilted sideways, run aground upon sandbars, in darkness and torrential rain. Mr. Barbour himself—laughing uproariously over his Virgin Mary and his Sunday morning bacon and eggs—had more than once told the story how he and the children were blown out to sea off Long Island Sound during a hurricane, radio knocked out, how Mrs. Barbour had phoned a priest at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park and Eighty-Fourth and sat up all night praying (Mrs. Barbour!) until the ship-to-shore call from the Coast Guard came in. (“First strong wind, and she hightails it to Rome, didn’t you, my dear? Ha!”)

“Daddy—” Platt shook his head sadly. “Mommy used to say that if Manhattan wasn’t an island, he could never have lived here one minute. Inland he was miserable—always pining for the water—had to see it, had to smell it—I remember driving from Connecticut with him when I was a boy, instead of going straight up 84 to Boston we had to go miles out of the way and up the coast. Always looking to the Atlantic—really really sensitive to it, how the clouds changed the closer you got to the ocean.” Platt closed his cement-gray eyes for a moment, then re-opened them. “You knew Daddy’s little sister drowned herself, didn’t you,” he said, in so flat a voice that for a moment I thought I’d misheard.

I blinked, not knowing what to say. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, she did,” said Platt tonelessly. “Kitsey’s named after her. Jumped off a boat in the East River during a party—a lark supposedly, that’s what they all said, ‘accident,’ but I mean anyone knows not to do that, the currents were crazy, pulled her right under. Another kid died too, jumping in trying to save her. And then there was Daddy’s uncle Wendell back in the sixties, half-crocked, tried to swim to the mainland one night on a dare—I mean, Daddy, he used to yammer on how the water was the source of life itself for him, fountain of youth and all that and—sure, it was. But it wasn’t just life for him. It was death.”

I didn’t reply. Mr. Barbour’s boating stories, never particularly cogent, or focused, or informative about the actual sport, had always vibrated with a majestic urgency all their own, an appealing tingle of disaster.

“And—” Platt’s mouth was a tight line—“of course the hell of it was, he thought he was immortal as far as the water was concerned. Son of Poseidon! Unsinkable! And as far as he was concerned, the rougher the water, the better. He used to get very storm-giddy, you know? Lowered barometric pressure for him was like laughing gas. Although that particular day… it was choppy but warm, one of those bright sunny days in fall when all you want is to get out on the water. Andy was annoyed at having to go, he was coming down with a cold and in the middle of doing something complicated on the computer, but neither of us thought there was any actual danger. The plan was to take him out, get him calmed down, and hopefully hop over to the restaurant on the pier and try to get some food down him. See—” restlessly he crossed his legs—“it was just the two of us there with him, Andy and me, and to be quite frank Daddy was a bit off his rocker. He had been keyed up since the day before, talking a little wildly, really on the boil—Andy called Mommy because he had work to do and didn’t feel able to cope, and Mommy called me. By the time I got up there and took the ferry out, Daddy was in the wild blue yonder. Raving about the flung spray and the blown fume and all that—the wild green Atlantic—absolutely flying. Andy was never able to tolerate Daddy in those moods, he was up in his room with the door locked. I suppose he’d had a party-sized dose of Daddy before I arrived.

“In hindsight, I know, it seems poorly considered, but—you see, I could have sailed it single-handed. Daddy was going stir-crazy in the house and what was I to do, wrestle him down and lock him up? and then too, you know Andy, he never thought about food, the cupboard was bare, nothing in the fridge but some frozen pizzas… short hop, something to eat on the pier, it seemed like a good plan, you know? ‘Feed him,’ Mommy always used to say when Daddy started getting a little too exhilarated. ‘Get some food down him.’ That was always the first line of defense. Sit him down—make him eat a big steak. Often that’s all it took to get him back on keel. And I mean—it was in the back of my mind that if his spirits didn’t settle once we were on the mainland we could forget about the steakhouse and take him in to the emergency room if need be. I only made Andy come to be on the safe side. I thought I could use an extra hand—quite frankly I’d been out late the night before, I was feeling a little less than all a-taunto, as Daddy used to say.” He paused, rubbing the palms of his hands on the thighs of his tweed trousers. “Well. Andy never liked the water much. As you know.”

“I remember.”

Platt winced. “I’ve seen cats that swam better than Andy. I mean, quite frankly, Andy was just about the clumsiest kid I ever saw that wasn’t out-and-out spastic or retarded… good God, you ought to have seen him on the tennis court, we used to joke about entering him in the Special Olympics, he would have swept every event. Still he’d put in enough hours on the boat, God knows—it seemed smart to have an extra man aboard, and Daddy less than his best, you know? We could easily have handled the boat—I mean it was fine, it would have been perfectly fine except I hadn’t been keeping my eye on the sky like I should, the wind blew up, we were trying to reef the mainsail and Daddy was waving his arms around and shouting about the empty spaces between the stars, really just all kinds of nutty stuff, and he lost his balance on a swell and fell overboard. We were trying to haul him back aboard, Andy and me—and then we got broadsided at just the wrong angle, huge wave, just one of these steep cresting things that pops up and slaps you out of nowhere, and boom, we capsized. Not even that it was so cold out but fifty-three-degree water is enough to send you into hypothermia if you’re out there long enough, which unfortunately we were, and I mean to say Daddy, he was soaring, off in the stratosphere—”

Our chummy college-girl waitress was approaching behind Platt’s back, about to ask if we wanted another round—I caught her eye, shook my head slightly, warning her away.

“It was the hypothermia that got Daddy. He’d gotten so thin, no body fat on him at all, an hour and a half in the water was enough to do it, floundering around at those temperatures. You lose heat faster if you’re not perfectly still. Andy—” Platt, seeming to sense that the waitress was there, turned and held up two fingers, another round—“Andy’s jacket, well, they found it trailing behind the boat still attached to the line.”

“Oh God.”

“It must have come up over his head when he went over. There’s a strap that goes around the crotch—a bit uncomfortable, nobody likes to wear it—anyway, there was Andy’s jacket, still shackled to the life-line, but apparently he wasn’t buckled in all the way, the little shit. Well, I mean,” he said, his voice rising, “the most typical thing. You know? Couldn’t be bothered to fasten the thing properly? He was always such a goddamned klutz—”

Nervously, I glanced at the waitress, conscious how loud Platt had gotten.

“God.” Platt pushed himself back from the table very suddenly. “I was always so hateful to Andy. An absolute bastard.”

“Platt.” I wanted to say No you weren’t only it wasn’t true.

He glanced up at me, shook his head. “I mean, my God.” His eyes were blown-out and empty looking, like the Huey pilots in a computer game (Air Cav II: Cambodian Invasion) that Andy and I had liked to play. “When I think of some of the things I did to him. I’ll never forgive myself, never.”

“Wow,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause, looking at Platt’s big-knuckled hands resting palms down on the table—hands that after all these years still had a blunt, brutal look, a residue of old cruelty about them. Although we had both endured our share of bullying at school, Platt’s persecution of Andy—inventive, joyous, sadistic—had verged on outright torture: spitting in Andy’s food, yes, tearing up his toys, but also leaving dead guppies from the fish tank and autopsy photos from the Internet on his pillow, throwing back the covers and peeing on him while he was asleep (and then crying Android’s wet the bed!); pushing his head under in the bathtub Abu Ghraib style; forcing his face down in the playground sandbox as he cried and fought to breathe. Holding his inhaler over his head as he wheezed and pleaded: want it? want it? Some hideous story too about Platt and a belt, an attic room in some country house, bound hands, a makeshift noose: ugliness. He’d have killed me, I remembered Andy saying, in his remote, emotionless voice, if the sitter hadn’t heard me kicking on the floor.

A light spring rain was tapping at the windows of the bar. Platt looked down at his empty glass, then up.

“Come see Mother,” he said. “I know she really wants to see you.”

“Now?” I said, when I realized he meant that instant.

“Oh, do please come. If not now, later. Don’t just promise like we all do on the street. It would mean so much to her.”

“Well—” Now it was my turn to look at my watch. I’d had some errands to do, in fact I had a lot on my mind and several very pressing worries of my own but it was getting late, the vodka had made me foggy, the afternoon had slipped away.

“Please,” he said. He signalled for the check. “She’ll never forgive me if she knows I ran into you and let you get away. Won’t you walk over for just a minute?”

iii.

STEPPING INTO THE FOYER was like stepping into a portal back to childhood: Chinese porcelains, lighted landscape paintings, silk-shaded lamps burning low, everything exactly as when Mr. Barbour had opened the door to me the night my mother died.

“No, no,” said Platt, when by habit I walked toward the bull’s-eye mirror and through to the living room. “Back here.” He was heading to the rear of the apartment. “We’re very informal now—Mommy usually sees people back here, if she sees anybody at all.…”

Back in the day, I had never been anywhere near Mrs. Barbour’s inner sanctum, but as we approached the smell of her perfume—unmistakable, white blossoms with a powdery strangeness at the heart—was like a blown curtain over an open window.

“She doesn’t go out the way she once did,” Platt was saying quietly. “None of these big dinners and events—maybe once a week she’ll have someone over for tea, or go for dinner with a friend. But that’s it.”

Platt knocked; he listened. “Mommy?” he called, and—at the indistinct reply—opened the door a crack. “I’ve got a guest for you. You’ll never guess who I found on the street.…”

It was an enormous room, done up in an old-ladyish, 1980s peach. Directly off the entrance was a seating area with a sofa and slipper chairs—lots of knickknacks, needlepoint cushions, nine or ten Old Master drawings: the flight into Egypt, Jacob and the Angel, circle of Rembrandt mostly though there was a tiny pen-and-brown-ink of Christ washing the feet of St. Peter that was so deftly done (the weary slump and drape of Christ’s back; the blank, complicated sadness on St. Peter’s face) it might have been from Rembrandt’s own hand.

I leaned forward for a closer look; and on the far side of the room, a lamp with a pagoda-shaped shade popped on. “Theo?” I heard her say, and there she was, propped on piles of pillows in an outlandishly large bed.

“You! I can’t believe it!” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You’re all grown up! Where in the world have you been? Are you in the city now?”

“Yes. I’ve been back for a while. You look wonderful,” I added dutifully, though she didn’t.

“And you!” She put both hands over mine. “How handsome you are! I’m quite overcome.” She looked both older and younger than I remembered: very pale, no lipstick, lines at the corner of her eyes but her skin still white and smooth. Her silver-blonde hair (had it always been quite that silver, or had she gone gray?) fell loose and uncombed about her shoulders; she was wearing half-moon glasses and a satin bed jacket pinned with a huge diamond brooch in the shape of a snowflake.

“And here you find me, in my bed, with my needlework, like an old sailor’s widow,” she said, gesturing at the unfinished needlepoint canvas across her knees. A pair of tiny dogs—Yorkshire terriers—were asleep on a pale cashmere throw at her feet, and the smaller of the two, spotting me, sprang up and began to bark furiously.

Uneasily I smiled as she tried to quiet him—the other dog had set up a racket as well—and looked around. The bed was modern—king-sized, with a fabric covered headboard—but she had a lot of interesting old things back there that I wouldn’t have known to pay attention to when I was a kid. Clearly, it was the Sargasso Sea of the apartment, where objects banished from the carefully decorated public rooms washed up: mismatched end tables; Asian bric-a-brac; a knockout collection of silver table bells. A mahogany games table that from where I stood looked like it might be Duncan Phyfe and atop it (amongst cheap cloisonné ashtrays and endless coasters) a taxidermied cardinal: moth-eaten, fragile, feathers faded to rust, its head cocked sharply and its eye a dusty black bead of horror.

“Ting-a-Ling, ssh, please be quiet, I can’t bear it. This is Ting-a-Ling,” said Mrs. Barbour, catching the struggling dog up in her arms, “he’s the naughty one, aren’t you darling, never a moment’s peace, and the other, with the pink ribbon, is Clementine. Platt,” she called, over the barking, “Platt, will you take him in the kitchen? He’s really a bit of a nuisance with guests,” she said to me, “I ought to have a trainer in…”

While Mrs. Barbour rolled up her needlework and put it in an oval basket with a piece of scrimshaw set in the lid, I sat down in the armchair by her bed. The upholstery was worn, and the subdued stripe was familiar to me—a former living-room chair exiled to the bedroom, the same chair I’d found my mother sitting in when she’d come to the Barbours’ many years ago to pick me up after a sleepover. I drew a finger over the cloth. All at once I saw my mother standing to greet me, in the bright green peacoat she’d been wearing that day—fashionable enough that people were always stopping her on the street to ask her where she got it, yet all wrong for the Barbours’ house.

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. “Would you like something to drink? A cup of tea? Or something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

She patted the brocade coverlet of the bed. “Come sit next to me. Please. I want to be able to see you.”

“I—” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

“I’m so glad you came.”

“Mrs. Barbour,” I said, moving to the bed, sitting down gingerly with one hip, “my God. I can’t believe it. I didn’t find out till just now. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her lips together like a child trying not to cry. “Yes,” she said, “well,” and there issued between us an awful and seemingly unbreakable silence.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, more urgently, aware just how clumsy I sounded, as if by speaking more loudly I might convey my acuity of sorrow.

Unhappily she blinked; and, not knowing what to do, I reached out and put my hand on top of hers and we sat for an uncomfortably long time.

In the end, it was she who spoke first. “At any rate.” Resolutely she dashed a tear from her eye while I flailed about for something to say. “He had mentioned you not three days before he died. He was engaged to be married. To a Japanese girl.”

“No kidding. Really?” Sad as I was, I couldn’t help smiling, a little: Andy had chosen Japanese as his second language precisely because he had such a thing for fanservice miko and slutty manga girls in sailor uniform. “Japanese from Japan?”

“Indeed. Tiny little thing with a squeaky voice and a pocketbook shaped like a stuffed animal. Oh yes, I met her,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “Andy translating over tea sandwiches at the Pierre. She was at the funeral, of course—the girl—her name was Miyako—well. Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.”

The little dog, Clementine, had crawled up to curl around Mrs. Barbour’s shoulder like a fur collar. “I have to admit, I’m thinking of getting a third,” she said, reaching over to stroke her. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, disconcerted. It was extremely unlike Mrs. Barbour to solicit opinions from anyone at all on any subject, certainly not from me.

“I must say, they’ve been an enormous comfort, the pair of them. My old friend Maria Mercedes de la Pereyra turned up with them a week after the funeral, quite unexpected, two pups in a basket with ribbons on, and I have to say I wasn’t sure at first, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever received a more thoughtful gift. We could never have dogs before because of Andy. He was so terribly allergic. You remember.”

“I do.”

Platt—still in his tweed gamekeeper’s jacket, with big sagged-out pockets for dead birds and shotgun shells—had come back in. He pulled up a chair. “So, Mommy,” he said, biting his lower lip.

“So, Platypus.” A formal silence. “Good day at work?”

“Great.” He nodded, as if trying to reassure himself of the fact. “Yeah. Really really busy.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“New books. One on the Congress of Vienna.”

“Another one?” She turned to me. “And you, Theo?”

“Sorry?” I’d been looking at the scrimshaw (a whaling ship) set in the lid of her sewing basket, and thinking of poor Andy: black water, salt in his throat, nausea and flailing. The horror and cruelty of dying in his most hated element. The problem essentially is that I despise boats.

“Tell me. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Um, dealing antiques. American furniture, mostly.”

“No!” She was rapturous. “But how perfect!”

“Yes—down in the Village. I run the shop and manage the sales end. My partner—” it was still so new I wasn’t used to saying it—“my partner in the business, James Hobart, he’s the craftsman, takes care of restorations. You should come down and visit sometime.”

“Oh, delicious. Antiques!” She sighed. “Well—you know how I love old things. I wish my children had shown an interest. I’d always hoped at least one of them would.”

“Well, there’s always Kitsey,” said Platt.

“It’s curious,” Mrs. Barbour continued, as if she hadn’t heard this. “Not one of my children had an artistic bone in their bodies. Isn’t that extraordinary? Little philistines, all four of them.”

“Oh, please,” I said, in as playful a tone as I could manage. “I remember Toddy and Kitsey with all those piano lessons. Andy with his Suzuki violin.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, you know what I mean. None of my children have any visual sense. No appreciation whatever for painting or interiors or any of that. Now—” again she took my hand—“when you were a child, I used to catch you in the hallway studying my paintings. You’d always go straight to the very best ones. The Frederic Church landscape, my Fitz Henry Lane and my Raphaelle Peale, or the John Singleton Copley—you know, the oval portrait, the tiny one, girl in the bonnet?”

“That was a Copley?”

“Indeed. And I saw you with the little Rembrandt just now.”

“So it is Rembrandt, then?”

“Yes. Only the one, the washing-of-the-feet. The rest are all school-of. My own children have lived with those drawings their whole lives and never displayed the slightest particle of interest, isn’t that right, Platt?”

“I like to think that some of us have excelled at other things.”

I cleared my throat. “You know, I really did just stop in to say hello,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you—to see you both—” turning to include Platt in this. “I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“Will you stay and have dinner?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling cornered. “I can’t, not tonight. But I did want to run up for a minute and see you.”

“Then will you come back for dinner? Or lunch? Or drinks?” She laughed. “Or whatever you will.”

“Dinner, sure.”

She held up her cheek for a kiss, as she had never done when I was a child, not even with her own children.

“How lovely to have you here again!” she said, catching my hand and pressing it to her face. “Like old times.”

iv.

ON MY WAY OUT the door, Platt threw out some kind of weird handshake—part gang member, part fraternity boy, part International Sign Language—that I wasn’t sure how to return. In confusion I withdrew my hand and—not knowing what else to do—bumped fists with him, feeling stupid.

“So, hey. Glad we ran into each other,” I said, in the awkward silence. “Give me a call.”

“About dinner? Oh, yes. We’ll probably eat in if that’s all right, Mommy really doesn’t like to go out that much.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Then, shockingly: “I’ve seen a good bit of your old friend Cable lately. Bit more than I care to, actually. He’ll be interested to know I’ve seen you.”

“Tom Cable?” I laughed, incredulously, although it wasn’t much of a laugh; the bad old memory of how we’d been suspended from school together and how he’d blown me off when my mother died still made me uneasy. “You’re in touch with him?” I said, when Platt didn’t respond. “I haven’t thought of Tom in years.”

Platt smirked. “I have to admit, back in the day, I thought it was weird that any friend of that kid’s would put up with a drip like Andy,” he said quietly, slouching against the door frame. “Not that I minded. God knows Andy needed somebody to take him out and get him stoned or something.”

Andrip. Android. One-nut. Pimple Face. Sponge Bob Shit Pants.

“No?” said Platt casually, misreading my blank stare. “I thought you were into that. Cable was certainly quite the little pothead in his day.”

“That must have been after I left.”

“Well, maybe.” Platt looked at me, in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. “Mommy certainly thought butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but I knew you were pals with Cable. And Cable was a little thief.” Sharply—in a way that brought the old, unpleasant Platt ringing back—he laughed. “I told Kitsey and Toddy to keep their rooms locked when you were here so you wouldn’t steal anything.”

“That’s what all that was about?” I had not thought of the piggy-bank incident in years.

“Well, I mean, Cable”—he glanced at the ceiling. “See, I used to date Tom’s sister Joey, holy Hell, she was a piece of work too.”

“Right.” I remembered all too well Joey Cable—sixteen, and stacked—brushing by twelve-year-old me in the hallway of the Hamptons house in tiny T-shirt and black thong panties.

“Sloppy Jo! What an ass she had on her. Remember how she used to parade around naked by the hot tub out there? Anyway, Cable. Out in the Hamptons at Daddy’s club he got caught rifling lockers in the men’s changing rooms, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. That was after you left, eh?”

“Must have been.”

“That sort of thing happened at several clubs out there. Like during big tournaments and stuff—he’d sneak into the locker room and steal whatever he could get his hands on. Then, maybe college by then—oh, darn, where was it, not Maidstone but—anyway, Cable had a summer job in the clubhouse helping out at the bar, ferrying home old folks too blotto to drive. Personable guy, good talker—well, you know. He’d get the old fellows talking about their war stories or whatever. Light their cigarettes, laugh at their jokes. Except sometimes he’d help the old fellows up to the door and the next day their wallets would be missing.”

“Well, I haven’t laid eyes on him in years,” I said curtly. I didn’t like the tone Platt had taken. “What’s he doing now, anyway?”

“Well, you know. Up to his old tricks. As a matter of fact, he sees my sister from time to time, though I certainly wish I could put a stop to that. At any rate,” he said, on a slightly altered note, “here I am, keeping you. I can’t wait to tell Kitsey and Toddy I’ve seen you—Todd especially. You made quite an impression on him—he speaks of you all the time. He’ll be in town next weekend and I know he’ll want to see you.”

v.

INSTEAD OF TAKING A cab I walked, to clear my head. It was a clean damp spring day, storm clouds pierced with bars of light and office workers milling in the crosswalks, but spring in New York was always a poisoned time for me, a seasonal echo of my mother’s death blowing in with the daffodils, budding trees and blood splashes, a thin spray of hallucination and horror (Neat! Fun! as Xandra might have said). With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of cloth and bone.

It was unthinkable. I’d thought of calling Andy a million times and it was only embarrassment that had kept me from it; it was true that I didn’t keep up with anyone from the old days but I did bump into someone from our school every now and again and our old schoolmate Martina Lichtblau (with whom, the year before, I had had a brief and unsatisfying affair, a total of three stealthy fucks on a fold-out sofa)—Martina Lichtblau had spoken of him, Andy’s in Massachusetts now, are you still in touch with Andy, oh yeah, just as humongous a geek as ever except he plays it up so much now it’s almost, like, kind of retro and cool? Coke bottle glasses? Orange corduroys and a haircut like Darth Vader’s helmet?

Wow, Andy, I’d thought, shaking my head fondly, reaching over Martina’s bare shoulder for one of her cigarettes. I had thought then how good it would be to see him—too bad he wasn’t in New York—maybe I’d call him some time over the holidays when he was home.

Only I hadn’t. I wasn’t on Facebook for reasons of paranoia and seldom looked at the news but still I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t heard—except that, in recent weeks, I’d been worried about the shop to the point I thought of little else. Not that we had worries financially—we’d been pulling in money almost literally hand over fist, so much money that Hobie, crediting me with his salvation (he’d been on the verge of bankruptcy) had insisted on making me partner, which I hadn’t been all that keen on given the circumstances. But my efforts to put him off had only made him more determined that I should share in the profits; the more I tried to brush off his offer, the more persistent he grew; with typical generosity, he attributed my reticence to “modesty” although my real fear was that a partnership would shed a certain official light on unofficial goings-on in the shop—goings-on that would shock poor Hobie to the soles of his John Lobb shoes, if he knew. Which he didn’t. For I’d intentionally sold a fake to a client, and the client had figured it out and was kicking up a fuss.

I didn’t mind giving the money back—in fact, the only thing to do was buy the piece back at a loss. In the past, this had worked for me well. I sold heavily altered or outright reconstructed pieces as original; if—out of the dim light of Hobart and Blackwell—the collector got the piece home and noticed something amiss (“always carry a pocket light with you,” Hobie had counselled me, early in the game; “there’s a reason so many antique shops are dark”) then I—grieved at the mix-up, while stalwart in my conviction that the piece was genuine—gallantly offered to buy it back at ten percent more than the collector had paid, under the conditions and terms of an ordinary sale. This made me look like a good guy, confident in the integrity of my product and willing to go to absurd lengths to ensure my client’s happiness, and more often than not the client was mollified and decided to keep the piece. But on the three or four occasions when distrustful collectors had taken me up on my offer: what the collector didn’t realize was that the fake—passing from his possession to mine, at a price indicative of its apparent worth—had overnight acquired a provenance. Once it was back in my hands, I had a paper trail to show it had been part of the illustrious So-and-So collection. Despite the mark-up I’d paid in repurchasing the fake from Mr. So-and-So (ideally an actor or a clothing designer who collected as a hobby, if not illustrious as a collector per se) I could then turn around and sell it again for sometimes twice what I’d bought it back for, to some Wall Street cheese fry who didn’t know Chippendale from Ethan Allen but was more than thrilled with “official documents” proving that his Duncan Phyfe secretary or whatever came from the collection of Mr. So-and-So, noted philanthropist/interior decorator/leading light of Broadway/fill-in-the-blank.

And so far it had worked. Only this time, Mr. So-and-So—in this case, a prize Upper East Side swish named Lucius Reeve—was not biting. What troubled me was that he seemed to think that, A: he’d been taken on purpose, which was true, and, B: that Hobie was in on it, was in fact the mastermind of the whole scam which could not have been farther from the truth. When I had tried to salvage the situation by insisting that the mistake was wholly mine—cough cough, honestly sir, misunderstanding with Hobie, I’m really quite new at this and hope you won’t hold it against me, the work he does is of such a high quality you can see how sometimes these mix-ups happen, don’t you?—Mr. Reeve (“Call me Lucius”) a well-dressed figure of uncertain age and occupation, was implacable. “You don’t deny that the work is from James Hobart’s hand then?” he’d said at our nervewracking lunch at the Harvard Club, leaning back slyly in his chair and running his finger around the rim of his club soda glass.

“Listen—” It had been a tactical mistake, I realized, to meet him on his own territory, where he knew the waiters, where he did the ordering with pad and pencil, where I could not be magnanimous and suggest that he try this or that.

“Or that he deliberately took this carved phoenix ornament from a Thomas Affleck, from a—yes yes, I believe it is Affleck, Philadelphia at any rate—and affixed it to the top of this genuinely antique but otherwise undistinguished chest-on-chest of the same period? Are we not speaking of the same piece?”

“Please, if you’d only let me—” We’d been seated at a table by the window, the sun was in my eyes, I was sweating and uncomfortable—

“How then can you maintain that the deception was not deliberate? On his part and yours?”

“Look—” the waiter was hovering, I wanted him to leave—“the mistake was mine. As I’ve said. And I’ve offered to buy the piece back at a premium so I’m not sure what else you want me to do.”

But despite my cool tone, I had been in a froth of anxiety, anxiety that had not been relieved by the fact that it was twelve days later and Lucius Reeve still had not deposited the money that I’d given him—I’d been checking at the bank right before I ran into Platt.

What Lucius Reeve wanted I didn’t know. Hobie had been making these cannibalized and heavily altered pieces (“changelings” as he called them) for virtually his whole working life; the storage space at Brooklyn Navy Yard had been crammed full of pieces with tags going back thirty years or more. The first time I’d gone out by myself and really poked around, I’d been thunderstruck to discover what looked like real Hepplewhite, real Sheraton, Ali Baba’s cave spilling with treasure—“Oh Lord, no,” said Hobie, his voice crackly on the cell phone—the facility was like a bunker, no phone reception, I’d gone straight outside to call him, standing on the windy loading dock with one finger in my ear—“believe me, if it was real, I’d have been on the phone to the American Furniture department at Christie’s a long time ago—”

I had admired Hobie’s changelings for years and had even helped work on some of them, but it was the shock of being fooled by these previously-unseen pieces that (to employ a favored phrase of Hobie’s) filled me with a wild surmise. Every so often there passed through the shop a piece of museum quality too damaged or broken to save; for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were unfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could (a pair of finials here, a set of finely turned legs there) and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

Acids, paint, gold size and lampblack, wax and dirt and dust. Old nails rusted with salt water. Nitric acid on new walnut. Drawer runners worn with sandpaper, a few weeks under the sun lamp to age new wood a hundred years. From five destroyed Hepplewhite dining chairs he was capable of fashioning a solid and completely authentic-looking set of eight by taking the originals apart, copying the pieces (using wood salvaged from other damaged furniture of the period) and re-assembling them with half original and half new parts. (“A chair leg—” running a finger down it—“typically, they’re scuffed and dented at the bottom—even if you use old wood, you need to take a chain to the bottom of the new-cut legs if you want them all to match… very very light, I’m not saying whale the hell out of it… very distinctive patterning too, front legs usually a bit more dented than the back, see?”) I had seen him reconfigure original wood from a practically-in-splinters eighteenth-century sideboard into a table that might have been from the hand of Duncan Phyfe himself. (“Will it do?” said Hobie, stepping back anxiously, not appearing to understand the marvel he had wrought.) Or—as with Lucius Reeve’s “Chippendale” chest-on-chest—a plain piece could in his hands become by the addition of ornament salvaged from a grand old ruin of the same period something almost indistinguishable from a masterwork.

A more practical or less scrupulous man would have worked this skill to calculated ends and made a fortune with it (or, in Grisha’s cogent phrase, “fucked it harder than a five-grand prostitute”). But as far as I knew, the thought of selling the changelings for originals or indeed of selling them at all had never crossed Hobie’s mind; and his complete lack of interest in goings-on in the store gave me considerable freedom to set about the business of raising cash and taking care of bills. With a single “Sheraton” sofa and a set of riband-back chairs I’d sold at Israel Sack prices to the trusting young California wife of an investment banker, I’d managed to pay off hundreds of thousands in back taxes on the townhouse. With another dining room set and a “Sheraton” settee—sold to an out-of-town client who ought to have known better, but who was blinkered by Hobie and Welty’s unimpeachable reputations as dealers—I’d gotten the shop out of debt.

“It’s very convenient,” said Lucius Reeve pleasantly, “that he leaves all the business end of the shop to you? That he has a workshop turning out these frauds but washes his hands of how you dispose of them?”

“You have my offer. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.”

“Why then do you continue to sit?”

I did not for one instant doubt Hobie’s astonishment if he learned I was selling his changelings for real. For one thing, a lot of his more creative efforts were rife with small inaccuracies, in-jokes almost, and he was not always so fastidious about his materials as someone turning out deliberate forgeries would have been. But I had found it very easy to fool even relatively experienced buyers if I sold about twenty per cent cheaper than the real thing. People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see. I knew how to draw people’s attention to the extraordinary points of a piece, the hand-cut veneer, the fine patination, the honorable scars, drawing a finger down an exquisite cyma curve (which Hogarth himself had called “the line of beauty”) in order to lead the eye away from reworked bits in back, where in a strong light they might find the grain didn’t precisely match. I declined to suggest that clients examine the underside of the piece, as Hobie himself—eager to educate, at the price of fatally undermining his own interests—was only too quick to do. But just in case someone did want to have a look, I made sure that the floor around the piece was very, very dirty, and that the pocket light I happened to have on hand was very, very weak. There were a lot of people in New York with a lot of money and plenty of time-pressed decorators who, if you showed them a photo of a similar-looking item in an auction catalogue, were happy to plump for what they saw as a discount, particularly if they were spending someone else’s money. Another trick—calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer—was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own—look, under all this dusty junk, a Sheraton settee! With this species of cheat—whom I took great pleasure in rooking—the trick was to play dumb, look bored, stay engrossed in my book, act as if I didn’t know what I had, and let them think they were rooking me: even as their hands were trembling with excitement, even as they tried to appear unhurried while rushing out to the bank for a massive cash withdrawal. If the customer was someone important, or too connected to Hobie, I could always claim the piece wasn’t for sale. A curt “not for sale” was quite often the correct starting position with strangers as well, as it not only made the kind of buyer I was looking for more eager to strike a quick bargain, in cash, but also set the stage for me to abort mid-deal if something went wrong. Hobie wandering upstairs at a bad moment was the main thing that might go wrong. Mrs. DeFrees popping in the shop at a bad moment was another thing that could, and had, gone wrong—I’d had to break off just at the point of closing the sale, much to the annoyance of the movie-director’s wife who got tired of waiting and walked out, never to return. Short of black light or lab analysis, much of Hobie’s fudging wasn’t visible to the naked eye; and though he had a lot of serious collectors coming in, he also had plenty of people who would never know, for instance, that no such thing as a Queen Anne cheval glass was ever made. But even if someone was clever enough to detect an inaccuracy—say a style of carving or a type of wood anachronistic for the maker or period—I had once or twice been bold enough to talk past even this: by claiming the piece was made to order for a special customer and hence, strictly speaking, more valuable than the usual article.

In my shaky and agitated state, I’d turned almost unconsciously into the park and down the path to the Pond, where Andy and I had sat in our parkas on many winter afternoons in elementary school waiting for my mother to pick us up from the zoo or take us to the movies—rendezvous point, seventeen hundred hours! But at that point, unfortunately, I found myself sitting there more often than not waiting for Jerome, the bike messenger I bought my drugs from. The pills I’d stolen from Xandra all those years before had started me on a bad road: oxys, roxys, morphine and Dilaudid when I could get it, I’d been buying them off the street for years; for the past months, I’d been keeping myself (for the most part) to a one-day-on, one-day-off schedule (although what constituted an “off” day was a dose just small enough to keep from getting sick) but even though it was officially an “off” day I was feeling increasingly grim and the vodkas I’d had with Platt were wearing off and though I knew very well that I didn’t have anything on me still I kept patting myself down, my hands stealing again and again to my overcoat and the pockets of my suit jacket.

At college I had achieved nothing commendable or remarkable. My years in Vegas had rendered me unfit for any manner of hard work; and when at last I graduated, at twenty-one (it had taken me six years to finish, instead of the expected four), I did so without distinctions of any type. “Quite honestly, I’m not seeing a lot here that’s going to make a master’s program take a chance on you,” my counselor had said. “Particularly since you would be relying so heavily on financial aid.”

But that was all right; I knew what I wanted to do. My career as a dealer had started at about seventeen when I happened upstairs on one of the rare afternoons Hobie had decided to open the shop. By that time, I had begun to be aware of Hobie’s financial problems; Grisha had spoken only too truly about the dire consequences if Hobie continued to accumulate inventory without selling it. (“Will still be downstairs, painting, carving, the day they come and put evacuation notice on front door.”) But despite the envelopes from the IRS that had begun to accumulate among the Christie’s catalogues and old concert programs on the hall table (Notice of Unpaid Balance, Reminder Notice Balance Due, Second Notice Balance Due) Hobie couldn’t be bothered to keep the store open more than half an hour at a time unless friends happened to stop in; and when it was time for his friends to go, he often shooed out the actual customers and locked up shop. Almost invariably I came home from school to find the “Closed” sign on the door and people peering in at the windows. Worst of all, when he did manage to stay open for a few hours, was his habit of wandering trustfully away to make a cup of tea while leaving the door open and the register untended; though Mike his moving man had had the foresight to lock the silver and jewelry cases, a number of majolica and crystal items had walked away and I myself had come upstairs unexpectedly on the day in question to find a gym-toned, casually dressed mom who looked like she’d just come from a Pilates class slipping a paperweight in her bag.

“That’s eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, and at my voice she froze and looked up in horror. Actually it was only two fifty, but she handed me her credit card without a word and let me ring up the sale—probably the first profitable transaction that had taken place since Welty’s death; for Hobie’s friends (his main customers) were only too aware that they could talk Hobie down to criminal levels on his already too-low prices. Mike, who also helped in the shop on occasion, hiked up the prices indiscriminately and refused to negotiate and in consequence sold very little at all.

“Well done!” Hobie had said, blinking delightedly in the glare of his work lamp, when I went downstairs and informed him of my big sale (a silver teapot, in my version; I didn’t want to make it seem like I’d outright robbed the woman, and besides I knew he was uninterested in what he called the smalls, which I’d come to realize through my perusal of antiques books formed a huge part of the inventory of the store). “Sharp-eyed little customer. Welty would have taken to you like a baby on the doorstep, ha! Taking an interest in his silver!”

From then on, I’d made it a habit to sit upstairs with my schoolbooks in the afternoons while Hobie busied himself downstairs. At first it was simply for fun—fun that was sorely missing from my dreary student life, coffees in the lounge and lectures on Walter Benjamin. In the years since Welty’s death, Hobart and Blackwell had evidently acquired a reputation as an easy mark for thieves; and the thrill of pouncing on these well-dressed filchers and pilferers and extorting large sums from them was almost like shoplifting in reverse.

But I also learned a lesson: a lesson which sifted down to me only by degrees but which was in fact the truest thing at the heart of the business. It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.

In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

That was how it had started; that was how Hobart and Blackwell, after languishing for years, had begun under my beady auspices to turn a profit. But it wasn’t just about money. I liked the game of it. Unlike Hobie—who assumed, incorrectly, that anyone who walked into his store was as fascinated by furniture as he was, who was extremely matter-of-fact in pointing out the flaws and virtues of a piece—I had discovered I possessed the opposite knack: of obfuscation and mystery, the ability to talk about inferior articles in ways that made people want them. When selling a piece, talking it up (as opposed to sitting back and permitting the unwary to wander into my trap) it was a game to size up a customer and figure out the image they wanted to project—not so much the people they were (know-it-all decorator? New Jersey housewife? self-conscious gay man?) as the people they wanted to be. Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set. The trick was to address yourself to the projection, the fantasy self—the connoisseur, the discerning bon vivant—as opposed to the insecure person actually standing in front of you. It was better if you hung back a bit and weren’t too direct. I soon learned how to dress (on the edge between conservative and flash) and how to deal with sophisticated and unsophisticated customers, with differing calibrations of courtesy and indolence: presuming knowledge in both, quick to flatter, quick to lose interest or step away at exactly the right moment.

And yet, with this Lucius Reeve, I had screwed up badly. What he wanted I didn’t know. In fact he was so relentless in sidestepping my apologies and directing his anger full-bore on Hobie that I was starting to think that I had stumbled into some preexisting grudge or hatred. I didn’t want to tip my hand with Hobie by bringing up Reeve’s name, though who could bear such a fierce grudge against Hobie, most well-intentioned and unworldly of persons? My Internet research had turned up nothing on Lucius Reeve apart from a few innocuous mentions in the society pages, not even a Harvard or Harvard Club affiliation, nothing but a respectable Fifth Avenue address. He had no family that I could tell, no job or visible means of support. It had been stupid of me to write him a check—greediness on my part; I’d been thinking about establishing a lineage for the piece, though at this point even an envelope of cash placed under a napkin and slid across the table was no assurance he was going to let the matter drop.

I was standing with my fists in the pockets of my overcoat, glasses fogged from the spring damp, staring unhappily into the muddy waters of the Pond: a few sad brown ducks, plastic bags washing in the reeds. Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without lunch when she needed the price of a museum pass at MoMA or a movie ticket at the Paris Theatre. Further along, past the Pond, where the path turned empty and dark, was the unkempt and desolate patch of ground where Andy and I had scattered her ashes. It was Andy who had talked me into sneaking over and scattering them in defiance of the city rule, scattering them moreover in that particular spot: well, I mean, it’s where she used to meet us.

Yeah, but rat poison, look, these signs.

Go on. You can do it now. No one’s coming.

She loved the sea lions, too. We always had to walk over and look at them.

Yeah but you definitely don’t want to dump her over there, it smells like fish. Besides it creeps me out having that jar or whatever in my room.

vi.

“MY GOD,” SAID HOBIE when he got a good look at me under the lights. “You’re white as a sheet. You’re not coming down with something?”

“Um—” He was just going out, coat over his arm; behind him stood Mr. and Mrs. Vogel, buttoned-up and smiling poisonously. My relations with the Vogels (or “the Vultures,” as Grisha called them) had cooled, significantly, since I’d taken over the shop; mindful of the many, many pieces they’d in my view as good as stolen from Hobie, I now tacked on a premium to anything I even vaguely suspected they were interested in; and though Mrs. Vogel—no fool—had taken to telephoning Hobie directly, I usually managed to thwart her by (among other means) claiming to Hobie that I’d already sold the piece in question and forgotten to tag it.

“Have you eaten?” Hobie, in his gentle woolly-mindedness and unwisdom, remained completely unaware that the Vogels and I no longer held each other in anything but the very highest regard. “We’re just running down the street for dinner. Come with us, why don’t you.”

“No thanks,” I said, conscious of Mrs. Vogel’s gaze boring into me, cold fraudulent smile, eyes like agate chips in her smooth, aging-milkmaid face. As a rule I took pleasure in stepping up and smiling back in her teeth—but in the stern hall lights I felt clammy and used-up, demoted somehow. “I think, um, I’ll eat in tonight, thanks.”

“Not feeling well?” said Mr. Vogel blandly—balding midwesterner in rimless glasses, prim in his reefer coat, tough luck to you if he was the banker and you were late with the mortgage. “What a shame.”

“Lovely to see you,” Mrs. Vogel said, stepping forward and putting her plump hand on my sleeve. “Did you enjoy Pippa’s visit? I wish I’d got to see her but she was so busy with the boyfriend. What did you think of him—what was his name—?” turning back to Hobie. “Elliot?”

“Everett,” said Hobie neutrally. “Nice boy.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to shoulder my coat off. The appearance of Pippa fresh off the plane from London with this “Everett” had been one of the uglier shocks of my life. Counting the days, the hours, shaky from sleeplessness and excitement, unable to stop myself looking at my watch every five minutes, leaping at the doorbell and literally running to throw open the door—and there she stood, hand-in-hand with this shoddy Englishman?

“And what does he do? A musician too?”

“Music librarian actually,” said Hobie. “Don’t know what that entails nowadays with computers and all.”

“Oh, I’m sure Theo knows all about it,” said Mrs. Vogel.

“No, not really.”

“Cybrarian?” said Mr. Vogel, with an uncharacteristically loud and merry chuckle. Addressing me: “Is it true what they say, that young people today can make it through school without once setting foot in a library?”

“I wouldn’t know.” A music librarian! It had taken every ounce of possession I had to keep my face empty (guts crumbling, end of everything) to accept his moist English hand, Hullo, Everett, you must be Theo, heard so much about you, blah blah blah, while I stood frozen in the doorway like a bayoneted Yank staring at the stranger who’d run me through to death. He was a slight, wide-eyed bounce of a guy, innocent, bland, infuriatingly cheerful, dressed in jeans and hoodie like a teenager; and his quick, apologetic smile when we were alone in the living room had sent me blank with rage.

Every moment of their visit had been torture. Somehow I’d stumbled through it. Though I’d tried to stay away from them as much as I could (as skilled a dissembler as I was, I could barely be civil to him; everything about him, his pinkish skin, his nervous laugh, the hair sprouting out the cuffs of his shirt sleeves, made me want to jump on him and knock his horsey English teeth out; and wouldn’t that be a surprise, I thought grimly, glaring at him across the table, if old antique-dealing Specs hauled off and busted his eggs for him?) still, as hard as I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to stay away from Pippa, I’d hovered obtrusively and hated myself for it, so painfully excited had I been by her nearness: her bare feet at breakfast, bare legs, her voice. Unexpected glimpse of her white armpits when she pulled her sweater over her head. The agony of her hand on my sleeve. “Hi, lovey. Hi, darling.” Coming up behind me, cupping my eyes with her hands: surprise! She wanted to know everything about me, everything I was doing. Wedging in beside me on the Queen Anne loveseat so that our legs touched: oh God. What was I reading? Could she look at my iPod? Where did I get that fantastic wristwatch? Whenever she smiled at me Heaven blew in. And yet every time I devised some pretext to get her on her own, here he came, thump thump thump, sheepish grin, arm around her shoulder, wrecking everything. Conversation in the next room, a burst of laughter: were the two of them talking about me? Putting his hands on her waist! Calling her “Pips!” The only even vaguely tolerable or amusing moment of his visit was when Popchik—territorial in his old age—had jumped up unprovoked and bitten him on the thumb—“oh, God!” Hobie rushing for the alcohol, Pippa fretting, Everett trying to be cool but visibly put out: sure, dogs are great! I love them! we just never had them because my mom’s allergic. He was the “poor relation” (his phrase) of an old schoolmate of hers; American mother, numerous siblings, father who taught some incomprehensible mathematical/philosophical something-or-other at Cambridge; like her, he was a vegetarian “verging on vegan;” to my dismay, it had emerged that the two of them were sharing a flat (!)—he had of course slept in her room during the visit; and for five nights, the whole time he was there, I’d lain awake bilious with fury and sorrow, ears attuned to every rustle of bedclothes, every sigh and whisper from next door.

And yet—waving goodbye to Hobie and the Vogels, have a great time! then turning grimly away—what could I have expected? It had enraged me, cut me to the bone, the careful, kindly tone she had taken with me around this “Everett”—“no,” I said politely, when she asked me whether I was seeing someone, “not really,” although (I was proud of it in a lucid, gloomy way) I was in fact sleeping with two different girls, neither of whom knew about the other. One of them had a boyfriend in another town and the other had a fiancé whom she was tired of, whose calls she screened when we were in bed together. Both of them were pretty and the girl with the cuckolded fiancé was downright beautiful—a baby Carole Lombard—but neither of them was real for me; they were only stand-ins for her.

I was irritated at how I felt. To sit around “heartbroken” (the first word, unfortunately, that came to mind) was foolish, it was maudlin and contemptible and weak—oh boo hoo, she’s in London, she’s with someone else, go pick up some wine and fuck Carole Lombard, get over it. But the thought of her gave me such continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock: what time was it in London? always adding and subtracting, totting up the time difference, compulsively checking the London weather on my phone, 53 degrees Fahrenheit, 10:12 p.m. and light precipitation, standing on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue by boarded-up St. Vincent’s heading downtown to meet my dealer, and what about Pippa, where was she? in the back of a taxicab, out at dinner, drinking with people I didn’t know, asleep in a bed I’d never seen? I desperately wanted to see photos of her flat, in order to add some much-needed detail to my fantasies, but was too embarrassed to ask. With a pang I thought of her bedsheets, what they must be like, a dark dorm-room color as I imagined them, tumbled, unwashed, a student’s dark nest, her freckled cheek pale against a maroon or purple pillowcase, English rain tapping against her window. Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom—many different Pippas, at many different ages—were a daily torment, always unexpected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at somebody else’s joke or smiling at someone who wasn’t me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn’t see her as I did—if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her—that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her. But this had never happened. Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles—long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes—Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were—to me—so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination, from the antique valentines and embroidered Chinese coats she collected to her tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there had always been something bright and magical about her unknown faraway life: Vaud Suisse, 23 rue de Tombouctou, Blenheim Crescent W11 2EE, furnished rooms in countries I had never seen. Clearly this Everett (“poor as a churchmouse”—his phrase) was living off her money, Uncle Welty’s money rather, old Europe preying off young America, to use a phrase I’d employed in my Henry James paper in my last semester of school.

Could I write him a check to make him leave her alone? Alone in the shop, in the slow cool afternoons, the thought had crossed my mind: fifty thousand if you walk out tonight, a hundred if you never see her again. Money was a concern with him, clearly; during his visit he’d always been digging anxiously in his pockets, constant stops at the cash machine, taking out twenty bucks at a time, good God.

It was hopeless. There was simply no way in hell she could matter half as much to Mr. Music Library as she did to me. We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn’t even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her. Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention a recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy. Certain objects that passed through the shop—a Pleyel piano; a strange little scratched-up Russian cameo—seemed to be tangible artifacts of the life that she and I, by rights, ought to be living together. I wrote thirty-page emails to her that I erased without sending, opting instead for the mathematical formula I’d devised to keep from making too big a fool of myself: always three lines shorter than the email she’d sent, always one day longer than I’d waited for her reply. Sometimes in bed—adrift in my sighing, opiated, erotic reveries—I carried on long candid conversations with her: we are inseparable, I imagined us saying (cornily) to each other, each with a hand on the other’s cheek, we can never be apart. Like a stalker, I hoarded a snippet of autumn-leaf hair I’d retrieved from the trash after she’d trimmed her bangs in the bathroom—and, even more creepily, an unwashed shirt, still intoxicating with her hay-smelling, vegetarian sweat.

It was hopeless. More than hopeless: humiliating. Always leaving the door of my room partially open when she came to visit, a not-so-subtle invitation. Even the adorable drag in her step (like the little mermaid, too fragile to walk on land) drove me crazy. She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. Twice I’d tried to kiss her: once drunk in a taxicab; once at the airport, desperate at the thought that I would not be seeing her again for months (or, who knew, years)—“I’m sorry,” I said, a beat too late—

“It’s okay.”

“No, really, I—”

“Listen—” sweet unfocused smile—“it’s fine. But they’re boarding my flight soon” (they weren’t, in fact). “I have to go. Take care of yourself, okay?”

Take care. What on earth did she see in this “Everett”? I could only think how boring she must find me if she preferred such a lukewarm gloop of a guy to me. Someday, when we have kids… though he’d said it half jokingly, my blood had gone cold. He was just the kind of loser you could see hauling around a diaper bag and loads of padded baby equipment.… I berated myself for not being more forceful with her, though in truth there was no way I could have pursued her any harder without at least a tiny bit of encouragement on her end. Already it was embarrassing enough: Hobie’s tact whenever her name came up, the careful flatness in his voice. Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment. Even a cow like Mrs. Vogel could see it. It wasn’t as if Pippa had led me on—quite the contrary; if she cared anything about me she would have come back to New York instead of staying in Europe after school; and still for whatever dumb reason I couldn’t let go of the way she’d looked at me the day when I first came to visit, sitting on the side of her bed. The memory of that childhood afternoon had sustained me for years; it was as if—sick with loneliness for my mother—I’d imprinted on her like some orphaned animal; when in fact, joke on me, she’d been doped up and knocked lamb-daffy from a head injury, ready to throw her arms around the first stranger who’d walked in.

My “opes” as Jerome called them were in an old tobacco tin. On the marble top of the dresser I crushed one of my hoarded old-style Oxycontins, cut it and drew it into lines with my Christie’s card and—rolling the crispest bill in my wallet—leaned to the table, eyes damp with anticipation: ground zero, bam, bitter taste in the back of the throat and then the gust of relief, falling backward on the bed as the sweet old punch hit me square in the heart: pure pleasure, aching and bright, far from the tin-can clatter of misery.

vii.

THE NIGHT OF MY dinner at the Barbours was rainwhipped and stormy, with blasting winds so strong I could scarcely get my umbrella up. On Sixth Avenue there were no cabs to be had, pedestrians head-down and shouldering into sideways rain; in the humid, bunker-like damp of the subway platform, drips plinked monotonously from the concrete ceiling.

When I emerged, Lexington Avenue was deserted, raindrops dancing and prickling on the sidewalks, a smashing rain that seemed to amplify all the noise on the streets. Taxis lashed by in loud sprays of water. A few doors from the station I ducked into a market to buy flowers—lilies, three bunches since one was too puny; in the tiny, overheated shop their fragrance hit me exactly the wrong way and only at the cash register did I realize why: their scent was the same sick, unwholesome sweetness of my mother’s memorial service. As I ducked out again and ran the flooded sidewalk to Park Avenue—socks squelching, cold rain pelting in my face—I regretted I’d bought them at all and came close to tossing them in a trash can, only the squalls of rain were so fierce I couldn’t bring myself to slow down, for even a moment, and ran on.

As I stood in the vestibule—my hair plastered to my head, my supposedly waterproof raincoat sopping like I’d soaked it in the bathtub—the door opened quite suddenly to a large, open-faced college kid that it took me a pulse or two to recognize as Toddy. Before I could apologize for the water streaming off me, he embraced me solidly with a clap on the back.

“Oh my God,” he was saying as he led me into the living room. “Let me take your coat—and these, Mum will love them. Awesome to see you! How long has it been?” He was larger and more robust than Platt, with un-Barbour like hair of a darker, cardboard-colored blond and a very un-Barbour like smile on him as well—eager and bright with no irony about it.

“Well—” His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness. “It’s been a long time. You must be in college now, right?”

“Yes—Georgetown—up for the weekend. I’m studying political science but really I’m hoping to go into nonprofit management maybe, something to do with young people?” With his ready, student-government smile, he had clearly grown up to be the high achiever that, at one time, Platt had promised to be. “And, I mean, I hope it’s not too weird of me to say but I have you in part to thank for it.”

“Sorry?”

“Well, I mean. Wanting to work with disadvantaged young people. You made quite an impression on me, you know, back when you were staying with us all those years ago. It was a real eye-opener, your situation. Because, even back in third grade or whatever, you made me think—that this was what I wanted to do someday, you know, something to do with helping kids.”

“Wow,” I said, still stuck on the disadvantaged part. “Huh. That’s great.”

“And, I mean, it’s really exciting, because there are so many ways to give back to youth out there in need. I mean, I don’t know how familiar you are with DC, but there are lots of under-served neighborhoods, I’m involved in a service project tutoring at-risk kids in reading and math, and this summer, I’m going to Haiti with Habitat for Humanity—”

“Is that him?” Decorous click of shoes on the parquet, light fingertips on my sleeve, and the next thing I knew Kitsey had her arms around me and I was smiling down into her white-blonde hair.

“Oh, you’re completely soaked,” she was saying, holding me out at arm’s length. “Look at you. How on earth did you get here? Did you swim?” She had Mr. Barbour’s long fine nose and his bright, almost goofy clarity of gaze—much the same as when she was a straggle-haired nine year old in school uniform, flushed and struggling with her backpack—only now, when she looked at me, I went blank to see how coldly, impersonally beautiful she’d grown.

“I—” To hide my confusion, I looked back at Toddy, busy with raincoat and flowers. “Sorry, this is just so weird. I mean—you especially” (to Toddy). “How old were you the last time I saw you? Seven? Eight?”

“I know,” said Kitsey, “the little rat, he’s so exactly like a person now, isn’t he? Platt—” Platt had ambled into the living room, poorly shaven, in tweeds and rough Donegal sweater, like some gloomy fisherman in a Synge play—“where does she want us?”

“Mm—” he seemed embarrassed, rubbing his stubbled cheek—“in her quarters, actually. You don’t mind, do you?” he said to me. “Etta’s set up a table back there.”

Kitsey wrinkled her brow. “Oh, rats. Well, it’s okay, I guess. Why don’t you put the dogs in the kitchen? Come on—” seizing me by the hand and dragging me down the hall with a sort of madcap, fluttery, forward-leaning quality—“we have to get you a drink, you’ll need one.” There was something of Andy in her fixity of gaze, also her breathlessness—his asthmatic gape reconfigured, delightfully, into parted lips and a sort of whispery starlet quality. “I was hoping she’d have us in the dining room or at least the kitchen, it’s so gruesome back in her lair—what are you drinking?” she said, turning into the bar off the pantry where glasses and a bucket of ice were set out.

“Some of that Stolichnaya would be great. On the rocks please.”

“Really? Are you sure it’s all right? We none of us drink it—Daddy always ordered this kind”—hoisting Stoli bottle—“because he liked the label… very Cold War… how do you say it again.…”

“Stolichnaya.”

“Very authentic-sounding. Won’t even try. You know,” she said, turning the gooseberry-gray eyes to me, “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“It’s not that bad out.”

“Yes but—” blink blink—“I thought you hated us.”

“Hated you? No.”

“No?” When she laughed, it was fascinating to see Andy’s leukemic wanness—in her—remodeled and prettified, the candyfloss twinkle of a Disney princess. “But I was so awful!”

“I didn’t care.”

“Good.” After a too-long pause, she turned back to the drinks. “We were horrible to you,” she said flatly. “Todd and me.”

“Come on. You two were just little.”

“Yes but—” she bit her lower lip—“we knew better. Especially after what had happened to you. And now… I mean with Daddy and Andy…”

I waited, as it seemed she was trying to formulate a thought, but instead she only took a sip of her wine (white; Pippa drank red) then touched me on the back of the wrist. “Mum’s waiting to see you,” she said. “She’s been so excited all day. Shall we go in?”

“Certainly.” Lightly, lightly, I put my hand at her elbow, as I had seen Mr. Barbour do with guests “of the female persuasion,” and steered her into the hall.

viii.

THE NIGHT WAS A dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening. But despite the continual, ugly scrape of Andy’s absence (Andy and I…? remember when Andy…?) and everything else so strange and shrunken (pot pies at a folding table in Mrs. Barbour’s room?) the oddest part of the evening was my blood-deep, unreasoning sense of returning home. Even Etta, when I’d gone back to the kitchen to say hi, had untied her apron and rushed to hug me: I had the night off but I wanted to stay, I wanted to see you.

Toddy (“It’s Todd now, please”) had risen to his father’s position as Captain of the Table, guiding the conversation with a slightly automatic-seeming but evidently sincere charm, although Mrs. Barbour hadn’t really been interested in talking to anyone but me—about Andy, a little, but mostly about her family’s furniture, a few pieces of which had been purchased from Israel Sack in the 1940s but most of which had come down through her family from colonial times—rising from the table at one point mid-meal and leading me off by the hand to show me a set of chairs and a mahogany lowboy—Queen Anne, Salem Massachusetts—that had been in her mother’s family since the 1760s. (Salem? I thought. Were these Phipps ancestors of hers witch-burners? Or witches themselves? Apart from Andy—cryptic, isolated, self-sufficient, incapable of dishonesty and completely lacking in both malice and charisma—the other Barbours, even Todd, all had something slightly uncanny about them, a watchful, sly amalgam of decorum and mischief that made it all too easy to imagine their forebears gathering in the forest by night, casting off their Puritan garb to frolic by the pagan bonfire.) Kitsey and I hadn’t talked much—we hadn’t been able to, thanks to Mrs. Barbour; but almost every time I’d glanced in her direction I’d been aware of her eyes on me. Platt—voice thick after five (six?) large gin and limes, pulled me aside at the bar after dinner and said: “She’s on antidepressants.”

“Oh?” I said, taken aback.

“Kitsey, I mean. Mommy won’t touch them.”

“Well—” His lowered voice made me uncomfortable, as if he were seeking my opinion or wanting me to weigh in somehow. “I hope they work better for her than they did for me.”

Platt opened his mouth and then seemed to reconsider. “Oh—” reeling back slightly—“I suppose she’s bearing up. But it’s been rough for her. Kits was very close to both of them—closer to Andy I would say than any of us.”

“Oh really?” ‘Close’ would not have been my description of their relationship in childhood, though she more than Andy’s brothers had always been in the background, if only to whine or tease.

Platt sighed—a gin-crocked blast that almost knocked me over. “Yeah. She’s on a leave of absence from Wellesley—not sure if she’ll go back, maybe she’ll take some classes at the New School, maybe she’ll get a job—too hard for her being in Massachusetts, after, you know. They saw an awful lot of each other in Cambridge—she feels rotten, of course, that she didn’t go up to see after Daddy. She was better with Daddy than anyone else but there was a party, she phoned Andy and begged him to go up instead… well.”

“Shit.” I stood appalled at the bar, ice tongs in hand, feeling sick to think of another person ruined by the same poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked my own life.

“Yep,” said Platt, pouring himself another hefty slug of gin. “Rough stuff.”

“Well, she shouldn’t blame herself. She can’t. That’s crazy. I mean,” I said, unnerved by the watery, dead-eye look Platt was giving me over the top of his drink, “if she’d been on that boat she’d be the one dead now, not him.”

“No she wouldn’t,” Platt said flatly. “Kits is a crackerjack sailor. Good reflexes, good head on her shoulders ever since she was tiny. Andy—Andy was thinking about his orbit-orbit resonances or whatever computational shite he was doing back at home on his laptop and he spazzed out in the pinch. Completely fucking typical. Anyway,” he continued calmly—not appearing to notice my astonishment at this remark—“she’s a bit at loose ends right now, as I’m sure you’ll understand. You should ask her to dinner or something, it would thrill Mommy senseless.”

ix.

BY THE TIME I left, after eleven, the rain had stopped and the streets were glassy with water and Kenneth the night man (same heavy eyes and malt-liquor smell, bigger in the stomach but otherwise unchanged) was on the door. “Don’t be a stranger, eh?” he said, which was the same thing he’d always said when I was a little kid and my mother came to pick me up after sleepovers—same torpid voice, just a half beat too slow. Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.

Though it had pervaded every aspect of the evening like a simmering toxin, Andy’s death was still too huge to grasp—though the strange thing too was how inevitable it seemed in hindsight, how weirdly predictable, almost as if he’d suffered from some fatal inborn defect. Even as a six year old—dreamy, stumbling, asthmatic, hopeless—the slur of misfortune and early demise had been perfectly visible about his rickety little person, marking him off like a cosmic kick me sign pinned to his back.

And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. Andy had been good to me when I had no one else. The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

x.

AN EVERY-OTHER-DAY HABIT WAS still a habit, as Jerome had often reminded me, particularly when I didn’t stick too faithfully to the every-other-day part. New York was full of all kinds of daily subway-and-crowd horror; the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench; and my dad’s painkillers, which had started as relief for my nigh-on uncontrollable anxiety, provided such a rapturous escape that soon I’d started taking them as a treat: first an only-on-weekends treat, then an after-school treat, then the purring aetherous bliss that welcomed me whenever I was unhappy or bored (which was, unfortunately, quite a lot); at which time I made the earth-shaking discovery that the tiny pills I’d ignored because they were so insignificant and weak-looking were literally ten times as strong as the Vicodins and Percocets I’d been downing by the handful—Oxycontins, 80s, strong enough to kill someone without a tolerance, which person by that point was definitely not me; and when at last my endless-seeming trove of oral narcotics ran out, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I’d been forced to start buying on the street. Even dealers were censorious of the sums I spent, thousands of dollars every few weeks; Jack (Jerome’s predecessor) had scolded me about it repeatedly even as he sat in the filthy beanbag chair from which he conducted his business, counting my hundreds fresh from the teller’s window. “Might as well light it on fire, brah.” Heroin was cheaper—fifteen bucks a bag. Even if I didn’t bang it—Jack, laboriously, had done the math for me on the inside of a Quarter Pounder wrapper—I would be looking at a much more reasonable expenditure, something in the neighborhood of four hundred and fifty dollars a month.

But heroin I only did on offer—a bump here, a bump there. As much as I loved it, and craved it constantly, I never bought it. There would never be a reason to stop. With pharmaceuticals on the other hand, the expense was a helpful factor since it not only kept my habit in control but provided an excellent reason for me to go downstairs and sell furniture every day. It was a myth you couldn’t function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me—jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy—pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning. Booze made people sloppy and unfocused: all you had to do was look at Platt Barbour sitting around at J. G. Melon at three o’clock in the afternoon feeling sorry for himself. As for my dad: even after he’d sobered up he’d retained the faint clumsiness of a punch-drunk boxer, butterfingered with a phone or a kitchen timer, wet brain people called it, the mental damage from hard-core drinking, neurological stuff that never went away. He’d been seriously screwy in his reasoning, never able to hold down any kind of a long-term job. Me—well, maybe I didn’t have a girlfriend or even any non-drug friends to speak of but I worked twelve hours a day, nothing stressed me out, I wore Thom Browne suits, socialized smilingly with people I couldn’t stand, swam twice a week and played tennis on occasion, stayed away from sugar and processed foods. I was relaxed and personable, I was as thin as a rail, I did not indulge in self pity or negative thinking of any kind, I was an excellent salesman—everyone said so—and business was so good that what I spent on drugs, I scarcely missed.

Not that I hadn’t had a few lapses—unpredictable glides where things flashed out of control for a few eerie blinks like an ice-skid on a bridge and I saw just how badly things could go, how quick. It wasn’t a matter of money—more a matter of escalating doses, forgetting I’d sold pieces or forgetting to send bills, Hobie looking at me funny when I’d overdone things and come downstairs a bit too glassy and out-of-it. Dinner parties, clients… sorry, were you talking to me, did you just say something? no, just a little tired, coming down with something, maybe I’ll go to bed a little early, folks. I’d inherited my mother’s light-colored eyes, which short of sunglasses at gallery openings made it pretty much impossible to hide pinned pupils—not that anybody in Hobie’s crowd seemed to notice, except (sometimes) a few of the younger, more with-it gay guys—“You’re a bad boy,” the bodybuilder boyfriend of a client had whispered into my ear at a formal dinner, freaking me out thoroughly. And I dreaded going up to the Accounts department at one of the auction houses because one of the guys there—older, British, an addict himself—was always hitting on me. Of course it happened with women too: one of the girls I slept with—the fashion intern—I’d met in the small-dog run in Washington Square with Popchik, it being rapidly apparent to both of us after thirty seconds on the park bench that we shared the same condition. Whenever things started getting out of hand I’d dialed it back and I’d even quit altogether a number of times—the longest, for a six-week stretch. Not everyone was able to do that, I told myself. It was simply a matter of discipline. But at this point, in the spring of my twenty-sixth year, I had not been more than three days clean in a row in over three years.

I’d worked out how to quit for good, if I wanted to: steep taper, seven day timetable, plenty of loperamide; magnesium supplements and free form amino acids to replenish my burnt-out neurotransmitters; protein powder, electrolyte powder, melatonin (and weed) for sleep as well as various herbal tinctures and potions my fashion intern swore by, licorice root and milk thistle, nettles and hops and black cumin seed oil, valerian root and skullcap extract. I had a shopping bag from the health food store with all the stuff I needed, which had been sitting on the floor at the back of my closet for a year and a half. All of it was mostly untouched except the weed, which was long gone. The problem (as I’d learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you’d so foolishly abandoned.

That night when I got back from the Barbours’ I swallowed a long-acting morphine tablet, as was my habit whenever I happened to come home in a remorseful mood and feeling I needed to straighten up: low dose, less than half of what I needed to feel anything, just enough on top of the booze to keep me from being too agitated to sleep. The next morning, losing heart (for, usually, waking up sick at this phase of the kick plan, I very quickly lost my nerve), I crushed thirty and then sixty milligrams of Roxicodone on the marble top of the nightstand, inhaled it through a cut straw, then unwilling to flush the rest of the pills (well over two thousand dollars’ worth) got up, dressed, flushed my nose with saline spray, and, after squirrelling away a few more of the long-acting morphs in case the “withdraws” as Jerome called them got too uncomfortable, slipped the Redbreast Flake tin in my pocket and—at six a.m., before Hobie awoke—took a cab up to the storage facility.

The storage facility—open twenty-four hours—was like a Mayan burial complex, save for an empty-eyed clerk watching TV at the front desk. Nervously I walked to the elevators. I had set foot on the premises only three times in seven years—always with dread, and then never venturing upstairs to the locker itself but only executing a quick duck in the lobby to pay the rent, in cash: two years’ rent at a time, the maximum allowed by state law.

The freight elevator required a key card, which fortunately I’d remembered to bring. Unfortunately, it failed to engage properly; and—for several minutes, hoping that the desk clerk was too out-of-it to notice—I stood in the open elevator trying to finesse the card-slide until the steel doors hissed and slid shut. Feeling jittery and observed, doing my best to avert my face from my fuzzed-out shadow on the monitor, I rode to the eighth floor, 8D 8E 8F 8G, cinderblock walls and rows of faceless doors like some pre-fab Eternity where there was no color but beige and no dust would settle for the rest of time.

8R, two keys and a combination padlock, 7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas. The locker creaked with a metallic squeal. There was the shopping bag from Paragon Sporting Goods—tag of the pup tent dangling, King Kanopy, $43.99, just as crisp and new-looking as the day I’d bought it eight years before. And though the texture of the pillowcase peeking out of the bag threw me an ugly short-circuit, like an electric pop in the temple, more than anything I was struck by the smell—for the plastic, pool-liner odor of masking tape had grown overwhelming from being shut up in such a small space, an emotionally evocative odor I hadn’t remembered or thought of in years, a distinct polyvinyl reek that threw me straight back to childhood and my bedroom back in Vegas: chemicals and new carpet, falling asleep and waking up every morning with the painting taped behind my headboard and the same adhesive smell in my nostrils. I had not properly unwrapped it in years; just to get it open would take ten or fifteen minutes with an X-Acto knife but as I stood there overwhelmed (slippage and confusion, almost like the time I’d waked, sleepwalking, in the door of Pippa’s bedroom, I didn’t know what I’d been thinking or what I ought to do) I was transfixed with an urge amounting almost to delirium: for to have it only a handbreadth away again, after so long, was to find myself suddenly on some kind of dangerous, yearning edge I hadn’t even known was there. In the shadows the mummified bundle—what little was visible—had a ragged, poignant, oddly personal look, less like an inanimate object than some poor creature bound and helpless in the dark, unable to cry out and dreaming of rescue. I hadn’t been so close to the painting since I was fifteen years old, and for a moment it was all I could do to keep from snatching it up and tucking it under my arm and walking out with it. But I could feel the security cameras hissing at my back; and—quick spasmodic movement—I dropped my Redbreast Flake tin in the Bloomingdale’s bag and shut the door and turned the key. “Just flush them if you ever really want to kick,” Jerome’s extremely hot girlfriend Mya had advised me, “else your ass is going to be up at that storage unit at two in the morning,” but as I walked out the door, lightheaded and buzzed, the drugs were the last thing on my mind. Just the sight of the bundled painting, lonely and pathetic, had scrambled me top to bottom, as if a satellite signal from the past had burst in and jammed all other transmissions.

xi.

THOUGH MY (SOMETIME) DAYS off had kept my dose from escalating too much, the withdrawals got uncomfortable sooner than I’d expected and even with the pills I’d saved to taper I spent the next days feeling pretty low: too sick to eat, unable to stop sneezing. “Just a cold,” I told Hobie. “I’m fine.”

“Nope, if you’ve got a bad stomach, it’s the flu,” said Hobie, grimly, just back from Bigelow with more Benadryl and Imodium, plus crackers and ginger ale from Jefferson Market. “There’s not a reason on the earth—bless you! If I were you, I’d get myself to the doctor and no fuss about it.”

“Look, it’s just a bug.” Hobie had an iron constitution; whenever he came down with anything himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.

“Maybe, but you’ve eaten hardly a bite in days. There’s no point scraping away down here and making yourself miserable.”

But working took my mind off my discomfort. The chills came in ten minute spasms and then I was sweating. Runny nose, runny eyes, startling electrical twitches. The weather had turned, the shop was full of people, murmur and drift; the trees flowering on the streets outside were white pops of delirium. My hands were steady at the register, for the most part, but inside I was squirming. “Your first rodeo isn’t the bad one,” Mya had told me. “It’s around the third or fourth you’ll start wishing you were dead.” My stomach flopped and seethed like a fish on the hook; aches, jumpy muscles, I couldn’t lie still or get comfortable in bed and nights, after I closed the shop, I sat red-faced and sneezing in a tub that was hot almost beyond endurance, a glass of ginger ale and mostly melted ice pressed to my temple, while Popchik—too stiff and creaky to stand with his paws on the edge of the tub, as he had once liked to do—sat on the bath mat and watched me anxiously.

None of this was as bad as I’d feared. But what I hadn’t expected to hit even a quarter so hard was what Mya called “the mental stuff,” which was unendurable, a sopping black curtain of horror. Mya, Jerome, my fashion intern—most of my drug friends had been at it longer than I had; and when they sat around high and talking about what it was like to quit (which was apparently the only time they could stand to talk about quitting), everyone had warned me repeatedly that the physical symptoms weren’t the rough part, that even with a baby habit like mine the depression would be like “nothing I’d ever dreamed” and I’d smiled politely as I leaned to the mirror and thought: wanna bet?

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin. Whatever reason I’d had for storing the painting all those years ago—for keeping it in the first place—for taking it out of the museum even—I now couldn’t remember. Time had blurred it. It was part of a world that didn’t exist—or, rather, it was as if I lived in two worlds, and the storage locker was part of the imaginary world rather than the real one. It was easy to forget about the storage locker, to pretend it wasn’t there; I’d half expected to open it to find the painting gone, although I knew it wouldn’t be, it would still be shut away in the dark and waiting for me forever as long as I left it there, like the body of a person I’d murdered and stuck in a cellar somewhere.

On the eighth morning I woke sweat-drenched after four hours’ bad sleep, hollowed to the core and as despairing as I’d ever felt in my life, but steady enough to walk Popchik around the block and come up to the kitchen and eat the convalescent’s breakfast—poached eggs and English muffin—that Hobie pressed on me.

“And about time too.” He’d finished his own breakfast and was unhurriedly clearing the dishes. “White as a lily—I’d be too, a week of soda crackers and nothing but. A bit of sunshine is what you are in need of, a bit of air. You and the pup should take yourselves out for a good long stroll.”

“Right.” But I had no intention of going anywhere except straight down to the shop, where it was quiet and dark.

“I haven’t bothered you, you’ve been so low—” his back-to-business voice, along with the friendly tilt of his head, made me look away uncomfortably and stare into my plate—“but when you were out of commission you had some calls on the home line. ”

“Oh yeah?” I’d switched my cell phone off and left it in a drawer; I hadn’t even looked at it for fear of finding messages from Jerome.

“Awfully nice girl—” he consulted the notepad, peering over the top of his glasses—“Daisy Horsley?” (Daisy Horsley was Carole Lombard’s real name.) “Said she was busy with work” (code for Fiancé around, Stay away) “and to text-message her if you wanted to get in touch.”

“Okay, great, thanks.” Daisy’s big important National Cathedral wedding, if it actually went off, would be happening in June, after which she would be moving to DC with the BF, as she called him.

“Mrs. Hildesley called too, about the cherrywood high-chest—not the bonnet top, the other. Countered with a good offer—eight thousand—I accepted, hope you don’t mind, that chest isn’t worth three thousand if you ask me. Also—this fellow called twice—a Lucius Reeve?”

I nearly choked on my coffee—the first I’d been able to stomach in days—but Hobie didn’t seem to notice.

“Left a number. Said you would know what it was about. Oh—” he sat down, suddenly, drummed the table with his palm—“and one of the Barbour children phoned!”

“Kitsey?”

“No—” he took a gulp of his tea—“Platt? Does that sound right?”

xii.

THE THOUGHT OF DEALING with Lucius Reeve, unmedicated, was just about enough to send me back to the storage unit. As for the Barbours: I wasn’t all that anxious to speak to Platt either, but to my relief it was Kitsey who answered.

“We’re going to have a dinner for you,” she said immediately.

“Excuse me?”

“Didn’t we tell you? Oh—maybe I should have phoned! Anyway, Mum loved seeing you so much. She wants to know when you’re coming back.”

“Well—”

“Do you need an invitation?”

“Well, sort of.”

“You sound weird.”

“Sorry, I’ve had the, uh, flu.”

“Really? Oh my goodness. We’ve all been perfectly fine, I don’t think you can have caught it from us—sorry?” she said to an indistinct voice in the background. “Here… Platt’s trying to take the phone away. Talk to you soon.”

“Hi, brother,” said Platt when he got on the line.

“Hi,” I said, rubbing my temple, trying not to think how weird it was for Platt to be calling me brother.

“I—” Footsteps; a door shutting. “I want to cut right to the chase.”

“Yes?”

“Matter of some furniture,” he said cordially. “Any chance you could sell some of it for us?”

“Sure.” I sat down. “Which pieces is she thinking of selling?”

“Well,” said Platt, “the thing is, I would really not like to bother Mommy with this, if possible. Not sure she’s up for it, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I mean, she’s just got so much stuff… things up in Maine and out in storage that she’ll never look at again, you know? Not just furniture. Silver, a coin collection… some ceramics that I think are supposed to be a big deal but, I’ll be frank, look like shit. I don’t mean figuratively. I mean like literal clods of cow shit.”

“I guess my question would be, why would you want to sell it.”

“Well, there’s no need to sell it,” he said hastily. “But the thing is, she gets so tenacious about some of this old nonsense.”

I rubbed my eye. “Platt—”

“I mean, it’s just sitting there. All this junk. Much of which is mine, the coins and some old guns and things, because Gaga left them to me. I mean—” crisply—“I’ll be frank with you. I have another guy I’ve been dealing with, but honestly I’d rather work with you. You know us, you know Mommy, and I know you’ll give me a fair price.”

“Right,” I said uncertainly. There followed an expectant, endless-seeming pause—as if we were reading from a script and he was waiting with confidence for me to deliver the rest of my line—and I was wondering how to put him off when my eye fell on Lucius Reeve’s name and number dashed out in Hobie’s open, expressive hand.

“Well, um, it’s very complicated,” I said. “I mean, I would have to see the things in person before I could really say anything. Right, right—” he was trying to put in something about photos—“but photographs aren’t good enough. Also I don’t deal with coins, or the kind of ceramics you’re talking about either. With coins especially, you really need to go to a dealer who does nothing but. But in the meantime,” I said—he was still trying to talk over me—“if it’s a question of raising a few thousand bucks? I think I can help you out.”

That shut him up all right. “Yes?”

I reached under my glasses to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Here’s the thing. I’m trying to establish a provenance on a piece—it’s a real nightmare, guy won’t leave me alone, I’ve tried to buy the piece back from him, he seems intent on raising a stink. For what reason I don’t know. Anyway it would help me out, I think, if I could produce a bill of sale proving I’d bought this piece from another collector.”

“Well, Mommy thinks you hung the moon,” he said sourly. “I’m sure she’ll do whatever you want.”

“Well, the thing is—” Hobie was downstairs with the router going, but I lowered my voice just the same—“we’re speaking in complete confidence, of course?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t actually see any reason to involve your mother at all. I can write out a bill of sale, and back-date it. But if the guy has any questions, and he may, what I’d like to do is refer him to you—give him your number, eldest son, mother recently bereaved, blah blah blah—”

“Who is this guy?”

“His name is Lucius Reeve. Ever heard of him?”

“Nope.”

“Well—just so you know, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he knows your mother, or has met her at some point.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. Mommy hardly sees anyone these days.” A pause; I could hear him lighting a cigarette. “So—this guy phones.”

I described the chest-on-chest. “Happy to email a photo. The distinctive feature is the phoenix carving on the top. All you need to tell him, if he calls, is that the piece was up at your place in Maine until your mother sold it to me a couple of years back. She will have bought it from a dealer out of business you see, some old guy who passed away a few years back, can’t remember the name, darn, you’ll have to check. Though if he presses—” it was astonishing, I’d learned, how a few tea stains and a few minutes of crisping in the oven, at low temperatures, could further age the blank receipts in the 1960s receipt book I’d bought at the flea market—“it’ll be easy enough for me to provide that bill of sale for you too.”

“I got it.”

“Right. Anyway—” I was groping around for a cigarette which I didn’t have—“if you take care of things on your end—you know, if you commit to backing me up if the guy does call—I’ll give you ten percent on the price of the piece.”

“Which is how much?”

“Seven thousand dollars.”

Platt laughed—an oddly happy and carefree-sounding laugh. “Daddy always did say that all you antiques fellows were crooked.”

xiii.

I HUNG UP THE phone, feeling goofy with relief. Mrs. Barbour had her share of second and third rate antiques, but she also owned so many important pieces that it disturbed me to think of Platt selling things out from under her with no clue what he was doing. As for being “over a barrel”—if anyone gave off the aroma of being embroiled in some sort of ongoing and ill-defined trouble, it was Platt. Though I had not thought of his expulsion in years, the circumstances had been so diligently hushed up that it seemed likely he’d done something fairly serious, something that in less controlled circumstances might have involved the police: which in a weird way reassured me, in terms of trusting him to collect his cash and keep his mouth shut. Besides—it gladdened my heart to think of it—if anyone alive could high-hand or intimidate Lucius Reeve it was Platt: a world-class snob and bully in his own right.

“Mr. Reeve?” I said courteously when he picked up the phone.

“Lucius, please.”

“Well then, Lucius.” His voice had made me go cold with anger; but knowing I had Platt in my corner made me more cocky than I had reason to be. “Returning your call. What’s on your mind?”

“Probably not what you think,” came the swift reply.

“No?” I said, easily enough, though his tone took me aback. “Well then. Fill me in.”

“I think you’d probably rather I do that in person.”

“Fine. How about downtown,” I said quickly, “since you were good enough to take me to your club last time?”

xiv.

THE RESTAURANT I CHOSE was in Tribeca—far enough downtown that I didn’t have to worry too much about running into Hobie or any of his friends, and with a young enough crowd (I hoped) to throw Reeve off-balance. Noise, lights, conversation, relentless press of bodies: with my fresh, un-blunted senses the smells were overwhelming, wine and garlic and perfume and sweat, sizzling platters of lemongrass chicken hurried out of the kitchen, and the turquoise banquettes, the bright orange dress of the girl next to me, were like industrial chemicals squirted directly into my eyes. My stomach boiled with nerves, and I was chewing an antacid from the roll in my pocket when I looked up and saw the beautiful tattooed giraffe of a hostess—blank and indolent—pointing Lucius Reeve indifferently to my table.

“Well, hello,” I said, not standing to greet him. “How nice to see you.”

He was casting his glance round in distaste. “Do we really have to sit here?”

“Why not?” I said blandly. I’d deliberately chosen a table in the middle of traffic—not so loud we had to shout, but loud enough to be off-putting; moreover, had left him the chair that would put the sun in his eyes.

“This is completely ridiculous.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. If you’re not happy here…” I nodded at the self-absorbed young giraffe, back at her post and swaying absently.

Conceding the point—the restaurant was packed—he sat down. Though he was tight and elegant in his speech and gestures, and his suit was modishly cut for a man his age, his demeanor made me think of a puffer fish—or, alternately, a cartoon strongman or Mountie blown up by a bicycle pump: cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.

After the food arrived—Asian fusion, with lots of crispy flying buttresses of wonton and frizzled scallion, from his expression not much to his liking—I waited for him to work around to whatever he wanted to tell me. The carbon of the fake bill of sale, which I’d written out on a blank page in one of Welty’s old receipt books and backdated five years, was in my breast pocket, but I didn’t intend to produce it until I had to.

He had asked for a fork; from his slightly alarming plate of “scorpion prawn” he pulled out several architectural filaments of vegetable matter and laid them to the side. Then he looked at me. His small sharp eyes were bright blue in his ham-pink face. “I know about the museum,” he said.

“Know what?” I said, after a waver of surprise.

“Oh, please. You know very well what I’m talking about.”

I felt a jab of fear at the base of my spine, though I took care to keep my eyes on my plate: white rice and stir-fried vegetables, the blandest thing on the menu. “Well, if you don’t mind. I’d rather not talk about it. It’s a painful subject.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

He said this in such a taunting and provocative tone I glanced up sharply. “My mother died, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, she did.” Long pause. “Welton Blackwell did too.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I mean. Written about in the papers, for heaven’s sake. Matter of public record. But—” he darted the tip of his tongue across his upper lip—“here’s what I wonder. Why did James Hobart go about repeating that tale to everyone in town? You turning up on his doorstep with his partner’s ring? Because if he’d just kept his mouth shut, no one would have ever made the connection.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You know very well what I mean. You have something that I want. That a lot of people want, actually.”

I stopped eating, chopsticks halfway to my mouth. My immediate, unthinking impulse was to get up and walk out of the restaurant but almost as quickly I realized how stupid that would be.

Reeve leaned back in his chair. “You’re not saying anything.”

“That’s because you’re not making any sense,” I rejoined sharply, putting down the chopsticks, and for a flash—something in the quickness of the gesture—my thoughts went to my father. How would he handle this?

“You seem very perturbed. I wonder why.”

“I guess I don’t see what this has to do with the chest-on-chest. Because I was under the impression that was why we were here.”

“You know very well what I’m talking about.”

“No—” incredulous laugh, authentic-sounding—“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Do you want me to spell it out? Right here? All right, I will. You were with Welton Blackwell and his niece, you were all three of you in Gallery 32 and you—” slow, teasing smile—“were the only person to walk out of there. And we know what else walked out of Gallery 32, don’t we?”

It was as if all the blood had drained to my feet. Around us, everywhere, clatter of silverware, laughter, echo of voices bouncing off the tiled walls.

“You see?” said Reeve smugly. He had resumed eating. “Very simple. I mean surely,” he said, in a chiding tone, putting down his fork, “surely you didn’t think no one would put it together? You took the painting, and when you brought the ring to Blackwell’s partner you gave him the painting too, for what reason I don’t know—yes, yes,” he said, as I tried to talk over him, shifting his chair slightly, bringing up his hand to shade his eyes from the sun—“you end up James Hobart’s ward for Christ’s sake, you end up his ward, and he’s been farming that little souvenir of yours out hither and yon and using it to raise money ever since.”

Raise money? Hobie? “Farming it out?” I said; and then, remembering myself: “Farming out what?”

“Look, this ‘what’s going on?’ act of yours is beginning to get a bit tiresome.”

“No, I mean it. What the hell are you talking about?”

Reeve pursed his lips, looking very pleased with himself.

“It’s an exquisite painting,” he said. “A beautiful little anomaly—absolutely unique. I’ll never forget the first time I saw it in the Mauritshuis… really quite different from any work there, or any other work of its day if you ask me. Difficult to believe it was painted in the 1600s. One of the greatest small paintings of all time, wouldn’t you agree? What was it”—he paused, mockingly—“what was it that the collector said—you know, the art critic, the Frenchman, who rediscovered it? Found it buried in some nobleman’s store room back in the 1890s, and from then on made ‘desperate efforts’ ”—inserting quotations with his fingers—“to acquire it. ‘Don’t forget, I must have this little goldfinch at any price.’ But of course that’s not the quote I mean. I mean the famous one. Surely you must know it yourself. After all this time, you must be very familiar with the painting and its history.”

I put down my napkin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was nothing I could do but hold my ground and keep saying it. Deny, deny, deny, as my dad—in his one big movie turn as the mob lawyer—had advised his client in the scene right before he got shot.

But they saw me.

Musta been somebody else.

There are three eyewitnesses.

Don’t care. They’re all mistaken. “It wasn’t me.”

They’ll be bringing up people to testify against me all day long.

Fine then. Let them.

Someone had pulled a window blind, throwing our table into tiger-striped shadow. Reeve, eyeing me smugly, speared a bright orange prawn and ate it.

“I mean, I’ve been trying to think,” he said. “Maybe you can help me. What other painting of its size would be anywhere near its class? Maybe that lovely little Velázquez, you know, the garden of the Villa Medici. Of course rarity doesn’t even enter into it.”

“Tell me again, what are we talking about? Because I’m really not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Well, keep it up if you want,” he said affably, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “You’re not fooling anybody. Although I have to say it’s pretty bloody irresponsible to entrust it to these goons to handle and pawn around.”

At my astonishment, which was perfectly genuine, I saw a blink of what might have been surprise cross his face. But just as quickly it was gone.

“People like that can’t be entrusted with something so valuable,” he said, chewing busily. “Street thugs—ignoramuses.”

“You are making absolutely no sense,” I snapped.

“No?” He put down the fork. “Well. What I’m offering—if you ever care to understand what I’m talking about—is to buy the thing off you.”

My tinnitus—old echo of the explosion—had kicked in, as it often did in moments of stress, a high-pitched drone like incoming aircraft.

“Shall I name a figure? Well. I think half a million should do nicely, considering that I’m in a position to make a phone call this moment—” he removed his cell phone from his pocket and put it on the table beside his water glass—“and put this enterprise of yours to a stop.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Look. How many times can I say it? I really don’t know what you’re thinking but—”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I’m thinking, Theodore. I’m thinking conservation, preservation. Concerns which clearly haven’t been paramount for you or the people you’re working with. Surely you’ll realize it’s the wisest thing to do—for you, and for the painting as well. Obviously you’ve made a fortune but it’s irresponsible, wouldn’t you agree, to keep it bouncing around in such precarious conditions?”

But my unfeigned confusion at this seemed to serve me well. After a weird, off-beat lag, he reached into the breast pocket of his suit—

“Is everything okay?” said our male-model waiter, appearing suddenly.

“Yes yes, fine.”

The waiter disappeared, sliding across the room to talk to the beautiful hostess. Reeve, from his pocket, took out several sheets of folded paper, which he pushed across the tablecloth to me.

It was a print-out of a Web page. Quickly I scanned it: FBI… international agencies… botched raid… investigation…

“What the fuck is this?” I said, so loudly that a woman at the next table jumped. Reeve—involved in his lunch—said nothing.

“No, I mean it. What does this have to do with me?” Scanning the page irritably—wrongful death suit… Carmen Huidobro, housekeeper from Miami temp agency, shot dead by agents who stormed the home—I was about to ask again what anything in this article had to do with me when I stopped cold.

An Old Master painting once believed destroyed (The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius, 1654) was employed as rumored collateral in the deal with Contreras, but unfortunately was not recovered in the raid on the South Florida compound. Though stolen artworks are often used as negotiable instruments to supply venture capital for drug trafficking and arms deals, the DEA has defended itself against criticism in what the art-crimes division of the FBI has called a “bungled” and “amateurish” handling of the matter, issuing a public statement apologizing for the accidental death of Mrs. Huidobro while also explaining that their agents are not trained to identify or recover stolen artwork. “In pressured situations such as this,” said Turner Stark, spokesman for the DEA press office, “our top priority will always be the safety of agents and civilians as we secure the prosecution of major violations of America’s controlled substance laws.” The ensuing furor, especially in the wake of the suit over Mrs. Huidobro’s wrongful death, has resulted in a call for greater cooperation between federal agencies. “All it would have taken was one phone call,” said Hofstede Von Moltke, spokesman for the art-crimes division of Interpol in a press conference yesterday in Zurich. “But these people weren’t thinking about anything but making their arrest and getting their conviction, and that’s unfortunate because now this painting has gone underground, it may be decades until it’s seen again.”

The trafficking of looted paintings and sculptures is estimated to be a six-billion-dollar industry worldwide. Though the sighting of the painting was unconfirmed, detectives believe that the rare Dutch masterwork has already been whisked out of the country, possibly to Hamburg, where it has likely passed hands at a fraction of the many millions it would raise at auction.…

I put down the paper. Reeve, who had stopped eating, was regarding me with a tight feline smile. Maybe it was the primness of that tiny smile in his pear-shaped face but unexpectedly I burst out laughing: the pent-up laughter of terror and relief, just as Boris and I had laughed when the fat mall cop chasing us (and about to catch us) slipped on wet tile in the food court and fell smack on his ass.

“Yes?” said Reeve. He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock. “Found something that amuses you?”

But all I could do was shake my head and look out across the restaurant. “Man,” I said, wiping my eyes, “I don’t know what to say. Clearly you are delusional or—I don’t know.”

Reeve, to his credit, did not look perturbed, though clearly he wasn’t pleased.

“No, really,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. But this is the most absurd fucking thing I have ever seen.”

Reeve folded his napkin and put it down. “You’re a liar,” he said pleasantly. “You may think you can bluff your way out of this, but you can’t.”

“Wrongful-death suit? Florida compound? What? You actually think this has something to do with me?”

Reeve regarded me fiercely with his tiny, bright blue eyes. “Be reasonable. I’m giving you a way out.”

“Way out?” Miami, Hamburg, even the place names made me burst into an incredulous huff of laughter. “Way out of what?”

Reeve blotted his lips with his napkin. “I’m delighted you find it so amusing,” he said smoothly. “Since I’m fully prepared to phone this gentleman at the art-crimes division they mention and tell him exactly what I know about you and James Hobart and this scheme you’re running together. What would you say to that?”

I threw down the paper, pushed back my chair. “I would say, go right ahead and phone him. Be my guest. Whenever you want to talk about the other matter, call me.”

xv.

MOMENTUM SPUN ME OUT of the restaurant so fast I hardly noticed where I was going; but as soon as I was three or four blocks away I began to shake so violently that I had to stop in the grimy little park just south of Canal Street and sit on a bench, hyperventilating, head between my knees, the armpits of my Turnbull and Asser suit drenched with sweat, looking (I knew, to the surly Jamaican nannies, the old Italians fanning themselves with newspapers and eyeing me suspiciously) like some coked-out junior trader who’d pressed the wrong button and lost ten million.

There was a mom-and-pop drugstore across the street. Once my breathing had settled I walked over—feeling clammy and isolated in the mild-hearted spring breeze—and bought a Pepsi from the cold case and walked away without taking my change and went back to the leaf shade of the park, the soot-dusted bench. Pigeons aloft and beating. Traffic roaring past to the tunnel, other boroughs, other cities, malls and parkways, vast impersonal streams of interstate commerce. There was a great, seductive loneliness in the hum, a summons almost, like the call of the sea, and for the first time I understood the impulse that had driven my dad to cash out his bank account, pick up his shirts from the cleaners, gas up the car, and leave town without a word. Sunbaked highways, twirled dials on the radio, grain silos and exhaust fumes, vast tracts of land unrolling like a secret vice.

Inevitably my thoughts went to Jerome. He lived way up on Adam Clayton Powell, a few blocks from the last stop on the 3 line, but there was a bar called Brother J’s where we sometimes met on 110th: a workingman’s dive with Bill Withers on the jukebox and a sticky floor, career alcoholics slumped over their third bourbon at two p.m. But Jerome did not sell pharmaceuticals in increments of less than a thousand dollars and though I knew he would be perfectly glad to let me have a few bags of smack it seemed like a lot less trouble if I just went ahead and took a cab straight down to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Old lady with a Chihuahua; little kids squabbling over a Popsicle. Up above Canal streamed a remote delirium of sirens, a formal offstage note that clashed with the ringing in my ears: something of mechanical warfare about it, sustained drone of incoming missiles.

With my hands pressed over my ears (which didn’t help the tinnitus at all—if anything, amplified it) I sat very still and tried to think. My childish machinations about the chest-on-chest now struck me as ridiculous—I would simply have to go to Hobie and admit what I’d done: not much fun, pretty shitty in fact, but better if he heard it from me. How he would react I couldn’t imagine; antiques were all I knew, I’d have a hard time getting another job in sales but I was just handy enough to find a place in a workshop if I had to, gilding frames or cutting bobbins; restorations didn’t pay well but so few people knew how to repair antiques to any kind of decent standard that someone was sure to take me on. As for the article: I was confused by what I’d read, almost as if I’d walked in on the middle of the wrong movie. On one level it was clear enough: some enterprising crook had faked my goldfinch (in terms of size and technique, not all that difficult a piece to fake) and the phony was floating around somewhere being fronted as collateral in drug deals and mis-identified by various clueless drug lords and federal agents. But no matter how fanciful or off-base the story, how lacking in relevance to the painting or me, the connection Reeve had made was real. Who knew how many people Hobie had told about me showing up at his house? or how many people those people had told? But so far no one, not even Hobie, had made the connection that Welty’s ring put me in the gallery with the painting. This was the crux of the biscuit, as my father would have said. This was the story that would get me put in jail. The French art thief who’d panicked, who’d burned a lot of the paintings he’d stolen (Cranach, Watteau, Corot) had gotten only twenty-six months in prison. But that was France, only shortly after 9/11; and, under the new rubric of federal anti-terrorism laws, the museum thefts carried an additional, more serious charge of “looting of cultural artifacts.” Penalties had grown much stiffer, in America particularly. And my personal life didn’t stand a lot of scrutiny. Even if I was lucky I would be looking at five to ten years.

Which—if I was honest—I deserved. How had I ever thought I could keep it hidden? I’d meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown made me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.

xvi.

“HOBIE,” I SAID, “I’M in a jam.”

He glanced up from the Japaned chest he was retouching: roosters and cranes, golden pagodas on black. “Can I help?” He was outlining a crane’s wing with water-based acrylic—very different from the shellac-based original, but the first rule of restorations, as he’d taught me early on, was that you never did what you couldn’t reverse.

“Actually, the thing is. I’ve sort of gotten you in a jam. Inadvertently.”

“Well—” the line of his brush did not waver—“if you told Barbara Guibbory we’d help with that home she’s decorating in Rhinebeck, you’re on your own. ‘Colors of the Chakras.’ I never heard of such a thing.”

“No—” I tried to think of something funny or easy to say—Mrs. Guibbory, aptly nicknamed “Trippy,” was usually a wellspring of comedy—but my mind had gone completely blank. “Afraid not.”

Hobie straightened up, stuck the paintbrush behind one ear, blotted his forehead with a wildly patterned handkerchief, psychedelic purple like an African violet had thrown up on it, something he’d found probably in a crazy old lady’s effects at one of his sales upstate. “What’s going on, then?” he said reasonably, reaching for one of the saucers he mixed his paint in. Now that I was in my twenties, the generational formality between us had vanished, so that we were collegial in a way it was difficult to imagine being with my dad had he lived—me always on edge, trying to figure out how fucked-up he was and what my percentage point was of trying to get any kind of straight answer.

“I—” I reached to make sure that the chair behind me wasn’t sticky before I sat. “Hobie, I’ve made a stupid mistake. No, a really stupid one,” I said, at his good-natured, dismissive gesture.

“Well—” he was dripping raw umber into the saucer with an eyedropper—“I don’t know about stupid, but I can tell you it wholly ruined my day last week to see that drill bit coming through Mrs. Wasserman’s tabletop. That was a good William and Mary table. I know she won’t see where I’ve patched the hole but believe me it was a bad moment.”

His half-attentive manner made it worse. Quickly, with a sort of sick, dreamlike glide, I rushed headlong into the matter of Lucius Reeve and the chest-on-chest, leaving out Platt and the back-dated receipt in my breast pocket. Once I got started it was like I couldn’t stop, like the only thing to do was keep talking and talking like some highway killer droning on under a light bulb at a rural police station. At some point Hobie stopped working, stuck the paintbrush behind his ear; he listened steadily, with a sort of heavy-browed, Arctic, ptarmigan-settling-into-itself look that I knew well. Then he plucked the sable brush from behind his ear and dabbled it in some water before he wiped it on a piece of flannel.

“Theo,” he said, putting up a hand, closing his eyes—I’d stalled, going on and on about the uncashed check, dead end, bad position—“Stop. I get the picture.”

“I’m so sorry.” I was babbling. “I should never have done it. Never. But it’s a real nightmare. He’s pissed off and vindictive and he seems to have it in for us for some reason—you know, some other reason, something apart from this.”

“Well.” Hobie removed his glasses. I could see his confusion in just how gingerly he was feeling around in the pause that followed, trying to shape his response. “What’s done is done. No point making it worse. But—” he stopped, and thought. “I don’t know who this guy is, but if he thought that chest was an Affleck, he has more money than sense. To pay seventy-five thousand—that’s what he gave you for the thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he needs his head examined, that’s all I can say. Pieces of that quality turn up once or twice in a decade, maybe. And they don’t appear on the scene from nowhere.”

“Yes, but—”

“Also, any fool knows, a real Affleck would be worth much more. Who buys a piece like that without doing their homework? An idiot, that’s who. Also,” he said, speaking over me, “you did the correct thing once he called you on it. You tried to refund his money, and he didn’t take it, that’s what you’re saying?”

“I didn’t offer to refund it. I tried to buy the piece back.”

“At a greater price than he paid! And how’s that going to look if he takes it to law? Which I can tell you, he won’t do.”

In the silence that followed, in the clinical blare of his work lamp, I was aware just how uncertain we both were how to move forward. Popchyk—napping on the folded towel that Hobie had set out for him between the clawed feet of a pier table—twitched and grumbled in his sleep.

“I mean,” said Hobie—he’d wiped the black off his hands, was reaching for his brush with a sort of apparitional fixity, like a ghost intent upon his task—“the sales end has never been my bailiwick, you know that, but I’ve been in this business a long time. And sometimes—” darting flick of the brush—“the edge between puffery and fraud is very cloudy indeed.”

I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanned chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain’s home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.

Hobie put down the brush again. “Oh, Theo,” he said, half-angrily, scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand and leaving a dark smudge. “Do you expect me to stand around and scold you? You lied to the fellow. You’ve tried to put it right. But the fellow doesn’t want to sell. What more can you do?”

“It’s not the only piece.”

“What?”

“I should never have done it.” Unable to meet his eye. “I did it first to pay the bills, to get us out from under, and then I guess—I mean some of those pieces are amazing, they fooled me, they were just sitting out in storage—”

I suppose I’d been expecting incredulity, raised voices, outrage of some sort. But it was worse. A blow-up I could have handled. Instead he didn’t say a word, only gazed at me with a sort of grieved fubsiness, haloed by his work lamp, tools arrayed on the walls behind him like Masonic icons. He let me tell him what I had to, and listened quietly while I did it, and when at last he spoke his voice was quieter than usual and without heat.

“All right.” He looked like a figure from an allegory: black-aproned carpenter-mystic, half in shadow. “Okay. So how do you propose to deal with this?”

“I—” This wasn’t the response I’d anticipated. Dreading his anger (for Hobie, though good-natured and slow to wrath, definitely had a temper) I’d had all kinds of justifications and excuses prepared but faced with his eerie composure it was impossible to defend myself. “I’ll do whatever you say.” I hadn’t felt so ashamed or humiliated since I was a kid. “It’s my fault—I take full responsibility.”

“Well. The pieces are out there.” He seemed to be figuring it out as he went along, half-talking to himself. “No one else has contacted you?”

“No.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Oh—” five years, at least—“one year, two?”

He winced. “Jesus. No, no,” he said, hastily, “I’m just glad you were honest with me. But you’ll just have to get busy, contact the clients, say you have doubts—you needn’t go into the whole business, just say a question has arisen, provenance is suspect—and offer to buy the pieces back for what they paid. If they don’t take you up on it—fine. You’ve offered. But if they do—you’ll have to bite the bullet, understand?”

“Right.” What I didn’t—and couldn’t—say was that there wasn’t enough money to reimburse even a quarter of the clients. We would be bankrupt in a day.

“You say pieces. Which pieces? How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, I do, it’s just that I—”

“Theo, please.” He was angry now; it was a relief. “No more of this. Be straight with me.”

“Well—I did the deals off the books. In cash. And, I mean, there’s no way you could have known, even if you’d checked the ledgers—”

“Theo. Don’t make me keep asking. How many pieces?”

“Oh—” I sighed—“a dozen? Maybe?” I added when I saw the stunned look on Hobie’s face. In truth, it was three times as many, but I was pretty sure that most of the people I’d rooked were too clueless to figure it out or too rich to care.

“Good God, Theo,” said Hobie, after a dumbstruck silence. “A dozen pieces? Not at those prices? Not like the Affleck?”

“No, no,” I said hastily (though in fact I’d sold some of the pieces for twice as much). “And none of our regulars.” That part, at least, was true.

“Who then?”

“West Coast. Movie people—tech people. Wall Street too but—young guys, you know, hedgies. Dumb money.”

“You have a list of the clients?”

“Not an actual list, but I—”

“Can you contact them?”

“Well, you see, it’s complicated, because—” I wasn’t worried about the people who believed they’d unearthed genuine Sheraton at bargain prices and hurried away with their copies thinking they’d swizzled me. The old Caveat Emptor rule more than applied there. I’d never claimed those pieces were genuine. What worried me was the people I’d deliberately sold—deliberately lied to.

“You didn’t keep records.”

“No.”

“But you have an idea. You can track them down.”

“More or less.”

“ ‘More or less.’ I don’t know what that means.”

“There are notes—shipping forms. I can piece it together.”

“Can we afford to buy them all back?”

“Well—”

“Can we? Yes or no?”

“Um—” there was no way I could tell him the truth, which was No—“it’s a stretch.”

Hobie rubbed his eye. “Well, stretch or not, we’ll have to do it. No choice. Tighten our belts. Even if it’s rough for a while—even if we let the taxes slide. Because,” he said, when I kept looking at him, “we can’t have even one of these things out there purporting to be real. Good God—” he shook his head disbelievingly—“how the hell did you do it? They’re not even good fakes! Some of the materials I used—anything I had to hand—cobbled together any which way—”

“Actually—” truth was, Hobie’s work had been good enough to fool some fairly serious collectors, though it probably wasn’t a great idea to bring that up—

“—and, you see, thing is, if one of the pieces you’ve sold as genuine is wrong—they’re all wrong. Everything is called into question—every stick of furniture that’s ever gone out of this shop. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that.”

“Er—” I had thought about it, plenty. I had thought about it pretty much without stopping ever since the lunch with Lucius Reeve.

He was so quiet, for so long, that I started getting nervous. But he only sighed and rubbed his eyes and then turned partly away, leaning back to his work again.

I was silent, watching the glossy black line of his brush trace out a cherry bough. Everything was new now. Hobie and I had a corporation together, filed our taxes together. I was the executor of his will. Instead of moving out and getting my own apartment, I’d chosen to stay upstairs and pay him a scarcely-token rent, a few hundred dollars a month. Insofar as I had a home, or a family, he was it. When I came downstairs and helped him with the gluing up, it wasn’t so much because he actually needed me as for the pleasure of scrabbling for clamps and shouting at each other over the Mahler turned up loud; and sometimes, when we wandered over to the White Horse in the evenings for a drink and a club sandwich at the bar, it was very often for me the best time of the day.

“Yes?” said Hobie, without turning from his work, aware that I was still standing at his back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.”

“Theo.” The brush stopped. “You know it very well—a lot of people would be clapping you on the back right now. And, I’ll be straight with you, part of me feels the same way because honest to goodness I don’t know how you pulled off such a thing. Even Welty—Welty was like you, the clients loved him, he could sell anything, but even he used to have a devil of a time up there with the finer pieces. Real Hepplewhite, real Chippendale! Couldn’t get rid of the stuff! And you up there, unloading this junk for a fortune!”

“It’s not junk,” I said, glad to be telling the truth for once. “A lot of the work is really good. It fooled me. I think, because you did it yourself, you can’t see it. How convincing it is.”

“Yes but—” he paused, seemingly at a loss for words—“people who don’t know furniture, it’s hard to make them spend money on furniture.”

“I know.” We had an important drake-front highboy, Queen Anne, that during the lean days I’d tried despairingly to sell at the correct price, which on the low end was somewhere in the two hundred thousand range. It had been in the shop for years. But though some fair offers had come in recently I’d turned them all down—simply because such an irreproachable piece standing in the well-lighted entrance of the shop shed such a flattering glow on the frauds buried in back.

“Theo, you’re a marvel. You’re a genius at what you do, no question about it. But—” his tone was uncertain again; I could sense him trying to feel his way forward—“well, I mean, dealers live by their reputations. It’s the honor system. Nothing you don’t know. Word gets around. So, I mean—” dipping his brush, peering myopically at the chest—“fraud’s hard to prove, but if you don’t take care of this, it’s a pretty sure thing that this will pop back and bite us somewhere down the road.” His hand was steady; the line of his brush was sure. “A heavily restored piece… forget about blacklight, you’d be surprised, someone moves it to a brightly lit room… even the camera picks up differences in grain that you’d never spot with the naked eye. As soon as someone has one of these pieces photographed, or God forbid decides to put it up at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in an Important Americana sale…”

There was a silence, which—as it swelled between us—grew more and more serious, unfillable.

“Theo.” The brush stopped, and then started again. “I’m not trying to make excuses for you but—don’t think I don’t know it, I’m the very person who put you in this position. Turning you loose up there all on your own. Expecting you to perform the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You are very young, yes,” he said curtly, turning halfway when I tried to interrupt, “you are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don’t care to deal with, and you have been so brilliant at getting us back in the black again that it has suited me very, very well to keep my head in the sand. As regards what goes on upstairs. So I’m as much to blame for this as you.”

“Hobie, I swear. I never—”

“Because—” he picked up the open bottle of paint, looked at the label as if he couldn’t recall what it was for, put it down again—“well, it was too good to be true, wasn’t it? All this money pouring in, wonderful to see? And did I inquire too closely? No. Don’t think I don’t know it—if you hadn’t got busy with your flim-flam up there we’d likely be renting this space right now and hunting for a new place to live. So look here—we’ll start fresh—wipe the board down—and take it as it comes. One piece at a time. That’s all we can do.”

“Look, I want to make it plain—” his calmness harrowed me—“the responsibility is mine. If it comes down to that. I just want you to know.”

“Sure.” When he flicked his brush, his deftness was practiced and reflexive, weirdly unsettling. “Still and all, let’s leave it for now, all right? No,” he said, when I tried to say something else, “please. I want you to take care of it and I’ll do what I can to help you if there’s anything specific but otherwise, I don’t want to talk about it any more. All right?”

Outside: rain. It was clammy in the basement, an ugly subterranean chill. I stood watching him, not knowing what to do or say.

“Please. I’m not angry, I just want to be getting on with this. It’ll be all right. Now go upstairs, please, would you?” he said, when I still stood there. “This is a tricky patch of work, I really need to concentrate if I don’t want to make a hash of it.”

xvii.

SILENTLY I WALKED UPSTAIRS, steps creaking loudly, past the gauntlet of Pippa’s pictures that I couldn’t bear to look at. Going in, I’d thought to break the easy news first and then move along to the showstopper. But as dirty and disloyal as I felt, I couldn’t do it. The less Hobie knew about the painting, the safer he would be. It was wrong on every level to drag him into it.

Yet I wished there were someone I could talk to, someone I trusted. Every few years, there seemed to be another news article about the missing masterworks, which along with my Goldfinch and two loaned van der Asts also included some valuable Medieval pieces and a number of Egyptian antiquities; scholars had written papers, there had even been books; it was mentioned as one of the Ten Top Art Crimes on the FBI’s website; previously, I’d taken great comfort in the fact that most people assumed that whoever had made off with the van der Asts from Galleries 29 and 30 had stolen my painting, too. Almost all the bodies in Gallery 32 had been concentrated near the collapsed doorway; according to investigators there would have been ten seconds, maybe even thirty, before the lintel fell, just time for a few people to make it out. The wreckage in Gallery 32 had been sifted through with white gloves and whisk brooms, with fanatic care—and while the frame of The Goldfinch had been found, intact (and had been hung empty on the wall of the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, “as a reminder of the irreplaceable loss of our cultural patrimony”), no confirmed fragment of the painting itself, no splinter or antique nail fragment or chip of its distinctive lead-tin pigment had been found. But as it was painted on wood, there was a case to be made (and one blowhard celebrity historian, to whom I was grateful, had made it forcefully) that The Goldfinch had been knocked from its frame and into the rather large fire burning in the gift shop, the epicenter of the explosion. I had seen him in a PBS documentary, striding back and forth meaningfully in front of the empty frame in the Mauritshuis, fixing the camera with his powerful, media-savvy eye. “That this tiny masterwork survived the powder explosion at Delft only to meet its fate, centuries later, in another man-made explosion is one of those stranger-than-life twists out of O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant.”

As for me: the official story—printed in a number of sources, accepted as truth—was that I’d been rooms away from The Goldfinch when the bomb went off. Over the years a number of writers had tried to interview me and I’d turned them all away; but numerous people, eyewitnesses, had seen my mother in her last moments in Gallery 24, the beautiful dark-haired woman in the satin trenchcoat, and many of these eyewitnesses placed me at her side. Four adults and three children had died in Gallery 24—and in the public version of the story, the received version, I’d been just another of the bodies on the ground, knocked cold and overlooked in the hubbub.

But Welty’s ring was physical proof of my whereabouts. Luckily for me, Hobie didn’t like to talk about Welty’s death but every now and then—not often, usually late at night when he’d had a few drinks—he was moved to reminisce. “Can you imagine how I felt—? Isn’t it a miracle that—?” Someday, someone had been bound to make the connection. I’d always known it and yet in my drugged-out fog I’d drifted along ignoring the danger for years. Maybe no one was paying attention. Maybe no one would ever know.

I was sitting on the side of my bed, staring out the window onto Tenth Street—people just getting off work, going out to dinner, shrill bursts of laughter. Fine, misty rain slanted in the white circle of street light just outside my window. Everything felt shaky and harsh. I wanted a pill badly, and I was just about to get up and make myself a drink when—just outside of the light, unusual for the coming-and-going traffic of the street—I noticed a figure standing unaccompanied and motionless in the rain.

After half a minute passed and still he stood there, I switched the lamp off and moved to the window. In an answering gesture the silhouette moved well out of the streetlight; and though his features weren’t plain in the dark I got the idea of him well enough: high hunched shoulders, shortish legs and thick Irish torso. Jeans and hoodie, heavy boots. For a while he stood motionless, a workmanly silhouette out of place on the street at that hour, photo assistants and well-dressed couples, exhilarated college students heading out for dinner dates. Then he turned. He was walking away with a quick impatience; when he stepped forward into the next pool of light I saw him reaching in his pockets, dialing a cell phone, head down, distracted.

I let the curtain fall. I was pretty sure I was seeing things, in fact I saw things all the time, part of living in a modern city, this half-invisible grain of terror, disaster, jumping at car alarms, always expecting something to happen, the smell of smoke, the splash of broken glass. And yet—I wished I were a hundred percent sure it was my imagination.

Everything was dead quiet. The street light through the lace curtains cast spidery distortions on the walls. All the time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

I got a glass of ice from the kitchen, went to the sideboard and poured myself a vodka, came back to my room and got my iPhone from my jacket pocket and—after reflexively dialing the first three digits of Jerome’s beeper—hung up and dialed the Barbours’ number instead.

Etta answered. “Theo!” she said, sounding pleased, the kitchen television going in the background. “You calling for Katherine?” Only Kitsey’s family and very close friends called her Kitsey; she was Katherine to everyone else.

“Is she there?”

“She’ll be in after dinner. I know she was looking for you to call.”

“Mm—” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. “Will you tell her I phoned then?”

“When are you coming back to see us?”

“Soon, I hope. Is Platt around?”

“No—he’s out too. I’ll be sure to tell him you called. Come back to see us soon, all right?”

I hung up the phone and sat on the side of the bed drinking my vodka. It was reassuring to know that I could call Platt if I needed to—not about the painting, I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him with that, but insofar as dealing with Reeve about the chest. It was ominous that Reeve had said not a word about that.

Yet—what could he do? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Reeve had overplayed his hand by confronting me so nakedly. What good was it going to do him to come after me for the furniture? What did he have to gain if I was arrested, the painting recovered, whisked out of his reach forever? If he wanted it, there was nothing for him to do but stand back and allow me to lead him to it. The only thing I had going for me—the only thing—was that Reeve didn’t know where it was. He could hire whomever he wanted to tail me, but as long as I kept clear of the storage unit, there was no way he could track it down.