Here and Gone(22)

11


AUDRA DRIFTED IN and out of sleep on slow, sickly waves. Every time the darkness took her, a jagged dream shook her loose again. Over and over, she jerked awake on the bunk’s thin mattress, terrified, disoriented, pain clamoring from her shoulders and wrists. The night dragged its hours out until she lost all sense of their passing. By the time dawn light crept through the skylight outside her cell, the quiet of the place had grown so heavy that she thought she might be crushed by it.

At one point in the darkest hours she had roused from her shallow sleep to see that Whiteside was watching her from just beyond the bars. She had lain there, frozen, afraid to move in case he came at her once more. After a minute or two, keeping his silence, he had turned and left the custody suite.

Whiteside had reminded Audra first of her father, but now he made her think of her husband. She remembered the nights she awoke in their bed to find Patrick sitting at the other side of the room, watching her. Only once did she make the mistake of asking him what he was doing; he had crossed the room in the time it took for her to gasp a breath, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her from the bed. As she lay on the floor, Patrick leaning over her, he told her it was his apartment, his bedroom, and he didn’t have to explain himself to her.

They had met ten years ago. Audra Ronan had been working at the gallery on East 19th Street – it was named Block Beautiful after the cluster of townhouses it nestled between – for six months, using her evenings to paint. She had enjoyed the job, walking each lunchtime to Union Square to eat whatever she’d been able to afford to pack for herself. The pay was terrible, but what she earned on the occasional sales commission gave her enough to get by. Sometimes enough to go to the big Barnes & Noble at the northern end of the square, or south along Broadway to the Strand Book Store, to treat herself to something from the art section. All the while, she cultivated contacts with the agents of the artists whose work passed through. A couple of them had seen her paintings, told her to keep them in mind when she felt she was ready to start selling.

But somehow she never seemed to be ready. Every piece began with hope that this time the vision in her head would make it onto the canvas unspoiled, but it never did. Her friend Mel told her she was too much of a perfectionist, that she was a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: those with the most talent can’t recognize it in themselves, and those with the least can’t see how little they have. Audra wasted hour upon hour reading articles about the Dunning-Kruger studies, and imposter syndrome, trying to convince herself she could do this. In one piece she found a quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wise man knowes himselfe to be a Foole.



She printed it out in big letters and pinned it to the wall of her little studio apartment.

Audra had tried cocaine because she’d heard it boosted confidence. She’d smoked weed at college, just like everyone else, and she imagined cocaine wouldn’t be much different. But she found it made her nauseous, the crackling in her brain too much to bear, so she had stopped using as quickly as she had started. She still smoked the occasional joint, but not often. Sometimes it relaxed her, but other times it made her jittery and nervous.

Instead, she drank.

It had started at college, all those parties, and she always seemed to be the last one standing. She can hold her liquor, they’d say. After college, she dialed it back a little, kept it for weekends. But as time went on, and more failed canvasses stacked up in the corner of her studio, she started drinking more. Soon, it was every night.

But she kept it under control. At least, that’s what she told herself.

‘Just give some of the pieces to an agent,’ Mel had said over and over, ‘see what happens. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Rejection could happen. The agent could tell Audra her work was good, but not good enough. And she knew, if that occurred, what little confidence she had would be stripped away. So she kept trying for the perfect piece that never came.

Patrick Kinney had come to the opening night of a new exhibition. Audra had been applying a red sticker to a large canvas on which someone had just dropped twenty-five thousand when a smooth voice spoke over her shoulder.

‘Excuse me, Miss, is this one sold?’

She turned to the voice and saw a tall and slender man, perhaps ten years her senior, in a suit so well made it seemed almost a part of him. When he smiled at her and said, ‘Miss?’, she realized she had been frozen there, staring, for some time.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, feeling heat on her neck and cheeks. ‘Yes, it sold a few minutes ago.’

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

Audra cleared her throat and said, ‘Maybe I can show you something else?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, and she was struck by the way he looked her in the eye, his utter confidence, and whether she realized it at the time or not, she was his from then on. She had to force herself to look away.

‘Are you thinking of an investment, or do you just want something for your wall?’

‘Both,’ he said. ‘I moved into my apartment six months ago and I still don’t have a single thing to look at, other than the TV or the window.’

He had a place in the East Village full of bare walls, he explained as she walked him around the gallery. Patrick bought two pieces that night, totaling forty-two thousand. He left with a receipt and her telephone number.