I walked, to clear my head. It was a clean damp spring day, storm clouds pierced with bars of light and office workers milling in the crosswalks, but spring in New York was always a poisoned time for me, a seasonal echo of my mother’s death blowing in with the daffodils, budding trees and blood splashes, a thin spray of hallucination and horror (Neat! Fun! as Xandra might have said). With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of cloth and bone.
It was unthinkable. I’d thought of calling Andy a million times and it was only embarrassment that had kept me from it; it was true that I didn’t keep up with anyone from the old days but I did bump into someone from our school every now and again and our old schoolmate Martina Lichtblau (with whom, the year before, I had had a brief and unsatisfying affair, a total of three stealthy fucks on a fold-out sofa)—Martina Lichtblau had spoken of him, Andy’s in Massachusetts now, are you still in touch with Andy, oh yeah, just as humongous a geek as ever except he plays it up so much now it’s almost, like, kind of retro and cool? Coke bottle glasses? Orange corduroys and a haircut like Darth Vader’s helmet?
Wow, Andy, I’d thought, shaking my head fondly, reaching over Martina’s bare shoulder for one of her cigarettes. I had thought then how good it would be to see him—too bad he wasn’t in New York—maybe I’d call him some time over the holidays when he was home.
Only I hadn’t. I wasn’t on Facebook for reasons of paranoia and seldom looked at the news but still I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t heard—except that, in recent weeks, I’d been worried about the shop to the point I thought of little else. Not that we had worries financially—we’d been pulling in money almost literally hand over fist, so much money that Hobie, crediting me with his salvation (he’d been on the verge of bankruptcy) had insisted on making me partner, which I hadn’t been all that keen on given the circumstances. But my efforts to put him off had only made him more determined that I should share in the profits; the more I tried to brush off his offer, the more persistent he grew; with typical generosity, he attributed my reticence to “modesty” although my real fear was that a partnership would shed a certain official light on unofficial goings-on in the shop—goings-on that would shock poor Hobie to the soles of his John Lobb shoes, if he knew. Which he didn’t. For I’d intentionally sold a fake to a client, and the client had figured it out and was kicking up a fuss.
I didn’t mind giving the money back—in fact, the only thing to do was buy the piece back at a loss. In the past, this had worked for me well. I sold heavily altered or outright reconstructed pieces as original; if—out of the dim light of Hobart and Blackwell—the collector got the piece home and noticed something amiss (“always carry a pocket light with you,” Hobie had counselled me, early in the game; “there’s a reason so many antique shops are dark”) then I—grieved at the mix-up, while stalwart in my conviction that the piece was genuine—gallantly offered to buy it back at ten percent more than the collector had paid, under the conditions and terms of an ordinary sale. This made me look like a good guy, confident in the integrity of my product and willing to go to absurd lengths to ensure my client’s happiness, and more often than not the client was mollified and decided to keep the piece. But on the three or four occasions when distrustful collectors had taken me up on my offer: what the collector didn’t realize was that the fake—passing from his possession to mine, at a price indicative of its apparent worth—had overnight acquired a provenance. Once it was back in my hands, I had a paper trail to show it had been part of the illustrious So-and-So collection.