Thirty-six

THREE YEARS EARLIER

A month or so after my meeting with Beatrice Cormier, rumors began circulating that some woman had gone to MoMA claiming Isaac Cullion hadn’t painted 4D, that she was the artist who created it. At first, it was just whispers that were easily scoffed away. But soon, notices began appearing on art blogs and in gossip columns reporting that the museum, which had determined 4D was Cullion’s work, was wrong: The claim was legitimate.

After disclosure that Isaac had been having an affair with “a much younger graduate student,” it didn’t take long for people to conclude that the “she” in both stories had to be me. Isaac, of course, denied everything, as did MoMA. Initially, I did, too. I still hadn’t recovered from the shock of the museum’s original decision, and I didn’t know what to do.

But plenty of other people did. I was stared at, whispered about, and often strangers, not to mention friends, asked me intrusive questions. Some were quite cruel.

“So did you do it because he broke up with you?” Like it’s your business.

“How much less do you think 4D is worth now?” Like I know.

“Do you still love him?” Like this is appropriate.

“Why would you try to destroy such a talented man?” Like that was my intention.

Although I was dubbed “The Great Pretender” by the tabloids and it was generally assumed I was seeking some kind of wrongheaded publicity for myself, the possibility that my claim was legitimate also sparked interest. Editorials appeared about museum experts who saw what they wanted to see and collectors who were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a name. Journalists and pundits speculated on the rights and wrongs of the situation. And to whom they belonged.

“Where does art’s value lie?” an editorial in ArtWorld demanded. “If it was painted by a graduate student, is 4D still a masterpiece?”

These were good questions, questions I kept asking myself. And although almost all of the arguments concluded that the value lay within the painting itself, that brands and celebrated names were nothing but “the glaze of our ego-driven consumer society,” one only had to look at the meteoric rise in the value of Isaac’s paintings after 4D to know the truth.

I WAS IN such a deep sleep that it took me a while to understand that the phone was ringing. The clock radio said it was 3:24 a.m. I fumbled for the phone.

“Murderer!” a woman’s voice screamed.

“Huh?”

“You killed him. You killed him. If it weren’t for you he’d still be alive!” Then she burst into huge, heaving sobs.

I shook my head to clear it. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

More sobbing, deeper now, more painful.

“Listen, ma’am,” I said, “I’m really sorry, but I didn’t kill anyone, so you’ve really got to hang up and dial again. Or, better yet, get someone to help you. Are you alone? Is there someone I can call for you?”

“You and your goddamned ego,” she managed to spit between sobs. “If you hadn’t, if you hadn’t gone there, claiming, claiming, if you’d let things be, then he, then he . . .”

I snapped straight up in bed. “Who is this?”

A wail. A keening that froze the marrow of my bones.

“Martha?” I asked, hoping against hope I was wrong, but knowing I wasn’t. Isaac’s wife.

A long intake of breath, a sob, a hiccup. “He’s gone, Claire.”

“Isaac?” I whispered.

The sobbing began again.

“No,” I said, but it came out as a moan. “No, no, please no.”

“He shot himself.” Martha’s voice was suddenly hard and clear. “But it wasn’t suicide. Not even close. And you’re going to have to live with the fact that you’re responsible for ending his life for the rest of your own.”

“Ending his life,” I repeated, sickened by her words. “No, no. I . . . I didn’t do that. I’d never do anything—”

“You can deny it all you want, but that doesn’t change the facts,” she spat, and hung up.

I dropped the receiver on the bed. I was numb, freezing cold, shivering as if I were running a high fever. I wrapped myself in a blanket, tried to pace the studio, but my knees wouldn’t hold me up. I collapsed on the floor, curled into a fetal position, rocked. And rocked. Isaac was dead. His great talent along with him. If only I hadn’t, if only I hadn’t, if only I hadn’t . . . But, of course, I had.

THE FUNERAL, HELD at Trinity Church in Copley Square, was a mob scene. News vans and reporters swarmed the plaza in front of the church, onlookers ogled. Rik came with me, and it was a good thing. When Martha Cullion turned her back in response to my condolences, he was there to catch me. When no professor from the museum school would meet my eye, he was there to hold my hand. And when I found I couldn’t bear the sight of Isaac’s casket, Rik took me home.

Martha told the press she blamed me for Isaac’s death. That my “preposterous claim” was an attempt to punish him for going back to her. Intellectually, I knew I hadn’t caused his death, but there was a great distance between my head and my heart, and guilt filled my gut.

I ignored the media calls for a statement. Although my friends begged me to tell my side of the story, I felt too responsible to defend myself. I wasn’t sleeping or eating, I wasn’t working, and I wasn’t leaving my studio. Rik tried to convince me to pack up my canvases and paints and move into his parents’ barn in Connecticut to finish my capstone project. I didn’t want to go anywhere—I’d become addicted to soap operas and daytime talk shows—but my overwhelming desire to put the whole museum school experience behind me finally got me to the barn.

When I returned to Boston with the first two completed works though, none of my professors was impressed. “Derivative,” Maya Myers, the chair of my committee, declared, and I noticed George Kelly and Dan Martin share a smirk.

“Derivative of what?” I asked.

“Go back and sit with them, Claire,” Maya said. “Review your early expressionists. I’m sure you’ll see what we mean.”

Expressionists? I stared at my paintings. Marc Chagall? Edvard Munch? Distortion of reality for emotional effect? Not even close. These were portraits of homeless people, one a man and the other two women, both highly representational. They were emotional, yes, that was the point. But there was no bending of reality, just reality staring you in the face.

I looked at George and Dan, waiting for someone to contradict her.

“I agree with Maya,” Dan said.

“Me, too,” said George.

I gathered the paintings and marched over to Rik’s apartment. I set them against the wall behind his kitchen table. “Would you call these expressionistic?”

He scrutinized them. “Well . . . they do create emotion. Strong angst. So I suppose, in that way, they’re expressionistesque.”

“Through distortion?”

“Couldn’t say that.”

“Are they derivative?”

“Of whom?”

“That’s what Myers claims. She and her two monkeys.”

Now Rik scrutinized me. “And you’re thinking this is because of Isaac?”

“What else?”

“Maybe she’s testing you, pushing you to new creative heights.”

“Except that she loved the idea when I first presented it. Told me to get right to work after she saw the initial sketches.”

“You’ve got to let this go, Bear. Not everything that happens to you is about Isaac.”

Yet everything else seemed to be about Isaac. Despite hurricanes and blistering heat, international unrest and a presidential election, the media wouldn’t let the story go, quoting Isaac’s friends and colleagues about his great talent and all that the world had lost. I finally gave the Globe an interview, explaining how everything happened, how 4D was mine, and that I’d gone to MoMA to set the record straight. But it seemed that no one, except my family and a few friends, was willing to believe me. Martha’s story had much more appeal.

So when I finally emerged from the barn, reworked “nonexpressionist” paintings and a newly minted MFA in hand, I wasn’t surprised to step into a world that pretended not to see the Great Pretender. But when the freeze flowed into the responses I received to the slides I submitted to galleries and competitions, to the lack of responses I received to my résumé, I realized that Rik was wrong. Everything was about Isaac. And in contradiction to conventional wisdom, I was fast discovering that there was, indeed, such a thing as bad publicity.