The day before its scheduled demolition he made his way to the small gallery. Across the waste field, the historical site of the once-hissing hospital for the criminally insane. The gallery’s owner had died the previous winter and after a faint- and half-hearted stab at introspective profitability attempted by the old man’s niece, the little building had been sold to the usual millenialists, the biggest, hungriest condo-erecting gangsters. The gift shop inventory, narrow as it may have been in the best of times, would surely be depleted down to a two-shelf bookcase by now. It pained him to imagine the unsold books and posters and artsy postcards and where they would wind up after today, particularly as he had no intention of rescuing them from present oblivion. He intended no more than a final pass-by, to stand on the sidewalk, stare past his reflection to the empty interior and give a thought or two to Jerzy, and Catherine, and Vice Consul Plum.
He was surprised to see a small knot of others milling the sidewalk as he approached. A few he recognized from nights past and they nodded at each other and went on. The gallery was utterly empty, rolls of torn up carpet piled to block the front door. A small selection of books were arranged on two long narrow tables on the sidewalk, with, between them, a spinnable rack of postcards and a plastic trash can from which protruded a dozen or so rolled and rubberbanded posters.
He recognized the niece by the polite distance she kept from himself and the others, halfway down the sidewalk, mobile phone to her ear, dressed like she’d just stepped away from the boardroom to attend to some black sheep’s bail. Blond hair as silken as stardom, green business suit that quizzed Prosecutor’s Office?, black stockings and high heels to make the old boys’ network squirm and re-prioritize. Everyone’s grown-up niece, gone corporate and secure, eager to be shed of the family past but not so eager to be seen doing it.
He tapped his finger along the exhibition catalogues. Ingres and Rego, McGalliard and Klee. Heartfield, Botta, Signac, Hesse. At the Heartfield show (or was it the Rego?) Catherine had nearly fainted and they’d gone outside and stood there at the corner with snow just beginning to fall and her agitation gave way to peace and he understood, wordlessly, that she’d arrived at a conclusion regarding her brand new pregnancy.
He moved on and peered down the long tube of a poster to guess its content. A dwarf star, giving up the ghost. Anything good? a voice asked and it took him a moment to locate the source. A small man in a woolen cap, frowning from the other side of the postcard rack. Oh, you know, he replied, with a smile and a gesture just as unhelpfully vague. The small man frowned and nodded and said something that could have been ‘Hokusai’ or ‘Who’s Your Daddy’ for all he knew. He moved on to the postcards, taking care that the body of the rack kept the would-be conversationalist out of sight. A Man Ray portrait, the famous one with glass beads on the woman’s cheek meant to simulate tears. Jerzy’s sister, on a visit from the dark world, had said in her blunt English I think they are sperms and looking again he agreed. He looked a while longer and drew out two as souvenirs of the day. Winter clouds impaled on night-sharpened trees, photographed by Paul Vitasse. Eerie, sumptuous. Which is it? Decide, please. And one taken by Robert Byron, the Briton whose recently reprinted travelogue was undergoing something of a vogue, nostalgie de la boue and all that. Herat’s blistered silence, its smoke-gray walls.
Beneath his thumb Catherine’s pulse had beat with an obedience that grew elusive when his tired mind wandered. Sometimes it had seemed her skin might scorch him when she had been asleep for many hours. Now the chill of her wrist and arm shocked him from indifference to selfishness to concern. Nothing must go wrong. Everything would be all right. He had never deserved what he was now going to lose. It all seemed clear as a winter’s morning with no one around to lie to or comfort him. He had stayed up with her for two sad nights running. Certain words, like buoys in her delirium, affected him even now. Laquearia. Coffer. Dolphin. When he told her he didn’t understand, she replied, perfectly reasonable. And I wouldn’t want you to follow where I’m going. Everyone had let everyone down ad it still sometimes seemed a miracle that they’d gotten out alive.