Gods of deception, p.2
Gods of Deception, page 2
Lengthening his focus just above Alger’s cleanly parted hair, he caught a glimpse of his opponent at the prosecution table, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas F. Murphy, formidably tall even when seated, his dark mustache flexing optimistically as he stared down at the number-two pencil in his hand with the unshakable confidence of one who’d already caught the glint of the executioner’s raised ax.
The rest of the defense team, Cross and McLean, remained rigid, perspiring, having read those twelve faces as well as he had.
Judge Goddard nodded at the court clerk, who leaped to his feet as if from a jack-in-the-box and demanded the verdict.
“How find you?”
Ada Condell didn’t wait a beat, thus heralding in the chaotic world that would become the Red-baiting McCarthyite decade of the 1950s. In a choked, then clearing high-pitched voice, she declared, “We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second count.”
Oddly, Edward wanted to reach out a steadying hand to Alger, his onetime Harvard Law confrere and fellow birder, but found him rigid, with arms folded, stiffened brows and clenched lips impervious to time as well as to history, as one hundred-plus pens in the press gallery swept across acres of spiral notepads. Priscilla barely blinked, her traumatized gaze flashing to the wintery space of light from the fantail window, her prim shoulders bent, hands crossed limply in the silk folds of her lap. If he could have spoken to her, this was the query that hovered on his lips like an incantation out of time itself: Oh, my dear Pross, how far from Handytown now?
And with that, he gave his attaché case yet another relieved pat.
Of the following fifteen minutes of instructions to the jurors not to blab about their deliberations, and a quick to-and-fro over the five-thousand-dollar bail, Edward found in later years that he remembered almost nothing. Only a final image of Alger grabbing Priscilla’s hand, whispering in her ear, “Keep your chin up,” and leading her quickly out past the horde of snarling reporters.
With that verdict of dishonor and ruin, Alger exited Edward Dimock’s life, as if he’d never been, which, upon deeper reflection, might indeed have been the case.
For as Edward would remember until his dying day, his thoughts at that moment flowed along these lines: A man who lies so expertly, so convincingly, who threatens with the merest inflection of voice, rarely treads the boards of this life, and then only in pursuit of his spectral shadow. Or as his grandson would put it to him some fifty years later: “Judge, it was as if you inhabited two different stages, two parallel universes; and I’m not entirely sure, even now, if you know the difference.”
2
Landscapes Transcendent
SEPTEMBER 13, 2002
GEORGE DIMOCK ALTMANN swiveled on his heels to make a last check of the hanging in Dark Matter, his four-year-old Chelsea gallery. Last dance, last chance for a profitable show to keep his gallerist gig above water after a disastrous post-9/11 year. Against all advice, against the odds in a contemporary art world more and more obsessed with the next wunderkind out of a prestige art school, he’d bet on a dead white male artist—George Altmann, no less, his grandfather and namesake. George surveyed his arrangement of Altmann’s late abstract landscapes from his Woodstock years, 1939 to 1949. Landscapes Transcendent. The title was emblazoned in hemlock green on the wall opposite the entrance, where a crowd of well-dressed and grunge-chic fashionistas was just filtering in. The living, breathing reality check—even worse, he thought, sighing, than a peer-reviewed paper.
After long months of planning—selecting, cleaning, framing— George would have to introduce himself to and glad-hand potential collectors, and elevator-pitch his grandfather’s artworks. (How could one even feign the pretense of objectivity?) To intercept a panic attack that had lain in ambush all day, he fixed his eyes on the showcase canvas facing the entrance: a shear-faced rocky escarpment, seething horizontals of milky-quartz tones, strips of jittery pigment describing a 430-million-year-old sedimentary conglomerate only recently revealed by the last ice age. This, the stunning cover image of his scholarly catalog, cropped to dramatize the masterful paint handling. But instead of experiencing pride, even ecstatic joy, he might as well have been dangling from that rock face by his fingernails as the knot in his gut expanded upward to compress his windpipe. And so he beat a hasty retreat into his office, holding up his cell phone and signaling to his assistant, JJ, standing at the entrance handing out catalogs, that he had an important call to take.
Clozapine, 1 mg. Take one every twelve hours for generalized anxiety.
He stared at the prescription bottle neatly tucked into the side of his desk drawer for emergencies, his heart doing a spiky tango, a bloom of sweat turning his blond hair dirty brown, chewed fingernails hovering. He grabbed two Listerine tabs instead and crammed them into his mouth, then rushed over to the single tall window of his book-crammed office, there to savor a vertical slice of teeming Eleventh Avenue from eight stories up. Where, in the distance beyond the careening buzz of evening traffic, interspersed with a nervous blur of Juicy Fruit light bars from phalanxes of parked police cars, two huge beams of diaphanous white sliced majestically into the night sky. He leaned into the plate glass, drawn to those ghostly beams, even as his thirty-two-year-old pathetic paunch and the click of his too-tight belt buckle thwarted a closer inspection—along with a bizarre yearning to merge with such a potent photon stream, and so scattered to the solar winds, his soul released in some quantum approximation of his essential self, minus the constant hassles and crippling uncertainty that had plagued him in recent years.
Like Einstein, he preferred a universe that played by the rules, where the twin towers still stood tall and proud and regal, perhaps where infinite inflation found them still aglow in some faraway morning’s early light, and Joe Santiago, still on his client list, waiting, even now, in his gallery for a tour of Altmann’s exhibition.
Fat chance, he thought, sighing. Anyway, what could alien eyes possibly make of those twin points of light coming from some random exoplanet in a backwater of an undistinguished galaxy: a desperate stab at contact; a cry of distress from a civilization embarked on wanton self-destruction; a celebration of endurance against all the odds? A hope, if even that, rendered meaningless by a faster-than-the-speed-of-light expansion of the visible universe, so that by the time such a feeble signal might be registered by some extraterrestrial intelligence, the culture that produced it would have long succumbed to suicide or been blown to smithereens by a meteor strike, with an exhausted sun for a sucker-punch finale—the Trade Center attack a firefly flicker in the cosmic void. Seven years analyzing luminosity and spectrum analysis of Cepheid variable stars in distant galaxies in the Princeton Astrophysics Department had more than convinced him of the pointlessness of such pitiful conjectures, given such vast soul-crushing distances. Just another pathetic thought experiment—past anxieties only fueling present anxieties—that he tried to put out of his mind. Even as he pressed his flattened palms against the glass in solidarity, full of guilt and anger that he hadn’t even had the guts to attend the memorial service of a few days before. Much less watch Bush at the U.N. yesterday demand that the world do something to stop Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction, or the United States would.
—
Just a year ago, like yesterday, with the bubble-wrapped painting tucked safely under his arm, he’d ascended the subway steps into that perfectly blue sky above the plaza, delighted to be personally delivering the artwork as promised to Joe Santiago, partner at Cantor Fitzgerald. Joe had spent a precious half hour in Dark Matter, away from the trading desk, picking out the perfect gift for his wife’s birthday.
“She—Jean—loves the kids, of course; her garden, especially the azaleas and hollyhocks; our black Lab, Chewbacca—kids, you know— get it … yeah, chews the shit out of the furniture. Mykonos she picked out for our honeymoon—lots of gay guys, you know; they have their own nude beach. And Danielle Steel is her favorite author. Did I mention she studied art history at Bard? A woman, don’t you agree, Mr. Altmann, always knows what she loves; they always have an opinion— always. Trust me, it’s part of my job to know such things.”
Joe had finally settled on a still life of yellow roses and tiger lilies in a crystal vase, eggplants on a blue platter, against a backdrop of a red-checkered tablecloth.
“Like you say, George—can I call you George?—a hint of Cézanne—for sure. The warm sunlight and those purples will make her happy—absolutely guaranteed. She’s big into moussaka—see, her Greek mom, but hey … George, it’s all about happiness with the small things in a marriage—trust me. Love comes and goes; endearments, like memories of happy times, last forever.”
The crystalline blue of the sky at the top of the concrete stairs, the sweetness of Joe’s Brooklyn accent, the nasal vowels and his excitement at the perfect gift of happiness—now cradled in his arm—all conspired against the scene of mayhem that greeted George in the plaza. Stink of jet fuel, the inferno belching fiery smoke and swirling paper geysers from the gaping wound in the vertical skin of glass and steel—so impossibly high above the churning chaos below. Mesmerized onlookers in gesticulating groups of two or three, some lingering, some running, on cell phones or snapping photos. He simply refused to believe his eyes. He had the floor number, the suite number, the telephone number—on a Post-it note affixed to the bubble wrap, the gift: all he needed to conclude an act of goodness. He’d promised Joe the painting for his wife’s surprise birthday party at a Greek restaurant in Nutley, New Jersey, that evening. He called on his cell phone. No answer. One hundred and first floor. Idiotically, he began counting the floors below the smoke-bellowing wound of the north tower, clutching the wrapped canvas to his chest like a scared child. Somehow his absolute belief in Joe’s gift, the deliberations of a busy man that had gone into this act of loving consecration, of solidarity with a kinder universe—much less that agreed upon delivery date, September 11, Jean’s birthday—belied what his eyes were witnessing. He remained rooted, willing time to retreat, the belching flames and acrid smoke to retreat and order reassert itself and so cancel out such hellish confusion.
Then the falling bodies began to hit the pavement, the first a hundred yards away … a dull thud thrown up from a pink mist. Then closer. People screamed. Then a shadow, followed by a splash of brilliant fiery red against the blue as the second 767 sliced into the south tower, followed by the roar of jet engines. He began to move off, disoriented, unsure whether he should retreat to the subway or head north on the West Side Highway. Then he caught sight of a black-suited figure on the concrete of the plaza. Perhaps he had tripped and needed help; perhaps it was Joe, who had rushed out to find him, to grab his offering of sanity and hope in the nick of time and find his way home. But as he approached, he found only the flattened shadow of a man’s suit, his innards, a pink mush, sprayed ten feet in all directions.
—
Six months later, he’d finally summoned the nerve to track down Joe’s widow. It was spring then in Nutley. Blooming azaleas dotted the cul-de-sac of modest faux half-timbered Tudor-style homes. Dogs barked. Scent of newly mown grass. Through her tears and dark bagged eyes, Jean Santiago, her two children hovering behind in the foyer, embraced him on her doorstep, embracing the canvas as well, holding him tight for over a minute, as if some part of her missing husband—his body was never recovered or identified—had returned home. She was still young, but her long brown hair was streaked with mourning gray, her gray-green eyes, red-veined and dark-circled, sunken. The children had been kept home from school. They shook hands when introduced but remained speechless. Chewbacca came and sniffed his shoes, then his hand, and then the wrapped painting. The dog began whining and wagging its tail. The children broke into tears that almost did him in.
When she unwrapped the painting, she, too, broke down in tears, rushing it to the living room, where Joe’s favorite La-Z-Boy remained extended full length, holding the painting up to the window, where the sunlight made the colors dance. Her kids, a girl eight and a boy six, stood on either side and reached to the canvas, first to the swelling swirls of pigments that formed flowers, then to the purples and blues of the eggplants. The three of them walked from room to room to room, trying to decide where to hang Daddy’s painting. When George left, it was still undecided. Even now, Jean Santiago texted at least once a week, with questions about exactly what Joe had said at the exhibition, about the artist, about her—why he’d chosen this particular painting for her, which she’d rehung a dozen times, as if some different configuration might yet reveal something she’d missed.
He found himself caught up by her constant inquiries, feeling compelled to fill in details about their honeymoon in Mykonos as told him by Joe: about eggplants he’d admired in the marketplace, sold by an old Greek woman; about the nude beach where Joe liked to proudly show off his new bride; how the morning light in her auburn hair against the pillow in their hotel room had made him fall in love all over again … same light as in the painting. He’d even read Danielle Steel, to indulge some parallel universe, so as to savor something of her longing.
He’d never cashed Joe’s check.
—
“Your mother just called,” said JJ, sticking her head in the door of his office. “She found a parking spot on Nineteenth Street and will be here with your aunts in ten minutes.” JJ held up her clipboard in a victory salute. “And we just sold seven paintings, including the one on the catalog cover and the one inside the cover—that’s almost half the show.”
“No fucking way—seriously?”
“Like, how do you say—pancakes?”
“Hotcakes.”
“Yes”—she tapped the clipboard—“very hot.”
“Who bought the cover one and the one inside the cover, someone on our client list or mailing list?”
“New, never heard of him,” said JJ. JJ was a tall, striking Chinese woman whose exquisitely made-up face accented her green eyes. She spoke near-perfect English and perfect Mandarin, and was a canny saleswoman of prodigious conviction when moving the merch. “Just sailed in, Armani suit, black silk turtleneck, spent five minutes walking around with the checklist, picked out the two most expensive pieces and didn’t even negotiate on price.”
“The review,” he intoned.
“Yes, he had folded page in his pocket.”
“Thanks, JJ, I’ll be out in a moment.”
—
George, digesting the sales report, felt as if a pall of disaster had lifted, replaced by a surge of confidence. He grabbed the rave New York Times review of that morning off his desk and let his pale blue-gray eyes luxuriate one more time: “a rediscovered genius … Rothko before Rothko … avatar of abstraction from nature in the line of Inness, Marsden Hartley, and Avery …”
Committing pithy excerpts to memory, George adjusted his silver-gray suit jacket, and the thin moiré stain of a tie that barely showed against his black shirt—hipster uniform for the contemporary art scene, acquired on JJ’s advice—and drifted out into the gallery. A huge crowd jammed his tiny three white cubes of exhibition space. The din was low and respectful. Instead of standing around, oblivious, in chatting clusters, consuming his cheap chardonnay, singletons and couples, catalogs in hand, were actually looking at Altmann’s abstract landscapes as if ardently absorbing their hypnotic splendor. Even the usual suspects, artists and their groupie hangers-on in deftly torn jeans and paintstained plaid shirts, were exchanging heated opinions. He smiled. The good artists were always intent on stealing anything worth stealing. George immediately began sorting the crowd, spotting the admixture of potential well-heeled upscale buyers, as if a long year in the doldrums of panic and grief was quite enough, thank you. For an instant, he indulged the corollary fantasy that his George Altmann revival was the catalyst to celebrate the end of a city’s and a nation’s mourning and a return to normalcy—that beauty, like the spectacle of a supernova (the end of a world), could trump tragedy. And with that delicious notion, the prospect of sales, of commerce, eased up a smile of pride and relief on George’s pudgy but not entirely unhandsome face as he began convincing himself that his harebrained plan to give up astrophysics for the art world was finally paying off; that he’d had the aesthetic moxie to look under his nose and take a risk on his grandfather’s forgotten work; that judicious restoration and cleaning would make all the difference, not to mention the simple yet sumptuous and expensive—slightly distressed—oak frames he’d chosen.
“Yes!”
Altmann’s genius was so blindingly clear: how his grandfather had taken the bone and gristle of Woodstock’s hills, and the conglomerate Palisades along the Shawangunk Ridge, and transposed their underlying patterns and color tonalities into masses of scintillating paint marks—brushed and scumbled and scraped and flattened and translated with bravura handling to reveal the metamorphic qualities of rock and foliage—the essence of the land. For the first time in his young life, he felt his grandfather’s awe (a man dead decades before he was born) as his own: nature’s timeless recrudescence.
“My God … the love …”
With an airy spring in his step, George began to mingle, luxuriating in his anonymity for just another moment as he listened in on the chatter. How he relished seeing his own words from the catalog imprinted boldly on the gallery walls: “Moments of rapture in the act of creation … a one-man battle against the drift into chaos. An artist taking the raw chaotic data of the universe and ordering it on a more human scale. Soul’s antidote to a new age of fanaticism and murderous hatred.”
George winced at the hyperbole. And yet … and yet some irrepressible yearning in him sought to make convincing that causal connection between tragedies past and present—now buttressed by the proof— like a perfect algorithm that dismissed all competing conjectures. He nodded to himself. A man with such a magnificent talent could not have killed himself, somehow slipped or fallen onto the ice from the Sawkill Bridge, Christmas Eve, 1949. Everything—the sheer creative energy on the surrounding walls gave the lie to that oft-rumored suicide that had plagued the family for three generations. The burden of fifty years lifted by the simple glory of paint applied to canvas … and so cauterizing that even more terrible impact of human breakage at terminal velocity.
