LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FOUR

      The gallery looks bright and optimistic in the daylight, but like every other morning for the last month I wonder when I unlock the door if I’ll find it ransacked. Will the photographs from my ‘Windows and Doors’ themed exhibition be ripped off the freshly painted white walls? Will the simple elegant frames be snapped, the glass smashed? All my images shredded and obscene graffiti sprayed on the walls?

      I’ve done my best to hide my worries from Gustav. I feel safe when I’m with him, in those strong arms, looking into those steady black eyes. But when I’m on my own I’m terrified. And to make matters worse I’ve been hiding something from him.

      He says she’s barred from the condo. Banned from the gallery. The apartment has been swept again for bugs and – surprise surprise: there were none. Although they did find one in the gallery office phone. She can’t come anywhere near us or he’ll call the police. So when does it become acceptable to turn fretting into snooping?

      I wasn’t really snooping. I left Gustav and Pierre to go for a walk together after our tense conversation and a few nervy bites of lunch, but thoughts of cufflinks and shirts went on nagging at me after they’d gone out. I knew Gustav would be furious and Pierre would think me neurotic. But the madness of Margot was infecting me. I couldn’t get her whispered threats out of my ears, the smell of her clogging perfume out of my hair, even the air in that apartment out of my skin. The fact that she had taken precious items engraved with Gustav’s initials from Lugano made me feel sick. She’d kept them somewhere for the last six years, brought them back to New York, lovingly unpacked them, washed and pressed them, hung them in their old wardrobe as if, as he said, she was waiting for him to come back.

      So here I was, facing the fear, or so I thought, opening one, then another of the battered antique cigarette boxes that Gustav keeps in his dressing room, and, after I’d sneezed away the old tobacco dust, there it was, glinting amongst some old coins, as if waiting for me to find it.

      The cufflink he said he’d thrown away, whose mate is now snugly fastened in the shirt he wore to marry Margot. He’d kept it.

      So he forgot about it. Big deal. Polly’s opinion was brisk. I dropped the cufflink as if it was red hot, and banged the box shut.

      Say what you like, Polly, but that cufflink makes her, their life together, a tangible presence. She’s a face, a voice, I have seen and heard and will never forget. A jealous, deranged woman collecting treasures from her marriage to my fiancé. And don’t tell me, Polly, that they’re just shirts and trinkets, because to me they feel like armour. Weapons of war. However mad that makes me sound, I want her gone.

       Leave it for now. Just leave it. Don’t let her get to you. Don’t stir things up between you over a piece of junk. And yes. You do sound mad.

      So today, like every day since I got my act together, everything in the gallery is in place. The main picture of the pale hand extending from between green shutters to dead-head some scarlet geraniums still holds centre stage on the main wall, now adorned with a red spot to indicate that it’s been sold. Actually to the local art college. The other pictures still hang in groups according to the city – London, Paris, Manhattan – where they were taken.

      Dickson has nailed the title of my new venture, Serenissima, above the door.

      That name isn’t just an emphatic version of my own. It’s a gift from my patrons the Weinmeyers and the moniker applied to the city of Venice at the height of its unique, feminine splendour.

      One of the larger images shows a row of blank palazzi windows, Gothic arches set into crumbling red walls, with a tattered gold curtain flapping through a broken pane like a lolling tongue.

      Here’s a church in a quiet campo, a broad carpet of sunlight leading the way across a worn step into the dark recesses. And there is the little costume shop in Campo San Barnaba where Crystal, sent by Gustav to watch over me, accompanied me to hire the ill-fated green gown for the Weinmeyers’ ball. The display in the hire-shop window is crammed with cruel, mirthless masks suspended behind the smeared glass like decapitated heads on spikes.

      I switch on all the spotlights, and with the glare comes a kind of epiphany. Time to embrace the day. Time to push aside the lingering fear that our life will always be a series of pitfalls, an identity parade of other enemies lining up to trip us up. Time to dismiss the discovery of a single tarnished cufflink and let Gustav’s calm belief in me make me feel ten feet tall. If he can forgive my recklessness in going off with a masked stranger after a ball in Venice, and my stupidity in believing that stranger to be my boyfriend, then I should be able to get past that hideous scene in Margot’s flat, too.

      Every day we talk and we talk, and we are closer than ever. But still I’m not sleeping. Thank God Gustav is coming back this evening after another business trip. His second in four weeks. I sleep better with him next to me, warmed up and worn out from sex. Last night I sat cross-legged on the wide window ledge of our bedroom and stared for hours over the dark oblong of Central Park.

      The world feels fragile somehow because Margot is on the planet. She may not be visible, but she’s everywhere. Gustav seems to think that by facing her he’s laid a ghost. Pierre disagrees. He reckons the diamond ring has made her all the more determined. And I just feel uneasy. All the time.

      Manhattan Island feels way too small.

      I nip out of the gallery to get a coffee. We’re well into April now. There’s real warmth in the air. Why not focus on all the good things? Green shoots and flowers are sprouting on the High Line above this street. I’m the owner of a great new gallery and my second exhibition is selling fast. I’ve got a rich, handsome, passionate man who makes me feel like a sexy, low-down princess every day and wants to marry me before the year is out.

      By the time I’ve got my coffee and my pastry and wandered back to the gallery I am feeling much more like Carrie in Sex in the City. Before tackling my schedule of phone calls, I assess each photograph and its position on the wall. It’s time to view the few unsold images through a potential buyer’s eyes. I mustn’t lose my resolve. I’m even wearing a sassy new Chanel suit, smoky pink bouclé tweed with a silky white blouse, and cherry-red brogues, to make me feel more like a boss.

      The steady flow of visitors results in the sale of the remainder of the images, so it’s late afternoon before I get to the penultimate of my list of phone calls. I’m speaking to the tutor of the large art college who bought my ‘Hand Plucking Petals’ photograph. I’m dictating another advertisement, trawling for raw new photographic, figurative or abstract talent amongst her students for my next show. Then I’m going to call Crystal in London and ask her to come out here to work for me.

      ‘The younger the better, so long as they need a real break,’ I tell the tutor at the other end of the phone, who is enthusing about the fledgling talent she has both in her current intake and amongst the freshers who will be arriving in the autumn. ‘I was given a chance by Gustav Levi, who launched a solo show for me not long after I graduated. I want to do the same for others. Yes, I hope to expand back to London,

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