The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (6 page)

Then she wills herself to the work at hand. Today, she places the stretched canvas on an easel by the window, flanked by a flower study. She sits on a stool with her back to the big double window, running her gaze across the frozen landscape. The icy river and the sky seem too pallid to her. In both, she wants the inflection of a deeper tone and color, something pushing behind all that white. During the dead-coloring phase, she'd underpainted the entire canvas with raw umber and black, but now she fears she used too little. The lead white in the snow seems uniformly cold and flat. She studies the area around the girl at the birch. She wonders sometimes if she isn't painting an allegory of her daughter's transit between the living and the dead, a girl trudging forever through the snow. It seems maudlin, even to her, but she lies awake each night, listening to the old wooden house tick and moan, retracing her own brushstrokes like the tenets of some delicate and inscrutable Eastern philosophy. The enigma of the brushwork and the passages of light startle her. But it also seems to wick away some of the ungodly anguish. For days at a time, she can think of nothing else but the painting.

Through the windowpane she can feel the cold at her back. She gets off the stool and prepares her palette for the day, mixing the pigments and oils in bowls and stone mortars. White lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. The diffusely lit clouds—the sun like a candle at the end of a dim hallway—form a dome over the entire scene. This morning she had planned to retouch the sky and snow, getting the colors just right, but it's the girl's face that keeps drawing her attention. There is a semblance of Kathrijn—the high cheeks and forehead and green eyes—but it's different enough that Sara worries she will forget what her daughter really looked like. How is it possible that there are no portraits of her, that there's just a single charcoal sketch that captures nothing of her essence? She has painted countless still lifes, even tried her hand at austere wedding portraits back in her apprenticeship days, but she never once turned her gaze and her brush to Kathrijn. She never thought to commission a friend to work up a portrait of her daughter. She swallows, standing before the canvas, and closes her eyes for a long moment. She sees Kathrijn's face at age five or six, that look of earnest concentration whenever she floated a sabot on the canal, or the doting smile when she put a doll to bed. She's terrified such memories will dwindle and fade, that one day she'll wake up and remember nothing but the smell of Kathrijn's damp, salty hair at the seaside.

For hours, she experiments with the eyes on separate pieces of stretched canvas. A friend of her father's, a portrait master, used to say the problem of the illuminated eyelid kept him awake at night. Now she knows why. But it's the suggestion of light being reflected into the eye socket and the root of the nose that seems infinitely more difficult than painting the catchlight on the eyeball itself. There are moments when Sara feels as if everything she has lost is contained in those green eyes, as if she's painting Kathrijn's fleeting tenure on earth in that miniature, ocular world.

*   *   *

Barent wants to get them out of debt on the spoils of tulipomania, the craze that's sweeping the provinces like some blue-lipped fever. He wants Sara to paint three identical compositions—a vase brimming with tulips in mottled light—so they can sell them in the spring, just as the first bloom of yellow crowns begins to spike through the sod. After spending months on his leviathan painting and then failing to find a buyer, he began selling quickly painted, unsigned landscapes in the taverns. When word of the illegal sales got back to the guild they were both fined, then suspended from its ranks for failure to pay. The scandal spread like poison, making it difficult for either of them to attract paying students. In desperation, Barent took a job with a bookbinder and strains by candlelight to paint at night. He comes home each day with new schemes, smelling of glue and paper. At dinner, when he tells stories of tulip speculators coming into their wild fortunes, Sara notices a new tone settling in, the hawking voice of a peddler. He recounts legends of tulip bulbs changing hands ten times a day, the man who traded twelve acres of land and four oxen for a single
Semper Augustus
bulb wrapped in muslin. Or the whore in Flanders who took her payments in bulbs, seeds, and crowns. The United Provinces are now shipping more tulips than ever before, he says, outranked only by gin, herring, and cheese. Then there are the tales of East India traders and Haarlem bleach-girls who've made it big in the flower market and retired to stone mansions on the coast.

At the end of these stories, he asks Sara for an update on her tulip paintings and she exaggerates their progress. She understands the gravity of their situation, but the truth is she has no feeling anymore for flowers. Besides, she resents the fact that every shipwright and chimneysweep in the Low Countries now wants to trade tulips and buy paintings. The flowers will make them rich; the paintings will tell their guests that they know beauty when they see it. For the most part they buy the paintings like so many tables and chairs. Only a few, the burghers from Delft and the foreign diplomats, have any eye for the work itself.

One night, Barent takes out an envelope at dinner and hands her a colored sketch of
Semper Augustus
. “Since they won't be blooming for months, I wrote away to a botanist in Leiden. A professor at the university.”

Sara studies it in the halo of the lantern while Barent reads the professor's letter.

“Can you work from this?” he asks.

“I think so.”

“He says the flame-like streaks are called rectification.”

She says, “They dream up ways to make it sound holy and important.” She sets the picture down and returns to her bean soup.

“He says that he can send us some grafted bulbs for a price. The daughter offsets bloom within a few years instead of the usual seven or so for a seed to catch.”

She says, “Apparently he's also trying to get rich with tulips,” but the phrase
daughter offsets
tugs at her mind. She sees Kathrijn in her attic bed, her lips murmuring and white. Bringing herself back to the room, she watches Barent rereading the letter in the light under the chimney canopy. He sits wrapped in his dressing gown, his face gaunt in the speckled firelight of the peat-box. All winter the house has been insufferably cold. She jokes that he wears seven waistcoats and nine pairs of trousers to bed, that she can't remember what his natural silhouette looks like.

After he finishes the letter, he presses it inside the pages of a leather-clad ledger. Whenever they sell a painting, he brings out the ledger and makes an entry. Each time, he reminds her that she is never to sign or initial her work. The paintings are stored in the attic until the spring markets or private sales that happen when the days turn warmer.
Dutchmen don't buy paintings when they're cold
is one of his axioms. All these paintings will be sold anonymously—ships tossed in a storm, a field at dusk, her tulips—each canvas wrapped in felt or wool blankets and sold from a stall or tavern. As Sara sits with her feet on a box-warmer, she wonders how many hurried, unsigned paintings they will have to sell before they can finally break free. She suspects there are dozens of debtor names at the back of Barent's ledger and another dozen that have never been written down.

 

Upper East Side

MAY 1958

A spring heat wave. Marty leaves a French restaurant in his shirtsleeves on a Friday afternoon, his jacket over one arm, hat in hand. He's a little drunk, the aftertaste of anise and steak heavy in his mouth. When he pushes through the big wooden doors and steps out onto Fifth Avenue, the city hits him in the chest, like he's pushed open the door to a foundry. The light dazes him for a moment—a burst of acetylene coming off the metal and glass and pavement. He can smell burning tar and sees that a road crew is filling potholes at the corner, much to the displeasure of the honking, idling cabbies. The scene is captured in the storefront window of a venerable old jewelry shop—a jittered filmstrip of men leaning on shovels against a bed of black velvet and diamonds. Marty sees his cameo flicker across the window. He could buy Rachel a celebratory gift, but then he's half a block away and it's already an afterthought. Two doormen commiserate about the heat under a canopy and they nod to him as he passes. He's always had a soft spot for doormen—his father used to call them the city's blue-collar admiralty. He can feel the sidewalk burning through the leather soles of his shoes and little blasts of air waft up his trouser legs and blow hot against his shins. He crosses to the park side of the street, for the deep shade along the stone wall. Clay was insistent that he take the rest of the day off, so he heads north along the park, away from the office.

He tries to remember Clay's exact words when he'd made the announcement, the partners already softened by Beaujolais. Something about partnership being like a marriage, only the hours are longer. Everyone nodded or gently laughed or absent-mindedly loosened a watchband. All except Roger Barrow, a senior partner and the other patent attorney, who studied the dessert menu. Clay presented Marty with new embossed business cards and an engraved Cartier pen. The small gift boxes were wrapped in papers from an infamous contract the firm had handled and bound with red legal tape. Marty told them the symbolism was not lost on him and then they all toasted his career. On Monday he would be moving to the upper floor, to the office with a view across Midtown instead of the next building's cooling station. Gretchen, his secretary, would also have a window and he would remember to bring her flowers for the new desk. Something that said new beginnings. He notices the sidewalk tulips are already gone, vanquished by the early heat.

The streets are full of people returning from long lunches, ad execs with loosened ties and secretaries in plaid skirts and knotted silk scarves. He smiles at the women as they pass, his mind still lingering on the right platonic flower for Gretchen. He remembers that yellow roses are the flower of friendship. The sidewalk girls are chatty with weekend plans, their cheeks flushed from the walk or the drinks with lunch, and he thinks he can smell perfume burning off behind their earlobes, tiny recesses of citrus and jasmine. A few of them smile back, their faces inscrutable behind outsize Greta Garbo sunglasses. Is it flirtation or just neighborliness in the dappled shade of the elms? He puts on his hat and tugs the brim down so that it lowers and frames his view, removes the ambiguity in the girls' faces. The world is bifurcated, exists only from the waist down. From the procession of anonymous shoes and stockings and skirt hems he tries to deduce something about the person. But when he tries to confirm a suspicion based on the cut of a suit or the buff of a shoe top, he's frequently wrong. A pair of battered shoes cracked along one seam end up belonging to an aristocratic old man instead of a dockworker. Rachel says he suffers from a kind of blindness, that when he walks into a room he notices the windows instead of the people and the furniture.

He thinks about how to tell Rachel the good news. In the last few months she has become lighter and happier, recounts her days to him at dinner with jokey asides. He wonders if the old childless ache will ever go away, or whether it will always be on the periphery, a knife blade winking in the sun. Still, there's no denying the new atmosphere in the house. They've even made love a handful of times and afterward talked about the future instead of the past. Something has lifted and he's been aware of it in himself. Not luck, exactly, but an upswing, a sense of being pulled along by some force he'd thought was indifferent but is, in fact, capable of benevolence. During client meetings he's noticed himself sounding more confident and shrewd. He'll say something smart or prudent and have no recollection of the preceding thought ever forming. Gifts out of nowhere. And then there are the parking spots that appear out of the void of Midtown, or the vacant booths in restaurants. He thinks of these as good omens, as portents, and they seem to fine-tune his senses, as if his body is being made to pay attention to his own wild good fortune. Walking along he can feel the nuances of the street, the sticky air against his palms and neck, the subtle weight of his tiepin on his rib cage, the syncopation of jazz from a passing car radio. He can discern the conversational drag between two pedestrians and know that one of them feels overwhelming guilt. For half an hour, he's clairvoyant and fond of everything around him.

*   *   *

Instead of going into his building lobby, he walks across the street and climbs the stone steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early on in his law career, after a deadline, he would sometimes take a taxi to kill off his lunch hour in the museum. He could have eaten lunch with Rachel in the apartment, but he chose to mill around the collections instead. His father had told him stories of working as a young banker in Amsterdam and eating a sandwich in a medieval courtyard that was entombed by modern apartment buildings. It was important to walk among your own thoughts, he seemed to be saying, to plunk down on a bench somewhere and let the world roar along without you for an hour. It's been years since he's been inside the museum, even though he and Rachel live across the street and have remained members and donors. He's pretty sure there's a gold plaque from the Iron Age that he helped procure—a scene of gilded winged creatures approaching stylized trees.

He produces his membership card from his wallet for the girl at the front desk and enters into the great hall. Under the arches and domed vaults, tourists are consulting maps and guidebooks, a Texas-sounding family deep into a standoff between medieval armor and pre-Columbian gold. Marty used to skip the pageantry of the first floor and steal off to a bench on the second level. He'd sit before a Rembrandt or a Vermeer and feel guilty about it, as if he'd gone straight to the postcoital cigarette. Most of the time he wouldn't even be thinking about the paintings themselves. He would stare up at them and loop through a cross-weave of associations, an obscure challenge of a new patent application he was filing and then a sliver of memory, a day at the beach with his grandparents eating salted cod at Scheveningen, the chill of the North Sea against his bare legs. The thoughts would rush in but eventually strip away, peel back to reveal a kernel of bare sentiment. Eventually, if he sat there long enough he would feel the brute force of nostalgia or a sense of loss or elation and it always seemed to be emanating from a particular painting. Rembrandts, no matter the depiction, brought to mind the desolation of winter, the loneliness of blue afternoons. He would walk back slowly to the office in a funk, brooding and distracted in client meetings the rest of the day. Maybe that was why he'd stopped coming.