The Music Lesson (10 page)

What is Mickey like? I don’t know. When I try to think of him in specific ways, he evanesces. Intense, funny, kind in an incredibly sexy way, sexy in an incredibly purposeful way. Pete was probably very much like Mickey when he was young.

The first night, when I saw Pete bring out his precious Red Breast, a vintage Irish whiskey he rarely shares, I knew Mickey was in like Flynn. (Who was Flynn, anyway? Some charming Irishman or other, no doubt.) They stayed up talking and drinking until three or four in the morning. By the time Mickey finally came to bed I was sound asleep, having read until the book—my dog-eared high school copy of Maugham’s
Cakes and Ale
—dropped on the blanket a few times, and I had finally given up and turned out the light.

They did it again the second night, and though I was beginning to feel neglected, there was something quite wonderful, too, about the intensity of their affinity. I fell into a peaceful sleep, listening to the low murmuring of the voices of the two men I love.

It was the first Christmas since the accident when I hadn’t felt so lost and alone that all I wanted to do was
lie comatose until after New Year’s when I could go back to work.

“I want you to pick one out,” he said, looking at me with sudden seriousness. “Could you do that?” It was about seven at night, which is to say, we had come in after a day of drifting around the city (Brooklyn Museum, South Street Seaport, World Trade Center) and we had torn our clothes off and gone straight to bed without stopping for food.

Generally, we would wander out onto Amsterdam Avenue afterward, starved, and eat dinner in one of the small places in my neighborhood, or bring something back. We had fallen into this routine almost immediately. Occasionally, when I was at work, Mickey would have started to cook something by the time I came home. These were very happy days. Needless to say, Mickey never did spend very much time in Rego Park.

Which is not to say that in our intense little storm of mutual discovery in those weeks we didn’t find time to talk, to talk about, oh, everything: movies, books, Mickey’s skills and ambitions with fine cabinetry, his love of sailing, my love of art, my work, arguments about the best temperature at which to drink beer, preferences for breeds of dogs, Chinese food, the virtues of sleeping with window shades up or down, Irish politics, stories of childhood adventures, my stories about Pete (with whom
he had chatted cautiously on the telephone a couple of times before they met)—all the usual getting-to-know-you conversations. (Though, as I have said, it emerged later that Mickey, through his mysterious sources, had already gotten to know my particulars.)

Now, with that deepest evening darkness of late December pressing against the windows, we lay twined together like satiated kittens.

I eyed him and put my head back down on the bony indentation below his sternum.

“What do you mean, pick one out? One what? A painting?” I listened to the quiet steady thump of his heart. “There’s one over there,” I said languidly, pointing to the framed poster from the Matisse in Morocco show that hangs on my bedroom wall. “It’s very blue, that painting. Very Moroccan. Very Matisse.” I wasn’t really paying attention yet.

“What I mean is, on a purely theoretical basis, if I showed you a group of paintings, would you automatically know which one was the best?”

“Oh, Mickey, of course, sure. You bet. The Patricia Dolan prize for excellence is awarded to … 
this
one.” I reached up and pressed my fingertips to his philtrum, which is perfectly formed, like that of a Raphael angel. His lips parted a little, and I slid my index finger down and slipped it between them. We were like children, always touching, always playing. He welcomed my finger
with a brief touch from the tip of his tongue, just for an instant, but then he pushed my hand and turned his head away, suddenly serious.

I tried to answer him more fully.

“Every art historian of whom you ask that question would say yes, but the real question is, Would any two art historians pick the same painting? People have their biases. And isn’t it ultimately about taste, anyway? It would depend on the art historians, and on the paintings, and probably on what the art historians had for lunch that day.”

Mickey laughed a frustrated little yelp and rolled over, away from me, dumping me onto the sheet beside him. I felt him tense up in some subtle way. I touched his shoulder and he didn’t say anything for another long moment.

“Mix? I’m sorry I laughed at you. I’ll try to be serious. Is there something you want me to do? I don’t know what you’re asking. Do you want me to look at somebody’s paintings and give advice? Somebody at Simon’s workshop? You know I’m not very good on contemporary work. I haven’t a clue about the gallery scene.”

“Do you think,” he asked in a measured voice, very slowly and deliberately, keeping all of his consonants rounded up instead of letting them blur at the edges, “very seriously, Patricia, given your expertise in Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, that you could pick
out the best Vermeer from a group of paintings that are all by Vermeer?”

“Are you kidding? You mean, go to The Hague and see the Vermeer show with you, something like that? I think you’ve missed the boat; it’s closing after next week. The time to see it was when it was in Washington.”

I rambled on about the Vermeer show, not really noticing the direction of Mickey’s questions. I told him a long and semipointless story that had been told to me by an acquaintance who works at the National Gallery about the President touring the exhibition, unscheduled, and how some two thousand ticket holders—eight hundred an hour was how they were scheduled for that show; just think of that, all those people so anxious to have a glimpse of those twenty-three paintings—had been kept waiting by the Secret Service for two and a half hours because the President had shown up that morning unannounced, with a sudden need for culture.

“Do you have access to special privileges in The Hague because of your Frick connection?” Mickey asked abruptly.

“Not especially. You know we wouldn’t lend any of our three to that show, which is very typical of the Frick,” I answered, still thinking we were talking about what we were talking about. “It’s too bad, for lots of reasons. Our paintings are important—well, any Vermeer is important—but at least two of them should have been included simply from a scholarly viewpoint. And on a
more practical level, there would have been the possibility of some courier assignments coming and going to The Hague for Frick staff, and it would have been a lot easier for all of us to get tickets to the exhibition, too.

“You and I looked at the Vermeers when I was showing you through on that first afternoon, remember? Before we looked at the Fragonard room.
Officer and a Laughing Girl
with the soldier and that big dark hat?
Girl Interrupted at Her Music
was almost next to it. I don’t like her face at all—it’s too weird, flattened, almost squashed. I’m sure he was getting at something, but it doesn’t work for me. Our best Vermeer, the
Mistress and Maid
, is in the West Gallery, in with some of the Rembrandts. It’s the last painting Henry Clay Frick bought before he kicked the bucket, not that you’d need to know that.”

Mickey was nodding impatiently and making a one-handed spooling gesture that was either a signal to keep on as I was or a request to hurry it up and get to the details. I tried to return to what I thought we were discussing, which was my having seen the Vermeer exhibition in Washington.

“I told you then that those Vermeers were skipping the family reunion in Holland, remember? It would have been unconscionable for me to miss the Vermeer exhibition, even if the Frick was sitting it out. So I flew down to Washington on the shuttle to see the show just for the one day, a couple of months ago. I had a VIP pass for the
morning, before the public viewing began. I really hate Washington. Everything feels so governmental. It was a madhouse of people clutching VIP passes, and afterward I positively craved those delicious little Dutch pancakes,
poffertjes
, which I ate the one time I went to the Mauritshuis, the summer of my junior year in college. Have you ever been in Holland, Mix?”

“You’ve already seen all the paintings? The same paintings that are in The Hague right now? At Mauritshuis?” Mickey sat bolt upright and peered down at me intently, as if my rambling disquisition on the Vermeer show suddenly was the most utterly wonderful and original set of remarks anyone had ever made to him. He didn’t answer my question.

“More or less. You pronounced it wrong—it’s just like
house
, not
hwees
. How did you say that—
hwees
? I like that. It sounds Irish when you say it.”

He ignored me and persisted. “You’ve seen all the paintings, then?” I was still puzzled by Mickey’s fascination with my every thought about the Vermeer exhibition.

“I think that there were a couple of paintings that didn’t travel to both shows—maybe not every Washington picture that was stuffed into the show regardless of current thinking was invited to The Hague. Maybe there were a couple of pictures from Dutch museums that were shown in The Hague that hadn’t been especially wanted
in Washington. Traveling exhibitions usually work that way—I don’t remember the details of this one. So, literally, maybe not, but yes, basically, I’ve seen the Vermeer show. When did you get so interested in Vermeer, Mickey? You didn’t seem too fascinated by the ones at the Frick—you actually said you preferred Chardin to anything else in the collection. Actually, your favorite thing of all was the tunnel from the library building to the collection itself.”

He didn’t answer me. He was thinking. Then he spoke, still not really answering me.

“Patricia, if you could have any single one of those paintings in the Vermeer exhibition, which one would it be?” A playful question asked in deadly seriousness.

“
The Music Lesson,”
I said without hesitation, matching him for gravity, not at all sure where this was going. “Do you want to see it? I’ve got about fifty books with Vermeers in them.”

Not waiting for his answer, I hopped off the bed and went out into the hallway, which is lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves for all my books.

“Here she is,” I said a moment later, back with a big volume about Vermeer and his circle that I have owned since Smith. We sat cross-legged, naked together on the bed, the book on the covers between us.

“I haven’t looked at this in a while.” I reached past Mickey for my reading glasses on the bedside table. A few
weeks earlier, I could never have imagined being on such casual and intimate terms with a man again. To think that I could sit this way, naked except for my reading glasses, unself-conscious of so many things—my forty-one-year-old stomach, my personal smells, my hair no doubt looking beddish and wild. I hadn’t been alive in so long.

“I love this woman,” I said after leafing through to find
The Music Lesson
. “I have always loved this woman. See? So, in answer to your question, I choose her. Absolutely the best. Look at that face. Look at those hands. Look at that sifted light. There’s no yellow in the world like a Vermeer yellow.”

“Not
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
?” Mickey sounded a little plaintive.

“No. Certainly not.”

“Reason?”

“No. Personal preference. You asked for the best. For my best. I like
Lady Writing a Letter
, but it just doesn’t get me where I live.”

Mickey was turning pages, as if he was looking for something. He found it. “How about
The Concert
? Do you think that was an important Vermeer?”

“My first Vermeer. Oh, God, I
loved
that picture. I used to visit it all the time when I was a kid. I’ve always thought it was a wonderful painting.” I was so pleased that Mickey kept picking topics I know so much about! Teacher, teacher, call on me, call on me! I know the
answer! “But of course it’s not in the show. It disappeared in 1990—it was part of the big Gardner theft—so I wasn’t thinking about it just then.
Was
might be right. Who knows if we’ll ever see that painting again. I guess no one really knows what that was about.”

Mickey tsked and murmured, “Someone must.” He was leafing through the book, turning pages, squinting at the plates. I think he needs glasses.

“Well, sure, you hear strange rumors from time to time. There’s a corrupt art dealer from Newburyport who claims to know something, but he’s in jail now for fraud and wants a pardon before he’ll talk. And there’s another guy trying to save himself with a deal with the feds, too, an antiques dealer who says he knows something. There’s a lot of buzz about those pictures from time to time, but who knows if anything will ever come of it? I filed a fascinating Interpol bulletin in the library about those paintings just last week. You know the reward is up to five million dollars now? Those were some terrific Rembrandts stolen along with the Vermeer. The last time I was there, it seemed so sad to me, the way the Gardner leaves the spaces on the walls blank, as if to exhibit the absence of the paintings.”

“Wait. Stop.” Mickey inhaled so sharply, I thought he was in some kind of pain, or had developed a cramp. But he was simply keyed up by something he had seen in the text on the page facing
The Music Lesson
.

“It says here that
The Music Lesson
is the smallest
known Vermeer, and it’s on a wooden panel, not canvas. Does any of that affect value?”

“In what sense? These aren’t yard goods, Mix. Vermeer was generally at his best with the intimacy of a room. Other than one of the early pictures,
View of Delft
is his biggest painting, inch for inch, okay? And it’s extraordinary, and it’s considered one of the world’s most beautiful paintings—I’ve always thought that Swann’s Vermeer obsession began with this painting.”

Mickey didn’t necessarily know anything about Proust, but I didn’t stop to footnote. He was intently focused, his head cocked slightly to one side as if he was listening for some distant signal.