‘So? She had to. I get that. You don’t know what it’s like to be involved with a really big personality, one that squeezes you up against the walls, flattens your personality, sucks away time and your own talent without even realising it. But Maxine and I, we know. She was a real cult hero, your girlfriend. I bet you didn’t even know that. I never met her, at least physically, but I know we could have been friends, you know, like really friends. She was talented. Just misunderstood. I think if we’d actually met we would have liked each other. I got her, like her relationship with you, right? I bet you pushed her down, like Felix does to me. You didn’t mean to, but your ego was too big for her, too loud, too fucking noisy. That’s why she left you in the first place.’
‘Shut up. You know nothing.’
‘But I do, see. Maxine and me, we were the same, don’t you get it? Soulmates. I agree with her philosophy; she was against all the commercialisation of art, the way big money has made it into the latest hip stock, taken it away from anything spiritual. That’s why I do the forgery: to expose the hypocrisy of it all. It’s not the money—’
‘All I want to know is did Maxine commit suicide or did Felix arrange for her to jump!?’
‘And why should I help you?’
‘If you do, I might be able to help with your plea, tell the cops you were manipulated into the forgery—’
‘Why don’t you just leave us alone!’
‘It’s not going to happen, Gabriel.’
He stubbed his cigarette out, grinding it into a saucer.
‘They were lovers, and I know that she knew something. See, I kept getting these phone calls, for about two weeks before she drowned. She worked out I was painting for Felix, and that it was to do with the Hoppers. She kept telling me the yellow was wrong, wrong hue, wrong pigment. It was haunting her, that colour, like she’d decided she was the girl in the painting, trapped there, waiting in that yellow square of light.
‘He screwed her over, you see, with her own career. After that group show, I think she thought he would promote her, but when her work failed to make any sales – it was the only work in the show to get panned – he dropped her. That’s when, I think, she started fishing around for information about the source of the Hoppers. I think she might have threatened him with exposure. I don’t think she jumped. I think she was pushed.’
‘But why was she up there at all?’ Susie asked, now consciously fighting a blind anger that was sweeping through her.
‘She loved him. Do you have any idea about what it’s like to discover the man you love is capable of such compartmentalisation, such manipulation that suddenly you feel you don’t know him at all?’
He was shaking now. Susie reached out and placed a hand on his bare arm. He shrugged it off.
‘I don’t need your pity! I watched it all from a distance. Like looking into a fishbowl I wasn’t allowed into. That’s what I do, that’s who I am: Felix’s other eyes. I watched you too. You might have him now, but it’s me he always returns to.’
She stared at him, at his thin, young frame, shivering slightly with… what? Fear? Lack of affection, shock? He was like a beaten dog and yet, as she glanced about the room, she could see that the youth wasn’t without talent. That must have been the real reason Felix recruited him, perhaps even seduced him. That was the dealer’s Achilles heel: a fatal attraction for talent.
She walked up to the other canvas, Gabriel’s own work, and studied it. ‘This is good, maybe even better than good. That’s a bigger tragedy, the way he screwed you over professionally. You didn’t have to become his whore. You had a career, only you didn’t know it – and he made sure of that. As for Felix and me, I’m a mirror for him. On some screwed-up level he doesn’t want to have me; he wants to be me.’
‘And what do you want from him?’
She touched her womb; the slightest of gestures, but clear to Gabriel.
‘I have everything I need from him now,’ she told him, then pulled out a camera from her bag and took a photo of him. ‘And now I have everything I want from you.’ She picked up her bag, ready to leave. ‘My opening’s tomorrow, I expect you to be there as my guest.’
*
Maxine’s figure flickered across the screen; the old black-and-white YouTube footage was strangely compelling. Gabriel sat in front of it, his fourth beer that night in hand, watching with the sound off. It was the third time he’d watched the footage. Mute, the artist looked more vulnerable than ever, a childlike thinness to her physique, the pale lips moving dumbly beneath those huge haunted eyes. Suddenly she gestured toward him, as if beckoning him closer. It was not what he had seen when he’d watched this before. Shocked, he stared at the screen, thinking he was mistaken, but again the pattern of her gestures that he’d memorised was abruptly broken as she lifted her hand and beckoned him, staring right out of the screen at him. In a daze he reached over and turned the sound up.
‘Gabriel. Stay true to your natural expression, the intuition we carry as artists, as a sixth sense. You and I, we are both prisoners. Break out of the jail Felix has put you in, fly free like I did. Is this a life, Gabriel? This half-world he’s forced you into living in? He has cut your throat as an artist, stolen the only thing you had the day he met you at that final show at college, dismantled your future piece by piece. Is that how you want to keep living? Whoring your talent?’
She paused and smiled at him, directly at him, waiting for a response. He moved closer, pushing his face up against the screen.
‘No, it’s not,’ he whispered, wondering whether he was now truly mad, yet in the same moment not caring, for hers was the kindest voice he’d heard in months.
She made him feel connected to someone, to something, a movement, a belief that had the potential to lift him out of the moral chasm he’d been swallowed up by over the years. Yes, that’s what Felix had done – he had corroded Gabriel’s political beliefs, the clear idea he held like a single pure note that afternoon, standing by his graduation artwork; the idea that art was to transport the spirit, bring the extraordinary to the mundane. Felix had destroyed that – and something even more profound: he had destroyed Gabriel’s belief that he was worthy of love.
‘You know what you have to do,’ Maxine whispered from the screen.
*
After Gabriel had slipped the stamped envelope addressed to Susie, a signed confession folded neatly inside it, under Chung’s door for him to mail, he went back up to his apartment and climbed out to sit on the edge of his window. He stared down at the bottom of the light well. From five flights up it seemed like a glinting mirage at the end of a long dark tunnel. There was water down there, a rain puddle catching the last rays of the evening sun, the dancing light beckoning Gabriel like the notes of a flute. It was easy to fall. As easy as flying.
Chapter Twenty-Five