The Marriage Artist by Andrew Winer

Author:Andrew Winer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

ONLY AS HE WAS driving away did it occur to Daniel that Herman had astutely avoided broaching the one subject that most obviously should have been discussed between the two of them: the question of the sudden side-by-side deaths of Benjamin and Aleksandra. Surely the man had to wonder why his son was unexpectedly found dead with the woman Benjamin had brought to his house. An opportunity had fallen into his lap to speak about it to the only other person on the planet as connected as he was to the mysterious deaths—and he had passed it up. The evasion nearly felt blasphemous to Daniel. And utterly, stupidly tragic. Herman Wind had not liberated himself from anything. His beliefs, his house behind gates—what were these if not small kingdoms of confinement? What was the arrogance in his eyes if not the pride of a slave? No taste of freedom had ever been as close at hand as that which came knocking on his door in the form of his own son two years earlier, and Daniel today. But in both instances the man had acquitted himself like a true veteran of captivity, fighting to preserve the walls that held him in. Daniel felt like an indecent visitor who had pried awfully into a constructed universe, and he was relieved, driving through the gate, to be getting off this particular reservation of the rich. As much as he loathed red-eye flights, it was a further relief to be sitting some hours later in an airplane headed back to New York, where the decent and indecent were given equal rein, and where enough sorrow flowed down its old streets for even Daniel to feel like a native.

The tired disappointment he felt on returning home without a single clue regarding the mystery of Aleksandra’s and Benjamin’s deaths never left him in the weeks that followed. It did not help that he was getting behind in the business of his life, was, in fact, running out of money. Running out of favor with his boss too, who warned that his position with the magazine might not survive his grieving process: “This isn’t a sinecure, Daniel—you have to produce.”

So he produced. He visited the galleries with diligence, wrote, read, and drank without moderation. But they were undistinguished, his days, his drinks, his new reviews. Especially the reviews: stock considerations so falsifying they hardly merited the scant money they fetched. He even stooped to repurposing phrases from reviews he had published years ago. His job had no claim on him. His obligations, his past passions … they had been ejected from his field of vision and supplanted by the smile on Benjamin Wind’s face in the photo Daniel still kept in his pocket.

Over the next few months, Daniel pursued every possible connection to that face he could find. He followed up on his awkward California visit with “America’s one and only Hebrew Indian” by phoning Max Wiener to ask whether there was any truth to Herman’s claim of having no blood connection to him.

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