The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  At the end of these stories, he asks Sara for an update on her tulip paintings and she exaggerates their progress. She understands the gravity of their situation, but the truth is she has no feeling anymore for flowers. Besides, she resents the fact that every shipwright and chimneysweep in the Low Countries now wants to trade tulips and buy paintings. The flowers will make them rich; the paintings will tell their guests that they know beauty when they see it. For the most part they buy the paintings like so many tables and chairs. Only a few, the burghers from Delft and the foreign diplomats, have any eye for the work itself.

  One night, Barent takes out an envelope at dinner and hands her a colored sketch of Semper Augustus. “Since they won’t be blooming for months, I wrote away to a botanist in Leiden. A professor at the university.”

  Sara studies it in the halo of the lantern while Barent reads the professor’s letter.

  “Can you work from this?” he asks.

  “I think so.”

  “He says the flame-like streaks are called rectification.”

  She says, “They dream up ways to make it sound holy and important.” She sets the picture down and returns to her bean soup.

  “He says that he can send us some grafted bulbs for a price. The daughter offsets bloom within a few years instead of the usual seven or so for a seed to catch.”

  She says, “Apparently he’s also trying to get rich with tulips,” but the phrase daughter offsets tugs at her mind. She sees Kathrijn in her attic bed, her lips murmuring and white. Bringing herself back to the room, she watches Barent rereading the letter in the light under the chimney canopy. He sits wrapped in his dressing gown, his face gaunt in the speckled firelight of the peat-box. All winter the house has been insufferably cold. She jokes that he wears seven waistcoats and nine pairs of trousers to bed, that she can’t remember what his natural silhouette looks like.

  After he finishes the letter, he presses it inside the pages of a leather-clad ledger. Whenever they sell a painting, he brings out the ledger and makes an entry. Each time, he reminds her that she is never to sign or initial her work. The paintings are stored in the attic until the spring markets or private sales that happen when the days turn warmer. Dutchmen don’t buy paintings when they’re cold is one of his axioms. All these paintings will be sold anonymously—ships tossed in a storm, a field at dusk, her tulips—each canvas wrapped in felt or wool blankets and sold from a stall or tavern. As Sara sits with her feet on a box-warmer, she wonders how many hurried, unsigned paintings they will have to sell before they can finally break free. She suspects there are dozens of debtor names at the back of Barent’s ledger and another dozen that have never been written down.

  Upper East Side

  MAY 1958

  A spring heat wave. Marty leaves a French restaurant in his shirtsleeves on a Friday afternoon, his jacket over one arm, hat in hand. He’s a little drunk, the aftertaste of anise and steak heavy in his mouth. When he pushes through the big wooden doors and steps out onto Fifth Avenue, the city hits him in the chest, like he’s pushed open the door to a foundry. The light dazes him for a moment—a burst of acetylene coming off the metal and glass and pavement. He can smell burning tar and sees that a road crew is filling potholes at the corner, much to the displeasure of the honking, idling cabbies. The scene is captured in the storefront window of a venerable old jewelry shop—a jittered filmstrip of men leaning on shovels against a bed of black velvet and diamonds. Marty sees his cameo flicker across the window. He could buy Rachel a celebratory gift, but then he’s half a block away and it’s already an afterthought. Two doormen commiserate about the heat under a canopy and they nod to him as he passes. He’s always had a soft spot for doormen—his father used to call them the city’s blue-collar admiralty. He can feel the sidewalk burning through the leather soles of his shoes and little blasts of air waft up his trouser legs and blow hot against his shins. He crosses to the park side of the street, for the deep shade along the stone wall. Clay was insistent that he take the rest of the day off, so he heads north along the park, away from the office.

  He tries to remember Clay’s exact words when he’d made the announcement, the partners already softened by Beaujolais. Something about partnership being like a marriage, only the hours are longer. Everyone nodded or gently laughed or absent-mindedly loosened a watchband. All except Roger Barrow, a senior partner and the other patent attorney, who studied the dessert menu. Clay presented Marty with new embossed business cards and an engraved Cartier pen. The small gift boxes were wrapped in papers from an infamous contract the firm had handled and bound with red legal tape. Marty told them the symbolism was not lost on him and then they all toasted his career. On Monday he would be moving to the upper floor, to the office with a view across Midtown instead of the next building’s cooling station. Gretchen, his secretary, would also have a window and he would remember to bring her flowers for the new desk. Something that said new beginnings. He notices the sidewalk tulips are already gone, vanquished by the early heat.

  The streets are full of people returning from long lunches, ad execs with loosened ties and secretaries in plaid skirts and knotted silk scarves. He smiles at the women as they pass, his mind still lingering on the right platonic flower for Gretchen. He remembers that yellow roses are the flower of friendship. The sidewalk girls are chatty with weekend plans, their cheeks flushed from the walk or the drinks with lunch, and he thinks he can smell perfume burning off behind their earlobes, tiny recesses of citrus and jasmine. A few of them smile back, their faces inscrutable behind outsize Greta Garbo sunglasses. Is it flirtation or just neighborliness in the dappled shade of the elms? He puts on his hat and tugs the brim down so that it lowers and frames his view, removes the ambiguity in the girls’ faces. The world is bifurcated, exists only from the waist down. From the procession of anonymous shoes and stockings and skirt hems he tries to deduce something about the person. But when he tries to confirm a suspicion based on the cut of a suit or the buff of a shoe top, he’s frequently wrong. A pair of battered shoes cracked along one seam end up belonging to an aristocratic old man instead of a dockworker. Rachel says he suffers from a kind of blindness, that when he walks into a room he notices the windows instead of the people and the furniture.

  He thinks about how to tell Rachel the good news. In the last few months she has become lighter and happier, recounts her days to him at dinner with jokey asides. He wonders if the old childless ache will ever go away, or whether it will always be on the periphery, a knife blade winking in the sun. Still, there’s no denying the new atmosphere in the house. They’ve even made love a handful of times and afterward talked about the future instead of the past. Something has lifted and he’s been aware of it in himself. Not luck, exactly, but an upswing, a sense of being pulled along by some force he’d thought was indifferent but is, in fact, capable of benevolence. During client meetings he’s noticed himself sounding more confident and shrewd. He’ll say something smart or prudent and have no recollection of the preceding thought ever forming. Gifts out of nowhere. And then there are the parking spots that appear out of the void of Midtown, or the vacant booths in restaurants. He thinks of these as good omens, as portents, and they seem to fine-tune his senses, as if his body is being made to pay attention to his own wild good fortune. Walking along he can feel the nuances of the street, the sticky air against his palms and neck, the subtle weight of his tiepin on his rib cage, the syncopation of jazz from a passing car radio. He can discern the conversational drag between two pedestrians and know that one of them feels overwhelming guilt. For half an hour, he’s clairvoyant and fond of everything around him.

  * * *

  Instead of going into his building lobby, he walks across the street and climbs the stone steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early on in his law career, after a deadline, he would sometimes take a taxi to kill off his lunch hour in the museum. He could have eaten lunch with Rachel in the apartment, but he chose to mill around the collections i
nstead. His father had told him stories of working as a young banker in Amsterdam and eating a sandwich in a medieval courtyard that was entombed by modern apartment buildings. It was important to walk among your own thoughts, he seemed to be saying, to plunk down on a bench somewhere and let the world roar along without you for an hour. It’s been years since he’s been inside the museum, even though he and Rachel live across the street and have remained members and donors. He’s pretty sure there’s a gold plaque from the Iron Age that he helped procure—a scene of gilded winged creatures approaching stylized trees.

  He produces his membership card from his wallet for the girl at the front desk and enters into the great hall. Under the arches and domed vaults, tourists are consulting maps and guidebooks, a Texas-sounding family deep into a standoff between medieval armor and pre-Columbian gold. Marty used to skip the pageantry of the first floor and steal off to a bench on the second level. He’d sit before a Rembrandt or a Vermeer and feel guilty about it, as if he’d gone straight to the postcoital cigarette. Most of the time he wouldn’t even be thinking about the paintings themselves. He would stare up at them and loop through a cross-weave of associations, an obscure challenge of a new patent application he was filing and then a sliver of memory, a day at the beach with his grandparents eating salted cod at Scheveningen, the chill of the North Sea against his bare legs. The thoughts would rush in but eventually strip away, peel back to reveal a kernel of bare sentiment. Eventually, if he sat there long enough he would feel the brute force of nostalgia or a sense of loss or elation and it always seemed to be emanating from a particular painting. Rembrandts, no matter the depiction, brought to mind the desolation of winter, the loneliness of blue afternoons. He would walk back slowly to the office in a funk, brooding and distracted in client meetings the rest of the day. Maybe that was why he’d stopped coming.

  Today he walks up the cool, wide stairwell and wanders back to a small gallery that houses the Post-Impressionists. He’s never been much of an admirer of Van Gogh or Gauguin, but there’s something about this weather that makes him want to stare at the indigo shade of a South Sea island and a dark woman’s breasts. He anchors himself in front of Two Tahitian Women, sets his hat and coat on the leather bench beside him. It looks so modern in its assuredness that it’s hard to believe it predates modern cinema, the automobile, air-conditioning, the neon sign. Two girls stare at the viewer, a corona of green and yellow playing on jungle foliage behind them. Both of them stand bare-chested—the girl with the tray of mango blossoms is naked from the waist up and the one on the right has one breast exposed above the neckline of some improvised garment. They are looking toward, but also past, the viewer, as if a child or animal might command their attention outside the frame. It’s a sensual gaze but also knowing and vaguely accusatory. It reminds Marty of certain Manet nudes, Olympia on a daybed staring out from another century, one arm crossed in front of her breasts and crotch, creating a boundary the viewer cannot cross. The shading in the Gauguin is heavy with violet and russet, almost nocturnal in its saturation. He hears a few footsteps clicking around the wood floors and he becomes conscious of how long he’s been sitting there staring up at those three uncovered breasts.

  He walks out to the balcony that overlooks the great hall and then decides to find a pay phone and call Gretchen, to tell her the good news. There’s a small bank of phones by the coat check on the first floor, but he has to break a dollar at the museum gift store to make change. He finds half a roll of mints in his pocket, pops one in his mouth, and tries to remember his own office number. He dials the main switchboard and asks for Gretchen. She picks up on the second ring and his name surprises him with its formality—Marty de Groot’s office.

  “Put me through to Marty de Groot right now. That big lummox is going to hear a piece of mind.” He says this in his best Russian drawl—a submarine captain on a vodka binge.

  “I’ve never fallen for that. It’s not even a Russian accent. It sounds like you’ve suffered a head injury.”

  Marty lets out a big, minty guffaw. “You’re right. Not once in five years.”

  “How did the partner lunch go?”

  “Did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That we’re moving upstairs on Monday.”

  “You made partner.” It’s both statement and question.

  “Yes, just in time for space travel.”

  He hears her breathing and smiling into the phone. “That’s really wonderful news.”

  “I’m not allowed back in the office the rest of the day. Clay’s banned me.”

  “Well, I thought something was suspicious when Mr. Thomas told me not to schedule anything for your Friday afternoon. That was two weeks ago!”

  “They’ve been plotting.”

  The line goes quiet for a moment. He tries to apply his street telepathy to the phone call and discern what she’s thinking. Gretchen is midtwenties, a graduate of NYU who still lives in the Village. An English major turned paralegal, she keeps an untranslated copy of Beowulf in her desk drawer. More than once he’s caught her mouthing the hard gutturals of Anglo-Saxon to herself. Even though she reads obscure novels in the park during her lunch hour and tells stories of exotic restaurants, there’s nothing bohemian about her appearance. She comes to the office dressed in impeccably modest wool skirts and demure earrings, her hair always pulled back, a tight spiral of French braids the color of cedar.

  He says, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you for cleaning off my desk at the end of every day. And I’m sorry I never follow your color-coding system.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  He doesn’t let the silence re-gather. “Why don’t you come meet me for a celebratory drink? I’m lurking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, doing everything I can to avoid the tourists in Ancient Egypt. I don’t want to make my hypertension any worse.”

  “Have you already told Mrs. de Groot the good news?”

  He knows the mention of Rachel is not incidental.

  “She’s visiting her sick mother in the Hamptons. I’m going to surprise her by driving up there in the morning.” The lie comes effortlessly, a dead bolt sliding into a groove.

  She pauses and he hears some rustling on her desk.

  He says, “But if you just want to take the rest of the afternoon off, that’s fine as well. I’ll wander here some more.”

  “Sure,” she says. “I’d love to meet up. Are you game to go south of Times Square?”

  “The map goes dotted for me somewhere below Forty-Second.”

  “Meet me at Claude’s Tavern in the Village in an hour.”

  “If it weren’t so hot I’d walk.”

  “Do you have any idea how far that is?”

  “Couple miles?”

  “Four miles, at least.”

  They hang up and Marty digs through his pockets for more change. When he calls the apartment, the sound of Hester’s voice is gruff and matronly and it’s such an affront after Gretchen’s warmth that he almost hangs up. Instead, he asks for Rachel and there’s an insufferable delay. He wonders about Rachel’s life in the house without him, whether she and Hester sit around and watch the soaps together in their housecoats. Does Hester only put on her apron at ten before six each evening, before he walks in the door? All this passes through his mind, and then he’s telling Rachel that he’s been invited to an impromptu partner dinner and it may go late, that he thinks the news might be very promising. She keeps saying I hope so, I hope so, for your sake. And then he hangs up the phone and leaves the museum. Back outside he rolls up his shirtsleeves and looks at his watch, then glances up at the penthouse of his building. Above the terrace wall of the fourteenth floor he can see the tops of the citrus trees that Rachel dutifully prunes and waters. He decides that he’s going to walk all four miles down to the Village.

  * * *

  An hour later, he’s running late and drenched in sweat. No longer drunk, he feels the first brassy notes of a han
gover wash over him somewhere in the Village. He stops strangers to ask about the location of Claude’s Tavern, but no one seems to have heard of it. Near NYU, he walks by cafeterias where students mill among steam tables, the smell of stew apocalyptic. He passes Laundromats—automatics and supermatics—where college kids in Levi’s smoke cigarettes and thumb paperbacks and play cards under ceiling fans. He sees big lonely men eating all-day breakfasts at Formica counters and he’s convinced this is a foreign country. Storefront churches and delis, a man selling papaya juice from a quilted metal cart. Shopkeepers hauling waxy boxes of produce into the cellars below the sidewalk. It might as well be Mozambique for how exotic it feels.

  Half an hour late, he stumbles into Claude’s Tavern—a bricked-in basement jammed with bodies. A jazz quintet plies their music through slats of smoky neon and hipsters sway like Pentecostals. He pushes through the crowd, looking for Gretchen, the subway rumbling somewhere beneath his feet. Impossibly, he finds her sitting by herself, reading a French novel in the low-watt hemisphere of a booth. It reminds him of Rachel, briefly, and he has to push away the mental association.