“How much time do you think I have?” he asked the agent. “Honestly?”
She said, “Gosh, I don’t know. I imagine this place will go fast.”
If everything worked out with Nora’s donation—and when would he know that? In a month? A year?—he’d feel, at least, secure in his job. He’d be ready. And if the house was still on the market when that happened, he’d take it as a sign.
He walked her back to Halsted, and the agent asked if he knew that the theater on the corner used to be a horse stable. Yes, he did. They stood together looking at the walled-in archway that must have been built to let carriages through. The agent said, “Imagine that.”
* * *
—
The night of the Howard Brown fundraiser was so windy and brittle that Yale and Charlie joked about taking a taxi the quarter mile to Ann Sather. The fact that this was a Swedish restaurant, that the food would be meatballs and mashed potatoes, had seemed silly when the planning began in August, but now sounded perfect. He’d had a glass of scotch at home to warm him up for the walk, and it buzzed nicely through his hands, his feet.
Yale had been in a heightened state lately, waiting to hear back again from Nora, jumping every time his office phone rang for fear it would be Cecily. And now, on the street with Charlie, with nothing to worry about till Monday, that nervous energy had turned to pure elation. He was thrilled to walk beside a handsome man in a black wool dress coat, thrilled to give a dollar to a punk kid on a sidewalk blanket.
Every day that week, Bill Lindsey had dropped into Yale’s office with more news from some Pascin or Metzinger expert who’d told him, off the record, what the works Bill described might be worth. “Not that I care about the money,” Bill said, “but the farther over two million this estimate gets, the better I feel.”
Bill was a “paper and pencil man” to begin with—he said it the same way Yale’s uncle used to say “legs and tits man”—and he was more excited about the drawings than Yale was, but he was also particularly drawn to the painting of the bedroom, which was supposedly the work of Jeanne Hébuterne. Hébuterne, Modigliani’s common-law wife, had been an artist herself, although after her early death her family hadn’t allowed her work to be exhibited. Authentication would be particularly difficult, but perhaps its existence might bolster the claims on the Modiglianis. Yale loved the bedroom himself, the crooked walls and shadows.
Ranko Novak and Sergey Mukhankin were unknowns, but with a little digging, Yale found that a Mukhankin drawing not unlike the one in Nora’s possession—both were charcoals of nudes—had done decently at Sotheby’s in ’79. Bill was taken with that piece, anyway.
The Novak works, the ones Nora was so adamant that they display, were the only disappointments. Five of the pieces—two small, rough paintings and three sketches—were his. Curiosities, but not valuable. Yale didn’t mind the painting of a man in an argyle vest, the way the lines of the argyle extended beyond the bounds of his clothing, the dark depth of his eyes, but Bill hated it, and he hated the other painting, of a sad little girl, and he hated the sketches, which were all of cows. “Don’t promise her this stuff’s going on the wall,” he said. Yale cringed and Bill said, “Well, maybe she’ll, ah, pass away first. She’ll never know. But look, minus these cows, the collection holds together. I’m a happy man. There’s balance, there’s contrast, there’s a story, and it’s just the right size. You know, it’s a show. Someone is handing us a show.” He’d clapped Yale on the back like Yale had drawn the stuff himself.
And so although the cold air had bored its way into every pore of his body, Yale was floating.
The restaurant, already festively Swedish with its folk art walls, was now a Scandinavian wonderland, festooned with Christmas lights and greenery. They headed up the stairs, fashionably late—Charlie, despite his planning role, had nothing to do with setup—and so they barely had their coats off before a dozen people ran to see them. Or, rather, to see Charlie. Not that they didn’t want to see Yale, not that he wasn’t their friend. But everyone had urgent and hilarious things to tell Charlie. Teddy’s friend Katsu Tatami, a counselor at Howard Brown, came bounding across the room like a gazelle. Katsu, despite being Japanese, had ended up with hazel eyes. He said, “We got like two hundred people up here! We’re gonna run out of raffle tickets!” Katsu fetched them both beers, because Charlie wasn’t going to make it to the bar without being stopped twenty times.
It was the regular crowd mostly. Which was comforting but always a bit disappointing: It would be nice, one day, to see people who hadn’t been at the last fundraiser, and the one before that. To see an alderman, a straight doctor or two.
The silent auction wrapped the edges of the room—donated wine baskets and concert tickets and a free hotel night downtown courtesy of Charlie’s travel agency—but the room was so crowded Yale couldn’t make his way around to see everything.
He spotted Fiona and Julian in deep debate, Fiona talking with her hands. Bird hands, he’d told her once, and she’d fluttered her fingers up to his face, flapped them on his cheeks. He thought he should maybe rescue her; Fiona, as intense as she was herself, found Julian exhausting. “He’s like a mouthful of Pop Rocks,” she said once. “And I like Pop Rocks! I do! They’re sweet, and he’s sweet. I’m not being mean. But you don’t want a whole mouthful.”
Richard took photographs, as Yale had suggested: candid shots of people eating and laughing and talking. His camera was such a permanent appendage that no one much noticed—the key, Richard said, to getting great photos.
Teddy came up to congratulate Charlie on the event before turning to Yale and asking if Evanston was even colder than the city today. “You’re so far up the lake!” he said. He kept rotating the pint of beer in his hand. His face looked fine, his nose looked fine. A scar right at the bridge to match the one on his upper lip. Then he said, “Have you seen Terrence?” Actually he whispered it. Yale scanned the room for Terrence’s lanky frame, his wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s not good,” Teddy said. And then Yale saw him, and Charlie must have, too, because he gave a low gasp and turned immediately back. Yale had thought the idea was that Terrence would look bleak, maybe have lost some weight since they’d seen him at Thanksgiving. What was that, two weeks ago? But Terrence was propped against the wall like a scarecrow, his head completely shaved, his cheeks sunken in. If it weren’t for the glasses, Yale might not have placed him. His skin, once warm and rich, was the color of a walnut shell. He looked barely able to lift his head.
“Bloody hell,” Charlie whispered.
“I mean, he’s sick,” Teddy said. “He was always sick, but now he’s sick. Like, his T cells are fucked. The Rubicon is crossed. He should be in the hospital. I don’t know why he’s here.”