The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (3 page)

*   *   *

The Beats work the edges of the crowd—conversations about art shows in abandoned electrical substations, about pancake dinners in cold-water lofts on Thompson Street. At first, they're congenial enough and even Marty has to admit this is a clever idea. The sandaled women sip red wine and dance exotically by the fireplace. One of them teaches a partner's wife how to do the fandango and the quartet has come back out onto the terrace to improvise. The bearded men in corduroy jackets and peacoats strike up conversations with the uptowners, taking an anthropological interest in the rituals of these obscure, affluent northerners. They flatter and defer, chuckle at a dentist's nervous jokes. A woman wearing dragon earrings exchanges business cards with an investment banker, only her card is embossed with the word
Woe
on the front. For fifteen minutes, no one can get over this deft party trick, and Marty comes up behind Rachel to tell her she's livened things up nicely. But then Marty sees one of the men—in a red beret and army surplus jacket—holding a small group of guests hostage in his living room. From out on the terrace, he can see the man standing on an antique chair while holding up the de Groots' fruit bowl before his vaguely terrified audience. Marty begins to move toward the house when
Woe
suddenly accosts him with a plate piled with shrimp. He wonders why the caterers haven't pulled all the appetizers by now. Were these bohos going to get food poisoning out on his rooftop? “My real name's Honey,” the woman says, “and I intend to eat my body weight in crustaceans. You must be the host. Glad to meet you, host.” She's drunk and barefoot, wearing a flowing skirt that looks to be made from old Amish quilts. Marty offers her an anemic smile and strains to see what's unfolding inside the apartment.

“Why on earth is your friend standing on a chair?” Marty asks.

“Benji? Oh, he's high as a kite on Benzedrine. He'll fuck that fruit bowl if you don't watch out.”

Marty feels himself clench as he heads toward the mayhem. The Spanish music is laced with guffaws and olés as he rushes through the glass doors and veers right.

“Take this Bartlett pear, ladies and drones, succulent and overripe with sensuality, slumming it beside a Red Delicious … it's waiting to be elevated to its highest calling.” The man plucks the pear from the bowl and brings it to his mouth, biting so hard that it sprays everywhere.

“Excuse me, I think we've had enough,” Marty says.

The man looks down from the chair imperiously, his beard morseled with pear flesh. Marty knows nothing about amphetamines but knows a deranged lunatic when he sees one—the man's pupils are as big and as bright as pennies.

“Is this the head square?” he asks his audience.

“I think I'd better call the police,” Marty says. He can sense other guests coming in from the terrace, quietly fanning out behind him to watch.

The man shakes his head, incredulous. “You're paying for this, sport. You thought the sideshow would just come and sip your champagne, read some poetry about hitchhiking and sleeping in the woods, and then we'd quietly slip away. Negative assumption, amigo. Flawed logic, compadre. We are guests now in this beau monde museum and we're off-script … your shadow side and demons have been dogging you your whole pathetic life, brother. Now they're here. Pleased to meet you.”

Honey stands beside Marty and says “Easy now” to the crazed man, as if to a riled horse.

“We've paid for your cab fare back,” says Rachel from somewhere in the crowd. “We'll get you all in a taxi with some leftovers from the caterer.”

This condescension makes the man on the chair tilt and gesticulate, a street corner evangelist warming to the Apocalypse. “Oh, that kills me. We don't want your fucking tinfoil sack lunch, Lady Macbeth. We're not here for the food or the wine … we're here because Amerika with a
k
is about to suck the phallus of Uncle Russkie and we want you to all see what a pinko commie dick looks like up close…”

At that moment, Clay Thomas comes bustling through the crowd. Later, Marty will think that he looks no angrier than a man woken abruptly from a nap. He seems put out, but there's nothing like violence in his manner. En route, he takes off his jacket, unclasps his cuff links, and rolls up his sleeves, like he's about to do the dishes. But as an old Princeton welterweight, Clay is limber and martial on his feet. Marty is about to ask him whether they should call the police when he finds himself holding his boss's dinner jacket. Without looking up at the man, Clay positions himself behind the chair and pulls the legs from the back, forcing the beatnik to lunge into a squat on the floor. He drops the fruit bowl en route, sending apples and pears under the furniture.

“What the hell, old man!”

Clay shoves the man once, hard, in the chest. “It's time for you all to leave.”

The man in the beret stands his ground for a moment, his eyes walled back, his hands limp. It seems equally possible that he'll smash an antique vase over Clay's head or run from the house in narcotic terror. Honey and the other Beats gather in the hallway and call to their comrade in plaintive voices.

Rachel says, “The police are on their way.”

He considers this, mulls it through a mental fog. Eventually he leans back on his heels and relents, following his friends down the hallway. Clay comes after them as they head into the stairwell. Marty uses the intercom to call down to Hart Hanover and tells him to make sure the intruders leave the building when they get to the main lobby. After making sure they get into the private elevator on 12, Clay appears back on the top floor to a hearty round of applause. Marty claps along, but he feels slighted and embarrassed. He just watched his sixty-year-old boss toss the Beats out like a bunch of profane teenagers causing havoc in a matinee. To make matters worse, Rachel had actually paid for this humiliation—called up and ordered it like room service.

Clay stands beside Marty, rebuttoning his cuffs. He takes his dinner jacket back and puts it on. Clay says, “You invite the lions to a dinner party and sometimes they bite.”

Marty knows the gracious thing to do is thank Clay for handling the situation, but he can't. He watches the Thomases walk down the hallway. Other guests begin nodding their goodbyes and slipping out after them. Rachel is nowhere in sight and the guests are met by a chagrined Hester at the coat closet, her eyes averted. When the last of them have left, Marty stands for a moment with his back against the elevator doors. Hester says good night and he climbs the stairs before fumbling his way in the dark toward his bedroom. It's not until he's undressed, standing naked in the light coming from the en suite bathroom, that he thinks of this day as a cruel hoax. Rachel is turned toward the wall, feigning sleep. He's still buzzing with embarrassment, feels it throbbing in his knuckles and teeth. He stares up at the painting, hoping to be lulled by its frozen quiet. The girl is so frail, mired between the woods and the icy river. The skaters' faces and hands are pinked from the cold. He looks at the dog trotting on the ice, chasing after the boy, and thinks of the Russian mongrel pinwheeling through space. It'll be many years before he discovers that the dog died shortly after leaving the atmosphere, that the high pressure and temperatures were too much for her to bear. He'll look back on the dead space explorer and the forgery hanging in plain sight and see himself as impossibly naive. Right now, though, he notices that the picture frame is slightly askew, dipping about two inches at the right corner. He straightens it before switching off the bathroom light and climbing into bed.

 

Amsterdam/Berckhey

SPRING 1636

In the long unraveling of her life, Sara will always come back to the leviathan. It is not the cause of Kathrijn's death and all that follows, but it is the omen that turns their days dark. A spring Sunday, the day blue and cloudless. Word has come that a whale has beached itself in the sandy shallows at Berckhey, a fishing village near Scheveningen. Villagers have tethered it to cables and lugged it ashore where, for two days, it has lain moaning through its leathery blowhole. Buckets of seawater have been doused over the monster's hull, to delay its passage long enough for scientists and scholars to take a proper inventory of it. To Sara's husband, a landscape painter by training, this is a rare chance to capture a spectacle and render it with precision. The springtime markets bring a swift trade in canvases and this will surely fetch a boon price. But on the sandy track toward the coast, Sara realizes that half of Amsterdam is making a pilgrimage to see this harbinger from the deep. Barent will have plenty of competition from sketchers and painters and engravers. Sara is also a member of the Guild of St. Luke, though she often helps Barent with his landscapes, grinding pigments and building up the underlayers. Barent's seascapes and canal scenes are popular among burgomasters and merchants; they fetch twice what she makes for a still life.

They ride in the back of a neighbor's wagon, a painting field kit and a wicker basket of bread and cheese at their feet. Kathrijn is seven and dressed as if for seafaring—a cinched bonnet, sturdy boots, a compass hanging from a chain around her neck. Sara watches her daughter's face as they follow the caravan of carts and men on horseback, out into the polder and toward the grassy dunes. When Barent told them about the talk of the leviathan in the taverns, about his desire to go paint the washed-up animal, Kathrijn's face filled with enormous gravity. It wasn't fear, but steely resolve. For months, she's been plagued by nightmares and bedwetting, by terrible visions in the small hours. “I must come see that, Father,” she said earnestly. Barent tried to change the subject, commented that it was no excursion for a girl. For half an hour, it appeared this was the end of the matter. Then, over dinner, Kathrijn leaned over to Sara and whispered in her ear: “More than anything, I want to see the monster die.” Sara was slightly appalled by this grim thought leaving her daughter's delicate mouth, but she also understood it. A monster had washed up from the deep of the North Sea to die in plain sight, tethered with ropes and cables. All the ravages of the night, the demons and specters that had kept Kathrijn awake for months, might be vanquished in a single afternoon. Sara patted her daughter's hand and returned to her bowl of stew. She waited to talk to Barent about it at bedtime and eventually he relented.

When they crest a hillside that overlooks the coast, Sara is certain that the whole idea is a terrible mistake. From a distance, the animal looks like a blackened, glistening pelt left to wither in the sun. It is surrounded by scores of people, all of them dwarfed by its bulk. A few men have climbed onto its enormous side with measuring rods and wooden pails. A ladder leans beside one of its twitching fins—broad as a ship's sailcloth. As the wagon makes the final trek down to the beachhead, their neighbor, Clausz, says that when he was at sea he once saw a whale eye pickled in brandy. “Big as a man's head, it was, and brined up in a bell jar with all the rest of the captain's specimens from the south latitudes.” Sara sees Kathrijn's eyes go wide and she tucks her daughter's hair behind her ears. “Perhaps the two of us can go take a picnic while Father paints,” Sara says. Kathrijn ignores her and leans toward Clausz sitting on the box seat. “What makes them come ashore like that?” The neighbor adjusts the reins and gives it a moment's thought. “Some say it's a messenger from the Almighty, an oracle. Me, I'm more inclined to say the beast just lost his way. If it can happen to a ship then why not to the fish that swallowed Jonah whole?”

They ride onto the sandy flats, tether the horses to a tree stump, and trundle their belongings down to the site of all the commotion. They set up a base of blankets and baskets. Barent puts together his easel and strainer. He's asked Sara to work at his side and grind pigments; she will also make her own sketches that can be used back in their workroom. “I was thinking I would paint from the water's edge, perhaps with the beast's head in the foreground.” Sara says this arrangement should work nicely, though she believes the scene will carry more drama if painted from above—the enormity of the glassy ocean for scale, the fish marauded by antlike city-dwellers, the shadows shortening in the noonday sun. Barent might even sketch until dusk and then commit the final impressions in the waning light. But recently she's learned that Barent prefers her ideas in the service of his own, so she says nothing.

While Barent scouts out a spot for his painting—no more than a dozen feet from the nearest artist—Sara and Kathrijn join the circling crowd. The air is heady with fishrot and ambergris, a sweetly foul odor. Kathrijn plugs her nose and holds Sara's hand. They get a few admonishing stares from the men in leather aprons who are at work with their measuring rods and pomanders. Sara garners from overheard conversation that an official from Rekenkamer has established claim to the animal and will put the carcass up for auction. She hears: “By noon tomorrow, the devil's bowels will burst out in all this sun and a foul pestilence will cloud the air.” The blubber oil will be sold to the soap works, the teeth used for carved ornaments, the intestinal unguents exported to Paris for musky perfumes. One red-faced chap with a logbook is arguing with a colleague over the length of the devilish beast's
unmentionable
, a difference of two inches on a confirmed length of three feet. They debate it with scientific candor, calling it a
sexing rod
and a
clamper
in quick succession. Sara is glad to see that Kathrijn is oblivious to the conversations of the men—she scrutinizes the hulking mass from under the rim of her bonnet, perhaps drawn into the whorl of her own nocturnal visions.

The tail is the width of a fishing trawler, spotted with flies and barnacles and greenish parasites. The whale is slightly curled in on itself, like a sleeping cat, and before they know it, mother and daughter have wandered into an alcove of festering stench and the much-debated three-foot phallus. Kathrijn's piping voice says, “Look, a giant sucker has attached itself to his belly,” and this gets a rowdy laugh from the nearby men. Sara takes Kathrijn by the shoulders and guides her toward the head. A villager asks them if they want to stare into the eye of the beast himself, for three stuivers each. He's propped a ladder against the jawbone and anchored it in the sand. Kathrijn looks up at her mother plaintively. “You can go up, but I prefer the view from down here,” Sara says. She pays the man his fee and watches as Kathrijn climbs slowly up the ladder. Sara imagines the eye backlit with bafflement, a dumbfounded predator looking out from the dark cave of his own skull and mind. She imagines Kathrijn staring, awestruck, into the abyss of that eye and coming back down, now at peace with the hauntings of her dreams. But Kathrijn's plodding ladder climb and the stilted way she leans over the eye socket suggests a girl carrying out a penance. She hoods her gaze and stares into the whale's eye for a long time, then climbs slowly down onto the beach, refusing to say a word about what she's encountered.