Marty de Groot in a rented tuxedo. Earlier in the day he bought a pair of black dress shoes on Pitt Street and now they pinch and rub as he nears the gallery. He’s worked up two blistered heels by walking the mile from the hotel, passing under the figs and palms of Hyde Park with his chilled hands in his pockets. He thinks of his father and his old dead boss, Clay Thomas, of inveterate walkers who footslog through the night air in dinner jackets and cuff links. He never set out to become one of them, but here he is, a rambler in formal wear. The museum director offered to send a car for him, but he refused for reasons that elude him. Was it because Max Culkins took his coffee weak and milky and hadn’t personally shown him around the gallery? He’s been known to slight a man for less.
At night, the gallery is floodlit and austere, a Greek temple hovering through the trees. The colonnaded pavilions and sandstone columns could belong to a courthouse, Marty thinks, if it weren’t for the bright, vertical banners. They billow and flutter in the cold breeze, rivers of silk above the entrance. Women of the Dutch Golden Age. The lettering is so big that Marty can read it without his bifocals, which he forgot anyway back in the hotel room. He managed to source a new battery for his hearing aid, but he’s had to turn the volume down to soften the brash auditory impulses of everything around him. He takes the broad stone stairs slowly, trying not to aggravate his feet. Surviving his eighties is predicated on a thousand contingencies—so why are there no Band-Aids in his trouser pockets? Old age is having the name of a chiropractor in your wallet. It’s cutting out coupons for the zeal of discounted, small commerce and the practice of fine motor skills. It’s talking unabashedly to the nightly news. His hearing aid warbles just below actual hearing. The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone’s moving furniture underwater.
The exhibition is in one of the smaller galleries off the main vestibule, but the reception lines the long entrance court, people mingling under the blackened skylights. Despite its billing before the Olympics, the turnout is good. And the fact that there are no Dutch heavyweights—no Vermeers or Rembrandts or Halses—has brought out a serious, scholarly crowd. No frivolous socialites here, just the true-blooded art patriots and critics. There’s an artsy, masculine style that Marty recognizes from decades of attending openings: longish gray hair raked below woolen berets and Greek fisherman’s caps, horn-rim glasses, hand-tied bow ties the color of tropical fish, collarless shirts with Nehru jackets, goatees and Van Dyke beards. The women wear batik shawls and indigenous-looking earrings, dark dresses with slashes of color. He realizes he’s misread the formality of the evening, because he’s the only one in a tuxedo, a rental at that, dressed like a sound engineer at the Academy Awards. He’d expected at least a few black-tie types, but the men are all bohemian dandies. Even Max Culkins is wearing a vest and a cashmere scarf.
He heads for the table filled with flutes of champagne and takes a canapé from a passing waiter. Hors d’oeuvres at openings are always highly salted, he thinks, to encourage drinking and the slackening of aesthetic standards. A string quintet plays some Bach or Vivaldi (he can’t decipher which) on a low stage. He scans the crowd for Ellie. It’s been two days since he sat in the back of the auditorium, admonished one of her students, and then fled before the end of her lecture. Not so much out of cowardice, he thinks, but as a reprieve from the inevitable. By now, she must have heard from the gallery director that Marty de Groot had shambled into his office, straight from the airport, with a seventeenth-century masterpiece wrapped in billiard cloth. Baize was the word he was trying to remember earlier—it drops into the mind slot with a satisfying clink. At least now she’ll be braced for the encounter. If he had any compassion at all he’d get on a plane instead of hobbling around the exhibition with bleeding heels and a forty-year-old apology.
He finishes his champagne and heads toward the exhibition gallery. Because he doesn’t have his bifocals and his hearing aid is dialed down, he moves cautiously, his champagne flute held out like the prow of a ship, parting the waves of bookish dandies and lesbian artists in velvet waistcoats. He infers from one of the museum staffers that no food or drinks are allowed in the exhibition space, so he drains his champagne and hands the glass to a nonplussed museum guard. Inside, he treads gently across the parquet floor to begin a slow perimeter check in one corner, starting with Judith Leyster. The Leysters hang against the starkness of the white wall, stippled into soft focus. He has to lean in close to make out the composition and then it’s too grainy and pixelated, a topographic map flaked with lead white. He’s tempted to go ask one of the other two octogenarians he spotted if he can borrow their tortoiseshell reading glasses. He recognizes Leyster’s The Proposition—the fur-hatted scoundrel leering over the sewing woman, his hand cupped with money. But in The Last Drop, as the half-shadowed drunkard throws back his flagon, Marty fails to make out the skeleton that’s been summoned back to life. For a full minute he thinks the skull in the skeleton’s bony hand is a loaf of bread being proffered by a maid.
He moves on to the Van Oosterwycks, the vanitas and portraits and floral still lifes, but they’re little more than gashes and rhomboids of color. Dispirited by his eyesight, he retreats for the entrance court and the champagne table. He picks up another flute and looks out into the whorl of mingling. He feels flattened out, burrowed inside himself. Somehow he’s daydreaming about all the dogs he’s owned in his lifetime, naming the lineage of terriers to himself as he faces down the repeating archways, when the formalities start up. He feels the air pressure change in the room behind him and he turns to see Max Culkins and Ellie up on the little stage, the quintet carrying their instruments off into the attentive crowd. A round of applause, then Max’s speech stripped of meaning and studded with moments of pantomime—some chuffed remarks, tepid laughter, then all eyes on Marty de Groot hiding in the back. He suspects he’s been thanked for trundling the painting all this way. He raises his champagne flute modestly and arranges a kindly smile. What passes between him and Ellie, who’s now at the microphone in a mauve dress, cannot be called eye contact. He can see her pale face framed beneath her gray hair and a posture that suggests she might be making glances in his direction, but he can’t make out her exact features or expression. He catches a few words from her speech, art is our most universal something-or-other. He looks into his champagne flute and finally turns up his hearing aid.
* * *
Ellie sees him at the back of the room—the only man in a tuxedo—and knows instantly that he’s not here to plunder her life. As she talks about art as the great window into culture, she brings her eyes again and again to his slumped shoulders. In her dreams, she’d conjured the melodrama of him unmasking her in public, but now she sees a man ravaged by age, shrunken and sallow-cheeked, still dapper but a little wobbly on his feet. This is the man who held her life and affections in his palm all those years ago? She’s never seen anyone after a four-decade hiatus before and the effect is startling. The husk of the younger man is still there, in the aristocratic nose and jawline and the elegant hands, but his balding scalp has the consistency of blotting paper and his skin is the color of weak tea. It’s the chromatic certainty of death. She’s surprised to feel a burst of pity. She’d always imagined him suspended in recollected time—an energetic adversary, the virile blue blood in driving moccasins, his cashmered arm out the window of the speeding Citroën. Wasn’t the promise of immense wealth a cryogenic cloister in which to grow old? Couldn’t decades of eating the best foods, taking the best vacations, and sleeping in the finest beds prevent the slumping of the frame and the spackling of the skin? All these years, she has kept him in his forties. It opens out before her during her speech, a backdrop to her words about the role of seventeenth-century women in Dutch society. Sara de Vos was somehow able to cut against the grain, to find her way into outdoor scenes because of her unique circumstances. With the new funeral painting, there is also strong evidence to suggest that she continued to grow and strengthen in her art. She says all this while realizing that even the old Brooklyn apartment has remained hers, preserved exactly as she left it in the autumn of 1958. The windows flung open, the mason jars brimming with solvents, the ceiling mold fluorescing at night, the expressway traffic streaming behind the curtains. Her museum of squalor and anonymity. She went back to New York numerous times for work but never once went to see the old neighborhood. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was the graveyard where she’d buried her twenties.
When her speech is over she steps down from the stage and decides to be the one to approach first. That weekend with him in upstate New York has never stopped replaying and unraveling in her mind—the tartan furniture of the quaint hotel, the narrow twin bed where he took her virginity under false pretenses. She had offered it up because she was tired of carrying her virginity around like a penance and Jake Alpert seemed like a safe bet, a widower reentering the fray of the living. She’d imagined courteous and patient lovemaking, an attentive older man, and instead she got a grim, silent impostor. She never got over the feeling of violation, but now something shifts in her as she comes toward him. When he looks at her she sees that it’s regret, not vengeance, that’s brought him halfway around the world. It’s a look of bruised self-loathing as his eyes lower then come up gently from her feet. His face changes and she sees something entirely familiar—that odd mixture of tenderness and playful attention from half a century ago. He smiles and gives a slight shrug.
Max Culkins is suddenly at her side. He makes introductions when they’re standing just a few feet away from Marty and the champagne table.
“Eleanor, I’d like you to meet our gracious benefactor of the beautiful de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood. Marty de Groot, this is Eleanor Shipley, the curator of the exhibition.”
Marty is pretty sure he’s bleeding through his socks. He wants to have a Scotch and lie in a warm bath. Even without his glasses, having her this close makes it hard to breathe. He says, “So I hear. I managed to turn up my hearing aid during Ellie’s speech. May I call you Ellie?”
“Of course,” Ellie says.
Max fetches three glasses of champagne. They stand through an awkward silence as the crowd mills toward the gallery.
Max makes a toast. “To Dutch women of the seventeenth century.”
“Hear, hear,” Marty says.
They clink their glasses and drink.
Max says, “Mr. de Groot here has quite a collection of Flemish and Dutch masters. Ellie, your assignment for the evening is to convince him to leave us a few things that the Met doesn’t want.”
“I’d rather not ask for crumbs from the table,” Ellie says. “I’d rather convince him to give us something the Met wants very badly.”
Marty idles a finger on a button of his tuxedo jacket. His fingernails are still manicured and white. “The Met is slowly poisoning me and they send spies to check on my ailing health. Do you think you’re up for that kind of curatorial espionage?”
“We’ll do our best,” Max says, a little uneasily. Somebody catches his eye in the crowd. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I must head into the gallery and make the rounds with the donors and journalists. Marty, I’ll leave you in Ellie’s capable hands.”
Ellie and Marty watch him disappear on the other side of the stone vestibule.
Ten seconds of silence. The sound of dress shoes on parquet flooring.
He folds his arms, the champagne flute jutting from one elbow, exposing the gold lion heads of his cuff links. She notices that he still wears the same cologne—an alpine and citrus telegram that arrives from 1958. He rocks gently onto the balls of his feet, about to launch into something, then he drops back and stares mutely out into the commotion. She takes a step back, turns her shoulders toward the champagne table.
In a low, steady voice, he says, “For what it’s worth, I didn’t come here to ruin your life. You should know that at the outset.”
She says nothing.
He blows some air between his lips, as if he might whistle into the gaping silence.
She says, “How do you know you didn’t ruin my life forty years ago?”
“From what I can see, you never looked back.”
“I looked back, believe me,” she says.
“That makes two of us.”
She surveys the entrance court, the art groupies and laggards who are more interested in the free food and bubbles than a roomful of masterworks by baroque Dutch women.
Then she turns back to him: “Did you come all this way just to reminisce about old times?” Her voice takes on an edge she doesn’t like, so she dampens it with a sip of champagne.
“Is there somewhere we could talk privately? Also, I’m in desperate need of some aspirin and some Band-Aids.”
Ah, the sense of easy entitlement, as if she’s got pills and Band-Aids in her purse. It sets something off in her and she stops trying to temper her speech. Louder than she intends it to be, she says, “How is it even possible you’re still alive?”
Instead of flinching he leans in, enjoying his own response. This is the other Marty de Groot, the guy with a thousand quips and rejoinders in his pockets like tiny scraps of colored paper. “Wheat germ and beta-blockers for the most part,” he says. “A miracle combination. If FDR hadn’t been so run-down with hypertension, Stalin might not have taken Eastern Europe at Yalta. Do you ever think about that?”
She finds this infuriating. “No, I’ve never thought of that. Not a single time.”
Quietly, he says, “They say regret eats you alive,” then he looks down at his hands. “But, actually, it keeps you alive. It gives you something to push against. That’s why I’m here. To apologize. I wronged you and I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. I kept waiting for a sign, for a way to cross paths again. Then I got the call from the museum…”
He’s still looking down at his hands, as if the past is pouring through his fingertips. His eyes are still sad and dark, she thinks, when they’re not in the service of banter. She remembers the eddies of reflection, the quiet beneath all that brash worldliness. He says, “Also, I thought you’d like to see the painting again after so many years. You know it better than I ever did.”
It occurs to her that he still doesn’t know that the fake has surfaced. How could he unless Max has divulged the museum’s embarrassing situation? After much lobbying and letting Max drone on about his potential legacy and his retirement, Ellie was able to convince Max to let her be the one to return the forgery to Leiden. The painting is now in the basement storage closet, waiting to be packaged in the morning. She’d lied and said she needed to do some quick research in the Netherlands anyway. But she’d assumed Max would quietly let Marty de Groot know of the museum’s pickle with the Leiden shipment. That was just the word he’d use, she was sure of it. But from the relief on Marty’s face, he’s oblivious to the fact that the loaned painting and its double have brought her life and career to a crossroads.
He says, “Would you give me the chance to explain myself? Can we go somewhere?” He pulls up his trouser leg and shows her the dark stain on his sock. “I’ve lost a gallon of blood from these Italian shoes. They’re made of fucking wood, as far as I can tell.”
“Aren’t you too old to be swearing like that?”
He waves a dismissive hand, still looking at his feet.
She says, “It looks painful. Follow me.”
She leads him to an elevator and they go down to the loading docks and the packing area. She knows Q has an industrial first-aid kit in his office. The fluorescent lights blink on and Marty sits down gently in the swivel chair. She refuses to tend his wounds, such as they are, so she hands him a few Band-Aids and some Panadol and watches him with folded arms. He lifts one leg and gingerly takes off his shoe and sock with a sigh. His bloodied heel looks as if it’s been grated and she can’t help wincing. He says, “I can’t get the Band-Aid to stick.” It’s the voice of a child, she thinks, plaintive and willful.
She ducks out of the office and fetches a few paper towels from the packers’ break kitchen. When she comes back she hands them to him and digs through the first-aid kit for some antibiotic gel. After a few minutes of watching him blot his heel she eventually gives in and squats down in front of him. He doesn’t smell old at close range, that’s the funny thing. He smells like a walk in the woods, like breath mints and cologne and vintage luggage. It baffles her. “Let me do it,” she says impatiently.
She dabs the heel and holds it there before applying a thin film of clear gel that tints red as she rubs it gently around. Away from the heel, the skin of his foot is pale and somehow untouched by eight decades of walking the planet. There are no calluses, no unsightly toenails. She’s always assumed ruined feet and orthopedic footwear were inevitable in old age. Perhaps this is what a cocooned life might yield—ageless feet. Annoyed, she goes back to the first-aid kit and opens a packet of cotton gauze. Placing the gauze over his heel, she unpeels a Band-Aid and presses it down.
She tells him to take off the other sock and shoe. “I have to admit,” she says, “I don’t mind the sight of your blood.”
He brightens—she can feel it in his body even though she doesn’t look at him. She repeats the brisk triage on his other foot.
Looking down at his bandaged foot, he says, “I never forgave myself for what I did to you. I’m so very sorry for it.”
Something about the candid, fluorescent light of Q’s office allows this to reach her. Her face is suddenly hot and she doesn’t know where to look.
He says, “For what it’s worth, I really was in love with you, Eleanor.”
She looks at him squarely over his kneecap, determined to keep her voice under control. “It was unbelievably cruel. I thought I was going to marry Jake Alpert and have a weekend house in Connecticut.”
He looks away and the room goes quiet.
Eventually, he says, “I’m not going to justify anything I did, that’s the first thing. But you might want to know—”
“Know what?” she says.
“The context.”
“An odd word choice.”
“Agreed.” But he decides to continue. “Rachel and I were reeling from two miscarriages and my career as a lawyer was lunging toward its mediocre highpoint. Patents were a trifling puzzle to me, they meant nothing. Inheriting money ruined me as a lawyer, maybe as a person. Thank God I never stepped into a courtroom. I was bored and unhappy, looking for something to get me out of bed in the mornings. When the painting went missing it gave my life a ruthless kind of focus. I manufactured quite a display of indignation, talked about it until I bored everyone senseless, hired a private detective, and we tracked you down in your apartment.”
Swallowing, Ellie says, “Oh, God, that apartment…”
“I thought I would just bait the trap and then hand you and that Brit dealer over to the police. Then something odd happened.” He places one hand on the back of a bandaged heel, his lips thinning.
Ellie takes in the wall of hanging clipboards and the industrial-green filing cabinets. There’s a chance, she thinks, that he might cry, and she wants to avoid that spectacle for both their sakes. But when he continues his voice is suddenly animated.
He says, “Not only did I fall in love with this odd little Australian art expert who was way too young for me, with the way she talked about paintings as if they were extensions of her own flesh and mind, but also I liked myself around her more than I could remember. She buoyed me up. So, I courted her—and my new, better self—as if my life depended on it. None of that was fake…”
He says all this to the side of her face as she studies the walls.
Then he says: “But then the deceit set in, of course, eventually burrowed in like a cancer. I’d never had affairs but I always felt like I was one phone call away from crossing over. So we dated, and I plotted because I was arrogant and stubborn. It was such a wild, audacious plan. And who the fuck were these people anyway stealing paintings off my wall? So I brought your forgery over that weekend we went upstate, knowing it would be there when you got back. That was supposed to be the unveiling. And then there we were in that sad little hotel upstate and you offered yourself up to me. And it was more than I could take. But I went ahead and took it anyway … and it’s dogged me ever since.”
It’s oddly comforting to her that he’s carried this burden with her name attached to it. She’d imagined herself to be the only one trapped like a speck in the amber of the 1950s. But then something else is pushing down on her and she turns her back to him, walking around the room. She looks up at a wall of graphed coefficients. Beneath the remorse and the sense of betrayal she suddenly feels a cavernous and familiar sense of shame. It is so familiar that she wonders if, in fact, it has ever not been swirling there at the pit of her stomach. She understands that she continued to paint the forgery for years in her mind, that she was forever tending the canvas because it was the last time she’d painted anything at all. She would summon it at her desk or on drives to the country with Sebastian—it would glimmer into view through the unsettled light of a dream—and it never failed to hold her attention. The shame was not merely in copying it but in the fact that it was the closest she’d ever come to creating something lasting. The forgery didn’t stop after she’d handed off the canvas, it continued into the unfolding of years—the plush academic job, the marriage to an art dealer, the publications and curating of exhibits, none of these spoils would have been offered if anyone knew what she’d done. She’d walk into London galleries and antique stores convinced she’d run into Gabriel with his battered attaché case and that everything would come undone, in an instant. She understands it now in Q’s bright, meticulous office. She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.
Marty says, “That was a dark period in my life.”
“You stayed married? Did your wife ever find out the whole truth?”
“It took years of therapy—a grim Freudian with Danish leather furniture—but we came back from the brink. I never took her forgiveness for granted, but neither did that look of betrayal ever go away when she looked at me. I became faithful, if you can believe that. It was like I’d had a near-death experience. The death of the soul, if that doesn’t sound like too much.”
“It sounds a little much,” she says. Then she softens, comes back to his side. “For what it’s worth, there’s nothing I’ve regretted more in my life than painting the de Vos. I never stopped looking over my shoulder, waiting for that ramshackle life to hunt me down.”
The air shifts between them. The silence, when it re-gathers, is unhurried.
He says, “Well, excellent, we have regret in common. I tried to make amends. The whole point of the reward and the newspaper ad was an apology. That money was meant for you. I imagined you making a fresh start to…” His voice trails off. Then, he says, “What happened to you after you left?”
“After the copy—” She begins again. “After the forgery, I went to England, where I was the most law-abiding citizen in the world. I admonished my ex-husband for taking bogus deductions on his taxes and never drove above the speed limit. I acted like a goddamn saint. It’s laughable, really.”
“So you married.”
She nods.
He smiles weakly. “Children?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t cut out for that.” She looks over at Q’s desk, at the cups of sharpened pencils and the goldenrod shipping forms. Something occurs to her. “Why were you heckling from the back of my lecture hall the other day?”
He grins. “That punk in the wool cap had it coming.”
“He’s all right. Just naive.”
“You spoke about the Vermeers like old lovers.”
“They are, in a way.”
The conversation falters again.
The thread is lost, he thinks. What else is there to say? You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again. The world is full of noise again. He can hear the mechanical gears of the industrial clock on the wall. He has always liked plain, white-faced clocks with red needlelike second hands.
She says, “I want to show you something. Can you walk?”
“I’m not putting those shoes back on.”
“Well, you’ll have to come barefoot.”
She stands and grabs Q’s key chain from a hook on the wall. Q and Max are the only ones beside security with keys to every room of the museum. She leads him to a set of storerooms. He hobbles behind her, swearing under his breath.
“Did you know that almost every museum has a room full of fakes?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“They come in over the years. Bequeathed or sold to the institution. Every year the technology gets better and most museums keep finding fakes in their own collections. They’ve had them hanging for years a lot of the time. Of course, they feel compelled to take them down and keep things under wraps.”
She jiggles the storeroom door handle and tries a different key. She can hear Marty breathing beside her. The lock gives and she pushes open the steel door. Inside, it smells of aluminum and plastic sheeting.
She says, “They don’t want the fakes drifting into the open market and burning them seems a little draconian.”
She turns on the lights and the cluttered room sputters to life. The copy of At the Edge of a Wood has been propped up on a shelf, facing out. It’s surrounded by other paintings, some of them wrapped, some naked. A masterful Manet, a Julian Ashton, a Cézanne, a Picasso, a Brett Whiteley.
Marty blinks and says, “I left my eyeglasses back at the hotel. I can barely see my own hand. What am I looking at?”
“My beautiful lie, Marty. It showed up just before you kindly brought us the original.”
He cocks his head, as if listening to a voice from another room. He didn’t know his exact intentions when he decided to loan the painting, but this eventuality now seems hardwired into the fabric of possibility. His act of repentance was also, it seems, an act of malice. He remembers that day in 1959 when he met the British dealer at an uptown restaurant. The shabby little man had the original but not the fake with him; he said they’d destroyed the copy after the advertisement had appeared in the newspaper. He made a show of a manila envelope full of ashes and strips of canvas. Marty had asked about Ellie and he’d said that she’d gone back to Australia. It wasn’t Marty’s concern what happened to the fake, after all. The reward had been intended for Ellie—a sum of atonement, a payout against his own guilt—but now that this man was staring at him with bread crumbs on his lapels there was no backing out of the arrangement. He might have run out of the restaurant and thrown the painting into the East River. So Marty took the painting into the men’s room, unwrapped it, and studied it. The antique copper nails he remembered were gouged into the flesh of the frame. But what if that too had been manufactured in the interim and this was still a fake? He doubted his instincts even as he came back and put the cashier’s check on the table with the bitterly ironic word reward printed on the memo line. The foolish Brit said he would have preferred cash, to which Marty said, “I don’t pay thieving cunts in cash.” The whole episode was over before Marty’s rare steak arrived. He remembers eating alone because he sure as hell wasn’t going to share a meal with this weasel. Of course the fake was kept and resold. Of course the past was still alive and throbbing in the veins of the present.
* * *
They spend an hour talking in the closed museum restaurant, looking down through the big windows at the Woolloomooloo docks. From the darkened waters of the harbor, buoys flash blue and green, tossing shards of light back and forth from Bradleys Head to Garden Island. Ellie knows all the names and the ferry routes; her childhood is written into the crags and coves and bays. She tells him he should make it over to the zoo before he leaves and see some of the old houses in Mosman. She brings him up to speed on the other de Vos painting, the child’s funeral procession, because he confesses the gallery was a blur of colors loosed from their frames. She tells him she’s leaving for the Netherlands in the morning to return the fake. He asks her lots of questions: the name of the private museum in Leiden, what the funeral painting depicts in detail. She says, “When I’m over there I’m going to do some digging. I want to find out what really happened to her.”
Marty says, “Will you write to me and tell me what you find out?”
“I’d be happy to.”
“And not by e-mail. An actual letter.”
“On paper.”
They look out at the darkened parkland that leads down to the harbor.
She says, “You were the first man I fell in love with.”
He catches his breath and says, “I can’t imagine.”
“You knew exactly how to reel me in.”
“Because I was smitten myself. I’d stare at your exquisite forgery in my study at night and plan our next encounter. I think I fell for you the first time we met at the auction house, the way you talked about the paintings. I bought those four copper paintings just to impress you. Cost me a fortune. I don’t think I even knew what I was bidding on.”
“Do you still have them?”
“Of course.”
She smiles at this, staring at his reflection in the wall of glass.
From the entrance court, they can hear the sound of chairs being folded up, of the event winding down.
He says, “I’m suddenly very tired. I think it’s time this old man got to bed. I’ll be up in a few hours with jet lag.”
They discuss possibilities for getting Marty back to his hotel with his bare feet and blistered heels. He refuses to put his shoes back on.
“Which hotel?” Ellie asks.
“I’m drawing a blank, but it’s nearby. Somewhere I have my room key with the name on it.”
She says, “I have an idea. Stay here and I’ll be back.”
She returns after a few minutes with a wheelchair from the guest services and coat check area. “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride back to the hotel.”
He looks mortified. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you push me through the night in that thing. I have exactly twenty percent of my dignity left and that ride would cost me a good deal more than that.”
She laughs and flourishes a hand down the chrome sides of the chair, as if it’s a prize on a game show. Now he’s the one laughing.
“I’ll go barefoot,” he says.
“We do have taxis in this country.”
“Walk me back,” he says.
They put his shoes in a brown paper bag from the restaurant and leave the wheelchair beside the counter. Back out toward the entrance court, the gathering has petered out; only the diehards and the drunks are still at it. The catering company is ferrying small plates and champagne flutes into plastic bus tubs. Something flashes through Marty’s mind and he gently touches Ellie’s elbow as he pads along in bare feet. It’s the hand pressure one reserves for dancing. “How did they get the goddamn painting out of my house in the first place? And who took those pictures? Your accomplice never did tell me that.”
His hand is still on her elbow, now on the pretext that it’s helping him stabilize. She’s surprised that she doesn’t flinch, that there’s no electrical jolt. It’s somehow consoling to both of them. She puzzles at it while she tries to answer his question: “The sad truth is that I have no idea. I knew nothing about the logistics. I really was the paintbrush for hire.”
Marty lowers his face in contemplation. “The same private detective who gave me your name and address told me that he thought it was the catering company we used for an Aid Society dinner we had in November 1957. He thought they did the swap, but we never could prove it.”
From under the archway that leads into the exhibition gallery, Max Culkins looks at them incredulously as they approach. Marty sees them through his eyes—the old barefoot blue blood, the cuffs of his tuxedo pants rolled up, hobbling along with a brown paper bag and a curator’s elbow. Marty nods at Max, who’s being buttonholed by an elderly female donor by the looks of it. Marty gives him a salute.
Marty says to Ellie, “Wait, I want to see the new de Vos.”
“I thought you couldn’t see anything.”
“You can describe it to me.”
Ellie turns for the gallery and they pass Max Culkins in the archway. Max and the donor stop talking to take in the spectacle. Max says, “Is everything all right, Ellie?”
“Mr. de Groot is having an attack of gout, but I’m getting him back to the hotel.”
Marty suppresses a smile. He can tell Max Culkins wants to break off and interrogate them, but something about them shuffling across the parquet floor is so surreal that he’s rendered speechless.
They continue on to the section devoted to the de Vos paintings. They stand directly under the funeral scene.
After a moment of contemplation, she says, “It’s a funeral procession, but they’re carrying a child-size coffin down from a darkened church. The clouds are brooding and cumulous. You know the Dutch use the word wolkenvelden to describe these skies. It means cloudfields. The river is frozen, just like in your painting. She became preoccupied with winter and ice, just like Avercamp did. There are children and onlookers clambering alongside the procession or watching from down on the ice. There’s a village downriver, but no smoke or firelight. It’s a deadly calm. The most unusual aspect of the painting is that it seems as if the entire scene is painted from above.”
“How do you mean?”
“As if she’s painting from up a tree or on top of a tall house. The whole perspective is from up on high, the vanishing point out beyond the frozen fields. It’s signed and dated in 1637. We thought she might have been dead by then. Or at least that she’d stopped painting.”
He almost says, “I could come with you, you know. To Leiden. I’d buy us first-class tickets. We’d scour the countryside looking for her trail.” He stares up at the painting and imagines her response. She would say something witty but definitive: “We both know that would be interesting for about three hours.”
After a few more moments in the gallery, they head out toward the main entrance. Max Culkins is nowhere to be seen, just a few security guards checking their watches. They clear the vestibule and foyer and walk out into the street. They take the footpath along Art Gallery Road, heading toward the city.
Ellie says, “Watch your step. I feel like junkies come to the Domain to shoot up. You might step on a needle.”
“I can’t see my feet anyway, so you’ll have to keep me from ruin.”
He still holds her elbow with the slightest amount of pressure.
She says, “That’s a lot of responsibility. Did you remember the name of your hotel?”
Marty digs through his trouser pockets for his room key. He hands it to Ellie to read—the Sheraton on the Park.
They reach the end of the Domain and St. Mary’s Cathedral looms above the tree crowns. The twin spires make Marty nostalgic for a strand of faith or religion he’s never had. He says to Ellie, “Can we cut through the park?” and she says, “I don’t fancy being mugged while I’m walking with a gout-stricken old man.” They walk past St. James station and make the left turn onto Elizabeth Street. The streets are mostly empty, but they get a few wary glances from bundled passersby. Sydney on a blustery August night. They reach the Sheraton Hotel and he finally lets go of her elbow.
“This is the end of the line,” she says.
He says, “It’s silly, I know, but I’d love to say goodbye with my eyeglasses on my face. All night you’ve been nothing but a bright whir that smells like jasmine.”
She contemplates making him go up to his room to fetch his glasses while she waits here. But then she decides he’s a man in his eighties who’s trundled all this way to set things right, who only has a finite number of elevator rides left in his lifetime, who couldn’t be an imposition in a hotel room even if he tried. He hasn’t been neutered by time exactly—there’s still a tiny high pressure weather system that hovers between them—but his potency moves in and out, at the edges of reception, muffled then surging then gone.
They ride in silence to his suite on the top floor. She opens his door with his key card because apparently it’s part of her new role. Would this have been her lot if she’d married a man fifteen years her senior?
He stands clutching his shoes in the paper bag, scanning the bedroom for his glasses.
She says, “I’m actually glad you came. It settled something for me.”
He looks blankly over at the television.
Ellie spots his eyeglasses on the nightstand and hands them to him. When he puts them on he blinks and stares at her for a long moment.
He says, “You don’t look a day over twenty-five.”
“I wouldn’t go back to my twenties for anything.”
“I don’t blame you. No matter. Your sixties seem eventful enough.”
She looks around the hotel suite, then back at him. “It would be a lie if I said all is forgiven.”
“Let’s not lie.”
“But everything is how it should be. How’s that for wisdom?”
He laughs at this a little, blinks back a tear in his left eye. He says, “It wouldn’t be in the right spirit of things to make a fuss. So, goodbye, then. Please take great care of yourself. I consider you an extraordinary person who happened my way.”
She’s shocked by the overwrought feeling in her chest. She says, “You take care as well.”
There’s a moment where a hug or a kiss on the cheek seems plausible, but then it vanishes. They shake hands slowly before she turns for the door. He closes it behind her, checks the lock, and moves slowly back to the bed to undress. He knows he won’t be able to sleep, so he turns on the television and flips through the channels. Eventually he turns off his hearing aid and puts it on the nightstand, but he leaves the TV running. Nila gets on his case when he does this, lies up in his room with a glass of seltzer water, the television murmuring and his hearing aid off, the hour and the day dialed down to a slight impulse. A whole afternoon in this near-soundless, silvery-blue light. It’s when he gets his best thinking done—the past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him. He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It’s a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you’d been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhale some of their previous owners’ atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don’t. You let the lamps burn all night.