A Woman’s Eye

THE CUTTING EDGE by Marilyn Wallace

The cases of police detectives Carlos Cruz and Jay Goldstein have entertained readers for several years, and such excellent novels as A Single Stone, A Case of Loyalties, and Primary Target are among the best books of their type. The last-named combines an excellent puzzle with strong political commentary. In addition, MARILYN WALLACE is the editor of the very successful Sisters in Crime series of anthologies. Ms. Wallace resides in San Anselmo, California.

If I weren’t Rico’s mother and if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, I probably would have reacted differently to Catherine’s two-sentence note, and to the invitation. Someone slipped this under the gallery door. What do you make of it? her curlicued scrawl asked.

The note was paper-clipped to an invitation to the opening of Porterfield’s, her new art gallery on West 51st Street. Thursday, December 4. Seven to nine P.M. Meet the artists, etc. I was familiar with the text not only because Rico was one of the artists but because my New York office, Happenings East, was coordinating the event.

It wasn’t until I turned the invitation over to look at the image on the other side, a montage portrait of the three artists each standing in front of one of their paintings, that I noticed a gash running from the right edge in toward the center of the card. It cut right across the picture of Rico. The edge of the cut appeared to be smeared with dried blood.

Dried blood? Surely I was imagining that.

Like my attempts to persuade him to finish his undergraduate studies, any implied threat would only make Rico-full of promise, so damned stubborn-more determined to pursue painting. My shudder of fear was his frisson of excitement. So what else was new?

I showed the card to David. After twenty-five years of marriage, we still count on each other to put a new spin on things. He held it close to the light, touched his finger to the cut.

“Why don’t you call Rico and see what he thinks? I’d guess it’s probably just a tear, a coffee stain, nothing to get worked up about.” He kissed my cheek; he seemed more concerned about my worrying than he was about Catherine’s note.

I granted the possibility that someone had slipped the note under the gallery door, that it had caught on a splinter, that perhaps coffee or something-wine, paint-had been spilled on it. But my anxiety level continued to rise as I dialed Rico’s number and listened to the phone ring and ring, unanswered.

I’ve never been very good at waiting and that seemed to be all I could do: wait for Rico to answer the phone, wait for Thursday when David and I were scheduled to fly to New York for the opening. David was just starting a four-night piano gig at Yoshi’s and couldn’t get away earlier.

By nine o’clock, despite David’s calm assurances, I had convinced myself that my New York staff needed my help. After all, the final mailing had to be done, the wine and hors d’oeuvres ordered, the work hung. I turned over the details of the California events to my Happenings West staff and bought a night-flight ticket from SFO to JFK.

I sat by the window, watching for those staccato glitters of light that are the small towns of nocturnal America. I tried to occupy my mind with one of Monk’s atonal melody lines that resolves itself three bars later than I always expect it to, and with keeping the plane in the air by the strength of my will.

After a while, convinced that the plane would be fine on its own, my mind was free to tend to other things. I thought about my friend Catherine. After struggling for twenty years to gain critical or commercial recognition for her own paintings, she had given up. A mother for the first time at forty-two, she spent a year at home with Michael before she decided that if she couldn’t paint, at least she would make a place for herself in the art world and open a gallery.

Images of Rico kept intruding. I remembered the moment I first held him and looked at his red, wrinkled fade and knew that my most difficult task as the mother of this miracle would be to learn how to let him go. I pictured his delight when he uncurled his fingers from mine and took three steps on his own. I recalled the pained confusion when he found out that two of his seventh-grade friends forgot to ask him to go to the movies with them.

Somewhere over Nebraska, I demoted the torn invitation to a prank perpetrated by some bored art-scene crisis junkie. No one would want to hurt Rico-why should they? I put on the earphones and let the jazz channel distract me the rest of the way across the continent.

The gray mist that hung over the city welcomed me home, the light so familiar that I wanted to embrace it. I headed for the first cab in the long yellow line and got in. Murray Feldman, number 3905467, nodded when I gave him Catherine’s Brooklyn address. I needed to hear what she thought before I laid my mother-worries on Rico. The cab careened into the Kennedy exit maze.

“Take the Van Wyck to Atlantic Avenue,” I said.

Murray grumbled and pulled into the proper lane and I closed my eyes, happy to be cm the ground.

Sooner than I expected, the cab turned left onto Tenth Street and pulled to the curb in a squeal of brakes, I squinted to see the meter through the dingy plastic shield.

“That’s twenty-four and sixty-eight,” the cabbie said. “If you’da took the subway, you coulda bought a new pair of glasses,”

I love New York.

I peeled a ten and a twenty from the roll in my wallet and waved away Murray’s change. He flashed me his best you-ain’t-a-bad-tipper-for-a-broad smile.

“Hey, you have a nice day, lady,” he said with enthusiasm,

I groaned. The city was deteriorating, losing its old abrasive edge. At least Park Slope, a neighborhood of brown-stones and gaslights and brave little window boxes, hadn’t changed much. Even though David and I moved to California two years earlier, I had insisted on keeping the Happenings East office open. Brooklyn still felt like home.

Brooklyn is a state of mind. Ask Walt Whitman or Marianne Moore. A genuine Brooklyn soul doesn’t last too long without forsythia in March, egg creams in July, and the minimum daily requirement of unidentified particulate matter blowing into your eyes in October.

Catherine, more a creature of the ether than of Brooklyn, met me at the door. Without makeup, her dark eyes and her springy brown curls made her look particularly vulnerable. We exchanged hugs and niceties in the entry foyer, its oatmeal-colored walls lined with Japanese artifacts. I purposely kept my back to her husband’s collection of Samurai swords. I would wait until we were comfortable-in the kitchen, where we told all our secrets-to ask about the slashed invitation.

Michael led the way down the hall. He had a sixteen-month-old’s round-faced, squat-legged chubbiness and looked somehow already bigger than Catherine, who was still exotically small. No one has ever accused me of being willowy, but I can still shop the outlets for size-ten samples. Still, Catherine is the one friend who makes me feel like a Valkyrie in full armor. That hadn’t changed in twelve years, nor had her questions.

“Do you ever sabotage yourself, Gina?” She spoke in a whisper, as though saying it aloud would make some negative reality more tangible.

Catherine always had questions. I used to think of it as a sign of some mild mental disorder, a dementia inquisitas manifesting itself in an inability to follow the rules of normal conversation. Then I discovered that I enjoyed looking for answers to give her. I even, quite consciously at some point, started to ask Catherine-questions myself.

“You didn’t tamper with that invitation just to get some free publicity for the gallery, did you?” I hadn’t slept much; that thought must have crept up when my mental censors were off duty. Maybe this was how Catherine lived all the time.

She made a face. “Your office can manage better publicity than that. Did you come out early because of that invitation? I mean, I’m glad you’re here and happy you’re working on the event, but I think you’re overreacting, Gina. I guess I was a little worried at first but now it seems, I don’t know, silly.” She held out a half sandwich, tiny moon shapes scalloping the crust edge, about at Michael’s mouth level, and he pulled her hand down to take a bite.

When he was a toddler, Rico had settled for nothing less than holding the sandwich in his own dimpled hands.

“Rico’s age is enough to get some good press. Featured in a major gallery at twenty-two. Patrick says they’ll call him a wunderkind.” She laughed, a small sound, and licked grape jelly from her fingers. “I asked him if he slipped that invitation under the gallery door, and he looked at me like I had finally lost my mind. I believe him. About not doing it, I mean.”

Did she mean Rico or Patrick? Before I could ask, she wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t have enemies and I doubt that Rico does. It’s probably not a threat at all.”

“Maybe you’re right. But why was the invitation stained only along that slash?”

With a shrug and a noisy sigh, Catherine sat in the rocking chair and folded her hands in her lap, Madonna becalmed.

I drank my coffee and remembered that April day, seven months earlier, when Catherine and I sat on the steps in front of her brownstone, hands wrapped around mugs of hot coffee. We had pretended that the sun was warm, but it was our friendship that felt so good.

“Did you ever wish Rico would disappear,” Catherine had said, “just be unborn? I mean not ever have been born.”

A real Catherine-question.

“Not once. Not ever,” I said, unable to entertain the notion of no Rico. The stone steps felt cold, hard.

“I stopped painting when I got pregnant.” Her dark eyes had looked into my very heart as though she were asking me to change something. “Rico will never have to face that.”

Now, as I sat in her kitchen, I wondered whether she would blame Michael, later, secretly, for this transformation from painter to purveyor of paintings.

Michael plopped himself at her feet and she reached down and stroked his cheek. “The gallery has to work. The rest isn’t enough for me,” she said. The silver gleam of the sky framed by the window behind her hurt my eyes.

“Not enough how… intellectually?… emotionally?” I asked.

She was quiet; Catherine’s pauses took some getting used to. It was her timing, I had learned. Not my fault, just her way.

“I want to soar. I don’t soar at home.”

Catherine wanted a poet to play his words in accompaniment to her rapture, to join her in freedom from the law of gravity.

“Aren’t things good with you and Patrick?” I had meant to ask her if she soared in her marriage. It hadn’t come out that way.

“Staying home, I don’t get much, you know, stimulation during the day. At first, when I told him my idea-about the gallery-Patrick said he wanted me to stay home with Michael for a few more years.” Her face was lost behind those wild curls. “But then he changed his mind. Just like that. He’s even financing the first twelve months.”

“That sounds good.” Almost too good, I thought. Patrick indulged this whim too readily and helped Catherine give up on herself as a painter. “So when the gallery opens, you’ll be happy.”

Catherine stood, stretched on her toes, and reached both arms up, her fingers pointing. I expected her to lift off the ground and float to the ceiling, to beat her wings against the window until someone opened it and let her out to catch the smoky November wind moving among the city’s spires.

“Mostly,” she said. “I guess, mostly.”

I left Catherine’s and wheeled my suitcase down the street. Just a tear… nothing to get worked up over, David had said. I think you’re overreacting, Catherine had told me. Probably they were right and I had fixed on this for some mother-reason born of my struggle to let my son live his own life. Surely Rico would consider my worries proof of a relapse into the role of overprotective mother with an overactive imagination.

He was, after all, a grown-up, a man whose dark hair, long-lashed brown eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips are attractive to women. His natural reserve gives way easily to his genuine interest in people. He keeps himself in cadmium yellow by working at a record store called Riffs, shelters neighborhood strays, likes old movies, and returns library books on time.

He’s good but not perfect,

What he hasn’t yet acquired, even after two years in New York, is an everyday instinct for self-preservation. He lives mainly on salami and Mallomars and would never buy a new toothbrush unless his old one fell into the toilet. He rides the subway at all hours, falls in and out of love with The Most Terrific Woman several times a year, and is determined to be a painter and not acquire any credentialed, marketable skills.

We all have our blind spots, and I had to allow Rico his and keep mine from getting in his way. I resolved not to mention the slashed, stained picture.

I set my bag in front of the grillwork gate, pressed the buzzer, looked through the just-below-street-level window. Inside, a Tiffany table lamp glowed in the midday pallor. Ribbons of light fell to the floor through a jungle of foliage. In lieu of paying rent to David and me, Rico has been restoring the three-level brownstone to its original Victorian glory. He calls the jungle room “the conservatory.” Shades of Colonel Mustard. The room was empty.

The tips of my fingers curled toward my palms in an attempt to get warm. The cold bit at my toes through the thin leather of my pumps, which had been fine for the 71 degrees I’d left in California.

Then Rico’s face appeared in the window, his expression leaping from wariness to surprise and finally settling into a broad smile. I hoped he would still be smiling in fifteen minutes.

I hugged him; his face felt good against my chilled cheek. He smelled good. When he pulled back, I noticed a scrap of toilet paper stanching a shaving cut on his jaw.

I suppressed a shudder and began. “I tried to call last night but you weren’t home and Riffs was closed. I didn’t decide I was coming until late. About nine. California time.” So much for urbane patter.

He set my suitcase beside the hall table, a spindly-legged affair sporting a drop cloth covered with plaster dust. “You could have had Dad call me or something. I know this is your house, but you said you’d give me some notice. I didn’t expect you until Thursday.”

It was a lame excuse. Clearly, I had lost some ground in the struggle to let go. “I’m sorry for the lack of warning.”

On cue, a rumpled little redhead wrapped in a wrinkled terry-cloth robe appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Mom, this is Laura. She plays keyboards for the Rompettes. Laura, this is my mom, Gina Capobella.”

Laura smiled and said hello and disappeared. Another of his women-we’d discussed safe sex since he was fifteen but maybe we needed a little brushup talk about safe relationships.

He hung my coat on a brass hook in the hall and we went into the kitchen. His mouth was tight, his shoulders up around his ears. He lit a burner on the stove and set a teakettle over the flame, In the tense silence, I heard my own breathing and the pounding water filling the upstairs bathtub.

“I hope Laura’s not in any hot water,” I said, emphasizing the key phrase as I pointed at the ceiling, in the general direction of the bathroom.

Rico’s face was blank, his silence stony. He was turning down the invitation to our old game.

“I hope she’s not in too deep,” I said, giving it one last try.

The corners of his mouth edged into a smile. “She’s prepared to sink or swim on her own,” he said. “She’ll talk about it when she’s ready to come clean.”

We both grinned, but I knew that punning our way to familiar ground was only a start. Rico had lived in this house on his own since his twentieth birthday, two years ago. It was peremptory to claim territorial prerogatives on such short notice; I really should have tried harder to call. “Maybe you could think of my being here as a double-reverse empty-nest syndrome,” I offered.

“You’ve been reading Good Housekeeping again. That’s dangerous.” He lifted a serrated knife out of its slot and cut a French bread in half.

“Very funny. Listen, I’m quiet in the mornings and I might even be persuaded to make you some bracciola,” I smiled sweetly.

“Home cooking and word games can’t make everything all right, Mom.”

It’s good when your kid keeps you honest. Reminds you that you’ve done a decent job of it. Knife in hand, he hugged me and then set to piling turkey, cheese, lettuce, mustard, and mayo on the bread. He sawed through the huge tower with a knife, then scooped the sandwiches onto plates and carried them to the table. “Does this visit have anything to do with Catherine? She’s seemed a little weird or something the past couple of days.”

“She desperately wants the gallery to be a success. I thought it would put her at ease if I was here.” Every word true, but sins of omission would surely be my undoing. They felt too much like getting away with something.

“She’s more anxious about the gallery than I thought.” Concern for my friend-his friend, too-creased his brow.

What a face. Not only a mother could love it.

“It’s been so hard on her, trying to make it as a painter. She’s giving up her dreams. Don’t you think”-What? That he should give up before he’s given it a try? What are you trying to tell your child?-“that she’s entitled to be a little weird?”

Rico didn’t answer.

“Enough water for me to have some tea?” Rico’s friend, her face scrubbed and sparkling but her hair still a wiry auburn tangle, stood in the doorway. The terry-cloth robe had been traded for jeans, a citrus-green turtleneck, and a tattered purple sweater that looked big enough for her to hold a party in.

Rico wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, then disappeared into the pantry and emerged with a teabag dangling between two fingers. “Almond Sunset for you, my lovely.”

“You two look just like each other.” The girl made a circle of her thumb and forefinger and held it up to her right eye, closing her left eye as though she were looking through a lens. “I’d recognize you anywhere. Not just from the pictures but because your mouth is so much like Rico’s and your eyes. It’s neat.” She put one hand in her lap, propped her head on the other fist, and watched Rico prepare the tea.

“What kind of music do the Rompers play?” I envisioned a band for the Sesame Street set. Somehow this pretty, sleepy woman didn’t seem the type, but maybe the small ruby stud in her left nostril gave the wrong impression.

“Rompettes. Ska.” Laura smiled benignly at my blank look. “You know, kind of like world beat or reggae. We’re not very good, but my boyfriend is making a documentary about us. He’s studying filmmaking. NYU, graduate level.”

Rico’s back was to me; this was a little confusing. Her boyfriend?

“Interesting,” I said. Rico looked over his shoulder and smiled. Interesting was a long-shared code for judgment temporarily deferred.

“He got very intense a couple of weeks ago. Watching me like he was framing every action for a scene-it made me nuts. So I came here and got my mother to promise not to tell him where I was. With the unlisted phone here, I don’t even have to talk to him unless I want to. The quiet feels… healing, I guess you’d say in California. Rico was terrific to offer me a place.” She got up and stood behind Rico, massaging his shoulders.

So she was another of his strays, not a romantic relationship at all.

“I never met her boyfriend,” Rico said as he set the teapot on the table, “but she swears he’s handsomer than me.”

“Well, he is. Anyway, you can’t compare dark and dashing with blond and brooding.” Laura stared at her crimson-tipped nails and then arranged her face in a smile. “Are you staying long?” she asked me.

I told her I would be in Brooklyn until the day after the gallery opening. The three of us sipped our tea and talked about friends and school, the art scene, and old neighbors. Rico showed me the five paintings he’d be exhibiting at Porterfield’s. They were abstract, with the suggestion of a face serving as the focal point for each. “This one’s a self-portrait,” he said pointing to the largest canvas.

I balanced my swelling pride with the desire to shield him from the frustrations of being a painter. Catherine and Patrick were doing things right with the gallery, Rico said, except that Patrick got stuck in traditional thinking sometimes-but what else could you expect from someone whose family had lived in the Hudson Valley since Rip Van Winkle went to sleep? She needed someone like that, I said, to gaze at her fondly while she explored her place in the arts.

By Thursday morning I had sublimated any leftover worries about Rico with vast and unnecessary expenditures of energy. Despite the presence of my willing and competent staff, I took care of everything personally: I hired the harpist, selected the champagne, calculated the number of hors d’oeuvres, tested the lighting, and called my media contacts. Only a few times during those hectic days did I catch myself staring at Rico, memorising the details of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, the ridge of his jaw, the clear, taut skin.

Only one last detail to settle-what to wear.

“Do you like this one better?” I swirled into the kitchen with what I hoped was the grace of a runway model. In the bulky gray suit with the leather trim, I felt more like a 747.

“No contest. The white jumpsuit. My boyfriend says white is the ultimate sophistication. He wants me to wear white all the time. He says it enhances inner purity.” Laura wrinkled her nose, tugged at the collar of her houndstooth jacket, pulled down the sleeve of her cinnamon-and-nutmeg striped jersey. “Maybe wear the green silk. I like what it does for your eyes.”

That sounded nice. “What about you, Rico? You’re the star. What are you wearing?” I asked.

Rico, who had become involved with a cleaver, garlic, celery, and bok choy, said through his gritted teeth, “I’ve done okay dressing myself for the past two years, Mom. I’ll figure out something.”

That told me.

“Mothers are supposed to care about these things, Rico.” Laura gave Rico’s cheek a pinch before she turned to me. “If you wear the silk, you need some outrageous earrings. I’m going to see my boyfriend before I go to the opening, so remind me before I leave and I’ll lend you mine.”

Did she mean the safety pins or the Christmas ornaments? I was saved from a reply by the insistent shrill of the doorbell.

I unlocked the inner door. A blast of arctic air swept into the vestibule as I opened the grill work gate. Shivering, I moved aside to let a grape-colored woolen bundle step in.

Catherine’s face was barely visible between the wool beret and the scarf pulled up around her nose. Her eyes warned that this was not a simple social call.

“Come into the kitchen and stand by the stove,” I said.

She didn’t budge. With her gloved hand she reached into her coat pocket and handed me an envelope. “Someone slipped this under the gallery door early this morning. I just found it.”

I opened the envelope and pulled out a folded page from the New York Post entertainment section. Great-they were doing a piece on the gallery. Not the Times, to be sure, but maybe after the opening… I unfolded the page. Rico’ face, centered in front of one of his paintings, stared up at me, A slash outlined in reddish brown sliced through the page. Dried blood or cranberry juice, it hardly mattered; the intent was clear enough.

“This doesn’t feel like a prank, Catherine. Someone is sending a message that they intend to hurt Rico.”

“Or me. Or the gallery.” Her eyes downcast, she jammed her hands into her pockets. “Rico’s not the only possible target. And no, I don’t know anyone who thinks Rico cheated them out of a place in the show. Patrick already asked me that.”

Exasperated with her self-indulgence and fearful for Rico, I sent her home and called Frankie Fretelli, an old friend with an NYPD desk job. If I brought along some Johnnie Walker Black instead of art gallery white wine, Frankie said, he’d come to the opening and keep an eye on things. David would be there too, if the weather didn’t delay his flight. We’d all keep our eyes open.

Now, despite my neat avoidance of the subject, Rico would have to be told. I could no longer convince myself that it was just a prank. Perhaps professional jealousy was the poison here. How many times had Catherine pointed out how young Rico was? Other artists, embittered after years of struggle, might also resent Rico’s success.

The delicious smell of vegetables sizzling in sesame oil filled the kitchen. Rico stirred them, then grated fresh ginger into the wok.

“Was that Catherine? I thought I heard her voice but it sounded kind of funny.”

Time to plunge in. Lettuce begin, I thought. “She’s worried. She, uh…” Orange you going to tell him? I demanded of myself. “She found a newspaper article. Slipped under the galleiy door. A picture of you and one of your paintings. It was cut and the edge was stained with something that looked like dried blood.”

Rico dribbled tamari over the vegetables and I went on. “That’s the second time. The first was eight days ago. It looks like someone is threatening you, Rico.”

He set the wooden stirrer on the stove. “Me? Who would threaten me?”

His bewilderment was genuine. I hated asking him to think the way I’d been thinking, off and on, for the past week, but I had to. “Another artist, maybe? Someone whose girl you stole? Someone you had an argument with at the record store?”

With each suggestion he shook his head. “None of the above. Listen, I get to have my first gallery opening once in my life. And nobody-no nameless enemy, no one playing jokes-nobody is going to keep me from enjoying it.”

He smiled at me and stopped just short of admonishing me to do the same.

It was ten after five when the taxi deposited me at the curb in front of the gallery. Fat snowfiakes drifted lazily to the ground, dusting everything with a sugary whiteness. No wind, temperature hovering near thirty. If I could let go of the nagging anxiety that had kept me company all afternoon, the weather might even feel festive.

I pushed open the door and surveyed the gallery.

The minifioods cast an even, untinted light on the paintings. White movable walls, arranged with enough angles to keep the space from feeling predictable, carried attention to the paintings rather than to the room itself. False modesty aside, Catherine and I had done a superb job of hanging this show and of placating artists’ egos, sensitive to such questions as which was the better wall and what critics would see first when they entered the gallery.

Rico’s large canvases, those faces emerging from abstract swirls of strong, clear colors, hung at the far end of the room. To the left of the door, a profusion of tiny paintings-florals a la O ’Keeffe but signed Siandra-dotted the wall. On the right, Ken Artie’s monochromatic, detailed landscapes of New England scenes served as somber balance. The total effect was stunning.

“Hello. Anybody here?” I called.

“I’ll be out in a moment.”

The voice was exactly as I remembered, a rich baritone, a little haughty but approachable, redolent of old money and Harvard.

I brushed the snow from my hair and peeled off my gloves, took off my coat, and shook it.

“Very fetching. You look like a Mary Cassatt, high-necked demure dress, dark eyes.” Patrick was tall, golden-haired, and polished; if he had been bald, he would have resembled an Oscar statuette wearing a gray wool suit.

“Thanks. I think. How do you like it?” I said, sweeping my arm to take in the whole room.

A flicker of something I didn’t understand shone in his eyes. “You’ve both done a fine job of it,” he said. “Fine.”

I gathered my coat and walked toward the small rear office, thinking about faint praise and damning myself for not pursuing my uneasiness over his feelings about the gallery. “Catherine’s a little nervous about tonight,” I said as I deposited the Johnnie Walker in a desk drawer. “She’s done a wonderful job. She has some terrific artists.”

“Even if you do say so yourself.” His voice was flat.

When I walked back into the gallery, he was standing in front of one of Rico’s paintings, arms crossed against his chest, the habitual skeptic’s pose. His head was tilted; considering that he was a corporate attorney, his hair curled toward his collar in an almost decadent way.

The man had taste. This was the painting on the invitation, the one in the newspaper. Catherine and Rico had chosen carefully; it was the best work Rico had ever done. The painting surged with compressed power that swept the eye to the upper left quadrant where a web of magenta lines delineated eyes, nose, mouth, and a spidery jumble of hair amid the gradations of blue and gray. If I squinted, it really did resemble Rico. Particular about titles, he had called it Feature This.

“I’m terribly old-fashioned,” Patrick said, stepping back from the canvas. “I believe that paintings should be of recognizable things, that music should have a melody one can hum, and that books should tell a story.”

And that women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom? I wondered. “Well, then it’s a good thing Catherine has such an eclectic trio of artists. Something for everyone, you might say.”

“Old-fashioned doesn’t mean ineducable. Maybe someday I’ll get the point of these paintings.” Patrick’s smile made him look less like the portrait of a disapproving Mather paterfamilias-Cotton, not Jerry-and more like someone my friend Catherine might fall in love with. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked.

“Thanks, but it’s all under control. Bound to be surprises-there always are-but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing to do now.”

Patrick’s gaze swept the room. “How about if I dice up this meat?” he said as he held up a crusty, wrinkled Italian salami.

“The caterer would kill me if I let anyone else touch her food.” The knife lay on the table, gleaming fiercely in the light. I wanted to hide it, throw it away.

The door swung open and the harpist and her unwieldy burden stumbled in. I pointed her to a corner to practice and busied myself with checking artists’ statements, price lists, champagne glasses, half listening as she brought David’s composition to life. The music was solid, lithe, fanciful, substantial; the notes flew around the room or marched, as the theme changed.

I couldn’t wait to see David. I shifted some of my anxiety to concern about his plane landing in the snow, pushed away the imagined sight of Rico’s face with a raw scar running down his cheek, left my worries in one corner of my mind while I attended to the problem of the three cases of Chablis that had arrived instead of the champagne I’d ordered.

By six forty-five, the caterer’s assistant had replaced the wine, everything else was in order, and I was holding David’s hand. His tumbled hair glistened with snow and his smile as the music spilled from the harp thrilled me nearly as much as his whispered description of how he intended to make up for lost time.

I had just finished telling him about this morning’s slashed newspaper when the door flew open and Catherine hurried in, stomping her feet and rubbing her hands.

“This is terrible. No one’s going to come out in this weather. The press will be covering the first snow of the season and the opening will be a flop. The whole thing is a terrible idea, and the critics are going to crucify me.” She shrugged out of her coat, mumbling all the way to the back room.

In fact, it had crossed my mind that the weather might keep some people away. I wondered if our correspondent would show up. Unless he (she?) was already here.

“Nonsense. The same reporters don’t cover snow and gallery openings, you know that. The guest list is loaded with people with a personal interest in you, the artists, or being seen at the new and happening place. And tonight, my dear, this is it.”

Catherine tried not to smile. “You really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Patrick took her in his arms. “You look wonderful. Your artists are marvelous and Porterfield’s is going to be a success.”

So supportive for someone who just a while ago told me how much he favored traditional values, at least in art and music.

Just then the door tinkled and a round woman swathed in a rainbow of gauzy stuff, a gold turban wound around her head, undulated toward the coat rack. “Cath-er-ine,” she purred. “The ten of pentacles in the future spot! I did a reading on the gallery and that’s what it said. Pentacles! Money, money, money. The tarot never lies.” She blew on her fingers and frowned. “Isn’t it cold in here?”

The thermostat was set for seventy but the red temperature indicator pointed to sixty. This was one of those things that ages an event coordinator beyond the mere passage of time. Like the broken water pipe outside the Central Park tent where four elephants were waiting for their cue in the benefit performance of Aïda, this was something I had to fix.

I soon discovered that the only piece of electrical equipment not on a circuit breaker was the furnace. By the time I found a fuse, installed it, and then made the necessary repairs to my dress and makeup, the party was well under way.

I scanned the bright, noisy crowd for Rico. A man in a dark suit and white shirt nodded to me: one of Frankie’s NYPD buddies, no doubt. Any others would be easy to spot, too. The invited guests dressed along a fashion continuum from Hell’s Angels chic to Kamali slouch, with hardly any room for Brooks Brothers, faux or vrai.

I finally spotted Rico on the other side of the room. I would not transmit my worries to him. I would not, tonight of all nights, be the hovering, overprotective mother. I would not ruin this celebration.

The lighting and the harp music and the tinkle of glasses and conversation were festive; I couldn’t help smiling as Rico, elegant in a camel-colored sweater and dark slacks, walked through the crowd toward me.

“You want a name tag? How about ‘Capobella’s Mother’?” Rico, his arm around David, grinned down at me. Frankie Fretelli stood nearby, clutching his glass half filled with amber liquid.

“A chiaroscuro mom in a rocking chair? No, thanks.” I hugged Rico, a little longer than he would have liked but a little shorter than would have pleased me. He was beautiful, radiating pleasure from his smile, from his perfect, unmarred skin. “The paintings look wonderful,” I whispered as I kissed his cheek and squeezed his arm.

“Thanks. So do you.” He kissed me back; then a leather-skirted lady appeared, slipped her arm through his, and led him into a thicket of well-wishers in the middle of the floor. Frankie stuck close behind him.

“You’re Rico’s friend?” A blue-eyed, platinum-haired, classically handsome young man stood beside me. A smile crinkled his face. In his right hand he held a champagne flute. The cast on his left arm was cradled in a sling, as fresh and white as his shirt and the scarf around his neck.

“How did you know?”

“I saw the two of you talking.” He shifted his arm.

I nodded; I would make pleasant talk with this fellow and not pursue Rico, with my eyes, all over the room. “I hope you’re not left-handed and not a painter.”

“I’m not a painter. I’m an aficionado. A particular fan of Rico’s.” He sipped from the champagne glass. “Can I get you some?”

“Thanks, no.” I craned my neck to look for David’s tousled head, which should have been towering above the crowd. I caught Catherine’s eye; she beamed back a message of gratitude.

“So Rico’s living with his girlfriend now, right? They must be really serious about each other. I mean, to be living together.” The young man’s gaze flitted around the room, resting for microseconds here and there. Then he turned to look at me; his eyes were blue, intense, and direct.

The conversation had taken a decidedly personal turn. “What did you say your name was?”

“Peter. Peter Webster.”

Harp music wafted through the din; the angel with blond hair and a cast on his arm grinned at me, but before I could say anything, Rico materialized at my right side. His worried eyes scanned the crowd. “You see Laura yet? I thought she’d be here by now.”

“She’ll be here soon,” I assured him. Now I could worry about her, too. I expected that Laura, who had seemed almost as excited about the opening as Rico, would have been here an hour ago. His leather-clad lady called his name and he winked at me and walked away.

He hadn’t said a word to this supposed friend standing beside me. Not even hello.

“You’ve known Rico a long time?” I smiled because it seemed the thing to do.

“We’ve got a mutual friend,” he said, his pale face expressionless. “You’re his mother aren’t you?”

My smile this time was genuine. “It shows, doesn’t it?”

“Since Rico came into my life, I can’t work, can’t concentrate.”

Before I could ask why, he turned and was gone, maneuvering through the crowd to the large silver coffee urn.

He’d said he was a fan. But he never really said a fan of the paintings. It was Rico himself. He had a crush on Rico, and Rico, trying to discourage Peter, was ignoring him.

I stepped back to let someone pass and almost bumped into Catherine. “The Times critic told someone that Rico is a-quote-bright new talent-unquote,” she said. “I really am soaring.” And she drifted away, not quite on the ground.

The crowd should have been thinning but, apparently reluctant to go out into the snow, they continued to pick over the last crumbs of pat£ and drain the last sips of wine. Rico was at my side again, beaming as the front door flew open. “There’s Laura. I wonder how things worked out with her boyfriend. She was going to tell him that she’s ready to start seeing him again.”

Snow swirling around her head, Laura waved and stepped inside. Rico went to greet her.

I let out my breath and relaxed. The evening was almost over. David was here, Laura was here, and no one had tried to cut Rico’s face. Rico and Laura swept toward the champagne table. As I followed their progress, I noticed the young man, Peter what’s-his-name, standing with his back to Rico’s largest canvas.

Sling knotted at his neck, Peter held his good arm up. His thumb and forefinger closed into a circle and he held the circle up to his eye. As though he were looking through a lens.

As Laura had, that first morning I met her.

Her filmmaker boyfriend.

He was neither admirer nor art aficionado. His questions now made sense, not like Catherine-questions at all, but attempts to trick me into offering him information to confirm his suspicions.

I was half a room away. Peter backed up, two large steps, his fingers still held to his eye like a make-believe camera.

The air, vibrating with chatter and laughter and harp music, parted as I pushed my way toward Peter.

A glint of light caught an object in his right hand. A silver pen, perhaps, or a cigarette lighter. Or a knife.

He took a step toward one of Rico’s paintings, arm raised.

“Stop!” I screamed as I pushed past three people who stood frozen between me and Peter.

I was two steps away when Peter’s arm came down, dragging the knife across a corner of the canvas. I could almost hear the image-face scream, could almost feel the ooze of warm blood and fluid leak through the rent cloth. Peter pulled the knife out and raised his arm again.

I grabbed his elbow and slid my hand down to his forearm. I dug my thumb into the soft inner flesh of his wrist. The knife clattered to the floor and I snatched it up.

“What are you doing?” I snapped.

Someone took the knife from me. Frankie clamped his beefy hand on Peter’s good arm.

“I was evening the score,” Peter said, his body slack as Frankie led him toward the door. “A little suffering. A little pain. For both of them. For the hurt I feel every time I think of them together.” His misplaced jealousy and those sad, beautiful eyes filled his twisted angel-face.

Shocked and pale, Rico put his arm around me. “My painting… I’m glad you…” He shook his head and drew me closer; we watched Laura run to Peter.

Tears spilled over onto her cheeks when Peter shrugged away from her touch. Poor girl, all she had wanted was some quiet.

I turned away from her pain and found myself staring at the square white card beside the painting. In neat letters, dark and clear, it announced the title of the painting: Feature This.

The self-portrait.

Rico’s face had been slashed.

“Mom, it’s a pretty small rip,” Rico said, examining the canvas, “Don’t get all torn up about it. You stopped him just in the nick of time.”

I didn’t feel at all casual but I joined the old game anyway. “Maybe someday what happened tonight will seem like just another slice of life.”

Rico hugged me a good, long time and then smiled sadly. “I wonder if it’s always like this out here on the cutting edge.”