Where’d She Go? - Part IV
About twenty years ago, my husband and I began attending art auctions. We didn’t know anyone and were never included in the post-auction lunch outings, so it was odd when we attracted the attention of a woman who always asked if she could join us for coffee or a meal. In the beginning we were baffled as to why this vague and whispery woman would’ve latched onto us, two unknowns. But we also wondered if she wasn’t aware of a certain hidden fact about us, one that we wanted to keep secret. We’ll never know for sure, because she mysteriously disappeared without a trace.
THIS IS PART 4 of a FOUR-PART STORY
A few weeks passed with Andrea Jean and I closely in touch, and then, suddenly, I stopped hearing from her. I’d call and email – no response. We’d go to auctions and all the usual people would be there, but no Andrea Jean. I asked around. Supposedly she was a dealer, but no one had ever heard of her, even though, historically, she’d been present at every single auction we’d ever attended. Have you seen Andrea Jean? we’d ask, only to be met with blank stares. Who was this person? She’d disappeared and now, for no reason I could think of, I was minus a friend.
When I went online I could find nothing about her, except that she’d once run a curatorial service; but that was small potatoes, a deadend – there’d been no posts in a long while (since the eighties!), and the few words connected to Andrea Jean were insignificant, just some blah blah about her having once been an art critic and a list of relatives, most of whom lived in Florida or Boston. I played with the idea of contacting her father, but when I eventually reached out to him, I never heard back. I considered getting in touch with her boyfriend, Theo, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember his last name. I scoured the internet, called every single person I knew who might be familiar with Andrea Jean, but came up empty. The woman had completely disappeared. And so I checked the obituaries. But there was nothing there either.
What the hell had happened? It was a mystery. Why would someone go off the grid like that, ignore her friends?
There’d been no falling out between me and Andrea Jean, no arguments or issues or meanness of any kind. She’d simply stopped communicating. I decided to give it a break for a little while, concentrate on other things. Trump was elected. Out of horror and disgust, I began a ghastly series of paintings of his administration. That took two years, and then I got busy drawing politicians and writing smack about them. I was pretty public. If Andrea Jean had been paying attention, she would have seen my work posted on the internet. But she was gone and I badly missed her friendship.
Greg Abbott, Nicole Jeffords (2022)
One day, perhaps about a year or so before Covid set in, my husband and I were in New York and found ourselves on Andrea Jean’s block. We decided to talk to her doorman. “Does Andrea Jean Levy still live here?” I asked.
“Yes, she does.”
“Is she okay?”
The doorman looked at me blankly. “As far as I know.”
“When did you last see her?”
“This morning.”
Well, that was a shock.
Andrea Jean was alive and well and ignoring me. The question was, why?
I quickly wrote her a note telling her how sad I was about being out of touch. But she never answered. I chalked it up to weirdness. In my mind, I relegated her to the auction hall, a blurry presence forever standing with the dealers at the back of the room, smiling wistfully, pretending she belonged there although no one seemed to know who she was. Perhaps her illness had made her a little crazy. I was glad she wasn’t dead – but so what? She had made herself dead to me.