“‘We were led into the oval office at half past two, just as the man was returning from his rather late lunch. We had to carry our easels, paint pots and supplies, and were instructed to stay well back from the desk, as the president was engaged throughout the day in meetings and various affairs of state. I was positioned in a corner, no less than twelve paces away. Wilson preferred the afternoon curtains to be tied back, with the windows open, and the declining sun dazzled my eyes directly, obscuring the president even further. I was in no way allowed to change my position once the session began, and the president himself was exceedingly recalcitrant to any suggestions of pose. Indeed, after my third request, I was told summarily to be still or be put out. Between the heat of the office, the constant motion of the subject, and the lack of even the barest refreshments, it was by far the least pleasant experience of my professional career. Indeed, I began to wonder if I truly desired the post after all.’
“Despite his doubts, Gus completed his painting of Wilson within the week, injecting it with his usual sense of the personality of the subject. All of the completed portraits were presented to Secretary Lane for his inspection. A week later, Gus’ portrait was returned to him at his rented room. A note was pinned to it, penned in Lane’s own hand. It read, ‘The office of the presidency is a position of honor, not leisure. This work is more suited to the bathhouse than the white house.’ The post of official White House portrait artist was later awarded to a veteran painter from Virginia named George W. Hallsley. Crushed and disillusioned, Gus took a job in a kitchen at a nearby hotel, but despite this very bruising setback, his career in Washington was far from over.”
Shane stopped reading and leaned back, frowning slightly.
He had often thought that he was a different sort of artist than the starving artists he had so often seen lurking in the halls at Tristan and Crane, but he had always thought so with a certain amount of smug disdain. The starving artists may have been more hip than Shane, and some of them may indeed have been equally as talented, but he’d never envied them. They were slaves to the muse, arrogant and temperamental.
Gustav Ferdinand Wilhelm, however, had apparently been an entirely different breed of artist, neither like the starving artists back at T and C, nor like Shane himself.
Shane felt a certain amount of discomfort in reading his exploits. Here was a man who had been nearly the exact polar opposite of he, himself; an artist who neither submitted to the muse nor rejected her, but who managed to command her affections as his own, and apparently without even trying. Here was a risk taker, a man of ambition and recklessness, of passion and megalomania. And yet, he seemed likeable enough, if a little intense.
Shane, on the other hand, was careful, timid, deliberate, and quiet. He tended to downplay his work, believing that if he pointed out its flaws first, no one else would be able to. He never made grand claims about his skills, or expected greatness.
Truly, Wilhelm, the man in whose cottage Shane now lived, was a different kind of artist than him. And was Shane a little jealous? Maybe he was. He hadn’t yet finished the article about Wilhelm’s life, but he knew that things certainly hadn’t ended with him working in a hotel kitchen. Things had gotten much better for him. He had indeed eventually painted for presidents, and even for kings and queens. Shane had never even considered such grandiose aspirations. He believed, even now, that he didn’t really even wish for such things. And yet…
Just then, Shane heard the crunch of tires on gravel. A dart of sunlight flashed through the curtains next to him as a vehicle turned onto the pull-off in front of the cottage, parking next to his geriatric Chevy pickup truck.
Shane glanced at his watch: it was twelve minutes after ten. Chris, the intern from Greenfeld’s office, was right on time. Shane had known interns in the past; three or four of them had made their way through the offices of Tristan and Crane during his time there. They were usually college students who spent most of their time hanging around the office kitchen talking about whatever they’d watched on television the night before or how drunk they’d gotten the previous weekend. He’d never been particularly clear what it was interns were supposed to do, mainly because he’d never been interested enough to ask.
He didn’t know what to expect from the aforementioned Chris. He assumed he would be in his twenties, wearing an expensive, ill-fitting shirt and tie over a pair of jeans. He’d probably be friendly and gregarious in a forced,
I’m-talking-to-a-grown-up
kind of way, and he’d express polite, insincere interest in Shane’s work for as long as it took to pack the painting in a crate and lug it out to the waiting van. Shane stood up, coffee in hand, and crossed the living room to the front door. He pulled it open and stood there, blinking in the hazy sunlight, as the driver’s door of the gray van swung open.
“Morning,” he called to the figure that climbed out, unseen on the other side of the van. Beneath the van, Shane could see a pair of small feet; bare ankles and taupe low-heeled shoes of a decidedly female stripe. He had time to raise his eyebrows in some small surprise—apparently Chris was a Christine, not a Christopher—before she came around the back of the van and all the rest of his expectations were knocked aside as well.
“You Bellamy?” the woman asked, glancing up at him as she pulled the rear doors of the van open.
“No, I’m his butler, Jeeves,” Shane said, trying to mask his surprise with humor, “but I’ll inform his lordship of your arrival, miss…?”
“Uh-huh,” the woman said, pulling a long white box out of the van’s dark interior. “I’m Christiana, but you can call me Chris. Everyone else does.” Shane studied her while she was turned away from him. She wore tan slacks that stopped halfway between her knees and ankles; were those called capris? He thought they were. Over that, she wore a lilac blouse with short, almost nonexistent sleeves. She had hair so black that it reflected the sun with nearly purple highlights; it was pulled back in a neat ponytail that swung as she turned, hefting the box out into the sunlight.
“Here, let me help you with that,” Shane said, remembering himself. He set his coffee on the porch railing and trotted out into the sunlight. Christiana allowed him to take the box, which was nearly as tall as she was. It was very light, but ungainly. Shane felt a little ridiculous, as he almost always did when he was one-on-one with an attractive woman he didn’t yet know. She looked at him with an unreadable expression that could have been disdain, could have been professional aloofness, could even have been plain and simple boredom. Her skin was very tan and Shane couldn’t help noticing that she had large eyes, almost as black as her hair. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but she was unique in a way that Shane found immediately attractive. It was hard not to stare at her.
“Christiana Corsica,” she said, sticking out her thin little hand, her expression unchanging.
“Oh, ah,” Shane replied, dropping the box so that it leaned against him, tall as his chest. He shook her hand; it was warm and dry, her grip firm. “Shane Bellamy. Nice to meet you. Er, coffee?” He gestured toward his own cup where it sat on the porch railing.
“Still have half a cup sitting in the cup holder,” Christiana replied, nodding toward the van. “I need to get back to the office quick like a bunny or Morrie will be sending out a posse. He uses up all his slack on his artists. The rest of us have to jump when he says frog or things get ugly. Where’s it at?”
It took Shane a moment to realize that she meant the matte painting. “Oh. Inside, upstairs, in the studio. Come on, I’ll help you pack it up.”
As they moved through the cottage, Shane in the lead, carrying the box and trying to keep it from bonking its big, unwieldy corners on the walls, he talked about the painting, warned her that it might still be tacky in some places, that it had taken him longer than he’d expected, merely spending words, almost nervously filling the quiet morning air. She followed, nodding, glancing around idly.
In the stuffy heat of the studio, Shane unplugged the fan and pushed it aside. Thankfully, the matte painting was mostly dry now, barely tacky even where the paint was thickest. Christiana took one cursory look at it, pressed her lips together and nodded. She held the box while Shane fished out the foam corner grips and began to fit them onto the corners of the painting.
“This where you do all your work?” Christiana asked, turning to look around the room.
“Yes. I like it. It’s small, but it’s all I need.”
“Sure is a big change from the corporate studio in New York, isn’t it?”
“I always preferred my own space, even then. I sort of defined it and made it my own. The art table came from there, and so did my Escher quote, the one hanging over the easel…” Shane turned to indicate the hand-painted quote and saw Christiana frowning at the easel, her hand cupping her chin. “Oh, that,” he said, a little uncomfortably. Christiana didn’t look up; she continued to study the painting of the manor house, the look on her face dark and inscrutable. Shane finished packing the matte painting into the box and sealed it. “Well, that’s that. I’ll help you get it down to the van.”
Christiana spoke without looking up, “You painted this?”
“Yeah. I’m… still working on it.”
“Who’s it for?”
Shane shuffled his feet a little. For some reason he didn’t like the way Christiana was looking at the painting. “I, uh… it’s not for anyone. It’s just mine.”
Christiana finally looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. “Oh,” she said. “Well that’s cool.”
“You… you like it?”
She frowned again and looked back at the painting. She nodded slightly. “I guess. It’s well done, at least. I can tell that. There’s a lot of realism in it, and yet it’s not realistic at all, not in the colors and the overlying shapes. It kind of messes with my eyes. It’s just… it’s not what anyone would call ‘nice’. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”
“No. Art is very subjective. And it’s still a work in progress. It’s just an idea that kind of got stuck in my head.” Shane looked at the painting himself, trying to see it the way she did. It was certainly very different than anything he’d ever painted before. Christiana was right that it wavered between realism and abstraction, and yet where she saw conflict, he saw a dance.
“I see what you mean about it sticking in your head,” she said, shaking her head and finally turning away. “It’s hard to avoid looking at it. I guess that means it’s a success, at least by somebody’s definition. I just wouldn’t want it hanging in my living room. Are we ready to load?”
Shane helped her carry the box back down the steps and around the corner to the front door. The heat was rising as the day turned humid, and by the time the box had been lifted into the van and strapped to the inside wall with bungee cords, Shane’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and noticed that Christiana still looked as cool and fresh as when she’d arrived. She shook his hand again, apparently anxious to leave.
“Good to meet you Mr. Bellamy. I’m sure I’ll see you again.”
Shane nodded. “I hope so. I have to admit, you aren’t what I expected.”
“I take it that’s a compliment?”
“Well, mainly it’s just that I expected some college guy long on attitude and short on attention span. We used to have interns like that back at T and C.”
“I’m no one’s idea of an intern, apparently,” Christiana said, fishing the van’s keys out of the pocket of her capris. “And that includes Morrie. I think he keeps me around for the scenery as much as for the work. I don’t really mind. Still.”
“So why do you do it?” Shane said, following her around to the driver’s side door. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
Christiana opened the door and looked back at him. She lifted her left shoulder in a quick shrug. “I like art. I can’t make it, but I like working with it. I used to be a legal assistant, and was studying for the bar. I woke up one day and realized something important. I realized I hated law. Worse, I hated lawyers. I was only studying to be one because that’s what my parents were, and that’s what they always expected me to be, too. And I thought, I don’t even
like
my parents. They’re some of the unhappiest people I know. Why would I want to do what they do? So I quit university, moved out of the apartment my parents had rented for me, and decided to get into art representation. Everyone’s got to start somewhere, right?”
Shane nodded somberly. “Impressive.”
“You think so?”
“I think it takes a lot of willpower to break out of the orbit of other people’s expectations,” he answered, and then added quickly, “Not that I’ve learned that from experience or anything.”
“Ah,” Christiana nodded, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Well, if you say so. See you around, Mr. Bellamy.”
Shane backed away as she started the van. “Call me Shane,” he said over the sound of the engine. “Everybody else does.”
She nodded through the open window, tipped a salute, and began to back up. She performed a neat three-point turn and gunned the van’s engine, propelling it down the broken driveway. Sunlight glinted off its rear windows and then it was gone, hidden behind the encroaching trees.
Christiana
, Shane thought, bemused.
What a nice name
. He headed back into the house, and had to return a minute later, once he remembered that his coffee was still sitting on the porch railing. It was still warm enough to drink.
The computer was still humming softly to itself, although the screen saver had popped on; the Microsoft logo appeared and disappeared on the screen, changing position each time like some kind of a corporate Whack-a-mole. Shane approached the desk and shook the mouse back and forth on its pad, waking the computer. The Microsoft logo vanished and a field of type appeared; the biography of Gustav Ferdinand Wilhelm.
Shane considered finishing the article, and then decided to save it for later. He had plans for today. On a whim, however, he scrolled down to the bottom of the page. There were thumbnail samples of the artist’s work there, mostly portraits. Shane recognized some of them. There was Theodore Roosevelt with his dog, seated on a long, sunlit veranda. Below that was an absurdly young Queen Mary, standing behind her husband, King George the fifth, who was seated, smiling cryptically.
