Before the Fall(37)

She makes so much money just being rich that the annual dividends her savings account earns make it the seven hundredth richest person on the planet. Think about that. Picture it if you can, which of course you can’t. Not really. Because the only way to truly understand wealth at that level is to have it. Layla’s is a path without resistance, without friction of any kind. There is nothing on earth she can’t buy on a whim. Microsoft maybe, or Germany. But otherwise…

“Oh my God,” she says, when she enters the study of her Greenwich Village home and sees Scott, “I’m obsessed with you. I’ve been watching all day. I can’t take my eyes off.”

They are in a four-story brownstone on Bank Street, two blocks from the river, Layla and Scott and Magnus, whom Scott called from the navy yard. As he dialed, Scott half pictured him still sitting in his car outside the gas station, but Magnus said he was in a coffee shop putting the make on some girl and could be there in forty minutes, faster once Scott told him where he wanted to go. If Magnus was offended at being ditched before, he didn’t say so.

“Look at me,” he tells Scott after the housekeeper lets them in and they’re sitting on a sofa in the living room. “I’m shaking.”

Scott watches Magnus’s right leg bounce up and down. Both men know that the audience they’re about to have could change their artistic fortunes irrevocably. For ten years Magnus, like Scott, has nibbled at the fringes of artistic arrival. He paints in a condemned paint warehouse in Queens, owns six stained shirts. Every night he prowls the streets of Chelsea and the Lower East Side, looking in windows. Each afternoon he works the phones, looking for invitations to openings and trying to get on the guest list for industry events. He’s a charming Irishman with a crooked smile, but there is also an air of desperation in his eyes. Scott recognizes it easily, because until a few months ago he saw it every time he looked in the mirror. That same thirst for acceptance.

It’s like living near a bakery but never eating any bread. Every day you walk the streets, the smell of it in your nose, your stomach growling, but no matter how many corners you turn, you can never enter the actual store.

The art market, like the stock market, is based on the perception of value. A painting is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, and that number is influenced by the perception of the artist’s importance, their currency. To be a famous artist whose paintings sell for top dollar, either you have to already be a famous artist whose paintings sell for top dollar, or someone has to anoint you as such. And the person who anoints artists more and more these days is Layla Mueller.

She comes in wearing black jeans and a pre-wrinkled silk blouse, a brown-eyed blonde, barefoot, holding an electronic cigarette.

“There they are,” she says brightly.

Magnus stands, holds out his hand.

“I’m Magnus. Kitty’s friend.”

She nods, but doesn’t shake. After a moment, he lowers his hand. Layla sits on the sofa next to Scott.

“Can I tell you something weird?” she asks Scott. “I flew to Cannes in May with one of your pilots. The older one. I’m pretty sure.”

“James Melody,” he says, having memorized the names of the dead.

She makes a face—holy shit, right?—then nods, touches his shoulder.

“Does it hurt?”

“What?”

“Your arm?”

He moves it for her in its new sling.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“And that little boy. Oh my God. So brave. And then—can you believe?—I just saw a thing about the daughter’s kidnapping, which—can you imagine?”

Scott blinks.

“Kidnapping?” he says.

“You don’t know?” she says with what seems like real shock. “Yeah, the boy’s sister back when she was little. Apparently, someone broke into their house and took her. She was gone for, like, a week. And now—I mean to survive something like that and then die so horribly—you couldn’t make this stuff up.”

Scott nods, feeling bone-tired all of a sudden. Tragedy is drama you can’t bear to relive.

“I want to throw a party in your honor,” she tells him. “The hero of the art world.”

“No,” says Scott. “Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” she says. “Everybody’s talking. And not just about the rescue. I saw slides of your new work—the disaster series—and I love it.”

Magnus claps his hands together suddenly at great volume. They turn and look at him.

“Sorry,” he says, “but I told ya. Didn’t I tell you? Fecking brilliant.”

Layla draws on her electronic cigarette. This is what the future looks like, Scott thinks. We smoke technology now.

“Can you—” she says, “—if it’s okay, what happened?”

“To the plane? It crashed.”

She nods. Her eyes sober.

“Have you talked about it yet? To a therapist, or—”

Scott thinks about that. A therapist.

“Because,” says Layla, “you’d love my guy. He’s in Tribeca. Dr. Vanderslice. He’s Dutch.”

Scott pictures a bearded man in an office, Kleenex on every table.

“The cab didn’t come,” says Scott, “so I had to take the bus.”