* * *
—
They wound up at a little French restaurant a few blocks away, across the street from a park that looked from Mirella’s vantage point like a hill barely contained by a high brick retaining wall. She didn’t know Brooklyn at all so everything was mysterious here, no points of reference beyond a vague notion that if she were to step outside the restaurant door, the spires of Manhattan would be somewhere to the left. The initial shock of the news of Vincent’s death had faded a little, replaced by a limitless exhaustion. She was sitting next to the guy in the fedora, whose name she had forgotten, and across from Gaspery, who sat next to Paul. The fedora was going on and on about Paul’s brilliance, his obvious influences, artistic debt to Warhol, etc.; he’d loved Paul’s work from the beginning, that groundbreaking experimental collaboration with the video artist—what was his name again?—at Miami Basel, what a leap it had been when Paul suddenly started using his own videos instead of collaborating with others, and so on and so forth. Paul was glowing. He loved being praised, but who doesn’t. She was facing the window, and her gaze kept drifting over Gaspery’s shoulder to the park. If there were an earthquake and the retaining wall broke, would the park spill across the street and bury the restaurant? She returned her attention to the table when she heard Vincent’s name.
“So your sister, Vincent, she’s the one who filmed that strange video in your performance tonight?” This was Gaspery, his name memorable because she hadn’t heard it before.
Paul laughed. “Name one of my videos that isn’t strange,” he said. “I did an interview last year, with this guy who kept calling me sui generis, and at a certain point I was like, ‘Guy, you can just say strange. Strange, weird, or eccentric, take your pick.’ Interview went a whole lot better after that, let me tell you.” He laughed loudly at his own anecdote, and the fedora laughed too.
Gaspery smiled. “I meant that video with the forest path,” he persisted. “With the darkness, the strange sounds.”
“Oh. Yeah. That was Vincent’s. She said I could use it.”
“Was it filmed near where you grew up?” Gaspery asked.
“You’ve done your research,” Paul said approvingly.
Gaspery inclined his head. “You’re from British Columbia, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Tiny little place called Caiette, northern Vancouver Island.”
“Oh, near Prince Edward Island,” the fedora said confidently.
“Didn’t really grow up there, though,” Paul said, apparently not hearing this. “Vincent grew up there. Same dad, different moms, so I was just there summers and every second Christmas. But yeah, that’s where the video was filmed.”
“That…that moment on the video,” Gaspery said, “that anomaly, for lack of a better word. Did you ever see anything like it in person?”
“Only on LSD,” Paul said.
“Oh,” the fedora said, brightening suddenly, “I didn’t realize there was a psychedelic influence on your work.” He leaned forward, in a confiding way. “I went pretty deep with psychedelics, myself. Once you get into heroic doses, you start to have certain realizations about the world. So much is an illusion, right?”
Gaspery shot him a troubled look. Mirella watched him while she waited for an opportunity to ask about Vincent. Gaspery seemed foreign in a way that she couldn’t quite parse.
“And then once you grasp that,” the fedora was saying, “it all just falls into place, right? Buddy of mine, he was struggling to quit cigarettes. Guy must’ve tried six or eight times. Not happening. Couldn’t do it. Then one day he takes LSD, and bam. He calls me up the next evening, says, ‘Dan, it’s a miracle, I haven’t even wanted a cigarette today.’ I tell you, it was—”
“What happened to her?” Mirella asked Paul. She knew she was being rude but she didn’t care, she was sitting there growing older by the minute, sinking into grief, and she wanted to know what had happened to her friend so she could leave these people.
Paul blinked at her, as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“She fell off a ship,” he said. “About a year and a half—no, two years ago. It was two years last month.”
“What kind of ship? Was she on a cruise?”
The fedora was glowering at his drink, but Gaspery was listening to the conversation with great interest.
“No, she was…I don’t know how much you know about what happened to her in New York,” Paul said, “that crazy thing with her husband, where it turned out he was a crook—”