The Marriage of Sticks Read online

  “Miranda! There you are.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Hiding from the men. They’re in there talking about boxing.”

  “Aren’t there any women?”

  “Not yet. Men always come early to parties when they know there are going to be gorgeous women.”

  “You did invite other women, I hope.”

  “Of course. And couples too. I wouldn’t throw you completely to the lions.”

  “Now I’m nervous.”

  “Don’t be. Just take off your clothes and walk right in. Come on.” She handed me a glass and we went in.

  Unlike the Hatch apartment, Dagmar and Stan’s was very sparsely furnished. Jaco had been there once and spitefully said you could clean the whole place with a fire hose and three Brillo pads. That wasn’t true, but it was not cozy and I never understood how two such warm people could be comfortable living in a hi-tech igloo. Walking down the hall to the living room, I heard a bunch of men burst into laughter.

  The living room was full of people, but the balance was about half-and-half. Doing a quick scan, I recognized a bunch of them and waved to a few. The unfamiliar men I saw on first glance looked good but not interesting. To a one, they had hair that was either slicked back with gel, gangster style, or falling over their shoulders in the chic of the moment. I knew it was an unfair assessment, but that’s how I went about things: Guilty until proven interesting.

  Dagmar squeezed my shoulder and went off to talk to the caterer. A man I’d met there some months before came right up and introduced himself. He was a broker who specialized in railroad stocks. For the next few minutes, we chatted about train rides we had known and loved. That was fine because he did most of the talking, which allowed me to continue looking.

  A waiter came around with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Their nice smell reminded me that the only thing I had eaten that day was a Ding Dong and a cup of coffee in the taxi with Clayton. Railroad Man and I took what looked like caviar-and-egg biscuits and popped them into our mouths.

  The hors d’oeuvre was so lethally hot and spicy that it exploded on contact. I barely had enough presence of mind to slap a hand across my mouth before squealing like a stabbed rabbit. He did almost exactly the same thing. We stared at each other. It was so unexpected and shocking. Thank God he fumbled in his pocket, brought out a package of tissues, and handed me one. Without a second thought, we spat the bombs into the tissues and wiped our mouths. I think we might have gotten away with it, but some people had seen us and were watching. He looked at me and made the sound of a train whistle: “Woo-OO-Woo!”

  I laughed and gave him a push. My eyes were tearing, my mouth was on fire, and I was embarrassed as hell but couldn’t stop laughing. “Everyone’s staring!”

  “So what? My life just passed before my eyes.”

  Everyone was staring, but that made us laugh harder. Stan came over and asked what was wrong. We explained and, sweet man that he is, he ran to stop the waiter from offering the hors d’oeuvres to other people.

  Who would have guessed that moment on fire would change everything?

  Half an hour later dinner was announced. As we moved into the dining room, a man I didn’t know came up and asked if I was all right. In his forties, he had a big thatch of unruly brown hair a la John Kennedy, and the kind of warm broad smile that made you like him right away, whoever he was.

  “I’m fine. I just ate an hors d’oeuvre from hell and it paralyzed me.”

  “You looked like you’d seen a goat.”

  I stopped. “You mean a ghost?”

  There was the smile. “No, like you’d just seen a goat walk into the room! Like this.” In an instant, he wore an imbecilic expression that made me giggle.

  “That bad?”

  “No, impressive! I’m Hugh Oakley.”

  “Miranda Romanac.”

  “This is my wife, Charlotte.”

  A knockout, she had the kind of unique beauty that only deepened and became more interesting with age. Her eyes were Prussian blue, the hair as white-blond and swept as a meringue. My first impression was that everything about Charlotte Oakley seemed Nordic and… white. Until her mouth, which was thick and sexual. How many men had fantasized about that mouth?

  “Hello. We were worried about you.”

  “I thought I’d eaten a flare.”

  “Make sure to say a little prayer to Saint Bonaventure of Potenza before going to bed tonight,” Hugh Oakley said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s the saint invoked against diseases of the bowels.”

  “Hugh!” Charlotte pulled his earlobe. But she was smiling, and oh, what a smile! If I’d been a king, I would have traded my kingdom for it. “One of my husband’s hobbies is studying the saints.”

  “My new favorites are Godeleva, who protects against sore throats. Or Homobonus, patron of tailors.”

  “Come on, Saint Hugh, let’s eat.”

  “Don’t forget—Saint Bonaventure of Potenza.”

  “I’m praying already.”

  He touched my sleeve and moved away with his wife. We continued to our places at the tables. By coincidence, Hugh and I were seated at the same one, although there were people between us.

  Unfortunately, my neighbor took a shine to me and all through the first two courses asked personal questions I didn’t want to answer. Sometimes I looked over and saw Hugh Oakley talking with a well-known SoHo gallery owner. They seemed to be having a great time. I wished I were in their conversation and not mine.

  Because I wasn’t paying attention to what the guy on my right was saying, it didn’t register when he began to touch me as he spoke. Nothing bad, just a hand on the arm, then a few sentences later fingers on my elbow to emphasize a point, but I didn’t want it. Once when his hand stayed too long on mine, I stared at the hands until he slowly pulled his away.

  “Oops. Sorry ‘bout that.”

  “That’s okay. I’m hungry. Can we eat?”

  The silence that followed was welcome. The food was good and my hunger had returned. I dug into the chicken-whatever and was content to eat and let the talk flow in and out of my mind. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have heard what Hugh said.

  “James Stillman would have been one of the best! It was a tragedy he died.”

  “Come on, Hugh, the guy was uncontrollable. Don’t forget the Adcock disaster.”

  Hugh’s voice was angry and loud. “That wasn’t his fault, Dennis. Adcock’s husband had us all fooled.”

  “Yeah, your friend Stillman most of all.”

  I leaned so far forward I felt my chest touching the table. “Did you know James Stillman?”

  They looked at me. Hugh nodded. The other man snorted dismissively. “Sure, who didn’t? Half New York knew him after the Adcock thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “Tell her, Hugh. You’re his big defender.”

  “Damned right I am!” He glared, but when he spoke to me his voice dropped back to normal range. “Do you know of the painter Lolly Adcock?”

  “Sure.”

  “Right. Well, a few years ago her husband said he had ten of her paintings no one had ever seen. He wanted to sell them and contacted Bartholomew’s—”

  “The auction house?”

  “Yes. Adcock wanted them to handle the auction. James worked for Bartholomew’s. They thought very highly of him, so they sent him to Kansas City to verify if the paintings were real.”

  The other man shook his head. “And in his great enthusiasm, Mr. Stillman cut a deal with the wily Mr. Adcock, only it turned out the paintings were fakes.”

  “It was an honest mistake!”

  “It was a stupid mistake and you know it, Hugh. You never would have done it that way. Stillman was famous for going off half-cocked. Half-cocked Ad-cocked. I never thought of that. Very fitting.”

  “Then explain how he found the Messerschmidt head that had been lost for a hundred years.”

  �
��Beginner’s luck. I need another drink.” The man signaled a waiter. While he was giving his order I grabbed my chance.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “James? Yes, very well.”

  “Can we—Um, excuse me, would you mind if we switched seats? I’d really like to ask Hugh some questions.”

  The gallery owner picked up his plate. As we were changing, he asked, “Were you also a Stillman fan?”

  “He was my boyfriend in high school.”

  “Really? I didn’t know he had a past.”

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck go up. “He was a good man.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never cared to spend time with him.”

  When I sat down I was so angry I couldn’t speak. Hugh patted me on the knee. “Don’t mind Dennis. He needs Saint Ubald.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Patron saint against rabies. Tell me about you and James.”

  We talked through the rest of dinner and dessert. I didn’t eat a thing.

  Hugh Oakley was an art expert. He traveled the world telling people what they owned, or should buy. Listening to him talk, I quickly understood why he looked so young. His enthusiasm for what he did was infectious. His stories about unearthing rare or marvelous things were the tales of a boy with a treasure map and a heart full of hope. He loved his work. I loved hearing him talk about it.

  Years before, he had given several lectures at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and that’s where he met James. Hugh described James as a young man who was lost but convinced there was something significant waiting for him. Something that would arrive one day out of the blue and lead him home.

  “After my last lecture he came up, looking so bewildered that I was concerned. I asked if he was all right. The only thing he could say was, ‘I want to know about this. I have to know more about this.’ I’d felt that same excitement at Columbia when I heard Federico Zeri speak. Do you know his book Behind the Image? You must read it. Let me write the title down.” He slipped a hand into his pocket and brought out a Connolly leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil. He wrote down the title and author’s name in distinctive block lettering. It was not till later that I learned it was the typeface known as Bremen. Another of Hugh Oakley’s many hobbies was meticulously copying in various faces poems and stories he liked and then, like a monk from the Middle Ages, illuminating them in paints he made from scratch.

  I was so absorbed in what he was saying that it took a while to realize I was hogging him from the rest of the party. I worried what his wife would think. Looking around, I was relieved to see her deep in conversation with Dagmar Breece.

  Somehow we’d gotten off the subject of James. I needed to know as much as Hugh was willing to tell.

  “What exactly did happen to James?”

  “The idiot heart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘Hope gleams in the idiot heart.’ It’s a line from a Mayakovski poem. His girlfriend had those words—the idiot heart—tattooed on the inside of her wrist like a bracelet. Can you imagine? But it’s the age of tattoos, isn’t it?

  “Her name was Kiera Stewart. She was a graduate student at Temple. Beautiful Scottish girl from Aberdeen. James was nuts over her, but you only had to meet her once to see she was an ocean of bad news. Women like that give you wonderful for the first few months, but then start taking it back bit by bit as the relationship goes on. After a while you’re wondering if that great stuff ever really existed at all. But you’re so hooked on them by then and the tidbits of delicious they parse out, it’s like being addicted to drugs.

  “The tragedy was, James was just coming into his own around the time they met. He’d found what he wanted to do with his life. And he was so good at it that the right people were already watching to see what he’d do next.

  “The good is always the enemy of the great. From the beginning, he had the rare ability to discern between them. The trouble was, in our business insight often comes slowly and through meticulous detective work. James constantly wanted to achieve right now, this second.” Hugh shook his head. “He once said he had a lot to prove but didn’t know to whom.

  “So everything happened at once. Not many people can handle that. His star was rising, he’d met a wild woman who sent him spinning, and then his bosses sent him to look at the Adcock paintings. James thought he was invincible. For a while it looked like he was.

  “Then it all crashed. He made a big mistake. Adcock’s husband turned out to be a clever crook, but not clever enough. The deal blew up in James’s face. That was bad enough, but then Kiera got wind of what happened. Over the phone she told him their relationship was finished. Over the phone. Classy, huh? A platinum bitch. He got in his car in the middle of the night, drove down to Philadelphia to see her but never made it. That’s the story, Miranda. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. He was a great favorite of mine.”

  “You haven’t touched your desserts!”

  Startled, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Dagmar glaring at us.

  “I’m sorry. We were talking—”

  “No excuses! That is a yogurt trilogy, which I had to torture a man into making. So eat!”

  She stood there until we picked up our spoons and started shoveling it in. Tasted like yogurt to me. Everyone else was finished and leaving the table. Charlotte Oakley came by.

  “What are you two talking about? You look like you’re sharing atomic secrets.” She was smiling and her voice was only friendly. A beautiful nice woman. Anyway, why should she be worried? She won any contest in the room. Whenever I’d looked at her, I’d noticed at least two men staring at her each time. Who wouldn’t?

  “Charlotte, the most amazing thing! James Stillman was Miranda’s boyfriend when they were in high school.”

  “Really? I loved James. He reminded me of Hugh when he was young.”

  That was it! I’d not been able to put a finger on why I liked Hugh Oakley so much. The instant she said it, I realized a great part of my attraction to her husband was that he seemed to have the same kind of roaring spirit and curiosity as James.

  “I hadn’t seen him since high school. Then I went to our class reunion and heard he was dead.”

  She frowned. “A bad place to hear something like that. James was the Prodigal Son always sneaking back in through the dog door. The original Bad Boy, and always a pleasure! Any time we spent time together he absolutely melted my underwear. I would have eloped with him any time. But that girlfriend, Kiera! She went from zero to bitch in two seconds.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Wait a minute, I have a picture of them.”

  “You do?” Hugh sounded as surprised as I did.

  “Sure. The time we all went to Block Island?” Charlotte carried a small purse but had a large wallet wedged into it. She took it out and rummaged through. “Here you go.”

  She passed me a photo and although I took it, I couldn’t look immediately.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s hard—the life I never lived is right here. On this piece of paper.”

  “Nah. Do it, Miranda. Then you won’t be haunted.”

  I took a deep breath and looked. James, Charlotte, and Kiera were smiling at the camera. He had short hair, which was a shock, because when we were together he wore it down to his shoulders. He looked older. There were wrinkles, and the gaunt face he’d had in high school had filled out some, but there was that same smile with the white, white teeth. Long artistic hands.

  My eyes filled. “I can’t stand it.”

  “He was great. You would have loved him.”

  “I did.” I looked at Charlotte and tried to smile.

  4. Babe Ruth’s Small Head

  In the month that followed I didn’t think much about the Oakleys. Business picked up, and I met a man who went from Promising! to Forget It! in just four dates. Do(u)g Auerbach came to town and we devoured each other for the weekend he was
there. Twice I had tea with Frances Hatch, After the second time, she said there was a brain behind my face and she liked me. That made me feel very good. I said I liked her too. She responded playfully “But do you want to love, or be loved?” For a long time the question fluttered around my mind like birds that fly into a building but can’t get out again.

  Doug said that while in Germany he had watched a TV documentary about people who had sexual fetishes for amputees. The show was very calm and informative and without any attitude. They showed snippets from amputee porno films, magazines, social clubs, and even comic books.

  “I’m a hip guy. You know, try not to judge others, be as open as possible. But I saw this show and my mouth dropped open. I kept wondering, do I live on the same planet as these people?”

  Frances liked to talk about sex, so I told her about it.

  “What’s the matter with you, Miranda?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You sound so prissy. Wouldn’t you go to bed with a man without a leg or an arm if you loved him?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What about a woman?”

  “I can’t imagine loving a woman that way.”

  “A child?”

  “Frances, you’re just trying to provoke me.”

  “How old is a child to you? How old would they have to be before you would sleep with them?”

  “I don’t know, seventeen?”

  “Ha! A lot of men made love to me before I was seventeen and that was eighty years ago.”

  “Yes, but you’ve led a pretty unique life compared to most people.”

  “So what? Know when I think a person is old enough to make love? When they become interesting.” She held a cane in her hand and knocked it on the floor.

  “I don’t think you should run for president on that platform, Frances. They might burn you at the stake.”

  “I know. I’m too old. My heart doesn’t live here anymore. That’s why memories are good: you wake up every morning and put them on like hand cream. That way, the days can’t dry you out.

  “Listen, Miranda, I have a favor to ask. Do you know the painter Lolly Adcock?”

  Hugh Oakley’s face came instantly to mind. “Funny you ask. Someone was talking about her just the other day.”