The House of Dreams (35 page)

“Hush.” Vita reached out and touched his arm, but Lambert pushed her away. I realized then from the look on her face that she loved him, in spite of everything.

“They'll never fall for it,” I said.

“I've looked at your sketchbook.” Lambert tapped at the dog-eared book on the table beside him.

I grabbed it, held it to my chest. “How dare you go through my things?”

“Your things?” He roared with laughter. “A few pairs of darned socks and a sketchbook?”

“You have no right…”

He sneered, waved me away with a hand that I recognized as my own. “I don't know what you're bothered about. It's not as if you have much.”

“But you will.” Quimby stood and walked over to me.

“And if you're worrying about being busted by the clients,” Vita said, “I used to be an actress—”

“That's one word for it,” Lambert said under his breath, lurching back into an old armchair in the corner of the studio. A cloud of dust rose up as he sat, legs spread straight ahead of him. I noticed there weren't any holes in the bottom of his hand-tooled, supple shoes, not like my mother's.

Vita ignored him. She put her hands on my shoulders and led me to the huge mirror she had placed by her easel. “I can help you age your features a little, put some gray in your hair to match Lambert's.” My hackles rose as she ran her fingers through my hair, brushed the skin at my temple. It was less the thought of art lessons from my father than the idea of being alone with Vita, her face close to mine like this, that made me agree to their plan.

As I left, I loitered on the stairs and listened to their conversation.

“Do you think he can pull it off?” Lambert said.

“Of course he will.” Vita's voice came and went as she paced the studio.

“We have to get to the States,” Lambert said. “I've heard of an American ‘angel' in Marseille who is spiriting artists to the U.S. We just go and find this guy, and we're out of here.”

“Everyone knows you've always been an outspoken critic of Nazism,” Quimby said. “Naturally they will help an artist of your stature.”

I heard Lambert cough. “Frankly I'm scared for my life.”

“Don't worry. The sale of these paintings will pay for your passage to New York,” Quimby said.

“And mine,” Vita added.

“What about the boy?” Quimby said.

“What of him?” Lambert laughed, a cold little laugh that made my stomach curl up and harden. “It's a little late in the day to be paternal. After we pull this off, he can stay here if he wants, or he can just disappear again. He's nothing, a nobody. The Nazis will leave him alone.”

When someone tells a boy he's worthless, that he doesn't count, it can go one of two ways. Either you believe them, resign yourself to second best, to being a nobody, or you decide to prove them wrong. Perhaps that is what I have been doing my whole damn life, trying to prove my father wrong. I wanted to show Gabriel Lambert that I was as good as him—hell, I wanted to prove I was better than him, who am I kidding. Vanity, greed, talent—they were just some of the gifts my father gave me. I have no illusions about my personality. I never did a thing I didn't want to, I was just as driven and selfish as my father. Maybe that's why I did so good a job, how I fooled so many people. There's the same uncompromising clarity in our work—even after all the people who had known him personally died, his work lived on, and not once did anyone question Gabriel Lambert's progression from decadent art deco nudes to big old angry abstracts, not once … well, not till today, this girl. The critics all put it down to the influence of Breton, of Duchamp, to the torch that these European greats passed on to the new generation of American artists that I became part of. They never doubted for a moment, because there is a perfect, true note in our work, like the way a soprano hitting a high C makes your hackles rise and glasses shatter. I became so adept at imitating my father's art and life, now even I don't know where he ends and I begin.

Like him, I have devoted my life to art, have done what I wanted to, needed to, without compromise. This work has, if you like, left the world a better place. Does that make mine a good life? Has everything I have done in the last sixty-odd years redeemed one unforgivable act? Looking back at that boy on the stairs now, I think it's kind of ironic. For once in my life, I did exactly what someone asked me to do. I disappeared.

 

FORTY-SIX

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

2000

G
ABRIEL

Sophie stretches out on the sand beside me. “So how did it work, Gabriel? How did this transformation come about?”

“I was a quick learner, it's as simple as that. And I was motivated—boy, was I motivated. I wanted to show that bastard just what I was made of.”

*   *   *

Is it fanciful to say that my father enjoyed my company? I wonder. He had many faults, but he was true to his word, and when I wasn't out fooling people with more money than sense into buying Quimby's stash of my father's—or should I say “our”—paintings, we worked in the studio from dawn till dusk. Lambert's studio was out across the courtyard in an old barn, where they had opened up the north-facing roof for skylights. Week after week, he had me practicing my drawing, turning out little oil sketches in the manner of his work. He spent the days sitting on the sofa, smoking, teaching me everything he knew about art. Around the house he was listless and apathetic most of the time, but when we were working I saw the fire in his eyes flare up, briefly. I saw what he once was and could imagine him as the toast of Paris.

There wasn't any question of asking me what I wanted to paint—when I showed him some of my modern pieces, he tossed the canvases into the corner of the studio. He said: “You are the son of a great figurative artist, and that is what I will teach you to paint.” Anyway, I must have done all right because one day toward the end of October I found him pacing in front of the piles of drawings and paintings I had done. He had them spread out on the big oak table he had by the barn door. I watched him for a while, saw him pause beside a painting I was particularly proud of, a copy of one of his early works, so good that even Quimby couldn't tell I'd done it.

“Not bad,” he said without turning to me.

“What do you mean, not bad?” I said, laughing. “Quimby said it was perfect.”

“Quimby's a fool,” he muttered, and pointed upward. “There's only one source of perfection in the world, don't you forget it.” He turned to me, but he was looking past me toward the courtyard. “Sometimes he gets it just right.” I followed his gaze and saw Vita doing her calisthenics, turning cartwheels across the yard. “Right, you're ready,” he said to me as he limped to the door. “Vita!” he yelled. “Vita.” Moments later she ran into the studio.

“What is it? Are you all right?”

He tossed aside his cane and gathered his purple dressing gown around him as he fell back onto the sofa. I saw him wince with pain. “It's time to teach this boy how to paint properly from life. I don't know what kind of nonsense they've been filling his head with in Paris, but we shall sort him out.” Vita glanced at me apologetically. “You will model for him.”

“Oh.” I saw her cheeks flush. “I couldn't, I mean, I—”

“My dear girl,” he said, “you're surely not going to play the blushing ingenue at this late stage.” He seized his cane and lifted the edge of her blouse with it. “Come along, off with it.” Vita looked horrified.

“That is no way to speak to your muse, dear heart,” she said, trying to make light of it.

“I'm sure we could find another model, p-perhaps a girl from the village…,” I stuttered.

“N-n-nonsense!” Lambert said, imitating me. “A girl from the village? That's like asking a donkey to run the Grand National.” He glared at me with those black eyes of his. “If we are to complete one or two of my unfinished paintings, you need to work with the woman who inspired my finest creations.”

“It's fine, really.” Vita glanced at me and shook her head as if to say,
Stop complaining
. I realized if we made too much of a fuss, my father would know there was something between us.

Was there? I've often wondered that over the years, whether Vita felt anything for me, anything at all. I know she loved Lambert, but there was something in her face, when I caught her looking at me sometimes. I don't know if she wanted me or just wished Lambert were still whole and healthy like me. Perhaps I was just a reminder of what might have been. All I know is my heart was in my mouth as she disrobed behind the screen in Lambert's studio.

“Put some music on, boy,” he said, dragging at a cigarette.

“What did you mean, about the unfinished paintings?” I asked him as I flipped through the stack of albums beside the gramophone. I selected Debussy's orchestration of Satie's
Gymnopédies
. I'd heard Vita listening to it one night as she sat alone at sunset, looking out over the hills. It suited her somehow—gentle and beautiful. It suited the melancholy sadness in her that she tried to hide.

“You didn't think I was teaching you everything I know out of the kindness of my heart, did you?” My father's eyes glimmered. “Quimby's nearly sold all my finished work, and all the last editions of the prints. I haven't had the energy to work for some time, and he reckons he can sell anything I can give him at the moment. We'll start with that.” He gestured toward a large canvas leaning face-to against the wall.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Passing myself off as you is one thing,” I said, struggling, “but to forge your work as well?”

“What on earth do you think I've been teaching you for? Stop blathering and listen. You have to talk convincingly to the buyers about the work. It's not enough that you look like me, you have to
be
me.” He leaned forward and whispered, “You will do exactly what Quimby and I tell you to. What if we were to tell the police that some young con artist has been impersonating me, selling off stolen work…”

“You wouldn't.”

“Try me.” I carried the painting he pointed at to the easel and pulled off the dust sheet. My lips parted as I stood back to inspect it. “I've done the hands and face, as you can see. The rest should be easy enough for you.” Vita's face gazed out of the painting. Her life-size body, arms raised sinuously above her head, her legs at full stretch, on tiptoe, had been sketched in.

“It shouldn't take too long for you to finish, a week, perhaps.” A week? A week of looking at Vita, in this pose? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was exquisite torture. “Any fool could finish the background,” he said. There was the suggestion of a familiar Lambert motif in the background, an art deco design like a metallic mosaic. His work had all the glamour of Tamara de Lempicka, but there was something else to it, a raw sexuality. “It's the line of her that you must be careful with.” He reached out and slapped Vita on the backside like a racehorse as she walked past. “That is the true signature of a Lambert painting.”

“Oh God, not this one,” Vita said. She paused in front of the canvas and wrapped a faded floral kimono around herself. “I'm sure he's a sadist,” she said. “I had the most awful cramps in this position, but would he stop? Would he hell.” She stalked away and unwound a rope tied to the beam at the side of the podium in the studio. “And it's bloody freezing in here. If you're going to have me pose all morning, at least light the sodding stove.” I rushed forward and clumsily stuffed balls of newspaper and kindling into the wood burner. I struck a match, and as the flame caught, I looked through the dancing light to where Vita stood, winching down a small noose.

“A little higher,” Lambert said. His voice was low, and I felt my cheeks burning. I tried to busy myself stoking the fire, but I glanced at him. His gaze followed Vita as she climbed onto the podium. She slipped the kimono from her shoulder, her gaze locked on his. It was as if she were stripping for him alone, and I felt like a voyeur. I could hear him breathing as I walked around to the easel and sorted through the brushes. When I looked up, she was quite naked, her hands looped into the noose for support as she took on the pose in the painting. The heat of the crackling fire, the buzzing of the cicadas in the grass, and the bees muzzing the lavender outside made my senses vibrate. The smell of turpentine and oil paint inflamed me. I turned to her, my brush in my hand, and tried to forget it was Vita. Tried to forget that I had kissed that rib cage slick with sweat, felt her move beneath me. “Perfect,” Lambert said softly. “Perfect.”

And she was. The truth is that painting had all of us in it—my father, Vita, and me. That's its complexity and beauty. Lambert finished it—two tiny dots of white on her pupils breathed life into the whole thing, like the touch of a god. That painting turned up at Sotheby's in New York not so long ago. It had stayed in the family of the old guy who bought it in 1940 all these years. I don't know how anyone could have let it go. I went into town to see it one last time. The director is a friend, so he let me in after hours to see my painting—our painting. They had it spotlighted at the center of the gallery, up against a black velvet wall, the heart of the collection. I recognized the work of the framer—he'd done a good job, a deco key design picked out in silver against the gilding, echoing Lambert's motif. The painting had “it,” that something that makes a work of art unforgettable. I brought my old Sony Walkman with me and listened to the cassette of the
Gymnopédies,
rewinding it over and over again as I sat in the dark gallery alone with her. The music, the plaintive oboe and soft strings, worked its magic. It was like having Vita in the room with me. The line, the pigments, shimmered with Lambert's genius, my teenage lust, but more than anything with her, with Vita. Looking at her in the peace of that gallery, I wasn't an old wreck of a man, I was a young boy again, and I wanted it, I wanted the magic. I could have bought the painting anonymously, of course. I won't pretend I wasn't tempted, but I couldn't have it in the house I share with Annie. It would have felt unfaithful.