Chapter 41
That night was the big holiday party for Tom’s firm.
We had been held up by a search for Henry’s favorite stuffed toy.
By the time we arrived, the small space—an art gallery two blocks off the Jardín—was already packed with people laughing and talking in front of overscaled abstract paintings.
I anxiously scanned the crowd. Tom’s arm was around my shoulder. “Can I get you a drink? Champagne?”
“Please, yes,” I said, relieved that for the next few minutes if someone greeted me as Mia, or asked about my mother, it wouldn’t be in Tom’s hearing.
He had already begun to pick his way through the crowd, smiling broadly, now and then stopping to tell someone hello, brimming with the certainty of his charm.
Watching him, I was overwhelmed by tenderness and pity, the sharp conviction I was not worthy of him; I was tainted and disloyal.
I refocused my attention on the paintings, broad swaths of beige and gray and black, above which a gritty texture had been haphazardly applied, as if a bucket of sand had been hurled at the canvas when it was still wet.
“Deep in contemplation, I see.”
I turned to find Bill Barnes smiling at me quizzically out of his big black eyeglass frames. His manner competent, assured, his handsome sweep of gray hair and square jaw. The sort of wealthy person you might bump into at the opera as easily as at the hardware store.
“It’s so lovely to see you!” We kissed hello. My warmth was genuine. Of all Tom’s colleagues, I liked him the best.
“How have you and the kids been getting on?” He’d grown up in Maine and retained a trace of that accent. “The house is acceptable, I hope?”
“Acceptable! It’s like living in a work of art.”
“Please, you’ll make me blush.” He took my hand. “A house needs someone beautiful to bring it to life. I’m too old and ugly for it now, but you…” He lowered his eyes, looking faintly abashed. “So, what do you make of them?” he asked, indicating the paintings.
“They’re pretty atrocious.”
“Aren’t they, though?” He laughed, as if the fact delighted him. “There’s a great deal of bad art in this town these days. Not so when I first came here in the ’60s. In those days, you would be at a party and Allen Ginsberg might show up, or Burroughs.”
“Yes, I have a friend who was here then. You know her, I think. Louise Nieman?”
“Nieman, hmm. I can’t say it rings a bell.” He’d pronounced it with that faint Brahmin accent, caahnt, the way Louise would have.
“Her husband, Allan, was a painter,” I went on. “Abstract, geometric shapes, with these little limbs, a bit like Paul Klee?”
“You don’t mean Allan Pearlman’s girl?”
“Yes, Allan Pearlman,” I said, nodding eagerly. “I know his wife, Louise.”
“Is that what she’s going by now?” He shook his head. “Oh, yes, I remember her. It was later, though, she was here, in the ’70s. Astounding she would have come back after what happened, and all the tomfoolery she got up to with that Spaniard—her name escapes me. Fernando Navarro’s girl.”
“Nuria.”
“The four of them doing things you ought by rights to be hanged for, Catholic country like this! Not that I’m a prude.
Still, that night, she and the Spaniard put on quite a show.
It was humiliating, the way they were draped against each other, sucking each other’s fingers, laughing at him.
We all thought Allan should break it off, but he was out of his mind over that girl.
” His face had darkened. “Of course he always claimed it was an accident.”
At that moment, he turned, nodding a greeting to someone passing. I was queasy, my hands and throat clammy with sweat. At the periphery of my sight, I could see Tom making his way through the crowd, two champagne glasses held aloft.
“Do you know, because the party was at my house, they wanted me as a witness?”
“What do you mean—?”
“Surely you knew? He threw her off the balcony. Gone completely around the bend. We all thought he’d killed her.
” He fell silent several beats. “I’ll never forget the sound when she hit.
And the blood! I couldn’t stand to look out over the balcony after that.
I had to pay for them to dig the rocks out.
That’s when the stairs were built to the Cuesta. ”
I should have been horror-struck, angry at having been deceived. Instead, I felt strangely emptied, numb.
“A pity, though, for Allan,” Bill continued, shaking his head again. “He had so much promise. I wonder what ever became of him?”
“He died,” I heard myself say.
“Moved to Italy is what I heard.”
Just then Tom reached us. “Sorry it took so long.” Handing me my drink, “The bar is absolutely mobbed. Hello, Bill.”
“Tom.” They shook hands.
“You both seem a bit somber. I hope you haven’t been telling her anything gruesome?”
“Funny you should say that,” Bill said, catching my eye. “No, your wife and I were having a rather interesting exchange. Seems we know someone in common, although we can’t agree on her name.”
“Speaking of people in common, a certain disgruntled investor just spotted you.”
“Shit and damn,” Bill said, both of them laughing. “You’ll forgive me if I make myself scarce?”
As we watched him disappear into the dense crowd, Tom explained about the investor, things at work—anecdotes full of jocular deprecations, mock self-pity. “Considering the tap dancing I had to do in Minneapolis,” I heard him say, and laughed on cue.
The whole while, the same thought kept intruding: How far did she go to make him hurt her?