Harmony In Flesh and Black (3 page)

Fred turned right at the river and then headed west on Route 2.

He'd thought for a long time that he was destined always to be a loner. He was changing. His prime objective now was not being a loner. He didn't have men to watch out for anymore; so let it be Molly and the kids, if they would let him.

He was eager to see Molly. Molly was a very pretty woman. Fred told her that she could be found in paintings from the school of Fontainebleau, and that she'd been prefigured by Italians working for French royal taste—though she was pinker, on the whole.

Molly said that didn't keep her, with her short brown curls—and especially when she was wearing an apron—from looking like the kid sister of the rosy farmer's wife in children's books from the thirties. If she didn't watch it, she'd get fat.

Traffic was slow and heavy. The green and pink dresses of spring were ruffled across the trees along his route, making him think with extra pleasure of Molly waiting for him.

The thought of Clayton Reed in Smykal's place was amazing, interesting, and most spectacularly odd. What devious twist of fate or research had brought him there? Whatever it was, Clayton had been seduced by the package now in the trunk of Fred's car. Out in the air, with the close reek of Smykal's nest of slime receding, Fred's appetite began emerging cautiously. He was anxious to see the painting Clay had discovered in such unpleasant surroundings.

*   *   *

But he had to wait. Molly had invited her sister, Ophelia, for dinner. It was to be the year's first backyard barbecue. Molly flagged him down as he turned into the driveway, and leaned into his car window to give him a kiss and warn him about what was impending in the backyard. Molly had been doing something with mint, whose crushed scent greeted Fred with her kiss.

She was dressed in a blue skirt and cardigan over a white blouse, and her skin was flushed with a Dutch color, rose: the color Renoir had goosed up and made monumental in those late nudes. Her green eyes glowed.

“I'm just home from the library,” Molly said. “Ophelia's back there trying to start the picnic by herself. Don't let her come into the kitchen and help, you ugly man.”

Fred left Clayton's package in the car, locked the car in the garage, and headed around the house to Molly's backyard, where the pear tree bloomed against the house and sea gulls, if there was no competition, liked to walk on the twenty-foot square of lawn next to the brick patio where Ophelia was prepared to receive.

“You make the yard smaller,” Ophelia said when Fred appeared. “We have been waiting for you. Where have you been, great hunter?”

“Bagging a virgin for Clayton Reed,” Fred said. “Where's the kids?”

Ophelia shrugged, gesturing toward the house. She was in an aluminum chair, wrapped in a pink blanket, drinking gin and tonic from a tall glass. Although the sun was almost gone, she had on the shades with the bangled corners. She was the perfect blond; she looked as if someone had reached into a Hockney painting and jerked her across the country from Hollywood. She should have palm trees around her, and a blue pool—not Molly's tiny yard, which, as Ophelia said, Fred made smaller.

Fred was never sure if Ophelia was making a play for him, or was making fun of Molly, or liked him, or was pretending to like him on Molly's account, or was pretending not to like him (also on Molly's account), or had something else on her mind. Molly's sister, Ophelia Finger, had kept her first husband's last name, a rock of stability as she blew from the reef of one marriage to the storm of another. Married three times, Ophelia was presently between marriages. She operated in the world at a success level that amounted to a public nuisance. Ophelia's achievement was based on the fashion of faith healing that disregarded any system requiring either more or fewer than twelve steps. She sold people what already belonged to them: the American Dream.

Her best-selling book, a pamphlet fleshed out with photographs,
Learning to Love the Body You Have,
was the offshoot of seminars she had done around the country before large audiences. The lectures led to a TV series that featured Molly's sister, pert and chic and fit in a skintight golden gown, addressing the limps, bulges, and goiters of a crowd of persons of both sexes whom she had persuaded into white leotards. They were learning to love, under Ophelia's direction and amid the lights and cameras, those parts of themselves and each other that all the other seminars told them they should get rid of with exercise or starvation.

“Tell me about the virgin,” Ophelia said, licking her lips and making her eyes bright for the cameras.

Fred looked around for Sam to see if he wanted to light the fire, but Sam was lying low, as was Terry. They had a program on TV that they depended on about this time, Fred knew, and it drew them as urgently as their aunt repelled them.

“I can't imagine Clayton Reed's knowing what to do with a virgin even if she were completely bagged,” Ophelia said.

Molly had insisted on introducing Ophelia to Clay, and it hadn't worked.

“‘Virgin' is a figure of speech,” Fred said, brushing dust and charred grease from the grill. “It's what the collector likes best, a painting no one's seen for ages. Everyone wants to find and buy a picture before it's offered. Anything that's marked For Sale, already tagged with chalk marks and price stickers, has lost value in the collector's eye.

“Eliminate the middleman. The collector, if he relies on his own judgment, as Clayton does, loves to take the first fruit straight from the tree. You should have seen the tree this one was on.”

“The virgin you're talking about is a painting,” Ophelia said. “I get it. How interesting.” She yawned and took a long, elaborate sip from her glass. It seemed to Fred that Molly was taking her time cutting carrot and celery sticks inside.

“I want your opinion, Fred,” Ophelia said as he began shaking charcoal into the grill.

Ophelia never wanted anyone's opinion. It was her opening gambit when she had something to brag about, such as a fabulous honor or a large sum of money.

“It's a new series I'm starting, and I can see the book in it already, though I don't want to crowd my first best-seller prematurely. What do you think of the title
Finding the Me in You?
”

Fred could see it right away. Another winner, guaranteed. Molly's sister, the genius.

3

After dinner Ophelia drove off toward her home in Lincoln in her Mercedes of subdued maroon. Molly and Fred washed up together in the kitchen while Sam and Terry, enjoying freedom from homework at the kitchen table since it was Friday, rode their bikes outside in the dusk with friends from down the street.

They played Hearts together after that, before Molly sent the kids up to pretend to sleep, as they were permitted to do on Friday and Saturday nights—they could read or do whatever they wanted that sounded like sleeping.

In the evenings the phone at Molly's house rang frequently and was for Molly or Sam or Terry. Fred was surprised when Sam called down at around 10:45.

“It's for you, Fred. It's Clayton. Mr. Reed.”

Fred picked up the kitchen extension.

“That creature cheated me,” Clay said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You have my painting?” Clay asked.

“I guess so,” Fred told him. “I haven't had a chance to look at it. He wrapped it. Smykal did.”

He had clean forgotten the painting. That was one of the problems with Clay's having kept him out of the foreplay. It hadn't been Fred's business, and he'd not had the scent of the quarry in his nostrils. But he recalled the stink of Smykal's place now and regretted it.

Clay said, “Unwrap it. I'll call back.”

Fred said, “What do you mean, he cheated you?”

“Hurry, Fred, would you?” Clay urged. “Open the package, look at the painting, see if a letter's in with it, and call me back? I'm at the Ritz bar.”

“What's that about?” Molly asked, drying her hands after washing the coffee cups she and Fred had been using.

“What that's about,” Fred told her, “is what made me late getting back: a picture I picked up for Clayton that sounds like a problem. A virgin, Clay said. Let's take a look. Rare bird where it came from, if true.”

They went through the kitchen into the garage, turning lights on. Fred got the package out of the car, and they worked on Smykal's string and tape together, using scissors, going carefully.

“It stinks,” Molly said, her nose wrinkling at the greasy package.

“Clay sounds like he's been conned,” Fred said. “Which is what happens to your average paranoid. He digs his own trap, playing games, then tiptoes in.”

“If that's a virgin,” Molly said, standing back and looking at the picture with her hands on her hips, “if that's a virgin, no wonder it's an endangered breed.”

Fred was behind the unwrapped picture, looking without success for anything resembling a letter, perhaps taped to the back of the frame, or caught in the wrapping. But Molly's tone brought him around front.

“Don't she make the Rokeby Venus look like a sick pig?” Molly went on. Molly was a direct, no-nonsense critic.

It was a nude of shocking elegance: a female figure reclining, her back toward you, her rotundities fully realized. The figure made a startling white diagonal of flesh against black draperies with red and gold accents in luscious, loaded slabs of paint: a fan, the carved gilt edge of the couch she lay on. A mirror in front of the figure, reflecting head and breasts, held painted gestures that suggested the striding legs—in black trousers—of a man entering the room in back of the viewer. The subject looked at you out of the mirror, surprised but pleased that you had found her. It did a strange thing with space, even in Molly's garage, because the viewer was eliminated. Molly and Fred couldn't exist if the reflected entrant was as present as they felt him to be. The garage, the bicycles, the lawnmower, Fred's car couldn't exist since they didn't reflect.

It was a painting of alarming intimacy.

“You're right,” Fred said. “The Velázquez is an image that stays with you. Whoever did this young lady spent an awed afternoon beforehand standing with his mouth open at Rokeby Hall—unless Agnew's had it already, off H. E. Morritt. The National Gallery in London didn't get it until after nineteen hundred, and this painting's earlier.”

It shook Fred to think of the pathetic vulgarity of the den from which he'd brought so arrogant a testament of beauty.

“Who's the lucky painter?” Molly asked.

Fred looked. It was usually the first thing he would do, but the command of the painting had distracted him. They both looked. They shone a flashlight at likely spots for a signature, examined the back for clues, and tried spitting on a thumb and rubbing to remove the layer of surface dust to expose—no signature.

Fred could guess a lot from a quick look at the painting's style and at its architecture front and back. He told Molly what he was thinking while he looked.

“It's by an American, done in the eighteen eighties. He's done the Grand Tour. Given the modeling and the celebration of grays, the painter was trained in Munich and then finished in Paris, where the painting was made, since you see here, on the back of the canvas, the inked stamp of Durand's shop on the Avenue des Ternes. The artist was a craftsman who knew his business, someone of Sargent's polish.”

“That's no Sargent,” Molly said. “Sargent was too mean with the female nude, never wanted to get any on him. He couldn't show affection or appreciation for the subject. No, Sargent was a drapery man, in my opinion.” Molly stood back, studying the image of the naked woman, pinching her face between the fingers of her right hand.

“Jeezus Heezus,” Sam said from the doorway to the kitchen, still in his jeans and the green Champion sweatshirt Fred had given him. “Is this what you two do after you think we're in bed?”

Fred turned.

“It's Mr. Reed again. Didn't you hear it ring?”

Fred went back to the kitchen for the phone. Sam stayed with his mother, looking at Clayton's picture.

“No letter,” Fred told Clayton. “Nothing.”

“The painting's all right? A female nude, late nineteenth century…?”

“The painting's a stunner,” Fred said. “Whose is it?”

“Mine,” Clayton said briefly, gloating. He knew Fred meant, who painted it? “So there's a limit to Smykal's perfidy. I can scarcely bring myself to speak his name. You're certain there's no letter? Wrapped with the painting?”

“Molly and I both looked,” Fred said.

“The villain's playing games,” Clay said. “He gave me an envelope that he said contained the letter—which I saw myself, I'm no fool, Fred—and switched it. It's a blank paper. He's holding out. What does that creature want?”

Fred answered, “He mentioned your appreciation for his photographs, which he calls art. You show promise, he told me. He is eager to receive you into his bosom as an apprentice.”

“I improvised and gave the man the impression that I abetted his perversions,” Clayton said. “The situation was complex. I would like this never to be mentioned between us again, Fred. I still reek of it.”

Clay, trying to be cute, had been screwed. It was going to cost Fred time and Clayton money.

“Let me think,” Clay said.

Fred could hear fragments of refined hilarity from the Ritz bar.

“I should have checked the letter before I left the man's apartment, Fred. Go back and get it,” Clay said.

“It's late, Mr. Arthurian,” Fred said.

Fred did not say—since there was no point, it was indeed late, and he had designs on Molly—The mistake was yours, Clay, keeping me in the dark, putting down money, and walking away without what you paid for.

“Stop the check,” he suggested, knowing there had been no check. “I'll go first thing in the morning.”