The High Season(27)
THE PARTY WAS crowded. She couldn’t find Mike and Jem. Ruthie grabbed a drink and wandered over to the pool, where enormous hot-pink pool toys floated, three swans with surprisingly evil faces.
“I’m having fun with it.”
She turned. Dodge was standing, smiling at her. He waved his glass at the pool toys. “The Whitney is interested. We’re stalled, though. I want them to put a pool on one of the outdoor spaces. Liability is a bitch.”
Oh, they were his. “I hadn’t seen your new work. It’s fun. Scary.”
“Yeah, basically my favorite combo,” he said. “Kitsch plus aggression. Listen, Ruthie, I just want you to know I’m with you.”
“With me?”
“I get your vision. You turned on the gas over there. They’re lucky to have you.”
Once again, people were talking to her as if she’d been accused of something. “Um. Thank you.”
“Hey, have you seen Joe? He’s here somewhere,” Dodge said, waving his glass. “You two must know each other. He was Peter’s dealer, you worked for Peter…same time, right?”
“Joe?”
“Joe Bloom.”
“Joe Bloom?”
Stop repeating his name, she told herself as the word bloom unfurled inside her. More than twenty years ago. Her summer fling that flung her straight into a wall.
She’d heard years ago that Joe Bloom had left the art world and moved out west. She had stuck a stupid cowboy hat on his head whenever he popped into her memory, and turned him into a cartoon.
“Yeah, he moved out here. He owns a restaurant in Greenport.”
Penny and Elena. The oyster place. Joe Somebody. She could not reconcile Joseph Bloom, slim in his Hugo Boss suits, with a guy opening oysters at an old bait shack.
“Hang on. Joe!” Dodge yelled, and Ruthie closed her eyes, glad she had this instant, at least, to collect herself.
She turned. He was slightly heavier, dressed in khakis, bare feet in sneakers. He was older. So was she. He looked better. Men.
He smiled and walked toward her. “Ruthie?”
“Joe!” She managed to release the word, but it sounded like an accusation.
He leaned over to kiss her cheek. Impression of stubble and soap and underneath it the scent she remembered, an instant hit. “It’s been so long. You look…different.”
“You’re not supposed to say that to a woman,” Ruthie said. “You’re supposed to say, You look exactly the same.”
“I meant it as a compliment, actually.”
“Oh, because I used to look so much worse than this?”
“Can we start over?”
“Hi, Joe,” Ruthie said. “So great to see you again after all these long years. You look exactly the same!”
“You too!” He stepped back, and she felt herself scrutinized, the better version of her, the Carole version.
“Seriously, though,” Joe said. “I remember you in a ponytail, some old T-shirt, splattered with paint. Overalls, even.”
Maybe Ruthie should have worn her own clothes after all; Joe was used to seeing her stained. “I hear you have a restaurant in Greenport.”
“It’s fantastic,” Dodge said. “Best oysters around.”
“Not a restaurant. I can’t handle a restaurant, but a shack with two items, I can do. It’s sort of an early retirement.” He tilted his head, and she saw the gray in his hair. He had a way of lowering his eyelids, as though he was thinking of either sex or a nap. She’d forgotten that.
“I’ll let you two catch up,” Dodge said. “I’m party-hopping today.”
Dodge wandered off, and they just looked at each other for a moment.
“So,” Joe said.
“So,” she answered, the way people who had hurt each other a long time ago do.
He had been Peter’s dealer, so they’d been on the phone often, since she ran the studio. Details of images to be sent, exhibitions to prepare for. They’d sat at the same expensive restaurant tables celebrating openings, only she would be at the far, far end, or else at the separate table with the nobodies.
Then she’d run into him outside Peter’s studio one hot July afternoon. Peter was out in Sag Harbor; everyone in New York, it seemed, was away.
It’s so hot. Shall we have a beer? Sure. Maybe it was his use of that slightly formal “shall” that had been the first seduction. She had walked into that bar not knowing what would happen, just feeling the current of sudden interest between them. An art dealer, a rich man, a slightly older man, way out of her league.
After the beers she’d brought him to her place to show him what she was working on. At the time she’d had an illegal sublet in Tribeca, five hundred square feet of loft carved out of a larger one in front. She had her own entrance, reaching it by a back staircase down an alley with an active rat population. She’d had to stamp her way down, making them scatter and dive. Sometimes she turned it into a dance. She was an artist with a loft in New York. Just that fact alone kept her level.
Joe had looked at everything, her books, her bedspread, her sketches pinned to the wall. He’d twirled a mobile made of fishing line and painted paper fish. At last he’d stood in front of the painting. He had pointed to an area where color met color.