CHAPTER 4
Vaughn
I was in a perilous mood and I had been for two weeks. Ever since I met the first person in a very long time who’d sparked my desire, my fascination. Ever since he’d turned out to be an FBI agent who tried to arrest me. Ever since I’d made every effort under the sun to convince him to go out with me anyway, and had every call, email, and letter rebuffed. Rejection wasn’t something I was accustomed to, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take it. No, this wasn’t about my pride, and it wasn’t about winning.
This was about how, FBI agent or no, I couldn’t get William Fox out of my head.
As such, I was anything but pleased about the fact that I was due at an obligatory Willowbrook College donor lunch.
Even on a good day, I would have been in no mood to make polite conversation with the particular brand of pompous windbag such lunches inevitably elicited. Trustees of the university who believed their money entitled them to puppeteer programming, deans of the university who cared far more about the reputation of the school than about the students who attended it, and the professors the deans thought would make the best impression on donors: dinosaurs holding tight to the prestige of academia as they collected student evaluations in a garbage can until they could convince themselves to retire and finish the books they’d been boring junior faculty with stories of for decades.
Today, I was positively fighting a scowl.
I must have complained a bit too vociferously as Natalie briefed me on the attendees, because she rolled her eyes at me and gave me the lecture that had become standard over the last six months since I’d hired her: that this was part of the business of being a Vaughn; that these people were more likely to donate to the foundation’s causes in the future if they rubbed elbows with me in other venues; that—and this one was a new addition and indicated that she’d apparently gotten more comfortable with me—I myself was a straight, middle-aged white man with a lot of money, so I should know better than anyone that those categories didn’t necessarily mean someone couldn’t be interesting.
It was delivered with an eye roll and a bit of a sideways smile that I supposed was intended to soften the blow. I was certainly white, and though I bristled at forty-two being categorized as middle-aged, I couldn’t argue with her math. But there was one part of her comment I absolutely couldn’t let stand. In fact, I was surprised she didn’t know, since I made no secret of it whatsoever.
“Natalie. My dear,” I said. “While I take your point about books and covers and judging, let me be very clear about one thing. I’m about as straight as a corkscrew.”
I chucked her lightly under the chin and then swept from the room as her mouth dropped open, deciding I’d let her process that with one of the other staff members while I was gone. Flush with the rare joy of delivering a perfect exit line, I decided that since I was early I’d stop and get a cappuccino, maybe walk along the wooded paths that cut through the campus, in an attempt to lower my blood pressure before the donor lunch.
Before I got to the stairwell though, Natalie had run after me, tapping me on the shoulder. When I turned around, she was grinning, but didn’t say anything. I raised an eyebrow at her expectantly but she just kept smiling and put her hands on her hips.
“You should go look at the art show,” she said finally. And for all that she was about twenty-five and a foot shorter than me, she said it like she was used to being obeyed. And wasn’t that just a little bit delightful?
“Oh? Why, pray tell.”
“Because you love art. And even though you act like you’re not interested in this lunch—okay, fine,” she corrected when I glared at her. “Even though you don’t want to go to the lunch, you do care about the money being raised because you actually care about the students and their work. And seeing the people your money is helping is the best way to deal with those asshats at lunch. You’ll have seen what you’re supporting so they won’t matter as much. Besides, it’ll give you something interesting to think about while they’re all yammering.”
“Why the sudden interest in my emotional well-being, hmm?”
“It’s not sudden, first of all—it’s like twenty-five percent of what you hired me for.” I snorted at that. “And…ya know…” She looked at the floor where the scuffed toe of her green ballet flat stood out against the richly polished ashwood flooring I’d put in three years before. “We kind of…play for the same team.” Her voice ran out on the last word, but her meaning was clear.
“Ah, I see. You play for the white, middle-aged, bisexual, billionaire, brandy enthusiast team as well?”
“Uhhh.” Natalie was black, very much not middle-aged, and I strongly suspected that she was neither a billionaire nor a brandy enthusiast. “Not…exactly?”
I took pity on her and patted her on the shoulder. The last thing I’d wanted to do was make her uncomfortable.
“All right, from one team member to another, I’ll go look at the student art. Thank you for the suggestion.” I inclined my head to her solemnly, then winked and got in the elevator, leaving her smiling and just a little bit exasperated.
It was how I so often left them.
At the studio space, I was immediately glad I’d taken Natalie’s advice because there was a lot of fascinating work here. Chalk up one point for team queer at the Vaughn Foundation. I made a mental note to give Natalie a raise. Then I made an immediate follow-up note to wait long enough that it didn’t appear I’d given her a raise because she’d outed herself to me. One really couldn’t be too careful about these things.
There were the standard computer-edited self-portraits rendered ethereal by lighting; violent sculptures made of garbage and nails and loathing; abstract color field paintings; attention-seeking photos of partial nudity.
But there were also a set of hoops holding stunning embroideries of trees, rendered in brilliant colored thread, leaves perfectly formed, roots reaching off the canvas to hang in jagged threads. There was a digital piece that layered skeletons of different animals with insects, the jut of bone stark against the filmy stretch of wings. In a pen and ink drawing, a loping wolf was paired with a portrait of a man who looked directly off the paper, one eye drooping with palsy, his lips drawn back over teeth as fanged as the wolf’s. He looked about the age to be the artist’s father.
The piece I couldn’t look away from was a large painting hung well below eye level. The background was chaotic and swirling but the figure was rendered in meticulous brushstrokes, all purples, mauves, amethysts, and pinks, as if a rose-colored filter had been slipped over the eye. The canvas was square, and the painting was of a young man with his hands outstretched, open palms cupped to receive something, empty, waiting. The perspective was masterful, the hands reaching toward the viewer intrusive because of their scale. They made the piece feel like you owed it something. The floor beneath the painting was strewn with money, condoms, twisted tubes empty of paint, and crumpled pieces of paper, one of which, when I bent close enough to read it, seemed to be an acceptance letter for James Novack—which was the name of the artist on the tag next to the piece—into the MFA program at Yale.
The painting was called Oliver and I knew what I would be buying from the show when it opened.
It was a good thing I’d momentarily buoyed myself with the gallery’s offerings, because the company at lunch was as excruciating as I’d predicted, and the food even more so. How did you ruin rolls? I pushed overdone roast beef and underdone green beans around on my plate as my mind wandered to the current object of my fascination.
The fact that the FBI unit William Fox worked for was Art Crimes and that I had, not long after swallowing Will’s come, stolen the Staunton painting out from under Oakley’s (comparatively flaccid) security system was…well, it was half romantic gesture, half calling card, and half indulgence. And, yes, as the president of the Vaughn Foundation, and something of a math whiz if I let loose the reins of modesty, I did realize that added up to one and a half wholes. But that’s how you succeeded as the head of a major philanthropic institution: by understanding that abundance begets abundance.
The problem with a calling card, though, was that convention dictated you leave a new one every time. And though William had followed up on mine—and what a follow-up it turned out to be—he’d staunchly refused to come calling again. In fact, he’d told me to get lost in no uncertain terms.
If I wanted to see him again, then, I would need to contrive a way to make it happen.
I’d already set one ball in motion by reaching out to Fox’s sister, Charlotte, an event planner, and hiring her for the Vaughn Foundation’s upcoming gala. But something also told me that William wasn’t much for subtlety, and it would take more than what could be written off as a coincidence to set the game afoot.
I was adjusting the overstarched napkin in my lap to hide the erection burgeoning from thoughts of William and games when I was jolted back to the dingy reality of the faculty dining room by a truly inelegant snort from the buffoon sitting next to me.
It was Curtis Loel, a dean of the university and, I happened to know, an absolute cad. (Loel would do well to note that the staff at a country club never fail to notice the activities of the patrons, and that this information is accessible to anyone with the money or the charm to elicit it.) Loel was agreeing with Artie Vikander, the dean of something I hadn’t bothered noting when he introduced himself, that student art shows were a pro forma waste of time.
“It’s for the parents, really. The college-age version of sticking their kids’ scribbles on the fridge,” Vikander said.
“Yes, only these scribbles cost their parents about two hundred grand,” Loel drawled, his sneer practically audible.
“Some of this year’s work is rather good—” This was Margaret Chun, the Dean of Students who was slightly less loathsome than the rest, and therefore was interrupted immediately.
“Good, not good, who cares?” Loel gestured carelessly, a forkful of dry roast beef plunking to the ground. “The point is that none of it will sell. Maybe—maybe—if one of the kids’ parents is feeling charitable, they’ll buy something.”
“Which, in a way, is worse,” Vikander chimed in. “Because that sets them up to think that it’s possible in the future.”
Loel nodded sagely, spreading butter thickly on one of the tasteless rolls.
“It’s a good experience for them to at least go through the motions of setting their work up for display,” Chun said, speaking lightning fast, as if she knew it’d be a miracle for her to get a full sentence in if she didn’t rush.
“Look, the point is,” Loel said, crumbs stuck to the butter glistening on his lips, “that it’s not about the art at all. None of these kids are going to have careers in art. Maybe a few of them will pack up their Honda Civics and move to New York City and try to make a go of it, but they won’t make it. Because no one cares about art anymore. And the ones who do only care about art that’s already established. These kids aren’t visionaries. No one is ever going to pay the kind of money for—for little Jamie’s painting of a dust bunny representing his inner emptiness that I paid for the Saska hanging in my living room!”
He finished with a flourish, looking around the table. Vikander nodded once in emphatic agreement, Chun examined her plate carefully, and the other two deans, who hadn’t even tried to squeeze their way into the conversation, smiled faintly and exchanged uncomfortable looks.
“Why are you here, then?” I asked, looking between Loel and Vikander. They’d been alternately kissing my ass and trying to impress me during the whole lunch. Now they both drew back in almost comical synchrony.
“I beg your pardon?” Loel said, finding his tongue first.
I kept my voice as lazy and friendly as ever. “If you don’t believe in the mission of the art department, or in the students who attend the university, or in their potential future success, then why on earth are you wasting your time at a lunch that is in service of raising funds to support their futures?”
Loel bristled all over again. “Well, I…naturally, I…it’s my job to…of course I wouldn’t…that is—”
“We would never suggest,” Vikander jumped in, “that the students have no futures, merely that…ah, that…”
I took a sip of water out of the red wine goblet it was served in (of all the ridiculous pretensions), and waited, expressionless, as if I had all the time in the world to allow the end of either of their sentences to coalesce.
After what felt like an eternity of silence, during which a muscle in Vikander’s eye began to twitch and Loel turned redder and redder, one of the younger professors cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Will you be at the show, then, gentlemen?” he asked innocently. Everyone at the table nodded tightly, and he turned to me.
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I told him. And I winked at Loel, a plan already beginning to take form.
A plan that would attract William Fox and punish Curtis Loel in one fell swoop.
* * *
It was a truth universally recognized that a man living alone in an affluent area felt invulnerable enough to consider the hiding of a spare house key more convenient than it was unsafe. Curtis Loel was a man living alone in such an area, and his spare key was hidden in a rather hideous ceramic frog lurking beside the coiled-up garden hose, next to the mudroom entrance off his back garden.
The Saska was beautiful—haunting blues and grays that made me feel like I would be sucked into it if I stood too close—and I revised my impression of Loel slightly when I saw that it was alarmed. I had bet sixty/forty against. It was always nice to have a little surprise with one’s larceny. Loel had the alarm hooked into his electrical system though, so a simple flip of the breaker took care of that.
I swaddled the painting in bubble wrap and slid it into the garment bag I’d brought with me. I was in and out in about eight minutes. I even waved hello to a woman jogging by in expensive exercise gear as I walked a few streets away to where I’d parked my car, taking care to hold the garment bag as if it held the weight of a suit and not a multi-million dollar painting.
* * *
The first time, I was twenty-one. It was in London, at a Vaughn Foundation party and I was there with my mother. It was the year before she died. The whole weekend had been a fog of London-gray autumn, and I’d gone where I was told to go and done what I was told to do, like a robot. A ghost. I was only there to shadow my mother, see how a Vaughn did things. Learn my place. As if I didn’t already know it. When these people looked at me all they saw were dollar signs. I had no utility beyond my money and my last name.
If I were being honest, I’d always felt that way. As if my path had been laid long before I was born, and my only job now was not to trip as I put one handsomely-shod foot in front of the other.
My parents were kind people, but I knew they viewed their work as noblesse oblige rather than a project of passion. They didn’t have a lot of that in their lives, period, and they didn’t much value it in others. When I’d turned eighteen and legally become a board member of the Vaughn Foundation, I’d asked my parents for a small allocation of funds within the VF to work on a project of my own. I’d wanted to sponsor an afterschool arts program for queer youth. My mother, who made all the decisions regarding new funding, said it was a nice idea but not something VF was interested in. We needed to stay on brand, she explained, and queer youth were not a part of the Vaughn Foundation’s brand.
Even though I had been one of them. Thanks, Mother.
I’d always known I was attracted to both men and women. It was finding out that this wasn’t the case for everyone that had surprised me. And, of course, the realization that my catholic preferences weren’t shared by everyone was swiftly followed by the understanding that they weren’t approved of by everyone either. Not that I cared. If there was one thing being a white man with money was good for, it was looking people dead in the eye and knowing that I didn’t have to care about their prejudices against me.
But, unfortunately, others weren’t so privileged in the fuck-off-forever category, hence my desire to use the Vaughn money to help them tell people to fuck off. And when my mother said no, I quietly took half of the percentage of the trust fund I’d come into when I turned eighteen, and simply started my own. Without the Vaughn name. In fact, I wasn’t sure anyone knew the charity was associated with me at all, except the woman I hired to run it.
At the party in London, I was…all right, I was mopey, and self-pitying, and paying more attention to the rather remarkable ass and posture of one of the tuxedoed waiters passing hors d’oeuvres. I decided he had to have been a dancer, and I followed him, first with my eyes, then around the curtain that divided the reception area from the rest of the hosts’ home. The waiter was going back into the kitchen, and I decided to poke around a bit. Distract myself.
I wandered into the bedroom mostly out of petulance. I figured I’d rifle the medicine cabinet and see which of our hosts were maintaining their sense of poise only with prescription help.
And there it was, hanging between the vanity and the door. A small painting—too small for the space, really. Only about two feet by two feet. It wasn’t famous. It wasn’t flashy. It was just beautifully framed and professionally lit.
And I had to take it off the wall. It wasn’t even that I wanted to own it. I just wanted to…be in charge of it. I hardly even thought about what I was doing. I just reached up and lifted it off the wall. Had I considered it, I’d have thought perhaps it was alarmed, but I didn’t.
Once I held it in my hand, it was transformed. On the wall, it had been art. Untouchable, distant, separated from me by more than space. Now, it was just an object. Now, it was something I had power over. I felt a rush like nothing I’d ever known rip through me. I was buzzing with excitement, everything gone sharp and clean and new.
I could have hung it right back up and walked away, considered it like a snort of cocaine or a shot of espresso, but I didn’t. I looked at it for a long time—at its beautiful brushwork and the tiny overpaint in the upper right hand corner that I could see when I tilted it to the side. Just a small bump where the cloud had originally extended farther to the right. Then I shrugged out of my jacket, draped it over my arm, and walked back to the party, carrying the painting in my hand, hidden from sight but pricking me with jolts of excitement, like the snap of a rubber band or the prick of a tack.
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t…abscond with anything else over the years. Opportunities presented themselves. Objects fell into my path, almost as if they wanted to leave with me. I procured a great deal of art through perfectly legal means as well, building a collection that meant something to me; one that wasn’t based on investment, but purely on pleasure.
And that’s how it was over time. Sometimes I’d go years without obtaining. Other years, I…wouldn’t.
It wasn’t a compulsion. I could stop any time I wanted, and I never stole from museums or from people who would consider it a true loss. Unless, of course, they deserved it.
Did I consider myself a kind of Robin Hood? No. Because I did it for myself.
Except that suddenly, after years without even a whiff of the impulse that often caught me in its fist, I had done it again.
And I had done it for Agent Will Fox. Not for him, precisely, but to get his attention. And oh, how I’d wanted his attention. I’d wanted everything about him.
When you’d been doing it as long as I had, you learned things. Like who was the type of person who alarmed their artwork, or their home. Who was the type of person who would even notice that something was missing. And who was the type of asshole so secure in his dominion over his own little world that he considered it unassailable.
I would’ve bet my own art collection that Keith Oakley belonged to the latter category, and I would have kept it. I’d sidled up to a woman standing in front of a Maritza Jean painting in the front hallway. If anything were alarmed, this painting would be, situated so close to the door. I’d bent as if to pick up something I’d dropped and bumped into her just enough that she had to take a step backward to steady herself. On the painting.
“Goodness, I’m so sorry,” I’d said, shaking my head at my own clumsiness. “Please excuse me. I swear, I’m a menace at parties.”
I’d given her the look that made most women of a certain age smile back, and I’d caught her elbow, surreptitiously lifting the edge of the painting off the wall with my other hand as I steadied her. Nothing. No alarm, no sudden rush of a security guard, no sound of the door automatically locking.
“No harm done,” she’d said, smiling.
“Well”—I’d gestured to the painting, which was now slightly askew—“I almost pulled this down on top of us for good measure.”
She’d laughed and I’d laughed—silly, silly Vaughn—and I’d taken her elbow and gotten her another drink. She was a lovely woman; couldn’t have stumbled upon a nicer one to figure out the Staunton was likely equally unprotected.
Three hours later, I’d graciously offered my assistance to the harried caterer’s assistant, and, under the cover of a garment bag, relieved Keith Oakley of what should never have been his.
It didn’t feel so much like theft as it did an opening gambit. My way of knocking on the door of the first man in ages who had tied me up in knots and saying, Your move.