Gossip by Beth Gutcheon Page B

by the mid-1980s and talking about founding his own museum, when he wasn’t flirting with the Metropolitan in New York, or the Carnegie in Pittsburgh, where he had grown up, or the Art Institute of Chicago, where he had gone to school and made his first units, as he referred to a hundred million dollars. All of these institutions dangled seats on their boards and hoped he would give them his increasingly impressive collections.
    The art world was bemused by the obviously congenial relationship that had grown between the famously abrasive collector and diffident and proper Avis Metcalf. Clearly there was something about her that appealed to Greenwood, and he, who had gotten very rich by trusting no one but himself, apparently trusted her. Whether they understood it or not, once that world knew that Victor Greenwood saw something special in Avis, others began to take an interest in what she was interested in, and certain sellers wanted connections to the people who were buying through her.
    â€œI’ll be back on Tuesday . . . on Friday . . . for the weekend . . . for your birthday, we’ll do something wonderful. What would you like most? Think about it, I’ll call you when I get there and we’ll make a plan.” Grace and her friends spent a lot of time slouching around Bloomingdale’s after school, trying on makeup and pretending they were in the market for Judith Leiber handbags. Or she’d take the subway to see Belinda, who would take her to dinner at Serafina or sometimes to the theater even on a school night. On her twelfth birthday, Belinda, airily ignoring Avis’s strictures, gave Grace a tiny poodle puppy. Grace named him Jelly.
    The whole family fell in love with Jelly. He was noisy but smart and very clownish. Grace paper-trained him in the kitchen, following instructions from a dog-training program she watched on television. When Jelly chewed apart one of her dancing school shoes—she found him in her bedroom lying half on top of it, gnawing on the instep strap and looking up at her with large innocent eyes—she went around the house spraying Bitter Apple on everything he liked sinking his little needle teeth into. Jelly chewed up the legs of two of her mother’s antique dining room chairs so that they looked as if they had been attacked by borer worms. Avis just laughed and sent them out to be refinished. And when Jelly lost control of himself after he ate something disgusting on the street and it disagreed with him, Avis patiently followed him around the apartment with a roll of paper towels and a gallon of Nature’s Miracle. Because of allergies Avis had never had a pet of her own, and she’d never imagined she would love a dog as much as she did this one. She even let Jelly sleep on Grace’s bed; he started the night curled on a towel near her feet but by morning was always up on the pillow beside her head, doing his best to worm his way under the covers.
    Avis was in London negotiating with the heirs of a grand collection of Bronzino drawings when Jelly was killed.
    He had just been groomed. He’d been washed and fluffed and perfumed, and it was said afterward that that may have been the problem: he didn’t smell like a dog. In any case, Grace was walking him home from the groomer’s at twilight on his pretty red leather leash when a man approached listening to his Walkman and paying no mind to his Akita strolling untethered behind him. With no warning, the Akita jumped Jelly, and in one garish melee of canine screaming clamped its jaws around the puppy’s throat and shook him until his neck broke. It took only seconds, but for Grace it lasted hours; it felt as if it would never stop, and went on feeling like that as it replayed inside her head for hours, then days.
    While Grace screamed, a woman ran across the street to them, yelling at the owner of the Akita, “Grab his tail, pull him off!” She gave the bigger