Stolen Valor

Kapri lay awake focusing on the rim of Mark’s mouth. She couldn’t fall asleep and didn’t think she needed it. She was 5’10 of detached concentration, focusing on the lightest patch of Mark’s mouth to see if she could catch his black stubbles grow in real time like she was watching a time lapsed video of a flower sprouting. It was a game of concentration.

Her dad had put her in the habit of making games of focus when he couldn’t afford coloring books or other games: counting subway passengers reading vs. how many were playing video games or texting, then scoring subway lines based on her data. When they’d come upon a flock of pigeons he’d immediately point to a pigeon and tell her to track down its mate, they always had mates. Anything to keep her brain active.

When he did have money, he’d get her puzzle books. Anything to help her understand the divide of nature: predators focus while prey reacts. He needed to teach her that she was a hunter, “a rare, special kind of lioness, the ones that are part unicorn horn. But, you gotta know, if you can’t focus, you’re always gonna be the prey.” That lived in her head long after he stopped living.

After forty minutes she was convinced that she witnessed real beard growth in real time and took her attention from his mouth to his hair, not to examine or focus, but to feel and smell and lose focus altogether.

She was waiting for morning to hit her neighborhood before waking Mark by pulling on the ponytail she’d been caressing. She’d spread the ends into a mathematically recognizable pattern on her purple pillowcase for having fallen asleep with his elastic hairband. He was half Chinese but his hair was full “Asian.” She’d searched online for pics of Asian/black/white hair but only got pictures of Tiger Woods. All she could think of now is pulling on his ponytail in revenge for passing out asleep while losing an argument.

Mornings started later in Bed-Stuy. No two neighborhoods in NYC start morning at exactly the same time. They all have the same lunch, but not the same mornings. She didn’t know that about NYC until she moved to the West Village after college. There, she remembered how bizarre it was for people to walk out their door at six am and feel the summer light in their face without worrying about what was behind them. That was what morning was supposed to be. You could do that at 5:00am in the Upper East Side, but not Washington Heights. People started their days just as early in Washington Heights, but walked out into the night while the people in UES marched out into the morning. Kapri didn’t miss the West Village.

When a diagonal of light divided Mark’s face, Kapri tugged on his hair until he woke. “Good morning to you, too,” he said.

“Morning…We’re not done talking. Not even close.”

Mark took a breath through his nose and adjusted his head to get both eyes out of the sunlight. He didn’t have the needed consciousness to defend himself, not before breakfast. But he didn’t care. The victory of waking next to her made any disagreement entirely disagreeable to the morning.

“Art Post gives zero shits about you. They see you coming and are laughing about what they’re going make you out to be. They do not give one fuck about you or the truth. None. Not a one. No fucks given about you. You’re going there to ‘explain yourself’ but they already know they’re going to make you out to be some selfish, spoiled asshole. How are you not understanding this?”

“I mean…I don’t know how to say it any differently, that’s how they’re going to think of me anyway. At least I should have my side out there,” Mark spoke like he was presenting each syllable for approval by Kapri. He was gentle and naïve and Kapri loved him for both.

Kapri focused on his emerald-green eyes, devising and strategizing how she could protect him against an ambitious, cynical journalist hoping to be the guest of honor at her next brunch in Park Slope by defaming the man in her bed.

“Turn your phone’s recorder on in your pocket. Make her think you trust her. Because, right now you stupidly do. Just do that for me.”

The light had advanced across his face and furthering the point would only mean enlisting the sun in a cruel interrogation. She didn’t want to ruin any positive association he had with sunlight.

Kapri had resisted him. But within a month she ignored other men. She hadn’t planned on ever waking up with him. A few weeks later she realized that he gave her something she never experienced: someone in her bed to protect with her life.

“Ok babe, I gotta get ready for work,” she said raising her eyebrows and shaking her head as if he was a misbehaved pet she didn’t have time to punish. Then lowering them, she reassured him “But just remember, ‘I told you so’ is Kapri-speak for I love you.” Mark’s heart fell into his stomach and he laughed and covered his eyelids when he felt the tears pooling in the corners of his eyelids. She saw the sunlight reflect the curves of his teeth and asked if it was really that funny.

He smiled and kissed her. She broke character and smiled back. Morning had arrived in Bed-Stuy.

Mark was waiting for Carrie at the lobby cafe of a trendy hotel in Midtown. The walls were a variation of burgundy that the decorator had told the hotel were designed “exclusively” for the hotel, and the hotel believed it. The furnishings and decor at eye level were 19th-century English royalty; everything waist level was Polynesian. The walls had family crests and taxidermy displays; the tables were giant ceremonial drums with reinforced, stretched leather hides for guests to either eat, dance or beat on them. Mark had been waiting for nearly forty minutes when Carrie walked in with a beaming smile as though she was owed a “thank goodness” for arriving at all. Mark waved her over and introduced himself.

“Yes...hi. Sorry, I’m late. I would’ve texted but my phone died. Which reminds me, I gotta ask the front desk if they have a charger. Excuse me.” Her knee-length white designer dress was casual yet irrationally intimidating. He’d heard it say that clothes make the man, but indeed they empower the woman.

After ten minutes, she returned and ordered a Macha and immediately controlled the conversation by feigning an emphatic interest in Mark’s animation work. Mark had been making a living doing free-lance animation work for the major studios while waiting—praying—for his own animation ideas to get backing. He was 28 and had learned how to draw before he’d learned what death was. He had hundreds of Moleskine notebooks and his friends would encourage him to keep them in an air-tight safe for museums, if only to encourage him.

Carrie then abruptly cut him off and got to her point: Mark either had an incredible story or he didn’t. It was then that Mark figured that the expensive treatments of her blonde hair were more successful than any therapeutic treatment she might have had for the neuroses within her head.

“Ok..So let’s just address this chronologically. What exactly are you saying your great uncle did—”

“—Rob”

“Yes, Rob LaSalle. What did Rob LaSalle do, according to you.” Her tone diminished into contempt, she looked down at her notepad, and ignored his face altogether while she took notes.

“Rob got to be a huge art dealer back in the 40s. He hit it big and young off one artist. The person you know of as Edward Sagan. Except Edward had never painted anything. They were all done by. The paintings were actually done by a black painter…”

Mark reported to Carrie everything that Rob confessed in a letter. Rob had met Josiah through a trumpeter in Harlem. Josiah was a barber by trade and artist by night. Josiah had given up painting since galleries wouldn’t take works by black artists because they couldn’t sell them to white buyers. Rob had said he’d find a white artist to sign Josiah’s work and they would all split the proceeds—unevenly. Josiah’s work was good, and Rob was convinced that he could sell it.

Rob demanded that Josiah never tell his future wife or children anything. If she got suspicious of what he was doing at night, confess to an affair. The only real truth is money, he told him. Pride, honor, all that other stuff was a lie to keep people from knowing the real truth of the world--money. Still, Rob scared Josiah with a contract that Rob knew wouldn’t hold up in court, but he also knew that Josiah couldn’t afford a lawyer. What’s more though, Rob had faith in belief itself. Patrons wanted to believe that the paintings were the work of an Eastern European alcoholic, not a black barber who starched his shirts and taught Sunday school. Josiah would paint, Edward would drink, and Robert would sell the paintings that would start his fortune.

Though Josiah knew he was getting the shaft, after years of taking cash under the table, he couldn’t speak now on anything without the government taking the table his five kids had their dinner on each night. As for Edward, he was usually too drunk to say much at all.

Then Josiah died of a stroke in his sleep at 36. But the problem was that Edward was still alive and expecting to earn a living off a dead black man’s art.

Rob panicked. Rob killed Edward.

Edward had indeed died of alcohol poisoning. The coroner got that part right, but Rob was holding the bottle while hired hands were holding down Edward’s arms and legs.

The 14 paintings that are hanging in modern art museums and a few billionaires' homes today, attributed to Edward Sagan, were done by Josiah Tyson. “I had you all praying to a false prophet” Robert wrote in the letter he left for Mark in a safety deposit box. Mark could imagine his smirk. He said he found Edward sleeping in the streets in the Bowery and got him into galleries, museums and textbooks. He looked like what buyers wanted to believe an artist looked like. Critics, buyers and other artists all looked on at first with suspicion. But Rob told a story, and they looked the other way.

Mark showed Carrie the black Moleskine notebook that was in the safety deposit box along with the confession and a few other items Mark didn’t think Carrie ever needed to know about. It was Josiah’s notebook. All the sketches of the paintings undergrads study today were there, including sketches of his children he wanted to paint but Robert would never let him.

Carrie’s piece shocked the art world while the real world yawned.

But then calls for Mark to give over his entire inheritance to Josiah’s heirs went viral on social media. The major animation studios caved and canceled his contracts, which only further convinced Mark to never give up the money.

It was only after Mark and Kapri had their child that the media discovered that Mark had tracked down and gone to Josiah’s heirs long before going to them, where he met Kapri Tyson. And when Mark was found unresponsive in bed, all the money did go to Josiah’s heir, and Kapri’s online fundraiser for her legal defense set a new record.