The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (8 page)

When they have their drinks, they take them into the living room and she puts on a jazz album for Marty's benefit—Miles Davis's
Blue Haze
. He gets her talking about her childhood in Michigan. The sister with polio who still lives at home with her Lutheran parents, the brother who served in Korea and now runs his own appliance store in Kalamazoo. These details siphon off the last of Marty's desire.

As the album bottoms out, Gretchen asks, “You never wanted a family?”

It catches him off guard and he finds himself staring into his drink. He says, “We wanted children very much, but the odds were stacked against us. Both times we already had names picked out, two separate lists that I kept in my pocket at all times.” He takes a sip of his drink and looks up at the wall.

She says, “Oh, God, I'm so sorry, Marty. I had no idea.”

The sound of his first name is alive with intimacy and he hopes that tonight—the near miss—won't ruin their productive working relationship. He can feel himself folding up the old childless ache just like that, glancing one more time at her fridge covered in photos and thinking of his own blank refrigerator door.

When the silence unravels, she gets up and says she'll make him some coffee for the road. A while later he's standing in the doorway and kissing her on the cheek. “Thanks for helping me celebrate,” he says. As she closes the door, she bites her bottom lip and looks down at the scuffed floorboards, slightly embarrassed by what she's laid before him.

*   *   *

He heads west through the quiet of the Village and then north along the Hudson, the water dotted with fishing boats and the murmuring lights of the Jersey shoreline. He feels lightened, as if he's narrowly escaped something terrible in the world. These streets belong to someone else's map of the city, but he feels suddenly fond of them. He sees taxis going by but lets them pass. He wants to walk as far as he can before going home to begin the next phase of his life. He wanders into the flower district, where men in coveralls unload blooms from truck beds and florists are preparing their stores for business. He convinces one of the deliverymen to sell him a bunch of flowers in newspaper, but he only has a twenty-dollar bill, so he gestures for the man to keep the change and walks some more, taking in the strange sights of Sixth Avenue over the crown of his gardenias. A locksmith's window with a vein of cracked glass, a dry cleaner's with a single blanched shirt hanging in front. He stops for a moment to consider the forlorn, white shirt, finds himself wondering about the man who once owned it. Then he turns and flags down a taxi heading north.

He walks into his building lobby as quietly as possible, nodding to the night watchman. In the private elevator he takes off his shoes and carries them inside when he gets to 12. The penthouse is quiet and he takes the stairs in his stocking feet. Carraway doesn't bark and he suspects he'll find his wife and dog curled and asleep in bed. At the top of the stairs he rests the flowers on a hall stand and continues down to their bedroom. As suspected, he finds Rachel in bed sleeping, the dog at her feet. The bedside lamp is still on and she has a book splayed across her chest. He can tell that she stayed awake as long as possible and now the guilt courses through him. Although he didn't sleep with Gretchen, he briefly intended to, and now he has to carry that. She startles when he opens the bathroom door and she begins talking, though he knows she isn't awake. The sleeping tablets do this to her, dredge words from her stupefied dreams. “Nobody likes that house … It smells like burnt toast,” she says. He stands in the doorway of the bathroom and looks at his wife's face as she talks up at the ceiling. “The stairs don't lead anywhere for one thing…” He lets his eyes move to the painting and the girl standing beside the birch. It never fails to still his thoughts, this moment of wintry suspension. Then he notices something odd about the outer edge of the frame. For years he's watched the antique copper nails turn verdigris inside the flesh of the wood, afraid they would eventually cause rust damage that would tarnish the canvas. He'd always thought that he would need to get the painting reframed and remounted. But now he can't see the nails. The outside edge of the frame is roughhewn and flecked with gold paint but he cannot detect a single nailhead. Quietly, he lifts the painting from the wall and carefully carries it into the bathroom. He closes the door and switches on the light. Resting the edge of the painting against the bath mat, he runs his hand back and forth, following the grain of the wood. It occurs to him that Rachel has secretly had the painting cleaned and reframed and this creates in him a moment of terrified obligation. But when he turns the painting to face him it looks dirtier than ever, the scene fogged beneath layers of antique varnish.

 

Sydney

JULY 2000

What a sad little party. Ellie thinks it while she's standing alone in her kitchen with a tray of food in her hands. Olives and Marcona almonds, a circle of water crackers with some aged Dutch Gouda in the center. There's nothing wrong with the spread—it's the sight of those five people standing awkwardly out on her veranda that sets something off in her. They're nominally here to celebrate her recent lifetime achievement award from the Women's Caucus for Art and the new edition of her book—
Dutch Women Painters in the Golden Age
. Two female colleagues from Sydney University, her sister up from the Blue Mountains, an art history graduate student, and an old friend from her boarding school days. Three years back in Sydney and this is all she can drum up. They stand out there with glasses of wine in hand, talking about the upcoming Olympics and watching the rosellas skirl in the treetops. At least the view is good.

She ferries the plate of food out to her guests and tells them the quiche will be a few more minutes. She doesn't even like quiche, but Kate had insisted and read out their dead mother's recipe over the phone. How did she become a woman in her sixties who serves ham and cheese quiche to people she's holding captive? The gathering was Kate's idea, but Ellie did all the inviting and organizing and now she feels certain it was an imposition. Drive an hour or two on your weekend, catch a ferry over to Scotland Island, drink some cabernet, admire my view and my accomplishments. She heads back inside on the pretext of more wine. As she goes in, she hears Michael, her graduate student, trying to strike up a conversation with her sister. Kate is a retired actuary and competitive bridge player. It begins and ends with a tentative
So are you into art as well?
because Kate either doesn't hear him or ignores him entirely, already narrating one of the rosella sorties as the birds swoop down from a treetop to the tray of seeds attached to the railing. Ellie closes the sliding glass door as Michael looks down into the glassy bay. The two art historians have colonized the other end of the veranda, their backs to the view, arms folded, deep in speculation, or perhaps airing the latest campus scandal.

She sometimes wonders whether she bought this house with exile in mind. Perched among blue gums and overgrown sedge at the head of a sandstone gully, the house rises to a view of Pittwater on stilts. She bought it three years ago after fleeing her failed marriage in London and receiving a job offer from Sydney University. Everyone, her Realtor included, had tried to talk her out of the purchase. He'd called Scotland Island the little piece of Sydney paradise nobody wanted to buy. But she'd changed her life to accommodate the ferry ride and hour-long commute to the city, adjusted her teaching schedule so that she went to campus only twice a week. Most of the time she loves the isolation. And the house itself—cathedral ceilings and a wall of glass overlooking the bay—always buoys her spirits. On sunny mornings, she likes to stand out on the veranda in her robe with a pair of field binoculars and observe the waterways and shorelines, the estuaries and coppery mangrove creeks that flow in from Towlers Bay. The airy, stoic house and its impractical location remind her daily that nobody has any claims on her. She has broken free. And yet here she is with an exact replica of a social life out on her veranda, but not the thing itself.

She's back in the kitchen when the wall-mounted phone rings. Her first thought is that it's the chair of her department, sending along his apologies, but instead it's Max Culkins, the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, calling from the airport. He's on his way to Beijing to speak at a conference. Even though she's curating an exhibition on seventeenth-century Dutch women painters that's opening next month at the gallery, she didn't invite Max to her gathering. He's an old-school art dandy in a pinstriped suit, a medieval Asia specialist who still calls himself an orientalist. Ellie had pictured him and her sister together in the same room and decided against inviting him. One less collision of worlds.

He's a little breathless on the phone and Ellie thinks of his nervous habit of wetting his lips with his tongue. It's a tic that punctuates his lectures on clan art of the Ming dynasty. “I'm boarding soon, but I wanted to share the good news. I tracked down the current owner of
At the Edge of a Wood
through some old colleagues at the Met. I telephoned early this morning and asked for the loan directly. Just like that, as if I were asking for cab fare.”

She feels her chest tighten, like someone is pushing the heel of their hand between her shoulder blades. She swallows and lets the silence gather for a few seconds. The quiche is burning in the oven—she can smell it, but she's unable to move. She says, “That's marvelous news,” but it comes after a long pause and the tone is all wrong. Her mind goes blank. Outside, her old schoolmate has taken up the binoculars and is scanning the bay.

A month ago, Ellie learned that a small private collection in the Netherlands had recently purchased the painting and was willing to loan it for the exhibition. It was due to arrive later in the week. The loan was proof, she felt sure, of Marty de Groot's passing, of an estate sale, that perhaps a widow had finally gotten that grimly beautiful harbinger off the bedroom wall. For a month she's felt relieved, grateful. How is it possible, she thinks, that Max Culkins has not seen the registrar's paper trail for the Dutch loan of the same painting? Then she sees an image of Max walking to the podium without his lecture notes, or the missing button from his shirt cuff, or the times he's called her Ella.

Max says, “I talked you and the gallery up quite a bit and then the chap insisted that he handle all the arrangements at his end. You have to love American philanthropy!”

Ellie coughs away from the phone to steady her voice. She is about to enlighten Max—she's certain of it for a lingering second—that two paintings of the same name, from two different hemispheres, are on their way to his museum. She might call it a baffling mix-up. But instead she says, “And who is this generous fellow?”

“A Mr. Martijn de Groot from Manhattan.”

Ellie does the math: somewhere in his eighties, unless there's a male heir with the same name. Through the glass doors she watches as the bay silvers with scales of afternoon sunlight.

“Goes by Marty—a brash sort, but very generous, if you ask me. The picture's been in his family for centuries. Remarkable, really.”

The carbonized smell of the quiche makes her feel light-headed. Max says something that she doesn't quite hear—it's muffled by a boarding announcement at the airport—then he comes back in, as if through static: “… apparently the painting is already bequeathed to the Met. They're just waiting for the old codger to die. But this is the best part, Ellie. Marty de Groot insists on bringing the painting himself. He'll be flying out with it sometime before we open. Isn't that something?”

She feels her throat thickening with dread.

Max says, “Speaking of flying, I should head over to my gate. I'll be in touch from Beijing.”

Because she's terrified of what her voice might sound like, she hums a goodbye and hangs up the phone. Her kitchen floor is plummeting for a few seconds, an elevator in free fall. She thinks,
I have invited ruin back into my life
. She stares dumbly at the oracle of the old rotary dial telephone, as if it might
unring
. She's been gone long enough that Kate comes bustling in from the veranda to lend a hand. “You're hopeless,” she says in a bright, cheery voice. “You went in search of wine and now you're standing there like a lobotomy patient. Ooh, smells like a house fire in here. What have you done to poor old mum's quiche?”

Ellie is jolted into action and opens the oven door. The quiche is smoking and charred beyond recognition. Kate nudges her out of the way, slips on an oven mitt, and pulls it out onto the stovetop. “You really know how to charm your guests,” she says. Then she opens the kitchen window to let out some of the smoke. “No fear,” she says, crossing to the fridge. “I saw some smoked salmon in here. We'll serve that up.” When she pulls the packet of salmon from the refrigerator she finally turns to see Ellie's ashen face. “What's wrong? You look like you need smelling salts.”

Ellie says, “I'm getting a terrible migraine. I can barely see.”

Kate's face washes with sisterly affection and concern. She touches Ellie's forehead with her wrist, as if checking for a fever. Their mother's migraines were burdensome acts of God that they both resented as girls, but Ellie's—which came on during puberty—were treated with tenderness and precision. Kate used to black out the windows of the old house with blankets if Ellie had an attack when she was back from boarding school. She used to make cold compresses and cups of tea and bring them to Ellie in the darkness of their shared bedroom. Kate says, “Go lie down and I'll bring you some medicine. I'll handle your guests and get them on the four o'clock ferry.”

Ellie is shocked by the panic burning in her chest and hands and face. There's something jagged and electrical about it. The aura of a migraine, that first pulse of recognition, is nothing compared to this. She nods and says, “You've always looked after me, Kate. I'm sorry I've spent most of my life on the other side of the world.” Kate kisses her cheek and sternly points her toward the back of the house.