Jeff spread cream onto a water cracker, then scooped a dollop of roe on top. This consumed all of his attention, assembling a snack like he was going to present it to a panel of judges on a cooking show. Then, satisfied with how it looked, he popped the whole thing into his mouth and chewed, eyebrows up, looking at me.
“I got back to the actor’s house,” he said, once he’d swallowed his bite and washed it down with a sip of his cocktail, “and rummaged around for the white pages, remember those? No Francis Arsenault. Either he was unlisted—as somebody would be who could afford to build a giant house on Mandeville—or my phone book’s coverage didn’t extend to that corner of the city.”
“If they’d tried to get the whole city into one book, it would have been the size of a small refrigerator.”
“Right. But I had a trick up my sleeve. Remember the job I was working, the online city-guide thing? Well, this was in the days of dial-up, and my boss had given me a modem to work with, meaning I had access to the nascent World Wide Web, as they used to call it. So I did what any of us would do first today—”
“A web search.”
“Right. I started with Yahoo, because they were rumored to be sniffing around our company for a possible purchase, so I felt a subtle allegiance to them. Turned out not to be true, by the way, no idea what became of the city search site. And Yahoo delivered. I discovered, without much trouble, a business called Francis Arsenault Fine Art on Camden Way in Beverly Hills.”
“A gallery?”
Jeff laughed. “You’ve never heard of him, I assume, which is fine, but I’m telling you now that in those days he was as well-known as Arne Glimcher or Larry Gagosian.”
“Okay, those sound familiar,” I said.
“Household names… in the right households. I look back now, of course, and I find it amusing that I’d never heard of him, that I hadn’t recognized his name as soon as I saw it on the lifeguard’s report. But that’s the way it is, isn’t it? We learn something new and we can’t imagine never having known it. We’re crossing the Rubicon every day, every minute. Can’t go back. Can’t return to a time when that name meant nothing to me. Not even in my imagination. Every bubble burst by the pinprick of reality.”
He made a balloon-popping motion with the little roe spoon.
“I went the next afternoon,” he said. “At first I couldn’t figure out where it was. I had no idea what to expect. I figured an intimate space, dark woods, old paintings displayed in the windows, but it turned out to be this big white cube tucked between two office buildings, with no sign on it other than the address. Only after I’d parked the old Volvo in the structure across the street did I walk up to the humungous frosted-glass facade and see the sign. FAFA Group Show. It was visible through a gap in the frosting on the glass, a strip of transparency in a field of translucency. I remember thinking that it couldn’t be good business—how was anybody supposed to know what this place was?
“The door—human-size and transparent—was cracked a tiny bit, just enough so I knew it was open. I stood on the sidewalk, imagining myself walking in. Who would I find? Francis? No, he wouldn’t be in front. A receptionist. And then I’d ask for Francis, right? And he would emerge from wherever, stand in front of me, and… what? What could I possibly say to the man?”
“I saved your life?”
Jeff shook his head. “See, that was the problem. I didn’t want it to seem like I had come to collect anything. Even if Francis decided to show his gratitude at that point, it wouldn’t be any more meaningful than when you remind a child to say thank you.”
“What’s wrong with coming to collect something?” I asked.
“It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like what a good person would do, to put it clumsily. You don’t save someone’s life to collect a reward. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t even feel like I’d been given a choice. And so I didn’t want it to seem as though that was what I was doing.”
“Why track him down, then?”
“I was asking myself the same question, trust me. I’m still asking myself.”
“Seeking closure?”
“What, here?”
“No, I mean why you sought him out. To put an endcap on your traumatic experience at the beach.”
He considered this. “Yes, that would have made sense to me at the time.”
“And now?”
He held his hand up. “Stick with me here.”
“Fair enough. Did you go in?”
“I crossed the street. There was a coffee shop next to the parking structure, cute little place with a patio. I went in, asked the woman behind the counter if people ever came over from the gallery. She said they were in and out all the time. Needed pepping up, she said, surrounded by that boring art all day.
“I took my Americano to a two-top on the sidewalk and waited. Maybe, I thought, he would come out and cross the street. Didn’t know what I would do next, but it seemed better than going in and asking for him. If he came to me, I mean, even serendipitously, that would be different. I remember sitting there, waiting, watching the afternoon’s shadows make their way across the street. They reached the sidewalk opposite, but the gallery still blazed white in the sun. How did they keep that thing so clean? I wondered. Parked there, watching nobody go through that door. Again, how could a place like that stay in business, I thought, no foot traffic.
“Occasionally, I did see signs of movement. Just inside the door there was a gap in the partition, with what looked like a desk behind it. Whoever sat at that desk could, while minding the gallery behind the partition, also see and interact with people coming in from the sidewalk. Sometimes I saw that person, but no Francis. The light turned yellowish, and the shadows creeped up the facade. I drank another Americano. My thoughts were going in circles. At one point it occurred to me that if I had in fact come for a reward, I could do very well for myself. Between the Mandeville house and this gallery, Francis Arsenault was obviously a wealthy man. What if he were to pay off my credit card debt? I put it out of my head. That wasn’t what this was about. Or if it was, it wasn’t for me to decide. I could only put myself in Francis’s path and see what happened from there.”
“You thought he would recognize you.”
“Why not? I wouldn’t have to remind him or ask him or in any way prod him for his gratitude. At the very least I had to give him a chance to see me again.
“The shadows had swallowed the entire building when I noticed a figure behind the frosted glass, walking the length of the gallery in front of the partition. I could see that it was a man, but I couldn’t see his face, obviously, just the outline of him. He walked slowly and deliberately, as if he had a stack of books on his head. When he reached the clear glass door, the outline resolved into someone specific.”
10
Francis Arsenault looked different than he had on the beach, his hair combed neatly, small wire-rimmed glasses sitting low on his nose. Nevertheless, he had the same drooping eye, the same tenderloin physique, the same five-o’clock shadow, the same mouth into which Jeff had breathed new life.
Francis didn’t push through the door. Instead, he turned and talked to someone through the gap in the partition. He looked toward the other end of the gallery, and a tall young woman in heels stomped across toward him, stepping past and opening the door, then handing him a small zippered portfolio case. Had he called her to bring him the case or to open the door for him, or both?