The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  He says, “Tomorrow we’ll start the grounding lessons, then?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Come up here tomorrow and we’ll get started.”

  He bites back a smile, buoyed along, a little jaunty now on his feet as he walks over to the door and closes it behind him.

  Manhattan

  OCTOBER 1958

  A month of dinners, lunches, matinees, and museum walks. But Ellie remains confused about Jake’s intentions until he invites her away for a weekend. In the fall, she agrees to go antique hunting upstate and stay overnight in Albany. He arranges to pick her up at her apartment early one Saturday morning, so they can hit the estate sales and antique shops before noon. The weather has turned—Indian summer has given way to chill mornings and cold nights. She wraps herself in a scarf and heavy wool coat. While she waits, she double-checks her luggage and becomes conscious that her suitcase is one size too big for a weekend getaway. Right-size luggage seems like an extravagance of poststudent life, a distant shore she’s still rowing toward.

  Jake raps at her door and when she answers he’s standing there with a framed painting wrapped in brown paper and masking tape.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “Your new assignment. It needs a good cleaning and some inpainting.”

  “Can I take a peek?”

  “It’ll be waiting for you when you come back.” He takes her hand and leans in to kiss her cheek. “We need to get a head start on those Albany widows. They’ve been up since four planning for the ancient blood sport of antiquing.”

  Ellie smiles and sets the painting beside the front door. Jake grabs her suitcase and doesn’t say anything about its size, for which she’s grateful. He leads her out into the hallway.

  At the curb, his night-blue Citroën looks almost sardonic in the morning light—its raked hood and sleek headlights give it the dreadnought grace of a shark. She thinks of the grey nurse sharks that sometimes followed her father’s ferryboat across Sydney Harbour. They’ve taken taxis up until now so the unveiling of the car feel momentous, like she’s seeing a new side to him. He puts her suitcase in the trunk and they climb in. When he starts the engine, the car shudders and rises a few inches with a pnuematic sigh. She looks over at him and he grins. He says, “They call that the kneel.” A moment later, he puts on a pair of driving gloves and gives the horn a light jab—it sounds French and adenoidal—and they pull down the street.

  “What do you think of the car?” he asks.

  She likes the way he asks her opinion about everything, even if she doesn’t know the first thing about cars or music or half the food they eat. She looks over the molded dashboard and the instrument panel with its needle-thin dials and clock-face odometer. The steering wheel has a single spoke and the brake appears to be more of a push button than a pedal. “I’m not sure whether it was designed by an engineer or an avant-garde theater director.”

  He likes this answer, she thinks, finds it sporting and witty.

  He says, “The French like a bit of theater in their automobiles. They pour their souls into them. Did you know that Citroën was part of the French Resistance during the war? They sold trucks to the Nazis but they lowered the oil markers on the dipsticks so the trucks just died out in the field, burned up their engines.”

  “I like this car already.”

  They pull down Thirty-Sixth Street to get on the expressway, past the plumbing supply store and the boarded-up florist and the rusting stairwells. From inside the car, she can’t help feeling like an aristocrat touring the proletariat. He’s wearing a pair of driving moccasins and they’re cut from the same leather as his kidskin driving gloves and his watchband—she’s always noticing his clothes. That kind of accessorizing on a different man might seem foppish, but on Jake it seems natural and masculine. Sometimes his clothes and mannerisms make her feel clumsy and flat-footed, but most of the time she likes to watch him do things with his hands—the slow and precise gestures, the easy way of folding his arms across his chest when he’s listening to her go on about paintings. She looks out the window and sees a gaunt man leaning in a doorway, his breath smoking as the early light braces the length of the street. She thinks about her parents and grandparents, about the hardscrabble brood of relatives in Dubbo and Broken Hill, about the impossibility of her driving in a Citroën with a Dutch-American blue blood named Jake Alpert. While his family passed down baroque and rococo paintings, hers passed down a set of tarnished souvenir spoons, complete with lacquered and wall-mountable display rack. Her mother’s pride and joy, right above the kitchen sink and the view of rusting oil tankers where the Parramatta River flows into the harbor.

  Driving north they talk about childhood exploits and transgressions.

  He says, “I used to feed my father’s horse an apple right before he’d go riding on weekends. I was terrified of horses so it took all my courage just to stand there with my flattened palm. I can still remember the feel of its soft muzzle against my hand.”

  “The horse was direct competition,” she says. “You wanted that animal, and therefore your father, to be stricken by horse flatulence. It makes perfect sense to me.”

  He throws out an easy laugh, his leather gloves turning walnut in a streak of autumn sunlight.

  She says, “At the boarding school I went shoplifting whenever I could. I’d steal lollies—candy—and batteries. I kept a transistor radio under my bed and listened to this wonderful show after lights out called Is It Ours? They’d play a piece of classical music by an unnamed Australian composer and then one by an anonymous European. People would call in to guess which was which. They almost always thought the better ones were European.”

  “What does that say about Australians?”

  “That we don’t trust our own talents. That anything foreign or exotic is automatically better and more refined.”

  They drive through the gold-and-russet foliage of the Catskills, stopping at small towns with stone courthouses and redbrick fire stations. People dress differently up here, she notices, the men in hats and suspenders, the women in brown woolen dresses. There are municipal bandstands painted white and willow trees presiding over ample walkways. The Citroën gets some stares from the locals as it wends through backstreets—an alien predator of the deep in search of estate sales and antique shops going out of business. They look at old church doors and leadlight windows and dusty mountains of Persian rugs. Ellie scopes out the artwork, but it’s mostly decorative and of little value—seascapes, riverscapes, portraits of stern ministers and their patrician wives.

  By noon the day has grown warm. They drive on to the next town, the radio playing, the windows down, Jake’s gloved hand patting the side of the car in a way that makes Ellie think of him patting the flank of a horse.

  Somewhere along the Hudson, between towns, he says, “I’ve been thinking about our list of prospective Dutch women’s paintings. I think I’d like to acquire the single de Vos first. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  She looks out at the scenery, scrutinizing a little wooded dell of noonday twilight. The car flashes into sunshine and then passes into these coppery green depths under the trees. In an instant, the temperature drops twenty degrees then warms again as they dash back into daylight. She thinks of ten-second days and nights, of miniature deaths. “That would be something,” she says casually. Her mood glazes over and she feels faintly dizzy. It reminds her of being on her feet for eight hours at a stretch while restoring a painting, the acetone and close work suddenly going to her head like the blade of a knife. “If you can find it,” she says.

  Jake adjusts the radio dial, moving the red needle between licks of static. “I’ve begun to make some discreet inquiries. Put out the word to fellow collectors.”

  She squints into the trees, letting her eyes go loose so she can slacken the colors from their shapes. She swallows to steady her voice. “That can be part of my brief, if you like. To research private collections and write letters of inquiry.”

 
There’s a long pause.

  “Your brief,” he says finally, without looking over. “Is that all this is to you?”

  There’s a moment of dappled quiet, the air siphoning and whistling in through the open windows.

  He says, “I expect there’ll be an itemized invoice at the end of the weekend. Send it to my PO box, will you?”

  She’s shocked by how mean he sounds. Around a bend, it looks as if winter has already burnished up along the riverbank, throwing the elms into skeletal relief. She reaches across the dashboard to touch his gloved hand on the steering wheel, the leather grain warming in the palm of her hand. She’s careful not to pat the back of his hand, because she doesn’t want to console or patronize.

  “That’s not the way I see this,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  She takes her hand back, but the words still burn in the air between them. She’s not sure if she’s surrendered something or claimed something. His face softens.

  He says, “I spoke out of turn. Forgive me.”

  Trying to regain some levity, she says, “Forgotten already. Now, let’s strategize about lunch.”

  He puts his foot down on the accelerator and the Citroën revs into the next octave, pulling them through a stretch of dun-brown fields, the shadows choked and violet up along the rocky hillsides.

  They stop for a late lunch at a restaurant run out of somebody’s house—a big Victorian with a screened-in porch. It’s a makeshift affair, with a parlor of white tablecloths and, in the backyard, picnic tables and wooden chairs set up by a stream. They sit out on the porch and eat sandwiches and chowder at a wicker table before retiring to a line of rocking chairs so Jake can have a smoke. She feels that something has shifted between them and wonders what will happen next. The inscrutability of men, she thinks, not mysterious so much as unreadable. She watches him blow smoke out toward the trees, the way he studies the middle distances as if his childhood were right there in the clearing, as if the teenage trumpeter were practicing scales out in the woods. He’s a brooder like me, she thinks.

  In the old Dutch section of Albany, they find an estate sale in a three-story house that appears to be sinking into an acre of delicate moss. It’s midafternoon and the best items have been thoroughly picked over. A son or nephew of the deceased walks across the naked wood floors—the rugs have all gone to a single buyer—and shows them what remains. There’s a handful of oil paintings from the nineteenth century, all of them badly fogged by age and antique copal varnish, some Quaker sideboards and china cabinets, and an array of knickknacks, some of them heaped into cardboard boxes. Jake asks if they can wander around and the heir tells them to take their time. They go upstairs to the top floor, where the rooms are cavernous and sun-scrubbed, up above the tree crowns. In an enormous bedroom a four-poster bed takes center stage, a hulk of wrought iron and solid carved mahogany. “The deathbed,” Jake whispers to Ellie. She takes a landscape painting down from the wall, scrutinizes its seams, and slants it into the light. Turning it over, she examines the back, trying to decipher the blue chalk marks from the auction house and the condition of the relining.

  He calls her over to an adjoining bathroom with a claw-foot tub, tiny white mosaics, and exposed copper pipes. The mood is one of convalescence, of warm mineral baths on white afternoons. The double windowpane above the tub is crazed and studded with tiny whorls of distortion that warps the view of the Albany skyline. She wants to tell Jake that the view through the warped windowpane reminds her of Picasso’s Still Life with a Bottle of Rum because she knows he’d find that amusing. But she doesn’t and instead she leans over, one foot inside the tub, letting the old glass buckle the sightlines and magnify the colors of the afternoon. Her first thought, when she feels his hand at her waist, is Here it is. “Be careful,” he says, “these floors look rotten and that tub could fall through to the basement at any moment.” But his hand stays there even when she straightens and turns. She finds herself standing in the tub and Jake Alpert leaning forward to kiss her, blinking into the cubist light of the window. A strange moment to choose, she thinks, with the bathroom smelling faintly of iodine and bath salts. This is part of the inscrutability, she thinks, a man’s absolute blindness to timing.

  The kiss itself is staid, almost platonic, but his hand rests on her hip and his thumb loops into the outer edge of her skirt pocket, pulling her forward.

  She says, “I wondered when that would happen.” Then, a second later, “Or if.”

  He backs away far enough to put her into focus. “Me too.”

  On a whim, Ellie lowers herself down into the tub, her hands along the smooth edge. She lies back, fully clothed, the satin lining of her coat a shock of blue against the white enamel. She looks up at the stenciled tin ceiling, then out the window, and says, “You could do worse than getting old with a big tub at your disposal. When I was a kid, to escape the household, I used to read in the bathtub for hours. The year I turned eleven took place with me and the Brontë sisters half-submerged. The pages would get as wilted as my pruned fingers and toes. All the great scenes from literature are watery in my mind—and they play out to the underwater sound of my own heartbeat.”

  “I’m not sure I should be picturing you naked in the tub as a prepubescent girl.”

  “Agreed,” she says, not looking at him.

  They hear footsteps on the rickety wooden stairwell and she extends her hand up to him so he can help her out. She straightens her clothes and they go back out into the bedroom where a middle-aged man and woman come through the door, their coats doubled over their arms, both of them smiling politely. The man says to Jake, “Find anything good?” and Jake says, “We’re still on the hunt.” They walk back out into the hallway and as they go down the stairs she can feel him behind her, his hand gently at her back. She thinks, Everything has changed.

  * * *

  The family-run hotel he’s booked is a big sunny Tudor-style house in a cul-de-sac. The check-in procedure is a mixture of mild interrogation and stilted small talk, the husband in his shirtsleeves and the wife in an apron. The woman keeps running her sparrow-boned hands down her front, dusting off patches of flour. She’s baked a pie from frozen cherries, she tells them, and this gets an approving nod from her offsider. Ellie thinks of how the world is governed by couples, how unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with. There’s only one room key on the counter and she stares at it as the wife discusses breakfast times and the inventory of board games in the den. The husband excuses himself to the raking of leaves and soon they’re climbing the stairs. When Jake opens the door to their room she sees there are two twin beds, each under an eave, and this poses a slight awkwardness. He seems not to notice. She looks over the room while he goes downstairs to bring up the suitcases from the car. The bathroom is swallowed up by lavender hand towels and doilies and ornate fixtures; there’s even an embroidered cover over the vulgarity of the spare toilet paper roll. She comes out of the bathroom when she hears Jake back in the room with the suitcases.

  He says, “Let’s get unpacked and have a glass of wine. How about it?”

  She watches as he lays his suitcase on one of the beds and unlatches the lid. Everything she suspects about the rich is contained in the silk-lined interior—an abundance of carefully organized spaces, a leisurely life organized into discreet compartments with tasseled zippers. A handmade shirt, trousers, socks folded around a pair of Italian loafers, a leather shaving bag. He produces a vintage bottle of red wine from the swaddle of a yellow cashmere sweater, but she’s still looking into the inner sanctum of his suitcase. Her suitcase faintly resembles the crumbling green Gloucester bag her mother keeps in the wardrobe with her wedding dress rolled in mothballs. He goes into the bathroom to fetch the two tumblers from the sink and proceeds to open the bottle with a corkscrew he’s brought along. She’s pretty sure it has its own dedicated pocket in the suit
case.

  Ellie puts her suitcase onto the other bed but refuses to open it. He hands her a glass of wine and even this gesture, of drinking a ’47 burgundy out of water glasses, seems rehearsed, like he’s done it before. Maybe this is why the rich are so good at self-deprecation, she thinks, because it offsets the perfection of their clothes and houses and lives.

  They sit in the easy chairs by the fireplace and sip their wine.

  “Should I light a fire?” he asks.

  “Not yet. Maybe we should take a walk before dinner.”

  She drinks her wine too quickly and feels it flushing up into her earlobes.

  He says, “I hope you don’t mind that we’re sharing a room. The rest of the house is fully booked.”

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I intend to pin a blanket in place as a partition.” She wonders if he’d planned to kiss her sooner, before this afternoon, to pave the way for this new intimacy.

  “I can sleep in the bathtub if you like.”

  “That would be appreciated.”

  He looks down into his glass, smiling into a pause before another sip.

  They try to talk about dinner plans and what a night in Albany might offer, but the conversation falters into long silences. She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that’s remotely graceful. He’ll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs. That problem doesn’t exist for painters. She knows they’ve been building toward this for months—a glittering trail of glances and innuendo—but now that it’s here she feels a stab of panic.