her sallowness, the wiry white-threaded unruliness of her morning hair.
Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya’s Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet’s Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet’s whore; although there’s every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She’s immortal now, she’s a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can’t help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world.
Rebecca says, “It’s hard to be a parent.”
“Meaning?”
“How do you think Mizzy is doing?” she asks.
Mizzy?
“All right, I guess. Weren’t we talking about Bea?”
“Yes. Sorry. I just have this feeling that this is some sort of last chance for Mizzy.”
“He’s not our daughter.”
“Bea is stronger than Mizzy.”
“Is she?”
“Oh, Peter, it probably is too early for this conversation after all. I’ve got to get dressed, I’ve got that conference call today.”
Blue Light is going under. Some conquistador from Montana, of all places, is considering bailing it out.
“Ugh.”
“I know.”
They have, of course, discussed this. Is it better to just fold, or decide to believe this out-of-nowhere benefactor when he says he doesn’t want the magazine to change? Consider history. How many wealthy nations have taken over smaller ones and left them unmauled?
Still, one wants things to live on. Still, one doesn’t want to be a forty-year-old unemployed editor in this market.
And what’s to like about having the phrase “in this market” rattling around in your head?
“What do you think?” he asks her.
“I know we’re going to say yes, if he’s really and truly interested. It would feel too strange to let it die.”
“Yeah.”
They sip their coffee. Here they are, hardworking middle-aged people with decisions to make.
If he’s going to tell her about Mizzy, now would be a logical time, wouldn’t it?
He says, “I’m going out to look at the Groffs today.”
“It’s a lucky break.”
“Is. I still feel a little… funny about it, though.”
“Mm.”
She’s not the biggest fan of his aesthetic squeamishness. She’s on his side, but she’s not an art nut, she appreciates it, she gets it (most of the time) but can’t—doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to—edit out a certain pragmatism; a certain sense (like Uta’s) that Peter can be too delicate for his own good, that he is unambiguously in the art business, and, maybe more to the point, is too goddamned hard on himself, he has never taken on an artist for purely cynical or commercial reasons. Do you understand, crazy old Peter Harris, do you understand that genius is rare, I mean by definition, and it’s one thing (a good thing) to search ardently and earnestly for the Real Deal but it’s another (a less-good thing) to obsess over it, to roll through your forties still nursing the suspicion that no one’s great enough, no artist or object can be forgiven for being, well, human in the first case and intractably thing-like in the second. Remember, how often the great art of the past didn’t look great at first, how often it didn’t look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it’s still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that’s survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.
“Anyway,” he says, “there are worse crimes than trying to sell a Groff urn to Carole Potter.”
Which is something she could just as easily have said to him, isn’t it?
What she says is, “Absolutely.” She’s not really thinking about him at the moment, and why should she? Her magazine, which she lovingly helped found and nurture, is about to either go out of business or become the property of some strange man who claims to be a patron of the arts, though he seems to live in Billings, Montana.
“Will you do me a favor?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Will you tell me I wasn’t the worst father in the world?”
“No. You were nothing like the worst father in the world. You did the best you could.”
She kisses him chastely on the cheek. And that’s that.
They perform their morning ablutions like the dance team they’ve become. He shaves while she showers, and when she’s done showering she leaves the water on for him because it takes him exactly as long to shave as it does her to shower. Impossible not to see it sometimes as a film montage, Scenes from a Marriage (oh, our corrupted imaginations), the synchronized washings and brushings and putting-on of clothes. Peter is the faster and more decisive dresser, which is funny, because he’s more vain and nervous than she is, but for workdays he’s got that man thing in his favor, just pick one of the four suits and one of the ten shirts, all of which go with any of the four suits. Rebecca puts on the dark pencil skirt (Prada, almost immorally expensive, but she was right, she’s worn it for years) and the thin mocha-colored cashmere sweater, asks him if it looks okay, he tells her yes but she changes anyway. He understands—although it’s just a conference call she’s looking for the lucky outfit, the one that’ll make her feel as forcefully herself as it’s possible for her to feel. He leaves her going through the closet, does a quick check of the kitchen for something breakfastlike, decides he’ll just grab a Starbucks sandwich en route, goes back into the bedroom, where Rebecca has switched to the navy blue sheath dress which, as he can tell immediately by her face, isn’t going to feel right either.
“Good luck today,” he says. “Call me after you’ve had the conference.”
“You know I will.”
A quick kiss and he’s off, past the closed door behind which Mizzy sleeps, or pretends to sleep.
The next couple of hours at the gallery are taken up with what Peter and Rebecca have come to call the Ten Thousand Things (as in, over the phone, “What are you doing?” “Oh, you know, the Ten Thousand Things”), their shorthand for the ongoing avalanche of e-mails and phone calls and meetings, their way of conveying to each other that they’re busy but you don’t want to know the particulars, they don’t even interest me. All Uta offers regarding Groff is what Peter calls her German look, a Teutonic hauteur that implies precisely what it’s meant to imply: Little guy, it’s a big world, why don’t you consider agonizing over things that actually matter? He’d like to have the conversation with Uta that he’d like to have had with Rebecca, the one about compromise and his refusal to dismiss the question as trivial; he’d like, in fact, to have talked to Uta about the idea of closing the gallery and doing… something else. No idea what, of course. And why would Uta, who likes her job just fine, who’s happy enough with good-enough art—why does he think she’d want to have that particular conversation with him?
Still. It’d be nice to have that conversation with someone, and although Bette is the likeliest candidate he can’t really have it with Bette. He’s not at all convinced that her sense of discouragement with the world of art sales isn’t a defense—who wants to leave a party when it’s going strong? If Bette pretends to be disgusted with commerce, doesn’t it cede less power to her illness? Does he really want to be a healthy younger man complaining about staying at the very same party she’s being compelled to leave?
He takes the L out to Bushwick (the limo days are over, even if you could still afford them it wouldn’t look
