The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  The ticket is printed with her birth name, Eleanor Shipley, which has always seemed too formal for a ferryman’s kid, but now it seems strangely comforting. She flies through the night with the Remington in the overhead compartment, arriving in Amsterdam on the edge of a blue dawn. She exchanges money at the airport, dollars for guilders, erasing her old life at the exchange booth window. A taxi takes her to a hotel near the Leidseplein, and by noon she walks the few blocks over to the Rijksmuseum. She stays there all afternoon, taking a slow walk of atonement under the searing depictions of the Dutch Golden Age. Then, at dusk, she walks back toward the hotel. She stops at a boutique on one of the narrow, kinked alleyways and buys three new outfits. She stays an hour and parts with a hundred dollars in cash—it’s more than she can remember spending on clothes at one time. Back at the hotel, she showers and puts on the guest robe and orders a steak from room service. She takes the Remington out of its travel case and places it on the little wooden desk that overlooks the tramline. She works through the night, trying to summon her way back into the seventeenth century, typing the next chapter on hotel stationery.

  * * *

  Marty arrives back in the city before midnight, overcome by remorse. The storefront synagogues of the Lower East Side, the granite and limestone cathedrals of Midtown, these all put him in mind of worship, of earnest hours spent on the knees beside widows of unspeakable woe. He has always wanted to believe in something greater than himself, but the God-fearing genetic code ran cold by the time he was born. His Calvinist grandparents had bundled their terrified faith over from Holland, erected shrines to it that ended up in every high-ceilinged room of the penthouse—the lowland paintings and embroideries were balms against the total depravity of man. As was money. The family fortune had been milled from cloth—sailcloth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and treasury-grade rag cloth in the nineteenth and twentieth. Banking was never discussed in the house; to do so was to elevate it to the status of idolatry. Instead they pretended the money came effortlessly and quietly from above, flowed across the centuries like a hallowed ancestral spring. He thinks about the glimmer of benevolence he first felt when the painting went missing. The cosmos bestowed him with small favors, with parking spots and insightful rejoinders. Then he’d seized upon the slight, rubbed it like bronze, the attack against his household and his bloodline and his ego, as if he’d painted the scene himself. Everything turned ashen after that. He’d lured her out of the woods like some rawboned animal and now he has blood on his hands.

  He drives into the Upper East Side feeling weightless and stunned, a fixed point in space behind the headlights, unable to control the drift of his thoughts. He thinks of Russian satellites pinging through the plasma of space, loosed above the continents like a handful of dice. There’s a new Sputnik mission up there now and he can’t recall whether there’s an animal tucked inside the probe. The previous dog, Laika, apparently burned up in the atmosphere upon reentry. What a savage and surreal end to a street hound’s biography. The lights of the dash are a pale and luminous green and they have a habit of dimming when he stops at a light and the engine idles. At a standstill, the sound of the motor churning reminds him of a fat man clearing his sinuses. He has no idea why he drives such a ridiculous car. Staring up at the red light he sees Ellie waking alone in the dormered room of the Tudor hotel. The magnitude of what he’d done kept him from sleeping or packing his things. A single speck of blood on the bedsheet as he got up in darkness and took his clothes out into the hallway to dress. He drove three hours without stopping, the radio off, the wind cold and gushing through the open window. The light turns green and a taxi honks. He understands that he will never forgive himself.

  Along the park, he realizes he can’t face Rachel, so he drives to his office, circling back toward Midtown. The streets are mostly empty, the storefronts peopled by mannequins in rust-colored outerwear. He parks in the garage below his building and calls up for one of the security guards. A big man with a billy club stands smiling when the elevator doors open in the lobby, a people person glad for the company. “A little late to be working, isn’t it?” he says. Marty says something about leaving some important documents in his office, then he leans in with a confiding tone. “I’m on the outs with the wife, so don’t come looking for me if I bunk down on my office couch.” The security guard knows just that situation, he says, and presses the elevator button with sudden discretion. Marty is startled by the brisk little bell when the doors open. When the doors close, Marty slumps against the back wall of the elevator and puts his face in his hands. He closes his eyes and feels the climb in his stomach and then his ears.

  He unlocks and relocks the front lobby and the dignified client sitting area, filing back to his corner office in semidarkness. He takes a brief inventory of Gretchen’s desk—the sharpened pencils and the blotting paper and the miniature souvenir drum he brought her back from Jamaica one year. He shuffles into his office, switches on the lamp, and pours himself a drink. Reclining on the stiff designer couch he stares out the big windows. He’s never been up here at night and there’s a sensation of being fortified behind glass, of something solid between him and the mercantile canyons of the city. The office buildings are phosphorescent through the darkness, effulgent with a smoky light that reminds him of dry ice. It occurs to him that everything outside the window is a mirage, that everything in his life is festering with untruth. He gets up and sits behind his desk and begins to write a letter with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad. At first he thinks he’s writing to Rachel, because he’s asking for forgiveness and itemizing his wrongdoings, but by the third page he understands it’s to something or somebody he’s never met—the Russian dog turning in the voids of space or the two unborn children they lost years ago or the man he might have become, the trumpeter with a big buttery tone that never wavers.

  Sydney

  AUGUST 2000

  Marty de Groot in a rented tuxedo. Earlier in the day he bought a pair of black dress shoes on Pitt Street and now they pinch and rub as he nears the gallery. He’s worked up two blistered heels by walking the mile from the hotel, passing under the figs and palms of Hyde Park with his chilled hands in his pockets. He thinks of his father and his old dead boss, Clay Thomas, of inveterate walkers who footslog through the night air in dinner jackets and cuff links. He never set out to become one of them, but here he is, a rambler in formal wear. The museum director offered to send a car for him, but he refused for reasons that elude him. Was it because Max Culkins took his coffee weak and milky and hadn’t personally shown him around the gallery? He’s been known to slight a man for less.

  At night, the gallery is floodlit and austere, a Greek temple hovering through the trees. The colonnaded pavilions and sandstone columns could belong to a courthouse, Marty thinks, if it weren’t for the bright, vertical banners. They billow and flutter in the cold breeze, rivers of silk above the entrance. Women of the Dutch Golden Age. The lettering is so big that Marty can read it without his bifocals, which he forgot anyway back in the hotel room. He managed to source a new battery for his hearing aid, but he’s had to turn the volume down to soften the brash auditory impulses of everything around him. He takes the broad stone stairs slowly, trying not to aggravate his feet. Surviving his eighties is predicated on a thousand contingencies—so why are there no Band-Aids in his trouser pockets? Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It’s cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted, small commerce and the practice of fine motor skills. It’s talking unabashedly to the nightly news. His hearing aid warbles just below actual hearing. The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.

  The exhibition is in one of the smaller galleries off the main vestibule, but the reception lines the long entrance court, people mingling under the blackened skylights. Despite its billing before the Olympics, the turnout is good. And the fact that there are no Dutch heavy
weights—no Vermeers or Rembrandts or Halses—has brought out a serious, scholarly crowd. No frivolous socialites here, just the true-blooded art patriots and critics. There’s an artsy, masculine style that Marty recognizes from decades of attending openings: longish gray hair raked below woolen berets and Greek fisherman’s caps, horn-rim glasses, hand-tied bow ties the color of tropical fish, collarless shirts with Nehru jackets, goatees and Van Dyke beards. The women wear batik shawls and indigenous-looking earrings, dark dresses with slashes of color. He realizes he’s misread the formality of the evening, because he’s the only one in a tuxedo, a rental at that, dressed like a sound engineer at the Academy Awards. He’d expected at least a few black-tie types, but the men are all bohemian dandies. Even Max Culkins is wearing a vest and a cashmere scarf.

  He heads for the table filled with flutes of champagne and takes a canapé from a passing waiter. Hors d’oeuvres at openings are always highly salted, he thinks, to encourage drinking and the slackening of aesthetic standards. A string quintet plays some Bach or Vivaldi (he can’t decipher which) on a low stage. He scans the crowd for Ellie. It’s been two days since he sat in the back of the auditorium, admonished one of her students, and then fled before the end of her lecture. Not so much out of cowardice, he thinks, but as a reprieve from the inevitable. By now, she must have heard from the gallery director that Marty de Groot had shambled into his office, straight from the airport, with a seventeenth-century masterpiece wrapped in billiard cloth. Baize was the word he was trying to remember earlier—it drops into the mind slot with a satisfying clink. At least now she’ll be braced for the encounter. If he had any compassion at all he’d get on a plane instead of hobbling around the exhibition with bleeding heels and a forty-year-old apology.

  He finishes his champagne and heads toward the exhibition gallery. Because he doesn’t have his bifocals and his hearing aid is dialed down, he moves cautiously, his champagne flute held out like the prow of a ship, parting the waves of bookish dandies and lesbian artists in velvet waistcoats. He infers from one of the museum staffers that no food or drinks are allowed in the exhibition space, so he drains his champagne and hands the glass to a nonplussed museum guard. Inside, he treads gently across the parquet floor to begin a slow perimeter check in one corner, starting with Judith Leyster. The Leysters hang against the starkness of the white wall, stippled into soft focus. He has to lean in close to make out the composition and then it’s too grainy and pixelated, a topographic map flaked with lead white. He’s tempted to go ask one of the other two octogenarians he spotted if he can borrow their tortoiseshell reading glasses. He recognizes Leyster’s The Proposition—the fur-hatted scoundrel leering over the sewing woman, his hand cupped with money. But in The Last Drop, as the half-shadowed drunkard throws back his flagon, Marty fails to make out the skeleton that’s been summoned back to life. For a full minute he thinks the skull in the skeleton’s bony hand is a loaf of bread being proffered by a maid.

  He moves on to the Van Oosterwycks, the vanitas and portraits and floral still lifes, but they’re little more than gashes and rhomboids of color. Dispirited by his eyesight, he retreats for the entrance court and the champagne table. He picks up another flute and looks out into the whorl of mingling. He feels flattened out, burrowed inside himself. Somehow he’s daydreaming about all the dogs he’s owned in his lifetime, naming the lineage of terriers to himself as he faces down the repeating archways, when the formalities start up. He feels the air pressure change in the room behind him and he turns to see Max Culkins and Ellie up on the little stage, the quintet carrying their instruments off into the attentive crowd. A round of applause, then Max’s speech stripped of meaning and studded with moments of pantomime—some chuffed remarks, tepid laughter, then all eyes on Marty de Groot hiding in the back. He suspects he’s been thanked for trundling the painting all this way. He raises his champagne flute modestly and arranges a kindly smile. What passes between him and Ellie, who’s now at the microphone in a mauve dress, cannot be called eye contact. He can see her pale face framed beneath her gray hair and a posture that suggests she might be making glances in his direction, but he can’t make out her exact features or expression. He catches a few words from her speech, art is our most universal something-or-other. He looks into his champagne flute and finally turns up his hearing aid.

  * * *

  Ellie sees him at the back of the room—the only man in a tuxedo—and knows instantly that he’s not here to plunder her life. As she talks about art as the great window into culture, she brings her eyes again and again to his slumped shoulders. In her dreams, she’d conjured the melodrama of him unmasking her in public, but now she sees a man ravaged by age, shrunken and sallow-cheeked, still dapper but a little wobbly on his feet. This is the man who held her life and affections in his palm all those years ago? She’s never seen anyone after a four-decade hiatus before and the effect is startling. The husk of the younger man is still there, in the aristocratic nose and jawline and the elegant hands, but his balding scalp has the consistency of blotting paper and his skin is the color of weak tea. It’s the chromatic certainty of death. She’s surprised to feel a burst of pity. She’d always imagined him suspended in recollected time—an energetic adversary, the virile blue blood in driving moccasins, his cashmered arm out the window of the speeding Citroën. Wasn’t the promise of immense wealth a cryogenic cloister in which to grow old? Couldn’t decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin? All these years, she has kept him in his forties. It opens out before her during her speech, a backdrop to her words about the role of seventeenth-century women in Dutch society. Sara de Vos was somehow able to cut against the grain, to find her way into outdoor scenes because of her unique circumstances. With the new funeral painting, there is also strong evidence to suggest that she continued to grow and strengthen in her art. She says all this while realizing that even the old Brooklyn apartment has remained hers, preserved exactly as she left it in the autumn of 1958. The windows flung open, the mason jars brimming with solvents, the ceiling mold fluorescing at night, the expressway traffic streaming behind the curtains. Her museum of squalor and anonymity. She went back to New York numerous times for work but never once went to see the old neighborhood. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was the graveyard where she’d buried her twenties.

  When her speech is over she steps down from the stage and decides to be the one to approach first. That weekend with him in upstate New York has never stopped replaying and unraveling in her mind—the tartan furniture of the quaint hotel, the narrow twin bed where he took her virginity under false pretenses. She had offered it up because she was tired of carrying her virginity around like a penance and Jake Alpert seemed like a safe bet, a widower reentering the fray of the living. She’d imagined courteous and patient lovemaking, an attentive older man, and instead she got a grim, silent impostor. She never got over the feeling of violation, but now something shifts in her as she comes toward him. When he looks at her she sees that it’s regret, not vengeance, that’s brought him halfway around the world. It’s a look of bruised self-loathing as his eyes lower then come up gently from her feet. His face changes and she sees something entirely familiar—that odd mixture of tenderness and playful attention from half a century ago. He smiles and gives a slight shrug.

  Max Culkins is suddenly at her side. He makes introductions when they’re standing just a few feet away from Marty and the champagne table.

  “Eleanor, I’d like you to meet our gracious benefactor of the beautiful de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood. Marty de Groot, this is Eleanor Shipley, the curator of the exhibition.”

  Marty is pretty sure he’s bleeding through his socks. He wants to have a Scotch and lie in a warm bath. Even without his glasses, having her this close makes it hard to breathe. He says, “So I hear. I managed to turn up my hearing aid during Ellie’s speech. May I call you Ellie?”


  “Of course,” Ellie says.

  Max fetches three glasses of champagne. They stand through an awkward silence as the crowd mills toward the gallery.

  Max makes a toast. “To Dutch women of the seventeenth century.”

  “Hear, hear,” Marty says.

  They clink their glasses and drink.

  Max says, “Mr. de Groot here has quite a collection of Flemish and Dutch masters. Ellie, your assignment for the evening is to convince him to leave us a few things that the Met doesn’t want.”

  “I’d rather not ask for crumbs from the table,” Ellie says. “I’d rather convince him to give us something the Met wants very badly.”

  Marty idles a finger on a button of his tuxedo jacket. His fingernails are still manicured and white. “The Met is slowly poisoning me and they send spies to check on my ailing health. Do you think you’re up for that kind of curatorial espionage?”

  “We’ll do our best,” Max says, a little uneasily. Somebody catches his eye in the crowd. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I must head into the gallery and make the rounds with the donors and journalists. Marty, I’ll leave you in Ellie’s capable hands.”

  Ellie and Marty watch him disappear on the other side of the stone vestibule.

  Ten seconds of silence. The sound of dress shoes on parquet flooring.

  He folds his arms, the champagne flute jutting from one elbow, exposing the gold lion heads of his cuff links. She notices that he still wears the same cologne—an alpine and citrus telegram that arrives from 1958. He rocks gently onto the balls of his feet, about to launch into something, then he drops back and stares mutely out into the commotion. She takes a step back, turns her shoulders toward the champagne table.