The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (25 page)

“You're exaggerating.”

“Not by much.”

“It's decided then,” she says.

They drink up, but she can't finish her second glass of wine. She stands up from the booth a little tipsily. Marty leaves some money on the table and they head back up to the street.

*   *   *

They carry a pepperoni pizza and some beer down to a strip of parkland along the river, the expressway traffic dulled by a hem of trees. There are a few people out walking their dogs and a lone fisherman casting into the river. They find a bench to watch the ferries and boats crossing between Manhattan and Union City. Ellie takes a slice of pizza from the box and tries to maneuver it into her mouth. The point sags down and cheese grease drips onto her white beaded dress.

“Shit,” she says. Then she looks up at him. “Mind my language. I come from a family of heavy blasphemers.”

“My father was Dutch and he swore like some deranged pirate from the eighteenth century.”

“Shouldn't have worn this stupid thing. I hardly ever go out—that's part of the problem.”

“You have to curl in the sides of the pizza, vertically down the middle. Then the tension picks up and keeps the tip from flopping.”

“Nobody wants a flopping tip,” she says, then, “Oh, God, I'm drunk.”

“Eat up,” he says.

She gestures to the ferries with her newly repositioned pizza slice. “My father's a ferry captain on Sydney Harbour. I was only ever asked once to ride inside the wheelhouse and I got seasick. Girls didn't belong there anyway, he said. He was a man who lived as if he'd been born a century earlier.” She takes another bite of pizza. “I'm prattling…”

“My father used to make his own tonic water, boil up the cinchona bark on the stovetop. Maybe that's why we like old paintings—our fathers were trapped by the past.”

Chewing, she says, “Either that or we can't get our heads around the present.”

They eat in silence for a moment, watching the lights of New Jersey in the grain of the river.

She says, “I rode in the wheelhouse during a big swell. I think he wanted to test me. These slate-colored rolling waves came through the heads between Manly and the city. The ferries probably shouldn't have been running, but my father was the last one to heed caution. Even the deckhands were turning green. When we got halfway between the heads it was so bad that I had to run out on deck and throw up over the railing. I came back in drenched from all the crashing waves but my father didn't say anything, completely ignored me until that night when we got home to my mother. We walked into the kitchen and my mother just about died when she saw how I looked. When she asked what the hell happened to me, he said, ‘Ellie had a little spell on board, that's all.' My torrential vomiting was dismissed as
a little spell
. That was the story of my childhood. My sister broke her arm once and my father called it a busted wing and rigged it up in a piece of torn bedsheet. To this day her arm's crooked. Her tennis ground stroke is five degrees off-center…”

“Your father sounds intrepid.”

“That's one word for it. He served in the first war and I think part of his personality was actually shell shock. Then they lost a son before us girls came along. He was never the same, or so I'm told. Did you go to the war?”

“I'm not that old.”

“I meant the second one.”

“No, they wouldn't have me. I'm flat-footed with a bung knee and a side of mild asthma. Filing a few patents for the army and navy was as close as I got to the action. How's the pizza?”

“Fabulous.”

“Tell me how you repair a painting.”

“It'll put you to sleep.”

“Try me.”

She reaches for another slice of pizza. “It's not interesting, believe me.”

“I'd really like to know. Please.”

She looks out at the river, then down at the pizza box. “It really depends. But you have to think of a painting in geological terms. It's all about strata, layers that do different jobs. A painting has its own archaeology.”

“This is why I think you'd be a good teacher.”

She pulls the crust off her slice and bites one end. “The shadows and the light usually take root in the ground layer. You fill in losses with chalk and rabbit glue. You should smell my apartment. There's a French butcher in Brooklyn who sells me rabbit pelts by the dozen.”

“You can't buy it ready-made?”

“It's better if you make it from scratch. For one thing, it gets you in the mind-set of the seventeenth century.”

“What else?”

“Well, you cheat a little with the brushwork, building it up sculpturally and then going over it with thin layers of paint. In London we used to argue about whether or not to match the color of the ground exactly or whether you should clearly mark out your territory, let future restorers know where you'd been.”

“It was an ethical issue,” he says.

“I suppose it was. They made you choose sides and there were professors there who hated each other because they couldn't agree on what color to make a ground.”

“I thought lawyers were petty and contentious.”

She looks over toward New Jersey, the slice of pizza midway to her mouth, and blows some air between her lips. She drops the pizza slice back in the box. “I'm exhausted and still drunk. I don't think I'm going to make it back to the Robin. I'm sorry.”

“The Sparrow.”

“I should stop talking.”

“Some other time. Do you want to take the pizza home?”

“Naturally. You're talking to a graduate student.”

Marty says, “Yes, one who charges thirty dollars an hour. That's more than my dead wife's analyst and he actually studied in Vienna with one of Freud's disciples.” He means it as a joke, but there's a note of hostility in his voice.

She turns her head but doesn't look at him. The pizza box sits open between them, grease stains like tiny islands on a cardboard map.

Slowly, she says, “Do you think it's unreasonable?”

“I think you know what rich people are willing to pay for mounting a little existential meaning on their walls. My wealth is a historical accident, just so we're clear.”

A diesel engine thrums somewhere out on the river. The mood has suddenly been poisoned. He wants to shift the conversation back to banter, but he knows it's too late. “Let me get you into a taxi,” he says. “Will you take the pizza?”

She doesn't answer but takes the box. They walk a few streets over from the expressway and he flags down a taxi. His father used to carry a doorman's whistle in his vest pocket, just for hailing cabs, and he wonders where that thing ended up. It might be resting at the bottom of a drawer in the ship captain's desk. When the cab pulls up he climbs into the back beside her before she can object. “Brooklyn and then the Upper East Side,” he tells the driver.

“You don't want to do it in reverse?” the driver asks.

“We'll take the lady first,” Marty says.

She says, “This is completely unnecessary.”

“Let's just say I'm from another century as well.”

They don't talk the full length of the Brooklyn Bridge. He watches her look out the window, shoulders turned away from him, her fingers gently drumming on top of the pizza box. Her body language suggests she's brooding about the earlier comment. He saw a flash of something back there. A quick temper, perhaps, but also a propensity for self-doubt. He rolls down his window slightly to let in some air.

*   *   *

Marty tells the driver to wait while she gets inside her apartment building. The stream of traffic thunders overhead on the expressway. He waits until he sees the play of light and her silhouette against an upper window, then tells the driver to go ahead. A few blocks later he tells the driver to let him out and he returns on foot, his collar up, gently drunk, pulled along by something he doesn't fully understand. Each thing she divulges about her life and work is a small theft. It's like taking ornaments off a stranger's shelf, one by one, and dropping them into his coat pockets. He stops at a late-night deli and buys two cups of coffee and a pint of ice cream. Then he stands outside her apartment building, the ice cream tucked under one arm, cooling against his rib cage, while his hands warm against the coffee. He watches her silhouette against the drawn curtains, the little forays she makes between rooms. He imagines showing up on her doorstep with the forgery wrapped in paper, telling her that it's a restoration he wants her to work on, or watching her face as he describes the Sara de Vos he once owned until someone plucked it off his bedroom wall during a charity dinner for orphans. It's her future he's holding in his hands, flimsy as two paper cups. He wants to understand her life from the inside out, to feel into its corners and handle the filaments that hold it in place.

He walks inside the darkened apartment building and climbs the tiled stairway to the second floor. He knows it's the corner apartment with its windows facing north—he's always been good with direction, knows the cardinal points when he's sitting in a windowless Midtown restaurant. He knocks softly and hears her feet padding across the wood floors, moving away and then coming back. A shadow breaks up the chink of light from under the door and her voice is muffled—“Who's there?”

Quietly, but as jovial as he can sound, he says, “It's Jake Alpert with coffee and ice cream as a peace offering. He's very sorry for being an ass.”

There's a moment of silence and another shift in the light under the door. “Tell Jake that I was just getting ready for bed. No need to apologize.”

“Well, at least let me put this in your freezer before it melts.”

“I'm sorry, it's just so late … I'm not dressed.”

“I understand.” He takes a step back from the door to make sure his voice doesn't sound threatening. “Since Rachel passed I've become a bit of an insomniac. I'm very sorry for my earlier comment. Good night, Ellie.” He feels a burst of terrible shame that he's used Rachel's name, as if her actual life now hangs in the balance. He takes another step away.

There's a pause, then he hears the sound of a chain being unlatched. Her face appears when the door opens six inches. She says, “You can give me the ice cream. I'll put it in my freezer and we can have it some other time. That was nice of you.”

He comes closer. “It's under my arm. I can't get it while I'm holding the coffees.”

“Oh,” she says, a little annoyed. She opens the door another six inches and extends her arm so she can reach below his elbow. He sees that she's wearing a flannel nightie with small birds on it. Her calves are skinny and pale, her feet slightly splayed and blunted at the toes. A girl who grew up barefoot, he thinks. When she takes the ice cream he says, “Peppermint chocolate chip.”

She looks away. “I'm more of a vanilla person myself.”

“I offended you and I'm sorry. Your expertise is worth every cent you charge. I wish I could come in, just for a moment.”

“I'm not used to having company,” she says. “The place isn't fit.”

“All right, well, good night. Here's your coffee as well.” He hands it to her through the doorway and she has to set the ice cream down to take it. He turns back for the stairwell, knowing that she's still there.

She says, “Five minutes is all. And you have to wait until I tidy up and dim the lights. The less you see the better. Wait here,” she says.

Another small theft. She closes the door and he comes back to await further instructions. He can hear her tidying up, placing dishes in the sink. When she finally comes back to the door she's put on a man's bathrobe that has flecks of paint on the lapels. He steps inside. The windows above the radiator, facing the elevated expressway, have been opened and there's a slight breeze blowing through the humid space. A series of snake plants and philodendrons line the sill in tiny pots. He can smell the animal glue she talked about and there's the high chemistry of solvents and oil paints, and something darker that smells like shoe polish. A small wooden island in the kitchenette is taken up by mortars and pestles and stone bowls. A lacquered tea tray has been repurposed to hold every kind of brush and palette knife imaginable. A drafting table on metal legs is covered by strips of paper and charcoal sketches. She sets her coffee down on a small Formica table by the window that Marty recognizes from the photo. The living area is stacked with books and newspapers and over in one corner is the offending Remington with a sheet of her dissertation, no doubt, wilting in its Bakelite mouth.

“If the landlord ever sees inside this place I'll get evicted,” she says. “But it's not easy to find apartments where they don't mind you melting rabbit pelts on the stovetop.”

Marty looks over at the blackened oven and range. “I'm pretty sure that kitchen has seen worse.”

She tells him he can sit down if he likes and he sits on the mustard-brown couch that faces the windows and a shelf with a record player. There's a painting resting on an easel by the window and it's covered by a paisley tablecloth. He wonders whether she has just draped it there or whether this is a habit, the masking and unmasking of her trade. He knows better than to ask about it right now, so he sits and drinks his coffee. When she brings the ice cream over there are no bowls but two spoons.

“Family tradition,” she says. “My mum used to make her own butterscotch ice cream, but she made us eat out of the churn bucket. Didn't want to dirty extra dishes.”

They eat several spoonfuls each, the pint between them on the couch. Marty looks around the room, taking it in. Gretchen's apartment had signs of a rich and vibrant social life—cheese knives and glassware and linen napkins for entertaining. This apartment could belong to an invalid, a shut-in with kidney stones and a fox terrier.