Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance (38 page)

I slid inside the leather interior and looked around, appreciating the luxurious gleam of the dash, the elegant styling of the controls, and the gorgeous male who I could see through the windshield, heading for the door. Despite everything, some part of me thrilled at the sensation of imminence, knowing he was about to be right next to me again in a closed metal box.

My heart beat fast as he opened his door and slid in beside me, confidently placing his hands on the wheel and gear shift and offering me a simple, heartfelt smile.

If only it were this easy
, I thought ruefully, reminding my galloping pulse that no date in the world was going to divert the brushfire that had already begun to smolder, and would turn everything to cinders in three days.

JACKSON PUT THE TOP DOWN for me and I laid my head back for most of the drive to the Getty Museum, loving the way the California sunshine sank through my flesh, warming my bones.

As we climbed the curving, drastic drive to the white, mammoth building high above, I felt like I was really getting closer to something. In the tram that would get us the final few hundred feet to the summit, he held onto the overhead rail and I stepped easily into the space under his arm as though I belonged there.

“So, if you live with Edna, how have I never run into you before?” I asked, trying to sound casual while I huddled close to his ribs as the tram climbed the steep hill.

“We don’t exactly live there. We just stay there when we’re in LA.”

“So then… where do you live?”

He shrugged. “Oh, we have places here and there. San Francisco, of course. Portland, Butte…”

“Montana?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, Declan had a thing for bison for a couple years. And skiing. There’s Tahoe, Vail, Chicago, Manhattan… And then Mexico City, Panama City, Rome, Tuscany…”

“Geez.”

“Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t stay anywhere too long, and there’s family or friends living there when we’re not most of the time. We just go, you know, wherever.”

“Sort of a network,” I offered.

“Sure,” he agreed. “Every day’s an adventure.”

“It sounds like fun,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure it sounded like fun at all. It sounded like a pain in the ass.

“It can be.”

“OK, excuse this totally idiotic question,” I blurted, palms out, “but do you… you know… like, actually work?”

He laughed, showing off a perfect arch of white teeth. “Kind of,” he admitted. “We negotiate deals. We buy things, sell them to other buyers. Land, businesses, whatever. Our father worked. Our grandfather worked like crazy. He was a mad industrialist, the sort you see in movies clobbering striking workers and whatnot. What he made became what we have today.”

“Are you also a mad industrialist?”

“No, I am a fiction-avenging Mother Teresa,” he reminded me.

“Oh, right, haha,” I laughed, swaying against his side. Every time his hip brushed the back of my hand I got a little jolt of electricity.

“Declan works, I guess you could say,” he mused. “Though I think he works at things he creates out of thin air. But there’s always a deadline in his mind. Always. We always have somewhere new to go.”

“You go together?”

He nodded, he lips pressed together. “Yes, always, since we were young. Our father even held me back a year in school so we would be together. He said it would balance our competition, so we would always be neck-in-neck. He thought it would make us better partners.”

“And did it?”

“Almost always,” he said with a smirk. “And what about you... only child?”

“Yes, just me,” I replied, sort of sorry that he seemed unwilling to tell me more about his life. “And I’ve been in the same house since my mom passed when I was five. My aunt took me in but then she died when I was a teenager. I was old enough so I kept the house and the car and the gardener and just started working before the cash ran out.”

“That’s so sad, to have your whole life upended like that, twice.”

I shrugged, as usual. It was always weird to me when people commented on Aunt Winnie and my mother. The whole thing was as immutable as a stone block in my mind. Something twinged in my gut reminding me that the cash had, in fact, run out but I knew he wouldn’t understand so I tried to spackle over that thought and just move on.

“So,” I continued, “pretty much the opposite of how you were brought up in every way.”

“No, I think I can see similarities,” he said. “You’re a self-starter, I’m a self-starter. You live in the hills of LA, and I sometimes live in the hills of LA.”

“Ha, yes that’s true,” I admitted.

“Actually the very
same
 hill of LA, to be precise,” he continued.

“Can’t disagree with you there,” I chuckled, wondering again how I had been there so long without ever knowing anything really about it. Not about Edna and her collection, and not about my aunt in any meaningful way. I had been so focused, it was like I had tunnel vision. I’d missed a lot.

The tram came to a stop and we got off and walked out onto the wide, white pavillion. The views of the mountains and valley were dizzying and glorious from this height. LA could be so frustratingly congested, it was nice to get above it sometimes.

Edna’s rejection hung over me like a dark cloud that Jackson seemed willfully determined to ignore. He made small conversation about people we saw as he guided me gently toward the wide, marble steps that stretched up to the building. I walked slowly, loving the formality of dozens of steps that I had walked dozens, even hundreds of times. The whole place really was very church-like, I realized. It struck me as funny that he knew that.

“Do we need a map?” he asked as we stood in the huge, cavernous entryway. We could see downtown LA in the valley below us through the far windows, blanketed under a soupy, green-grey layer of smog.

“No, we don’t need a map,” I said, looking over the rack of maps and brochures for exhibitions in the different wings of the massive buildings.

“OK, then lead on. Where do we start?”

I began walking across the marble foyer and to the left, to my favorite galleries.

“Let’s just start at the beginning,” I suggested.

I didn’t feel like talking, and we settled immediately into an easy, comfortable silence as we entered the gallery with the oldest oil paintings. They were small, detailed likeness on wood with realistic skin tones and sad, attentive expressions.

“What are these?” he asked in appropriately hushed voice.

“They’re funeral pieces, like snapshots of the deceased. They were buried with the dead so that their faces would remain forever. And since they were in the middle east, the dry weather preserved them.”

“That’s an oil painting?” he said.

I nodded. “Pretty much. The process hasn’t changed a whole lot in 2000 years. There were innovations, of course, and styles… religious and political ideas about how and why something should be depicted… but the basic materials and process have been around for as long as this.”

“Huh,” he said. “I thought it was less old than that. I never would have guessed.”

I sighed deeply, trying to feel a connection with the displays of faces, each distinct and probably a tender recreation of someone beloved to someone else. “The history of Western art is usually taught from a thousand years later. But this is the very, very beginning of what I do. We use the same pigments made from sand and minerals, spread in oil to make something look like something. It’s all just dirt pushed around with fur on sticks.”

“Ha, that’s funny,” he said, and I could see how he would think that. But to me, it was downright miraculous.

As we walked through the galleries, combing our way through centuries, gradually following the thread to the 14th century, I began to feel more at ease. There really was something reassuring about being in a place with so much beauty and order.

We stood for a while in front of a lavish French floral, pristine in every detail and I could feel him breathing next to me. He seemed totally centered, as reliable and solid as a concrete pillar. I had the sudden urge to lean against him, hard.

As I looked at the floral still life, I tried to feel around in my memory for Edna’s words. Gingerly at first, as though testing a fresh wound in my mouth with my tongue, I prodded the memory to see if I could withstand it.

“You’re an extremely technical and precise painter,”
 she had said.

Why yes, I really am,
 I thought bitterly as I looked at the still life, noting its technical precision, the choreographed blossoms and each and every leaf in the best possible place.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Being precise. Nothing at all.

“But if you’re unwilling to really expose yourself, then you’re leaving something out, don’t you think?”

Was I? I stared hard into the bundle of tulips and snapdragons, trying desperately to see what might have been left out. Or maybe it was just me? Maybe other people could use technique to express some connection, but I could only use it to cut the connection off?

And then something seemed to change. The painting began to look false, like a plastic bouquet of flowers.

That’s silly; of course it’s false,
 I thought.
It’s not a real bouquet, after all. It can only ever be a painting.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling. There was something uncanny about it. Something too precise, like a wax model. It didn’t breathe. It was as lifeless as a beetle pinned to a board.

Oh my god,
 I gasped inwardly, flipping through all my mental images. Everything I had ever painted transformed in my memory all at once and I saw them all as wax dummies of the beautiful things I had intended to paint.

I thought I was a surgeon… but really I was a taxidermist.

“Holy shit,” I said aloud. Several tourists at the tail end of a tour turned around to look at me.

“Where?” Jackson chuckled.

I looked up at him, unable to really put it into words. “I just figured out what Edna was talking about.”

“Oh, don’t listen to her, Margot. She’s just one collector. I’m sorry we ever introduced--”

“No, no, it’s all right,” I said rapidly, reaching out to touch his arm to try to convey what I was thinking without having to make it make actual sense. “She was totally right. Totally. Everything I’ve ever done is just… so wrong.”

“Your work is beautiful,” he objected.

“No, don’t you see?” I persisted. “If I know what’s wrong, I can fix it. I can totally fix this…. Oh my god...
Oh my god!
Jackson, can we go?”

“Sure!” he said simply, and took my elbow. Excitement clenched in my belly like passion. I felt a serious case of the giggles threatening to bubble up and out of me and bit the inside of my cheek, hard, to keep my mouth safely shut.

I tried to keep the sensation in my mind as we rushed out of the building, into the sunlight and down the marble steps. I couldn’t look directly at the image in my mind, just obliquely like something glimpsed in a dream. But I couldn’t stop looking at it either. I didn’t want it to fade away.

Jackson was like a man on a mission. He got us back to the car in record time but still dashed to my door and opened it before I got there like a gentleman. I sat in the leather seat all excited, my fingertips pressed between my knees and stared at him adoringly.

“What?” he asked me sheepishly as if my cow-eyes expression was making him uncomfortable. I knew I should stop, but at that moment I was too overwhelmed to remember to act demure.

“You’re pretty OK,” I said, as though that explained anything.

One side of his mouth curled up in a happy grin.

“Well, good. That’s what I was going for.”

***

It was late afternoon by the time Jackson pulled into my driveway. He parked next to my Saab which Raul must have returned as promised. By the shiny, pristine look of it, he’d had it washed too.

My hands were sweaty from pressing them together during the drive. I still couldn’t quite see the image in my mind directly, but I knew what it felt like. After turning it over and over in my imagination, I had an inkling of what it would take to get there and I was excited to get started.

“You’re OK?” Jackson asked me as he turned the engine off, and I realized suddenly how rude I had been. I hadn’t said a word on the ride back, just alternated between chewing my lip and grinning stupidly as I concentrated on my painting problem.

“Gosh, yeah, I am great,” I nodded fervently. I wished I had words to describe the optimism that was foaming through my brain, but I had never really learned how to translate work into words. “So, do you want to come in?” I asked, hoping he would say No.

“I’d love to,” he nodded and left the car to swing around and open my door.

OK, be nice
, I reminded myself silently.
Don’t do your psychotically anti-social artist thing around him. Try to act normal.

As we walked to the entryway, I noticed the crate of paintings was near the front door, in the shade, and silently blessed Raul for his thoughtfulness. A cream colored envelope was wedged under one of the slats.