Marty can’t believe how easy it is to open a Midtown post office box under the name of Jake Alpert. It’s the only address he gives to Ellie, but even so, he’s surprised when she sends him an invoice a week after the auction. Under the heading Art Consultation—17th Century she has charged him ninety dollars for the three hours they spent together. It galls him, because he knows he brought her an afternoon of deep pleasure as they sat in the mahogany-paneled jewel box of Thornton and Morrell’s showroom, the flawless diction of the Brit auctioneer more like a holy incantation or Vedic prayer than a sales pitch. Since he can’t write her a check—a bank would check his ID more scrupulously than the post office—he thinks about another meeting and handing her cash. At his desk, working through a patent lawsuit, he finds himself auditioning venues in his mind.
He invites her to meet up at a jazz club one Monday night after work. He briefly considers Birdland but he’s afraid he’ll run into an acquaintance, one of the many lapsed musicians he’s encountered at the clubs over the years. Instead, he chooses the Sparrow, a second-tier basement club below Fifty-Second. He tells Rachel that he’s meeting some of his squash buddies for a night of beer and jazz. She won’t go to see bebop for the same reason he won’t go to see Impressionist exhibitions—the patterns are pretty but they don’t make sense. Once a month, sometimes more, he goes to a jazz club and relives his time as an aspiring trumpeter in the prep school marching band. He spent many hours listening to Dixieland phonograph records at three-quarter speed, slowing the notes so he could play along. Before his mother died of cancer, when he was in high school, this eccentric hobby was tolerated, even encouraged by his parents. But once his father became a widower, something hardened in the household and the trumpet was seen as a boyish indulgence. His father came into his bedroom one night where he was blowing scales in front of the mirror and simply said, “Enough with that thing. You won’t be fifteen the rest of your life.” Then he was gone, the door closed, the era over. Marty can still feel the embouchure in his facial muscles when he walks into a jazz club, the nervy tension in his jaws when he hears a trumpeter cut loose.
Ellie agrees to meet him but insists on taking a cab. He walks over from his office, up Broadway where the car showrooms are lit up as if for surgery, chrome fenders in high gloss, then he heads along Fifty-Second Street, past the sorry procession of prewar swing clubs and clip joints and Chinese restaurants. Through a steak house window he sees a ravaged old Steinway and what looks to be a sad cruise ship quartet playing to an empty restaurant. He waits outside the Sparrow and lights up a Dunhill. Within four square blocks of here, in exposed-brick basements he considers to be subterranean temples, he’s seen Charlie Parker and Art Blakey and Fats Navarro ply their trade, names that mean nothing to Rachel, that might as well be obscure baroque painters. If she had her way there would be nothing in the house but Cole Porter and French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, a soft murmuring atmosphere of crooners and blue-greens. When Marty looks at certain Cézannes he sees bluish fuzz—the powdery bloom on the skin of a Concord grape.
Ellie arrives ten minutes late and overdressed. In her dark wool coat and white beaded dress she looks like she’s going to dinner theater circa 1928, he thinks, smiling broadly as she steps from the cab. He leans in the front window to pay the driver. When the cab pulls away, she says, “I was going to do that.”
“Can we agree that transportation and meals are on me?”
She nods and looks up at the club’s neon sign. “I’d be surprised if there’s great art inside.”
“There is, but not the kind you’re thinking. Do you like jazz?”
“I wish I knew the first thing about it.”
“I looked at the playbill. No one big is on tonight, but the place is fun. You can’t leave New York without hearing some jazz.”
“At the rate my dissertation is going, I’ll be here for a while.”
They walk inside and head down the musty carpeted steps to the ticket window and coat check. At the base of the stairs, in the threshold to the club proper, they hand their tickets to a hostess and she leads them to a booth. The interior is dark and smoky. He likes the juxtaposition of this place with the funereal splendor of the auction house, a jump-cut that suggests he’s a man who might spend eighty thousand on paintings one afternoon and then hole up in some underground cathedral of jazz on a Monday night. He wants Ellie to know it’s possible to belong to both worlds, that he swims in the high and the low registers of the city.
The hostess guides them toward the wall of booths not far from the bandstand. They sit and a cocktail waitress comes over. All the women who work here are over fifty, Marty realizes, as if it vouches for the club’s seriousness. Ellie orders the house red and he asks for a Tom Collins and some nuts. It’s still early and one of the warm-up bands, a quintet, is playing onstage, the sax player deep into a solo. Marty thinks about the time he saw Charlie Parker, a little ample around the waist, his tie loosened and barely reaching his rib cage, eyes downcast as if he could see the notes burning out of the bell of his horn. He was an apparition, junked out and holy. Every saxophone player since has seemed entirely mortal.
Ellie looks around the room. “I think I’m a little overdressed.”
“They’re used to theatrical types,” he says, smiling.
Their drinks and a bowl of peanuts arrive.
Taking a handful of nuts, he gestures over to a burly black man in a white suit. “The emcee is a bit of a tip monger. If you stiff him he’ll remember you forever. Even the musicians tip him because he introduces the bands and if they stiff him he botches their names.”
“It sounds even more cutthroat than the auction houses.”
“Ten times worse.”
She sips her drink. “How are the oil-on-coppers doing?”
“They’re beautiful, a reunited family, though right now they’re all sitting in my study, waiting to find wall space.”
“I’d love to see your collection some time,” she says.
“Of course. I’m renovating at the moment so it’s a disaster zone.”
Staring into the red bowl of her wineglass, she says, “I’m sure that’s an ordeal for your wife.”
Marty realizes he’s never mentioned Jake’s wife, but neither has he removed his wedding ring. He lets five seconds of silence unravel while he considers his options. Looking off toward the band he says, “Actually, she passed away last year. I guess I haven’t gotten around to taking my gold band off.” As soon as the words are in the air he feels his stomach drop. He looks over to see her face fall a little, as if she’s committed some error of taste.
She says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t meant to pry.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m getting back on my feet. Maybe that’s why I want to fill out the holes in the collection. She usually took the lead on that front.”
He takes a big sip of his Tom Collins to wash away the aftertaste of deceit. He thinks about the European river cruise in the spring, the way Rachel will lay out the brochures and ship menus across the perfectly made bed. They will eat oysters and truffles and make love once or twice, floating by the peat fields of old Europe, sunken down into its ancient rivers. She will read novels in bed and fall asleep with the light on. The predictability of it is both heartening and its own kind of ruin. He looks up at the stage where the trumpeter is on the outer edge of his solo, rising onto the balls of his feet to launch his big buttery tone. “That kid’s not bad,” he says.
“Are you musical?”
“I used to play trumpet in high school. Then my father made me give it up and I became a patent attorney. Now I vet other people’s creations.” He wonders whether he should have invented an alternative career. Jake Alpert could have been anything—a diplomat, a surgeon, a financier.
“My father tried to make me give up painting. He was uncomfortable with anything artistic, thought it was puttin’ on bloody airs.”
They both watch the emcee as he walks through the crowd lighting cigarettes, prospecting for tips with an oversize butane lighter. A few musicians with their instrument cases have set up on the bleachers to watch their colleagues onstage.
Ellie says, “So, how can I help you build the collection you want?”
“That reminds me.” He takes an envelope from his pocket with the cash inside and slides it across the table. He’s seen this done in movies and it makes him wish he’d ordered a martini. For some reason she refuses to look at it.
“Thank you.”
“I know it’s crazy, but I prefer to deal in cash. I’m the son of an immigrant.”
“I hope you didn’t pay cash to Thornton and Morrell.”
“They were only too happy to set up an arrangement directly with my bank. Delivery happened once they got confirmation that the funds were transferred. The delivery guys looked like their doorman—arthritic old men in blazers and argyle sweaters.”
“No one seemed to be younger than sixty over there.” She laughs. “So what’s next? Italian Renaissance? Venetian wedding portraits might suit you.” She looks away from the table, as if she’s made another conversational blunder.
He lets the ice clink against the side of his glass. “What do you know about women artists of the seventeenth century? Dutch women, for example.”
He wasn’t sure when he would steer the conversation in this direction, but now that it’s happened he tries to gauge her reaction. The lie about being a widower has freed something up in him.
She looks down at the table and takes another sip of wine. “As it happens, that’s what I’m writing my dissertation on. Women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Well, before it stalled out.”
“I didn’t mean to remind you.”
“It’s fine, I’m just riddled with guilt. Every time I look over at my typewriter I feel sick. Did you know Remington makes guns as well as typewriters? I think about that every time I look at it.”
“I guess I never thought about it. Did you know they invented the zipper before barbed wire? As a patent attorney I follow the history of inventions. The guy who filed the first zipper patent in the nineteenth century called it the Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure. For obvious reasons that name never caught on…”
“Interesting,” Ellie says, but he can tell she’s not listening. She takes up a cocktail napkin and digs through her handbag until she finds her eyeglasses and a pen. “So there were a handful of Dutch women painters in the Golden Age. Maybe twenty-five mentioned in the historical sources but only a few with surviving works.” She writes the following names on the napkin: Judith Leyster, Maria van Oosterwyck, Rachel Ruysch. She raises the pen tip and her eyes waver over the rim of her glasses to the smoky stage. The trumpeter finally comes down from his solo. “There’s also a woman named Sara de Vos, but so far she’s only got one attributed work.” She adds de Vos to the bottom of the list.
Without hesitation, he says, “And these are likely to be in private collections? So if a collector like myself wanted to acquire them it’s conceivable they might come up for auction at some point?”
“Most of these are in university and public museums. A handful of private collections. The National Gallery in Washington has some good Leysters. And everyone’s got some Ruysch flower paintings—she lived to be very old and painted her whole life.”
“Perhaps you can help me locate some. I think my wife would have liked the idea of Dutch women painters.”
He’s aware of the theatrically morose tone in his voice, but he also realizes there might not be another six encounters with Ellie. She will grow increasingly anxious as she’s reminded of her unfinished dissertation or her forgery and before long she’ll claim to be too busy to meet up. He can see it all in her careful, circumspect manner—an underground river of guilt.
“Do you have any children?” she asks.
He touches the rim of his glass. “We were doomed not to have any,” he says. Somehow she’s made him divulge something of his real life.
He orders another round of drinks when she gets her glass below the halfway mark.
“So, that’s enough business for now,” he says. “If you would do some research and let me know what you find out I’d be very grateful.” He folds his hands together to indicate a change in subject. “How does an Aussie girl end up in Manhattan?”
“It’s complicated. I thought I wanted to restore paintings professionally, so I spent a few years in London at the Courtauld Institute. They taught me everything there is to know about inpainting and the structure of old paintings. Though even there every professor had his own rules and none of them were in agreement. We’d all go down to the pub and argue about which way was the right way to build a loss back up in a painting. It was a very small world. So I decided to switch to art history and will probably end up teaching. I applied to Columbia and got a fellowship.”
“Seems like you’ll make a very fine teacher. From what I can tell, you know how to bring paintings to life.”
“That’s sweet of you to say.” She takes her glasses off and folds them.
“And do you paint yourself?”
“Not much anymore, though I painted a lot in my youth.”
She squints into her glass and he wonders just how shortsighted she is.
She says, “That sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? My youth.”
“Not at all.”
She pushes her first empty wineglass six inches away from her side of the table.
“And what do you do for fun? Is there a vanguard of Columbia grad students who storm the Village every weekend, playing barefoot in Washington Square Park? Are there male colleagues in thin black ties and sunglasses, riding Vespas?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m a bit of a homebody. It’s sad, really. I just find it difficult to like people.” She brings the second wineglass in and takes a sip. “Who knows what’s wrong with me. When I was a girl everyone just thought I was a snob, my own parents included. Dreamy kids who paint for hours in their bedrooms don’t do well in Australia, at least not where I grew up.” She looks around the bar again. “I’m suddenly starving.”
“Let’s finish our drinks and then we’ll go foraging. They don’t have much in the way of food here. Do you want to go have dinner and then come back? The better bands always come on late anyway.”
“Only if we can get pizza and eat it out of the box. We can take it down to the Hudson and sit on a bench.”
“You make the Hudson sound like Key West. I’m not much in the mood to get mugged by a juvenile delinquent or one of the winos that live down by the river.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Not by much.”
“It’s decided then,” she says.
They drink up, but she can’t finish her second glass of wine. She stands up from the booth a little tipsily. Marty leaves some money on the table and they head back up to the street.
* * *
They carry a pepperoni pizza and some beer down to a strip of parkland along the river, the expressway traffic dulled by a hem of trees. There are a few people out walking their dogs and a lone fisherman casting into the river. They find a bench to watch the ferries and boats crossing between Manhattan and Union City. Ellie takes a slice of pizza from the box and tries to maneuver it into her mouth. The point sags down and cheese grease drips onto her white beaded dress.
“Shit,” she says. Then she looks up at him. “Mind my language. I come from a family of heavy blasphemers.”
“My father was Dutch and he swore like some deranged pirate from the eighteenth century.”
“Shouldn’t have worn this stupid thing. I hardly ever go out—that’s part of the problem.”
“You have to curl in the sides of the pizza, vertically down the middle. Then the tension picks up and keeps the tip from flopping.”
“Nobody wants a flopping tip,” she says, then, “Oh, God, I’m drunk.”
“Eat up,” he says.
She gestures to the ferries with her newly repositioned pizza slice. “My father’s a ferry captain on Sydney Harbour. I was only ever asked once to ride inside the wheelhouse and I got seasick. Girls didn’t belong there anyway, he said. He was a man who lived as if he’d been born a century earlier.” She takes another bite of pizza. “I’m prattling…”
“My father used to make his own tonic water, boil up the cinchona bark on the stovetop. Maybe that’s why we like old paintings—our fathers were trapped by the past.”
Chewing, she says, “Either that or we can’t get our heads around the present.”
They eat in silence for a moment, watching the lights of New Jersey in the grain of the river.
She says, “I rode in the wheelhouse during a big swell. I think he wanted to test me. These slate-colored rolling waves came through the heads between Manly and the city. The ferries probably shouldn’t have been running, but my father was the last one to heed caution. Even the deckhands were turning green. When we got halfway between the heads it was so bad that I had to run out on deck and throw up over the railing. I came back in drenched from all the crashing waves but my father didn’t say anything, completely ignored me until that night when we got home to my mother. We walked into the kitchen and my mother just about died when she saw how I looked. When she asked what the hell happened to me, he said, ‘Ellie had a little spell on board, that’s all.’ My torrential vomiting was dismissed as a little spell. That was the story of my childhood. My sister broke her arm once and my father called it a busted wing and rigged it up in a piece of torn bedsheet. To this day her arm’s crooked. Her tennis ground stroke is five degrees off-center…”
“Your father sounds intrepid.”
“That’s one word for it. He served in the first war and I think part of his personality was actually shell shock. Then they lost a son before us girls came along. He was never the same, or so I’m told. Did you go to the war?”
“I’m not that old.”
“I meant the second one.”
“No, they wouldn’t have me. I’m flat-footed with a bung knee and a side of mild asthma. Filing a few patents for the army and navy was as close as I got to the action. How’s the pizza?”
“Fabulous.”
“Tell me how you repair a painting.”
“It’ll put you to sleep.”
“Try me.”
She reaches for another slice of pizza. “It’s not interesting, believe me.”
“I’d really like to know. Please.”
She looks out at the river, then down at the pizza box. “It really depends. But you have to think of a painting in geological terms. It’s all about strata, layers that do different jobs. A painting has its own archaeology.”
“This is why I think you’d be a good teacher.”
She pulls the crust off her slice and bites one end. “The shadows and the light usually take root in the ground layer. You fill in losses with chalk and rabbit glue. You should smell my apartment. There’s a French butcher in Brooklyn who sells me rabbit pelts by the dozen.”
“You can’t buy it ready-made?”
“It’s better if you make it from scratch. For one thing, it gets you in the mind-set of the seventeenth century.”
“What else?”
“Well, you cheat a little with the brushwork, building it up sculpturally and then going over it with thin layers of paint. In London we used to argue about whether or not to match the color of the ground exactly or whether you should clearly mark out your territory, let future restorers know where you’d been.”
“It was an ethical issue,” he says.
“I suppose it was. They made you choose sides and there were professors there who hated each other because they couldn’t agree on what color to make a ground.”
“I thought lawyers were petty and contentious.”
She looks over toward New Jersey, the slice of pizza midway to her mouth, and blows some air between her lips. She drops the pizza slice back in the box. “I’m exhausted and still drunk. I don’t think I’m going to make it back to the Robin. I’m sorry.”
“The Sparrow.”
“I should stop talking.”
“Some other time. Do you want to take the pizza home?”
“Naturally. You’re talking to a graduate student.”
Marty says, “Yes, one who charges thirty dollars an hour. That’s more than my dead wife’s analyst and he actually studied in Vienna with one of Freud’s disciples.” He means it as a joke, but there’s a note of hostility in his voice.
She turns her head but doesn’t look at him. The pizza box sits open between them, grease stains like tiny islands on a cardboard map.
Slowly, she says, “Do you think it’s unreasonable?”
“I think you know what rich people are willing to pay for mounting a little existential meaning on their walls. My wealth is a historical accident, just so we’re clear.”
A diesel engine thrums somewhere out on the river. The mood has suddenly been poisoned. He wants to shift the conversation back to banter, but he knows it’s too late. “Let me get you into a taxi,” he says. “Will you take the pizza?”
She doesn’t answer but takes the box. They walk a few streets over from the expressway and he flags down a taxi. His father used to carry a doorman’s whistle in his vest pocket, just for hailing cabs, and he wonders where that thing ended up. It might be resting at the bottom of a drawer in the ship captain’s desk. When the cab pulls up he climbs into the back beside her before she can object. “Brooklyn and then the Upper East Side,” he tells the driver.
“You don’t want to do it in reverse?” the driver asks.
“We’ll take the lady first,” Marty says.
She says, “This is completely unnecessary.”
“Let’s just say I’m from another century as well.”
They don’t talk the full length of the Brooklyn Bridge. He watches her look out the window, shoulders turned away from him, her fingers gently drumming on top of the pizza box. Her body language suggests she’s brooding about the earlier comment. He saw a flash of something back there. A quick temper, perhaps, but also a propensity for self-doubt. He rolls down his window slightly to let in some air.
* * *
Marty tells the driver to wait while she gets inside her apartment building. The stream of traffic thunders overhead on the expressway. He waits until he sees the play of light and her silhouette against an upper window, then tells the driver to go ahead. A few blocks later he tells the driver to let him out and he returns on foot, his collar up, gently drunk, pulled along by something he doesn’t fully understand. Each thing she divulges about her life and work is a small theft. It’s like taking ornaments off a stranger’s shelf, one by one, and dropping them into his coat pockets. He stops at a late-night deli and buys two cups of coffee and a pint of ice cream. Then he stands outside her apartment building, the ice cream tucked under one arm, cooling against his rib cage, while his hands warm against the coffee. He watches her silhouette against the drawn curtains, the little forays she makes between rooms. He imagines showing up on her doorstep with the forgery wrapped in paper, telling her that it’s a restoration he wants her to work on, or watching her face as he describes the Sara de Vos he once owned until someone plucked it off his bedroom wall during a charity dinner for orphans. It’s her future he’s holding in his hands, flimsy as two paper cups. He wants to understand her life from the inside out, to feel into its corners and handle the filaments that hold it in place.
He walks inside the darkened apartment building and climbs the tiled stairway to the second floor. He knows it’s the corner apartment with its windows facing north—he’s always been good with direction, knows the cardinal points when he’s sitting in a windowless Midtown restaurant. He knocks softly and hears her feet padding across the wood floors, moving away and then coming back. A shadow breaks up the chink of light from under the door and her voice is muffled—“Who’s there?”
Quietly, but as jovial as he can sound, he says, “It’s Jake Alpert with coffee and ice cream as a peace offering. He’s very sorry for being an ass.”
There’s a moment of silence and another shift in the light under the door. “Tell Jake that I was just getting ready for bed. No need to apologize.”
“Well, at least let me put this in your freezer before it melts.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just so late … I’m not dressed.”
“I understand.” He takes a step back from the door to make sure his voice doesn’t sound threatening. “Since Rachel passed I’ve become a bit of an insomniac. I’m very sorry for my earlier comment. Good night, Ellie.” He feels a burst of terrible shame that he’s used Rachel’s name, as if her actual life now hangs in the balance. He takes another step away.
There’s a pause, then he hears the sound of a chain being unlatched. Her face appears when the door opens six inches. She says, “You can give me the ice cream. I’ll put it in my freezer and we can have it some other time. That was nice of you.”
He comes closer. “It’s under my arm. I can’t get it while I’m holding the coffees.”
“Oh,” she says, a little annoyed. She opens the door another six inches and extends her arm so she can reach below his elbow. He sees that she’s wearing a flannel nightie with small birds on it. Her calves are skinny and pale, her feet slightly splayed and blunted at the toes. A girl who grew up barefoot, he thinks. When she takes the ice cream he says, “Peppermint chocolate chip.”
She looks away. “I’m more of a vanilla person myself.”
“I offended you and I’m sorry. Your expertise is worth every cent you charge. I wish I could come in, just for a moment.”
“I’m not used to having company,” she says. “The place isn’t fit.”
“All right, well, good night. Here’s your coffee as well.” He hands it to her through the doorway and she has to set the ice cream down to take it. He turns back for the stairwell, knowing that she’s still there.
She says, “Five minutes is all. And you have to wait until I tidy up and dim the lights. The less you see the better. Wait here,” she says.
Another small theft. She closes the door and he comes back to await further instructions. He can hear her tidying up, placing dishes in the sink. When she finally comes back to the door she’s put on a man’s bathrobe that has flecks of paint on the lapels. He steps inside. The windows above the radiator, facing the elevated expressway, have been opened and there’s a slight breeze blowing through the humid space. A series of snake plants and philodendrons line the sill in tiny pots. He can smell the animal glue she talked about and there’s the high chemistry of solvents and oil paints, and something darker that smells like shoe polish. A small wooden island in the kitchenette is taken up by mortars and pestles and stone bowls. A lacquered tea tray has been repurposed to hold every kind of brush and palette knife imaginable. A drafting table on metal legs is covered by strips of paper and charcoal sketches. She sets her coffee down on a small Formica table by the window that Marty recognizes from the photo. The living area is stacked with books and newspapers and over in one corner is the offending Remington with a sheet of her dissertation, no doubt, wilting in its Bakelite mouth.
“If the landlord ever sees inside this place I’ll get evicted,” she says. “But it’s not easy to find apartments where they don’t mind you melting rabbit pelts on the stovetop.”
Marty looks over at the blackened oven and range. “I’m pretty sure that kitchen has seen worse.”
She tells him he can sit down if he likes and he sits on the mustard-brown couch that faces the windows and a shelf with a record player. There’s a painting resting on an easel by the window and it’s covered by a paisley tablecloth. He wonders whether she has just draped it there or whether this is a habit, the masking and unmasking of her trade. He knows better than to ask about it right now, so he sits and drinks his coffee. When she brings the ice cream over there are no bowls but two spoons.
“Family tradition,” she says. “My mum used to make her own butterscotch ice cream, but she made us eat out of the churn bucket. Didn’t want to dirty extra dishes.”
They eat several spoonfuls each, the pint between them on the couch. Marty looks around the room, taking it in. Gretchen’s apartment had signs of a rich and vibrant social life—cheese knives and glassware and linen napkins for entertaining. This apartment could belong to an invalid, a shut-in with kidney stones and a fox terrier.
“I could build you some bookshelves,” he said. “I come from a line of men with carpentry tools in the basement.”
“It wouldn’t do any good. All those spines wedged together would make my head spin.”
“Again, I am sorry about what I said before.”
“It’s fine. You’re probably right. I’ve been spoilt. You people pay me to do something I’d do for free. The money doesn’t mean anything to me. I can’t ever bring myself to spend it. It feels tainted because it comes too easily.”
“That sounds rather noble. What do you mean by you people?”
“There are people who look at art, people who buy it, and people who make it. I’m in a whole separate category—I mend it, bring it back to life. It’s not unusual for conservators to spend more hours alone with a great work than the artist themselves.”
“Is that why you do it? To meditate on the work?”
He watches her shrug and leverage her spoon into the core of the ice cream. She lands a chunk and smooths it with the roof of her mouth, pulling the half-empty spoon back out. Something has shifted between them, a new candor on the end of her spoon.
“I’m not good with men,” she says matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what they want.”
“Have you had many men in your life?”
“That seems rather personal,” she says, then, “No, not many. What was she like? Rachel?”
He flinches at the sound of her name and has to look away. “I don’t want to cry, so I’d rather not say.”
“I’m sure it’s a terrible loss.”
“It’s hard to describe.”
They seem to be at a conversational impasse, so Marty gets up and strolls around the room.
“You can put on a record if you like, though I don’t have any jazz.”
“I’ll buy you some Chet Baker.”
He flips through the small stack of LPs—Chopin sonatas, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff. “Why am I not surprised by your record collection? Is there anything here from the twentieth century?” She doesn’t answer. He takes out the Chopin from its sleeve and places it carefully onto the turntable. “Do you ever paint with music on?”
“Never,” she says. “It changes the brushwork.”
He sits back on the couch. She closes her eyes and leans back against a cushion, letting the music wash over her. She says, “Tell me about your first encounter with art. I always like to hear that story.”
“My father used to tell stories of being at the Armory Show, of lining up with a thousand people to see Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. He liked to hang out with painters when he could so he knew some of the Ashcans and their circle. He used to get drunk with John Butler Yeats, father of the famous Irish poet. As an old man John Butler Yeats was living above a French restaurant. Anyway, my father claimed that he went to the Armory Show with John Yeats and saw a woman faint when she got to the front of the Duchamp line. So that was my first encounter with art, a story about what it could do to people. Do you know that Duchamp lives in Lower Manhattan and hasn’t painted in decades? He says his life is the art now.”
“I didn’t know that. Obviously because he’s from the twentieth century.” With her eyes still closed, she says, “What else?”
“I grew up in a house filled with Old Masters. It wasn’t until I got to college and took some art history that I understood what my father had assembled or inherited. We owned some of the paintings discussed in the textbooks.”
They continue in this eddy of conversation for a while. She throws out a murmured question and he answers at length, trying to summon interesting anecdotes from his real life, as if he can make up for so many layers of deceit. Eventually, she stops asking questions and he suspects she’s fallen asleep. To test his theory he says, “Am I so boring that you’ve nodded off?” She doesn’t answer. The Chopin and art stories have finished what the pizza and beer began. He sits very still, listening to her breathe, the ice cream slowly melting on the scuffed coffee table.
After several minutes, he quietly sets down his spoon and walks toward the short hallway, back toward the bathroom and bedroom. He walks as softly as he can, trying not to squeak the battered hardwoods. The bathroom smells of damp towels and there’s a wire clotheshorse set up in the tub, a few pairs of her underwear hanging out to dry. In her haste to tidy up, she’d forgotten to close the shower curtain and there’s something tender and sad about her industrial cotton underwear. He pictures her hand washing her clothes in the tub. Her beaded white dress—now stained with cheese grease—has been spot cleaned and draped over the sink. He looks back at her underwear and quietly closes the shower curtain. He’s afraid to use the toilet in case the sound of it flushing wakes her, so he steps back out into the hallway and peers into the darkened bedroom, a narrow room with a single lamp burning from a bamboo nightstand. The bed is unmade, the floor strewn with clothes, and her closet appears to be filled with suitcases. A flourish of rising damp blots against one wall and part of the ceiling. He can’t imagine how this is the product of a methodical mind, a temperament for finessing a canvas one painstaking stroke at a time.
When he goes back into the living area she’s still slumped against the back of the couch, head back, mouth slightly open. He moves over to the easel and lifts one corner of the paisley tablecloth. For a fleeting moment he imagines his de Vos sitting there, but now he sees it’s a canvas awaiting some depiction—an underlayer painted an earthy and pale red. That she thought to cover the naked canvas but not her damp cotton underwear reveals something, though he’s not sure what. He drops the corner of the tablecloth and begins for the door. As he passes the drafting table with its rummage of papers and sketches, he sees a pattern that looks familiar. A narrow strip of photographic paper protrudes from under a charcoal etching. The sliced-away piece is no wider than two inches, but he recognizes the headboard and the arabesque of his own bedroom’s plush gray wallpaper. The bed appears to be unmade, the pillows in plain sight, and from the shadows of the headboard rods against the wall he guesses it was taken on a winter morning, when the light spills into the room late and from the south. He puts it in his pocket and continues for the door. He should wake her, he knows, so that she can lock the door behind him. She’ll wake some hours from now, and feel disoriented and vulnerable. But the thought of someone taking photographs in his bedroom during broad daylight rushes through him and he heads down the darkened stairwell in a surge of anger.
Outside, he walks several blocks until he finds a cab and makes his way back toward Manhattan. As they near the Brooklyn Bridge, the city glimmers into view—a Dutch outpost at the confluence of two rivers, an island plucked from the flotsam of history. Whenever he reenters Manhattan, even if it’s just from a weekend in the Hamptons or an antique show in Queens, he can’t help feeling how tenuous his grasp of the city is. He’s spent his whole life here and yet there are neighborhoods that are as dark and unknowable to him as the Congo. Like his father, he’s a street walker, but it’s always above the parallel of Forty-Second Street and south of Central Park’s upper edge. He has dreams in which he walks his dog around the perimeter of the entire island, letting Carraway drink from both rivers.
At home, Hester has turned off all the lights—her customary way of protesting his late hours—so he’s forced to walk up the stairs from the foyer in the dark. To turn on a light would be to admit moral failure to the housemaid. As he enters the upstairs hallway he wonders whether Hester has betrayed them, whether she let in a photographer when they were catching some winter sunshine in the Bahamas one January. Although there must have been a few hundred people through the house in the last year, very few had been there during daylight. It could have been a tradesman, the plumber or the piano tuner with camera in hand. He knows if he confronts Hester she’ll quit in a heartbeat; she has Southern notions of honor and loyalty and his wife will carry a grudge for years.
Through the bedroom doorway Rachel appears to be asleep, facing the other wall, the dog curled behind her legs. He pads down the hallway to his study and closes the door behind him. He pours himself two fingers of Scotch and picks up the telephone and dials the number on Ellie’s business card. It rings half a dozen times before she answers. “I’m sorry I left without waking you,” he says, peering at her forgery against the bookshelves. “It occurred to me that your front door isn’t locked.” He can hear her sleep-addled breathing, the sound of her swallowing to wake up. “I must have dozed off. My apologies,” she says.
“I forgive you.”
She breathes drowsily into the phone.
He says, “I’ll be in touch soon.”
“I’ll have a list of Dutch works by women for you to consider.”
“Excellent. Until then.”
“Good night, Jake.”
He puts the phone down and drains his glass. He walks out into the hallway and down to the bedroom. In the en suite bathroom he puts on his pajamas and hangs his clothes on the back of the door. He takes out the narrow strip of photographic paper from his trouser pocket and brings it into the bedroom, holding up the strip in a narrow band of moonlight. The photographer had stood at the end of the bed with the windows behind the camera. He looks up at the empty space on the wall above the headboard. During daylight, you can see the blanched ghost of the painting, the rest of the wall turned a pale sepia from the light and grit of the city. It hung there for forty-five years, since before they were married and the room had belonged to his father, who never remarried, who slept alone under the ice skaters and the girl at the edge of the frozen river after his wife had been wrenched from his grasp.
With her back to him, Rachel says something. At first he thinks she’s talking in her sleep, some snippet of a troubled dream, but then the sounds assemble in the darkness with a slight delay.
“You’re awfully late. How was the jazz?”
“Frederic got us all drunk and I lost track of time. There were a few decent quintets playing, nothing special.”
She repositions herself and the dog has to adjust. “What’s that smell?”
“The club’s underground, remember? A bunker of cigarette smoke and sweaty musicians.” He sits on the edge of the bed and puts the photographic strip into the drawer of his nightstand.
“No, it’s something else,” she says. “I can’t quite place it.”
“Should I shower?”
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
“It smells like old house paint. Like you’ve been crawling through somebody’s attic.”
“Strange,” he says. “Sorry to wake you.”
He gets up and closes the bathroom door behind him. In the shower, he runs the water as hot as he can stand it, letting it scald the back of his neck and shoulders. He scrubs himself with soap and washes his hair, removing the fug of Ellie’s apartment.