Claire turned from Troy's intense green gaze, looked down again at the woman who seemed caught in time. "I really didn't bring her here wanting money. I just wanted know who she was, who painted her, what he was thinking about when he did. She just seemed so, so—so real somehow. Like she could step out of the boundaries of the frame."
Troy gave her a smile that somehow connected them, breaking through the cool reserve he wore every bit as much as his expensive suit. "Very poetically put." He lifted the painting from the table. "This certainly isn't something Avery's would be interested in offering at auction. It's too clearly a knockoff. But if you leave it with me I might be able to get some money for it through a private sale as a curiosity."
The young woman's painted eyes still steadily returned Claire's gaze. "No, that's all right," Claire said, surprising herself. She realized she didn't care who had created the painting or when. Despite what Troy said, the woman was alive to Claire. The secret of her letter still intrigued her. And if the painting ended up over Charlie's fireplace instead of in a museum, would that really matter?
"Are you certain? I'd hate to see you come all the way to New York and then have nothing to show for it. I might"—Troy hesitated—
"I might be able to get as much as five or ten thousand for it."
Given her state salary, five or ten thousand sounded like a lot of money. Claire was tempted until she looked back down at the painting. "No, no, I want to keep it. Even if it's a fake, there's something about it—about her—that I really like."
For the briefest instant, Troy's lips seemed to tighten, but then his face relaxed into a smile and he nodded. "Think about what I've said. Give me the number where you're staying, and I'll ask around a bit before you leave New York. Who knows, there may be heightened interest because of the show last year."
STAY 2ND
Chapter 16In the shelter of Avery's doorway, Claire took the page from the Guide to Manhattan. She was only about two dozen blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aware of the painting bouncing lightly against her back with each step, she set off.
In some ways, Claire was relieved that she didn't have to deal with all the complications that would have ensued if Troy had said the painting were real. Now it was simply hers to enjoy. When she had first seen it, its beauty had stolen her breath. If it were an imitation of something else, did that make it less beautiful?
And could only an original be beautiful? Were there degrees of falsehood? Was something more or less of a fake—and thus more or less beautiful—if it wasn't an exact copy but made up of familiar elements combined in new ways? Although perhaps to a trained eye her painting wasn't beautiful at all. Troy had talked about a stiffness, a lack of life, a falseness, all things that she had been unable to detect but that he had seen as clearly as he had seen Claire—if not more clearly.
Claire's thoughts kept coming back to Troy. She had never met anyone like him before—smart, sophisticated, beautiful in away that was entirely masculine. Mis kind couldn't exist in Portland, or probably anywhere outside New York City. Everything, from the way Troy made his living to the way he dressed, was in sharp contrast to Evan. Evan cared little for art. The walls of his house were nearly bare. His state-of-the-art security system was there to protect his computer and stereo system, and because it was statistically cost-effective.
She rounded the corner onto 81st Street. Ahead of her lay the sprawling stone edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each entrance door was bracketed by pairs of fluted pillars that dwarfed the people clustered on the sweeping outdoor staircase. Claire's heart gave a little bounce, reminding her that despite the disappointment of the painting, she was here in New York City, doing just fine on her own, thank you, and about to enter a place she had been reading about for years.
Inside the magnificent openness of the Great Hall a grade school class in blue plaid uniforms raced around her, testing the acoustics. The space was big enough to muffle even their squeals. After checking her jacket and backpack, she climbed the broad central stairway that led to the rooms of European paintings. She walked quickly past the canvases, her eyes skimming over portraits, allegories, religious subjects. Troy had mentioned that the Met had several Vermeers and she wanted to see what the person who had painted—or copied—her painting had been trying to imitate. His careful way of seeing things must have rubbed off, for Claire found herself noticing the colors in each painting and how the paint itself had been applied, sometimes in tiny dabs, sometimes in broad daubs a quarter-inch thick.
The rooms of the gallery flowed from one to the next, each with white painted walls and pale hardwood floors that showed no sign of the thousands of feet that must have scuffed over them. Claire passed couples and an occasional knot of people speaking softly in what she guessed was Japanese, German, French, Italian. For the most part, though, the Met was relatively uncrowded on a Thursday afternoon in October.
Then she saw it. A painting, only a little more than a foot square, nearly lost amid the much larger ones that surrounded it.
In the painting, a young woman, evidently asleep, sat at a table. Her eyes were closed and her head rested on one hand. Her black hair was drawn back, emphasizing the widow's peak that accented her pale oval face. Claire's heart skidded. The table in front of the woman was covered with a bunched oriental carpet in deep shades of red and blue and cream. On top of the carpet rested a bowl of fruit and a white curving jug with a brass top. She had seen both the carpet and the jug before. They were identical to the ones in the little painting in the backpack she had checked downstairs.
Claire moved closer. On the right side of the painting, part of a chair was visible, with brass buttons on its dark back and lions' heads at the tops of the posts. The chair, too, was a mate to the one in Aunt Cady's painting.
Her gaze dropped to the inscription under the painting. "Girl Asleep at a Table," c. 1657, oil on canvas, Jan Vermeer, Dutch, 1632—1675. Bequest of Benjamin Altman. She was a foot away from the real thing, but still, despite what Troy had said, she couldn't tell the difference between this painting and the one she had checked downstairs.
"Hmmm." It wasn't until the man walking by her stopped that Claire realized she had made a sound in the back of her throat. Before turning his dark eyes to the painting, he offered her a smile. One of his teeth had been broken and then mended with a flash of white. With his dark curly hair and a gold hoop in one ear, he looked like a pirate, only one dressed in an old Pendleton instead of a white ruffled shirt. When he spoke, he had the flattened vowels of a native New Yorker.
"Some people say she's a still life masquerading as a portrait. That she's simply an excuse for painting light and color."
Claire considered the woman in the painting. Even in repose, her face contained an inner radiance. "Are you saying she doesn't seem real? To me she looks like she could open her eyes at any second." Claire could almost see the dark blue eyes (somehow she knew they were blue) regarding them calmly.
"Maybe you're right. Maybe I've seen her too often to really see her." His dark eyes were level with Claire's. He shook her hand with one that was cool and slightly callused. "Dante Bonner."
"Claire. Claire Montrose. Are you an artist?"
"Not in the same class as Vermeer. But I majored in art history at college."
Which meant she had glibly offered her opinion to a man who had spent years studying painters. "I'm really interested in Vermeer, but I don't know much about him."
"There's not a lot to know. He died young and penniless in Delft, leaving eleven children. He owed such a huge bill to the baker that after his death it had to be paid in paintings. That's about it. Did he always live in Delft? Where did he learn to paint? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what this painting means. Some experts think this woman is drunk, others that she's sleeping. Some people insist that she is the lady of the house. Or no, that she's a maid stealing a siesta. And some people say the woman is depressed because she has lost at love."
"Som
etimes a cigar is simply a cigar," Claire said, happy that she had thought of something halfway intelligent to say. "You do know a lot about Vermeer."
"Unfortunately, I've just told you about everything there is to know. No one even knows how many paintings he painted."
"Does the Met have any more?" She felt sophisticated, casually referring to the museum in the diminutive.
"Four more, which is an amazing number when you consider we know of fewer than forty that he painted. Would you like me to show them to you?"
She nodded, then allowed herself a small private smile. For the second time in as many hours, Claire was following a gorgeous man.
Dante's first stop was a much larger painting. It showed a woman in a white dress posed theatrically, her foot resting on a globe. Behind her was a painting of Christ on the cross. Claire saw nothing in this painting that reminded her of the one she had in her backpack downstairs, which pointed out just how little she knew about art.
Dante said, "I'll start with the Vermeer I like the least. It's called Allegory of the Faith, and was probably a commissioned painting. Pretty much everything in the painting is a symbol."
"You mean like the apple and the crushed snake?" They lay on the black-and-white-tiled marble floor.
"You got it. That's why this painting doesn't work. Vermeer did his best work when he painted mysteries, not allegories."
"Mysteries?" Claire echoed, thinking of the woman in her painting, her enigmatic expression, the letter containing unknown news.
"Think of the first painting we looked at, Girl Asleep at a Table. It's a common genre theme, but no one remembers other paintings like it. What makes it different? I think it's that other artists of the day always spelled out what everything meant. Another artist would paint an empty jug of wine, so everyone would know the woman was drunk. Or children gone wild so the viewer would know it's about a housewife neglecting her duties. Instead, Vermeer painted a sleeping beauty and left the viewer to figure out what it meant." Dante's rough voice was oddly soothing. "The interesting thing is that when Vermeer first painted her, there was a man waiting for her in the doorway. Later he painted him out."
"How do they know that?"
"You can X-ray a painting to see the underlayers, and with Vermeer, there are always changes to the underlayers." He turned to her, and Claire saw that his irises were flecked with gold. "Am I boring you?"
"No, this is fascinating!" Claire protested, afraid he might disappear. She was enjoying seeing things through the eyes of an artist.
"Let me know if you change your mind. Here's a painting that's more typical of Vermeer—Portrait of a Young Lady."
Against a nearly black background was a three-quarter view of a girl's head and shoulders. She appeared to be in her early teens. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face, her shoulders covered with a white satin shawl. A pearl earring glinted at her lobe. Her expression was calm, with a hint of a smile. With thin lips and seemingly lashless eyes, she was no beauty, yet she had been portrayed with a serene self-possession that Claire found appealing. The small painting was itself astonishingly delicate, a complex play of light and rich shadows.
Surreptitiously, Claire also examined Dante as he examined the painting, his thick lashes and generous mouth. He spoke softly, keeping his eyes fastened on the small portrait. "This girl could be one of his daughters. There's no way of knowing. But he was so poor and worked so slowly that he probably couldn't afford a professional model."
The next painting Dante showed Claire was Lady Playing a Lute. In it, a young woman played a bowl-shaped stringed instrument. Her head was turned to the side, her expression a half-smile. Diffuse golden light poured into the room through the leaded window on the left of the painting, glinting off the woman's earring and the yellow satin of her fur-trimmed jacket.
That jacket! Claire thought. It seemed to be the same jacket as the woman in her painting was wearing, although not as much of it was visible. And again there was the chair with the lions' heads on the posts. What had Troy said? That her painting was a pastiche of every known Vermeer cliche?
She looked again at the woman's face, at her high forehead and wide-set eyes. "This looks like the same person in the last portrait, only a few years older," Claire ventured.
"But Portrait of a Young Lady was probably painted a year or two after Lady Playing a Lute. It could be a family resemblance. This could be Vermeer's wife, and the other one his daughter."
Dante took Claire's hand and led her a few more steps, then released her fingers as easily as he had taken them. I’ve saved the best for last. Young Woman with a Water Jug." At first, Claire had difficulty paying attention to the picture, her mind still on the light pressure of Dante's fingers.
In the painting, a woman stood with one hand on the frame of an open window. The other rested on a brass pitcher set in a matching shallow basin. She wore a starched and pleated white headdress attached to a cape-like collar. Dante pulled a small black plastic oval from inside his jacket, surprising Claire. He flicked it open to reveal two black-framed clear circles—tiny magnifying glasses—and bent forward to squint at the canvas.
Claire wondered if he were allowed to get so close, even though he wasn't actually touching the painting. But when a guard walked by, he took in Dante's actions without even breaking stride. She relaxed enough to look at the same spot where Dante was focused, at the underside of the brass basin. It was a mosaic of tiny chips of colors reflecting the carpet on which it rested.
Dante's voice was a near whisper. "It all seems so simple, but when you look closely, you realize you can't find the edges of anything. And look how much light is in the map behind the woman, and then compare that to the blue haze underneath it. Even the wall is more like a rainbow than pure white. There's pink-white, yellow-white, blue-white, purple-white. But he makes it seem like one color."
"Is that why you like Vermeer so much?" Part of Claire was listening, but another part was wondering how she could keep the conversation going. She was absurdly conscious of her heart beating, of her mouth pushing out each breath. She knew it was silly to lust after a stranger, but the combination of his looks and intelligence was proving irresistible.
Dante straightened up and slipped his magnifying glass back into his pocket.
"That, and I guess I like all the mysteries—knowing so little about his personal life, or who taught him to paint, or whether he used the camera obscura."
"What's that?"
"It was a kind of early camera. You took a completely dark room and admitted only a pinhole of light. A box with a lens captured the image of a scene on ground glass. Some artists used it to trace the projected image. There's no way to tell for sure if he used it, but many of Vermeer's paintings have optical effects like those of a camera. See what he did here?" Dante pointed to the woman's dark skirt silhouetted against the white wall. "He accentuated the contrasts of light and dark, like a camera would. And everything he paints has blurred edges, like they're slightly out of focus. And many of his paintings, especially his later ones, are marked with circles of confusion."
"Circles of confusion? What are those?" Claire was beginning to feel more than a little confused herself. She had never looked at anything so closely before.
"Highlights that are slightly out of focus, the way you often see them in photographs. See this luminous spot? It's a circle of confusion." Dante pointed to the liquid white dot that sparkled on the plump curve of the woman's lower lip. He turned his attention back to Claire. "I'm afraid that's it for the Vermeers. I've probably bored you with my lecture."
"Not at all," Claire said, not wanting the conversation to end. A way to prolong it suddenly occurred to her. On top of Charlie's list of "must see" sights had been the Met's sculpture garden. "I really enjoyed it. It was like having my own private tour guide." She took a deep breath. "Can I thank you by buying you a glass of wine on the rooftop garden? I've never been up there, but I hear the view is incredible."
Dan
te hesitated before answering, and Claire could feel a flush crawling up her neck. But then he said, "I think I'd like that."
Claire made a quick decision. "I need to get my stuff from the front desk."
"I'll save us a good spot."
After retrieving her backpack, Claire entered the elevator and waited for it to groan skyward, amazed at her own daring. Last week she had been vetting LUVBABY, now here she was at the greatest museum in the world, about to have a glass of wine with a fascinating man. A bead of sweat traced the length of her spine, and she shivered.
Just as Charlie had promised, the view from the rooftop was breathtaking. The museum rested on the eastern edge of Central Park, which cut a green swath through the city's brownstones and highrises. The avenues bounding the park squared it off like great garden walls. Viewed from this vantage point, New York City was gorgeous, the litter and crowds and homeless people invisible. And for the first time since she had left Oregon, Claire could see the full sweep of sky. Belying the fall chill in the air, the sky was a clear blue with scudding white puffy clouds.
Dante was waiting on a bench, watching her with a half-smile, a glass of red wine in each hand.
"That's not fair!" Claire protested. "I was going to treat you!"
"You can buy next time."
Claire accepted the glass of wine from him and took a sip. To cover her nervousness she studied the bronze sculpture facing them. It was of a nude woman who stood on tiptoe, her arms raised shoulder-high, fingers spread. She was larger than life, with a rounded stomach and full breasts. The sculpture was sensual rather than sexual, but even so Claire felt awkward facing her breasts and belly.
Dante saved her by asking her a few questions about what she did. He seemed gratifyingly amused by her descriptions of bizarre license plate requests.