The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (36 page)

After a few more moments in the gallery, they head out toward the main entrance. Max Culkins is nowhere to be seen, just a few security guards checking their watches. They clear the vestibule and foyer and walk out into the street. They take the footpath along Art Gallery Road, heading toward the city.

Ellie says, “Watch your step. I feel like junkies come to the Domain to shoot up. You might step on a needle.”

“I can't see my feet anyway, so you'll have to keep me from ruin.”

He still holds her elbow with the slightest amount of pressure.

She says, “That's a lot of responsibility. Did you remember the name of your hotel?”

Marty digs through his trouser pockets for his room key. He hands it to Ellie to read—the Sheraton on the Park.

They reach the end of the Domain and St. Mary's Cathedral looms above the tree crowns. The twin spires make Marty nostalgic for a strand of faith or religion he's never had. He says to Ellie, “Can we cut through the park?” and she says, “I don't fancy being mugged while I'm walking with a gout-stricken old man.” They walk past St. James station and make the left turn onto Elizabeth Street. The streets are mostly empty, but they get a few wary glances from bundled passersby. Sydney on a blustery August night. They reach the Sheraton Hotel and he finally lets go of her elbow.

“This is the end of the line,” she says.

He says, “It's silly, I know, but I'd love to say goodbye with my eyeglasses on my face. All night you've been nothing but a bright whir that smells like jasmine.”

She contemplates making him go up to his room to fetch his glasses while she waits here. But then she decides he's a man in his eighties who's trundled all this way to set things right, who only has a finite number of elevator rides left in his lifetime, who couldn't be an imposition in a hotel room even if he tried. He hasn't been neutered by time exactly—there's still a tiny high pressure weather system that hovers between them—but his potency moves in and out, at the edges of reception, muffled then surging then gone.

They ride in silence to his suite on the top floor. She opens his door with his key card because apparently it's part of her new role. Would this have been her lot if she'd married a man fifteen years her senior?

He stands clutching his shoes in the paper bag, scanning the bedroom for his glasses.

She says, “I'm actually glad you came. It settled something for me.”

He looks blankly over at the television.

Ellie spots his eyeglasses on the nightstand and hands them to him. When he puts them on he blinks and stares at her for a long moment.

He says, “You don't look a day over twenty-five.”

“I wouldn't go back to my twenties for anything.”

“I don't blame you. No matter. Your sixties seem eventful enough.”

She looks around the hotel suite, then back at him. “It would be a lie if I said all is forgiven.”

“Let's not lie.”

“But everything is how it should be. How's that for wisdom?”

He laughs at this a little, blinks back a tear in his left eye. He says, “It wouldn't be in the right spirit of things to make a fuss. So, goodbye, then. Please take great care of yourself. I consider you an extraordinary person who happened my way.”

She's shocked by the overwrought feeling in her chest. She says, “You take care as well.”

There's a moment where a hug or a kiss on the cheek seems plausible, but then it vanishes. They shake hands slowly before she turns for the door. He closes it behind her, checks the lock, and moves slowly back to the bed to undress. He knows he won't be able to sleep, so he turns on the television and flips through the channels. Eventually he turns off his hearing aid and puts it on the nightstand, but he leaves the TV running. Nila gets on his case when he does this, lies up in his room with a glass of seltzer water, the television murmuring and his hearing aid off, the hour and the day dialed down to a slight impulse. A whole afternoon in this near-soundless, silvery-blue light. It's when he gets his best thinking done—the past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him. He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhale some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.

 

Heemstede

WINTER 1649 / SUMMER 2000

A week of snow follows a storm from the north. The meadows and tree branches are glazed with ice. Just before dusk, Tomas and Sara watch the whitening from behind the chill windows of their stone cottage in back of the main house. When Van Schooten finally retired and went to live with his ailing sister in Utrecht, Tomas was promoted to estate manager. Shortly after, he and Sara married—in the spring of 1638—and moved into the cottage. Cornelis, now in his seventies, has never liked the fussiness of titles (
head butler
,
scullery maid
,
footman
…) so he still calls Tomas the stableboy and Sara the visiting painter. She tutors some of the wealthy children during the summer retreats from Amsterdam and Haarlem, teaches them the principles of perspective, how to paint flowers and barns. In the winter, she helps out Mrs. Streek, who finds the stairs a painful bother. She stocks the pantries and cleans the upstairs rooms, brings Cornelis his meals when he's in a funk of melancholia and sulking by the fire in his tearoom. Although she occasionally sketches, the truth is that she hasn't completed a canvas in years. Somehow that practice was swallowed up in the new workaday, domestic routine. She's happy—she would be the first to claim that state or emotion—but she misses the tension of an unfinished work, the sidling glances of a world looking back at her.

They spend much of the spring and summer out of doors. Tomas is fond of expeditions to collect mushrooms and mosses, to pick wildflowers or catch trout upriver. The foraging is a pastime he learned from Cornelis and Sara suspects he's trying to keep the collecting flame alive now that the old man is housebound. One season Tomas spent every waking moment hauling lumber out to a secret location on the estate under Cornelis's direction. Their employer had asked him to build an observation hut to keep watch on the eastern border of the estate—the neighbors were threatening a boundary skirmish—but then Cornelis forgot all about it. So in June of that year Tomas laid claim to the tiny outpost and announced to Sara that he'd built them a
zomerhuis
overlooking the coastal dunes. Whenever it's warm and the mood strikes, they trundle out to the one-room cabin, a painted wooden jewel box on the seaward side of a bluff. Sara prefers the stone cottage and the comfort of her own bed, but she indulges Tomas's frontier spirit. They cook fish on open coals, swim in the river, sleep on wadded cotton and sheepskin. He erects neat piles of heather and the webcap mushrooms that Sara uses for dying yarn. These earnest little offerings remind her of Kathrijn. As he ages, Tomas is forever turning seven again.

Sometimes she spends a few hours with her sketchpad, looking down toward the North Sea. It's been years since a subject seized her by the nape of the neck. After the funeral procession there were other works of ambition, a handful of grapplings, but then the hunger died off in the easy contentment of daily life. She wonders about it sometimes while she sketches, feathering a gossamer cloud or blurring the amorphous line of the dunes against the blanched sky. She's surprised that it doesn't weigh on her more, this carefree quality of her days. But she sleeps easily and deeply, the sleep of a farm hound who's spent all day outside. She looks forward to the darkness, when everything is hushed and Tomas tells stories of boyhood escapades and seafaring uncles and cruel spinsters. A little flourish in the design of the
zomerhuis
is that there's a removable panel in the slanted roof. Tomas likes to make a show of opening up the room to the night sky above their makeshift bed, to present his wife with this rectangle of stars and planets. Here, he seems to be saying, I have assembled all this for you. But she suspects that he never quite finished shingling the roof. She lets him exaggerate his stories and talk her through the five constellations that he knows before they drift toward sleep. This seems like the truest kind of love to her.

She's thinking about the impossibility of warmer days while she stares out at the brittle world from the cottage window, at the pendants of ice hardening along the barren fruit trees, the vapor of hoarfrost against the fence palings. Tomas interrupts her daydreaming—she's staring into and through the fogged windowpane. He kisses her cheek and tells her there's a break in the weather.
Ice-skating at night
, when he says it, sounds like an invitation to wonder.

*   *   *

Ellie drives down from Leiden in a rental car. The Netherlands in August is a vision of symmetry and Calvinist restraint, the greening fields perfectly square and run through with sluices and irrigation canals, not a rise anywhere to bend the sightlines. The Dutch love to repair to the countryside in the summer, take up residence in caravan parks and jerry-rigged dwellings no bigger than a sunroom. They ferry across to the wind-ravaged island of Texel or the dunes of Zeeland to spend a month reading barefoot in a tent. Or they drive into Germany and France with their pull-behind trailers and an end-of-days supply of toilet paper and tinned soup, afraid of what they might find outside their own province of watery domestication. Have they ever recovered from their intrepid seventeenth-century preoccupation with slaying everything wild? And yet they long to be free, barefoot, outspoken, immersed in nature, can't wait to make this annual pilgrimage to camp under the stars. She wants to share these observations with her Dutch passenger, but she knows he would take offense. Instead, she looks out at the gentleness of the countryside and considers how much has happened within forty-eight hours, how her life has been reshaped. She left Sydney just as a winter southerly buster was lashing the coast and now she's driving a rented Peugeot with Hendrik at her side and her own forgery in the trunk.

*   *   *

The storm clears just after nightfall and a full moon emerges from behind a cloth of weather. Tomas sharpens their skate blades with a file he uses for shoeing horses, makes them sharp enough to slice an apple. Sara packs along some walnuts and dried fruit and a kidskin bag of spiced wine. They bundle up in their woolen caps and mittens and scarves, their skates looped by the laces across one shoulder, and walk out into the cold, their breath like smoke. The freeze has settled deep into the landscape, sent splintered ropes of ice out along the leafless arbor vines, stiffened the hinges on the metal gate. They head for a western branch of the river, a spot where it widens a few miles from the village ruins. It's a favorite summertime fishing spot for Tomas, a deep pool of rocks and eddies where the trout like to congregate. The snow is halfway up their calves as they walk along through the woods. The moonlight comes through the treetops in flickers and starts. Sara stares up as she tramps through the snow, glimpses the moon and a few stars dulled by its milky aura. It makes her realize that she hasn't seen a cloudless sky in months.

They come down to the frozen riverbank, the ice thick and almost translucent where the snow has blown clear. There are patches of such clarity that she can see warped reflections of the night sky. The reeds are empty husks, gone the color of driftwood; they rattle and clack in the light wind. The couple stands together, his arm around her shoulder. She looks down into a window of clarified ice and thinks of the sluggish fish moping at the bottom, drifting in the slurries that run cold along the mud, of the way she and Tomas might appear to them as a two-headed beast through the frozen lens of the river. Tomas throws a big rock out into the center to test the hardness of the ice. It makes a satisfying thunk. There are Dutchmen who categorize the tenor of that sound and classify it against degrees of hardness. There are men who, during epic freezes, skate from Leiden to Amsterdam in a matter of hours. They sit on the cold stones to put on their skates and each take a sip of spiced wine to warm themselves through. Sara is the first to get to her feet and glide out onto the ice. She keeps her hands behind her back and kicks off with one leg, heading upriver. Tomas is forced to follow, calling after her as he copies the lines of her blades. She turns to face him, skating backward, her face flushed with wild good cheer. “Come on, you old mule,” she yells, “I'm going to skate all the way to the sea.”

*   *   *