The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (26 page)

“I could build you some bookshelves,” he said. “I come from a line of men with carpentry tools in the basement.”

“It wouldn't do any good. All those spines wedged together would make my head spin.”

“Again, I am sorry about what I said before.”

“It's fine. You're probably right. I've been spoilt. You people pay me to do something I'd do for free. The money doesn't mean anything to me. I can't ever bring myself to spend it. It feels tainted because it comes too easily.”

“That sounds rather noble. What do you mean by
you people
?”

“There are people who look at art, people who buy it, and people who make it. I'm in a whole separate category—I mend it, bring it back to life. It's not unusual for conservators to spend more hours alone with a great work than the artist themselves.”

“Is that why you do it? To meditate on the work?”

He watches her shrug and leverage her spoon into the core of the ice cream. She lands a chunk and smooths it with the roof of her mouth, pulling the half-empty spoon back out. Something has shifted between them, a new candor on the end of her spoon.

“I'm not good with men,” she says matter-of-factly. “I don't know what they want.”

“Have you had many men in your life?”

“That seems rather personal,” she says, then, “No, not many. What was she like? Rachel?”

He flinches at the sound of her name and has to look away. “I don't want to cry, so I'd rather not say.”

“I'm sure it's a terrible loss.”

“It's hard to describe.”

They seem to be at a conversational impasse, so Marty gets up and strolls around the room.

“You can put on a record if you like, though I don't have any jazz.”

“I'll buy you some Chet Baker.”

He flips through the small stack of LPs—Chopin sonatas, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff. “Why am I not surprised by your record collection? Is there anything here from the twentieth century?” She doesn't answer. He takes out the Chopin from its sleeve and places it carefully onto the turntable. “Do you ever paint with music on?”

“Never,” she says. “It changes the brushwork.”

He sits back on the couch. She closes her eyes and leans back against a cushion, letting the music wash over her. She says, “Tell me about your first encounter with art. I always like to hear that story.”

“My father used to tell stories of being at the Armory Show, of lining up with a thousand people to see Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
. He liked to hang out with painters when he could so he knew some of the Ashcans and their circle. He used to get drunk with John Butler Yeats, father of the famous Irish poet. As an old man John Butler Yeats was living above a French restaurant. Anyway, my father claimed that he went to the Armory Show with John Yeats and saw a woman faint when she got to the front of the Duchamp line. So that was my first encounter with art, a story about what it could do to people. Do you know that Duchamp lives in Lower Manhattan and hasn't painted in decades? He says his life is the art now.”

“I didn't know that. Obviously because he's from the twentieth century.” With her eyes still closed, she says, “What else?”

“I grew up in a house filled with Old Masters. It wasn't until I got to college and took some art history that I understood what my father had assembled or inherited. We owned some of the paintings discussed in the textbooks.”

They continue in this eddy of conversation for a while. She throws out a murmured question and he answers at length, trying to summon interesting anecdotes from his real life, as if he can make up for so many layers of deceit. Eventually, she stops asking questions and he suspects she's fallen asleep. To test his theory he says, “Am I so boring that you've nodded off?” She doesn't answer. The Chopin and art stories have finished what the pizza and beer began. He sits very still, listening to her breathe, the ice cream slowly melting on the scuffed coffee table.

After several minutes, he quietly sets down his spoon and walks toward the short hallway, back toward the bathroom and bedroom. He walks as softly as he can, trying not to squeak the battered hardwoods. The bathroom smells of damp towels and there's a wire clotheshorse set up in the tub, a few pairs of her underwear hanging out to dry. In her haste to tidy up, she'd forgotten to close the shower curtain and there's something tender and sad about her industrial cotton underwear. He pictures her hand washing her clothes in the tub. Her beaded white dress—now stained with cheese grease—has been spot cleaned and draped over the sink. He looks back at her underwear and quietly closes the shower curtain. He's afraid to use the toilet in case the sound of it flushing wakes her, so he steps back out into the hallway and peers into the darkened bedroom, a narrow room with a single lamp burning from a bamboo nightstand. The bed is unmade, the floor strewn with clothes, and her closet appears to be filled with suitcases. A flourish of rising damp blots against one wall and part of the ceiling. He can't imagine how this is the product of a methodical mind, a temperament for finessing a canvas one painstaking stroke at a time.

When he goes back into the living area she's still slumped against the back of the couch, head back, mouth slightly open. He moves over to the easel and lifts one corner of the paisley tablecloth. For a fleeting moment he imagines his de Vos sitting there, but now he sees it's a canvas awaiting some depiction—an underlayer painted an earthy and pale red. That she thought to cover the naked canvas but not her damp cotton underwear reveals something, though he's not sure what. He drops the corner of the tablecloth and begins for the door. As he passes the drafting table with its rummage of papers and sketches, he sees a pattern that looks familiar. A narrow strip of photographic paper protrudes from under a charcoal etching. The sliced-away piece is no wider than two inches, but he recognizes the headboard and the arabesque of his own bedroom's plush gray wallpaper. The bed appears to be unmade, the pillows in plain sight, and from the shadows of the headboard rods against the wall he guesses it was taken on a winter morning, when the light spills into the room late and from the south. He puts it in his pocket and continues for the door. He should wake her, he knows, so that she can lock the door behind him. She'll wake some hours from now, and feel disoriented and vulnerable. But the thought of someone taking photographs in his bedroom during broad daylight rushes through him and he heads down the darkened stairwell in a surge of anger.

Outside, he walks several blocks until he finds a cab and makes his way back toward Manhattan. As they near the Brooklyn Bridge, the city glimmers into view—a Dutch outpost at the confluence of two rivers, an island plucked from the flotsam of history. Whenever he reenters Manhattan, even if it's just from a weekend in the Hamptons or an antique show in Queens, he can't help feeling how tenuous his grasp of the city is. He's spent his whole life here and yet there are neighborhoods that are as dark and unknowable to him as the Congo. Like his father, he's a street walker, but it's always above the parallel of Forty-Second Street and south of Central Park's upper edge. He has dreams in which he walks his dog around the perimeter of the entire island, letting Carraway drink from both rivers.

At home, Hester has turned off all the lights—her customary way of protesting his late hours—so he's forced to walk up the stairs from the foyer in the dark. To turn on a light would be to admit moral failure to the housemaid. As he enters the upstairs hallway he wonders whether Hester has betrayed them, whether she let in a photographer when they were catching some winter sunshine in the Bahamas one January. Although there must have been a few hundred people through the house in the last year, very few had been there during daylight. It could have been a tradesman, the plumber or the piano tuner with camera in hand. He knows if he confronts Hester she'll quit in a heartbeat; she has Southern notions of honor and loyalty and his wife will carry a grudge for years.

Through the bedroom doorway Rachel appears to be asleep, facing the other wall, the dog curled behind her legs. He pads down the hallway to his study and closes the door behind him. He pours himself two fingers of Scotch and picks up the telephone and dials the number on Ellie's business card. It rings half a dozen times before she answers. “I'm sorry I left without waking you,” he says, peering at her forgery against the bookshelves. “It occurred to me that your front door isn't locked.” He can hear her sleep-addled breathing, the sound of her swallowing to wake up. “I must have dozed off. My apologies,” she says.

“I forgive you.”

She breathes drowsily into the phone.

He says, “I'll be in touch soon.”

“I'll have a list of Dutch works by women for you to consider.”

“Excellent. Until then.”

“Good night, Jake.”

He puts the phone down and drains his glass. He walks out into the hallway and down to the bedroom. In the en suite bathroom he puts on his pajamas and hangs his clothes on the back of the door. He takes out the narrow strip of photographic paper from his trouser pocket and brings it into the bedroom, holding up the strip in a narrow band of moonlight. The photographer had stood at the end of the bed with the windows behind the camera. He looks up at the empty space on the wall above the headboard. During daylight, you can see the blanched ghost of the painting, the rest of the wall turned a pale sepia from the light and grit of the city. It hung there for forty-five years, since before they were married and the room had belonged to his father, who never remarried, who slept alone under the ice skaters and the girl at the edge of the frozen river after his wife had been wrenched from his grasp.

With her back to him, Rachel says something. At first he thinks she's talking in her sleep, some snippet of a troubled dream, but then the sounds assemble in the darkness with a slight delay.

“You're awfully late. How was the jazz?”

“Frederic got us all drunk and I lost track of time. There were a few decent quintets playing, nothing special.”

She repositions herself and the dog has to adjust. “What's that smell?”

“The club's underground, remember? A bunker of cigarette smoke and sweaty musicians.” He sits on the edge of the bed and puts the photographic strip into the drawer of his nightstand.

“No, it's something else,” she says. “I can't quite place it.”

“Should I shower?”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“It smells like old house paint. Like you've been crawling through somebody's attic.”

“Strange,” he says. “Sorry to wake you.”

He gets up and closes the bathroom door behind him. In the shower, he runs the water as hot as he can stand it, letting it scald the back of his neck and shoulders. He scrubs himself with soap and washes his hair, removing the fug of Ellie's apartment.

 

Heemstede

SUMMER 1637

A week of fog and drizzle. Bone-chilled and melancholic, Cornelis Groen holes up in his tearoom, plying himself with home remedies and apothecary blends of Ceylon loose leaf. Mrs. Streek carries a lacquered tray through the warrens of the great house, sets them out for his consideration beside the blazing hearth. Cinchona wine, tinctures of aloe and saffron, a compound of aniseed water for his chills. At precisely noon each day he places a sugar cube in his mouth and draws a swill of tea, warm and medicinal, down the back of his throat. Sara sits part of each afternoon in the stifling room, listening to a litany of bodily complaints. “My bones are made from ice,” is a favorite expression. Groen tells stories of being a shipping merchant, of being transformed by latitudes of smallpox, scrofula, and canker. “Changed my very constitution,” he says, looking forlornly out the window, “as if the humors of the body coalesced into a watery gruel.” She tries to cheer him with stories of her progress preparing canvases for his desired project. She's enlisted Tomas to make wooden supports, grind pigments, and size the canvas they've had delivered from Haarlem. But there's no cheering Cornelis when he's overcome by distemper. His mind kindles in the memory of previous ailments and he feels them all over again—the swollen knuckles, the chilblains. The entire house succumbs to his sunken mood. Tomas tells her that even the horses seem out of sorts. Mrs. Streek, standing blowzily in her pristine display kitchen, cannot be summoned from her wordless blue funk. She cooks Groen's favorite meals like so much penance—mutton with prunes and mint, minced ox tongue with green apples.

The painting expedition to the village of Groenstede, the abandoned settlement out along the river, has been delayed for weeks. They wait for Cornelis to recover so he can lead the excursion, but Sara suspects he's in no hurry, that he enjoys the latitudes of illness more than health. They give him something to philosophize about, some tension in the pull of daily rope. Eventually, after a month of napping and complaining in the tearoom, he rebounds with the weather. When midsummer arrives with a morning of clear skies, Cornelis rallies in the dining room in a pair of rhinegraves and a tunic, a pair of garden shears tucked into his belt like a rapier. Tomas is instructed to ready the horses and the wagon. Mrs. Streek is given very precise dietary instructions. Sara is told to gather her supplies.

They head out of the grounds toward the back country in an open wagon, Tomas on the box seat and Cornelis and Sara in the rear. The wooden pavilion with the domed roof, the arbor where Cornelis reads poetry on sunny afternoons, the raspberries ripening along the painted fences, all this cultivation is left behind but also bundled along in the wicker baskets Mrs. Streek has prepared. Bread rolls, Leiden cheese studded with cumin seeds, strawberries with sour cream, marzipan, and wine spiced with cinnamon and cloves. Sara thinks back to meals she shared with Barent, the bean flour bread and the turnips served with fried onions. Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still, she would trade all her newfound appetites for a single day back at the old house before things came untethered. Kathrijn floating a sabot on a canal; Barent sitting on the stoop after a day of painting, reading the gazettes and chatting with the neighbors while she made a hearty stew in the brightly lit kitchen. The past is so clear to her that she could paint it. It burns through every dream and waking hour.