The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  She says, “This is completely unnecessary.”

  “Let’s just say I’m from another century as well.”

  They don’t talk the full length of the Brooklyn Bridge. He watches her look out the window, shoulders turned away from him, her fingers gently drumming on top of the pizza box. Her body language suggests she’s brooding about the earlier comment. He saw a flash of something back there. A quick temper, perhaps, but also a propensity for self-doubt. He rolls down his window slightly to let in some air.

  * * *

  Marty tells the driver to wait while she gets inside her apartment building. The stream of traffic thunders overhead on the expressway. He waits until he sees the play of light and her silhouette against an upper window, then tells the driver to go ahead. A few blocks later he tells the driver to let him out and he returns on foot, his collar up, gently drunk, pulled along by something he doesn’t fully understand. Each thing she divulges about her life and work is a small theft. It’s like taking ornaments off a stranger’s shelf, one by one, and dropping them into his coat pockets. He stops at a late-night deli and buys two cups of coffee and a pint of ice cream. Then he stands outside her apartment building, the ice cream tucked under one arm, cooling against his rib cage, while his hands warm against the coffee. He watches her silhouette against the drawn curtains, the little forays she makes between rooms. He imagines showing up on her doorstep with the forgery wrapped in paper, telling her that it’s a restoration he wants her to work on, or watching her face as he describes the Sara de Vos he once owned until someone plucked it off his bedroom wall during a charity dinner for orphans. It’s her future he’s holding in his hands, flimsy as two paper cups. He wants to understand her life from the inside out, to feel into its corners and handle the filaments that hold it in place.

  He walks inside the darkened apartment building and climbs the tiled stairway to the second floor. He knows it’s the corner apartment with its windows facing north—he’s always been good with direction, knows the cardinal points when he’s sitting in a windowless Midtown restaurant. He knocks softly and hears her feet padding across the wood floors, moving away and then coming back. A shadow breaks up the chink of light from under the door and her voice is muffled—“Who’s there?”

  Quietly, but as jovial as he can sound, he says, “It’s Jake Alpert with coffee and ice cream as a peace offering. He’s very sorry for being an ass.”

  There’s a moment of silence and another shift in the light under the door. “Tell Jake that I was just getting ready for bed. No need to apologize.”

  “Well, at least let me put this in your freezer before it melts.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just so late … I’m not dressed.”

  “I understand.” He takes a step back from the door to make sure his voice doesn’t sound threatening. “Since Rachel passed I’ve become a bit of an insomniac. I’m very sorry for my earlier comment. Good night, Ellie.” He feels a burst of terrible shame that he’s used Rachel’s name, as if her actual life now hangs in the balance. He takes another step away.

  There’s a pause, then he hears the sound of a chain being unlatched. Her face appears when the door opens six inches. She says, “You can give me the ice cream. I’ll put it in my freezer and we can have it some other time. That was nice of you.”

  He comes closer. “It’s under my arm. I can’t get it while I’m holding the coffees.”

  “Oh,” she says, a little annoyed. She opens the door another six inches and extends her arm so she can reach below his elbow. He sees that she’s wearing a flannel nightie with small birds on it. Her calves are skinny and pale, her feet slightly splayed and blunted at the toes. A girl who grew up barefoot, he thinks. When she takes the ice cream he says, “Peppermint chocolate chip.”

  She looks away. “I’m more of a vanilla person myself.”

  “I offended you and I’m sorry. Your expertise is worth every cent you charge. I wish I could come in, just for a moment.”

  “I’m not used to having company,” she says. “The place isn’t fit.”

  “All right, well, good night. Here’s your coffee as well.” He hands it to her through the doorway and she has to set the ice cream down to take it. He turns back for the stairwell, knowing that she’s still there.

  She says, “Five minutes is all. And you have to wait until I tidy up and dim the lights. The less you see the better. Wait here,” she says.

  Another small theft. She closes the door and he comes back to await further instructions. He can hear her tidying up, placing dishes in the sink. When she finally comes back to the door she’s put on a man’s bathrobe that has flecks of paint on the lapels. He steps inside. The windows above the radiator, facing the elevated expressway, have been opened and there’s a slight breeze blowing through the humid space. A series of snake plants and philodendrons line the sill in tiny pots. He can smell the animal glue she talked about and there’s the high chemistry of solvents and oil paints, and something darker that smells like shoe polish. A small wooden island in the kitchenette is taken up by mortars and pestles and stone bowls. A lacquered tea tray has been repurposed to hold every kind of brush and palette knife imaginable. A drafting table on metal legs is covered by strips of paper and charcoal sketches. She sets her coffee down on a small Formica table by the window that Marty recognizes from the photo. The living area is stacked with books and newspapers and over in one corner is the offending Remington with a sheet of her dissertation, no doubt, wilting in its Bakelite mouth.

  “If the landlord ever sees inside this place I’ll get evicted,” she says. “But it’s not easy to find apartments where they don’t mind you melting rabbit pelts on the stovetop.”

  Marty looks over at the blackened oven and range. “I’m pretty sure that kitchen has seen worse.”

  She tells him he can sit down if he likes and he sits on the mustard-brown couch that faces the windows and a shelf with a record player. There’s a painting resting on an easel by the window and it’s covered by a paisley tablecloth. He wonders whether she has just draped it there or whether this is a habit, the masking and unmasking of her trade. He knows better than to ask about it right now, so he sits and drinks his coffee. When she brings the ice cream over there are no bowls but two spoons.

  “Family tradition,” she says. “My mum used to make her own butterscotch ice cream, but she made us eat out of the churn bucket. Didn’t want to dirty extra dishes.”

  They eat several spoonfuls each, the pint between them on the couch. Marty looks around the room, taking it in. Gretchen’s apartment had signs of a rich and vibrant social life—cheese knives and glassware and linen napkins for entertaining. This apartment could belong to an invalid, a shut-in with kidney stones and a fox terrier.

  “I could build you some bookshelves,” he said. “I come from a line of men with carpentry tools in the basement.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. All those spines wedged together would make my head spin.”

  “Again, I am sorry about what I said before.”

  “It’s fine. You’re probably right. I’ve been spoilt. You people pay me to do something I’d do for free. The money doesn’t mean anything to me. I can’t ever bring myself to spend it. It feels tainted because it comes too easily.”

  “That sounds rather noble. What do you mean by you people?”

  “There are people who look at art, people who buy it, and people who make it. I’m in a whole separate category—I mend it, bring it back to life. It’s not unusual for conservators to spend more hours alone with a great work than the artist themselves.”

  “Is that why you do it? To meditate on the work?”

  He watches her shrug and leverage her spoon into the core of the ice cream. She lands a chunk and smooths it with the roof of her mouth, pulling the half-empty spoon back out. Something has shifted between them, a new candor on the end of her spoon.

  “I’m not good with men,” she says matter-of-factly. “I don’t know
what they want.”

  “Have you had many men in your life?”

  “That seems rather personal,” she says, then, “No, not many. What was she like? Rachel?”

  He flinches at the sound of her name and has to look away. “I don’t want to cry, so I’d rather not say.”

  “I’m sure it’s a terrible loss.”

  “It’s hard to describe.”

  They seem to be at a conversational impasse, so Marty gets up and strolls around the room.

  “You can put on a record if you like, though I don’t have any jazz.”

  “I’ll buy you some Chet Baker.”

  He flips through the small stack of LPs—Chopin sonatas, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff. “Why am I not surprised by your record collection? Is there anything here from the twentieth century?” She doesn’t answer. He takes out the Chopin from its sleeve and places it carefully onto the turntable. “Do you ever paint with music on?”

  “Never,” she says. “It changes the brushwork.”

  He sits back on the couch. She closes her eyes and leans back against a cushion, letting the music wash over her. She says, “Tell me about your first encounter with art. I always like to hear that story.”

  “My father used to tell stories of being at the Armory Show, of lining up with a thousand people to see Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. He liked to hang out with painters when he could so he knew some of the Ashcans and their circle. He used to get drunk with John Butler Yeats, father of the famous Irish poet. As an old man John Butler Yeats was living above a French restaurant. Anyway, my father claimed that he went to the Armory Show with John Yeats and saw a woman faint when she got to the front of the Duchamp line. So that was my first encounter with art, a story about what it could do to people. Do you know that Duchamp lives in Lower Manhattan and hasn’t painted in decades? He says his life is the art now.”

  “I didn’t know that. Obviously because he’s from the twentieth century.” With her eyes still closed, she says, “What else?”

  “I grew up in a house filled with Old Masters. It wasn’t until I got to college and took some art history that I understood what my father had assembled or inherited. We owned some of the paintings discussed in the textbooks.”

  They continue in this eddy of conversation for a while. She throws out a murmured question and he answers at length, trying to summon interesting anecdotes from his real life, as if he can make up for so many layers of deceit. Eventually, she stops asking questions and he suspects she’s fallen asleep. To test his theory he says, “Am I so boring that you’ve nodded off?” She doesn’t answer. The Chopin and art stories have finished what the pizza and beer began. He sits very still, listening to her breathe, the ice cream slowly melting on the scuffed coffee table.

  After several minutes, he quietly sets down his spoon and walks toward the short hallway, back toward the bathroom and bedroom. He walks as softly as he can, trying not to squeak the battered hardwoods. The bathroom smells of damp towels and there’s a wire clotheshorse set up in the tub, a few pairs of her underwear hanging out to dry. In her haste to tidy up, she’d forgotten to close the shower curtain and there’s something tender and sad about her industrial cotton underwear. He pictures her hand washing her clothes in the tub. Her beaded white dress—now stained with cheese grease—has been spot cleaned and draped over the sink. He looks back at her underwear and quietly closes the shower curtain. He’s afraid to use the toilet in case the sound of it flushing wakes her, so he steps back out into the hallway and peers into the darkened bedroom, a narrow room with a single lamp burning from a bamboo nightstand. The bed is unmade, the floor strewn with clothes, and her closet appears to be filled with suitcases. A flourish of rising damp blots against one wall and part of the ceiling. He can’t imagine how this is the product of a methodical mind, a temperament for finessing a canvas one painstaking stroke at a time.

  When he goes back into the living area she’s still slumped against the back of the couch, head back, mouth slightly open. He moves over to the easel and lifts one corner of the paisley tablecloth. For a fleeting moment he imagines his de Vos sitting there, but now he sees it’s a canvas awaiting some depiction—an underlayer painted an earthy and pale red. That she thought to cover the naked canvas but not her damp cotton underwear reveals something, though he’s not sure what. He drops the corner of the tablecloth and begins for the door. As he passes the drafting table with its rummage of papers and sketches, he sees a pattern that looks familiar. A narrow strip of photographic paper protrudes from under a charcoal etching. The sliced-away piece is no wider than two inches, but he recognizes the headboard and the arabesque of his own bedroom’s plush gray wallpaper. The bed appears to be unmade, the pillows in plain sight, and from the shadows of the headboard rods against the wall he guesses it was taken on a winter morning, when the light spills into the room late and from the south. He puts it in his pocket and continues for the door. He should wake her, he knows, so that she can lock the door behind him. She’ll wake some hours from now, and feel disoriented and vulnerable. But the thought of someone taking photographs in his bedroom during broad daylight rushes through him and he heads down the darkened stairwell in a surge of anger.

  Outside, he walks several blocks until he finds a cab and makes his way back toward Manhattan. As they near the Brooklyn Bridge, the city glimmers into view—a Dutch outpost at the confluence of two rivers, an island plucked from the flotsam of history. Whenever he reenters Manhattan, even if it’s just from a weekend in the Hamptons or an antique show in Queens, he can’t help feeling how tenuous his grasp of the city is. He’s spent his whole life here and yet there are neighborhoods that are as dark and unknowable to him as the Congo. Like his father, he’s a street walker, but it’s always above the parallel of Forty-Second Street and south of Central Park’s upper edge. He has dreams in which he walks his dog around the perimeter of the entire island, letting Carraway drink from both rivers.

  At home, Hester has turned off all the lights—her customary way of protesting his late hours—so he’s forced to walk up the stairs from the foyer in the dark. To turn on a light would be to admit moral failure to the housemaid. As he enters the upstairs hallway he wonders whether Hester has betrayed them, whether she let in a photographer when they were catching some winter sunshine in the Bahamas one January. Although there must have been a few hundred people through the house in the last year, very few had been there during daylight. It could have been a tradesman, the plumber or the piano tuner with camera in hand. He knows if he confronts Hester she’ll quit in a heartbeat; she has Southern notions of honor and loyalty and his wife will carry a grudge for years.

  Through the bedroom doorway Rachel appears to be asleep, facing the other wall, the dog curled behind her legs. He pads down the hallway to his study and closes the door behind him. He pours himself two fingers of Scotch and picks up the telephone and dials the number on Ellie’s business card. It rings half a dozen times before she answers. “I’m sorry I left without waking you,” he says, peering at her forgery against the bookshelves. “It occurred to me that your front door isn’t locked.” He can hear her sleep-addled breathing, the sound of her swallowing to wake up. “I must have dozed off. My apologies,” she says.

  “I forgive you.”

  She breathes drowsily into the phone.

  He says, “I’ll be in touch soon.”

  “I’ll have a list of Dutch works by women for you to consider.”

  “Excellent. Until then.”

  “Good night, Jake.”

  He puts the phone down and drains his glass. He walks out into the hallway and down to the bedroom. In the en suite bathroom he puts on his pajamas and hangs his clothes on the back of the door. He takes out the narrow strip of photographic paper from his trouser pocket and brings it into the bedroom, holding up the strip in a narrow band of moonlight. The photographer had stood at the end of the bed with the windows behind the camera. He looks up at the empty space on
the wall above the headboard. During daylight, you can see the blanched ghost of the painting, the rest of the wall turned a pale sepia from the light and grit of the city. It hung there for forty-five years, since before they were married and the room had belonged to his father, who never remarried, who slept alone under the ice skaters and the girl at the edge of the frozen river after his wife had been wrenched from his grasp.

  With her back to him, Rachel says something. At first he thinks she’s talking in her sleep, some snippet of a troubled dream, but then the sounds assemble in the darkness with a slight delay.

  “You’re awfully late. How was the jazz?”

  “Frederic got us all drunk and I lost track of time. There were a few decent quintets playing, nothing special.”

  She repositions herself and the dog has to adjust. “What’s that smell?”

  “The club’s underground, remember? A bunker of cigarette smoke and sweaty musicians.” He sits on the edge of the bed and puts the photographic strip into the drawer of his nightstand.

  “No, it’s something else,” she says. “I can’t quite place it.”

  “Should I shower?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It smells like old house paint. Like you’ve been crawling through somebody’s attic.”

  “Strange,” he says. “Sorry to wake you.”

  He gets up and closes the bathroom door behind him. In the shower, he runs the water as hot as he can stand it, letting it scald the back of his neck and shoulders. He scrubs himself with soap and washes his hair, removing the fug of Ellie’s apartment.

  Heemstede

  SUMMER 1637

  A week of fog and drizzle. Bone-chilled and melancholic, Cornelis Groen holes up in his tearoom, plying himself with home remedies and apothecary blends of Ceylon loose leaf. Mrs. Streek carries a lacquered tray through the warrens of the great house, sets them out for his consideration beside the blazing hearth. Cinchona wine, tinctures of aloe and saffron, a compound of aniseed water for his chills. At precisely noon each day he places a sugar cube in his mouth and draws a swill of tea, warm and medicinal, down the back of his throat. Sara sits part of each afternoon in the stifling room, listening to a litany of bodily complaints. “My bones are made from ice,” is a favorite expression. Groen tells stories of being a shipping merchant, of being transformed by latitudes of smallpox, scrofula, and canker. “Changed my very constitution,” he says, looking forlornly out the window, “as if the humors of the body coalesced into a watery gruel.” She tries to cheer him with stories of her progress preparing canvases for his desired project. She’s enlisted Tomas to make wooden supports, grind pigments, and size the canvas they’ve had delivered from Haarlem. But there’s no cheering Cornelis when he’s overcome by distemper. His mind kindles in the memory of previous ailments and he feels them all over again—the swollen knuckles, the chilblains. The entire house succumbs to his sunken mood. Tomas tells her that even the horses seem out of sorts. Mrs. Streek, standing blowzily in her pristine display kitchen, cannot be summoned from her wordless blue funk. She cooks Groen’s favorite meals like so much penance—mutton with prunes and mint, minced ox tongue with green apples.