Eight

The exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is underwhelming, to say the least. The façade is plain, almost unbroken by windows or decoration, an unwelcoming fortress. The first time I saw it—I must have been about seven—I cried when my mother told me this was the museum she had been raving about. But when I went inside, my tears quickly dried.

The museum is essentially an ornate Venetian palace turned in on itself, a seven-year-old girl’s delight. Instead of canals, a magical four-story central courtyard faces the interior walls. A greenhouse of sorts. The roof is glass and the floor is a sensuous garden filled with freestanding columns, whimsical twelfth-century lion stylobates, and all manner of statuary. A Roman mosaic sits at the center, surrounded by an ever-changing installation of flowers and shrubs. A pair of towering palm trees reach up to the sunlight, climbing beyond the third floor.

All four walls, which rise at least sixty feet, are cut by tiers of stone-fronted arches, notched doorways and windows, marble balustrades, and exposed stairways overflowing with flowers and greenery. The rooms at the perimeter of this courtyard form the bulk of the museum. Isabella Gardner built this monument to live in, to house her art collection, and to leave to the public upon her death.

Although I’m here to meet Rik for lunch, I climb the stairs to the second floor and walk through the Early Italian Room and the Raphael Room and into the Short Gallery. I need to see Bath’s empty frame. The gallery is only about ten feet wide and has to be just about the worst place to hang a painting as large as After the Bath. But Isabella, who was eccentric, to say the least, personally determined the placement of each of her 2,500 pieces of art and then decreed in her will that nothing was to be changed, removed, or added. Ever.

It is this conceit that created the hodgepodge that is the Gardner. In contrast to the openness and brilliance of the courtyard, the shadowy galleries are filled with mismatched groupings of furniture, fine art, and random trinkets. Priceless paintings are hung over doorways, and 3,000-year-old sculptures are hidden in corners.

Poor lighting and cramped spaces render this clutter even more claustrophobic, and there’s barely a piece of artwork that’s shown to its best advantage. But since 1924, the year Isabella died, the museum has stayed as its mistress wished, as charming and capricious as she was herself. Only the thieves were able to best the old girl.

I walk up to the empty frame, the hollow enclosure where After the Bath once lived, and I’m overwhelmed by shame. I press myself into a corner, try to make myself small, hoping no one will notice me, recognize my culpability. And nobody does. As I relax and pull to a stand, to both my surprise and consternation, a surge of adrenaline nearly knocks me over. I am suddenly jubilant. I have After the Bath. It’s in my very own studio, where I sleep and paint. Degas’ masterpiece, to look at whenever I want. To smell, to even touch, that most forbidden act within museum walls. And, I remind myself, I’ll be partially responsible for its return home.

I watch the people filing past, looking sadly at the vacant spot, wondering as I’ve always wondered. I have an overpowering urge to tell them, to shout to the world that it’s mine, all mine. I turn abruptly and leave the room, calming as I wend my way to the small café hidden behind the tiny bookstore on the first floor.

Rik and I kiss, hug, exchange pleasantries and a bit of gossip, order our food, and then I ask him a few questions about the robbery.

“Why this sudden interest in the heist?” he asks.

I shrug. “I’ve always been interested. Isn’t everyone?”

Rik takes a bite of his burger. “Guess the rumor that Whitey Bulger had them with him in Argentina was as false as all the rest.”

“Couldn’t he have had them there anyway? Before he was arrested? Maybe they’re still there now.”

“Nah. I never believed Whitey or any of the Boston mob were involved. If it was organized crime, they’d have sold most of the cache pretty fast, and at least a few would’ve surfaced by now.”

“Then who did it?”

“I’m thinking some European. The robbery involved planning, disguises, and deception. That’s how art thieves work in Europe.”

“Not here?”

“Hardly ever.”

“You think the paintings are in Europe?”

“After all these years, they could be anywhere,” Rik says. “Although lots of people assume they have to be hidden away in some greedy collector’s attic, my guess is that they’re being used as collateral for weapons and drug running. Sometimes terrorist groups swap stolen paintings for their imprisoned comrades.”

Markel alluded to this, too. “No James Bond and Dr. No?”

“This works out better for the thieves. It’s tough to sell the paintings outright because everyone knows they’re stolen, so they use them on the black market. Say, for example, that you want to buy a load of cocaine for $1 million, which you know you can turn into $4 million in a week. You don’t have $1 million, but you do have a Rembrandt worth at least $30 million. So you offer a moneyman the painting as collateral for the mil and another million when the deal’s done. If the deal falls through, moneyman’s got something worth much more than he gave you, and if it works, he gets double his investment and returns the painting to you. Ergo, you end up with $2 million tax-free and a $30 million painting to run through the same scheme when the next opportunity comes around.”

“Great for the thieves, lousy for the paintings.”

“You’ve got that right,” Rik says. “It’s awful what happens to them. They get stashed in places that are too wet or too hot or too cold. They’re cut from their frames. Ripped. Destroyed.” He presses a hand to his stomach. “I get sick just talking about it.”

I, too, am nauseated by the image, the ravaging, the waste. “Blood paintings.”

“Like blood diamonds?” Rik laughs without humor. “But instead of slave labor, it’s art that’s exploited, sometimes massacred.”

This is a fate I refuse to imagine for Bath.

WHEN I LEAVE the museum, I rush home to be with Bath. It feels as if I’m hurrying to meet a new lover: the excitement, the desire, the seemingly endless drenching of serotonin. I whip the sheet off the canvas, and there she is. Alive and intact. Even more beautiful than I remember. I’ve set her on a large easel and pulled up a folding chair so I can sit in front of her, drink her in.

Every time I look, I see something new. Now I notice how much green there is. The blues and the oranges are so vibrant, the women’s skin so pale and luminescent, that I was distracted. Green fills the entire painting, gently stretching out behind all the sharper colors, but very much there.

Then I’m struck by the women’s faces, all in profile, yet each her own. Most of Degas’ bathers are either painted from behind, have an arm thrown over their faces, or are loosely sketched, but these women are clearly individuals. Françoise, with reddish hair and a sharp nose, sits to the right, her leg outstretched; Jacqueline, at the center, tall and powerful, looks over her shoulder at the raised knee Françoise is toweling; Simone, introverted, her features too small for her round face, dries her hair crouched at Jacqueline’s feet.

There’s been an argument going on for decades among art historians with too much time on their hands: Was Degas really an Impressionist? Those who say no point out that Degas didn’t paint outdoors, plein air, as did most of the Impressionists, and that he didn’t boldly splash thick pigments on canvas to capture the moment in front of him. Instead, he did multitudes of sketches and detailed drawings and then worked on the piece slowly in his studio.

But to me, the argument is just semantics, an exercise in mental masturbation. True, Degas painted neither plein air nor spontaneously, but he had his own way of bringing his impressions into the heart of the viewer: his focus on the movement of racehorses and ballet dancers, his depiction of the ordinary milliner or washer woman or bather, caught in a complete lack of self-consciousness.

I turn from Bath and squat before the piles of books flanking the north wall. I have a couple of Degas piles: biographies and criticism; books of his drawings, prints, and paintings; diaries and collections of his letters; notebooks of scribbled lecture notes. I also have two books devoted to only his preliminary sketches. Not to mention all the library books, many overdue, on his contemporaries that I’ve been using for my book proposal.

I pull out his sketchbooks and bring them back to the chair. I open the first one and flip through the bather sketches. Degas often used the same models in a number of different paintings. I’m searching for Simone, Jacqueline, and Françoise.

I find a couple of Simone and turn back to the painting for a closer look at Jacqueline. Again, the power of Bath assaults me. Although I’m sure I can master the technical aspects needed to avoid detection—stripping the old Meissonier canvas down to the sizing, mixing the correct nineteenth-century paints and mediums, using the proper period brushes—I have no idea how I’ll master reproducing the commanding gestalt of Degas’ masterwork. But Bath reaches out to me, touches my heart, and I know I have to try.

I’M WORKING DILIGENTLY on the Pissarro for Repro, but all I want to do is go through the Degas sketches and find my three French ladies, maybe even a compositional drawing for the whole painting. I make a deal with myself: one more hour on the Pissarro and then I can take a quick break with the books. Whatever else I’ve decided to do, Repro pays the rent. It also, as Markel so accurately pointed out, gives me a cover.

I’m just settling back into the Pissarro when Markel shows up with a very expensive-looking bottle of champagne and a pair of crystal flutes. Obviously, he remembers the juice glasses from his first visit. We toast to our arrangement and the Gardner regaining its treasure. I pull the sheet from Bath.

He takes a small step backward as the force of the painting hits him. It’s clear he feels the same way about her as I do. I motion him into the folding chair and pull the rocking chair over for myself. We sit in silence, sipping our champagne and looking at her.

“Like two old folks watching a sunset,” he says.

“Sometimes I cry when I look at it.”

A pause, then, “Me, too.”

“I was at the Gardner yesterday,” I tell him.

“Looking at the empty frame?”

I nod my head but don’t take my eyes from the painting.

“Didn’t feel as guilty as you thought you were going to, did you?”

I whip around. “Why do you say that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Of course not,” I say with conviction. “I did feel guilty. I even thought about bringing it back.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shrug.

Markel’s laugh is warm and rich, without a touch of condescension. “You’ve fallen in love with her.”

“Is it that obvious?”

He touches his flute to mine, and our eyes lock. “Takes one to know one.”

“The faces are so specific, so individual, not like most of his nudes.”

Markel looks at the two books of sketches on the floor in front of him. “Find any of them?”

“I just started looking, and although there are hardly any faces in the sketches, I think I’ve found a few of Simone.”

“Simone?”

“Françoise, Jacqueline, and Simone,” I say pointing to each in turn. “Hard to be in love with someone whose name you don’t know.”