Yale stood, looked around. Poor Cecily—the guy had actually commandeered her phone. He imagined her sitting there, eyes closed, fingertips at her temples.
“That’s correct,” he said. “I’ve been coordinating a—”
“Because there seems to be a miscommunication. Those paintings actually belong to a friend of mine.”
Yale picked up the phone base, tried to stretch the cord into the hall. He could only get about a foot out the door. Bill’s office stood ajar. He said, “Could you hold—” but Donovan was still talking.
“Now, Miss Pearce and I had a very specific understanding, and what I want to know, I want to know two things. First, who is responsible for this miscommunication, and second, how are we going to make things right?”
Yale took off his left shoe and hurled it down the hall at Bill’s door. Roman emerged, followed by Bill. They looked at the shoe, the floor, and Yale beckoned them frantically. He said, for their benefit, “Mr. Donovan, are you in Ms. Pearce’s office right now? You’re on campus?”
Bill hit his forehead with his palm.
Yale said, “I’d like to invite you over to the gallery, and we’re going to get our general counsel here too.”
“Great,” he said. “Great. That’s what I like to hear.”
* * *
—
It was 5:30 before they could assemble everyone. Roman had gone home, but Bill, Yale, Cecily, Herbert Snow, and Chuck Donovan—Yale had imagined someone paunchy and red-faced, and was surprised at Donovan’s lankiness, his neat white mustache—gathered in Bill’s office, where Bill’s intern brought them coffee that Yale was too nervous to drink. He had told Bill, in the meantime, about his slipup in Wisconsin. He steered clear of his hangover, his other distractions that morning.
Donovan said, “I’m glad for the chance to address you all.”
Before he could begin his speech, Yale said, “The bequest is a done deal. There’s no undoing it.”
Herbert Snow jumped in with some legal language, and Yale was able, as Snow talked, to make eye contact with Cecily. She looked like a woman about to meet the firing squad. Yale had dropped by her office right after his negative test to give her the news, and she’d hugged him, clapped him warmly on the back. “Now you just need to stay that way,” she’d said.
Donovan said, “I’ve been made a fool. I give money to this university, and I sit on this board, with very little thanks. One of the only rewards I’m promised in exchange for my significant time and work is a bit of leverage. Now I’m not the type to poke my nose into the curriculum. I’m not, for instance, going to complain if you put up some nudes in your gallery. But I ought to be able, as a man of my word, to make a promise to a friend with the understanding that I can follow through on that promise. That my requests won’t be ignored. I’m looking foolish now in front of my friend, my business associate, and frankly this makes me question my relationship with the university as a whole.”
Yale wondered if Cecily might speak, but she sat deflated. He imagined she’d already said everything she could, back in her own office.
“I speak with Miss Pearce, and I assume it’s taken care of. Then I learn from my friend Frank that a deal has been struck, he’s very upset, but he says You’ve done enough, it’s over, we’ll let it go. And then. Then! This weekend I get a call from Frank, who has learned, via his daughter, that you’re valuing the art at millions of dollars.”
Bill said, “Mr. Donovan, I understand your concern. But that’s three million dollars that is now an asset of Northwestern.”
Yale coughed, tried to stop coughing, tried, with his eyes, to stop Bill from saying the thing he’d already said. Yale hadn’t heard anything about three million. It must have had to do with the Soutine expert. Sure enough, Donovan’s eyebrows rose to where his hairline would have been.
He whipped his head toward Cecily. “You didn’t share that figure with me.”
“I did not have that figure,” she said.
“That’s three million dollars that rightly belongs to my friend Frank Lerner.”
Yale said, “Emotions are running high, but listen, we’re excited about this collection. We’re about to go public in the next week or two, and you’re getting the inside scoop.”
Donovan ignored him and talked to Cecily. “If these people aren’t in a position to do anything, I don’t know why you dragged me over here.”
Had this really been Cecily’s idea? Had she handed Donovan the phone and said to call Yale? Yale said, “This has absolutely nothing to do with her. Nora Lerner contacted me, and I was the one who handled the acquisition. To be honest, we did not fill Ms. Pearce in on the proceedings from that point on. She was an advocate for you and your concerns at every step.”
Cecily put her hands to her cheeks, looked at him, and he couldn’t tell if she was trying to warn him or thank him. Yale hoped Bill would say something now to back him up, but Bill was staring at his own knees. Herbert Snow was taking notes. Yale realized, with a chill, that he was writing down what Yale had just said about circumventing Cecily.
Yale said, “Because you’ve been so understanding—perhaps we could arrange a private showing of the works, for you and a select group of friends. It could be soon, or it could be after the show is fully curated. Champagne and hors d’oeuvres in the gallery. What do you think?”
Donovan stood. “I’m paying a visit to the president. And I think people are going to be very interested in this story. I have a few journalist friends, in fact.”
Yale stood, too, a moment before everyone else. He reached into his pocket, extracted a business card. “Please understand that the acquisition was my undertaking, and that we acted against the direction of Ms. Pearce.”
Bill said, “That we includes me. If you’re going to complain about someone, please complain about me personally. Yale was only acting—”
Yale held up a hand to stop him. He said, “This was my project. We did nothing unethical or illegal, but any anger should be directed at me.” It would be dishonest, Bill taking the fall. Especially when Yale was the one who’d messed up, the one who’d been too distracted by his own life to do his job properly in Wisconsin.
Cecily adjusted her shoulder pads and followed Donovan most of the way out the door. She stopped and looked at Yale before she left the room, a look you’d throw a drowning man as you took the last life preserver.
* * *
—
Yale sat numbly that night on Asher Glass’s floor, along with everyone else who didn’t fit into the chairs or along the walls. Half of Asher’s living room was his office, with desks and phones and file cabinets, and the other half held a ratty couch, a small TV. Yale’s tailbone pressed into the wood, and down here you could see every dust clot, of which there were many.