The House Girl (22 page)

The man tilted his chin down. “Nice to meet you.” He seemed to Lina about her age, perhaps a bit older. Over a black T-shirt and green cargo pants he wore a tuxedo jacket that fit snug around his wide, wiry shoulders.

“Lina, this is Jasper Battle. He has some Bell pictures, so he believes, but he’s uninterested in selling. I’ve told him that I’m in the business of
buying
art, I am not a freelance authenticator, but he has been very persistent.” Marie flashed him a winning smile that undercut, somewhat, the irritation in her voice.

“I’m sorry I’ve bothered you. I just don’t have the money for an authenticator.” Jasper returned her smile, his genuine, a little sheepish.

Marie’s gaze shifted, and she laughed and waved at a stout man in owlish glasses standing several paces away. “I’m afraid you must excuse me,” Marie said, and flashed Lina a brief look of apology as she darted into the gallery.

“And she was the only one who even returned my e-mails,” Jasper said, seemingly more to himself than to Lina, and rubbed a flat palm over his shaved head. Lina noticed slender tattoos that circled his wrists like bracelets or chains.

“So what makes you think you have some Bells?” Lina asked, unsure if she really wanted to hear the answer. Everything about Jasper Battle—from his piercings to Marie’s obvious reluctance to speak with him—gave Lina reason to exit this conversation as quickly as possible. She skimmed the crowd, hoping for another sight of Garrison, a friend of her father’s, anyone.

“Mine are so similar to these,” and he waved a hand toward the wall of portraits. “But I have no idea who made them. They’re family heirlooms, so my dad always said, but no signature.”

“Family?” Lina settled her gaze firmly on Jasper’s face. She noted the color of his skin: a burnished tan that could have passed for Persian, African, Latino, Caucasian. “So are you related to Lu Anne Bell?”

“I don’t know. Either Lu Anne or Josephine, I guess, depending on who you believe.” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

Suddenly the noise and bustle of the room fell away and Lina felt a sharpening of this little pocket of air and space where she and Jasper stood.

“Do you mind if we go someplace to talk?”

“Talk about …?” A half-smile tweaked his mouth, though in flirtation or surprise Lina couldn’t say and didn’t care.

“About your family heirlooms.”

“M
Y DAD DIED THREE MONTHS
ago,” Jasper said, picking at the label of his beer bottle. They were sitting atop high stools at a long mahogany bar strewn with bruised rose petals. After leaving the gallery they had wandered a few blocks south to a bar Jasper knew, a cavernous underground space lit by flickering torches affixed to the walls. The place smelled of woody incense and the salty heat of bodies and liquor.

“These drawings have been hanging in my parents’ room for as long as I can remember,” Jasper continued, not looking at Lina. “My dad always said that the artist was a distant relation. But that’s all I know. He didn’t talk much about his family. He was an only child. I never even met my paternal grandparents—they died before I was born.”

Lina jotted notes as Jasper spoke. A tall cylinder of orange juice stood untouched on the bar in front of her. She sat with legs crossed tight, her back straight.

“When I saw that article in the paper about Lu Anne Bell, I recognized the style of the pictures they’d printed. I’ve got three that look just the same—one of a white woman sitting on a porch, one of an African American man, and the last of a man and a woman together, slaves or sharecroppers, at least that’s what I always thought. Some real old-timers.”

“I’d be interested in looking at them,” Lina said, thinking of the Bell portraits she had seen—most were in oil. Were there any drawings? “I’d also like to do some genealogical research on your dad. Where was he from?”

“Arkansas. Real rural. I don’t think he had the greatest childhood there.” Jasper spoke slowly, his voice hard to hear. “He fought in Vietnam too, he lived through a lot. I wish I had asked him more.” Jasper’s elbows were propped on the bar, his back curved slightly. He had taken off his jacket and Lina could see the knobby bones of his spine through his thin T-shirt, and this sight struck her hard somewhere in the middle of her chest. She put her pen down.

“I’m sorry,” Lina said. “About your father.”

Jasper glanced at her and nodded once, an acknowledgment that gave away nothing of himself. “And why are you so interested in all this?” he asked, straightening on the stool and turning to face her. “You’re a lawyer, Marie said?”

“Yes, with the corporate firm Clifton & Harp.” She briefly described the reparations suit, her ongoing research, her search for a lead plaintiff. “We have some other candidates,” Lina said, “but our client would like us to pursue the Josephine Bell angle. The artistic controversy will help with publicity for the case, and there’s a strong … symbolism there.” Lina took a long swallow of orange juice, ice cubes clattering in the glass. “But we need to find a descendant.”

There was silence. Then a throat clearing. “I’m not really sure about any lawsuit,” Jasper said. “I didn’t realize that’s what this was about.”

“Well, it’s not a
lawsuit
lawsuit. It’s reparations, for slavery. It’s historic.” Lina heard Dan’s voice echoing in her ears.

“But me? The
plaintiff
? I don’t think … And my mom—she doesn’t even know I’m looking into all this.”

“I’d be happy to meet with her. This is a groundbreaking case, Jasper. Generations who just disappeared, who have never been memorialized. No one knows their names.” Lina was leaning toward Jasper, their knees almost touching. She heard the earnestness in her voice, the utter absence of dignified remove, but she did not tone it down as she would have for Dan or Dresser or any of her clients. “This case will help tell their story.”

“But, I’m not—I mean, I’m not even black. At least I don’t
think
I am …” Jasper’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in any lawsuit.”

Lina realized she was losing him, and this—the looming possibility of failure—made it seem urgently and improbably true that here was Josephine Bell’s descendant, discovered with a luck so pure Lina did not even question it, and she had only to persuade him to help her. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn’t his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn’t this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between? Porter Scales’s essay came back to her:
Who is slave and who is free?
Jasper’s uncertainty about his family roots would only serve to strengthen Dresser’s point about the need to remember. She thought of
Children No. 2,
the closed eyes of that mysterious boy.

“Ready for another beer?” Lina said, smiling. “On the firm.” She ordered one for herself as well and folded away the notebook. “So, tell me more about yourself.”

Jasper hesitated and then he shrugged his shoulders and began to talk. He was a musician, he told her. His band, The Wisdom, played in and around New York City. All five of them were high school friends from Queens, the most underrated of the New York boroughs in Jasper’s purely objective opinion. His parents had moved to Poughkeepsie after Jasper went away to college, but he still thought of Queens as home. Jasper was excited about the band’s development; they were getting serious, getting better. They’d had some small successes, songs played on certain radio stations that Lina didn’t know, gigs played at clubs to which Lina had never been.

They finished their beers and Jasper nodded at the tattooed blonde behind the bar. “This round’s on me,” Jasper said. Lina glanced at her watch, thinking she really should leave, but there seemed a tenuous connection between them now, their stools close, their heads bowed together over the bar. As people, they could not be more different, Lina decided, and this made it easier for her to focus. She wasn’t looking to manipulate the situation, not exactly, but she knew what she needed to accomplish. Wasn’t this part of her professional acumen, the ability to persuade, to convince the unconvinceable? The new beer arrived and Lina tilted back the bottle.

“So do you do this a lot, this reparations stuff?” Jasper asked.

“No. Usually I represent corporate clients. Contract disputes, that sort of thing.”

Jasper’s eyebrows lifted and fell. “You know, don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t really seem like a lawyer.”

“I don’t?” Lina wasn’t sure if she felt insulted or flattered. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Depends on how you feel about being a lawyer, I guess,” Jasper said.

“I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” Lina answered quickly, disliking this shift of focus from Jasper to her. Reflexively she told him the story she always recited when asked why she had chosen the law, a story that Oscar often told too as part of their family lore. “When I was ten, I decided that I didn’t need any more babysitters. I knew the subway, I had my can of mace. I didn’t see why we needed to pay some teenager ten bucks an hour to read a magazine while I did my homework. So I convinced my father that I could take care of myself. And he agreed. He said, ‘Lina, you’d make a great lawyer. You could argue the pants off any judge.’ And I guess that just stuck in my head. It seemed to make sense for me. I could support myself, support my dad too if he needed it. It’s a good, stable career, not too many surprises. You know, reliable. My dad’s an artist, and I knew I didn’t have what it took for that kind of life.”

“How’d you know?” Jasper’s gaze weighed heavily on Lina. She shifted on the stool and took a quick sip of her drink.

“Well, I was never very good at drawing or painting. Even photography, I don’t have a good eye.”

“So you didn’t have what it took to be your
father’s
kind of artist.”

“If you mean successful, then yes, I guess so.”

“No, I mean that anything can be art. Don’t you think? If you do it well enough, if you love it.”

Lina paused, trying to think of a suitable response, funny or sarcastic, but she felt unexpectedly stilled by him—his unabashed sincerity, this talk of love and art—and the feeling both terrified and thrilled her. That old story about her dad always elicited a smile from the listener, and for that reason Lina enjoyed telling it, but the anecdotal flipness now seemed ridiculous, dishonest.

“I do, I do … love it,” Lina stammered. “Being a lawyer, I mean.”

Lina remembered suddenly, vividly the immigration law clinic she had taken her last year at law school, a complete departure from the other, more practical classes in which she usually enrolled (Litigation Techniques, Trial Advocacy, Evidence). The professor, a harried, gray-haired mother of two, assigned Lina to represent an asylum seeker in Manhattan’s immigration court. Lina’s client was a young woman from the Sudan, and this woman—was she even twenty?—had looked at her hands and tapped one small, slippered foot as she told Lina her story.

Ange. Her client’s name had been Ange.

But Lina did not tell Jasper this story. An abrupt, paralyzing shyness overcame her, a fear that speaking Ange’s name would reveal something about herself that she was not ready to show.

“I’m sorry, it’s late. I need to get home,” Lina said, pulling some bills from her wallet and placing them on the bar. She stood and slipped into her suit jacket.

“Here’s my card,” she said. “I hope you’ll reconsider about the reparations case.”

“I’ll … think about it.” Jasper moved to stand beside her. “Carolina,” he said, looking down at the card. “That’s a pretty name.”

“Um, thanks.” Lina gazed at the floor and then up again at him, his eyes looking almost gold in the refracted light from the long glimmering row of liquor bottles. A spinning sensation overcame Lina then, perhaps from blood rushing to her head, or those two beers, or Jasper’s smooth gaze, or the fractured feeling she’d had ever since reading those notes left by her mother. She felt herself tilt, the bar tending away from her, slanting toward the scuffed, dusty floor.

Jasper reached out and grabbed Lina’s elbow. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Fine. Head rush, I think.” She steadied herself on his arm. “Long day.” The tattoo around his right wrist, she saw now, was a bird.

J
ASPER PUT HER IN A
cab, closing the door behind her, waving good-bye as the cab left the curb. Lina leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. This evening had not gone as she had hoped—Jasper remained unconvinced, she had no definitive information about Josephine Bell. Even Porter Scales’s lecture had been inconclusive as to authorship of the Bell works. And yet this tattooed, pierced stranger who played in a rock band, who had lectured her about
art,
offered the barest whisper of a chance in the reparations case. And Lina was unsure if it was this possibility or the memory of his arm steadying her, holding her up, that made her want to see him again.

Lina left the house early. Today she would again ask Dan to send her to Richmond. This time Lina was prepared, her arguments fleshed out, her reasons clear. Every press article dealing with the Bell exhibit was clipped and filed in a three-ring binder. A spreadsheet displayed the (shockingly minimal) cost of a one-to-two-day trip to Richmond. A bullet-point list described the reasons that Josephine’s descendant would best represent the harm suffered by the class. They were nearing the deadline; Lina would work fast. Mr. Dresser fully supported the idea. And most important, she now had a lead: Jasper Battle, who might (or might not) possess some Bell works, who might (or might not) be a Bell descendant. This last she would not share with Dan, not yet. Too uncertain. But the information gave her an extra impetus, a little fire in her belly.

As she approached the office, Lina called good morning to Mary.

“He’s in there with Garrison.” Mary’s tone was curt, as though this were information Lina should have known. “Is he expecting you?”

“Not really. But I can wait.”

Mary tilted her chin down, her lips parted as if to speak again, and for a moment she looked at Lina with what seemed like pity. But Mary said nothing. She turned away from Lina and noisily retrieved a coffee mug from her top drawer, then disappeared in the direction of the break room. Lina watched her go, puzzled, and stood outside Dan’s door, listening to the rise and fall of Garrison’s voice. Animated, it seemed to Lina, as though he were arguing with Dan. The hallway was quiet; only a few of the secretaries and even fewer associates were in this early. Lina did not intend to eavesdrop but Garrison’s voice rose, coming cleanly through the door.