Before the Fall(32)
“Wikipedia lists him as some kind of painter, but has no personal information. We contacted the Chicago gallery where Mr. Burroughs allegedly held his last show in 2010, but they claimed never to have met him. So ask yourself, how does a nobody painter who hasn’t shown a painting in five years end up on a luxury plane with two of the richest men in New York?”
Scott watches his house on TV. A shingled, single-story home rented from a Greek fisherman for nine hundred dollars a month. It needs a paint job—and he waits for Cunningham’s inevitable joke, the painter’s house that needs a paint job—but it doesn’t come.
“And so now, live on this network, this journalist is asking—if there’s anyone out there who knows this mystery painter, please call the station. Convince me that Mr. Burroughs is real and not some sleeper agent posing as a has-been who just got activated by ISIS.”
Scott sips his tea, aware of the stares of the two soldiers. He feels a presence behind him.
“Looks like going home is out of the question,” Gus says, having wandered up behind Scott.
Scott turns.
“Apparently,” he says, feeling a completely foreign disconnect—who he is inside versus this new idea of him, his new identity as a public persona, his name pronounced with vitriol by a famous face. And how if he goes home he will walk out of his life and onto that screen. He will become theirs.
Gus watches the TV for a moment, then goes over and turns it off.
“You got anywhere you can crash for a few days,” he says, “under the radar?”
Scott thinks about it, comes up blank. He has called the one friend he has and ditched him in a gas station parking lot. There are cousins somewhere, an old fiancé, but he has to believe that these people have already been discovered in the Google search of modern curiosity. What he needs is someone nonlinear, a name generated seemingly at random, that no private eye or computer algorithm could ever predict.
Then a name enters his head, some cosmic synapse firing. Two words spoken with an Irish lilt that paint a picture: a blond woman with a billion dollars.
“Yeah, I think I know who to call,” he says.
Chapter 13
Orphans
Eleanor remembers when they were girls. There was no yours and mine. Everything she and Maggie owned was communal, the hairbrush, the striped and polka-dot dresses, the hand-me-down Raggedy Ann and Andy. They used to sit in the farmhouse sink, facing the mirror, and brush each other’s hair—a record on in the living room—Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie or the Chieftains—the sounds of their father cooking. Maggie and Eleanor Greenway, eight and six, or twelve and ten, sharing CDs, swooning over the same boys. Eleanor was the younger, towheaded and spritely. Maggie had a dance she did, twirling with a long ribbon until she got dizzy. Eleanor would watch and laugh and laugh.
For Eleanor there was never a time where she thought in terms of I. Every sentence in her head began with we. And then Maggie went to college and Eleanor had to learn how to be singular. She remembers that first three-day weekend, spinning in her empty room, listening for laughter that never came. And how that feeling, of being alone, felt like bugs in her skeleton. And so on Monday, when school started, she threw herself off the cliff of boys, opening her eyes for the first time to the idea of couplehood with someone else. She was going steady with Paul Aspen by Friday. And when that ended three weeks later, she switched to Damon Wright.
It was the lightbulb behind her eyes guiding her, this idea—never be alone again.
Over the next decade there was a series of men, crushes and infatuations, surrogates. Day in and day out Eleanor dodged her central defect, locking the door and rolling up the window, eyes doggedly forward, even as its knocks became louder and louder.
She met Doug three years ago in Williamsburg. She had just turned thirty-one, was working a temp job in Lower Manhattan and doing yoga in the evenings. She lived with two roommates in a three-story walk-up in Carroll Gardens. The most recent love of her life, Javier, had dropped her a week earlier—after she found lipstick stains on his boxers—and most days she felt like a rain-soaked paper bag. Her roommates told her she should try being alone for a while. Uptown, Maggie said the same, but every time she tried Eleanor felt that same old feeling, those bugs climbing back into her bones.
She spent the weekend with Maggie and David. Helping with the kids is how she remembers it, but really she just lay there on the sofa staring out the window and trying not to cry. Two nights later, she was out with some work friends at a blue-plate hipster joint near the L train when she spotted Doug. He had a heavy beard and wore overalls. She liked his eyes, the way they crinkled when he smiled. When he came up to the bar for another pitcher, she struck up a conversation. He told her he was a writer who avoided writing by hosting elaborate dinner parties. His apartment was full of obscure food prep machinery, vintage pasta rollers and a three-hundred-pound cappuccino machine he’d rebuilt screw by screw. Last year he started curing his own sausage, buying bung from a butcher in Gowanus. The trick was controlling the humidity so botulism didn’t set in. He invited her over to try some. She said that sounded dicey to her.
He told her he was working on the great American novel or maybe just a paperweight made entirely out of paper. They drank Pabst together and ignored their friends. She went home with him an hour later and learned he slept on flannel sheets, even in the summer. His decor was lumberjack meets mad scientist. There was a vintage dentist’s chair he was rebuilding with a television mounted on the arm. Naked he looked like a bear and smelled of beer and sawdust. She felt like a ghost lying under him, watching him work, as if he were making love to her shadow.