Thanksgiving dinner was atrocious, the two of us sniping at each other across the table while the rest of her guestsall art peoplekept trying to steer the conversation back on track. Marilyn got very drunk and began to tell ugly stories about her ex-husband. I mean truly savage; she mocked his inability to sustain an erection; she imitated his pillow-talk; she railed about his three daughters and how stone-dumb they were, how none of them had scored higher than eight hundred on their SATs and how he’d had to bribe their way both into and through Spence, piling detail upon humiliating detail, all the while staring at me, so that if you’d walked into the room midway through her speech you would’ve likely figured me for the buffoon in question. Finally I couldn’t stand any more. “Enough,” I said.
Her head swiveled loosely toward me. “I’m boring you?”
I said nothing. “Am I?”
I saidI couldn’t help myself”Not just me.”
And she smiled. “All right, then, you pick a topic.”
I excused myself and left the table.
Knowing she’d be hungover, I got up early the next morning and told Isaac that I wouldn’t be needing his services anymore. I packed my things and went downstairs to catch a cab back to TriBeCa. The clothes from Barneys I kept.
AS I MENTIONED, work wasn’t going so well, either. I shouldn’t say that; I actually have no idea what the gallery was like during those months, because I was seldom there. While it was true that I had been gone a lot longer dealing with the Cracke drawings, at least then I’d been working for the gallery. Now what could I say? Mornings when I should have been able to step into a suit, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment. At the time I told myself that the cause of my lethargy was physical. I was tired; I needed to rest; I had just gotten out of the hospital. But by December I was feeling mostly fine, and I still didn’t want to get back on the floor. Having missed Alyson’s opening, I had a hard time getting invested in her show; and at moments, I couldn’t even remember what was hanging, let alone muster the energy to sell it.
This surprised me, most of all because I had so recently felt better than ever about my job. Victor Cracke’s work had reawakened my love of art and made the exercise of buying and selling seem worth more than the dollars involved. But I suppose that that was the very essence of the problem. Without the kind of charge that Cracke provided, I was back to pushing work that I didn’t fully believe in, lots of cleverness and allusiveness that now rang hollow. And since I couldn’t count on a Victor Cracke coming along very often, I looked at my future and saw one big blank.
So there you have it, a neat dichotomy: Marilyn and my gallery and my day job on the one side; and on the other side Samantha and Victor and five dead boys. I’ve wrapped it up neatly in story and served it to you on a bed of symbolism. You’ll never really understand how profoundly that winter changed me, though, because to this day I don’t understand it myself.
With time I have come to see that these changes were lying in wait longer than I realized. When people we know do something radically out of character, we force ourselves to revise our impressions; we look back and the insignificant becomes illuminating. It’s hard to look at yourself critically, objectively; but as a narcissist, I’ve spent a lot of time examining my own life, and I know now that I had been dissatisfied longer than I realized. When I entered the business I thought I had found the place for me. Until that point I was half a personality, unformed and uninformed by anything except my desire to distance myself from my father. He was cold and art was hot. Art wasso I told myselfas different from real estate as possible. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I thought that. You might be laughing at me; I know Marilyn would. But the fact that I tell you what I thought and not worry whether you’re laughing is, I think, a pretty good indication of how far I’ve come.
IT WAS THE THIRD WEEK OF DECEMBER before the DNA results started coming back in, and we met with Annie Lundley to review the forensics reports. It was a frustrating afternoon: none of the evidence allowed us to draw firm conclusions. All of the hair recovered from the room, for example, matched samples taken from the excluded groupincluding me.
Samantha looked at me. “You know what this means.”
“What.”
“It means your hair is falling out.”
The old pair of jeans yielded two DNA profiles, one from the bloodstain and the other from the semen, the latter presumably belonging to the perpetrator. Although the state crime lab still hadn’t gotten back to Samantha about her request to check the profile against CODIS (see how fast I was learning?), Annie had been able to scrounge up dead skin cells from the sweater found in Victor’s apartment. That profile did not match the profile taken from the jeans. Although we had been assuming that the sweater belonged to Victor, we had no proof; and we furthermore could not rule out the possibility that the wearer of the sweater (if it was in fact Victor) had been present at the crime scene but failed to leave DNA.
The most promising lead was the partial fingerprint taken from the inside of the weather journal. At my request, Annie had tried to be as nonin-vasive as possible when handling the art; and, going slowly, she had page by page examined the journals for usable evidence. The print had also been sent to the FBI, request still pending. As Samantha and Annie talked it once again became clear to me how much of what they did was paperwork, how much time got wasted in leaving messages and sending follow-up e-mails. In that sense, our jobs had a lot in common.
When Annie left, Samantha and I turned our attention to the group of comparison cases. She had whittled it down to three, one of which left a surviving victim. The two other murders were cold, their evidence in storage, and we planned to get those boxes out of storage once the holiday had passed. The survivor was a boya man now, assuming he was still alive named James Jarvis. At age eleven he had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and choked, and left for dead in a park four miles from Muller Courts; this happened in 1973, six years after the presumed final murder. So far, Samantha had been unable to locate Jarvis, but she was determined to keep trying. When she told me that, she got the little familiar bulge in her jaw.
It was December 21. We were in a booth at the Chinese restaurant, tired of talking about homicide, content to watch the traffic. It was dark out, the sidewalk slush painted red and green by the stringlights in the window. I never found Queens beautiful, but at that moment it seemed realer than any place I had ever been.
” ‘You will endure a great trial,’ ” she read.
“In bed.”
“In bed.” She chewed loudly. “Your turn.”
” ‘You have many friends.’ “
“In bed.”
“In bed. Please,” I said, holding up a hand, “don’t even bother.”
She grinned and reached for her wallet.
“On me,” I said.
She studied me. “Is this a ruse?”
“Consider it a gift to the working class.”
She gave me the finger. But she let me pay.
Outside we stood shivering and talking about the upcoming holiday. Samantha was headed to Wilmington with her mother and sister and their respective spouses. “I’ll be back on the second,” she said. “Try not to miss me.”
“I will.”
“Miss me, or try not to.”
I shrugged. “You decide.”
She smiled. “And what are your big plans?”
“Marilyn’s having a party this Thursday. Yearly thing she does.”
“That’s the twenty-third,” she said. “I meant Christmas itself.” “What about it.”
“Are you going to be somewhere?” “Yes,” I said. “At home.” “Oh,” she said.
“You can hang on to your condescension just a little longer, if you don’t mind.”