A month of dinners, lunches, matinees, and museum walks. But Ellie remains confused about Jake’s intentions until he invites her away for a weekend. In the fall, she agrees to go antique hunting upstate and stay overnight in Albany. He arranges to pick her up at her apartment early one Saturday morning, so they can hit the estate sales and antique shops before noon. The weather has turned—Indian summer has given way to chill mornings and cold nights. She wraps herself in a scarf and heavy wool coat. While she waits, she double-checks her luggage and becomes conscious that her suitcase is one size too big for a weekend getaway. Right-size luggage seems like an extravagance of poststudent life, a distant shore she’s still rowing toward.
Jake raps at her door and when she answers he’s standing there with a framed painting wrapped in brown paper and masking tape.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Your new assignment. It needs a good cleaning and some inpainting.”
“Can I take a peek?”
“It’ll be waiting for you when you come back.” He takes her hand and leans in to kiss her cheek. “We need to get a head start on those Albany widows. They’ve been up since four planning for the ancient blood sport of antiquing.”
Ellie smiles and sets the painting beside the front door. Jake grabs her suitcase and doesn’t say anything about its size, for which she’s grateful. He leads her out into the hallway.
At the curb, his night-blue Citroën looks almost sardonic in the morning light—its raked hood and sleek headlights give it the dreadnought grace of a shark. She thinks of the grey nurse sharks that sometimes followed her father’s ferryboat across Sydney Harbour. They’ve taken taxis up until now so the unveiling of the car feel momentous, like she’s seeing a new side to him. He puts her suitcase in the trunk and they climb in. When he starts the engine, the car shudders and rises a few inches with a pnuematic sigh. She looks over at him and he grins. He says, “They call that the kneel.” A moment later, he puts on a pair of driving gloves and gives the horn a light jab—it sounds French and adenoidal—and they pull down the street.
“What do you think of the car?” he asks.
She likes the way he asks her opinion about everything, even if she doesn’t know the first thing about cars or music or half the food they eat. She looks over the molded dashboard and the instrument panel with its needle-thin dials and clock-face odometer. The steering wheel has a single spoke and the brake appears to be more of a push button than a pedal. “I’m not sure whether it was designed by an engineer or an avant-garde theater director.”
He likes this answer, she thinks, finds it sporting and witty.
He says, “The French like a bit of theater in their automobiles. They pour their souls into them. Did you know that Citroën was part of the French Resistance during the war? They sold trucks to the Nazis but they lowered the oil markers on the dipsticks so the trucks just died out in the field, burned up their engines.”
“I like this car already.”
They pull down Thirty-Sixth Street to get on the expressway, past the plumbing supply store and the boarded-up florist and the rusting stairwells. From inside the car, she can’t help feeling like an aristocrat touring the proletariat. He’s wearing a pair of driving moccasins and they’re cut from the same leather as his kidskin driving gloves and his watchband—she’s always noticing his clothes. That kind of accessorizing on a different man might seem foppish, but on Jake it seems natural and masculine. Sometimes his clothes and mannerisms make her feel clumsy and flat-footed, but most of the time she likes to watch him do things with his hands—the slow and precise gestures, the easy way of folding his arms across his chest when he’s listening to her go on about paintings. She looks out the window and sees a gaunt man leaning in a doorway, his breath smoking as the early light braces the length of the street. She thinks about her parents and grandparents, about the hardscrabble brood of relatives in Dubbo and Broken Hill, about the impossibility of her driving in a Citroën with a Dutch-American blue blood named Jake Alpert. While his family passed down baroque and rococo paintings, hers passed down a set of tarnished souvenir spoons, complete with lacquered and wall-mountable display rack. Her mother’s pride and joy, right above the kitchen sink and the view of rusting oil tankers where the Parramatta River flows into the harbor.
Driving north they talk about childhood exploits and transgressions.
He says, “I used to feed my father’s horse an apple right before he’d go riding on weekends. I was terrified of horses so it took all my courage just to stand there with my flattened palm. I can still remember the feel of its soft muzzle against my hand.”
“The horse was direct competition,” she says. “You wanted that animal, and therefore your father, to be stricken by horse flatulence. It makes perfect sense to me.”
He throws out an easy laugh, his leather gloves turning walnut in a streak of autumn sunlight.
She says, “At the boarding school I went shoplifting whenever I could. I’d steal lollies—candy—and batteries. I kept a transistor radio under my bed and listened to this wonderful show after lights out called Is It Ours? They’d play a piece of classical music by an unnamed Australian composer and then one by an anonymous European. People would call in to guess which was which. They almost always thought the better ones were European.”
“What does that say about Australians?”
“That we don’t trust our own talents. That anything foreign or exotic is automatically better and more refined.”
They drive through the gold-and-russet foliage of the Catskills, stopping at small towns with stone courthouses and redbrick fire stations. People dress differently up here, she notices, the men in hats and suspenders, the women in brown woolen dresses. There are municipal bandstands painted white and willow trees presiding over ample walkways. The Citroën gets some stares from the locals as it wends through backstreets—an alien predator of the deep in search of estate sales and antique shops going out of business. They look at old church doors and leadlight windows and dusty mountains of Persian rugs. Ellie scopes out the artwork, but it’s mostly decorative and of little value—seascapes, riverscapes, portraits of stern ministers and their patrician wives.
By noon the day has grown warm. They drive on to the next town, the radio playing, the windows down, Jake’s gloved hand patting the side of the car in a way that makes Ellie think of him patting the flank of a horse.
Somewhere along the Hudson, between towns, he says, “I’ve been thinking about our list of prospective Dutch women’s paintings. I think I’d like to acquire the single de Vos first. Wouldn’t that be something?”
She looks out at the scenery, scrutinizing a little wooded dell of noonday twilight. The car flashes into sunshine and then passes into these coppery green depths under the trees. In an instant, the temperature drops twenty degrees then warms again as they dash back into daylight. She thinks of ten-second days and nights, of miniature deaths. “That would be something,” she says casually. Her mood glazes over and she feels faintly dizzy. It reminds her of being on her feet for eight hours at a stretch while restoring a painting, the acetone and close work suddenly going to her head like the blade of a knife. “If you can find it,” she says.
Jake adjusts the radio dial, moving the red needle between licks of static. “I’ve begun to make some discreet inquiries. Put out the word to fellow collectors.”
She squints into the trees, letting her eyes go loose so she can slacken the colors from their shapes. She swallows to steady her voice. “That can be part of my brief, if you like. To research private collections and write letters of inquiry.”
There’s a long pause.
“Your brief,” he says finally, without looking over. “Is that all this is to you?”
There’s a moment of dappled quiet, the air siphoning and whistling in through the open windows.
He says, “I expect there’ll be an itemized invoice at the end of the weekend. Send it to my PO box, will you?”
She’s shocked by how mean he sounds. Around a bend, it looks as if winter has already burnished up along the riverbank, throwing the elms into skeletal relief. She reaches across the dashboard to touch his gloved hand on the steering wheel, the leather grain warming in the palm of her hand. She’s careful not to pat the back of his hand, because she doesn’t want to console or patronize.
“That’s not the way I see this,” she says. “Not anymore.”
She takes her hand back, but the words still burn in the air between them. She’s not sure if she’s surrendered something or claimed something. His face softens.
He says, “I spoke out of turn. Forgive me.”
Trying to regain some levity, she says, “Forgotten already. Now, let’s strategize about lunch.”
He puts his foot down on the accelerator and the Citroën revs into the next octave, pulling them through a stretch of dun-brown fields, the shadows choked and violet up along the rocky hillsides.
They stop for a late lunch at a restaurant run out of somebody’s house—a big Victorian with a screened-in porch. It’s a makeshift affair, with a parlor of white tablecloths and, in the backyard, picnic tables and wooden chairs set up by a stream. They sit out on the porch and eat sandwiches and chowder at a wicker table before retiring to a line of rocking chairs so Jake can have a smoke. She feels that something has shifted between them and wonders what will happen next. The inscrutability of men, she thinks, not mysterious so much as unreadable. She watches him blow smoke out toward the trees, the way he studies the middle distances as if his childhood were right there in the clearing, as if the teenage trumpeter were practicing scales out in the woods. He’s a brooder like me, she thinks.
In the old Dutch section of Albany, they find an estate sale in a three-story house that appears to be sinking into an acre of delicate moss. It’s midafternoon and the best items have been thoroughly picked over. A son or nephew of the deceased walks across the naked wood floors—the rugs have all gone to a single buyer—and shows them what remains. There’s a handful of oil paintings from the nineteenth century, all of them badly fogged by age and antique copal varnish, some Quaker sideboards and china cabinets, and an array of knickknacks, some of them heaped into cardboard boxes. Jake asks if they can wander around and the heir tells them to take their time. They go upstairs to the top floor, where the rooms are cavernous and sun-scrubbed, up above the tree crowns. In an enormous bedroom a four-poster bed takes center stage, a hulk of wrought iron and solid carved mahogany. “The deathbed,” Jake whispers to Ellie. She takes a landscape painting down from the wall, scrutinizes its seams, and slants it into the light. Turning it over, she examines the back, trying to decipher the blue chalk marks from the auction house and the condition of the relining.
He calls her over to an adjoining bathroom with a claw-foot tub, tiny white mosaics, and exposed copper pipes. The mood is one of convalescence, of warm mineral baths on white afternoons. The double windowpane above the tub is crazed and studded with tiny whorls of distortion that warps the view of the Albany skyline. She wants to tell Jake that the view through the warped windowpane reminds her of Picasso’s Still Life with a Bottle of Rum because she knows he’d find that amusing. But she doesn’t and instead she leans over, one foot inside the tub, letting the old glass buckle the sightlines and magnify the colors of the afternoon. Her first thought, when she feels his hand at her waist, is Here it is. “Be careful,” he says, “these floors look rotten and that tub could fall through to the basement at any moment.” But his hand stays there even when she straightens and turns. She finds herself standing in the tub and Jake Alpert leaning forward to kiss her, blinking into the cubist light of the window. A strange moment to choose, she thinks, with the bathroom smelling faintly of iodine and bath salts. This is part of the inscrutability, she thinks, a man’s absolute blindness to timing.
The kiss itself is staid, almost platonic, but his hand rests on her hip and his thumb loops into the outer edge of her skirt pocket, pulling her forward.
She says, “I wondered when that would happen.” Then, a second later, “Or if.”
He backs away far enough to put her into focus. “Me too.”
On a whim, Ellie lowers herself down into the tub, her hands along the smooth edge. She lies back, fully clothed, the satin lining of her coat a shock of blue against the white enamel. She looks up at the stenciled tin ceiling, then out the window, and says, “You could do worse than getting old with a big tub at your disposal. When I was a kid, to escape the household, I used to read in the bathtub for hours. The year I turned eleven took place with me and the Brontë sisters half-submerged. The pages would get as wilted as my pruned fingers and toes. All the great scenes from literature are watery in my mind—and they play out to the underwater sound of my own heartbeat.”
“I’m not sure I should be picturing you naked in the tub as a prepubescent girl.”
“Agreed,” she says, not looking at him.
They hear footsteps on the rickety wooden stairwell and she extends her hand up to him so he can help her out. She straightens her clothes and they go back out into the bedroom where a middle-aged man and woman come through the door, their coats doubled over their arms, both of them smiling politely. The man says to Jake, “Find anything good?” and Jake says, “We’re still on the hunt.” They walk back out into the hallway and as they go down the stairs she can feel him behind her, his hand gently at her back. She thinks, Everything has changed.
* * *
The family-run hotel he’s booked is a big sunny Tudor-style house in a cul-de-sac. The check-in procedure is a mixture of mild interrogation and stilted small talk, the husband in his shirtsleeves and the wife in an apron. The woman keeps running her sparrow-boned hands down her front, dusting off patches of flour. She’s baked a pie from frozen cherries, she tells them, and this gets an approving nod from her offsider. Ellie thinks of how the world is governed by couples, how unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with. There’s only one room key on the counter and she stares at it as the wife discusses breakfast times and the inventory of board games in the den. The husband excuses himself to the raking of leaves and soon they’re climbing the stairs. When Jake opens the door to their room she sees there are two twin beds, each under an eave, and this poses a slight awkwardness. He seems not to notice. She looks over the room while he goes downstairs to bring up the suitcases from the car. The bathroom is swallowed up by lavender hand towels and doilies and ornate fixtures; there’s even an embroidered cover over the vulgarity of the spare toilet paper roll. She comes out of the bathroom when she hears Jake back in the room with the suitcases.
He says, “Let’s get unpacked and have a glass of wine. How about it?”
She watches as he lays his suitcase on one of the beds and unlatches the lid. Everything she suspects about the rich is contained in the silk-lined interior—an abundance of carefully organized spaces, a leisurely life organized into discreet compartments with tasseled zippers. A handmade shirt, trousers, socks folded around a pair of Italian loafers, a leather shaving bag. He produces a vintage bottle of red wine from the swaddle of a yellow cashmere sweater, but she’s still looking into the inner sanctum of his suitcase. Her suitcase faintly resembles the crumbling green Gloucester bag her mother keeps in the wardrobe with her wedding dress rolled in mothballs. He goes into the bathroom to fetch the two tumblers from the sink and proceeds to open the bottle with a corkscrew he’s brought along. She’s pretty sure it has its own dedicated pocket in the suitcase.
Ellie puts her suitcase onto the other bed but refuses to open it. He hands her a glass of wine and even this gesture, of drinking a ’47 burgundy out of water glasses, seems rehearsed, like he’s done it before. Maybe this is why the rich are so good at self-deprecation, she thinks, because it offsets the perfection of their clothes and houses and lives.
They sit in the easy chairs by the fireplace and sip their wine.
“Should I light a fire?” he asks.
“Not yet. Maybe we should take a walk before dinner.”
She drinks her wine too quickly and feels it flushing up into her earlobes.
He says, “I hope you don’t mind that we’re sharing a room. The rest of the house is fully booked.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I intend to pin a blanket in place as a partition.” She wonders if he’d planned to kiss her sooner, before this afternoon, to pave the way for this new intimacy.
“I can sleep in the bathtub if you like.”
“That would be appreciated.”
He looks down into his glass, smiling into a pause before another sip.
They try to talk about dinner plans and what a night in Albany might offer, but the conversation falters into long silences. She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that’s remotely graceful. He’ll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs. That problem doesn’t exist for painters. She knows they’ve been building toward this for months—a glittering trail of glances and innuendo—but now that it’s here she feels a stab of panic.
When he eventually stands, halfway through their second glass, there is no pretext or subterfuge. He’s driven from his chair in the middle of her scrambling sentence about Sunday country drives to the Blue Mountains. It’s ungainly, an unchecked impulse, and he almost knocks over his glass in the process. Then she’s craning her head up awkwardly as he kisses her from above, his winy breath in her mouth, his hand with the dead woman’s wedding band cradling her head. Nobody tells you how to kiss him back while convincing him through some unvoiced nuance or telepathy that he’s throwing your neck out of joint. She tries to stand, but he seems to be pinning her in place. Eventually, when the kiss peters out, he puts his hand down inside her blouse, straining against the buttons, and she can feel her heart drumming into his hot palm. Again, there’s something odd about the timing, something forced and off-kilter. To break the moment, she takes hold of his wrist and he goes slightly limp, straightens, and walks back to his easy chair and his wine.
These erotic sorties—if there are more of them coming—already seem exhausting. She’d prefer to just be done with it, to meet the change of season at the door. She drains half her second glass of wine and says, “You asked me that first night in my apartment whether I had much experience with men.”
He brings his gaze back from the window but says nothing.
She forces herself to look directly at him. “Well, the truth is, if you really want to know, I’ve never been with a man. Not properly, anyway.” She’s eleven again, her pruned hands trembling in the bathtub as Mr. Darcy dances with Elizabeth Bennet for the first time. “You’ll be the first.”
He looks into the tightly woven rug instead of her eyes, blinking and nodding soberly, like he’s just received news of a distant cousin’s death. “I had no idea,” he says, sitting up straight. “It makes sense, though. You’ve never been married, so…”
The earnestness kills her and she can feel the mortification like a wave of nausea. She has to sip her wine and let it rest against her tongue for a few seconds before she can talk. She’s looking at the darkening wallpaper behind his head when she says, “Most of the women I know lost their virginity before now. I’m late to—what’s the expression?”
“The races? The party?”
“One of those.”
A gash of darkness at the window. She wishes now they’d lit a fire. At least they would both have something to look at. An enduring silence guts the room. Eventually, she says, “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no, I’m glad you did. It means a lot to me.”
He seems to consider saying more, but his thoughts trail off and now he’s looking over at the blackened window and scratching the side of his neck.
She wants to scream.
Instead, she says, “I think I’m going to take a bath and freshen up before dinner.”
“Excellent idea,” he says. “I might take a walk around the neighborhood.” He gets up out of the chair, pushing himself with both hands. “Will you be ready in half an hour?”
They both know what he’s asking and she feels the question fall through her. Is it a look of resignation or tenderness on his face and why can’t she tell the difference?
Against all her impulses, she says, “I’ll be ready.”
He walks gingerly over to the bed, grabs his anorak, and heads for the door. From the lamplit hallway he turns to look at her one last time before closing the door.
Over at the bed she opens her battered suitcase and lays out the negligee and lace underwear she bought in Manhattan the day before. She’d carried them back to Brooklyn on the train, neatly folded in tissue paper in a thin white cardboard box, certain her fellow passengers knew what was inside. I’ve kept it as long as I care to, she’d wanted to tell them. She takes her satchel of toiletries into the bathroom and runs the water into the tub. It takes forever to warm up, but soon she’s soaping herself and rinsing off with a metal bowl the housewife downstairs, the woman of frozen cherries, keeps by the basin. She stands naked in front of the steamed mirror, finding her reflection with the watery wipe of her hand. She didn’t wet her hair so she brushes it out, cleaning the brush into the toilet bowl and remembering to flush. Wrapped in a towel, she walks out into the room and closes the curtains. She puts on the negligee and feels it cool against her skin. The lace underpants, on the other hand, are immediately uncomfortable, riding up in the back. She wishes now that she’d brought her paint-spattered bathrobe to cover up at the beginning of things. The truth is, every time she imagines sex it’s with a big window behind her lover, blurring out the lines of his body in an impressionistic starburst.
She peeks through the curtains to see a rind of purple and orange against the western sky. She straightens the beds and pours the remaining wine into her glass. Now she tests out a number of positions for his entrance—sitting on the edge of his bed, reclining in the easy chair, standing over by the window. The wine has blotted out her initial humiliation, but she can’t imagine feeling actual desire. All of the positions seem rigid and pretentious. She sits back in the chair with her wine and wishes she hadn’t noticed that her toenails need trimming, or that the hairs on her arms have darkened now that summer is gone. On hot sunny days, she sits out on the fire escape with lemon juice rubbed into her arms and scalp, bleaching herself. She drinks down the wine and waits. The darkness outside has bloated against the windowpane and she can see herself framed and looking back into the room. This slightly baffled doppelgänger is always following her. She realizes he’s been gone at least an hour. The thought of dressing again to go find him, of putting her coat over her negligee, demoralizes her beyond belief. Hasn’t she already offered herself up like a bag of peaches at the tail end of the season? No, she’ll wait, she’ll wait, until he walks through the door.
When he comes into the room thirty minutes later, he brings the scent of the night with him, a smell of wood smoke and damp leaves. He makes no apology and instead walks over to her in silence and takes her hands. She stands, and it’s immediately clear that he will take control, that he’s worked out some strategy for her deflowering while walking under the first evening stars. He kisses her forehead, then her mouth, then gently slides the straps of her negligee over her bony shoulders. It drops at her feet with a soft ripple. He kisses her collarbone and then her breasts, gently, one then the other. She closes her eyes while he trails his lips down her stomach and removes her underwear, the lace scratching against her thighs. She wants to undress him, but she doesn’t, because she’s not sure if she’s supposed to. Taking her by the hand, he leads her over to the bed and settles her on the edge, tenderly, while he peels back the lavender bedspread and reveals the shock of white sheets. His hands on her shoulders as he leans her back, her body flat and exposed. There’s an instinct to curl up and face away but she doesn’t, she keeps her legs relaxed while he undresses beside the narrow bed. It’s a child’s bed, she thinks, in a dormer room with windows, perfect for a daydreamer or a girl with hobbies. She brings herself back, trying to keep everything relaxed and visible. She’s conscious of her knees and her cold feet. Her mother’s feet, a little big and flat. He leans over her, naked, his mouth on hers, one hand pressing into her. After a minute or so, she reaches up to take hold of him because frankly she needs a job to do, something besides this waiting, half in terror and half in love, her heart like a swollen hand balled in her chest and her throat like burning metal. But he brushes her hand away gently, his other hand tight between her thighs. When he finally lies down on top of her she feels his weight and then everything seems to happen at once. He says nothing the whole time and she wishes there could be a moment of levity, some acknowledgment of the strangeness of him on top of her, her legs splayed like a frog’s, her wrists pinned to the bedsheet, but there’s no joke or kind word of encouragement. She had hoped, or imagined, that they would still be themselves during sex, and perhaps that will happen, but for now he’s a stranger, a sinner in church with a look of grim devotion on his face.
When she wakes some hours later, the room has been swallowed by nightfall and Jake is gone. By the clock on the nightstand it’s still relatively early, before nine, but it feels like the middle of the night. They never ate dinner, she realizes. She has the sensation of coming to in a strange house, unmoored, finding herself inexplicably—at least for a few seconds—naked and lying in a twin bed. When the recent past flares up again she rubs her forehead where a hangover has already taken root. She gets up and turns on a lamp. Her outfit from earlier is draped across a chair and she notices how comforting the rough twill of the skirt is against her thighs, how reassuring she finds the tension in her bra straps. She wraps herself in her coat and goes out into the hallway and down the creaking wooden stairs, trying to favor the strip of carpet in the center. A din of pots and pans comes from the back of the house. She looks in the living room and the den, half expecting to find Jake Alpert reading the newspaper or playing checkers with a fellow hotel guest. But there’s nobody to be found. She drifts back toward the kitchen and sees the aproned wife drying some dishes with a hand towel. The woman turns and seems startled to see Ellie in the doorway.
“I’m just doing the last of the dishes. Your husband said you were feeling unwell.”
Ellie can feel herself blinking in confusion.
“Have you seen him?” she says.
“Your husband?”
Ellie stares at her, nodding.
“No, but I did hear that exotic car of his popping and rumbling in the driveway. He went out quite a while ago. Seemed to be in a hurry.”
“Thank you,” Ellie says.
She moves through the rooms of the house, the tartan furniture marooned in lamplight.
Back in the room she turns on the overhead light and it makes the gritty feeling behind her eyes flare up. He must have left hours ago, she thinks, and her mind ticks over with possibilities and speculations, the drugstore run or the engine trouble out on a country road. But why didn’t he wake her or leave a note? She’s a light sleeper, so he must have dressed silently or in the bathroom, not turning on a single light. She slumps down on the unmade bed and stares at his suitcase on the other bed before she moves toward it and unzips the lid. She begins to go through his things, thinking at first that she’ll put his clothes in the dresser. Do you put things in the dresser for an overnight trip? She has no idea what the proper etiquette is, so she just arranges everything neatly out on the bed. The leather shaving bag is kidskin, so soft and smooth it feels like an organ being removed from a warm body when she takes it from under the cashmere sweater. With everything laid out she runs her hands through each compartment and sets a few pennies and a stray button onto his pillow. Inside the cashmere sweater is a label hand-sewn into the collar. At first she thinks it must be the name of a European menswear store in Manhattan—Martijn de Groot—because there’s also a 212 phone number printed on it. But then she finds the initials MdG monogrammed onto a pajama shirtfront and realizes that Martijn de Groot must be a person, not an uptown menswear store. She stares at the name and number for a long time, deciphering each letter and digit.
She walks back downstairs with the number written on a piece of paper and asks the housewife if she can make a long-distance call to Manhattan. The woman says she’ll have to time it and can only guess at the charge, but she shows her into the office where a big black phone sits on the desk. Ellie picks up the receiver and asks the operator to connect her. After a few rings an older woman with a Southern accent answers—“De Groot residence.”
Absurdly, Ellie says, “I’m looking for Jake Alpert.”
The sound of a dog barking in the background, then: “You must have the wrong number, miss.”
“I’m terribly sorry. Who lives here? I may have written down the wrong number.”
“This is Marty and Rachel de Groot. Good night.”
The line goes dead, the receiver still in her hand.
* * *
She barely sleeps, waking every few hours to stare at the ceiling. She feels numb, hollowed-out. She sleeps in her clothes on top of the bedspread beside the emptied suitcase, her coat still on. All of his things have been thrown onto the floor, but she can’t remember doing it. In the morning, she carefully packs up both suitcases and trundles them downstairs. She pays for the room and the phone call in cash and asks the wife if she would mind driving her to the train station. The woman is consoling and discreet, has her husband bring around the station wagon but insists on driving on such a delicate occasion. Her manner suggests that either Ellie’s husband has run off or he’s shown up in a morgue overnight. Ellie wants to tell her He’s not my husband. Outside, it’s pouring, and the woman drives to the train station ten miles under the speed limit, confiding her own marital burdens. “Sometimes he goes a week without speaking to me, a blue streak or whatever, but then he comes around. In the beginning you don’t know everything and then, by the middle, you know too much.” She hugs Ellie on the platform, tipping a porter to make sure both bags get safely on the train. In Ellie she has seen her own narrow escapes from marital oblivion. She waves goodbye, one hand clutched at her stomach with a crumpled tissue.
Ellie rides next to a window, stunned by the veracity of the moving landscape. Other people’s lives flicker by—headlights through the drizzle, a tractor swaying out in a sodden field, a couple wordlessly sharing a sandwich on a covered station bench. The same five white farmhouses scroll by. Every time she woke up in the night her fists were clenched, but now she feels weak with bafflement and hunger. She hasn’t eaten since lunchtime the day before—that scene in the rocking chairs by the stream is already receding, the lines soft as a Vermeer. The landscape floats by in her peripheral vision. Had it not been for the name tag and monogram she might have spent half the night calling every hospital and police station within fifty miles. She rubs the situation over in her mind, looking at it from different angles. She hadn’t yet fallen completely in love with him, but she was hoping to be dragged along in its wake. She sees herself standing behind a high window, overlooking a yew maze and trying to solve its inner passages. The whole thing has been put together with too much artfulness and care to simply be a married man cheating on his wife. It’s a thing she feels outside of, a shapeless configuration of larger forces and events.
* * *
At Grand Central, as she’s leaving the express train, she makes the conscious decision to leave both suitcases behind, and it gives her an odd sense of relief as she walks, unencumbered, under the enormous zodiac of the vaulted ceiling and makes her way to the subway. The lace underwear, the monogrammed pajama shirt, the tasseled zippers, all of it headed back upstate or into the storage catacombs below Grand Central. She arrives back in Brooklyn around lunchtime and has no recollection of the painting until she sees it leaning by the front door. Her future has arrived, wrapped in brown paper. Nothing has come together yet, but there’s a sidling premonition so that she approaches the painting warily. Placing the painting facedown on the Formica table, she untapes the corners so that it’s the back of her forgery that she sees first—the worn relining, the stained wood supports, the ghosting of insect frass that suggests an attic somewhere in the painting’s history. She can feel her pulse in her eyelids, feels it buzzing in her thumbs. She gently turns the picture over and studies her work, sickened but also relieved to have the copy back in her possession, to have solved the mandala that’s held her transfixed for eighteen hours. Slowly, she walks back into the bedroom and pulls the original from her closet and its case and brings it into the living room. Side by side, from a few feet away, they are absolutely painted by the same hand. But as you step closer the roughened passages are different and the yellows in the copy are not as vital. She thinks about Martijn de Groot’s careful restraint, the way he lured her one step at a time—the auction, the jazz, all that wine—and she can’t help admiring his cunning. Was this a jaunt of the well-heeled, to track down the forger and handle the entrails of her life? Was it her virginity that finally made him feel like enough had been stolen in return? She had left the door wide open for him to plunder her life and he did it flawlessly. When would she receive the call from an investigator or detective asking for information about the original?
She sits there for an hour or so, studying the two paintings before wrapping the original in the fake’s brown paper. She calls Gabriel at the gallery. “I seem to have both paintings in my apartment.”
“What exactly are you talking about, dear?”
“The de Vos. The copy and the original.”
“How is that possible?”
“When you get here, the original is the one wrapped in brown paper.”
“Stay there. I’ll be right over.”
But she doesn’t stay there. She walks through the apartment, from room to room, taking a mental inventory of everything she’s going to leave behind. It shocks her to see how she’s been living. The blooming damp above her bed, the sprawl of dirty clothes, the towers of books that are slowly being mutilated by mold. It’s not self-loathing, exactly, because she hates this version of Ellie Shipley’s life with as much vigor as if it belonged to a separate person who’s wronged her. Whatever destruction she’s summoned from outside, she’s sure it will track her down. But for a month, or six, she will quietly go about the business of resurrection, of reclaiming the reasons she came here in the first place. She takes her passport and her bank account passbook from her dresser, puts a small photo album in her handbag, grabs her thesis manuscript, and packs the Remington into its travel case. A last look from the door at the two paintings, one concealed and one open-faced, before leaving the door unlocked and the key under the mat. She will write a letter to her landlord and a letter to her dissertation committee. In three months, she will come back to defend her dissertation about Dutch women painters of the seventeenth century. The only remaining question is where she will go in the meantime. The taxi waits while she goes into her bank branch and withdraws as much money as they will allow, an even ten thousand dollars. She doesn’t want to put the cash in an envelope so she sinks it to the bottom of her bag. And it’s not until she’s at the airport that things fall into place. She pictures a loft apartment overlooking the Prinsengracht, or a room in a house near the Kalverstraat, in the neighborhood where Sara de Vos lived and possibly died.
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.