Her Infinite Variety (20 page)

"Even a son who publicly asserted that his father was of unsound mind and putty in the hands of a designing woman?"

"But, Clara, that was just legal gobbledygook!"

"When a person throws that much mud, Elmina, some of it is bound to stick."

"But not forever!"

"Well, for a while. Longer than we've had, anyway."

Miss Tyler nodded to indicate her acceptance that this short round was over. "I'll bring it up again next year."

***

Clara's favorite beneficiary and the source of her greatest interest was the New York colossus, the Museum of World Art, on whose stellar board she had taken Eric's old place. It was not long after her first major grant to that institution that its president wisely promoted her to the Acquisitions Committee, and there she formed a delightful friendship with Oliver Kip, the curator of Italian painting, whose brilliantly convincing presentations to the members had aroused the jealous indignation of the other department heads who feared an imbalance in moneys appropriated for the purchase of artifacts.

Clara was perfectly aware that Kip was concentrating his particular charm on herself, for he was too smart to be unaware that even if the Acquisitions Committee outvoted Mrs. Tyler in the proposed purchase of an object that he coveted she might well arrange for her foundation to buy it. But Kip's charm was such that she had no objection to being its victim. After all, everyone conceded that he was an expert in the Italian Renaissance. His record in the objects he had acquired for the museum was without a stain.

He was a bachelor, apparently a couple of years her junior; he admitted, perhaps not quite truthfully, to thirty-seven. He was a bit on the short side and just the tiniest bit plump, but he was agile and possessed of a catlike grace in all his movements, debonair in his courtliness, with smooth skin and thick curly brown hair pulled straight back from a broad pale cerebral brow, a fine aristocratic nose, thin tight lips and eyes of a serenely questioning blue.

He took her on guided tours of the museum, and not just his own department but all the others; he seemed to be as familiar with Roman or Greek art as with Italian, and his knowledge even embraced primitive Africa. He was vivid but at the same time concise and to the point. Whether he was telling her the story of a grand duchess, painted by Vigee-Lebrun on her visit to Saint Petersburg, or Gauguin's liaison with a Tahitian woman, or how Philippe de Champaigne had to express the human body in robes because his Jansenism forbade him to paint the nude, he wove art and history into a tapestry of delight.

The first social occasion to which he invited her was a dinner for eight that he was giving for the president of the museum and his wife. His apartment was small but as exquisite as she had expected. His passion for the Italian Renaissance had not included its rather massive furniture or its heavy porcelain; it was represented only by his collection of master drawings on the walls. The rest was drawn from the elegance of the Venetian eighteenth century: delicately wrought chairs upholstered in yellow silk, consoles with gilded animal legs, mirrors of stained glass in intricately carved frames. And in the air a faint odor of incense.

Oliver was carefully turning the pages of a huge album spread out on a table to show Clara and another early arrival his finest drawings, kept there and not hung to avoid sunlight, when she suddenly caught his hand with an exclamation of excitement.

"Oh, wait, let me look longer at this one!"

"Trust you, Clara, to pick my prize," he said with a smile. "It's Rembrandt."

The drawing depicted Christ returning from the Mount of Olives to find the three disciples, whom he had asked to keep watch, fast asleep. A mere dozen or so masterstrokes had sufficed to endow the face and upheld hands of Jesus with a wonderful sense of sorrow, acceptance and love, tinged with a foreboding of the doom that awaited him.

"The brown wash on the trees in the background may have been added by another hand," Oliver suggested. "But it doesn't hurt the overall effect."

"Where on earth did you get such a marvel?" she asked.

But Oliver caught sight now of a couple entering the room and he abruptly closed the album. "Here is our president. We must not show him too many treasures."

"Why? Did you filch them? I could hardly blame you."

"No. A sharp eye can make up for a thin purse. But we must not arouse his envy."

On her next visit to the museum she wanted to see all the Rembrandt drawings in the collection, to compare them with his, and, meeting her in the great hall to guide her to the storage rooms, they passed through the Greek and Roman galleries. He could never, however, withold a passing comment, and he paused to show her the base of a column taken from a Roman edifice in Caesarea. On it was inscribed a date and part of the letters in the name and title of Pontius Pilate, Procurator.

"You see before you," he announced gravely, "a most significant window into the past. No other contemporary archeological, epigraphic or numismatic evidence exists that the judge of Jesus ever lived."

"What about the Gospels?"

"All written later. They might be as fictional as Anatole France's delightful story of the aged Pilate, retired to a villa on the Bay of Naples, who cannot even recall the name of the Jewish thaumaturgist whom he delivered to the mob."

"You mean Christ himself might not have existed?"

"Oh, I don't say that. I simply point out how slender the evidence is. All hearsay that would be excluded by any court of law. That is why I cling to this pedestal. Pilate, at least, existed. And out of that I can deduce the whole New Testament, the way a dinosaur can be deduced from a single bone in its toe."

"You mean that from Pilate you can deduce the Crucifixion?"

"Just so. For had Pilate spared him, Jesus would have done himself in by continuing to preach, right into his old age, the imminent destruction of the world that never came."

"You sound like Gibbon. Are you even a Christian, Oliver?"

"You mean do I believe in all the horrors of the early church? The persecutions, the burnings, the relic hunting, the theological split hairs, the idiotic Crusades? I should hope not! In history I skip directly from the Greeks to Leonardo!"

"Using your pedestal as a steppingstone?"

Going to art galleries with Oliver was even more exciting. Seated with him in a private back room after the dealer had brought out the work of art requested and placed it on a table or easel before them and then discreetly retired—Kip could not endure the presence of a chattering salesman while he studied an artifact—Clara would silently wait for his first comment. She could always tell when he wanted to acquire something for the museum, for he seemed to turn into a different person. His voice would become tense and sharp; he would make no effort to persuade or dazzle or coax her as a potential donor. Oh, no, he was suddenly above all that. He seemed to be sternly offering her the choice of damning herself forever as a hopeless philistine or just managing to squeeze through the closing gates of the angels. She was a bit afraid of this second Oliver Kip.

The second Oliver was very much in evidence one morning when they were at the Lecky Gallery examining the small portrait of a young man, apparently a Florentine, seen in profile, head and shoulders, against a background of blue hills and a silvery winding road on which two men in armor were riding a black and a white steed. The youth, brilliantly handsome, was wearing a red cap over his finely curled raven locks and a pleated red doublet over a black tunic. Clean-shaven, his features were strong and pale, and his eye, bold and piercing, had yet in it what seemed to signify something more than intelligence, perhaps even a rare sensitivity.

Oliver had been silent so long that at last she asked: "Who is he? Do we know?"

"Perhaps a member of the Strozzi family."

"And the painter?"

"They're not sure. It could be Ghirlandaio. A painter absurdly underestimated by Berenson. Or his workshop. But I seem to make out the master's touch. Although the date's a little late for him. You can read it on the cornice over the subject's head. 1492."

"The year Columbus sailed the ocean blue!"

"But rather, for us Renaissance lovers, the year France invaded Italy and started the whole bloody occupation that, with Spain to help, stamped out the light of civilization."

"Forever?"

"Well, have we really had any since then? Before the Renaissance, men looked for God in the sky. Since the Renaissance, they've looked for God in other men: Napoleon, Lincoln, Hitler, Stalin, what have you. But in the Renaissance, men looked for God in themselves. Consider this wonderful young Strozzi, or whoever he is. He doesn't trouble himself with visions of heaven or hell or dream up ideal societies to make the miserable creatures around him more miserable than they already are. He will settle for the one life he has and make it a beautiful thing!"

But Clara wasn't going to let him ride roughshod over her. "So to hell with everyone else? The only time to live was the Renaissance? What about all the people they poisoned? What about that poor clumsy page in the Symonds book you gave me whom one of Cesare Borgia's officers punished by pushing him into the fireplace and holding him there with a poker until he was burned to a crisp? Was that so beautiful?"

Oliver looked at her with a surprised exasperation. "Really, Clara, what sort of argument is that? There are brutes in every era."

"And Machiavelli? You approve of his cynicism?"

"His principles guide every statesman today. It's no longer fashionable to admit them, that's all."

She decided she had gone far enough. There was one sure way to change him back to the other Oliver Kip. "Well, I give up. I never heard such an existentialist. And do you know something? You look very much like your Strozzi. Isn't that a sufficient reason for my recommending its purchase by the Tyler Foundation?"

His smile was now radiant. "Clara, you're a darling! And a shrewd eye, to boot. For that portrait is a steal if it's a true Ghirlandaio, and I think I'll be able to prove it is! But hush!" And he glanced around conspiratorially in mock fear of being overheard by a salesman with an ear to a keyhole.

The purchase of the Florentine youth by a grant from the Tyler Foundation marked a new stage in their friendship. Oliver was less deferentially polite with her now; he seemed to regard her more as a partner than either a trustee of his employer or a pupil of his own. There was a kind of intimacy in the way he explained things to her that she found at first titillating and then pleasantly erotic. It was beginning to be clear to what their relationship was tending.

She was now much more aware of him physically. Having been brought up in France by expatriate parents, Oliver manipulated his body and limbs with the coordinated grace of a perfect Gallic gentleman. His every move and gesture was confined to its purpose with a seamless efficiency. If he opened a door and stepped aside for her to enter first, if he got into a taxi before her so that she wouldn't have to climb into the farther seat, if he stooped in a restaurant to retrieve a napkin she had dropped, he lent charm to his action. She had a sense that this man would never indulge in anything so vulgar as foreplay, that when the moment came for sexual union it would be accomplished as easily and effectively as any other demonstration of bodily activity, as if indeed to show that all other such had been his own method of foreplay.

As the notion that they were about to become lovers took firm hold in her mind, it was accompanied by a sudden wakening of her senses stronger than that evoked by any other man in her life, including her long forgotten first fiancé with the crew cut and broad shoulders. Stronger but very different. She wanted to belong to Oliver, to be appreciated by his cool, appraising eyes, to be added to his collection of beautiful objects. She didn't even seem to care very much about the state of his heart, whether or not he loved her in a romantic sense. Could Oliver love? Did she even want him to? She knew only that she wanted him.

And when it happened it was, unlike most such encounters in life, very much what she had fantasized. They had been to a gallery to inspect a show of paintings of French interiors by Walter Gay, an American expatriate of the belle époque who had specialized in depicting the elegant rooms of his own and his friends' chateaux. The Museum of World Art had lent one of these, and Oliver wished to see if it was properly displayed.

"Did Gay never put people in his rooms?" Clara asked after they had made their tour of the gallery. "Why are they always empty?"

"Oh, I think he did when he was young. But for some reason after middle age he banned the human figure. One theory is that he was so bored by the stylish set that flooded these chambers, that he shooed them all away, like Christ and the money changers."

Clara paused before the study of a little foyer with a marble parquet floor and french doors opening on a garden. "Maybe Gay was thinking of the people who
should
have occupied these rooms. Charming people, of course! Can't you just see the couple who walked through those doors into that lovely garden? Only a few minutes ago? Beautiful! That might have been his way of doing their portraits!"

Oliver smiled. "That is real beauty, then? What you
don't
see?"

When they walked up Park Avenue afterwards and came to his building, he paused.

"Will you come up, my dear?" he asked her in a tone that was suddenly serious, almost grave. "I should like you to see my apartment."

"But, Oliver, what are you talking about? You know I've seen it!"

"Ah, but only with others."

"You mean I must see it empty? Like a Walter Gay?"

"You must see it with just me. And the best room you haven't seen at all."

Which was her introduction to his gilded Venetian bedroom with the wide-canopied bed and the sculpted angels over the bedstead. But before he made love to her he made a request that thrilled her as much as it surprised her. He asked her if she would pose for a sketch in the nude. When she had disrobed and settled herself on the bed in the pose of Goya's
Maja Desnuda,
he, still fully clothed, sat down to work on his drawing in utter silence for some twenty minutes. It had the effect of perfectly preparing her for what was to follow. It made her feel that her exposure was the most natural thing in the world, even a kind of professional exercise, and it dispelled any shrinking fear that her body, no longer young, might fail to please him. It also put him in a position of male mastery that more than balanced any consideration of her being the rich patroness of his employer. If she was a goddess, she had nonetheless stripped to submit herself to the judgment of Paris.