Claire, the woman with a dozen dictionaries lined up across her desk at work, couldn't resist a chance to show off that she too knew something. "You mean you felt nauseated. If you're nauseous, it means you cause nausea."
Troy narrowed his eyes for a split second, then shook his head and laughed. "All right, I felt nauseated. Whatever. I just knew. And that can't be taught. It's aesthetics. When I look at a painting I evaluate it subconsciously. Every painter has a dozen little personal mannerisms, from the way he loaded his brush with paint to the light he liked to work in. Even if a forgery tries to copy something exactly, he can't. Because he is copying, not creating, whatever he produces lacks the freedom of an original. Five years ago, Avery's went against my advice and bought a painting. It was supposedly a masterpiece, a Botticelli showing an angel hovering over the Madonna and the Christ Child. The first time I saw it I knew it was wrong. But they bought it, and it went under the hammer and sold for a very good price."
"Then what happened?" Claire took a sip of her second glass of wine. Or was it her third?
"A year later, they were forced to buy it back, very quietly. An analysis of the paint had turned up Prussian blue—which wasn't invented until 1704. That's almost three hundred years too late." Troy suddenly shook his head. Then he leaned forward to squeeze her hand. "I'm sorry! I've been lecturing, not having a conversation."
"No, no, I'm really interested." Claire took another sip of wine. It had been years since she had had more than two glasses of anything, but she was finding she liked the way it enhanced what already seemed a waking dream. In a few more days she would be back at work rejecting 6ULDV8 for the umpteenth time, but for now she planned on enjoying herself.
The waiter cleared their plates and brought the next course, a surprisingly delicate white bean soup. After Troy had an animated conversation with the sommelier, all about noses and legs, another bottle of wine was brought to the table, tasted and approved of. The woman at the table opposite Claire unbuttoned yet another inch of her lime-green jacket. She was clearly not wearing anything underneath it, and she laughed and swished her black hair, as shiny as patent leather, while she toyed with the collar.
Troy continued. "So the question is—if Vermeer didn't paint your Vermeer, then who did? And I'm beginning to wonder if you might have a real curiosity on your hands—a 'Vermeer' painted by Han Van Meegeren. Didn't you say that you thought your aunt acquired this painting during World War II?" He pronounced it "awnt" the way only rich people did in Portland.
"As far as I can tell, she got it during the war, put it under her bed, and then left it there. Who was Van Mee—, Van Meeg—?" Her tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar name.
Over the soup, Troy told Claire the story of Han van Meegeren, a 1930s Dutch painter whose own work had fallen out of fashion with the critics. Angry at their inability to recognize his genius, he had turned his talents to forgery—specifically seventeenth-century Dutch masterpieces. He was successful beyond his wildest flights of fancy. The same critics who had once called his own paintings shallow and sentimental now greeted the discovery of one after another of Van Meegeren's newly created "Vermeers" with reverence.
Troy explained the painstaking steps Van Meegeren took to make sure his paintings would meet all academic and scientific tests. First, Van Meegeren needed genuinely old canvases, stretched on old wood stretchers and held in place with 300-year-old tacks. So he bought minor seventeenth-century paintings at second-rate antique stores and then scraped off the images. To ensure the authenticity of the smallest details in the backgrounds of his paintings, he also bought seventeenth-century household objects: pewter plates, candlesticks, fabrics, jugs.
But by choosing Vermeer, Troy explained, Van Meegeren had set himself a puzzle. Vermeer was famous for his blues, yellows and whites. Even Van Gogh had praised Vermeer's use of those colors. Unfortunately for Van Meegeren, they were precisely the three colors whose manufacture had changed the most over three centuries. Van Meegeren knew he couldn't just go out and buy tubes of paint, because tiny samples would be put under a microscope and give the game away immediately. He had to make his own paint the way painters did centuries before—-from plants, resins and minerals. To get one special shade of blue Vermeer was known for, Van Meegeren was forced to spend thousands of dollars on lapis lazuli and then grind the semiprecious stone by hand, as Vermeer had done. If he had ground it mechanically, the microscope would have revealed that all the paint particles were the same size.
The main course arrived—veal in some kind of brown sauce the waiter had called a reduction, accompanied by garlic-infused potatoes. It tasted a lot like potatoes and gravy to Claire. Troy barely touched it before he put his fork down and continued his explanation of Van Meegeren's clever approach to forgery.
Van Meegeren knew that an occasional bristle from his paintbrush would be left in the paint and thus might be lifted out and examined. So he made his own paintbrushes from badger hair shaving brushes, because Vermeer painted only with badger hair brushes.
All these measures were only just the beginning. Van Meegeren also had to find a way to make the paint prematurely hard, because oil paint normally took a century to dry completely. New synthetic chemicals were just coming on the market, and he found one that would make the paint dry quickly—but would still soften at the touch of mineral alcohol, the standard test to reveal a true Old Master.
Van Meegeren spent months painting his first "Vermeer," and then when he finished he baked it in a specially constructed oven to help dry and crack the paint. He knew it was impossible for a 300- year-old painting to be in perfect condition, so as a final step, he damaged the canvas with a number of unimportant abrasions and one small tear. Then he carried out some deliberately bumbling repairs before tacking the canvas onto the wood of the old stretcher, using the same old tacks. His last step was to plant the painting where it could be "discovered" by an eager critic.
Claire tried to imagine this man, this Van Meegeren, painting the face of the woman in her painting, not 350 years ago but 50. She said, "All that must have taken him years. There must have been a lot of trial and error and starting over again. How or why did he invest so much time and money when he had no idea if in the end people would believe they were really Vermeers?"
"He'd had some experience, though. When he was in art school, one of his professors believed the only good ways were the old ways, so he had taught all his students to paint using the same methods the Old Masters had. And when Van Meegeren first began to create his forgeries, he sold some of the less believable forgeries to unscrupulous dealers who didn't mind looking the other way."
"So you think the painting I have is a Van—fake by this man?" The waiter had brought their fourth course and a third bottle of wine, and Claire's lips were going numb. With great care, she sank her fork into the thin sheet of Parmesan cheese that lay on top of her artichoke and avocado salad. The woman at the next table got up to answer a tiny cell phone she drew from her purse. The entire dining room took notice, their eyes on the leopardskin shorts and the legs that unfolded endlessly from beneath the table.
Troy nodded. "There's a good chance it could be. His early Vermeer forgeries were genre paintings, paintings of—"
"—the upper middle class's daily life," Claire interrupted, remembering what Dante had told her.
Troy shot her a curious look before continuing. "Like your painting, Van Meegeren's first forgeries were clearly based on other well- known works by Vermeer. But then he took a gamble. He knew that if it paid off he would not only get revenge against those critics who had rejected him, but that he would also become very, very rich."
Troy explained that art historians had long speculated that in his youth Vermeer might have spent some time painting in Italy. So Van Meegeren set out to create a Vermeer like no one had seen before— a religious Vermeer with Italian overtones.
"Ironically, twenty years later a religious painting that everyone had thought was Italian turned out t
o be a Vermeer. And it's nearly an exact copy of a painting by a Florentine artist. So does that make Vermeer a forger? The only difference between what Van Meegeren and Vermeer did is that Vermeer signed the imitation with his own name." Troy seemed completely alive, green eyes snapping, hands cutting through the air. Claire could tell he admired the forger's cleverness. "Now all Van Meegeren needed to do was to completely take in one critic—in this case a half-blind old guy in his eighties. Once he had reeled him in, the critic did all the work to convince the rest of the world. An unknown masterwork by Vermeer had been found—by his one and only connoisseur's eye. A Dutch museum bought it for an incredible sum, and hundreds of thousands of people lined up in the streets to see it. All this time, Van Meegeren was busy making more paintings while living the high life on the Riviera—and developing a taste for cocaine."
"So how do people know all this?" Claire asked. "Why aren't we still looking at his paintings and thinking, you know, thinking they are really Vermeers?" While she was still following what Troy said, it was getting harder to articulate her own thoughts.
"Because Van Meegeren got greedy and sold paintings to Hitler's general, GSring. Both Hitler and Goring were fanatical art collectors, but Goring had better taste. After the war, the Allies found a 'Vermeer' in Goring's castle and traced it back to Van Meegeren. Then they discovered he had sold other 'Vermeers' to Goring. He was arrested and charged with collaborating with the enemy by selling Dutch national treasures to the Nazis. After weeks in prison, he broke down and admitted that the paintings he had sold Giiring were not really Vermeers. In fact, he, Han Van Meegeren, had painted them."
"What happened then?" Claire's mind was whirling. Vermeers that were not Vermeers but that did end up having a little bit of truth in them.
"They laughed at him. Finally, to prove his point, he offered to create another 'Vermeer' right in front of their eyes. They brought canvas and paints to his cell, and he began to paint. When the authorities finally realized he was telling the truth, they dropped the collaboration charge."
"Did they let him go?" Claire became aware of Troy's knees grazing hers under the table.
"Are you kidding? Everyone was angry at being taken in by this bad painter with a drug habit. Instead they accused him of forgery. He died in prison. Just before he died, he told his daughter that there was another of his Vermeers that had never been discovered. I think he was talking about your painting. He could have sold it to Goring or another collector."
Claire tried to picture this, tried to see an embittered man creating the woman in her painting, not from love, but from a desire for revenge. Tried and failed. "But if that's true, then how did my Aunt Cady get it?"
"The art market during World War II was very, well, I guess the best word would be fluid. When there's a war on, things tend to get discarded or bartered or left behind. Your aunt could have run across the painting and picked it up. She might not even have known it was supposed to be a Vermeer."
"But what makes you think it's a Van Meegeren?" Claire still didn't understand why Troy was so certain.
"Four reasons." Troy spread out his fingers and began to tick them off. "One, my gut reaction to it as a forgery. Two, the complete lack of documentary evidence that Vermeer ever painted a painting that matches this description. Three, while your painting is a pastiche, it's a very accomplished one—just like the ones Van Meegeren did before he turned his hand to religious forgeries. And four, the time period in which it appeared—just when Han Van Meegeren was known to be churning out fakes."
The waiter had brought two slices of lemon meringue tart. Claire should have been full, but the sharp tartness of the lemon filling, enlivened by tiny pieces of zest, contrasted marvelously with the cloud of meringue. She ate every bite, then scraped her fork across the china to get a last lingering crumb of pie crust.
Troy had been watching her with a smile. "Would you like some of mine?" he asked, already turning his fork to cut off a piece for her. He leaned closer and slid the fork between her lips, then turned the fork aside, wiping his thumb across her upper hp to catch an errant crumb. His touch made her shiver. She wished she hadn't drunk so much. When she tried to think of Evan, his pale face seemed as insubstantial as a ghost's.
"You make a lot of noises when you eat," Troy observed.
"I do?" Claire felt her face begin to flush. God, she had drunk too much!
"These little moans of happiness. Don't worry, I like that in a woman. Someone who knows how to enjoy herself." He gave her a cat's sleepy smile, eyes half-closed.
Claire had had too much wine to keep her guard up, had even forgotten that she was supposed to be wary. Now she couldn't tell whether she still needed to be. Troy hadn't mentioned buying her painting at all. Was her painting really a Van Meegeren forgery? Thoughts formed and then slipped away.
She excused herself to go to the ladies' room. The walk down the long narrow room seemed endless, and her feet were so far away. Colors were brighter and bits of conversation floated past her. When she pushed open the door, she was surprised to see an old woman sitting in a plastic chair next to the sink, a basket of small white towels at her feet. Claire wasn't sure what protocol demanded of her, but her bladder was so full that she just gave the woman a swift smile and went into one of the stalls. With exaggerated care, she gathered up her dress and sat down. She pressed her fingers into her numb cheeks. How much had she had to drink tonight? There had been three bottles of wine—or was it four? Enough so that everything was slightly out of focus. She finished, flushed the toilet and went back out into the main part of the rest room.
"Am I supposed to tip you?" Claire had decided that she was no longer capable of pretending that she really lived this kind of life.
"Most people give me a dollar." The woman's voice had a trace of an accent, perhaps Russian, reminding Claire a little of the Ukrainian taxi driver who had picked her up at the airport—was that just two days ago? They regarded each other in the mirror. In her white-collared black polyester uniform, with her legs planted wide, the old woman presented a complete contrast to Claire. "You look like beautiful bride."
"Um, thank you." Claire fumbled for a dollar in the beaded purse she had also purchased at Filene's. She finally found one and exchanged it for a towel.
"I am half Gypsy. For another ten dollar I read your palm."
Claire wondered if the management knew about this money- making sideline. "I'm sorry, but I need to get back."
She was still holding the towel, uncertain of where to put it. The woman reached out, first taking and discarding the towel into another basket half hidden by her chair, and then grabbing Claire's palm and turning it over. Her fingers were surprisingly soft. Without even seeming to look at Claire's palm, she rattled off, "I see danger and opportunity, great wealth and true love. But only if you follow your heart."
Her heart? What was that supposed to mean? Claire felt that she had to give the woman something. She managed to find a five- dollar bill, dropped it into the woman's lap and left before she could demand more.
Troy was waiting for her just outside the door. He put his arm around her. She was grateful for the support. Unaccustomed to heels, her feet were having difficulty setting a straight course. In the car, he drew her to him without speaking and tried to kiss her. His mouth tasted of wine and lemon. Although desire washed over her like a wave, Claire put her hand on his chest.
"What about him?" she whispered. She imagined the driver's flat, acne-scarred face watching them in the mirror.
"Who? The driver? Forget about John." Troy took her hand, turned it over and kissed the palm. "He's there to drive. He's not paying any attention." He pulled her to him again, only this time she let him kiss her.
The car came to a stop, and outside the window, made dreamlike by the tinted glass, she recognized the outline of the Farthingale. "Can I come up to your room?" Troy murmured in her ear. Part of her could imagine them strolling through the lobby, hips bumping together, their arms ar
ound each other and the crowds parting before them. But the spell had been broken. She couldn't imagine them lying down together in her small room, couldn't even picture them on the elevator. And was it her he wanted—or just to be in the same room again with the painting? Claire shook her head. "I'm sorry, I just can't."
"Why not?" Troy's green eyes narrowed a bit. "Do you have a boyfriend?"
She nodded in agreement, but instead of picturing Evan, Claire found herself thinking of the painter she had met, Dante with his pirate's grin.
In her room, she went to her hiding place and pulled out the painting. The woman regarded her with her mysterious, serene expression. Who was she? A patchwork cribbed from other Vermeers, created by a failed painter fifty years before in the hopes of making a fortune? Or had Vermeer himself captured her image, magically creating an arrested moment of stillness in what must have been a chaotic household overrun with children?
The woman's face revealed nothing and everything. Whoever she was, Claire decided, she had been painted with passion.
She put the painting down and went into the bathroom, where she regarded herself in the full-length mirror. The lighting in here was bright and harsh, not really the kind meant to be softly reflected by satin. Her face held none of the inner stillness of the woman in the painting. Her eyes were wide, her lips a little swollen from kissing, her hair a wild halo half sprung from her pins. Still, part of her approved of this woman in the mirror, this other version of Claire Montrose. If nothing else, this trip to New York had revealed to her a new side of herself, a woman who could talk about art and turn a movie star's head and make her way around a city of seven million people on her own. She carefully removed the dress and hung it up, but she was too full of unexpelled energy to sleep. Finally she took Aunt Cady's diary from her suitcase and began to read.