“That’s my name,” she growled. “Paris. With one r. Like the city. Like the dead Greek guy. Paris Samille, if you want the whole enchilada. And if you ever—ever—call me either one, I’ll hurt you.”
Richard checked the time as he stood and picked up his jacket. He wasn’t an idiot, so he didn’t so much as smile. “All right,” he agreed. “I promise I’ll never call you anything you don’t like.” Before she could evade him, he bent and kissed her again.
“I’ll lay off,” he said softly. “For now. But when this divorce is final, I’ll be back.”
Sweeney didn’t say anything, just watched silently as he let himself out of the apartment. Was that a promise, or a threat? The decision was up to her, and she had no idea which it would be. The only thing she knew for certain was that when he kissed her, she had left safety far behind.
* * *
Sweeney picked up first one canvas and then another, trying to decide which she should take to the gallery. She didn’t like any of them, and the thought of anyone else seeing them embarrassed her. The bright colors looked childish to her, garish. Twice she started to call Candra and tell her she wouldn’t be bringing anything over after all, but both times she stopped herself. If what she was doing was crap, she needed to find out for certain now before she wasted any more time. She didn’t know what she would do if it was crap; therapy, maybe? If writers could have writer’s block, the equivalent had to be possible for artists.
She could just hear it now; a therapist would solemnly tell her she was trying to resolve her childhood issues by becoming a child again, seeing things through a child’s eyes. Uh-huh. She had resolved her childhood issues a long time ago. She had resolved never to be like her parents, never to use her talent as an excuse for selfish, juvenile behavior, never to have children and then shunt them aside while she pursued her art. Her mother advocated free love and went through a period of trying to “free” Sweeney from her inhibitions by openly making love with her various lovers in front of her young daughter. These days, she would have been arrested. She should have been then, too.
The wonder, Sweeney thought grimly, was that she had had the courage to paint at all, that she hadn’t gone into something like data processing or accounting, to get as far away from the art world as possible. But she had never considered not painting; it had been too much a part of her for as long as she could remember. As a little girl she had eschewed dolls, choosing colored pencils and sketch pads as her favorite toys. By the time she was six, she had been using oils, snitching the tubes from her mother whenever she could. She could lose herself in color for hours, stand enraptured staring not just at rainbows but at rain, seeing clouds as well as sky, individual blades of grass, the sheen of a ripe red apple.
No, there had never been any question about her talent, or her obsession. So she had tried to be the best artist she could, and at the same time to be normal. Okay, so she sometimes slipped and forgot to comb her hair, and sometimes when she was working, she forgot and shoved her hands through said hair, leaving bright streaks of paint behind. That was minor. She wasn’t promiscuous; she paid her bills on time; she didn’t do drugs even on a recreational basis; she didn’t smoke; she didn’t drink. There wasn’t a swag of beads anywhere in her apartment, and she was a regular June Cleaver in her personal life.
The most abnormal thing about her was that she saw ghosts, which really wasn’t so bad, was it? Like maybe a sixty-seven on a scale of one to ten.
Sweeney snorted. She could stand there and philosophize all day, or she could pack up some canvases and get them over to the gallery.
Because she had said she would, and because it didn’t matter which she chose, finally she just picked three at random. She thought they were all equally bad, so what difference did it make?
As an afterthought, she picked up the sketch she had done of the hot dog vendor. She was pleased with that, at least. She had just guessed at how he would have looked at six years of age, as a teenager, as a young man, but she had kept that same sweetness of expression in all the sketches in the collage. She hoped he would like it.
Her mind made up, she left the apartment before she could talk herself into dithering further. The rain the day before had left the air fresh and sweet; after a moment, surprised, Sweeney had to admit the weather forecast had been accurate: it was a beautiful day. That weird chill was gone, chased away by Richard’s body heat, and she felt warmer than she had in a long time. If it wasn’t for the anxiety that kept gnawing at her, she would have felt great. She decided to enjoy being warm and forget about how she had gotten that way.
The hot dog vendor wasn’t in his usual spot. Sweeney stopped, disappointed and unaccountably uneasy. As if she could will it into appearing, she stared at the location where the cart was usually parked. He must be sick, because she had never before walked down this street without seeing him.
Worried, she walked on to the gallery. Kai rose from his desk and came forward to take the wrapped canvases from her. “Great! Candra and I have been talking about you. I can’t wait to see what you’re doing now.”
“Neither can I,” Candra said, coming out of her office and smiling warmly at Sweeney. “Don’t look so worried. I don’t think you’re capable of doing a bad painting.”
“You’d be surprised what I can do,” Sweeney muttered.
“Oh, I don’t know,” drawled a thin, black-clad man with stringy blond hair, sauntering out of Candra’s office. “I don’t think you’ve surprised any of us in a long time, darling.”
Sweeney stifled a disgusted groan. VanDern. Just the person she least wanted to see.
“Leo, behave yourself,” Candra admonished, giving him a stern look.
At least, Sweeney thought, seeing VanDern chased away her anxiety. Hostility overrode anxiety any day of the week. Her eyes narrowed warningly as she looked at him.
Like her mother, he epitomized what she despised most, dramatizing himself by wearing black leather pants, black turtleneck, black Cossack boots. Instead of a belt, a hammered silver chain was draped around his skinny waist. He wore three studs in one ear and a hoop in the other. He was never clean-shaven, but cultivated the three-day-stubble look, expending more energy on appearing not to shave than he would have on shaving. She suspected he went months, certainly weeks, without washing his hair. He could go on for hours about symbolism and the hopelessness of modern society, about how man had raped the universe and how his single glob of paint on a canvas captured the pain and despair of all mankind. In his own opinion, he was as profound as the Dalai Lama. In hers, he was as profound as a turd.
Candra unwrapped the canvases and in silence set them on some empty easels. Sweeney deliberately didn’t look at them, though her stomach knotted.
“Wow,” Kai said softly. He had said the same thing about her red sweater the day before, but this time the tone was different.
Candra was silent, tilting her head a little as she studied the paintings.
VanDern stepped forward, glancing at the paintings and dismissing them with a sneer. “Trite,” he pronounced. “Landscapes. How original. I’ve never seen trees and water before.” He examined his nails. “I may faint from the excitement.”
“Leo,” Candra said in warning. She was still looking at the canvases.
“Don’t tell me you like this stuff,” he scoffed. “You can buy ‘pitchers’ like this in any discount store in the country. Oh, I know there’s a market for it, people who don’t know anything about art and just want something that’s ‘purty’ but let’s be honest, shall we?”
“By all means,” Sweeney said in a low, dangerous voice, stepping closer to him. Hearing that tone, Candra snapped her head around, but she was too late to preserve the peace. Sweeney poked VanDern in the middle of his sunken chest. “If we’re being honest, any monkey can throw a glob of paint on a canvas, and any idiot can call it art, but the fact is, it doesn’t take any talent to do either one. It takes talent and skill to reproduce an object so the observer actually re
cognizes it.”
He rolled his eyes. “What it takes, darling, is a total lack of imagination and interpretive skills to do the same old thing over and over again.”
He had underestimated his target. Sweeney had been raised in the art world and by the queen of sly, savage remarks. She gave him a sweet smile. “What it takes, darling”—her tone was an almost exact mimicry of his—”is a lot of gall to pass your kind of con off on the public. Of course, I guess you have to have something to offset your total lack of talent.”
“There’s no point in this,” Candra interjected, trying to pour oil on the waters.
“Oh, let her talk,” VanDern said, languidly waving a dismissive hand. “If she could do what I do, she would be doing it, making real money instead of peddling her stuff to the Wal-Mart crowd.”
Candra stiffened. Her gallery was her pride, and she resented the implication that her clientele was anything but the crème de la crème.
“I can do what you do,” Sweeney said, lifting her eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. “But I outgrew it somewhere around the age of three. Would you like to make a small bet? I bet I can duplicate any of your works you choose, but you can’t duplicate any of mine, and the loser has to kiss the winner’s ass.”
A low rumble sounded in Kai’s throat. He turned his head, pretending to cough.
VanDern gave him a furious look, then turned his attention back to Sweeney. “How childish,” he sneered.
“Afraid to take the bet, huh?” she said.
“Of course not!”
“Then do it. I tell you what: I won’t limit you to just my work. Pick a classic; duplicate a Whistler, a Monet, a van Gogh. I’m sure they would be worthy of your great talent.”
His cheeks turned a dull red. He glared at her, unable to win the argument and equally unable to think of a graceful way of getting out of the bet. He glanced at Candra. “I’ll come back later,” he said stiffly, “when you have more time.”
“Do that,” she said, her tone clipped. Her annoyance was obvious. When the doors closed behind him, she turned to Sweeney. “I’m sorry. He can be an arrogant jerk sometimes.”
“Without straining,” Sweeney agreed.
Candra smiled. “You more than held your own. He’ll think twice before he challenges you again. He’s hot right now, but fads pass, and I’m sure he knows his day in the sun won’t last very long.”
In Sweeney’s opinion, VanDern thought he was the center of the universe, but she shrugged and let the subject drop.
Candra returned her attention to the paintings, tapping one elegant nail on her bottom lip as she considered them. Sweeney’s stomach knotted again.
“They’re almost surreal,” Candra murmured, talking to herself. “Your use of color is striking. Several shades seem to glow, like light coming through stained glass. A river, a mountain, flowers, but not like any you’ve done before.”
Sweeney was silent. She had spent hours, days, staring worriedly at those canvases; she knew every brushstroke on them. But she looked at them again, wondering what she had missed, and saw that nothing had changed. The colors still looked strangely intense, the composition was a little off in some way she couldn’t explain, the brushstrokes were a touch blurred. She couldn’t tell if it was surreal, as Candra said, or exuberant. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
“I want more,” Candra said. “If this is an example of what you’ve been doing, I want every canvas you’ve completed. I’m doubling your prices. I may have to come down in price, but I think I’m judging it right.”
Kai nodded in agreement. “There’s energy here, a lot more than I’ve ever seen in your work. People will go nuts over these.”
Sweeney dismissed the bit about energy; that was just a buzzword. His last statement was more honest, an assessment of their marketability. Relief swamped her. Maybe she hadn’t lost her talent, just her ability to judge it.
“What’s that?” Candra said, indicating the folder holding the sketch of the hot dog vendor.
“A sketch I made of a street vendor,” Sweeney said. “I want to give it to him.” She shivered suddenly, a chill roughening her skin. Damn it, she had been enjoying feeling warm, but the warmth hadn’t lasted long.
“I’ll have these framed immediately,” Candra said, turning back to the paintings. “And bring the others. I’d like to make a full display of them, place them close to the front so the light is better and they’re the first thing clients see when they come in. I promise, these are going to fly out the door.”
* * *
Walking back home, Sweeney hugged herself against the cold. She was relieved at Candra’s reaction to the paintings, but for some reason she couldn’t enjoy her relief. The uneasy feeling was growing stronger.
She reached the corner where the old vendor had always been, but it was still empty. She stopped, a great sadness welling in her as she wondered if she would ever see him again. She wanted to give him the sketch, wanted to know if she had accurately deduced his childhood features from the facial structure of an old man. She wanted to see that sweet smile.
“Hi, Sweeney,” said a soft voice at her elbow.
She looked around, and delight speared through her. “There you are,” she said joyfully. “I thought you must be sick—” She halted, shock replacing delight. He was faintly translucent, oddly two-dimensional.
He shook his head. “I’m all right. Don’t be worryin’ about me.” The sweet smile bloomed in his dark face. “You got it right, Sweeney. That’s just how I used to look.”
She didn’t say anything else. She couldn’t. She wanted to weep, she wanted to say she was sorry she hadn’t gotten it right sooner, so she could have given him the sketch.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Send it to my boys. David and Jacob Stokes. They’re lawyers, my boys, both of them. Fine men. Send it to them.”
“I will,” she whispered, and he nodded.
“Go on now,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I just had some loose ends needed takin’ care of.”
“I’ll miss you,” she managed to say. She was aware of people giving her a wide berth, but they were New Yorkers; no one stopped, or even slowed.
“I’ll miss you, too. You always brought the sunshine with you. Smile now, and let me see how pretty you are. My, my, your eyes are as blue as heaven. That’s a mighty nice sight...”
His voice became gradually fainter, as if he were walking away from her. Sweeney watched him fade, becoming more and more transparent until there was nothing left except a faint glow where he had stood.
The chill was gone. She felt warm again, but frightened and sad. She wanted to be held the way Richard had held her that morning, but he wasn’t here, and he wasn’t hers. She didn’t have him. She was alone, and for the first time in her life she didn’t like it.
CHAPTER
SIX
Candra took the early shuttle from New York to D.C. the next morning. The capital suited her purposes better, so she didn’t mind the inconvenience. For one, seeing him in D.C. was easier than seeing him in New York, where he was seldom in his office. She would have had to either go to his house or call him there for an outside meeting, and she preferred not to.
Perhaps Margo knew about her affair with the senator, but perhaps not. Despite her own stupidity in telling Richard about the abortion when she should have kept her mouth shut, Candra didn’t believe in unnecessarily hurting or humiliating anyone. Margo might not care how many women Carson banged, but she definitely wouldn’t want him banging them in her house. Knowing what she knew about him, Candra wouldn’t be surprised if he insisted on having sex right there in the office, before he even knew why she was there. She smiled thinly, humorlessly. First he would fuck her, then she would fuck him; she thought that was fair.
She had taken extra pains with her appearance that morning, not to attract attention but to avoid it. On went the black business suit, the staid black pumps with one-and-a-half-inch heels. Her earrings were plain gold hoops; she left off
all rings and exchanged her wafer-thin, impossibly elegant Piaget wristwatch for an old Rolex, one her father had given her when she was sixteen. She doubted it had cost more than a couple of thousand. A Rolex wouldn’t stand out in the capital, where status was everything and Rolexes were as common as embassy plates.
She brushed her hair more severely and toned down her makeup. She wouldn’t stand out; she would look like thousands of businesswomen or lobbyists. She didn’t want to be memorable, should anyone see her. It was, perhaps, a foolish precaution on her part, but then she had never before blackmailed anyone and she thought some discretion was needed.
Today was Margo’s regular day at Elizabeth Arden; since the trip to Rome had been postponed, she would go about her normal routine, and Margo was a fanatic about pampering her looks. With Margo safely in New York, Candra didn’t worry that Carson had told her to come to his town house in the capital. Doing so actually suited her better, because she wouldn’t have enjoyed the crassness, the utter distastefulness, of being screwed on an office desk with a troop of aides just outside the door.
At the airport, she hailed a taxi and sat quietly in the backseat, not encouraging the driver’s occasional attempts at conversation. To her surprise, she felt the beginning flutters of excitement and anticipation she normally felt when she knew she was going to have sex. Until now her mind had been completely on what she would say afterward, but now she began to think about the act itself. Carson had little technique but a lot of vigor, and sometimes, when she was feeling a little nasty, that was just what she wanted.
He had to be in his office at ten-thirty. She would have an hour with him. That would be sufficient.
Carson met her at the door himself, smiling and saying all the inane social things in case anyone was listening. He had staff here, of course, at least a cook and a housekeeper. He was very good looking, Candra thought, smiling up into that almost classical face. How odd that she actually preferred Richard’s more rugged looks. Richard was one of those men who was so overtly male a woman couldn’t help looking at him. She gave herself a small mental shake; she had to stop thinking about him, because she had lost him. That part of her life was over, and she had to make a success of this new chapter or lose everything.