Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read online

  “I like his stuff.”

  “Me, too. And she reps that woman who did the egg series. She ripped off your mom, a bit, with those, but she’s good, too. Who needs an agent?”

  “Just someone I know.”

  “Ben? Benjie S.?” There had been three Benjamins in their preschool class, and ever after Benjamin had been Benjie S., not to be confused with Benjie C. or Benjie M. In fact three times there had been a Benjie reunion: the assistant PR rep for the New York Yankees, the baby banker, and the second unit camera guy on some film none of the other two had ever heard of or would ever watch.

  Silence on both ends of the line. Breathing. A sound that might be Maddie opening a bottle of water.

  Then a scream.

  “Ben Symington, if you are scouting an agent for Rebecca Winter, Rebecca goddamn Winter, if you are sending your mother to Paige Whittington on my say-so, which, you had better believe it, will make Paige Whittington’s career, I want some credit. I want my fingerprints all over this. I want Paige Whittington to know my name and put me on gallery opening lists and send me flowers.”

  “I always figured you were already on gallery opening lists,” Ben said. “Paige Whittington,” he’d written down on a sheet of paper in strong block print. Ben had once wanted to be a comic book artist. “Graffiti artist, tattoo artist, comic book artist,” his father had said. “How the word has been devalued.”

  “You’re evading,” Maddie said.

  “I think you mean evasive.”

  “And again. Which means you don’t want to tell me. Wait, doesn’t TG represent your mother?”

  “She did,” said Ben.

  Another scream. “I want to be part of this conversation,” Maddie yelped before she hung up.

  “Paige Whittington reps the woman who did that egg series,” Ben told Rebecca.

  “Those are wonderful photographs,” Rebecca said. “I went to the opening.”

  “A bit of a Rebecca Winter rip-off.”

  “Oh, please. There’s nothing new under the sun. Do you have a number for Miss Whittington? I’m afraid I will never be able to think of her without thinking of Dick Whittington and his cat.”

  “Mention Maddie, can you? She’s the one who came up with her name.”

  “How is Maddie? Still applying paint for that old fraud?”

  “She sends you her love.”

  “I’ve always liked Maddie.”

  “Don’t start, Mom.”

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  “Maddie Becker recommended you,” said Rebecca.

  “I should send her flowers,” said Paige Whittington.

  She was a tiny woman who looked as though she was preparing to play Peter Pan in summer stock. Her hair was perhaps an inch long all over, a variegated blond. Her features were small and regular, and she wore leggings and a smocklike shirt in a batik print.

  “Toad-in-the-hole? They honestly serve toad-in-the-hole?” she said at Tea for Two, looking at the back of the menu.

  “If you order it you will have made a friend for life,” Rebecca said quietly, and sure enough Sarah squealed and said, “Oh, New York, right?”

  “And my mother happens to be English,” Paige said.

  “You lucky duck!”

  “What’s the difference between toad-in-the-hole and sausage pie with gravy?”

  Sarah sat down and crossed her floury forearms on the table. “Same thing,” she said.

  “Got it,” said Paige.

  Just as Rebecca had realized after Peter was gone that she was living with a mother lode of channeled disapproval in her mind, so Paige Whittington had showed her in less time than it took Sarah to prepare their lunch that she had for many years been in an abusive agent relationship. This feeling had begun when she first called Paige Whittington and offered to drive to Manhattan to meet with her. “Oh, I’ll come to you,” the younger woman had said, and she had, with a packet describing her other clients and what she would do for Rebecca if she represented her. Her other clients were not as well-known as Rebecca, but their photographs were very fine. And how nice it was, to talk to someone who was enthusiastic and pleasant and spoke in full sentences and had an actual name instead of initials.

  (TG had spent a week considering whether to insist that she had an agreement with Rebecca and that their relationship was legally binding. Then she had done an income run on Rebecca for the last three years, and made a snorting noise. “So over,” she said, and went out to a party on a hotel roof for a London artist whose work made extensive sculptural use of firearms and grenades.)

  “This is excellent toad-in-the-hole,” Paige said to Sarah.

  “Well, all I can say is, you made my day, my week, maybe my month. It’s hard, selling English cuisine in a place like this if it’s not a scone, and even my scones are Americanized, to be honest, and Rebecca—I still can’t believe I call her Rebecca, did you see the poster on the wall, it’s signed, excuse me very much—what was I saying? Oh, Rebecca says they’re good scones, but I had to adapt and adapt. That’s why toad-in-the-hole is under two names, the real name and the one I can sell it with.”

  “Excuse me,” called a woman sitting at another table.

  “Oh, hold your horses,” Sarah whispered, winking.

  “Wow,” said Paige Whittington after Sarah walked away.

  “She was just getting started,” Rebecca said, eating her croque monsieur, which on the menu was called “Deluxe grilled cheese and ham.”

  “To be honest, she gave me a bit of breathing room. I’m very starstruck, and a little overwhelmed, and I’ve spent two hours in the car trying to come up with the right words to convince you to let me represent you.”

  “What exactly were those words?”

  “ ‘Pretty please’? ‘I love your work’? No, not ‘I love your work,’ I think your work is iconic. I think it has something to do with why many of us feel the way we do about photography, particularly women. It’s both accessible and mysterious.”

  “Oh, nonsense. It’s not mysterious at all.”

  “I have to disagree. Compare and contrast it with, say, the Ansel Adams photographs, the Grand Tetons photographs. You may admire, even love those photographs, but you don’t look at them and think What happened next? They have an immutable quality—that’s their strength and power. But there’s no question embedded in them. There’s a question embedded in all your work, that sense of ‘what happens next.’ And women feel as though they want to know the answer to the question, which makes the work conversational, which makes it female.”

  Rebecca smiled slightly.

  “I’m trying much too hard,” said Paige Whittington.

  “No, it’s simply that I’m comparing this conversation with the conversations I had with my previous agent, which consisted largely of ‘No sale.’ ”

  Paige Whittington ate the very last morsel of her toad-in-the-hole. Rebecca thought she must be either a triathlete or a bulimic. Her wrists seemed made of pickup sticks.

  She swallowed, then blurted, “This is really bad form, but I can’t imagine how you stayed with her all these years! Honestly, when you called I expected you to be completely different, tough and mean and difficult to deal with.”

  “I suppose I left that to my agent since I can’t seem to manage it myself.”

  “Neither can I. If you’re looking for another version of that agent, there are a couple of people I can recommend. But I don’t think it’s necessary. This new work you sent me speaks for itself, as do you. No one needs to muscle their way into a gallery on behalf of you and this work. And, by the way, this work really is mysterious. I’ve spent hours looking at these photographs, and I’m still not sure what they denote. They’re mysterious, and they’re unbelievably sad.”

  “You think they’re sad?”

  “They overwhelm me with sadness.”

  “What about those?” Rebecca pointed to the long wall of Tea for Two, where another complete set of the dog prints now hung.

  Pai
ge Whittington smiled. “They’re dog pictures,” she said.

  “Yes they are.”

  She pointed to the one close-up of the dog’s paw pad, the one that looked like the gap between sand dunes, or perhaps some odd cacti. “That’s a Rebecca Winter photograph,” she said. “The others were taken by a different woman.”

  “I can assure you that they’re all mine.”

  “I understand that. I figured that out. But look at the others.” The dog looked into the camera, his head cocked. The dog looked over his shoulder. The dog lay on his back, paws aloft, showing off, playing dead. “I don’t know that the Rebecca Winter whose work I know would have taken those photographs.”

  “Why not?” Rebecca said.

  “You’ve got me there. I’m just an agent.”

  And that was that. There were brownies for dessert, and Rebecca went home full and contented, and Paige Whittington called her mother from the car and shrieked, “I am going to represent Rebecca Winter!”

  “I don’t believe it,” said her mother, but it was true.

  “Amateur hour,” said TG when she heard, but she was secretly a little uncomfortable, and that night she went extra heavy on the eye cream, although she was not a woman to consciously make the connection between Rebecca Winter’s thirty-year-old new agent and the lines around her own eyes.

  And the next day at work Maddie Becker got a huge bouquet of spring flowers. She took Ben out to dinner at an Indonesian place in Brooklyn, and picked up the check, and kissed him on the street outside the restaurant to thank him, and then kissed him because the thank-you kiss had been unexpected and, frankly, pretty fantastic. And then she took him back to her apartment, which in a few months would become his apartment, too.

  But that was later.

  THE WHITE CROSS SERIES

  This series of enigmatic tableaux is both mysterious and heartbreaking. Each is as it was found: some images reflect the disintegration wrought by wind and weather, but none have been manipulated by Rebecca Winter, who discovered them over time in a forest in a rural area of New York State.

  MYSTERIOUS AND HEARTBREAKING

  The opening was in Brooklyn. Rebecca was so hopelessly out of date that she still associated Williamsburg with observant Jewish families, mother and father and a graduated string of children walking to shul on Shabbos, like black pearls on an opera-length strand. She’d never actually seen that, of course, but she had heard about it and even seen a series of photographs. Not very good, she’d thought at the time.

  From the window of the car she saw young people in odd and oddly similar clothes. There were many young men in small fedoras. There were many young women in torn tights. Some of them were coming to the opening party for the White Cross series. A young agent begat a young gallery owner, although with Paige, whose forebears had indeed arrived on the Mayflower and whose great-great-grandfather had founded the Metropolitan Bank of New York and whose grandfather had sold it to some other bigger bank and founded a museum of Americana, youth was only part of the point. The gallery owner was someone she had known at boarding school; his family was just as wealthy as her own, and his goal as a nascent gallery owner was to get attention.

  He’d gotten it.

  Rebecca wore the same black pants and kimono jacket that she had worn to the Bradley dinner. It had been only a little more than a year ago, but it might have been forever. She rattled around in her own clothes, thinner and more wiry than she’d been that night. It was almost comical, that she had brought these things to the cabin. The jacket had had a thin coating of sawdust on the shoulders, which she assumed meant she had termites somewhere in the closet. Perhaps now the exterminator would take her on instead of sending her to a roofer. Soon it would all be someone else’s problem and she would be in Pittsburgh for the fall and winter. This made her feel no better.

  “Gorgeous!” Josef Gourdon cried, his arms open. “Your hair! So Georgia O’Keeffe!”

  “I never know whether what you say is a compliment or not,” Rebecca said, kissing him on both cheeks as though he was from Budapest rather than Kansas City, where his father had been a butcher.

  “Oh, you’re so clever! Brooklyn! The hip new place. And everyone is here!”

  It was true. Art critics, old acquaintances, lunch friends, art school professors, trust fund babies, a young Russian oligarch’s daughter in a short sequined dress with her decorator as her date, a pair of personal injury lawyers whose apartment was designed purely to showcase art with a very cramped wing for their children and nannies, the Greifers from Colorado Springs, of course, and dozens of very young people, friends of Paige, of Maddie, of Ben, of the gallery’s owner, who was standing in one corner with a champagne flute and a maniacal grin amid the crush.

  “These photographs break my heart,” said Josef’s companion, a young man so tanned and beautiful that he seemed gold-plated.

  “Are you an artist?” said Rebecca.

  “I’m an Episcopal priest,” he said, and she blinked. “I’m sure you’ve heard this already, but these photographs are both religious and sacramental.”

  She had not heard this, but would read it the following week, in a review by a critic who had overheard the gorgeous priest.

  She had printed the pictures large, as large as anything she had ever done, and the crosses seemed to vibrate on the wall as though they were three-dimensional. Ben had come with her to see the show when it was being hung, and at the artisanal beer bar to which he’d taken her afterward he had said, with great seriousness, as though he was not her son but a colleague, “This is the best work you’ve ever done.”

  “I don’t mean to be self-effacing, but at some level I can’t help thinking that the artist is actually the individual who arranged these objects.”

  “Take the compliment,” he said, sounding like her son again and eating edamame. “What’s going on with Pop Pop’s stuff?”

  “The appraiser from the auction house is looking at everything tomorrow. I’m meeting him there.”

  “Sonya?”

  “Going back to Poland as soon as the apartment is cleared out.” Rebecca did not mention the meeting with the lawyer who had explained that, through some complex machinations, everything now belonged to Rebecca rather than her mother, who had been eliminated from the chain of custody as thoroughly as though she, too, was in Green-Wood Cemetery instead of at the Jewish Home. She did not share the scene earlier that day in which she had gingerly broached the subject of Sonya’s claims to any of the objects Oscar Winter had left behind. The housekeeper had waved her off with a lemon-scented hand. She’d been polishing the furniture in advance of the appraiser’s arrival.

  “Your papa, he was a good man. Very good. And he have a head for numbers. Some people say no”—a glare, and a head toss, which Rebecca assumed was supposed to denote Bebe Winter, the failed family business, and a lifetime of criticism—“but he does. He say, ‘Sonya, you buy these with this little money, you make big money. Google, Apple, Toys R Us. Prospects.’ ” The last word rolled around in Sonya’s mouth. “Not all perfect, truth, Kodak not so smart. Sometimes old-fashioned. But the Google? Very good investment.”

  Rebecca had asked Sonya to come to the opening, but she shook her head and shrugged. “Not so much for me,” she said. If pressed Rebecca would say the same. It was her good luck that now she was recognizable, but she could remember when she was young hearing people talk about her work and finding it horrible, second cousin to that old dream of public nakedness. She always liked her shows best when she was there alone, turning in a circle until she was slightly dizzy, before the others arrived. One of the cater waiters had said to her quietly before the guests arrived, “These are fabulous.”

  “Actor?” Rebecca had asked.

  “Playwright,” he replied, polishing a tray with a white cloth.

  Paige pressed a glass of champagne into her hand. Maddie kissed her cheek. “Here’s the buzz,” Maddie shouted, since the noise level was high. “It’s the new Rebe
cca Winter for a new generation. Out with the old team, in with the new one. And with work that’s incredibly edgy.”

  “An Episcopal priest told me that he found it sacramental.”

  “There’s a priest here?”

  “Everyone is here,” said Paige. “I don’t think a single person turned us down. Certainly not a single major collector or critic.”

  There was smoked salmon on black bread, and tiny blintzes and crab cakes. The Greifers elbowed their way through the crowd to tell her how much they loved the stone wall photograph, which they had hung in the foyer of their house on Tortola. The Russian oligarch’s daughter was introduced, curtsied very prettily, said “This is an honor” with not a trace of an accent, or an accent that couldn’t be laid at the door of a British boarding school. How strange was it that Rebecca found herself yearning for the cottage, the dog, the empty spaces, the tall trees, the solitude, the quiet? She had been in town for three days, and it was all the same, and yet completely different. It was not so much that her old life had slipped away, that someone else was in her apartment, that she was in a hotel in a downtown Manhattan neighborhood with which she was only glancingly familiar. She had gone to a dinner party in her honor the night before the opening, and everyone had asked, with precisely the same intonation, as though it was a piece of urban Gregorian chant, “Where have you been?” And she had no idea how to respond. In the country? Up a tree? With a roofer? In a completely alternative universe that somehow, sneakily, had come to seem more real to her than this crystal, this Brunello, these men and women, this lacquered room? When she got into a cab at dinner’s end, her head a little muddled by the wine, she felt the way she always did when she was traveling, as though she was enjoying the novelty but would be happiest when she could consider it all from the vantage point of home, with her suitcase unpacked, in more comfortable clothes.