The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  Jake unfurls his napkin into his lap, bringing his eyes up at her slowly. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was presumptuous. An old habit.”

  “It’s okay. You seem to know what to order. Did you come here often? With Rachel?”

  “Not this place, but another Spanish restaurant near the park. We fell in love with the food when we honeymooned in Barcelona.”

  They sip their wine. The short stubby glasses remind Ellie of the water tumblers her mother used to keep on the kitchen counter.

  “I brought you the list of paintings,” she says, taking it from her pocket and laying it flat on the table. “It’s a bit wrinkled.”

  He reaches over to pick it up. “It looks well loved.”

  She watches his eyes move down the list, then back up again.

  He says, “Thank you for putting this together.”

  “Listing them is the easy part. Finding them is another question. But a good art dealer might have some leads. I looked up auction and museum records to make sure they’re all still private.”

  “Which one is your favorite?” he asks.

  “A year ago I would have said the Leyster. A Game of Cards. The woman is holding her own with the men, sharing some bawdy joke. She’s looking back over her shoulder and just letting everything unfold. She’s in charge, somehow.”

  He adjusts his silverware parallel to his plate. “And what about now?”

  “It’s the de Vos. No question.”

  “¿Por qué?”

  She suspects he’s flirting, but she also knows she has a track record of misreading signals from men. In London, there was a series of botched dates with fellow restoration students. Three dates in with an aristocratic boy from Yorkshire before she realized she’d mistaken his effeminate manners for refinement and that he was furtively gawking at the Italian waiters whenever they ate out.

  She pushes all that back and focuses on the question at hand. “It’s totally unique. A landscape by a baroque woman. People depicted with portrait-like details. The only painting attributed to her.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “We can’t be sure, but she lost a daughter to the plague and her husband went bankrupt. That much is documented.”

  “And where is it? The painting.”

  “Hard to know. I suspect it’s been in the same family for generations.”

  The gazpacho arrives and she hopes that he won’t condescend to her with something like Now this is a cold soup. That would ruin everything, poison whatever flirtation is, or isn’t, transpiring. She can’t even work out if she’s attracted to him. Does he smell like an old suitcase and Ivory soap and, if so, could that ever evoke more in her than a well-traveled uncle coming to visit? She likes his hands, the way the French cuffs rest against the bony part of his hairless wrists. His eyes are kind and vital, his smile a little raffish. But there’s something self-entitled, she thinks, a man who’s never known want.

  “Fascinating,” he says, swallowing some soup. “Have you seen it?”

  “No.” She takes up her spoon and swirls the surface of the soup a little, aware of him watching her. “Though I would dearly love to. I wouldn’t say it’s a famous painting in the art world. More like a cult classic. An enigma.” She’s surprised by how effortless the lie is, though she knows the real exposure is the list itself. One day, years from now, if her dissertation manuscript becomes a book, Jake Alpert might happen upon it and read the chapter on de Vos and realize she was holding out on him. The thought of her future feels like a rope around her waist, a tightening noose around her rib cage. She sips her wine and focuses on her soup for a moment to steady her thoughts.

  He says, “Listen, I’ve got the afternoon off and I wondered if you might like to go see a movie.”

  She lets it hang in the air too long, so that when she answers she sounds calculating instead of enthusiastic. “What’s playing?”

  He wipes his mouth with his napkin, perhaps a little disappointed. “There’s a Fellini over at the Paris Theatre. Nights of Cabiria.”

  She puts her soupspoon down. “I don’t really understand Fellini. I always feel like I’m watching someone else’s demented dream in black and white.”

  He laughs. “That’s a relief, actually. I was trying to be more cultured than I am. Rachel used to drag me along and I was dutiful. How about Gigi?”

  “The musical?”

  He nods.

  “Sounds like fun.”

  They finish their soup and the paella arrives in a big pan with handles, shrimp tails and clam shells sticking out of the saffron-colored rice. The waiter serves them and refills their wine and she hears Jake whisper gracias, an affectation that has become endearing in the span of half an hour.

  When they leave the restaurant there’s a downpour and of course Jake has a compact umbrella in his briefcase. She takes his arm and walks beneath the open umbrella, worried about the garlic aftermath of the paella, trying to talk out of the side of her mouth, facing away from him. He walks closest to the curb, a gesture, like the cheek kiss, that smacks of chivalry and old money. They walk over to Broadway where a movie palace on hard times is still showing Gigi with faded posters out front to prove it. Jake buys their tickets and while Ellie stands out at the curbstone, craning to look up at the Art Deco facade with its gold lions and chevron-painted tiles, it occurs to her that here is the life she has written about and fabricated for her parents. Lunch at a Spanish restaurant, wine from a glass flask, a wealthy widower taking her to see a matinee on a rainy weekday afternoon. Her life suddenly seems interesting and full, as if a glaze has shocked a muted underlayer into color.

  Jake comes back with their tickets and says it’s about to start. They go inside the musty, cavernous lobby, the dingy red carpet and the pendant lights and the tired concession stand, the 15-watt gloaming as heavy as a fog. She loves everything about this place. They buy a bag of popcorn to share and two Cokes and go inside the theater itself, where a handful of people sit watching previews in the underwater light, the pale blue-white ribbons of the projector rippling above their heads. They sit in the middle, an entire row to themselves. He nestles the popcorn between them, holding it for her on the armrest. When the film starts she’s immediately won over by the costumes and the sets and the music. Paris in dappled light, the upper classes frivolous about marriage and serious about love, Maurice Chevalier dancing in a boater and powder-blue suit. She’s faintly aware of the plot beneath all the musical and visual confection, the girl who is being groomed for life as a courtesan, the lackluster options that fan out before her, but the darker themes seem like a distraction, the struts beneath a beautiful bridge. Several times Jake grazes her hand at the rim of the popcorn bag and she wonders whether his attention is mere loneliness, a widower reentering the fray with a younger woman. She tells herself to make no assumptions, that keeping a man company is not the same as keeping a man’s interest, a sentiment that seems like something her mother once told her. How did they ever make love, come to think of it, Bob and Maggie Shipley, with her dad spending his nights out on his boat? On-screen, Gigi flirts and drinks champagne with an older man, apparently oblivious to her own intoxicating sexual charm.

  When the movie finishes he puts her in a cab and pays the driver and she doesn’t protest. He kisses her again on the cheek, thanks her for the list, asks her to send him an invoice, and then she’s driving home in the rain, the afterimages of the movie and the melodies floating through her mind, a warm floaty sensation that she always gets after a good matinee, a sense of waking slowly to the quotidian world and its demands. She hopes the driver won’t make small talk and he doesn’t. Brooklyn is gray and ambient, the whir of tires on the road, the yellows of headlights. Even her apartment, when she gets home, feels softened and less cluttered. She tells herself it was a date and puts the kettle on the stovetop. While she waits for the water to boil, she hurries down to her bedroom and opens the closet. The de Vos—now on Jake Alpert’s list—was recently moved back into her apa
rtment, this time in an airtight case. Certain complications developed at the Chelsea storage unit and with the bakery key, Gabriel reported, but a sale, he felt sure, was imminent. She assumes it’s all part of keeping his inventory on the move. She lays it flat on her bed. How remarkable, she thinks, the way paintings trap light and time. Father Barry used to call it starlight, the passage of pigments on canvas across the centuries. Feeling inspired for a moment, she goes to the typewriter table and begins to jot down some dissertation ideas on a notepad. She needs a chapter on the Guilds of St. Luke and the apprenticeship model.

  When the phone rings she knows it’s Jake Alpert because no one else has called her since the summer, not since Meredith Hornsby summoned her to campus for a browbeating. She decides to let it ring four times before picking up. “I had a wonderful time,” he says. “Have you ever been to the Cloisters? I was thinking we could go on Sunday afternoon.” For the first time, she allows her imagination to brim over and she sees a Metrocolor montage of her new dating life. They’ll meet for drinks in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central and she’ll lead him through a tour of the Frick and they’ll picnic in the park. She’ll cut her hair to make herself look older, wear lipstick in the middle of the day, learn how to cook eggs Benedict. She’ll move to Manhattan and start reading again for pleasure and they’ll go ballroom dancing. All the colors in this vision are milky and washed out, softened not by rain but by a delicate blue haze. It’s Rembrandt meets Metrocolor. She sees the new palette taking shape, the beginning of the life she’s been lying about in her letters for years. “I would love to,” she says. “It sounds fabulous.” She can’t remember ever using the word fabulous before.

  Sydney

  AUGUST 2000

  Marty shambles across the sandstone campus in his field vest, his pockets filled with Aussie dollar coins and banknotes, with toothpicks, an acorn, a roll of antacids. Something about their money he likes, the frontier gold coins, the wild colors and the bush motifs on the notes, the outlandish-looking animals on the coat of arms. Sydney is easy to like and for several days he’s been walking and cabbing-it around with a pocket-size map. Sightseeing has never been his forte—that was always left up to Rachel—but he likes to launch out into an unknown city with few bearings, exploring the grid or the serpentine alleyways, and see where he ends up. For two days he’s wandered through the Central Business District and out into the leafy innards of Georgian sandstone and postwar redbrick, along the little scrubby bays and mangrove inlets of the harbor. He took a ferry across to Manly and back, saw the steel blue of the Pacific through the sandstone jaws of North and South Head. He ate a hamburger with an egg tucked inside on a hilltop above Bondi Beach, washed it down with a very thin banana milkshake that seemed as exotic and outlandish to him as tapioca. His walk is loose-kneed and a bit shuffling, but he can clip along at two miles an hour, a pace endorsed by his doctor. When he tires he flags down a taxi and makes notes in his small Moleskine. When he was still driving, hunkered down into his sixties, he took up the habit of reading street names and commercial signage aloud, a bewildered tone in his voice, as if no one had any business naming a place Dick’s Accessories or Krumholz Drive. It drove Rachel around the bend and he thinks of her when he finds himself doing it in the back of a cab, flummoxed by the Aboriginal words—Woolloomooloo and Woollahra and Kirribilli and God knows what. The drivers look at him blankly or give him a charitable laugh.

  Sydney University is High Church in an Anglican sort of way, a croft of leaded windows and wheat-colored stonework. He sees echoes of Cambridge and Oxford, of British imperiousness. He scrutinizes the campus map handed to him by a security guard at the main gate. The auditorium is circled in yellow highlighter several times because the old and the infirm need a little extra help. Early this morning he’d asked one of the front desk clerks at the hotel to help him with an Internet search in the business center. He told her that the ham radio and the pacemaker were inventions he knew something about, but the World Wide Web was a sea of white noise to him. Under his direction, the woman brought up the University of Sydney website and located Professor Eleanor Shipley’s faculty profile, complete with course schedule and building locations. He made a point of not looking at her faculty profile picture, because he wanted his first glimpse of new millennium Ellie to be in person.

  It’s not until he gets close to the lecture hall that he has second thoughts. He rarely thinks of death, but when he does it’s usually in the context of inconvenience—a stroke at thirty thousand feet, a heart attack in the barber’s chair, the fatal onset of colitis on a foreign park bench. For the most part, he stopped traveling oversees as a courtesy to the future strangers who might one day find him sullied and expired beside one of their national monuments. What he thinks now is that he won’t live much longer and this is an errand he’s always meant to run—a settling in the ledger of regret. He sits down to catch his breath before going into the lecture hall. Whatever shape Ellie’s life has taken on, he knows this will be an intrusion. Here comes Marty de Groot, the wrecking ball of the past.

  He scans the hedgerows and building facades for omens and portents, for signs of cosmic sanction. As he’s gotten older, his superstitions have grown increasingly mystical and apocalyptic. In his forties, he was briefly convinced that the missing painting had rescued him from premature gout or death, that the men in his bloodline had been cursed by its presence. This theory was disproved when the painting was returned. Not only has he lived into his eighties but also his marriage endured and there were decades of relative happiness. If not actual and abiding happiness it was at least contentment buoyed by occasional moments of bracing pleasure. Still, despite all this inductive proof against nameless cataclysm, there’s always been a quadrant of his thinking reserved for the world’s signs that prophesy ruin. A digital clock face with three identical numbers aligned suggests bad luck for the rest of the day, an acorn in his pocket prevents him from being struck by lightning, looking away when an ambulance wails by prevents fatal injury befalling him. He’s never killed a bee that’s flown into his house because he knows it will invite a troublesome stranger onto his doorstep. He can see all these beliefs as irrational, understand that they rise through the layer of primal murk buried below the hippocampus, but none of that stops them from angling his thoughts toward misfortune. So as he looks at the lecture hall he waits for a sign, for permission to enter. Eventually, it comes in the form of two coeds walking toward the building, two girls wrapped in bright scarves holding hands and chatting excitedly about some scandal. Marty can’t remember girls holding hands during his college years, but there’s such a look of good cheer on their faces, such fellow feeling burning in their cheeks on a blustery afternoon, that he’s convinced of his mission. He gets up and follows in their wake, moving into the dark chill of the building, across the wax floors and into the auditorium itself. He gets a few stares from university students who are dressed in tattered clothing and who look like teenagers to him. He sits down in the back row and settles himself with an antacid.

  Marty sees her for the first time in more than forty years across the valley of raked wooden seating. She seems small down there, standing behind the lectern, her hair long and completely gray, pulled back at the seams in the manner of academics and archivists and feminist poets. He thinks of the old-fashioned word handsome when applied to women. She’s dressed in navies and creams, in a wool skirt and knee-length boots and a copper necklace that seems from another time. As she leans against the lectern she raises one boot, brings it onto the toe as she looks out at her ragged charges. When she begins talking it’s clear how comfortable she is up there. She speaks about the Vermeers in intimate tones, as if she’s talking to a fellow devotee, to a confidant who’s made a pilgrimage to unravel these mysteries. A pretty little lecture, he thinks, the coaxing of poetry from the passage of light. Something about tronien and the invented person. Very nice.

  * * *

  Two days after her encounter with Helen in t
he conservation studio, Ellie gives an undergraduate lecture on Vermeer and his use of light. This part of her course on the Dutch Golden Age always coincides with the heart of a Sydney winter, when the maritime light angles low and from the north. As an assignment, she asks her students to pay attention to the way winter sunlight slants across Victorian sandstone in the afternoons or the rosin, almost pink light that brims off the Pacific in the mornings. They’re supposed to keep a journal of their observations—a light journal—but they are mostly blind to the subtleties of illumination. It’s like noticing their own heartbeats or breathing for the first time. They take the tawny hues of Sydney’s bushland in summer, or the somber warm light of the city in winter, for granted. So she starts out her lecture by putting several Vermeers up on the projection screens in the auditorium and walks them through the fall of light.

  “In Woman Holding a Balance, we are spectators to the passage of light. Arthur Wheelock describes the light as spilling in from the window, behind the thickest part of the orange curtain. You see it cascade down toward the table, bathing the gold and the pearls. Blue drapery, folded in shadow. The light is northern and amorphous. It gently guides the eye. Our gaze goes to her hand at the edge of the table, then up her forearm toward her face. It could be reverie on her face, her eyes downturned, nothing to distract us from the balance between her fingers. Wheelock says it looks as if she will never move and you can see it. She’s suspended in time. Vermeer wants us to believe that the light is still pouring down, her pinky still extended.”

  She looks out into the auditorium where sixty or so Bachelor of Arts students take notes or make asides or fidget with their mobile phones. For two days she’s had the sensation of seeing her own life as a painting under an X-ray—the hairline fractures and warped layers that distort the topmost image. She sees her private history, the personal epochs and eras in foreign cities, with a keen, clinical detachment. They have all led to the cracks on the surface and it’s time to take responsibility for those flaws. Last night, she drafted two letters of resignation, one to the museum and one to the university.