WS: Do you care to explain why you’ve moved your portrait out of the dining room?
GD: I don’t recall there ever being a portrait in the dining room.
WS: Come now, Mrs. Spencer. You know the one. The glorious Boldini. It was there a week ago and now, poof, disappeared with the wind.
GD: Boldini? Hmm, the name sounds familiar.
WS: Surely you’re not going to lie about this! It’s the most fetching portrait the old bastard ever did, as far as I know. Unless there’s some other lady in some other country hiding some other portrait in her broken-down home.
GD: He was a bastard, wasn’t he? Oh, I adored the man!
WS: So he did paint you.
GD: Perhaps. It’s all starting to seem familiar.
WS: There’s not a person alive who finds creeping dementia so convenient.
GD: You’re mistaken, though. About the painting. There’s never been a portrait of me on the premises.
WS: You’re truly going to claim the Boldini wasn’t in your dining room?
GD: It wasn’t. Ever. Not for a single second.
WS: Note to manuscript. Writer’s assistant looks at GD agog.
PRU: I’m not your assistant.
GD: Who’s GD? Surely you’re not calling me goddamned.
WS: Simply your initials. Though it’s also a highly appropriate coincidence.
PRU: Mrs. Spencer, that portrait was there. I saw it with my own two eyes! Why can’t you admit it? What’s holding you back?
GD: Boldini painted me, it is true. And he sketched me many times besides, the renditions of which I’m happy to provide. But the portrait was never in my home. My former husband kept it, if I recall.
WS: He’s been dead, quite a while now.
GD: Probably incinerated the thing. He hated Boldini. Called him a pig. To his face and behind his back. Boldini had a salacious reputation with women and my former husband worried he’d make me look like a tart.
PRU: Mrs. Spencer, I don’t understand. The portrait was there. We both saw it.
GD: I don’t know what you think you saw but it wasn’t me. And so what if I did remove it? Why is it any concern of yours? There are things about me you don’t know. Things not even a would-be biographer can weasel out of me with his incessant quizzing. Though, I am sure, that won’t stop him from trying.