Mouth to Mouth

An unnamed narrator, a writer traveling on a budget from Los Angeles to Berlin, sits at a gate at JFK during a layover when he hears the name Jeff Cook called over the PA. He recognizes a handsome man in his forties, wearing a sharp blue suit and Lucite-framed glasses, as a former UCLA acquaintance he barely knew almost 20 years earlier. Jeff had been a mysterious, long-haired figure the narrator repeatedly spotted around campus before they shared a single film class. Jeff recognizes the narrator, remembers his name, and invites him to the first-class lounge with a spare pass. Over the hours that follow, Jeff shares a story he has never told anyone.

Jeff begins in the period just after college. He was living in a house in the Los Angeles canyons, house-sitting for an actor who was himself house-sitting for another actor, and working for an internet startup. His girlfriend, Genevieve, a film student he called G, had broken up with him after he drunkenly proposed at her father's second wedding. One predawn morning, Jeff drove to Santa Monica beach. At the water's edge, he spotted a swimmer whose arm slapped the surface once and went limp. With no lifeguard on duty, Jeff waded into the freezing water, towed the unresponsive body to shore, and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) despite having no training. He cracked one of the man's ribs during compressions. Eventually the swimmer convulsed, gasped, and vomited. Paramedics arrived and carried the man away. Jeff gathered his clothes and trudged off the beach wrapped in a wool blanket, shivering and disheveled. No one acknowledged his role.

Jeff never told anyone about the rescue. After recovering from a fever brought on by the ordeal, he returned the lifeguard's blanket to headquarters as a pretext to ask questions. A lifeguard named Dennis confirmed the swimmer had survived and privately showed Jeff an incident report bearing the name Francis Arsenault, with an address on Mandeville Canyon Road. Dennis told Jeff he never showed him the report.

Jeff drove to the address and found a construction site. Using his startup's dial-up internet, he discovered Francis Arsenault Fine Art (FAFA), a prominent gallery in Beverly Hills. Research at the UCLA library revealed Francis's background: born Frank Busse in Columbus, Ohio, he inherited an art collection from his industrialist grandfather at 20 and reinvented himself under his mother's maiden name. He built a career as a dealer, married one of his artists, Alison Collins Baker, and earned a reputation for having "the eye," a prized ability to discern quality in art, along with rumors of dishonest practices.

Jeff staked out the gallery from a coffee shop across the street. One evening he followed Francis to a hotel and realized Francis was having an affair. When an assistant stormed out of the gallery in tears and a help-wanted sign appeared, Jeff walked in and applied. Marcus, Francis's second-in-command, mistakenly assumed Jeff had studied art history at UCLA, and Jeff did not correct him. He was hired on the spot.

Jeff acclimated to the gallery and began digitizing the Rolodex for Fiona, the registrar, creating extra database fields to capture Francis's cryptic marginalia. This initiative caught Francis's attention. He praised Jeff's cleverness and began pulling him off the front desk for more substantive work. Through the records, Jeff discovered what he considered a near-criminal enterprise: money moving via wire transfers, artworks of dubious provenance, and allegedly stolen and forged work.

Meanwhile, Jeff attended an opening at the gallery PaceWildenstein for the artist Agnes Martin and met Chloe, a confident USC senior majoring in fine art and art history. They spent the night together, and the next morning Chloe reluctantly revealed her last name: Arsenault. She was Francis's daughter and had pursued Jeff after first noticing him at a FAFA event. Jeff was stunned that what he had seen as an escape from his obsession led him directly back to Francis.

Francis soon learned of the relationship and told Jeff that if he broke Chloe's heart, he would destroy him, though the warning carried an implicit blessing. Francis began treating Jeff as a protégé, inviting him to industry dinners, taking him to Sotheby's auction house, and sharing his philosophy. At Sotheby's, Jeff encountered a large two-panel painting by Joan Mitchell that produced a profound aesthetic response in him, the first stirring of his own eye. During a Sunday dinner at the Arsenault home, Francis confided that he had once died while swimming and found nothing on the other side: only oblivion. He told Jeff there was no reason to be good. Jeff, his palms slick with sweat, said nothing about his role in the rescue and excused himself to throw up.

The equilibrium shattered when Astrid, a young artist, confronted Chloe at a party and revealed that Francis had promised her a show at FAFA in exchange for a sexual relationship and then reneged. Chloe told her mother, Alison, who admitted Francis had broken promises before but said she could not forgive him for dragging Chloe into the mess. Chloe moved in with Jeff. Francis enlisted Jeff as a go-between, asking him to report on Chloe's state of mind. Jeff agreed but lied, telling Francis that Chloe was softening when she still refused to speak to her father.

Francis proposed a family ski trip to Val d'Isère, a resort in the French Alps, as a reconciliation gesture. The trip was tense. At dinner, Chloe discovered Jeff had been reporting to Francis and publicly denounced both men. The next morning, Francis insisted on skiing alone with Jeff. On the gondola, Francis remarked that Jeff had once had long hair, signaling that he knew, or suspected, Jeff was the man who had saved him on the beach. Francis smiled and said nothing more. He led Jeff down the Epaule du Charvet, an expert-level slope far beyond Jeff's ability. Partway down, Francis lost his rhythm, was thrown into the air by a mogul, and crumpled. Jeff reached Francis's motionless body, received no response, and traversed down the mountain to summon ski patrol. He did not attempt CPR. Jeff tells the narrator he knew Francis's heart had failed again, just as it had in the ocean years before, this time compounded by overexertion and habitual cocaine use. He acknowledges that he did not try to save Francis a second time.

Jeff reveals the aftermath: He married Chloe, had two children, and eventually took over the gallery. Alison had assumed the director role and proved to have a superior eye, particularly for underrepresented women artists. After seven years, she asked Jeff to run the business. He now operates galleries in Chelsea, London, and Berlin. The narrator observes that Jeff has effectively "dethroned the king, married the princess, and taken over the kingdom" (177) and questions whether Jeff truly acted without calculation. As boarding is announced, Jeff thanks the narrator for listening and tells him the story is now his to do with as he pleases, confirming the narrator's suspicion that Jeff wants him to write it. Jeff scans his first-class boarding pass and glides down the jetway with the lightness of someone relieved of a heavy load. The narrator offers a quiet reassurance that Jeff did what anyone would have done, noting privately that he does not believe it.

In Berlin, the narrator's trip to meet his German publisher is a disappointment. Lying awake and jet-lagged, he researches Jeff's story online and finds that everything checks out, with one exception: The earliest local reports from Val d'Isère state that Francis Arsenault died not from heart failure but "from injuries sustained after a collision with another skier" (180).