Jeff excused himself to use the bathroom, where he promptly threw up his dinner.
Chloe arrived immediately with a cup of water, admonishing her father for getting her boyfriend sick. Francis cackled in the other room, saying the blame lay entirely with Jeff, he was a big boy, Francis hadn’t forced anything on him. Alison scolded him from the kitchen, Francis countered. Jeff lay his head on the toilet seat while Chloe stroked his hair.
47
“Excuse me.” Saskia from the reception desk materialized in front of us. “Your flight has been cleared, but there is the matter of gathering a new crew. So you will be flying this evening, but please be patient with us.”
We thanked her, and she went in search of other refugees from our flight.
The sun had disappeared over the horizon. It was almost completely dark outside. The planes and their service vehicles were lit up, but in the dark parts of the view, the windows had been taken over by our reflections.
“Do you think it was possible that Francis knew?”
“Of course it was possible, anything is possible. At the time, in moments of anxiety and paranoia, I was sure he knew. Why else would he pay me so much attention? And then I’d talk myself down. I reminded myself that I was dating his daughter, that I reminded him of himself, that I was like the son he’d never had, and so on. It was a function of my self-esteem, I decided. If I believed myself worthy of Francis’s attention, then of course he didn’t remember me from the beach. If I thought myself unworthy, I could find no other reason for him to keep me close.”
“What do you think now?”
“I think that some part of him might have known then, but strictly subconsciously.”
“Resulting in a bias toward you?”
“Correct.”
“But you didn’t press him on it? Ask about who rescued him?”
Jeff shook his head. “I didn’t dare. We’d only just achieved a kind of equilibrium, a family dynamic, I guess you could say. I’d never had it growing up, so it was hard to recognize, also in general it’s hard to know when things are going well, it’s like your health, you take it for granted to the degree that it becomes invisible to you. Nevertheless, I knew that were I to reveal my role in Francis’s rescue, everything would have come crashing down. I’m sure he would have been grateful, but the way I’d inserted myself into his life, which I would contend was basically accidental, the result of a series of decisions I hadn’t fully thought through, would have immediately cast a cloud of mistrust over me.
“I’d had an anxiety attack that night. Even the music that was playing in the background, it was jazz, the same Charlie Parker mix I had played in the gallery, dissolved into chaos, notes falling all over one another, torn out of time. While sitting there on the floor of the Arsenault bathroom, my face on the cool toilet seat, Chloe stroking my hair, my panic receding, I realized that the source of the attack wasn’t hearing Francis’s account of the rescue, wasn’t the prospect of reliving the event that had, as you put it, traumatized me. The source was a dawning fear that as a result of this whole ordeal I had become monstrously deceptive and selfish, on the order of Francis himself, as if he had infected me the moment I had put my mouth to his, and that by some operation of cosmic justice this would be exposed, and that everything around me, everything I had so recently begun, and, without any force of will or malicious intent, had come to treasure, would be stripped from me.”
48
Everything was about to be overturned, but not by Jeff, not by his secret or his action or inaction. Not even by his complacence, his comfort, his desire for everything to stay the same. No, life was about to go upside down because of another secret, one Francis was keeping.
One night, Chloe called Jeff, sobbing. She had just been attacked, she said. He asked if she was all right, if she had called the police, if he needed to drive down there right away. Verbally, she said, I was attacked verbally. He asked her who had done it and where and why, and again asked her if she was okay. She said she was not okay, she was miserable and confused and angry. She had been at a party thrown by one of the art MFAs when a woman, an MFA student, pulled her aside. She didn’t know this person—she’d seen her around, of course, she was aware of the graduate students, but she had never met her. The student was shaking, on the verge of tears. She said her name was Astrid.
Jeff’s stomach dropped. Astrid? He asked her what she looked like. Chloe said it didn’t matter, she was pretty, too skinny, about Jeff’s age, a few years older, kooky hair.
Away from the main party, tucked into an alcove by the kitchen, Astrid asked Chloe if her last name was indeed Arsenault.
“Yes,” Chloe said.
“Your father is Francis Arsenault?”
“Yes,” Chloe said.
“He’s a bastard,” said Astrid. She proceeded to tell her all about how her father had led her along, showing interest in her work, all but telling her he was going to sign her, give her a show, at least put a piece in a group show, or hang her work in the back room. He’d done a studio visit, she said. And she had done everything she could to put everything she had into her new paintings, thinking—no, knowing—the whole time that they would, or at least one would, be hanging in FAFA sometime over the next year.
Astrid was manic, voice shaking. Chloe looked for a way to extricate herself from the situation. She had never been called to task for her father’s business decisions, nor should she have been. Astrid started to slur her words, recognized it, and proceeded to overenunciate every phrase.
Chloe looked around for another MFA student to confirm that Astrid had crossed a line, but nobody met her eye. And yet she could feel their gazes, as if some of them knew what was happening, what was going to happen, experiencing the schadenfreude of someone else’s career suicide, because even if Chloe wasn’t doing anything then, even if she couldn’t escape or respond or shut down Astrid, she would without hesitation describe this episode in its entirety to her father.
Her work was supposed to be shown at FAFA, Astrid continued, it was the deal, it was part of the deal, he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t now, who cared if they never shook on it, if there was nothing on paper, he had promised her, and besides—Astrid became curiously still then, as if to steady her aim before firing a kill shot—he must have known, he couldn’t not have known, that if he hadn’t been who he was, if he hadn’t held the power and the allure and the access, there was no way in a million years she would have fucked him.
On the phone, Chloe sniffled. “How messed up is that?” she asked Jeff.
Jeff asked her if it was possible Astrid was lying, or that someone was pulling a prank. He said this half-heartedly, knowing what he had known since he saw Francis place his hand on Astrid’s at Mr. Chow, but a part of him hoped that all this could go away, that he could go back to the time before he picked up the phone to a sobbing Chloe.
If it was a prank, Chloe said, then Astrid was a hell of an actress. She had unleashed the full force of her fury, pain, and frustration at Chloe, without restraint or tempering. She was going to blow everything up, even if she took herself out in the process.