The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) Read Free Page B

on your own. Like most of the people I knew at Johns Hopkins, for me New York was the Holy Grail. Or Paris, or San Francisco. Somewhere where there was at least a chance of making a place for yourself in the art world, or at least being in the art world. Maybe I should’ve tried Paris; New York’s no place to be unless you have some money.”
    “Well, Mom never got it out of her system. She’s happier’n a pig in shit to be back there. Pap’s dyin’ made it a good deal easier for her, of course, but she’dve done it anyway.”
    “And from what I’ve heard from you and Mose, she’s a pretty damn good sculptor. That improves her odds of making it, but I’ve seen a lot of damn good artists driving cabs and waiting tables until it was all squeezed out of ’em. You’ve gotta have connections to go along with your talent, or you may never get that first big break. I’m sure that having friends like that gallery owner didn’t hurt a bit.”
    “Hap. No, it can’t hurt to have friends who can help you along. Seems to me that’s true in any business, and art, at least if you’re trying to make a living out of it, is just another business.”
    She sighed. “True enough, in the sense that artists need to pay the bills. Trouble is, artists are artists, and they do what they do because they must, whether it makes money or not. So, paying the bills takes second place to that, at least while you’re young. But somewhere along the way most people either succeed, leave town, get a ‘real’ job or become some kind of an art whore.”
    Jack let a few seconds pass before he spoke. “Just out of curiosity, where were you in that process when you decided to leave?”
    She let more than a few seconds pass, then said, “Where did you get the idea that I considered myself an artist? What I wanted to do was just to live around artists, to be in that world and have a ‘real’ job in a gallery or, even better, a museum. I thought I could parlay a degree in art history into a life like that, one that would let me learn more and more about art and artists. Turned out a lot more people wanted to do that than there were opportunities to do it, even in New York. So, long story short, I traded on the friendship of a photographer that I’d gotten to know, and he helped me learn the photo stylist’s trade. From there it was far too short a hop into the bed of a charming ad agency vice president, who made sure that I had the pick of the agency’s assignments.”
    “Oh, yeah, the guy with the boat,” Jack said, hating him.
    “And the wife.”
    “Mmm-hm.”
    “Which really didn’t bother me at all; she was in Greenwich, and for me that was as good as being on the moon. And anyway, what you heard a lot back then, at least in the circles I was moving in, was ‘The good ones are always married.’ I wasn’t at all interested in being married myself, not then anyway. And since he wasn’t around much on weekends, I could spend those with my friend the photographer and other ‘artist-any-day-now’ friends, in whom he wasn’t much interested. It was actually quite nice- for a while.”
    “When did you start living on the boat?”
    “A few months after we started seeing each other. He didn’t like staying over at my place; I had a roommate, and it was pretty small apartment. We’d gone sailing several times, and I loved it. Him, too, or so I thought. The wife wanted no part of it; had a problem with motion sickness. She kept after him to sell it, and he kept telling her that he would. That, of course, was the farthest thing from his mind. So I moved aboard the good ship Petrel, and was still there on that fateful day a couple of years later, when you and Mose walked up the gangplank.”
    Jack grinned, remembering. “Fateful is right. That was some boat. Crew wasn’t bad, either.”
    She grinned back, reaching out to slap his cheek. “I still can’t believe what we did. You were quite the little stud at 16. Hope you never