Julie Hayes: A Death In The Life Part 28

"Not much."

"Why not, for heaven's sake?"

"Ghosts," Julie said, not altogether flippant.

Jeff looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

"I'm kidding. No! I'm not...Jeff, are you pa.s.sionate about Felicia's portrait of you?"

He looked at it from across the room as though he had forgotten it was there.

Having at long last brought up the subject, she plunged ahead: "It's spooky. It isn't you, really. Those eyes are nasty. You know what it's like? It's as though she wanted to paint a judge and used you for a model."

Jeff grinned. "That's very funny. Her father was a judge."

"Oh, boy."

He flinched. "I wish you'd stop saying that."

"I'll try. I will try."

He came and stood beneath the portrait and looked up at it.

"You're better looking than that," Julie said.

"I'd have to agree with you," he said dryly.

It was his distinguished air that Felicia had tried to catch. He had a strong face with wise dark eyes, and the tough mouth of someone who had to be shown. There were little pouches under his eyes that Felicia had overlooked. Or maybe they weren't there in her day. His hair was starting to gray now-at forty. He was a head taller than Julie, just under six feet, slight, but muscular, and fifteen years older. Which sometimes seemed a lot.

He took the picture from the wall and Julie thought of her psychotherapist and all the time they had spent on the subject of that painting until the doctor had finally said, "Couldn't you simply ask him to remove it?"

The mountain had turned out to be a molehill after all.

Jeff said: "We can take it up to the attic when we take the luggage and hide it there."

"Why don't we pack it up and send it to Felicia?"

He made a face of mock reproof. Felicia had recently remarried. "The question is, what do we do for a replacement?" The outline of where the painting had hung was plainly visible.

Julie almost said, "Move." But she didn't.

"We ought to look at pictures," Jeff said. "That's something we do nicely together."

Which confirmed her suspicion that he had been sorting out the days and nights ahead, his, hers, and theirs, now that he was to make New York his headquarters for a while.

"I wish I'd said something in Paris."

"We'll find something. I shouldn't want a reproduction. I'm sure you wouldn't either."

"Let's take our time," Julie said, which wasn't like her. But whatever came in was going to have to make it among some pretty exalted company-a Rembrandt etching, an early Pica.s.so, a Daumier drawing, two good Impressionists.

"I'm glad you feel that way," Jeff said, on his way to answer the first telephone call since their return.

Julie went to the window and looked down on the street traffic-light on Sunday: a few cars, more taxis. The apartment was the second floor through of one of the last of the nineteenth-century townhouses left on Sixteenth Street. It faced a church and backed against the outer reaches of the garment industry, with a tired catalpa tree slouching in a garden where no flowers grew. But the house itself was well kept up. Jeff had lived there before his first marriage. In his and Julie's four years together it remained his in character. Not because he wanted it that way, but because Julie had not known how to change it. One thing she hadn't wanted to do was make a hash of the place just to prove that Julie as well as Geoffrey Hayes lived there. And now that Felicia's painting was going, she thought, she might not want to change it at all. Furthermore, she decided almost at the same instant, she was through with psychotherapy. Until further notice.

They agreed that night, having coffee in the living room, that something had to be done soon about the bald spot over the mantel.

"What would you say to a good mirror if we can find the right style?" Jeff suggested.

"Not much." She wasn't fond of mirrors. But if Jeff wanted one..."Maybe," she added, trying to sound hearty.

"What we had better do," Jeff said, quite aware, "when either of us has an hour or two to spare is drop in on some of the better galleries-and if we see something we like, we can go back together and give ourselves time to consider it."

"Fine," Julie said. An hour or two to spare...that was Julie's whole problem: she had far too much time to spare and Jeff no time at all. The old floundering feeling and the depression that came with it began to descend. Do something, Julie.

She got up instantly and went to her desk in the bedroom. She looked up the phone number for Lieutenant Donleavy, Mid-Manhattan Homicide. He might or might not be on duty, Sunday night. He was there.

"This is Julie Hayes, Lieutenant. I don't know if you remember me..."

"The little fortune-teller. I'm not ever going to forget you, Mrs. Hayes. What can I do for you?"

Julie was chagrined at the description, the little fortune-teller. She had come close to serious trouble that spring-before she joined Jeff in Paris-by setting up as "Friend Julie, Reader and Advisor" in a shop on West Forty-fourth Street. She said, "I wondered if you could tell me what happened to Rita Morgan."

Rita Morgan was the prost.i.tute she had mistaken for a child and tried to help.

"She's still under psychiatric observation, but I'll give you an educated guess as to what will happen."

"Please."

"Off the record, you understand. I don't think she'll ever come to trial."

Rita Morgan had murdered Julie's friend, Pete Mallory, who also had tried to help her.

"She'd be a great witness for the prosecution," Julie said. "I never knew of anybody so self-destructive."

"It's a pity she didn't do herself in, instead of Mallory," Donleavy said, going short on sympathy. "Do you want to see her?"

"I don't think so, and I don't think she'd want to see me. There's not much point."

"That's being sensible."

"Lieutenant, I've gone out of the fortune-telling business."

"I was teasing you. I don't think you were ever really in it. Were you now?"

"Not for long. It was a lark. You're right. Thank you, Lieutenant."

"Any time, Mrs. Hayes."

It was like a dream and more bizarre than most, Julie thought, sitting a moment after she put down the phone. She remembered very clearly leaving her therapist's office that April morning, angry and hurt because the doctor had said that until Julie was ready to find gainful employment and help herself, the therapy was a waste of Jeff's money. It didn't wash with Doctor Callahan that Jeff liked "his little girl," his "child bride," his wife the dilettante. "Rubbish. He will like a woman better. And so will you, which is more important." She had known even then that Doctor was right, but she had felt abandoned, and when someone handed her a flyer on Fifth Avenue, advertising "Madame Tozares," like a mischievous child, she had decided to go into the business of reading the Tarot cards and advising.

Her rationalizations were numerous, of course. She had expected to meet, and G.o.d knows she had met, a lot of troubled people about whom she hoped to write someday. Of all the things she wanted to do, writing was foremost. But she lived in the shadow of a master whose work she had reverenced from the time he'd lectured on campus when she was in college, and the more he encouraged her, the less capable she felt. No, she decided, Forty-fourth Street had meant more to her than mere spite of Doctor Callahan: she had attempted to create an environment for herself among people who would not intimidate her intellectually. She had subsequently learned that the simplest people were by no means simple. And she had learned about herself that she functioned well in emergencies, even while pumping adrenalin. She had taken all her notes to Paris with her and Jeff had said he did not know an investigative reporter who could have done better at collecting material.

She went back to Jeff in the living room and told him what Donleavy had said about Rita Morgan, that she was probably incompetent to stand trial. "It's a sort of ending, isn't it?" she said.

"Or a beginning," Jeff said, looking at her over his reading gla.s.ses.

"Yeah."

Jeff took off his gla.s.ses and put them in his pocket. "Julie, keep the place on Forty-fourth Street for a while. I don't know how much I'll be at home, but you ought to have a place of your own to work in."

Julie's spirits took an upward leap. She said, "You're great, Jeff, absolutely great."

"Well, it's time there was a Geoffrey the Great," he said in mock seriousness. "There's been a Geoffrey the Handsome, a Geoffrey the b.a.s.t.a.r.d-Archbishop of York, by the way-and a Geoffrey the Cat that I know about, but to my knowledge, I am the first Geoffrey the Great."

Julie's impulse was to throw herself into his lap, something she knew pleased him very much, but that was part of the "little girl" pattern, and the time had come to break it. She went around the back of his chair and hugged him. Straightening up, she faced the empty wall over the mantel. "Before anything, I'd like to find a picture," she said. "I'd like this room to be right, somehow. It's like starting a sentence and never finis.h.i.+ng it."

"Then look. Go out and look at pictures. There must be a hundred gallery owners in New York waiting for you."

TWO.

THE GALLERY DOOR STOOD open and a young man with a broom noticed Julie at about the same time she noticed him. "Come in if you want to."

Julie walked into the Maude Sloan Gallery. She had already seen too many paintings for one day, but the poster out front announcing the opening that afternoon described Ralph Abel's first American show as "Parisian fantasies." It wasn't so bad, only fourteen paintings when she got to counting them, with a lot of wall s.p.a.ce and light around them. She strolled from one canvas to the next, not greatly impressed. They all had names, but so far as she could see, there was not much relations.h.i.+p between the name and the picture. Julie the art critic, she mocked herself. Except that once she had studied art...but then, what had she not studied at one time or other?

She had the feeling that the young man was painfully aware of her. He took plastic gla.s.ses from a box and lined them up alongside a punch bowl. Was he the artist? She felt that he was, although his att.i.tude was uncharacteristic of any artist she knew. He put the box away and went back to work with the broom.

"Hey!" Julie came up to a splash of city colors-or so she saw them, a lot of red, blue, purple, and black. Non.o.bjective. But she could sense the presence of the lurking wh.o.r.es. She swung around to where the young man had stopped in his tracks to stare at her. The color leaped to his face. "Are you Mr. Abel?"

"Yes, I am." But he fled with the broom to the closet at the back.

Julie read the legend beneath the frame: SCARLET NIGHT.

"I'm going to have to close up for an hour, ma'am." He really could not bear to be in the room alone with someone looking at his paintings, not today anyway.

Ma'am, Julie thought, and wondered if there was a Paris, Nebraska, or Iowa or Illinois. "I'll go peaceably. No problem."

"I didn't mean to be impolite," he said, still blus.h.i.+ng to the roots of his corn-colored hair. It made his eyes seem very blue. "It's nerves, that's all."

"I kind of like that," Julie said, indicating Scarlet Night.

His smile was beatific. "I'm sorry the wine hasn't come yet." He made a helpless gesture toward the empty bowl.

"Is everything here Paris? I've just got back from there."

"No kidding? I'll tell you the truth, I painted most of them in Naples. I couldn't get with Paris until I got away from there. I guess that doesn't make much sense..."

"You bet it does. I'd never make it in Paris alone."

"Funny. I thought at first you were a critic."

"No way. I don't even know why I like things."

"Do you think any of the critics will come? Do you live in New York?"

"All my life-except for a month in Paris."

He was on a single track. "And you go to a lot of openings. Right?"

"Not a lot."

"But you look like you do," he persisted. "The way you dress, you know-a certain style, good material. My father was a tailor."

Julie was beginning to feel the whole scene wasn't happening-not in SoHo, New York. "I usually wear sneakers and a raincoat."

"That wouldn't matter. I'd say the same thing. Even the bones in your face."

Julie turned her wide gray eyes upon him. "Look, I'm curious. This is your first exhibit, right?"

He nodded.

"What's the price on Scarlet Night?"

"I'm not allowed to talk prices. That's Mrs. Sloan's department."

"I didn't say I was buying. I'm just curious. I suppose it's rude of me, but I'm a very direct person." With some people; she had overstated the characteristic.

"It's not that, but Maude's been good to me. She said she'd give me a show after seeing a couple of transparencies and stuck to it when I got here with the rest, which I'm pretty sure she didn't like much."

"Oh, man. You need a larger dose of self-confidence than that. Don't you think they're good?"

"Yes, ma'am. I think they're beautiful."

"Then they are. Don't sell them short, for heaven's sake." Julie made a move toward the door.

"Don't go...I mean please stay for the opening."

"I'll come back at five and join the crowd."

"What if n.o.body comes?" There was such a sweet, sad look about him. Ah, Wilderness! Julie thought, having played in it in college. Or Our Town. They ought to be sitting on two stools at a make-believe soda fountain.