The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  “There is, but not the kind you’re thinking. Do you like jazz?”

  “I wish I knew the first thing about it.”

  “I looked at the playbill. No one big is on tonight, but the place is fun. You can’t leave New York without hearing some jazz.”

  “At the rate my dissertation is going, I’ll be here for a while.”

  They walk inside and head down the musty carpeted steps to the ticket window and coat check. At the base of the stairs, in the threshold to the club proper, they hand their tickets to a hostess and she leads them to a booth. The interior is dark and smoky. He likes the juxtaposition of this place with the funereal splendor of the auction house, a jump-cut that suggests he’s a man who might spend eighty thousand on paintings one afternoon and then hole up in some underground cathedral of jazz on a Monday night. He wants Ellie to know it’s possible to belong to both worlds, that he swims in the high and the low registers of the city.

  The hostess guides them toward the wall of booths not far from the bandstand. They sit and a cocktail waitress comes over. All the women who work here are over fifty, Marty realizes, as if it vouches for the club’s seriousness. Ellie orders the house red and he asks for a Tom Collins and some nuts. It’s still early and one of the warm-up bands, a quintet, is playing onstage, the sax player deep into a solo. Marty thinks about the time he saw Charlie Parker, a little ample around the waist, his tie loosened and barely reaching his rib cage, eyes downcast as if he could see the notes burning out of the bell of his horn. He was an apparition, junked out and holy. Every saxophone player since has seemed entirely mortal.

  Ellie looks around the room. “I think I’m a little overdressed.”

  “They’re used to theatrical types,” he says, smiling.

  Their drinks and a bowl of peanuts arrive.

  Taking a handful of nuts, he gestures over to a burly black man in a white suit. “The emcee is a bit of a tip monger. If you stiff him he’ll remember you forever. Even the musicians tip him because he introduces the bands and if they stiff him he botches their names.”

  “It sounds even more cutthroat than the auction houses.”

  “Ten times worse.”

  She sips her drink. “How are the oil-on-coppers doing?”

  “They’re beautiful, a reunited family, though right now they’re all sitting in my study, waiting to find wall space.”

  “I’d love to see your collection some time,” she says.

  “Of course. I’m renovating at the moment so it’s a disaster zone.”

  Staring into the red bowl of her wineglass, she says, “I’m sure that’s an ordeal for your wife.”

  Marty realizes he’s never mentioned Jake’s wife, but neither has he removed his wedding ring. He lets five seconds of silence unravel while he considers his options. Looking off toward the band he says, “Actually, she passed away last year. I guess I haven’t gotten around to taking my gold band off.” As soon as the words are in the air he feels his stomach drop. He looks over to see her face fall a little, as if she’s committed some error of taste.

  She says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t meant to pry.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m getting back on my feet. Maybe that’s why I want to fill out the holes in the collection. She usually took the lead on that front.”

  He takes a big sip of his Tom Collins to wash away the aftertaste of deceit. He thinks about the European river cruise in the spring, the way Rachel will lay out the brochures and ship menus across the perfectly made bed. They will eat oysters and truffles and make love once or twice, floating by the peat fields of old Europe, sunken down into its ancient rivers. She will read novels in bed and fall asleep with the light on. The predictability of it is both heartening and its own kind of ruin. He looks up at the stage where the trumpeter is on the outer edge of his solo, rising onto the balls of his feet to launch his big buttery tone. “That kid’s not bad,” he says.

  “Are you musical?”

  “I used to play trumpet in high school. Then my father made me give it up and I became a patent attorney. Now I vet other people’s creations.” He wonders whether he should have invented an alternative career. Jake Alpert could have been anything—a diplomat, a surgeon, a financier.

  “My father tried to make me give up painting. He was uncomfortable with anything artistic, thought it was puttin’ on bloody airs.”

  They both watch the emcee as he walks through the crowd lighting cigarettes, prospecting for tips with an oversize butane lighter. A few musicians with their instrument cases have set up on the bleachers to watch their colleagues onstage.

  Ellie says, “So, how can I help you build the collection you want?”

  “That reminds me.” He takes an envelope from his pocket with the cash inside and slides it across the table. He’s seen this done in movies and it makes him wish he’d ordered a martini. For some reason she refuses to look at it.

  “Thank you.”

  “I know it’s crazy, but I prefer to deal in cash. I’m the son of an immigrant.”

  “I hope you didn’t pay cash to Thornton and Morrell.”

  “They were only too happy to set up an arrangement directly with my bank. Delivery happened once they got confirmation that the funds were transferred. The delivery guys looked like their doorman—arthritic old men in blazers and argyle sweaters.”

  “No one seemed to be younger than sixty over there.” She laughs. “So what’s next? Italian Renaissance? Venetian wedding portraits might suit you.” She looks away from the table, as if she’s made another conversational blunder.

  He lets the ice clink against the side of his glass. “What do you know about women artists of the seventeenth century? Dutch women, for example.”

  He wasn’t sure when he would steer the conversation in this direction, but now that it’s happened he tries to gauge her reaction. The lie about being a widower has freed something up in him.

  She looks down at the table and takes another sip of wine. “As it happens, that’s what I’m writing my dissertation on. Women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Well, before it stalled out.”

  “I didn’t mean to remind you.”

  “It’s fine, I’m just riddled with guilt. Every time I look over at my typewriter I feel sick. Did you know Remington makes guns as well as typewriters? I think about that every time I look at it.”

  “I guess I never thought about it. Did you know they invented the zipper before barbed wire? As a patent attorney I follow the history of inventions. The guy who filed the first zipper patent in the nineteenth century called it the Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure. For obvious reasons that name never caught on…”

  “Interesting,” Ellie says, but he can tell she’s not listening. She takes up a cocktail napkin and digs through her handbag until she finds her eyeglasses and a pen. “So there were a handful of Dutch women painters in the Golden Age. Maybe twenty-five mentioned in the historical sources but only a few with surviving works.” She writes the following names on the napkin: Judith Leyster, Maria van Oosterwyck, Rachel Ruysch. She raises the pen tip and her eyes waver over the rim of her glasses to the smoky stage. The trumpeter finally comes down from his solo. “There’s also a woman named Sara de Vos, but so far she’s only got one attributed work.” She adds de Vos to the bottom of the list.

  Without hesitation, he says, “And these are likely to be in private collections? So if a collector like myself wanted to acquire them it’s conceivable they might come up for auction at some point?”

  “Most of these are in university and public museums. A handful of private collections. The National Gallery in Washington has some good Leysters. And everyone’s got some Ruysch flower paintings—she lived to be very old and painted her whole life.”

  “Perhaps you can help me locate some. I think my wife would have liked the idea of Dutch women painters.”

  He’s aware of the theatrically morose tone in his voice, but he also realizes there might not be another six
encounters with Ellie. She will grow increasingly anxious as she’s reminded of her unfinished dissertation or her forgery and before long she’ll claim to be too busy to meet up. He can see it all in her careful, circumspect manner—an underground river of guilt.

  “Do you have any children?” she asks.

  He touches the rim of his glass. “We were doomed not to have any,” he says. Somehow she’s made him divulge something of his real life.

  He orders another round of drinks when she gets her glass below the halfway mark.

  “So, that’s enough business for now,” he says. “If you would do some research and let me know what you find out I’d be very grateful.” He folds his hands together to indicate a change in subject. “How does an Aussie girl end up in Manhattan?”

  “It’s complicated. I thought I wanted to restore paintings professionally, so I spent a few years in London at the Courtauld Institute. They taught me everything there is to know about inpainting and the structure of old paintings. Though even there every professor had his own rules and none of them were in agreement. We’d all go down to the pub and argue about which way was the right way to build a loss back up in a painting. It was a very small world. So I decided to switch to art history and will probably end up teaching. I applied to Columbia and got a fellowship.”

  “Seems like you’ll make a very fine teacher. From what I can tell, you know how to bring paintings to life.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say.” She takes her glasses off and folds them.

  “And do you paint yourself?”

  “Not much anymore, though I painted a lot in my youth.”

  She squints into her glass and he wonders just how shortsighted she is.

  She says, “That sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? My youth.”

  “Not at all.”

  She pushes her first empty wineglass six inches away from her side of the table.

  “And what do you do for fun? Is there a vanguard of Columbia grad students who storm the Village every weekend, playing barefoot in Washington Square Park? Are there male colleagues in thin black ties and sunglasses, riding Vespas?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m a bit of a homebody. It’s sad, really. I just find it difficult to like people.” She brings the second wineglass in and takes a sip. “Who knows what’s wrong with me. When I was a girl everyone just thought I was a snob, my own parents included. Dreamy kids who paint for hours in their bedrooms don’t do well in Australia, at least not where I grew up.” She looks around the bar again. “I’m suddenly starving.”

  “Let’s finish our drinks and then we’ll go foraging. They don’t have much in the way of food here. Do you want to go have dinner and then come back? The better bands always come on late anyway.”

  “Only if we can get pizza and eat it out of the box. We can take it down to the Hudson and sit on a bench.”

  “You make the Hudson sound like Key West. I’m not much in the mood to get mugged by a juvenile delinquent or one of the winos that live down by the river.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Not by much.”

  “It’s decided then,” she says.

  They drink up, but she can’t finish her second glass of wine. She stands up from the booth a little tipsily. Marty leaves some money on the table and they head back up to the street.

  * * *

  They carry a pepperoni pizza and some beer down to a strip of parkland along the river, the expressway traffic dulled by a hem of trees. There are a few people out walking their dogs and a lone fisherman casting into the river. They find a bench to watch the ferries and boats crossing between Manhattan and Union City. Ellie takes a slice of pizza from the box and tries to maneuver it into her mouth. The point sags down and cheese grease drips onto her white beaded dress.

  “Shit,” she says. Then she looks up at him. “Mind my language. I come from a family of heavy blasphemers.”

  “My father was Dutch and he swore like some deranged pirate from the eighteenth century.”

  “Shouldn’t have worn this stupid thing. I hardly ever go out—that’s part of the problem.”

  “You have to curl in the sides of the pizza, vertically down the middle. Then the tension picks up and keeps the tip from flopping.”

  “Nobody wants a flopping tip,” she says, then, “Oh, God, I’m drunk.”

  “Eat up,” he says.

  She gestures to the ferries with her newly repositioned pizza slice. “My father’s a ferry captain on Sydney Harbour. I was only ever asked once to ride inside the wheelhouse and I got seasick. Girls didn’t belong there anyway, he said. He was a man who lived as if he’d been born a century earlier.” She takes another bite of pizza. “I’m prattling…”

  “My father used to make his own tonic water, boil up the cinchona bark on the stovetop. Maybe that’s why we like old paintings—our fathers were trapped by the past.”

  Chewing, she says, “Either that or we can’t get our heads around the present.”

  They eat in silence for a moment, watching the lights of New Jersey in the grain of the river.

  She says, “I rode in the wheelhouse during a big swell. I think he wanted to test me. These slate-colored rolling waves came through the heads between Manly and the city. The ferries probably shouldn’t have been running, but my father was the last one to heed caution. Even the deckhands were turning green. When we got halfway between the heads it was so bad that I had to run out on deck and throw up over the railing. I came back in drenched from all the crashing waves but my father didn’t say anything, completely ignored me until that night when we got home to my mother. We walked into the kitchen and my mother just about died when she saw how I looked. When she asked what the hell happened to me, he said, ‘Ellie had a little spell on board, that’s all.’ My torrential vomiting was dismissed as a little spell. That was the story of my childhood. My sister broke her arm once and my father called it a busted wing and rigged it up in a piece of torn bedsheet. To this day her arm’s crooked. Her tennis ground stroke is five degrees off-center…”

  “Your father sounds intrepid.”

  “That’s one word for it. He served in the first war and I think part of his personality was actually shell shock. Then they lost a son before us girls came along. He was never the same, or so I’m told. Did you go to the war?”

  “I’m not that old.”

  “I meant the second one.”

  “No, they wouldn’t have me. I’m flat-footed with a bung knee and a side of mild asthma. Filing a few patents for the army and navy was as close as I got to the action. How’s the pizza?”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Tell me how you repair a painting.”

  “It’ll put you to sleep.”

  “Try me.”

  She reaches for another slice of pizza. “It’s not interesting, believe me.”

  “I’d really like to know. Please.”

  She looks out at the river, then down at the pizza box. “It really depends. But you have to think of a painting in geological terms. It’s all about strata, layers that do different jobs. A painting has its own archaeology.”

  “This is why I think you’d be a good teacher.”

  She pulls the crust off her slice and bites one end. “The shadows and the light usually take root in the ground layer. You fill in losses with chalk and rabbit glue. You should smell my apartment. There’s a French butcher in Brooklyn who sells me rabbit pelts by the dozen.”

  “You can’t buy it ready-made?”

  “It’s better if you make it from scratch. For one thing, it gets you in the mind-set of the seventeenth century.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, you cheat a little with the brushwork, building it up sculpturally and then going over it with thin layers of paint. In London we used to argue about whether or not to match the color of the ground exactly or whether you should clearly mark out your territory, let future restorers know where you’d been.”

  “
It was an ethical issue,” he says.

  “I suppose it was. They made you choose sides and there were professors there who hated each other because they couldn’t agree on what color to make a ground.”

  “I thought lawyers were petty and contentious.”

  She looks over toward New Jersey, the slice of pizza midway to her mouth, and blows some air between her lips. She drops the pizza slice back in the box. “I’m exhausted and still drunk. I don’t think I’m going to make it back to the Robin. I’m sorry.”

  “The Sparrow.”

  “I should stop talking.”

  “Some other time. Do you want to take the pizza home?”

  “Naturally. You’re talking to a graduate student.”

  Marty says, “Yes, one who charges thirty dollars an hour. That’s more than my dead wife’s analyst and he actually studied in Vienna with one of Freud’s disciples.” He means it as a joke, but there’s a note of hostility in his voice.

  She turns her head but doesn’t look at him. The pizza box sits open between them, grease stains like tiny islands on a cardboard map.

  Slowly, she says, “Do you think it’s unreasonable?”

  “I think you know what rich people are willing to pay for mounting a little existential meaning on their walls. My wealth is a historical accident, just so we’re clear.”

  A diesel engine thrums somewhere out on the river. The mood has suddenly been poisoned. He wants to shift the conversation back to banter, but he knows it’s too late. “Let me get you into a taxi,” he says. “Will you take the pizza?”

  She doesn’t answer but takes the box. They walk a few streets over from the expressway and he flags down a taxi. His father used to carry a doorman’s whistle in his vest pocket, just for hailing cabs, and he wonders where that thing ended up. It might be resting at the bottom of a drawer in the ship captain’s desk. When the cab pulls up he climbs into the back beside her before she can object. “Brooklyn and then the Upper East Side,” he tells the driver.

  “You don’t want to do it in reverse?” the driver asks.

  “We’ll take the lady first,” Marty says.