The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  Back in his seat the steward refreshes Marty’s drink and brings him another blanket, because the old and infirm can never have too many blankets. The Qantas man wears a crisp black apron while pouring the red wine and making some low-volume small talk. Marty’s hearing aid is on the fritz, so Jerome’s Aussie friendliness comes in faint, buzzing waves. Marty nods and smiles and puts his hand against the blanketed painting. Where else but at thirty-five thousand feet can you drink with abandon regardless of time zones or international date lines? It could be four in the morning above Fiji, but a glass of Shiraz is just the ticket. Maybe he says this aloud, or something self-deprecating, because Jerome throws him a cheeky smile before he moves down the aisle. The lights have been dimmed and the window is awash in blackness and he can see a hairline fracture of dawn against the horizon. Darkness at high altitude, the midflight quietude, always makes him think of the bottom of the ocean. There’s a submarine quality to the experience, a sense of dredging the bottom instead of scraping up against the stratosphere. The stars pinhole the dome of black, but he always thinks of looking up to a surface, of glimpsing stars through a film of water or ice.

  They serve breakfast two hours out from Sydney and he relishes the tray with its little compartments, a bento box of surprises. It’s not miniature exactly but scaled down 30 percent. He eats everything on the tray, right down to the fruit and yogurt. His sense of taste is going, but there’s some kind of muscle memory, an echo of meals past. By now, the sun is blazing through the windows and most of the shades have been lowered. He keeps his open a crack and reads The Times in a wedge of white sunlight. You travel halfway around the world with your own city newspaper. This is a miraculous thing to him. He’s had to ask Jerome to help him with his customs form, because apparently forms of all varieties make his blood pressure spike. His feathery, spastic block letters cannot be corralled into single boxes. His ankles are swollen, he realizes, and he begins rifling through his seat pocket for some ibuprofen and then he forgets what he’s looking for and comes upon his itinerary and decides he’s looking for the name of the hotel where he’s staying. He must be the only person alive still using a travel agent, a woman he’s never met in person who used to work for the law firm. She’s a voice on the other end of a phone, a woman versed in seating plans and foreign mass transit. She tried explaining to him several times that the tickets were paperless and he said he wanted something in black and white. “Paperless ticket is an oxymoron,” he’d said into the phone.

  They fly toward the edge of the continent, a rim of sandstone cliffs and red terra-cotta roofs and olive-drab treetops. He follows the landing on the seatback monitor in front of him, checks the correspondence between the pixelated, video game icon of the plane and the scene outside the window. They come in low to land, dropping down as the oil refineries of Botany Bay come into view. They taxi and he prepares to deplane, a verb that would make the steward sound ex-military if it weren’t for the pink carnation in his lapel. The specialized vocabulary of airports has always made Marty uncomfortable. The theater of alienation, he thinks, as he carries the bundled painting up the bridge or gangplank or whatever it’s called. He’s brought only a carry-on suitcase and the painting, so he sails through the baggage claim area and is among the first ones to arrive at customs. A kid in his twenties in a short-sleeve shirt with a badge asks him why the painting wasn’t declared on the customs form. Marty says he’s loaning it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and this naturally complicates matters. Pretty soon there’s a huddle of older men deliberating about commercial forms and protocols. Marty refuses to let them unwrap the painting but insists that they’re welcome to put it through the X-ray machine. They take him up on this and he’s escorted to a small lounge area with vinyl seats while he waits for them to be done. Eventually he gets the painting back and walks out into the terminal. A line of people stand against a guardrail as passengers wheel their luggage out into the tiled whiteness of the airport.

  The Indian taxi driver is dressed for a blizzard, with the heat cranked, even though it’s only in the fifties. Marty left a Manhattan summer and has arrived to a Sydney winter, only it feels like an early spring day before the tulips crown beside the sidewalks along Central Park. Suddenly he’s being driven on the wrong side of the road. It unnerves him, even though he hasn’t driven a car since before Clinton was in office. The painting is next to him in the back and his suitcase is in the trunk, now called a boot. He reads the driver—Mahesh, according to the ID clipped to the sun visor—the name of the hotel on the itinerary and he seems to know it. He asks Mahesh if he can turn down the heat because he has a valuable painting in the blanket and it’s sensitive to changes in temperature. Mahesh says nothing but turns down the heat. They drive through commercial streets with warehouses and furniture stores before wending through a residential area of squat, single-story row houses with undersize tiled courtyards out front, a few potted ferns or palms in place of a yard. Closer to the city, Marty sees two- and three-story Victorian terraces with filigreed iron balconies and double doors, a distant cousin of New York’s brownstones. He adjusts his watch to the local time, copying the orange digital numbers on the dashboard. It’s 9:06 in the morning and he realizes he doesn’t know what day it is. He’d left on a Wednesday but somewhere a day was lost, or gained, he can’t remember which. “Sir, can you tell me what day it is?” The driver looks at him warily in the rearview mirror and tells him it’s Friday.

  The vision of a weekend spent in a hotel room, or sightseeing with a group of tourists he can’t quite hear or understand, cuts through him. He’s never been one to dawdle around monuments with a camera in hand or take day trips to picturesque estates. Instead, he likes to walk a city’s grid, to build a place up in his mind by walking its backstreets, to stop in front of real estate agents’ windows to see what a 3/2 in a decent suburb might cost. This kind of urban safari always bothered Rachel. They’d go on luxury cruises of European rivers and he’d stay below or read American newspapers in a deck chair before heading out for a four-hour walk into obscurity. She studied the literature, the maps and guidebooks, the illustrations of native flowers and birds, and tried to engage him in the deep backstory of a country or town. He didn’t want to know anything before he came upon it in the street. His interests were narrow—pubs, delis, paintings in hotel lobbies, two-hour circuits of museums (never with a guide or those ridiculous headphones), local color, cheap meals on busy streets, firm mattresses with feather pillows, breakfasts served in the room. He’d wear his field vest with many pockets to carry his pills and foreign coins and dental floss. They’d been to dozens of countries together, but what he remembered was meals and hotel rooms. She used to accuse him of lacking curiosity, of not wanting to know a people’s history. He said he wanted to know the people from their parks and streets and sandwiches. He wrote things down on small spiral notepads, like a reporter, and never looked at them again. He had a pocket in his field vest dedicated to ballpoint pens. Now she’s gone—has it been ten years already?—and he rarely travels, because now he’s in the chute. This is what he tells Nila. Soon they’ll install a gurney and a home nurse who’ll sponge down his privates. This is the cul-de-sac that cannot be avoided. He won’t die in a nursing home or hospital. This is the final thing that wealth might guarantee. But even a rich old man has to sit down to piss. This is another thing he says to Nila to make her shake her head and groan.

  “Do you mind if we go to the Art Gallery of New South Wales instead of the hotel?” he says to the driver. “Is it nearby?”

  “Very close.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  New York could use a few more drivers like Mahesh. They pull up in front of a typical museum facade—plinths and columns and stonework. He pays the driver and trundles up the steps with the painting and his wheeled suitcase. It’s not until he comes into the main entrance and sees the security guard eyeing him that the full absurdity of this errand strikes him. H
e doesn’t quite know why he’s done this, why the idea persisted like arterial plaque. Ellie was part of the reason, but there were other parts that defied explanation, some dark and mysterious sense of circling back or making amends or just reappearing in another time zone, defying time and death. He had out-existed so many people, but Ellie was still alive and by all accounts she had made something of herself. Was he here to bear witness or to remind her how she started out? No, he thinks, he’s here to pay homage to an old, scalding regret.

  He tells the security guard that he’s here to see the director, Max Culkins, and the guard sizes him up—the shuffling lunatic with some plywood wrapped inside a blanket.

  “He’s expecting me. Tell him it’s Marty de Groot from New York.”

  A phone is picked up. A call is made. Words are mumbled discreetly into the mouthpiece.

  “Someone will come down for you,” the guard says, a slight change in his tone.

  Moments later, a pretty assistant arrives—she reminds him of Gretchen, another name from a lost decade (didn’t she marry a state senator?)—and he’s being led toward the back rooms and offices of the museum. He’s whisked along parquet-floored galleries where Impressionists and old Europeans hang on a periphery of light that cascades down through ceilings of wrought iron and glass. Unlike the rich grays and burgundies of the painted gallery walls, the upstairs administrative offices are stark white and filled with bookish cubicles. The assistant offers him some coffee or a glass of water and they talk about long-haul flights because she’s not allowed to ask what he’s carrying in the twined-up blanket. As they arrive in the executive suite, a dapper fellow comes out to meet them and introduces himself as Max Culkins. He’s a man of quick wit, pastel socks, and a pale, slightly pockmarked face. He has the handshake of a diplomat or politician, one hand pressed over the clasp. Marty admires his bespoke suit, the cut of the trouser legs with a pair of lavender socks winking at the ankles as he walks back to his office with Marty in his wake. Surprisingly, there’s very little artwork on the walls of his office. Behind a sleek desk hang publicity shots of Culkins being presented with oversize checks and peeking out from the shining blade of a bulldozer in front of a new wing of the museum. Marty notices that he never makes direct eye contact with the suitcase or the square of blanket, as if passersby come in here every day with their luggage and wrapped paintings. The assistant arrives with a tray of biscuits and coffee in a French press. Marty tells her that he’ll take it black and she pours him a cup. She makes coffee for Max—milk with two sugars—and Marty can feel some layer of respect he’d felt for the man strip away. She closes the glass door behind her as she leaves.

  “I have to say, you’re not the usual sort of courier we see around here. It was very generous of you to bring the painting all this way,” says Max.

  “At my age you want to stretch your legs every chance you get. It also takes an hour to put your shoes on.”

  The director chuckles. They sip their coffees.

  “My colleagues at the Met tell me that you’re like part of the family.”

  “Call it a long courtship. They’ve been after my collection since the sixties and they’ve worked out that I’m a childless widower. I guess the odds are in their favor.”

  The director leans back in his leather chair to absorb the curt humor. He looks like he’s taking Marty in by degrees, like a difficult painting from across the room. “I can’t tell you how excited we are to have your de Vos on loan. It means a lot to us. I hope the painting traveled well.”

  Marty watches as the director allows himself a glance at the wrapped painting for the first time.

  “I was hoping to meet with the curator and hand her the painting personally.”

  “Like much of the artwork, I’m afraid she’s also on loan to us. Eleanor teaches at Sydney University and comes to the gallery a few times a week. She’s been burning the midnight oil of late. We have some last-minute repairs being done to the exhibition space.”

  “When do you open?”

  “Next week. You’re just in the nick of time, actually. We’d almost given up.”

  “Sorry for the alarm.”

  “Not at all,” says Max, smiling.

  Marty places a hand on top of the painting. He sees the raised veins and the liver spots like small brown planets; he has no idea who this hand might belong to.

  “Will you be in town for long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, we’d love for you to stay for the opening. You’d be a guest of honor. And we can show you the sights while you’re here. Would you like one of the curators to give you a tour of the museum?”

  “Yes, I’d like that.” Marty thinks it poor form that Max is deputizing a curator for the tour. Another varnished layer of respect peels away. His hand is still on the painting and he’s curious how Max will raise the issue of the actual handoff. He waits and sips his coffee.

  “As it turns out, we’ve had a couple other de Voses come from the Netherlands and we were wondering if you’d allow us to do some testing on your painting. We have a few days before we can hang everything, so all the loan paintings are in storage.”

  “Testing?”

  “It’s a rare chance to have a handful of de Vos paintings in the same room. We have a scientist on staff who does magic with X-rays and infrared images. She can practically tell you what the painter had for breakfast on the day of the final brushstroke. I can assure you that not a thread of the canvas will be harmed. Everything is covered in the insurance forms.”

  Marty sees Max’s shoes wagging under the table and he drains his coffee cup. It burns the roof of his mouth a little, but then there’s a wonderful burst of caffeine, like warm water being poured over his scalp. “I would need to see the paperwork. This painting has been in my family since before Isaac Newton was born.”

  The specificity of the historical reference seems to take the wind out of Max Culkins’s sails. He whistles silently and shakes his head. “A miracle, really.” Then he gathers himself up again. “Right, of course, please take your time with all the paperwork. Consult your lawyers as you see fit. I’ll have the head conservator come up and go over everything.” Max forms a church steeple with his fingers and bites his lower lip. “I don’t suppose I could grab a quick peek?”

  Marty gets to his feet and sets his coffee cup on the edge of the desk. He picks up the painting and follows Max to a corner of the room where a reading table is laid out with antique maps covered in vellum. He sets the painting down and Max produces a letter opener, a tiny sword with a silver-plated handle. Marty takes it from him and cuts through the twine. He pulls back a flap of the thick blanket to reveal a bed of green felt.

  “Is that billiard cloth?” Max asks.

  “Good eye. I had to get the baize on mine replaced so I kept the old one for just such an occasion.”

  “Genius idea.”

  Marty pulls back the green felt and exposes the face of the painting to the room. She’s in perfect condition, he thinks. Kept in a narrow temperature range except for the taxi rides to and from airports. Max sidles up in his French cuffs, the kind of shirts Marty used to wear as a law partner. He looks for something in the director’s face, some recognition of history and the fluke of an old man bundling across the globe to bring him this gift. I would have liked you better if you drank your coffee black and offered me a tour, if you’d led me around the galleries in your dandy purple socks. But what Marty sees in Max’s face is something else—a quiet look of consternation. “There it is,” Max says, “there it is.”

  Manhattan

  SEPTEMBER 1958

  Red Hammond is on the other end of the telephone, filing what he calls “a dispatch from the field.” He’s sent Marty an envelope containing a business card and a grainy photo of a woman hunched over a kitchen table. Marty turns the card over between his fingers. Eleanor Shipley, Art Restoration. It’s a tasteful beige cardstock with discreet lettering and a slanting phone number. It’s
a business card that promises artful restraint.

  Red says, “From all accounts, she’s a woman.”

  “I can see that. What did you find out about her?”

  But Red is not quite ready to talk about the upshot. Instead, he wants to talk about his week of surveillance in Brooklyn as if he’s just returned from the jungles of Malaysia. “I have no idea what people eat over there. I was starving, could never find a decent bagel. And no one seems to have heard of parallel parking in that particular borough. I circled her apartment for hours sometimes because some jerk refused to park against the curb. Or because people live in such small apartments that they store their clothes in their automobiles. We’re talking about parked closets, stationary clothes hampers, not modes of transportation. I’m telling you that Brooklyn makes Edgewater, New Jersey, look civilized.”

  “What else?”

  “I paid some bum to watch my car while I followed her into the city, up into the hundreds at Columbia, over to the little framing shop, then a few meetings with clients in coffee shops and ethnic restaurants.”