The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (7 page)

Today he walks up the cool, wide stairwell and wanders back to a small gallery that houses the Post-Impressionists. He's never been much of an admirer of Van Gogh or Gauguin, but there's something about this weather that makes him want to stare at the indigo shade of a South Sea island and a dark woman's breasts. He anchors himself in front of
Two Tahitian Women
, sets his hat and coat on the leather bench beside him. It looks so modern in its assuredness that it's hard to believe it predates modern cinema, the automobile, air-conditioning, the neon sign. Two girls stare at the viewer, a corona of green and yellow playing on jungle foliage behind them. Both of them stand bare-chested—the girl with the tray of mango blossoms is naked from the waist up and the one on the right has one breast exposed above the neckline of some improvised garment. They are looking toward, but also past, the viewer, as if a child or animal might command their attention outside the frame. It's a sensual gaze but also knowing and vaguely accusatory. It reminds Marty of certain Manet nudes, Olympia on a daybed staring out from another century, one arm crossed in front of her breasts and crotch, creating a boundary the viewer cannot cross. The shading in the Gauguin is heavy with violet and russet, almost nocturnal in its saturation. He hears a few footsteps clicking around the wood floors and he becomes conscious of how long he's been sitting there staring up at those three uncovered breasts.

He walks out to the balcony that overlooks the great hall and then decides to find a pay phone and call Gretchen, to tell her the good news. There's a small bank of phones by the coat check on the first floor, but he has to break a dollar at the museum gift store to make change. He finds half a roll of mints in his pocket, pops one in his mouth, and tries to remember his own office number. He dials the main switchboard and asks for Gretchen. She picks up on the second ring and his name surprises him with its formality—
Marty de Groot's office
.

“Put me through to Marty de Groot right now. That big lummox is going to hear a piece of mind.” He says this in his best Russian drawl—a submarine captain on a vodka binge.

“I've never fallen for that. It's not even a Russian accent. It sounds like you've suffered a head injury.”

Marty lets out a big, minty guffaw. “You're right. Not once in five years.”

“How did the partner lunch go?”

“Did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That we're moving upstairs on Monday.”

“You made partner.” It's both statement and question.

“Yes, just in time for space travel.”

He hears her breathing and smiling into the phone. “That's really wonderful news.”

“I'm not allowed back in the office the rest of the day. Clay's banned me.”

“Well, I thought something was suspicious when Mr. Thomas told me not to schedule anything for your Friday afternoon. That was two weeks ago!”

“They've been plotting.”

The line goes quiet for a moment. He tries to apply his street telepathy to the phone call and discern what she's thinking. Gretchen is midtwenties, a graduate of NYU who still lives in the Village. An English major turned paralegal, she keeps an untranslated copy of
Beowulf
in her desk drawer. More than once he's caught her mouthing the hard gutturals of Anglo-Saxon to herself. Even though she reads obscure novels in the park during her lunch hour and tells stories of exotic restaurants, there's nothing bohemian about her appearance. She comes to the office dressed in impeccably modest wool skirts and demure earrings, her hair always pulled back, a tight spiral of French braids the color of cedar.

He says, “I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you for cleaning off my desk at the end of every day. And I'm sorry I never follow your color-coding system.”

“You're very welcome.”

He doesn't let the silence re-gather. “Why don't you come meet me for a celebratory drink? I'm lurking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, doing everything I can to avoid the tourists in Ancient Egypt. I don't want to make my hypertension any worse.”

“Have you already told Mrs. de Groot the good news?”

He knows the mention of Rachel is not incidental.

“She's visiting her sick mother in the Hamptons. I'm going to surprise her by driving up there in the morning.” The lie comes effortlessly, a dead bolt sliding into a groove.

She pauses and he hears some rustling on her desk.

He says, “But if you just want to take the rest of the afternoon off, that's fine as well. I'll wander here some more.”

“Sure,” she says. “I'd love to meet up. Are you game to go south of Times Square?”

“The map goes dotted for me somewhere below Forty-Second.”

“Meet me at Claude's Tavern in the Village in an hour.”

“If it weren't so hot I'd walk.”

“Do you have any idea how far that is?”

“Couple miles?”

“Four miles, at least.”

They hang up and Marty digs through his pockets for more change. When he calls the apartment, the sound of Hester's voice is gruff and matronly and it's such an affront after Gretchen's warmth that he almost hangs up. Instead, he asks for Rachel and there's an insufferable delay. He wonders about Rachel's life in the house without him, whether she and Hester sit around and watch the soaps together in their housecoats. Does Hester only put on her apron at ten before six each evening, before he walks in the door? All this passes through his mind, and then he's telling Rachel that he's been invited to an impromptu partner dinner and it may go late, that he thinks the news might be very promising. She keeps saying
I hope so, I hope so, for your sake
. And then he hangs up the phone and leaves the museum. Back outside he rolls up his shirtsleeves and looks at his watch, then glances up at the penthouse of his building. Above the terrace wall of the fourteenth floor he can see the tops of the citrus trees that Rachel dutifully prunes and waters. He decides that he's going to walk all four miles down to the Village.

*   *   *

An hour later, he's running late and drenched in sweat. No longer drunk, he feels the first brassy notes of a hangover wash over him somewhere in the Village. He stops strangers to ask about the location of Claude's Tavern, but no one seems to have heard of it. Near NYU, he walks by cafeterias where students mill among steam tables, the smell of stew apocalyptic. He passes Laundromats—
automatics
and
supermatics
—where college kids in Levi's smoke cigarettes and thumb paperbacks and play cards under ceiling fans. He sees big lonely men eating all-day breakfasts at Formica counters and he's convinced this is a foreign country. Storefront churches and delis, a man selling papaya juice from a quilted metal cart. Shopkeepers hauling waxy boxes of produce into the cellars below the sidewalk. It might as well be Mozambique for how exotic it feels.

Half an hour late, he stumbles into Claude's Tavern—a bricked-in basement jammed with bodies. A jazz quintet plies their music through slats of smoky neon and hipsters sway like Pentecostals. He pushes through the crowd, looking for Gretchen, the subway rumbling somewhere beneath his feet. Impossibly, he finds her sitting by herself, reading a French novel in the low-watt hemisphere of a booth. It reminds him of Rachel, briefly, and he has to push away the mental association.

She looks up. “Oh my goodness, you walked, didn't you?”

“I had no idea this was down here.”

“Claude's?”

“The southern half of Manhattan.”

She smiles. He rests a hand at the edge of the table but doesn't sit.

She says, “Don't you get down here for meetings?”

He has to yell to be heard. “The Wall Street firms pretend this isn't here. They put a bag over your head on the taxi ride down.” He looks around and takes in the scene. “I'm going to go get us a drink. If I'm not back in three days read Keats at my funeral. What would you like?”

“Surprise me,” she says. “Something clear with ice.”

He jostles into the crowd and makes for the bar. En route, he watches the band play, five black men in white suits. In high school, he played the trumpet and jazz always makes him sad for the kid who was forced by his fiduciary-minded father to put down the instrument. The trumpeter swivels his horn out toward the room as he murders a fat note, eyeless under his trilby. The fleet pianist angles his ass off the bench to dig into the keys and the drummer is tightly coiled and half in shadow, his knuckles glinting above a cymbal. Marty finally reaches the bar—a barge-like colossus of wood that looks like it's been dredged from the East River. The line is three deep and he holds a twenty in the air to get some attention. He orders himself a neat whiskey and Gretchen a Pimm's Cup loaded with ice. When he gets back to the booth he sets the drinks down and settles on the other side of the table. In this light her face is softened—the delicate spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks looks like a tan.

“I'll never hear you unless you sit over here,” she says. “I should have chosen somewhere else.”

He smiles and makes the move. He leans toward her ear to speak, but the sudden smell of her hair forces him into a pause. Swallowing, he says, “I feel like an anthropologist in the jungles of Borneo.”

“Cheers,” she says, lifting her drink. “Here's to Marty de Groot making partner.”

“Here's to you,” he says. “Because I never would have made it without you. All those times you told Clay that I was meeting with a client when he was in a temper. Thank you!”

They clink their glasses and each take a sip.

“Pimm's makes me think I should be playing tennis.”

“Is it okay?”

“Wonderful.”

“You live nearby if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, this is my secret life. Uptown paralegal by day and weekends in Washington Square Park.”

“It seems to suit you,” he says.

She smiles into her drink, her breath smoking against the ice. He has never cheated on Rachel, not in fifteen years of marriage, but there's been a lineage of near misses, office infatuations and lunches with protégées in barrettes and woolen skirts. It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest. But he feels something shifting in the space between them, a hesitation and nervousness that suggest he's readying to cross a new line. Even though Gretchen has always been attentive to him he knows there's a chance he's misread everything. It's possible he's followed the wrong set of clues, just like the matching of shoes to faces and lives out in the street. He makes two more forays to the bar, each time holding up a twenty to suggest a ridiculous tip. He can feel younger men glaring at him. Back at the booth, he flattens one palm against the grain of the leather and asks her questions. They talk about her childhood and her family, about road trips to Montreal and the difficulty of learning foreign languages. He knows a handful of Dutch phrases and trots them out like drunken Middle English. It gets her laughing. “Better than your Russian,” she says, sipping, letting the ice clink against her teeth. He listens attentively, but he's aware of the heat coming off her stockinged legs under the table, the warm hollow behind her left knee. Her thigh is inches away and it wags toward him when she speaks.

He imagines placing his hand squarely on her leg, or touching the back of her hand, but then there's a commotion that draws his attention. The drummer has just come off a hell-bent solo, giving out a Comanche war cry at the tail end, and now something shifts in the crowd—voices pitch, somebody gets jostled. The atmosphere becomes charged. Marty can smell the room come alive with body heat and beer and something primal. He can smell the violence taking shape even before it happens—molecules heating before a lightning strike. He leans in and says to her, “We should go. I think it's about to get rowdy in here.” He rests his hand on her elbow and leaves it there while she zips up her purse. As they get up from the booth, the scuffling escalates into thrown punches they can hear but cannot see through the welter of packed bodies. As they get to the stairs, Marty looks back down to see a man being hurled across the bar, shards of broken glass in his wake like ice from a comet's tail. He's surprised by how beautiful it looks and how the band keeps playing their tight, syncopated rhythms during the whole thing. Then there's a shift, something telegraphed from the stage. At the outer edge of a solo, the trumpeter gets distracted. His tone goes thin and flat, like he's developed a sudden head cold, and this is the signal to the rest of the room to start running in panic.

*   *   *

They stand on a street corner sometime after midnight. People are spilling out of clubs on MacDougal, couples holding hands and whispering boozily to each other. A few musicians heft their instruments into station wagons and pickups. Marty buys two hot dogs and they stroll under the pretext of him walking her home. The club is still ringing through his whole body, his ears buzzing under the streetlights. They stand in front of her apartment building, a stone facade zigzagged with fire escapes. “There used to be an elevator, but now they're all walkups,” she says. “If you don't mind the alpine hike we can have a nightcap.” When she says it her eyes are on his shoes and then a slight shrug works into her shoulders. He feels a surge of tenderness toward her; he wants to assure her that he's honorable and no matter what will always be kind to her. Instead, he says, “Lead the way, my little Sherpa.” Climbing the darkened stairway behind her, he watches the authority of her ass swaying in her knitted skirt. He feels lust rankle through him, a pound of lead dropping into his stomach. Her apartment is decorated in a mandarin style—blond wood floors and earthen jars and books on lacquered shelves. There's a stack of novels on the low coffee table and a bedroom, faintly visible, where he sees a guitar on the wall and a scarf tossed over a lamp. She decides to make them a drink and goes to the small kitchen and begins opening cupboards filled with neatly stacked crockery and glassware. He suspects dinner parties, a circle of friends that includes bon vivants and actors and photographers. She opens the freezer door and starts in about the buried ice cube trays and how she hasn't defrosted in ages. He watches her as she stares into the diorama of snowmelt and frosted meat hilltops. The freezer ticks and breathes. He imagines pulling the wooden pin from her barrette and her cedar-colored hair falling down her shoulders. He pictures hiking up her woolen skirt from behind and pressing her into the refrigerator door. Then he notices the snapshots attached to the front of the fridge with magnets—a middle-aged couple on a country front porch; a marine, possibly a brother, in uniform; a young girl in polio leg braces leaning up against a tree beside a sunny-faced teenage Gretchen. The tableau, the sudden window into her rural upbringing, might have given his longing a new edge, further particularized his lust, but instead he feels it dissipate. He's never felt for one moment fatherly toward her until now, as she rinses off a handful of frostbitten ice cubes and divides them equally between two glasses.