The Lioness(29)

She was mostly in David’s lap and so she whispered into her husband’s ear, “We can get the gun behind us. Grab it. You know Terrance will join you once you move.”

He continued to stare straight ahead, clearly thinking about the idea. She pointed out the window at the elephants as she added, her voice little more than breath, “Billy could get his hands around the neck of the driver. Or maybe grab the wheel.”

David seemed to understand the ruse of the elephants and craned his neck to look at them.

“Tell Billy,” she murmured. “Lean forward and tell him. We outnumber them.”

He nodded but didn’t move. Katie supposed he was waiting. He was smart—the son of an OSS veteran and then CIA officer—and no doubt envisioning the best moment for the group to act.



* * *



.?.?.

When she was out and about in L.A., the rule was simple: keep moving. As long as she kept walking—and walking briskly, the gait of a born New Yorker—the photographers didn’t notice her and the autograph seekers who did didn’t have time to rifle through pockets and purses for a pencil and a scrap piece of paper. If she stopped? The crowds gathered fast. She was chum for the sharks.

The first time she went to visit David at his gallery, she drove there herself and parked behind the nearby Italian restaurant where, if she called ahead, the owner always had a spot waiting. Her autographed picture, as well as a movie poster from her hit The Academy, hung by the coat check. Then she walked through the alley to Brighton Way, her scarf pulled tightly around her face and sunglasses the size of goggles perched on her nose, and beelined into the gallery. The billboard at the corner for Lanvin perfume, a black cat gazing at the black bottle, was peeling, the paper falling away like long strips of cucumber rind.

The first time she’d seen David in California was when Billy had brought him to her house. Two days later, they’d had lunch with her brother and Margie at Billy’s little bungalow, and Billy had joked how reminiscent it was of that afternoon when Nick Carraway had brought Jay Gatsby to his humble little cottage for a reconciliation with Daisy Buchanan, and for a moment Katie thought Billy was suggesting that she and David were on the cusp of a poignant, powerful romance. But that wasn’t what he meant, she quickly realized: rather, he was embarrassed that his new post-divorce digs were so modest. The following week, she and David went to dinner alone, twice in five days, evenings that could only be construed as dates. The second time he’d kissed her good night, a chaste, dry peck on the cheek after he drove her home. It was unsatisfying because despite their two dinners together, she was honestly unsure whether the kiss was, by design, the polite kiss of her older brother’s friend, the kiss of a person she’d known since she was a little girl, or the shy kiss of a suitor who just wasn’t sure how aggressive to be with a movie star. If she had been confident that it was the latter, she might have given license to her more prurient instincts and pulled him through her front door and into the living room with its plush carpet and faux zebra couch.

No one spotted her as she walked to his gallery and so no one trailed her when she went inside.

And the place was empty.

Not the walls, which had bold, imposing paintings that stretched almost to the ceiling, and not the floor. Scattered around the room were bronze sculptures of creatures that looked to be monster birds: beaks and feathers, but also arms and legs. They were the size of adult people, and they had talons instead of fingers and toes. Their eyes and ears were as human as their bills and mandibles were avian.

Some of the canvases on the walls had been created by an artist named Martin Deedes, who thought he was the next Max Ernst: he crafted great surreal oil paintings and collages of fairy-tale icons in art deco cityscapes. Deedes was a pal of Ken Kesey’s and claimed that most of his images were born when he was tripping on LSD, often with Ken and some filmmakers who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. David said he suspected there was some weird connection between his father and Kesey, but he himself had never met him and Deedes had never brought the novelist into the gallery. Kesey hadn’t been able to come to his friend’s opening.

And then, prominently displayed by itself on one wall, was the painting by the Soviet artist. The woman who had defected, most of whose work was at the museum. Nina…Nina something. She was famous for defecting, and she was famous as a painter, and if Katie had not been alone she would have been flustered that she could not recall the woman’s last name. The painting was brand new, and David might have hung it that very morning. The image was a life-size vertical of a steelworker, the deep runnels of sweat on his chest so palpable that Katie wondered briefly if the piece was some sort of mixed media. David said that he had gotten the painter to allow him to represent this one piece because, she told him, she wanted his gallery and his radical tastes to succeed. Katie suspected there was more to it than that: she wouldn’t have been surprised if someday she learned that David’s father had had something to do with the woman’s defection—neither she nor David believed that David’s old man worked in something as innocuous as personnel—and now the painter was doing the man’s son a favor. Or, perhaps, David and this Russian woman were lovers.

She was disappointed that nobody was in the gallery browsing, and although the glass door was unlocked, there wasn’t even a shop girl behind the sleek Danish modern desk—which was Katie’s favorite thing in the room and the one thing that most assuredly was not for sale. The place and the feeling it evoked in her right now reminded her of a moment when she was eleven and she and her mother went to see a Wednesday matinee of one of her friend’s shows. It was at a small, down-at-the-heels theater in the West Village that Katie had never been to before, and the seats were ragged. She counted, as she did always to the best of her ability, the number of seats in the venue. This one was easy. There was no balcony and no mezzanine. There were a total of seventy. Seven rows of ten. The theater, even though it was a legitimate off-Broadway venue and the usher had handed them traditional playbills, was depressing and sad. There was not a single soul in the house for that performance other than the two Stepanovs, and when Katie had met her friend backstage after the show, a grown-up in the cast who had been in the wings that moment as well said, “Nothing like disappointing two people. Tonight, we should disappoint twice that many.” The show closed the following week.