Long Gone. Alafair Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ Sampson wed, Life magazine pronounced America’s most sought-after young director and the actress he’d twice directed to best actress nominations “The King and Queen of New Hollywood.” Five and a half months later, Alice’s older brother, Ben, was born.

      Where was Ben? Alice now wondered. He’d been a no-show at the gallery, texting her that he’d meet them at the restaurant. Fifteen minutes into cocktails, his seat at the table remained empty. She tried to write off the pit in her stomach as a byproduct of his past.

      “We’re so proud of you, dear.” Her mother patted her gently on the shoulder as she spoke, but with her gaze still directed at her husband. The silence that followed was awkward.

      Luckily, Jeff was there to fill it.

      “Great turnout tonight. Did you sell much?”

      “Not everything’s about money, Jeff.”

      Had she been seated next to her father, she would have nudged him under the table. Poor Jeff. She was certain he would have preferred to be anywhere other than the “celebratory family dinner” her mother had been determined to organize, but he had insisted on accompanying her after Lily had come down with a stomach flu.

      Alice had been careful to engineer the seating arrangements at the round table: her father next to her mother, then her, then Jeff, and then Ben was to be the buffer between Jeff and her father. But thanks to that empty fifth seat, her dad had a clear shot at Jeff. And, as always, he’d taken it. And, as usual, Jeff deflected the bullet.

      “Of course not, Mr. Humphrey.”

      Alice jumped in before the discussion could escalate. “It’s actually a good thing my friends turned out, or the place wouldn’t have looked so full. We had pretty good publicity leading up to the opening—mentions in Time Out and New York magazine—but about half of the crowd were people I know.”

      “Gee, I wonder how all your friends heard about it,” Jeff said with a smile.

      She filled her parents in on the joke. “I sort of buried every person I’ve ever met with Evites, Facebook alerts, and every other form of spam so they’d at least show their faces.”

      “That’s what it’s all about,” her mom said. “You’ve got to create that opening buzz. It’s just the same with movies, you know.”

      Alice could count on a single hand the number of acting jobs her mother had lined up since Alice’s birth, but the film industry was and would always be the lens through which Rose Sampson saw the world. This was, after all, a woman who’d stayed locked in her bedroom for a week when a much younger Alice had finally stopped trying to be a star herself.

      “I only sold a couple of prints tonight, but I was checking online orders, and we were about to cross into the triple digits when I left the gallery.”

      Jeff’s eyes widened above his highball glass. “You’re kidding me.” Coming off her adrenaline high from the successful opening, she’d been so busy gushing to Jeff in the cab about the various socialites who’d shown up to the gallery that they hadn’t had a chance to talk numbers.

      “Is that a lot?” her mother asked.

      “You saw the pictures, Mom. Hans Schuler’s a little off the beaten path.”

      “Good,” her father interjected. “Too much art is sterile and commercialized. If you’re representing fresh work, you can be proud regardless of whether you make a single dollar.”

      Now her father was proud. He hadn’t actually seen the crap she was pushing, and couldn’t resist that dig to Jeff about art not being measured by money, but all he needed to hear was that the photographs were weird, and suddenly he was on board. This from the man who watched his opening weekend grosses like a hawk, even as he insisted that studio executives were hacks who cared only about their bottom line. Her father wasn’t consistent, but he was definitely predictable.

      Predictable enough that she foresaw his response when the waitress interrupted to ask whether Mr. Humphrey preferred to wait for the last member of his party before ordering.

      “If we waited to eat every time my son ran late, the whole family would have starved by now. Go ahead, everyone. Let’s order up.” Her father had spent so much of his life in charge of other people on set that he refused to tolerate tardiness, especially from his flaky son, Ben. It probably did not help that everyone at the table was imbibing while he sipped club soda, twenty-five years after he quit drinking (but not craving, as he liked to say). “I’ll have the duck,” he announced, handing the waitress his unopened menu. “Get the duck, Jeff. They do a great duck.”

      Just as she knew that the family dinner would be at Gramercy Tavern, the restaurant her father always insisted on when he came to “her neighborhood” (meaning south of Thirty-fourth Street), she knew he’d order the duck. She also knew that, even though Jeff would have preferred beef, tonight he would opt for duck.

      She wished she could persuade Jeff to stop trying to appease her father. She wished she could explain why her father would always be hard on him. But any discussion about her father’s disapproval of Jeff would inevitably lead to a discussion about the history of Jeff’s relationship with her, and that might end the friendship that meant so much to her.

      After the waitress departed, Alice continued calculating her sales results for the day. “We’ll have brought in over seventy thousand dollars by morning. I have to admit, I thought Schuler was full of it, but maybe he’s onto something. The online orders came in from all over the world. Instead of targeting the tiny pool of customers who happen to show up in a New York City gallery, anyone living anywhere can buy this stuff. Granted, I don’t understand the appeal of it, but—”

      Her mother tipped her pinot grigio in Alice’s direction. “To each his own, right?”

      She noticed a small groan from her father and felt like she was thirteen years old again. She’d been about that age when she’d first learned to recognize—to label—the tension that had always existed between her parents. Her mother’s resentment of her father’s successes. Fights that coincided with his time spent on location. Her father’s barely veiled boredom as her mother filled him in on the mundane details of days he missed from his family. His snorts—like the one she’d just heard—when her mother wasn’t sufficiently creative in her choice of words.

      With any other couple, she might have wondered why the two of them bothered to remain married. But she always assumed—or maybe, as their daughter, she’d just wanted to believe—that there was some sticky bond of love between them that outweighed all of the apparent imperfections. The rumors about her father? She’d always written them off as precisely that. Her mother trusted him, and therefore she had too.

      But they weren’t rumors. She’d learned that last year. And yet Mom still didn’t leave. Someone had to say something to him. And so Alice had been the one. She had finally cut the cord, at least as much as she could without destroying her mother. Then she’d lost her job at the Met. Now she’d finally landed on her feet and didn’t know whether to see her father’s absence from the show as punishment or exactly what she had asked of him.

      She took another sip of her vodka martini, allowing the alcohol to warm her stomach, feeling it form a fuzzy cloud around her face.

      Ben never did show up that night. It would be two more days before she realized why.

      CHAPTER СКАЧАТЬ