At the computer she typed “art restoration” into a search window and wrote down several numbers, putting a star by one on lower Decatur and wondering why she hadn’t noticed the place, given how close it must be to the bar. There was no web page, just a phone-book listing. She started to stand, but the mouse held her hand as thought it were magnetic, and she went to the site—the site — to see if Clay’s advertisements were still posted. Only one was; his experiment on the bottom seemed to be failed and over. His ad as a submissive was gone. She read the other one twice, slowly, feeling blood rush between her legs and the thing inside her chest unlatch. What she felt in her mind, though, was very close to jealousy. She didn’t care if he had a girlfriend or a fiancée or a wife, but she wanted what they did together for herself. Otherwise she might as well date a nice guy, someone like Eddie, which was not something she could do with bruises all over her body.
Eli
Ted had arranged this meeting, too, and the woman he was meeting had named the time and place: one o’clock at a newly reopened Caribbean restaurant on Magazine Street. He’d expected one of two clichés: a heavy-breasted woman with a deep, friendly laugh or a thin and beautiful descendent of multigenerational plaçage, which Ted had signified when he’d used the horrible phrase high yellow to describe the Pontalba family. But Felicia Pontalba was more Vassar girl than anything else. A different cliché altogether — one not specific to this place. Her prettiness veered hard from beauty toward the amiable. Her face was wide and affable, her eyes more round than deep, her mouth more flat than sensual. Had he not known she was from a Creole family, he might have taken her for third-generation Italian American or half Lebanese. Vaguely ethnic was the term a prison buddy had used to describe the type of leading lady he preferred to star in the movies he watched and the fantasies he indulged in. “I like brunette girls,” he’d said, and at the time Eli had agreed with enthusiasm.
Felicia Pontalba was smart, or at the least had studied well for her graduate degree in art history — Brown had followed Vassar on her vita — and she showed the practical good sense that someone holding her job should have. She might have been hired through nepotism, or whatever it’s called when you’re connected but not necessarily related, but she could have been hired on merit.
“It wasn’t clear what would happen for several weeks, but then we got busier than we’ve ever been,” she told him after they’d ordered their food and been delivered cold glasses of pale beer. “It’s way, way too early to call the future of the city, but I’m optimistic. It will be different — a lot of people who left won’t come back. I think new people will move here, younger people, creatives. We’re already seeing it. Some neighborhoods are never coming back. Others will swing up. A friend of mine who just reopened his restaurant is having to pay well over minimum wage just to the dishwashers, when he can get them. A client of mine who is in real estate told me that some of the people moving here are renting or even buying in the Bywater. White kids. In the Bywater. Speculators are already there snapping up shotguns and painting them all kinds of colors. Painted ladies they’re not, but painted somethings.”
One of the casualties of his time in prison was Eli’s conversational adeptness. Not knowing what to say, he pulled out a platitude: “Change can be a good thing.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Felicia said, animating with her frequent sips of beer. “I’m not one of those fools who thinks that ‘things happen for a reason,’ and I’m not saying the storm was a good thing. It was an awful thing. An awful, awful, awful thing. People died. Lots of people had to start all over, and the ones who will come off the worst are those who started with the least anyway. Now they’ll be just as poor but living in some horrible place that’s not New Orleans. Can you imagine having to live in Houston? All the heat and none of the joie de vivre. That’s where a lot of them landed. Also Atlanta. And some just stopped wherever the money ran out, God help them wherever they are.”
The clichés seemed to be working, so Eli stayed close to them. “But you’re also looking at the half-full part of the glass.”
“Well, of course I want to. I love this city. Love, love, love it. Naturally I’m also glad to see my business not just returning to baseline but booming.”
Eli realized it was his turn to say something so stalled with a question: “Are more people buying or selling?”
“There are sellers, of course — there are always people who need money or who overextended or can’t wait out appreciation or guessed wrong in the first place. But a lot of people are actually buying. In many cases, insurance money is coming in, and people are looking to rebuild their collections. Southern art especially is flying out of the houses, and textiles, but really everything is doing well.”
“Speaks to your skills, too, I’m sure.”
“The key to success in the auction world is to have things other people want — or at least to matchmake people who want things with the people who have them.”
“So are you better at acquiring the valuables or making introductions?”
“I guess if I had to start over, I’d establish one of those dating services they advertise in in-flight magazines.”
Eli shrugged, his expressed ignorance authentic.
“You know, I’d match ‘successful’ people with each other over lunch.”
Eli took a slow sip of his beer, less of a stall than a settling into Felicia’s pace, which punctuated the languor of the place with her more rapid enthusiasms. “You said Southern art is hot, but what about European paintings lately? Belgian?”
“Ted told me you’re looking for a small painting by Eugeen van Mieghem.” She lifted her eyebrows, her taste for obvious communication extending from words to gestures.
The waiter interrupted with their plates: shrimp with garlic, black beans with yellow rice, fried plantains, green salad.
“Any whiff of it?”
“We’re extremely cautious about due diligence. More than most houses, even. We have to be, given the city’s general reputation for corruption. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the painting were here, or came through here, but I didn’t hear about it. Not a whiff, and I do hear at least some things I shouldn’t.” She gave another eyebrow raise and a smile that felt stock to him — something she’d learned from a movie or perhaps an imitation of someone she knew and wanted to be more like but wasn’t.
The food was better than it looked, which was beginning to seem like a citywide truth. “People know how to cook here,” he said.
“From way back.” Felicia’s wide smile transformed into something more authentic, tilting her back toward beautiful without getting her all the way there. She was attractive, but affable was indeed the word. He decided he liked her a lot.
“Ted said you might be able to help me with some contacts, or at least some names. I’d be interested in knowing about any collectors of European painting, particularly interwar, but also any known questionable dealers. And of course full-on fences. There may be names you have that we don’t.”
“When I get back to the office I’ll type you up a list and email it, assuming you have access.”
“I’d appreciate it. It would also be good to have the names of any appraisers and, given the hurricane, restorers. It’s probable that the painting was in the city when Katrina hit.”