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"Because I find you fascinating."
"After all these years?"
"It's probably abnormal," I said, "but I can't help it."
It had been late afternoon by the time I left the Addison Club. I walked home and took a shower, then sat down and went over my notes. She'd called around six to say she wouldn't be getting home for di
"Don't do that."
"There's some leftover Chinese in the fridge, but you'd probably rather go out. Don't throw out the leftovers, I'll have them when I get home."
"I've got a better idea," I said. "I want to get to a meeting. You go to your class, and meet me afterward at Paris Green."
"Deal."
I went to the 8:30 meeting at St. Paul's, then walked down Ninth Avenue and got to Paris Green around a quarter after ten. Elaine was on a stool at the bar, chatting with Gary and nursing a tall glass of cranberry juice and seltzer. I went to collect her and he laid a hand on my arm.
"Thank God you're here," he said archly. "That's her third one of those, and you know how she gets."
Bryce gave us a window table, and over di
"He does these village scenes in oil on masonite," she said, "and they have a nice folk-art look to them, but they left me underwhelmed. Maybe I've seen too much of that kind of thing. Or maybe he has, because that's the feeling I got, that his source of inspiration wasn't his own childhood memories as much as it was the work of other artists he's been exposed to." She made a face. "But that's New York, isn't it? He's never taken a class or sold a painting, but he knows to bring slides. Who ever heard of a folk artist with slides? I bet you don't get that crap in Appalachia."
"Don't be so sure."
"You're probably right. Anyway, I told him I'd keep his name on file. In other words, don't call us. I don't know, maybe he's the long-lost bastard son of Grandma Moses and Howard Finster, and I just blew the chance of a lifetime. But I have to go with my instincts, don't you think?"
They had served her well over the years. When we met I was a cop with a brand-new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons in Syosset, and she was a young call girl, bright and fu
A couple of years ago circumstances threw us together again, and what we'd had was still there, stronger than ever and richer for the years we'd lived through. At first she went on seeing clients and we both pretended that was okay, but of course it wasn't, and eventually I bit the bullet and said so and she admitted she'd already put herself out of business.
We kept inching closer and closer to marriage. Last April she'd sold her old place on East Fiftieth and picked out an apartment in the Parc Vendôme and we'd moved in together. It was her money that bought the place and I'd refused to let her put my name on the deed.
I paid the monthly maintenance on the apartment and picked up the checks when we went out to di
Eventually we would get married, too, and I wasn't sure why it was taking us so long. We kept not quite setting a date. We kept letting it slide.
Meanwhile, she had opened a gallery. First she'd gone to work at one on Madison Avenue with the intention of learning the business. She had an argument with the woman who ran the place and quit after two months, then got a similar job downtown on Spring Street. She didn't much care for the artwork in either establishment; the photo-realists at the uptown gallery struck her as sterile, while she saw the commercial can-vases at the SoHo gallery as clicheád and cloying, a high-ticket equivalent of Holiday I
More to the point, she found the business itself unpleasant, the snobbery, the petty jealousies, the relentless courting of investors and corporate collectors. "I thought I quit prostitution," she said one night, "and here I am pimping for a bunch of bad painters. I don't get it." She went in the following morning and gave notice.
What she wanted, she decided, was a sort of cross between a gallery and a curiosity shop. She'd stock it with things she liked, and she'd try to sell them to people who were looking for something to hang on the wall, or place on the coffee table. She had a good eye, everyone told her that, and she'd taken more courses over the years at Hunter and NYU and the New School than your average art historian, so why shouldn't she take her best shot?
It turned out to be easy to get started. There were a lot of vacant storefronts in the neighborhood that season, and she checked them all out and charmed the owner of a building on Ninth and Fifty-fifth into giving her a good lease at a reasonable rent. Over the years she'd packed a locker in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse with things she'd bought and tired of; the two of us went through it and filled the back of a borrowed station wagon with prints and canvases, and that gave her enough stock to open.
Toward the end of her first month of operation she paid a second visit to the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art and came back wide-eyed. "It's an exalting experience," she said, "even more than the first time, and I was completely blown away, but you know what? I realized something. Some of those early paintings, the portraits and still lifes. If you take them entirely out of context, and if you forget that they happened to be painted by a genius, you'd think you were looking at something out of a thrift shop."
"I see what you mean," I said, "but isn't that a little like looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, 'My kid could do this'?"
"No," she said. "Because I'm not knocking Matisse. I'm putting in a word for the anonymous unheralded amateur."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean context is everything," she said.
The next day she beeped TJ and hired him to mind the store while she hit every thrift shop she could get to. By the end of the week she had covered most of Manhattan, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of paintings and buying almost thirty, at an average price of $8.75. She lined them up and asked me what I thought. I told her I didn't think Matisse had anything to worry about.
"I think they're great," she insisted. "They're not necessarily good, but they're great."
She picked out her six favorites and had them framed in simple gallery-style black frames. She sold two the first week, one for $300 and one for $450. "See?" she said, triumphant. "Stuff 'em in a bin at the Salvation Army at ten bucks apiece and they're thrift-shop art that nobody looks at twice. Treat them with respect and price them at three to five hundred and they're folk art, and people think they're a steal. I had a woman in just before closing who fell in love with the desert sunset. 'But this looks like paint-by-number,' she said. 'That's just what it is,' I told her. 'It was the artist's favorite medium. He worked only with paint-by-number.' What do you bet she comes back tomorrow and buys it?"
It was getting on for midnight when we left Paris Green and walked home on Ninth Avenue. There was rain forecast but you never would have known it. The air was cool and dry, and there was a breeze off the Hudson.