“You know, Herbert, I still can’t find the cum stains,” Hank pointed out. “I checked the whole tie front and back before dinner.” He lifted it toward the inadequate candle. We scrutinized the tie.
“Up by the top.” I pointed, helpful. “You see, next to the clam’s neck, or whatever they call that thing. It kind of disappears into the knot.” Herbert and I leaned closer, but Hank couldn’t see because it was too high.
“Did Jeffries say it was his cum, or just cum generally?”
“Oh, definitely his cum,” Herbert assured Hank. “Commodification of the artist, the artist’s ‘body-of-work,’ and blah-blah-blah. I know the ideas are getting pretty stale, but he is limiting the number of items, and with his signature on it there’s no doubt of the value. We could ask him to stain it again if you like, I mean, if there really is no discernible mark. I’m sure he’d be happy to do that for you, Hank.”
Hank paid no attention to Herbert’s offer. He smoothed the tie proudly against his chest. “I’m giving it to my son,” he pointed out. “For his bar mitzvah.”
“Oh, hell yes,” I let out. “He’ll love it. Kids love goofy ties.”
An arcade ran around the periphery of this broad high-ceilinged room, with tiny shops full of gewgaws and magazines, sewing kits, tooth care and soaps, all the miscellanea of travel. The shops opened up both toward us—articulating glass walls drawn back like the flaps of a surgical wound—and outward to the surrounding streets (mere doors there) to encourage “flow-through.” Dogan, my very erotic and beloved ex-student, flowed through, his two parents in tow. Then they flowed right back out again. A miracle of architecture!
“Look, the important thing about the family, Allan’s family, is that they are very sharp, and if they catch wind of any reason why I should be pursuing these particular drawings, if they even suspect I want them at all, for God’s sake, the price is going to go right through the ceiling.”
“They’re not priceless already?”
“No, I don’t think so. Picasso drawings aren’t all that rare. He must have scribbled on every surface in Europe, like Napoleon sleeping. These are probably undated, maybe even unsigned. In any case, I’ve got to let the family believe there’s no special value in them, that just by selling me the drawings they’re taking advantage of me.”
“Maybe they sold them already—I mean, decades ago.”
“They might have. But the family is the only starting point, unless the Baltimore Museum turns up something.”
Hank held the photograph of Allan next to the color plate of Boy Leading a Horse. There was no similarity, per se. The face in the painting looked more like a mask than a face, a reduced emblem that seemed to hang in space before the body, not a rendering of something you might touch in real life. The genitals were a mess, so that he looked uncircumcised but you couldn’t be sure. It might have been a poor reproduction. His slim chest and belly were achingly beautiful, warm and rounded enough to feel with your hand. I kept catching glimpses of Dogan in the shopping arcade (with Mom and Dad, apparently returned). His loose-limbed grace and elegant head would flash at me like a snapshot from the shifting crowd.
“I wonder if Allan’s classmates cared that he knew Picasso?” (Dogan’s association with me, even when it was mere parental rumor, had lent him a glamour and worldliness that dazzled the mock sophisticates of Urban Country Day’s upper school. The girls flocked around him—martyred sexual decadent, grown-up seducer of men—and began to pursue this slim little boy who just weeks before had been nothing more than a charming but infantile halfback on the soccer team. Dogan had sex with many of these girls, seduced by the rumors of his homosexuality, and I could only swallow the bitter reports of my jealous heart.)
“You know, Herbert, if you’re not going to finish that lamb—”
Herbert slid the tepid plate to Hank, who smiled and asked me, “How is that school of yours?” deflecting attention from the flap of meat he then slipped into his mouth. Hank took a great interest in my school but thankfully had no information except what I gave him. He’d even met Dogan once, when I took the boy to the local sports palace to join Hank and his teenage son in an opulent sky box, replete with swiveling chairs, nifty curtains, sniveling help hauling beer and snacks, plus a huge TV, which was a big hit all around.
“My school?” It was doubtful Hank knew anything. “Actually, I’ve quit teaching.” Herbert glanced at me, then, pointedly, away. “I’m working with Herbert now, helping him out at the museum.” I could have caused two deaths with this single utterance, as it caught Herbert in mid-swallow of a glass of water, on which he began to choke, and Hank in the depths of chewing a tongue-sized lamb chunk, through which undercooked sinew he tried exclaiming, “Why, that’s just terrific!” A long draught of wine dislodged the meat and kept us from the ugly exertions of the Heimlich maneuver (invented by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, whose charming twin daughters I have met and enjoyed).
“That’s just terrific,” Hank repeated, after the wine. “Working together like a team. There’s nothing better.” Herbert didn’t seem to think so. “Herb kept mum about it the whole day.”
“Yes,” Herbert said. “I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”
“What are you now, an assistant or a consultant of some sort?”
I was silent.
“He’s my assistant,” Herbert said, drinking my wine because his was empty. “I let him fiddle with all the machines, the faxes, the mimeographs, and all that.”
“Herbert’s no good with machines,” I explained.
“That’s right. It’s really very helpful having an assistant around to take care of them.”
“Sometimes I make the coffee.” I added. Hank laughed because this was obviously a joke. “Actually, I’ll be doing a lot of the footwork on these Stein drawings.”
“That’s right.” Herbert smiled at me. “Which is why I was so glad, Hank, that you were interested in seeing both of us for dinner tonight, because that is precisely the project we need your help on.”
“I’m always interested in helping,” Hank allowed. “Particularly if it’s going to be some kind of fun.”
“It will be fun, Hank. I want you to buy the drawings and donate them to the museum.”
Hank looked a little unhappy. “Just buy them?”
“Uh-huh, and donate them to the museum.”
“It sounds pretty dull to me.”
Poor Herbert. He looked completely undone by