The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (35 page)

It's oddly comforting to her that he's carried this burden with her name attached to it. She'd imagined herself to be the only one trapped like a speck in the amber of the 1950s. But then something else is pushing down on her and she turns her back to him, walking around the room. She looks up at a wall of graphed coefficients. Beneath the remorse and the sense of betrayal she suddenly feels a cavernous and familiar sense of shame. It is so familiar that she wonders if, in fact, it has ever
not
been swirling there at the pit of her stomach. She understands that she continued to paint the forgery for years in her mind, that she was forever tending the canvas because it was the last time she'd painted anything at all. She would summon it at her desk or on drives to the country with Sebastian—it would glimmer into view through the unsettled light of a dream—and it never failed to hold her attention. The shame was not merely in copying it but in the fact that it was the closest she'd ever come to creating something lasting. The forgery didn't stop after she'd handed off the canvas, it continued into the unfolding of years—the plush academic job, the marriage to an art dealer, the publications and curating of exhibits, none of these spoils would have been offered if anyone knew what she'd done. She'd walk into London galleries and antique stores convinced she'd run into Gabriel with his battered attaché case and that everything would come undone, in an instant. She understands it now in Q's bright, meticulous office. She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.

Marty says, “That was a dark period in my life.”

“You stayed married? Did your wife ever find out the whole truth?”

“It took years of therapy—a grim Freudian with Danish leather furniture—but we came back from the brink. I never took her forgiveness for granted, but neither did that look of betrayal ever go away when she looked at me. I became faithful, if you can believe that. It was like I'd had a near-death experience. The death of the soul, if that doesn't sound like too much.”

“It sounds a little much,” she says. Then she softens, comes back to his side. “For what it's worth, there's nothing I've regretted more in my life than painting the de Vos. I never stopped looking over my shoulder, waiting for that ramshackle life to hunt me down.”

The air shifts between them. The silence, when it re-gathers, is unhurried.

He says, “Well, excellent, we have regret in common. I tried to make amends. The whole point of the reward and the newspaper ad was an apology. That money was meant for you. I imagined you making a fresh start to…” His voice trails off. Then, he says, “What happened to you after you left?”

“After the copy—” She begins again. “After the forgery, I went to England, where I was the most law-abiding citizen in the world. I admonished my ex-husband for taking bogus deductions on his taxes and never drove above the speed limit. I acted like a goddamn saint. It's laughable, really.”

“So you married.”

She nods.

He smiles weakly. “Children?”

She shakes her head. “I wasn't cut out for that.” She looks over at Q's desk, at the cups of sharpened pencils and the goldenrod shipping forms. Something occurs to her. “Why were you heckling from the back of my lecture hall the other day?”

He grins. “That punk in the wool cap had it coming.”

“He's all right. Just naive.”

“You spoke about the Vermeers like old lovers.”

“They are, in a way.”

The conversation falters again.

The thread is lost, he thinks. What else is there to say? You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again. The world is full of noise again. He can hear the mechanical gears of the industrial clock on the wall. He has always liked plain, white-faced clocks with red needlelike second hands.

She says, “I want to show you something. Can you walk?”

“I'm not putting those shoes back on.”

“Well, you'll have to come barefoot.”

She stands and grabs Q's key chain from a hook on the wall. Q and Max are the only ones beside security with keys to every room of the museum. She leads him to a set of storerooms. He hobbles behind her, swearing under his breath.

“Did you know that almost every museum has a room full of fakes?”

“I didn't know that.”

“They come in over the years. Bequeathed or sold to the institution. Every year the technology gets better and most museums keep finding fakes in their own collections. They've had them hanging for years a lot of the time. Of course, they feel compelled to take them down and keep things under wraps.”

She jiggles the storeroom door handle and tries a different key. She can hear Marty breathing beside her. The lock gives and she pushes open the steel door. Inside, it smells of aluminum and plastic sheeting.

She says, “They don't want the fakes drifting into the open market and burning them seems a little draconian.”

She turns on the lights and the cluttered room sputters to life. The copy of
At the Edge of a Wood
has been propped up on a shelf, facing out. It's surrounded by other paintings, some of them wrapped, some naked. A masterful Manet, a Julian Ashton, a Cézanne, a Picasso, a Brett Whiteley.

Marty blinks and says, “I left my eyeglasses back at the hotel. I can barely see my own hand. What am I looking at?”

“My beautiful lie, Marty. It showed up just before you kindly brought us the original.”

He cocks his head, as if listening to a voice from another room. He didn't know his exact intentions when he decided to loan the painting, but this eventuality now seems hardwired into the fabric of possibility. His act of repentance was also, it seems, an act of malice. He remembers that day in 1959 when he met the British dealer at an uptown restaurant. The shabby little man had the original but not the fake with him; he said they'd destroyed the copy after the advertisement had appeared in the newspaper. He made a show of a manila envelope full of ashes and strips of canvas. Marty had asked about Ellie and he'd said that she'd gone back to Australia. It wasn't Marty's concern what happened to the fake, after all. The reward had been intended for Ellie—a sum of atonement, a payout against his own guilt—but now that this man was staring at him with bread crumbs on his lapels there was no backing out of the arrangement. He might have run out of the restaurant and thrown the painting into the East River. So Marty took the painting into the men's room, unwrapped it, and studied it. The antique copper nails he remembered were gouged into the flesh of the frame. But what if that too had been manufactured in the interim and this was still a fake? He doubted his instincts even as he came back and put the cashier's check on the table with the bitterly ironic word
reward
printed on the memo line. The foolish Brit said he would have preferred cash, to which Marty said, “I don't pay thieving cunts in cash.” The whole episode was over before Marty's rare steak arrived. He remembers eating alone because he sure as hell wasn't going to share a meal with this weasel. Of course the fake was kept and resold. Of course the past was still alive and throbbing in the veins of the present.

*   *   *

They spend an hour talking in the closed museum restaurant, looking down through the big windows at the Woolloomooloo docks. From the darkened waters of the harbor, buoys flash blue and green, tossing shards of light back and forth from Bradleys Head to Garden Island. Ellie knows all the names and the ferry routes; her childhood is written into the crags and coves and bays. She tells him he should make it over to the zoo before he leaves and see some of the old houses in Mosman. She brings him up to speed on the other de Vos painting, the child's funeral procession, because he confesses the gallery was a blur of colors loosed from their frames. She tells him she's leaving for the Netherlands in the morning to return the fake. He asks her lots of questions: the name of the private museum in Leiden, what the funeral painting depicts in detail. She says, “When I'm over there I'm going to do some digging. I want to find out what really happened to her.”

Marty says, “Will you write to me and tell me what you find out?”

“I'd be happy to.”

“And not by e-mail. An actual letter.”

“On paper.”

They look out at the darkened parkland that leads down to the harbor.

She says, “You were the first man I fell in love with.”

He catches his breath and says, “I can't imagine.”

“You knew exactly how to reel me in.”

“Because I was smitten myself. I'd stare at your exquisite forgery in my study at night and plan our next encounter. I think I fell for you the first time we met at the auction house, the way you talked about the paintings. I bought those four copper paintings just to impress you. Cost me a fortune. I don't think I even knew what I was bidding on.”

“Do you still have them?”

“Of course.”

She smiles at this, staring at his reflection in the wall of glass.

From the entrance court, they can hear the sound of chairs being folded up, of the event winding down.

He says, “I'm suddenly very tired. I think it's time this old man got to bed. I'll be up in a few hours with jet lag.”

They discuss possibilities for getting Marty back to his hotel with his bare feet and blistered heels. He refuses to put his shoes back on.

“Which hotel?” Ellie asks.

“I'm drawing a blank, but it's nearby. Somewhere I have my room key with the name on it.”

She says, “I have an idea. Stay here and I'll be back.”

She returns after a few minutes with a wheelchair from the guest services and coat check area. “Hop in. I'll give you a ride back to the hotel.”

He looks mortified. “There's no way in hell I'm letting you push me through the night in that thing. I have exactly twenty percent of my dignity left and that ride would cost me a good deal more than that.”

She laughs and flourishes a hand down the chrome sides of the chair, as if it's a prize on a game show. Now he's the one laughing.

“I'll go barefoot,” he says.

“We do have taxis in this country.”

“Walk me back,” he says.

They put his shoes in a brown paper bag from the restaurant and leave the wheelchair beside the counter. Back out toward the entrance court, the gathering has petered out; only the diehards and the drunks are still at it. The catering company is ferrying small plates and champagne flutes into plastic bus tubs. Something flashes through Marty's mind and he gently touches Ellie's elbow as he pads along in bare feet. It's the hand pressure one reserves for dancing. “How did they get the goddamn painting out of my house in the first place? And who took those pictures? Your accomplice never did tell me that.”

His hand is still on her elbow, now on the pretext that it's helping him stabilize. She's surprised that she doesn't flinch, that there's no electrical jolt. It's somehow consoling to both of them. She puzzles at it while she tries to answer his question: “The sad truth is that I have no idea. I knew nothing about the logistics. I really was the paintbrush for hire.”

Marty lowers his face in contemplation. “The same private detective who gave me your name and address told me that he thought it was the catering company we used for an Aid Society dinner we had in November 1957. He thought they did the swap, but we never could prove it.”

From under the archway that leads into the exhibition gallery, Max Culkins looks at them incredulously as they approach. Marty sees them through his eyes—the old barefoot blue blood, the cuffs of his tuxedo pants rolled up, hobbling along with a brown paper bag and a curator's elbow. Marty nods at Max, who's being buttonholed by an elderly female donor by the looks of it. Marty gives him a salute.

Marty says to Ellie, “Wait, I want to see the new de Vos.”

“I thought you couldn't see anything.”

“You can describe it to me.”

Ellie turns for the gallery and they pass Max Culkins in the archway. Max and the donor stop talking to take in the spectacle. Max says, “Is everything all right, Ellie?”

“Mr. de Groot is having an attack of gout, but I'm getting him back to the hotel.”

Marty suppresses a smile. He can tell Max Culkins wants to break off and interrogate them, but something about them shuffling across the parquet floor is so surreal that he's rendered speechless.

They continue on to the section devoted to the de Vos paintings. They stand directly under the funeral scene.

After a moment of contemplation, she says, “It's a funeral procession, but they're carrying a child-size coffin down from a darkened church. The clouds are brooding and cumulous. You know the Dutch use the word
wolkenvelden
to describe these skies. It means cloudfields. The river is frozen, just like in your painting. She became preoccupied with winter and ice, just like Avercamp did. There are children and onlookers clambering alongside the procession or watching from down on the ice. There's a village downriver, but no smoke or firelight. It's a deadly calm. The most unusual aspect of the painting is that it seems as if the entire scene is painted from above.”

“How do you mean?”

“As if she's painting from up a tree or on top of a tall house. The whole perspective is from up on high, the vanishing point out beyond the frozen fields. It's signed and dated in 1637. We thought she might have been dead by then. Or at least that she'd stopped painting.”

He almost says, “I could come with you, you know. To Leiden. I'd buy us first-class tickets. We'd scour the countryside looking for her trail.” He stares up at the painting and imagines her response. She would say something witty but definitive: “We both know that would be interesting for about three hours.”