Small Town

two

She was at her desk by ten. She turned on the radio — it was preset to WQXR — and raised the volume a notch. She’d lower it in the afternoon, when people who were so inclined made the rounds of art galleries, but for now she could play it as loud as she liked. Not rock-concert loud, not even Carnegie Hall loud, but with sufficient volume so that it was real music, not just background noise.

Though it might as well have been background noise for all the attention she paid to it. She busied herself in correspondence, real mail and e-mail, made phone calls, and sprang up from her chair from time to time to walk around the gallery, straightening a painting that had gotten itself tilted, dusting a piece of sculpture, and just claiming the place as her own, like a cowboy riding his fences.

Mornings were her favorite time. No one came to the door, and the phone hardly ever rang. She had the place to herself, and the work to herself, and she liked it that way. Chloe would come at one o’clock and station herself at the reception desk, and potential customers would drift in, stare thoughtfully at the work, and wander off again. She enjoyed it when one of them wanted to talk about the art, enjoyed it even more when someone actually bought something. (And it did happen sometimes. You knocked yourself out making phone calls and working your mailing list, you eighty-sixed the jug wine and cheese cubes and got Fabulous Food to cater the opening, and then someone walked in off the street, someone you never heard of who never heard of you, either, and he fell in love with something and wanted to know if you took American Express. Damn right she did.)

She enjoyed all that, and couldn’t have stayed open without it, but the sheer contentment of her morning routine, all by herself in her ever-changing private museum — that was the real payoff. That was close to heaven.

But there was something she was supposed to do, and she couldn’t remember what it was.

At eleven o’clock they interrupted the music for a five-minute news summary, and she wasn’t paying any attention to it until she heard a name she recognized. “Marilyn Fairchild,” the announcer said, and said something else about the police pursuing several leads, and then the item was past, and he was saying something no doubt important about India and Pakistan.

Marilyn Fairchild, murdered the other night in her West Village apartment. She’d been aware of the murder, she was always aware of it when a woman was murdered in Manhattan, but either the name hadn’t registered or, more likely, they hadn’t announced it. Pending notification of kin — wasn’t that what they always said? And now she could understand the policy, because she could imagine how a person would feel, getting the news of a loved one’s death over the radio. She was a little bit shocked and stunned herself, and she barely knew Marilyn Fairchild.

She’d been found in her bed, strangled. She hoped they’d find the bastard, hoped some slick son of a bitch didn’t get him off, hoped—

That’s what she couldn’t remember!

Maury Winters’s number was on her speed dial, and she pushed the button and drummed her fingers waiting for the receptionist to pick up. She said, “Susan Pomerance for Mr. Winters,” and looked up when a buzzer sounded. There was a young man at her door.

Was it safe to let him in? He was black, and that automatically triggered a mental alarm, she couldn’t help it, she was white and that was how she reacted. She sized him up at a glance and noted his short hair, his regular features, his skin tone that suggested a Caucasian grandparent or great-grandparent. He was clean-shaven, his jeans had been ironed, his sneakers were tied.

None of this meant anything — you could be neatly dressed and nice-looking and white in the bargain, with your fucking arm in a cast yet, and turn out to be Ted Bundy — but he looked all right, he really did, and he was carrying an envelope, just an ordinary six-by-nine manila clasp envelope, and she didn’t see how he could tuck a knife or a gun into it.

Marilyn Fairchild, who’d found her the perfect co-op at London Towers, high ceilings and casement windows and an attended lobby and she could even walk to work, Marilyn Fairchild had let someone into her apartment, someone who hadn’t needed a knife or a gun, and now she was dead and—

He was probably a messenger, she thought, but he didn’t look like a messenger. He seemed too purposeful, somehow.

She buzzed him in, and when the attorney came on the line she said, “Hold on a sec, Maury. Someone at the door.” To the young man she said, “How may I help you?”

“Are you Miss Pomerance?” When she nodded he said, “I have these pictures, and Mr. Andriani said you might look at them.”

“David Andriani?”

“That has the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street?” He smiled, showing perfect teeth. “He said you might be interested.”

“You’re an artist?”

He shook his head. “My uncle.”

“Have a seat,” she said. “Or have a look around, if you like. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She picked up the phone. “Sorry,” she said. “Maury, I got something in the mail the other day. They want me to report Monday morning for jury duty.”

“So?”

“So how do I get out of it?”

“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve already postponed it twice, if I remember correctly.”

“Can’t I postpone it again?”

“No.”

“Why the hell not? And why can’t I get out of it altogether? I have my own business to run, for God’s sake. What happens to this place if I get stuck in a courtroom?”

“You’re right,” he said. “Three days in the Criminal Courts Building and the Susan Pomerance Gallery would go right down the tubes, triggering a stock-market crash that would make Black Tuesday look like—”

“Very funny. I don’t see why I have to do this.”

“Everybody has to.”

“I thought if you were the sole proprietor of a business—”

“They changed the rules, sweetie. It used to be very different. Loopholes all over the place. There was even a joke going around for years, like how would you like your fate to be in the hands of twelve people who weren’t bright enough to get out of jury duty?”

“That’s my point. I ought to be bright enough to—”

“But they changed the rules,” he went on, “and now everybody has to serve. Lawyers, ex-cops, everybody. Rudy got called a couple of years ago, if you’ll recall, and he was the mayor, and he served just like everybody else.”

“I bet he could have gotten out of it if he’d wanted to.”

“I think you’re probably right, and that’ll be an option for you when you’re elected mayor, but for the time being—”

“I’m supposed to go to the Hamptons next week.”

“Now that’s different,” he said.

She grinned in spite of herself. “I’m serious,” she said. “Can’t you do something? Tell him I’m blind or I’ve got agoraphobia?”

“I like that last,” he said. “You’ve got a fear of empty spaces, all right. On other people’s walls. Do you have the letter they sent you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t throw it out, would I?”

“You might, but I meant do you have it handy.”

“It’s somewhere,” she said. “Hold on a minute. Here it is. You want me to fax it to you?”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

“Coming at you,” she said, and rang off, then found his card in her Rolodex and carried it and the offending letter to the fax machine. She sent the fax, and while it made its magical way across town she looked over at the young man, who was standing in front of a painting by Aleesha MacReady, an elderly woman who lived in rural West Virginia and painted formal oil portraits of biblical figures, all of them somehow looking as though they were undergoing torture, but didn’t really mind.

“That’s Moses,” she said. “That’s the golden calf in the bulrushes. She puts in a batch of props that don’t necessarily go together, but all relate to the person portrayed. She’s self-taught, of course. I suppose that’s true of your uncle?”

“My mom’s uncle,” he said. “My great-uncle. Emory Allgood, that’s his name. And he never had lessons.”

She nodded at the envelope. “You have slides?”

He opened the envelope, handed her a color print that looked to have been run off a computer. It showed an assemblage, an abstract sculpture fashioned from bits of junk. You couldn’t tell the scale of the thing, and the printing was bad, and you were seeing it from only one angle, but she felt the power of the piece all the same, the raw kinetic energy of it.

And something else, something that gave her a little frisson, a pinging sensation, almost, in the center of her chest.

“Is this the only—”

He shook his head, drew out a disk. “A friend of mine has this digital camera. He only printed out the one picture, but he said if you has, if you have a computer...”

She did, at the desk in her office, and she popped in the disk and went through the images, almost two dozen of them, and before she was halfway through the pinging had become a bell pealing in her chest, resonating throughout her whole being.

She said, “Tell me his name again.”

“Emory Allgood.”

“And you are...”

“His great-nephew. My mom’s mom, my gran, was his sister.”

“I meant your name.”

“Oh, didn’t I say? I’m sorry. It’s Reginald Barron.”

“Do they call you Reginald or Reggie?”

“Mostly Reginald.”

If you has, if you have a computer. Just the slightest stress on have. He was careful to speak correctly, but care was required. She found it charming.

“Reginald,” she said, and looked at him. He was several inches taller than she was, say an inch or so over six feet. Slender but well muscled, with broad shoulders, and muscles in his arms that stretched the sleeves of his red polo shirt. She kept her eyes away from his crotch, but couldn’t stop her mind from going there.

She said, “Tell me about your uncle. When did he start making art?”

“About five years ago. No, that’s not exactly right. Five years ago he stopped paying much mind to people, and then a year or so after that he started making these things.”

“First he withdrew.”

“He stopped answering,” he said. “Took less and less notice of people. He’d be staring, and there wouldn’t be anything there for him to stare at.”

“I understand.”

“What I think, he was going inside.”

“Yes.”

“And he’d go in the street like a junk picker and come home with all this trash, and my mom was worried, like he’d have to, you know, go away or something, but it turned out he was bringing all this shit—”

He winced, and she was touched. Gently she said, “I’ve heard the word before, Reginald.”

“Well.”

“I may even have said it once or twice.”

“Well, what I was saying. He was bringing these things home for a reason, to use them in what he was making. But we didn’t know that until one day he showed my mom what he was working on, and that made it better. The junk-picking and all.”

“Because he had a reason.”

“Right, and so it wasn’t so crazy.”

“Did he talk about his work?”

“He, uh, pretty much stopped talking. I don’t know what you’d call him, if he’s crazy or what. He’s not scary, except the way any old man’s scary who keeps to himself and doesn’t say nothing, anything, and just stares off into space. But he never makes trouble or disturbs anybody, and there’s people who know what he does and bring him things, empty spools of thread and bottle caps and pieces of wire and, well, you seen, saw, the kind of things he uses.”

“Yes.”

“So this man on the next block said there’s people who pay attention to this type of art, and I got some pictures taken, and I went around different people until somebody sent me to Mr. Andriani, and he said you were the person to come see.”

“And here you are.”

He nodded.

She said, “They call it outsider art, Reginald, because it’s produced by artists who are outside the mainstream, generally self-taught, and often entirely unaware of the art world. But it seems to me you could just as easily call it insider art. You were just looking at Aleesha MacReady’s painting of Moses. Could any work of art be more internal than hers? She’s communicating a wholly private vision. It’s outside as far as the New York art scene is concerned, but it comes from deep inside of Aleesha MacReady.”

“And my uncle’s work’s like that?”

“Very much so.” She walked around him, careful not to touch him, but passing close enough so that she fancied she could feel his body heat. “I don’t know much about Aleesha,” she went on. “I’ve never met her, she’s never come to New York. I’d be surprised if she’s ever been out of West Virginia. But I gather she’s quite normal in her day-to-day life. When she picks up a paintbrush, though, she accesses whatever it is we see in her paintings.”

She moved to stand in front of another work, painted in Day-Glo colors on a Masonite panel that had been primed in black. Like all the artist’s work, it showed a monster — this one was rather dragonlike — devouring a child.

“Jeffcoate Walker,” she said. “Nice, huh? How’d you like this hanging on your living room wall?”

“Uh...”

“Of course you wouldn’t. His work’s impossible to live with, and my guess is that he creates it so he won’t have to live with it inside him. But it’s only a guess, because Mr. Walker’s been institutionalized for the past thirty-some years. I believe the diagnosis is some form of schizophrenia, and it’s severe enough to keep him permanently locked up.”

“My uncle’s nowhere near that bad.”

“What he has in common with both of these artists, and with just about everyone whose work I show, is an internal vision, a very personal vision, along with the ability to communicate that vision. I find that very exciting.”

“I see.”

She had, suddenly and entirely unbidden, a personal vision of her own. Reginald Barron, stripped naked, all done up in a complicated leather harness suspended from a nasty-looking meat hook mounted in the ceiling. His muscles strained against the leather straps that cut into his glistening teak-colored skin, and more leather girded his loins, painfully tight on his balls and the base of his engorged penis, and—

Turning from him, she said, “I had a background in art history and went to work for a traditional gallery on upper Madison Avenue. I worked for several galleries, and I got married and divorced, and I lived with an artist for a while, which is something no one should have to do, and when that ended I went to Switzerland for two weeks. I’d been to Europe several times, of course, and I’d spent a few days each in Zurich and Geneva, so I went to a few other cities this time, I got a rail pass and just bounced around, and I read in one of the guidebooks about a museum in Lausanne devoted to art produced by the insane. After six months with Marc Oberbauer I inclined toward the belief that all art was produced by the insane, but this was different. This was the most exciting work I’d ever seen in my life.”

“And that got you started?”

She nodded. She was able to look at him now without seeing him as she had a few moments ago. He was a nice polite young man now, that’s all. Undoubtedly attractive, she had to admit she was more than a little attracted, but that didn’t mean she was going to act out, or let her imagination run wild.

“I came home,” she said, “and learned everything I could. I’d always been drawn to folk art, I did my thesis on Colonial weather vanes, but now I was seeing it all differently. Now some of it looked cute and amusing, while the work that really moved me came from somewhere deep within the person who made it. And it didn’t have to be folk art. When I went to the Prado in Madrid, the work that most affected me was Goya’s series of Black Paintings, all created late at night during a period when the artist was profoundly disturbed and quite possibly ill. Goya was hardly self-taught, he was arguably Spain’s greatest painter, but the Black Paintings would have been right at home in La Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Or in this gallery — his Cronos Devouring His Children might have been painted by Jeffcoate Walker, if Mr. Walker had had the advantage of formal training and a classical education.”

She was telling him too much. What did he know about Goya or the Prado? But he seemed interested.

“My artists rarely know how to talk about their work,” she said, “if they talk at all. But how many artists can speak intelligently about what they do? If you’ve ever read the silly statements they prepare for their show openings—”

But he wouldn’t know what she was talking about, he wouldn’t have been to an opening, might never have been to a gallery. She shifted gears and said, “I went all over the country looking at things, including an outdoor shrine in Iowa that a priest spent his life creating, with shells and crystals and semiprecious gemstones. And the Watts towers, of course, and a house made entirely of Coke bottles, and, oh, all sorts of things. And I came home and sold everything I owned and opened this place.”

Enough life history, she thought. Cut to the chase.

“I’d like to show your uncle’s work, Reginald. I’d like to give him a one-man show sometime in the fall. I’d love it if he could supervise the installation and come to the opening, but that’s not a requirement. The work speaks for itself, and I’ll be here to speak for it.”

He nodded, taking it in. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what he’ll want to do. I don’t guess he’ll mind parting with the work, on account of he’ll give a piece away if anyone tells him they really like it.”

“Don’t let him give anything else away, okay?”

“No, he hasn’t been doing that lately. On account of not talking to people, you know, and keeping to himself.” He pointed at the wall, where Jeffcoate Walker’s dragon loomed a few yards from Aleesha MacReady’s Moses. “I didn’t see anything there about the prices.”

“It’s considered a little crass to post them. This” — she crossed to the front desk, brought back a price list in an acetate sleeve — “is considered more discreet.”

“These the kind of prices you’d put on Uncle Emory’s things?”

“I’m not sure. Pricing’s tricky, there are a lot of factors to consider. Artists command higher prices as they gain a reputation, and your uncle’s unknown.” She gave him a smile. “But that won’t be true for long.”

“He gonna be famous?”

“Well, is Aleesha MacReady famous? Or Jeffcoate Walker? Perhaps, but to a relatively small circle of collectors. Howard Finster’s fairly famous, you may have heard of him. And you probably know Grandma Moses.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t be specific about prices,” she went on, “but I can explain the way we work.” And she told him the gallery took fifty percent of sales proceeds, noticing as she spoke that he looked tense. Well, why shouldn’t he? Fifty percent was high, but it was standard, and it was hard enough to come out ahead in this business, and—

But that wasn’t it. “I got to ask this,” he said, “so there won’t be any misunderstanding. We won’t have to come up with any money in front, will we?”

“Money in front?”

“ ’Cause this one dealer was talking about what we’d have to front him to cover expenses, and we can’t afford to do anything like that.”

“That’s not how we work,” she assured him. “Expenses are my problem. In fact, there’ll be a token good-faith advance for you when we get the paperwork signed.”

“Paperwork?”

“We’ll want exclusive rights to represent the artist’s work. In return, you’ll get an advance from us against future earnings. It won’t be much, maybe a thousand dollars, but that’s better than having to pay money to some vanity gallery, isn’t it?”

He nodded, still taking it all in. “When you say we...”

“I mean me,” she said. “The editorial we, or perhaps it’s more the entrepreneurial we. The Pomerance Gallery is a one-person show in itself, and—”

The phone rang, and caller ID showed it was Maury Winters. “I have to take this,” she told Reginald, and picked up and said, “Well? Did you work a miracle?”

“I hope you have good weather in the Hamptons.”

“You got me out of it.”

“I got you a postponement,” he said, “to which you’re not entitled, but it’d be a hard life if we never got more than we deserved. You’re committed to show up the second week in October, and—”

“October? That’s—”

“—a busy time for you,” he supplied, “and that’s too bad. Susan, sweetheart, we’re talking about a probable three days, starting on a Monday, and you’re closed Mondays, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“And how busy are you on Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Don’t answer that, because I don’t care how busy you are then or any other time. You’ll go and do your duty as a citizen, and you won’t get picked because this is criminal court and nobody’s going to want you on a jury.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’re smart and chic and in the arts.”

“So?”

“So either the prosecution or the defense is going to want you out of there. And even if they don’t, you can keep from being selected. The judge’ll ask if any of the prospective jurors feel incapable of being fair and open-minded about the case at hand, and that’s when you raise your hand and say you couldn’t possibly be fair to Joe Blow because he looks just like the uncle who tried to get in your pants when you were eleven.”

“And he’ll believe me?”

“No, he’ll probably figure you just don’t want to be on a jury, but what do you care about his good opinion? He’ll excuse you, because after you’ve said that he’ll have to. Three days, Susan, and they’ll be over before you know it, and you won’t have to serve again for four more years.”

“If I’d known it was just three days...”

“What?”

“Well, as far as next week is concerned—”

“Forget next week. You’re off the hook for next week and you can’t get back on.”

“I’d rather wait until October anyway,” she said. “You’re a love, Maury. I appreciate it, I really do.”

“You should. You know, you shouldn’t call me for something like this. You should ignore the summons and wait until you’re arrested, and then you call me. I’m a criminal defense attorney, and—”

“One of the best in the country.”

“What are you buttering me up for? I already did you the favor. But every time you have a legal question you call me, and most of it’s stuff I’m rusty on. You must know other lawyers.”

“Not as well as I know you, Maury.” She nibbled her lower lip. “You’re the only one on my speed dial. If there’s anything I can do in return...”

“Well, now that you mention it, one of your famous blow jobs would be more than welcome.”

She let the silence stretch as long as she could. Then, her voice strained, she said, “Maury, you’re on speakerphone. I thought you knew that.”

He didn’t say anything, and the silence was delicious.

“Gotcha,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess you did. I get you out of jury duty and you give me a heart attack. Nice.”

“Just wanted to keep you on your toes,” she said, and blew him a kiss, and rang off.

Chloe was a few minutes late, but no more than you’d expect from a twenty-three-year-old blonde with a crew cut and a nose ring. She took up her post at the front desk and Susan, who generally had lunch delivered, decided it was too nice a day to stay indoors. She walked over to Empire Diner and had a large orange juice and a salmon salad, then browsed a couple of Ninth Avenue antique shops and was back at the gallery a little after two.

She’d sent Reginald Barron off earlier with papers for his uncle to sign and a $500 check as a good-faith advance, and now she had another look at the photos of Emory Allgood’s extraordinary work. She’d kept the disk — Reginald hadn’t thought to ask for its return, and she would have talked him out of it if he had. She didn’t need it, she’d already downloaded the images, but she didn’t want it floating around, not until she had the artist firmly committed to the Susan Pomerance Gallery.

Not that anyone else was likely to respond as strongly as she had, but you never knew, and why take chances? She knew how good the man was, she’d learned to trust that bell in her chest, that tingling in her fingertips, and now, looking again at the pictures, taking more time with them, she found herself running through her client list, picking out those who’d be particularly likely to respond to what she saw.

Before the show she’d invite a few of her best prospects to preview the work. (The show would probably be in late October or early November, and if jury duty cost her a few days in early October, well, she could work around that.) Ideally, there’d be red dots on a third of the pieces by the time the show opened, even if she had to give some of the early birds an unannounced break on the price.

Of course a lot depended on the artist, on the likelihood of his continuing to produce work in quantity. Most of them kept at it, but sometimes an artist would stop making art as abruptly and incomprehensibly as he’d started. If Emory Allgood was likely to pull the plug, she’d do best for his sake and hers to get the highest possible prices for the work at hand.

But if there was more work to come, she could afford for both their sakes to take a different tack. Her goal would be to get those red dots up as quickly as possible, and to sell out the whole show in the first week. Then, when she showed his new work a year later, the buyers who’d been shut out the first time would be primed for a feeding frenzy. And she’d boost the prices and make everybody happy.

She returned to one image, frustrated by the limitation of a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object. She wanted to be right there in the room with the piece, wanted it life-size and smack in front of her, wanted to be able to walk around it and see it from every angle, to reach out and touch it, to feel the up-close-and-personal energy of it.

Eventually, of course, she’d go out and look at the work. She’d assumed they lived in Harlem, but the address Reginald Barron had given her was in Brooklyn, and she had no idea where Quincy Street might be. Bedford-Stuyvesant, she supposed, or Brownsville, or, well, some neighborhood unknown to her. She’d spent a little time in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and she’d been a few times to Carroll Gardens, and of course she’d been to galleries and loft parties in Williamsburg, but that left most of Brooklyn as foreign to her as the dark side of the moon.

The hourly news summary came on. A suicide bomber had taken eleven lives (including, thank God, his own) in a café in Jerusalem. A mining disaster in the Ukraine had left forty-some miners trapped and presumed dead. The mine, she noted, was a mere eighty miles from Chernobyl.

She turned up the volume when they got to the Marilyn Fairchild murder. That was the name, she hadn’t misheard it, and they identified her as a real estate agent and gave her age as thirty-eight.

The announcer moved on to something else and she lowered the volume, and Chloe buzzed her — would she take a call from a Mr. Winters?

She picked up and said, “I was just thinking of you.”

“You got a traffic ticket and you want me to fix it.”

“Silly. I don’t have a car.”

“Jaywalking, then.”

“I was thinking about Marilyn Fairchild. I knew her, Maury.”

“The actress? No, that’s something else.”

“Morgan.”

“That’s it, Morgan Fairchild. There’s something automatically sexy about a woman with two last names. Ashleigh Banfield, I watch her on MSNBC and I get a hard-on. She’s good-looking, but I think it’s the name as much as anything else. Who’s Marilyn Fairchild?”

“She was murdered the day before yesterday.”

“Oh, of course. The name didn’t register. Lived in the Village, strangled in bed. You say you knew her?”

“Not terribly well. She showed me five or six apartments, including the one I bought.”

“You still at London Towers?”

“Until I leave feet first. I love it there.”

“And you’ve been there what, three years?”

“Almost five.”

“That long? You stay in touch with her after the closing?”

“No.” She frowned. “I thought at the time we might get to be friends. They just said she was thirty-eight, so we were a year apart, and—”

“You’re thirty-nine?”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed, delighted. “So you’re thirty-seven. Two years is worth fuck you?”

“We were a year apart,” she went on, “and she was a successful professional woman living alone in the Village, and I’m a successful professional woman living alone in Chelsea, and, oh, I don’t know...”

“You identified.”

“I’m taller by an inch or two. Her figure was fuller. Her hair had a lot of red in it, but I have a hunch it would have been the same dark brown as mine without professional intervention. I don’t smoke, but she did, and that may have given her the throaty voice. She liked a drink.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Did I identify? I suppose.”

“ ‘If it could happen to her...’ ”

“It could happen to me.” She frowned. “Maury, you called me, and probably not because I was thinking of you.”

“I don’t know. Your thoughts are pretty powerful.”

“What did you want?”

“I was thinking it’s been a while, and I was thinking we should have dinner.”

“You still married, Maury?”

“Like you and your apartment,” he said. “Till the day I die.”

“That’s good, and I’d love to have dinner with you. Not tonight, I hope, because—”

“Tonight’s no good for me either. I was thinking the day after tomorrow.”

“Let me check... That’s Friday night? I accept with pleasure.”

“I’ll call you when I know where and when. It’ll be someplace nice.”

“I’m sure it will. And I’ll look forward to it, unless someone strangles me in my bed between now and then. I hope they catch the son of a bitch.”

“They probably will.”

“I hope they put him away.”

“Again, they probably will,” he said. “Unless he gets a good lawyer.”