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I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simply beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one natural virtue.
--Oscar Wilde
The man seemed to know his way around households of this kind, he knew where everything was. He had made himself at home. This gift of being everywhere at home belongs only to kings, light women and thieves.
--Honore de Balzac
* * * *Chapter One
If you don't know what you're looking for, Nguyen's is not easy to find. Unlike the hundreds of other antique stores that compete for space on the crowded Antique Row, Nguyen's does not have a flashy sign proclaiming its presence. Nor has the building in which it is housed been painted garish attention-grabbing colors. No, Nguyen's is in an unremarkable, two-story building of blond brick with a large storefront window facing Broadway.
In this window, there are no artfully arranged displays of furniture, no silver tea sets, or chandeliers (its owner being too concerned with theft and sun damage to ever display any of her treasures to the public). In this window, there is nothing more than a floor-to-ceiling black velvet curtain. A curtain that acts both as a sunblock and as a backdrop for her sign--an artist's easel on which rests a matte black canvas in an elaborate gold frame. On this canvas there are small, raised, gold letters spelling out Nguyen's, and then below, in identical, although somewhat smaller script, is the exclusionary phrase by appointment only. There used to be a telephonenumber on the sign, which the curious could call to gain entry; but lately even this has been removed and replaced with an e-mail address, since the owner, who is impatient with most of the buying public, now does most of her buying and selling online.
Nguyen's deals in high-end antiques, mostly of French or Asian origin, and is owned by Jane Nguyen, who is as minimal in appearance as her first name and storefront imply. On any day, in any season, she is invariably dressed in a simple, sleeveless black dress, the hemline of which, regardless of the current fashion, she keeps just above the knee. A simple strand of pearls or occasionally a gold brooch adds variety to what is otherwise a uniform. She is short, perhaps only five feet tall, and thin, and her long straight black hair is usually held back in a ponytail by a simple black band. Her one concession to whimsy is a pair of cat's-eye glasses, the corners of which are encrusted with small, almost imperceptible, rhinestones. In addition to her encyclopedic knowledge of French antiques, she is known about town, and with the dealers and clients around the country, for these glasses, whose lenses (unbeknownst to all but a select few) have as much prescriptive value as a window pane. They are completely useless as anything other than an accessory, and somehow I knew, even before she confessed it to me, that the glasses had been my uncle's idea.
Max was like that: always coming up with simple ways to make ordinary things extraordinary. His love of all things marinated or pickled is a perfect example of this. Okra, watermelon rind, cheap cuts of meat--anything that people usually wouldn't consider eating, would actively avoid or even discard--Max could dress up in some colorful vinegar with a few floating herbs, et voil?! The mundane would become a delicacy.
"The French are wise that way," I remember him saying (according to Max, the French were wise in just about every way). "They could pickle a piece of shit and make it edible. It's all about potential, Dil. Never mind what things are, the important thing is what they can become."
My name is Dillon, but he always shortened it to Dil, which is perhaps appropriate since I was nothing more than one of his very large pickles. An awkward, ugly, all-too-ordinary suburban adolescent who he marinated into something much more one summer almost a decade ago.
But, on this particular summer morning, it was to Nguyen's shop that I eagerly made my way. I work there on the weekends and on some evenings or on the days when I'm not in class. I was not scheduled to work for another hour, but something I'd come across in the newspaper that morning while paying for my order at the coffee shop had caused me to rush over, paper in hand, to show Jane.
"It's him!" I cried, breathless with excitement, dropping the paper on the desk in front of her, open to the page I'd been reading. "It's got to be him."
Calmly, Jane pushed the paper aside and neatly stacked the invoices on which she'd been working. She emitted an annoyed sigh and slowly put on her glasses. She was not yet forty, but her somber world-weary manner made her seem much older. She picked up the paper, scanned the articles, and then finally discovered the one I'd intended her to see. I watched her dark eyes behind the glasses as they darted across the text.
It was a small article on page two in the slender column devoted to celebrity news, which is, I have to admit, the first section I look at in the morning.
former denver tycoon and wife robbed at gunpoint in south of france, the headline blared. The article went on to detail how Lloyd and Beverly Boatwright-Stark, former Denver residents, had left St. Tropez early Friday afternoon en route to Monaco, where they planned to spend the winter. Roughly midway on their journey, their car was forced off onto a side road by another car and two motorcycles, all piloted by men in ski masks. The driver was pulled from the car, stripped, gagged, and tied to a tree. The frightened couple were then forced out and ordered by the leader of the gang--"in perfect, unaccented English," they were quoted as saying--to hand over the undisclosed quantity of cash and jewelry they were carrying. They were then similarly stripped, gagged, and tied up. They were discovered some hours later, frightened but unharmed, by a group of bemused schoolgirls.
When Jane had finished reading, she handed me the paper, gave a dismissive wave, and said, "They always were flashy. Remember their house, remember that ridiculous pink taffeta dress she wore to the Governor's Ball? Just like a blob of taffy! A woman half her age--and weight--couldn't have gotten away with that! And look at this, look here," she said, pointing to a line in the article. "...an undisclosed quantity of cash and jewelry? Christ! Who would drive around with a carload of cash and jewels? Only stupid ostentatious yokels like them, that's who. Serves them right."
"But what abou--"
"Oh, I know what you're thinking," she said, cutting me off. "But it wasn't him. You know as well as I do that he probably never even made it there." She then picked up her pen and went back to her invoices.
I was leery of her calm exterior. I had seen the sparkle in her eyes as they scanned the article and knew it had been caused by more than her gleeful distaste for the Boatwright-Starks.
"Oh come on! France! The Boatwright-Starks! Robbery!" I cried, naming three of Max's passions. "Who else could it be?"
Jane looked up from her invoices. She stared through the crowded shop at the small strip of sunlight admitted through the door. She had taken off her glasses and her face looked softer, less severe. I knew that she was thinking of Max, but what she was thinking I could only imagine. My own thoughts of my uncle went from one extreme to another, with very little in between that was neutral, and I was sure that she felt the same. Whatever she was thinking, I thought it best not to intrude for a while so I stretched out on the large Empire sofa and took one of the small madeleines from the paper bag I'd bought at the coffee shop. I chewed absently and stared up at the ceiling, the newspaper resting on my chest.
Maybe she's right, I thought. Maybe it's not him.
I remembered the picture of the Jaguar as it was pulled from the ocean. It had fallen two hundred feet into shallow water. The hood had been accordioned to one-eighth its original length and both doors had been torn off on impact. His body had never been found. It was assumed that it had been ejected through the windshield and that what was left of it had floated out to sea.... Fish food. But I didn't believe it. It was him in France. Somehow I knew it. I shut my eyes and tried to remember the last time I'd seen him; he'd been walking away, into the garage. I could see the outline of his lean body, his black hair; but try as I might, I could not make out his face. I remembered that his nose was crooked where it had been broken, that his eyebrows were enviably thick, and that his jawline was square and pronounced, but I could not see the whole picture. It was all in shadow. I tried hard to imagine him winding rope around the rotund, naked bodies of the Boatwright-Starks, as the paper had described, but I could see his features no better than they had through the mask.
"Dillon." It was Jane's voice. I looked up from the sofa. She had put her glasses back on and she was smiling. "Give me some of those," she said, motioning toward the bag of madeleines. "We don't open for another twenty minutes, why don't you go lock the door and tell me about your date last night."
I groaned and made my way to the door. Lately, I'd been trying my luck with personal ads in one of the weekly papers as a new way to meet guys who were hopefully a little less shallow and a little more intriguing than the ones I met in bars or at the gym. The results had been disastrous so far, but I have to admit, I did relish giving an account of the trauma to my friends the next morning. Bad dates, like disastrous vacations and injuries requiring stitches, always make for interesting stories.
I swung myself up from the sofa and handed her the bag. Then I wove my way through the maze of desks and sideboards and tables to the front door, turned the key in the lock, and went back to the sofa, dropping the newspaper in an elephant's foot trash can on the way.
"Let's hear it," Jane said, leaning her tiny body forward on the huge desk and rubbing her hands together in anticipation.
"What can I say?" I sighed. "He was very nice to look at: broad shoulders, slender waist, beautiful hands. He had a nicely shaped head in which, unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing."
"And you already refer to him in the past tense," Jane chuckled. I went on.
"Yes. When my life is made into a stage play, the actor given his minor role will be disappointed with his brief moment in the spotlight, but at least his lines will be easy to memorize since they'll consist mostly of one-word exclamations like Whoa! Cool! and Righteous!"
"That bad?"
"Oh, much worse. I had to drink just to get through it, but even that wasn't easy," I said, sitting up on the sofa, warming to the tale. "I was just a little bit late getting to the restaurant and when I arrived I saw that he had already been seated and had taken the liberty of ordering us a bottle of wine. It was an unnaturally pink wine that tasted awfully close to spiked Kool-aid, with a picture of some kittens on the label."
I knew this last remark would offend Jane, the wine snob, more than anything.
"No!" she cried, leaning back in her chair.
"Oh yes," I said. "And I couldn't drink it fast enough. But let me get to the meal. Every time I paused he'd look over at my plate and say, in his booming voice, 'Dude, you gonna finish that?' If I said no (and I did quite often. Imagine the food in a restaurant that sells wine with kittens on the label), he'd reach one of his hamhock arms across the table and scoop it up with his fork."
"At least he knew how to use one," Jane laughed.
"Oh God, I'm not even sure he had thumbs! It's too bad, really," I said, shaking my head, "because, of course, the sex afterward was quite good."
"So you slept with him."
"Of course. I didn't want the night to be a total loss."
"Will you see him again?"
"I don't think so," I said wistfully.
"What if he calls?"
"Ahh," I said, raising a finger, "then the phone will ring at the pay phone down the street from my house."
* * * *Later that afternoon, as I sat polishing a long neglected silver tray that Jane was preparing to photograph for eBay, I asked her when was the last time she'd gone out on a date. Her head remained focused on the camera she was mounting on the tripod.
"A long time ago," she said, curtly. "Aren't you finished yet?"
I knew I had hit a nerve, but I continued.
"Do you think you ever will?" I asked.
Her head remained down, as if she were looking at the camera, but her eyes were looking up and off to the side. "Maybe not," she said, and then went back to the camera.
"Is that because of him?" I asked.
"Because of whom?"
I didn't answer but let the question hang in the air. She paused, shook her head slightly, and returned her attention to the camera. I went back to rubbing the tray.
"Do you think he's ruined it for us?" I asked. "I mean, you not dating anyone and me writing off every new guy five minutes into our first date."
"You're still young," she said. "Don't be silly."
"I'm not that young," I countered, "and you're not that old. Do you think we'll ever find anyone like Max?"
"Not if we're lucky," she quipped, and got up and left the room. I knew then, despite her flip response, or perhaps because of it, that I was right. He had ruined us. And the fact that now he was probably still alive made it even worse. In many ways a ghost of the living is much worse than a ghost of the dead, for there is always the possibility that he will come back, or that someday, walking in London or Prague or Paris, I'll meet him again or even catch a glimpse of him or someone that looks like him. Max will always haunt us, I thought, just like Rebecca, or Lara, or Ilsa, or any of the other ghostly movie heroines. But instead of a monogrammed hanky, or the balalaika, or a few bars of As Time Goes By, I'll think of him every time I have a date.
I went back to polishing the tray and tried again to imagine Max's face, but I couldn't. I could see it no better than my own murky reflection in the tarnished silver. And maybe that was what really scared me--not that I would always be haunted by him, but that I would forget him. That I was forgetting him. That slowly he was fading from my memory. Soon, I knew, it would be difficult to picture him at all; and the thought of that was like a hollow space in my life, a cartoon gunshot right through my torso leaving a perfectly round hole, an empty, hungry feeling.
Maybe he hasn't ruined me, I thought, maybe I just don't want to let go.
I finished with the tray, positioned it on the wooden stand in front of the black velvet curtain, and went to find Jane. As I walked through the shop toward the back room, past the elephant's foot trash can. I looked down. It was empty. A few feet ahead sat Jane, looking dwarfish in an enormous wing-back chair, newspaper in her lap, again staring out the window at the street.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've started raining from the clear blue sky, as Max used to say, meaning that I haven't let the clouds build up. I've cheated you out of all the thunder and lightning. I've started near the end of the story, and I've skipped the beginning and the middle entirely. I've left out the Balzac and the climbing and the egg, and everything, really.
But when did it all start? It's hard to say. I suppose I could start with the night Max arrived, but it really began earlier, when my stepfather left us and when Lana found God. The summer I was supposed to go to camp, but then at the last minute, thanks to Max, didn't...
