DANIEL STUCK OUT his hand. “Daniel Mantis.”
“Ruth Beamish,” Ruthie said, shaking his hand and trying to cover her embarrassment. “I’m sorry, you caught me admiring your Rothko. Your daughter told me to take a peek at the Peter Clay, and I got waylaid.”
“You like Peter’s work?”
“I worked for him back in the nineties.”
“Then you must see the painting. But first, the Rothko. Come on, you need a closer look.”
She followed him farther into the house. “It’s a lovely party, thank you. I’m sort of crashing. Adeline Clay invited me.”
He swiveled. “You know Adeline?”
“She’s renting my house.”
“Ah. You’re the one with the nice husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
“I see.”
A blue slate floor, and out the back, the sudden shock of ethereal blue of sea and sky through the enormous wall of glass. White and blue everywhere. She tried to tiptoe. This was a space in which even a footfall felt unseemly.
“The house is extraordinary,” she said. “It’s like heaven, if God had taste.”
“Ha. I like that. It’s a sacred space, isn’t it,” Daniel agreed. “The volumes are so carefully articulated, yet you get no sense of effort. I look at this and I can’t see schematics or blueprints. Just inspiration. It’s as though it was always here, isn’t it? Yet the modernity grounds you in the now.”
His stump speech, she could tell. He recited it as though someone else had written it for him.
“Come, I want to show you something. I can tell you’ll appreciate it.” He moved farther into the vast cathedral of the house.
She could glimpse the formal dining room. A long table that could seat twenty or more, the wood polished and rich. A stunning Cy Twombly on the wall. “The chairs are beautiful.”
“Jacques Adnet.” He stopped. “Sometimes I just stand here for twenty minutes at a time. It’s the exact center of the house. And of course the Rothko right in your center sight.”
That Rothko, floating blue and anchoring black.
“The Richter abstract to your left.” A knockout-punch Richter, skeins of bright paint over navy. Ruthie estimated maybe forty million. It was a guess; it could be worth more.
“Now look down.”
She looked down at a tiny square of golden tile in the middle of the stone floor.
“I had the architect put in that square. The guy argued with me, like he was the boss. Look up.”
She looked up into a blue sky through a skylight.
“I think of this space, right here, as art. Just here. Do you feel it? It’s like my own Turrell. I walk in every Friday, and I stop. This is where I center. This is where serenity kicks in.”
Could serenity actually kick?
“Do you feel it? Like you’re at the center of a turning world?”
What does one say to a billionaire except “Yes.”?
“Let’s exhale.”
Obediently she blew out a breath.
“I like to come here right after meditating, before espresso, without any chemical buzz. And now, the Rothko again. Do you see it now through a different lens?”
Ruthie struggled for the right thing to say, something that wasn’t a hearty Bullshit. A riff. “When I first saw it I was struck by how well it reflects the elements of the house. Repeated forms, that deep blue. Now I’m seeing something within the painting, maybe back to the intent of the artist himself. I’m seeing that Rothko didn’t suck out light, he infused the painting with it. Even the black.”
“Exactly. It’s a spiritual exercise, standing here.” Daniel beamed at her.
He didn’t command her to exhale, but she did.
“And now, the dialogue with the Clay.”
“From the Dowager Series. A good picture.”
They walked closer. On the opposite wall from the Rothko hung a signature Peter Clay portrait, a piece Ruthie was intricately familiar with, being that she had been the one to paint it. Peter had become bored with the actual process of painting later in his career, spending all of his time thinking about art rather than doing it. That was for his studio assistants. She’d gone from mixing colors to underpainting to painting under Peter’s direction as he sat in the red upholstered armchair, drink in hand, and yelled instructions across the studio. She had a sudden plunge backward, remembering the smell of the studio, the blare of the music—the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention.
In the beginning, just being in the studio with Peter was thrilling—she’d started when she was still a student. There were long stretches of boredom while he sat in a chair, talking to his dealer or collectors, and then sudden, brilliant bursts of talk and, occasionally, sketching. Peter could draw a line on a page and she could identify it as his mark, and probably still had the muscle memory to replicate it. She had been in the presence of something that ordinary people didn’t have, maybe even couldn’t comprehend, and she’d felt privileged to see it.
For a while.
She wasn’t surprised that Daniel had a Dowager painting. Society portraits, Peter had called them, most of them commissions. Peter hadn’t thought much of them but now those portraits turned out to be the ones that survived to influence contemporary artists, with their thin washes of paint and simple lines, close to cartoons. The subject matter made art critics foam and lather. He painted daring young socialites as dowagers, their older selves, and dowagers as ingénues, vacuous or rapacious. Some of them awkwardly, splendidly nude. They all loved the recognition but no doubt hated the portraits. “What a hoot,” they had said, “how marvelous.” They were rarely flattering, and most of the subjects had sold them.
“A dialogue? I’m not sure,” she said. “More like a standoff. Rothko liked a raw, rough canvas, and Peter of course was the opposite, a very tight weave. He was all about precision, that sort of eggshell Renaissance quality. It’s like Peter is saying, You think you know blue, Mark, my friend? Now, this is a blue.”
“Arrogant bastard,” Daniel said, grinning. “That’s why I love him. Didn’t he always say he was a misanthrope rather than a misogynist? And people couldn’t tell the bloody difference?”
“Actually he said people couldn’t tell the fucking difference, but yes.”
“Ha. I think it’s brutal in all good ways,” Daniel said. “The life force unleashed.”
“Yes, he captured spirit, didn’t he.” She gestured at the painting. “But I have to confess I still see the misogyny.”
“I don’t believe in misogyny,” he said. “It’s too limiting. I believe in tribalism.”
He reached over and touched her wrist, then lifted it. For a panicked moment she thought he was about to make a pass. But he only looked at the watch. “May I?” There was a detail on it, a slender piece of metal that she realized could slide as Daniel touched it.
Fairy sounds. Ding ding ding and then a higher ping ping ping ping…coming from the watch itself. Some kind of alarm?
“Lucky you,” he said. “I almost bought one once. Just for that minute repeater music. The vintage ones are hard to find.”
He gave her a look that indicated she was undergoing a reevaluation. “I’ll have to check out the Belfry sometime.”
“That would be great. I’m always there.”
“Dedication. I like it.”
A woman appeared at the end of the hall, dressed in a white polo shirt and black pants. A housekeeper. She stood still, and Ruthie had a feeling it was a signal. Nothing so crass as a raised hand, or a nod.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Daniel said. “Party details. My daughter always tells me she’ll handle everything and then halfway through she’s dancing on the beach. Take your time, explore a bit, enjoy the art.”
The two disappeared behind a white wall.
Ruthie peeked down a hallway and found another room, this one with a fireplace and an Ed Ruscha. She jumped when she saw herself reflected in a mirrored sculpture that looked vaguely like Louise Bourgeois but wasn’t, and then into another room, this one with glass walls that faced the activity on the lawn and four white leather Mies benches placed in a perfect square. One exquisite curved steel hook in the wall with a gray hoodie hanging on it. That was it, no other furniture. No art, but she sat down anyway.
Ruthie lifted her arm. The watch slid like a bracelet, or a handcuff. She had barely looked at the watch this morning, just strapped it on. She noticed, maybe for the first time, how beautiful it was. She examined the smooth moony texture of the dial, the elegance of the numerals.
The hair on her neck prickled.
She reached for her phone and plugged in Patek Philippe. Scrolling and searching. AUCTION PRICES…IMPORTANT WATCHES…IMAGES…
What the heck was a minute repeater?
Holy crap. She pinched the glass on her phone, and the image bloomed. She looked from her wrist to the screen.
If it were real, it wouldn’t be nickel or steel, it would be platinum.
With shaking fingers she unbuckled it, then looked at the transparent back. She pushed the metal slide again. Ding ding ding ding ding ping ping tring tring tring tring tring tring tring…
It was five thirty-seven. It had just told her the time.
Which meant she was holding at least a quarter of a million dollars in her hand.
How could it be real, tossed in a box for a six-year-old? But who could make a fake this beautiful, this intricate? Surely someone could. People faked everything.
What had Carole said? Vintage stores and Canal Street and the Brooklyn Flea. Canal Street vendors ran whole businesses on fakes.
Was it possible that it was real, and Carole didn’t know? She’d bought a box full of junk for dress-up. A jumble of jewelry, of glitter and glass. A little girl pawing through it, ignoring the utilitarian, going for the bangles. A fortune tossed aside.
But if it was real…The cost of the watch would be so little to Carole and Lewis, a fraction of an annual bonus. For her…she could pay off the mortgage. They could own the house clear.
How many of her fights with Mike had centered on money? Where to spend it, how to save it. Unlike her, he hadn’t grown up without it.
Mike wasn’t used to the scramble for rent, let alone the fear. The shock of his parents’ death in a car accident was followed by the shock of discovering that they weren’t just New England parsimonious, they were in debt. They had been running on the fumes of the Dutton family inheritance, and it had petered out years before. They’d sold the family house and were renting from the new owners. The erosion of his dreams, for Mike, had resulted in an aggrieved battle with a world that had cheated him.
In one of their most spectacular fights, Mike had called her on the big lie of their marriage: that they got the best of the house. They said it at Thanksgiving, as they sat around the fire. They said it at Christmas, they said it on snowy February afternoons, they said it when the forsythia bloomed. Oh, the spectacular fall! The fairyland winter! The explosive spring! Bullshit! Mike had cried, brandishing a spatula in the air. They lived in a summer town, they had never had it between Memorial Day and Labor Day, not after the first year, when the house was still crap and they were broke. We never made a home, we made an investment. Admit it!
They had been doing the dishes, and Ruthie had gone on primly rinsing a cup, resisting the urge to throw it against the wall. She did not believe in hurling crockery during arguments. She didn’t believe in arguments. Mike had never raised his voice to her before. When he was angry, he just accented his consonants. He called her by her name and hit the R hard, his lips forming an angry rosebud. RRU-thie.
“It’s all such a compromise,” Mike said. “Can’t hang my paintings because they aren’t neutral enough, have to have only white sheets and towels so that we can bleach them, only white paint, white plates, white cups, white fucking slipcovers.” He shook a white plate at her. This is our life! he’d shouted. This crummy white plate!
What are you talking about, crummy? It’s Williams Sonoma!
The plate had been Frisbeed against the wall, and shattered. Crockery had been thrown. Ruthie had stared at the shards and thought, Well, it’s only a salad plate. How bad could this be?
Within six months, he’d moved out.
She rose and went to the window. How funny life was. She had stood with a billionaire admiring his fifty-million-dollar painting (How much were Rothkos now, worth unimaginable for one person to afford, yet they did, mere museums could no longer afford to buy these paintings…sixty million? Eighty?) while wearing couture and (possibly) a quarter of a million dollars on her wrist. Had Daniel’s notice of the watch changed her in his eyes, was that the meaning of the warmer look, the reevaluation of her importance?
There was a whole world around her in this blessed landscape, with these beautiful people, that took these exquisite things as a given. Something painted out of anguish could sit on a wall and be worth fifty times her house, something purchased for ornament on a wrist could change a life. This was the stuff of revolutions, she supposed. But that never worked. This was the way of things. Money was the golden square. The fulcrum of the turning world.
If you held the thing that could change everything, if it could ease your anguish, repair what had been broken…if it could give you exactly what you wanted…would you just toss it back in a box?
She pushed the slider again. Ding ding ding…She heard the music of time marked, and even as she listened, she felt it pass.
Out the wide window, she finally spotted her family. Finally, there they were, her people. They stood talking to Adeline on the lawn. Strange how she’d been to two parties with Adeline and had yet to have a conversation. Ruthie was always on the opposite side of the gathering. Mike slung an arm around Jem as he laughed at something Adeline said. Sunlight on blond heads, a sky like a vault, a shimmering sea. Gold and blue.
Ruthie felt a wave of displacement take her over, and she placed her hands on the glass. She had a sudden urge to beat against it. The connectors to Mike, to Jem, already stretched (divorce, adolescence), now vibrated in her chest, close to a snap. Heart strings, she thought. She felt as fragile as paper, the fishmonger’s daughter gazing down at royalty so fine it could only be envied, not overthrown.
It was only a moment, only a trick of the eye. It was this dappled buttery light, this ravishment, this ridiculous overripe Renoir in a rich man’s garden, everything a stroke of pure pigment. It was not a premonition, she thought at that moment, though later, of course, she knew it was. Poor Ruthie! That pretty summer afternoon, she thought it could be happiness.