The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (34 page)

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Ellie sees him at the back of the room—the only man in a tuxedo—and knows instantly that he's not here to plunder her life. As she talks about art as the great window into culture, she brings her eyes again and again to his slumped shoulders. In her dreams, she'd conjured the melodrama of him unmasking her in public, but now she sees a man ravaged by age, shrunken and sallow-cheeked, still dapper but a little wobbly on his feet.
This
is the man who held her life and affections in his palm all those years ago? She's never seen anyone after a four-decade hiatus before and the effect is startling. The husk of the younger man is still there, in the aristocratic nose and jawline and the elegant hands, but his balding scalp has the consistency of blotting paper and his skin is the color of weak tea. It's the chromatic certainty of death. She's surprised to feel a burst of pity. She'd always imagined him suspended in recollected time—an energetic adversary, the virile blue blood in driving moccasins, his cashmered arm out the window of the speeding Citroën. Wasn't the promise of immense wealth a cryogenic cloister in which to grow old? Couldn't decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin? All these years, she has kept him in his forties. It opens out before her during her speech, a backdrop to her words about the role of seventeenth-century women in Dutch society.
Sara de Vos was somehow able to cut against the grain, to find her way into outdoor scenes because of her unique circumstances. With the new funeral painting, there is also strong evidence to suggest that she continued to grow and strengthen in her art
. She says all this while realizing that even the old Brooklyn apartment has remained hers, preserved exactly as she left it in the autumn of 1958. The windows flung open, the mason jars brimming with solvents, the ceiling mold fluorescing at night, the expressway traffic streaming behind the curtains. Her museum of squalor and anonymity. She went back to New York numerous times for work but never once went to see the old neighborhood. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was the graveyard where she'd buried her twenties.

When her speech is over she steps down from the stage and decides to be the one to approach first. That weekend with him in upstate New York has never stopped replaying and unraveling in her mind—the tartan furniture of the quaint hotel, the narrow twin bed where he took her virginity under false pretenses. She had offered it up because she was tired of carrying her virginity around like a penance and Jake Alpert seemed like a safe bet, a widower reentering the fray of the living. She'd imagined courteous and patient lovemaking, an attentive older man, and instead she got a grim, silent impostor. She never got over the feeling of violation, but now something shifts in her as she comes toward him. When he looks at her she sees that it's regret, not vengeance, that's brought him halfway around the world. It's a look of bruised self-loathing as his eyes lower then come up gently from her feet. His face changes and she sees something entirely familiar—that odd mixture of tenderness and playful attention from half a century ago. He smiles and gives a slight shrug.

Max Culkins is suddenly at her side. He makes introductions when they're standing just a few feet away from Marty and the champagne table.

“Eleanor, I'd like you to meet our gracious benefactor of the beautiful de Vos,
At the Edge of a Wood
. Marty de Groot, this is Eleanor Shipley, the curator of the exhibition.”

Marty is pretty sure he's bleeding through his socks. He wants to have a Scotch and lie in a warm bath. Even without his glasses, having her this close makes it hard to breathe. He says, “So I hear. I managed to turn up my hearing aid during Ellie's speech. May I call you Ellie?”

“Of course,” Ellie says.

Max fetches three glasses of champagne. They stand through an awkward silence as the crowd mills toward the gallery.

Max makes a toast. “To Dutch women of the seventeenth century.”

“Hear, hear,” Marty says.

They clink their glasses and drink.

Max says, “Mr. de Groot here has quite a collection of Flemish and Dutch masters. Ellie, your assignment for the evening is to convince him to leave us a few things that the Met doesn't want.”

“I'd rather not ask for crumbs from the table,” Ellie says. “I'd rather convince him to give us something the Met wants very badly.”

Marty idles a finger on a button of his tuxedo jacket. His fingernails are still manicured and white. “The Met is slowly poisoning me and they send spies to check on my ailing health. Do you think you're up for that kind of curatorial espionage?”

“We'll do our best,” Max says, a little uneasily. Somebody catches his eye in the crowd. “Well, if you'll excuse me, I must head into the gallery and make the rounds with the donors and journalists. Marty, I'll leave you in Ellie's capable hands.”

Ellie and Marty watch him disappear on the other side of the stone vestibule.

Ten seconds of silence. The sound of dress shoes on parquet flooring.

He folds his arms, the champagne flute jutting from one elbow, exposing the gold lion heads of his cuff links. She notices that he still wears the same cologne—an alpine and citrus telegram that arrives from 1958. He rocks gently onto the balls of his feet, about to launch into something, then he drops back and stares mutely out into the commotion. She takes a step back, turns her shoulders toward the champagne table.

In a low, steady voice, he says, “For what it's worth, I didn't come here to ruin your life. You should know that at the outset.”

She says nothing.

He blows some air between his lips, as if he might whistle into the gaping silence.

She says, “How do you know you didn't ruin my life forty years ago?”

“From what I can see, you never looked back.”

“I looked back, believe me,” she says.

“That makes two of us.”

She surveys the entrance court, the art groupies and laggards who are more interested in the free food and bubbles than a roomful of masterworks by baroque Dutch women.

Then she turns back to him: “Did you come all this way just to reminisce about old times?” Her voice takes on an edge she doesn't like, so she dampens it with a sip of champagne.

“Is there somewhere we could talk privately? Also, I'm in desperate need of some aspirin and some Band-Aids.”

Ah, the sense of easy entitlement, as if she's got pills and Band-Aids in her purse. It sets something off in her and she stops trying to temper her speech. Louder than she intends it to be, she says, “How is it even possible you're still alive?”

Instead of flinching he leans in, enjoying his own response. This is the other Marty de Groot, the guy with a thousand quips and rejoinders in his pockets like tiny scraps of colored paper. “Wheat germ and beta-blockers for the most part,” he says. “A miracle combination. If FDR hadn't been so run-down with hypertension, Stalin might not have taken Eastern Europe at Yalta. Do you ever think about that?”

She finds this infuriating. “No, I've never thought of that. Not a single time.”

Quietly, he says, “They say regret eats you alive,” then he looks down at his hands. “But, actually, it
keeps
you alive. It gives you something to push against. That's why I'm here. To apologize. I wronged you and I've never been more sorry about anything in my life. I kept waiting for a sign, for a way to cross paths again. Then I got the call from the museum…”

He's still looking down at his hands, as if the past is pouring through his fingertips. His eyes are still sad and dark, she thinks, when they're not in the service of banter. She remembers the eddies of reflection, the quiet beneath all that brash worldliness. He says, “Also, I thought you'd like to see the painting again after so many years. You know it better than I ever did.”

It occurs to her that he still doesn't know that the fake has surfaced. How could he unless Max has divulged the museum's embarrassing situation? After much lobbying and letting Max drone on about his potential legacy and his retirement, Ellie was able to convince Max to let her be the one to return the forgery to Leiden. The painting is now in the basement storage closet, waiting to be packaged in the morning. She'd lied and said she needed to do some quick research in the Netherlands anyway. But she'd assumed Max would quietly let Marty de Groot know of the museum's
pickle
with the Leiden shipment. That was just the word he'd use, she was sure of it. But from the relief on Marty's face, he's oblivious to the fact that the loaned painting and its double have brought her life and career to a crossroads.

He says, “Would you give me the chance to explain myself? Can we go somewhere?” He pulls up his trouser leg and shows her the dark stain on his sock. “I've lost a gallon of blood from these Italian shoes. They're made of fucking wood, as far as I can tell.”

“Aren't you too old to be swearing like that?”

He waves a dismissive hand, still looking at his feet.

She says, “It looks painful. Follow me.”

She leads him to an elevator and they go down to the loading docks and the packing area. She knows Q has an industrial first-aid kit in his office. The fluorescent lights blink on and Marty sits down gently in the swivel chair. She refuses to tend his wounds, such as they are, so she hands him a few Band-Aids and some Panadol and watches him with folded arms. He lifts one leg and gingerly takes off his shoe and sock with a sigh. His bloodied heel looks as if it's been grated and she can't help wincing. He says, “I can't get the Band-Aid to stick.” It's the voice of a child, she thinks, plaintive and willful.

She ducks out of the office and fetches a few paper towels from the packers' break kitchen. When she comes back she hands them to him and digs through the first-aid kit for some antibiotic gel. After a few minutes of watching him blot his heel she eventually gives in and squats down in front of him. He doesn't smell old at close range, that's the funny thing. He smells like a walk in the woods, like breath mints and cologne and vintage luggage. It baffles her. “Let me do it,” she says impatiently.

She dabs the heel and holds it there before applying a thin film of clear gel that tints red as she rubs it gently around. Away from the heel, the skin of his foot is pale and somehow untouched by eight decades of walking the planet. There are no calluses, no unsightly toenails. She's always assumed ruined feet and orthopedic footwear were inevitable in old age. Perhaps this is what a cocooned life might yield—ageless feet. Annoyed, she goes back to the first-aid kit and opens a packet of cotton gauze. Placing the gauze over his heel, she unpeels a Band-Aid and presses it down.

She tells him to take off the other sock and shoe. “I have to admit,” she says, “I don't mind the sight of your blood.”

He brightens—she can feel it in his body even though she doesn't look at him. She repeats the brisk triage on his other foot.

Looking down at his bandaged foot, he says, “I never forgave myself for what I did to you. I'm so very sorry for it.”

Something about the candid, fluorescent light of Q's office allows this to reach her. Her face is suddenly hot and she doesn't know where to look.

He says, “For what it's worth, I really was in love with you, Eleanor.”

She looks at him squarely over his kneecap, determined to keep her voice under control. “It was unbelievably cruel. I thought I was going to marry Jake Alpert and have a weekend house in Connecticut.”

He looks away and the room goes quiet.

Eventually, he says, “I'm not going to justify anything I did, that's the first thing. But you might want to know—”

“Know what?” she says.

“The context.”

“An odd word choice.”

“Agreed.” But he decides to continue. “Rachel and I were reeling from two miscarriages and my career as a lawyer was lunging toward its mediocre highpoint. Patents were a trifling puzzle to me, they meant nothing. Inheriting money ruined me as a lawyer, maybe as a person. Thank God I never stepped into a courtroom. I was bored and unhappy, looking for something to get me out of bed in the mornings. When the painting went missing it gave my life a ruthless kind of focus. I manufactured quite a display of indignation, talked about it until I bored everyone senseless, hired a private detective, and we tracked you down in your apartment.”

Swallowing, Ellie says, “Oh, God, that apartment…”

“I thought I would just bait the trap and then hand you and that Brit dealer over to the police. Then something odd happened.” He places one hand on the back of a bandaged heel, his lips thinning.

Ellie takes in the wall of hanging clipboards and the industrial-green filing cabinets. There's a chance, she thinks, that he might cry, and she wants to avoid that spectacle for both their sakes. But when he continues his voice is suddenly animated.

He says, “Not only did I fall in love with this odd little Australian art expert who was way too young for me, with the way she talked about paintings as if they were extensions of her own flesh and mind, but also I liked myself around her more than I could remember. She buoyed me up. So, I courted her—and my new, better self—as if my life depended on it. None of that was fake…”

He says all this to the side of her face as she studies the walls.

Then he says: “But then the deceit set in, of course, eventually burrowed in like a cancer. I'd never had affairs but I always felt like I was one phone call away from crossing over. So we dated, and I plotted because I was arrogant and stubborn. It was such a wild, audacious plan. And who the fuck were these people anyway stealing paintings off my wall? So I brought your forgery over that weekend we went upstate, knowing it would be there when you got back. That was supposed to be the unveiling. And then there we were in that sad little hotel upstate and you offered yourself up to me. And it was more than I could take. But I went ahead and took it anyway … and it's dogged me ever since.”