Faking It

  “And how do you feel about that, Ethan?” Gwen said, exasperated with them both.

  Ethan shrugged. “It’s summer.”

  No, it isn’t, Gwen thought, It’s Nadine.

  “You look tired, Grandma,” Nadine said. “Go to bed. Ethan and I will take care of everything down here.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Gwen said and then someone banged on the street door to the gallery. “Who could that be? It’s after midnight.”

  “Want me to get it?” Ethan said.

  “No.” Gwen went toward the door. “You stay here and clean.”

  When she lifted the shade on the street door, Mason was standing there. “Hey, we’re closed,” she said, opening the door for him.

  “Thought you might be able to spare another drink,” Mason said, a little sheepishly, as he came in.

  “Hello, Mr. Phipps,” Nadine said politely, when they came into the office. “Come on, Ethan, let’s do the gallery.” She picked up the sweeper and went into the gallery, Ethan following her with a trash bag and a pained expression.

  “Cute kids,” Mason said, while Gwen got out the orange juice and vodka.

  “Good kids,” Gwen said, failing to see how anybody could call either Nadine or Ethan cute. She glanced through the glass into the gallery. Nadine was attacking the floors with the sweeper while Ethan gathered up miscellaneous cups and plates, keeping one eye on Nadine’s rear end. Maybe it was time to send Ethan home.

  “I thought maybe,” Mason began and hesitated. “I don’t want to go home to Clea tonight, Gwen,” he blurted finally. “Let me stay with you.”

  “Oh,” Gwen said.

  “I don’t want to rush you,” Mason said, moving closer. “I know you’re tired.”

  Oh, good, I look tired. Gwen stood up. “You’re a very generous man, Mason.”

  “I’m not generous,” Mason said. “I get a lot, too. It’s lonely back at the house.”

  Gwen thought, I know. It’s lonely where I am, too. And sooner or later... “Would you like to see my apartment?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said solemnly. “I would like to very much.”

  “Great,” she said and stood up. “It’s this way.”

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  THE BASEMENT ROOM was big when Tilda turned on the light. Davy saw three walls lined with expensive-looking metal cabinets and the fourth with shelves full of tools and equipment, some of it standard artist’s supplies but a lot of it unfamiliar. The whole place was white, just like everything else in the basement.

  Tilda pulled out a bentwood side chair that had seen better days, and said, “Sit,” and Davy sat, facing the longest wall of cabinets. She opened the first cabinet and pulled out a painting, cornfields under a heavily painted, swirling blue sky.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said.

  “A van Gogh?” Davy said, not caring. “You have great legs.”

  “A Goodnight,” Tilda said. “My great-grandpa painted it. Of course, he signed it van Gogh.”

  Davy squinted at it. “Why didn’t Great-grandpa sell it?”

  “Because it was lousy,” Tilda said and began to open more cabinets, her body moving under the slippery fabric of her dress. Davy watched as she pulled out painting after painting, her body tensing with each canvas until she had dozens of them propped against the walls and lying at her feet, and he wanted her so much he was dizzy with it.

  “All Goodnights,” she said, looking at them. “They’ve been down here for decades, in the family for centuries. Our great secret. We should burn them, but we can’t. They’re history. They’re part of us.”

  “Burn them?” Davy said, not caring. “Why didn’t you sell them?”

  Tilda put her hands on her hips and looked at him sternly, which made him stop thinking about the paintings entirely. “They’re forgeries. That’s illegal.”

  “Really, Scarlet?” Davy said. “Come here and tell me about it.”

  “Okay, because most of them are really bad,” Tilda said, dropping her hands. “And because some of them were intended for future generations. We pass them down.”

  “Why?” Davy said, trying to gauge how much longer he had to talk to her before he could get that dress off.

  “I told you,” Tilda said, “the hardest forgeries to break are the contemporaries, the ones painted during the time the real artist worked. Science can’t touch them. So every generation of Goodnights paints for the next generation.”

  “Because once the artist is dead, nobody can tell,” Davy said, gaining new respect for the Goodnights. “How many of these do you have?” A small part of him was interested from a purely financial point, but most of him was praying she wasn’t going to make him look at all of them. It would take hours and there was very little blood left in his brain.

  “Over two hundred if you include the drawings and prints,” Tilda said. “We have some that go all the way back to Antonio Giordano, who is supposed to be the first of us. We switched to Goodnight when we came to America.”

  “To fit in?”

  “To cover up the fact that we were related to my great-uncle Paolo Giordano,” Tilda said. “He sold a Leonardo off the wall and got caught.”

  “Off the wall,” Davy said, interested in spite of his lack of blood. “He just pointed to it and said—”

  “No,” Tilda said. “He lined up a client and said, ‘I’ll steal the Leonardo for you.’ And he did. And he told the client he was painting a copy for the police to find so that they’d stop looking for it and they’d all be safe.”

  “Who got the copy?” Davy said.

  “The client,” Tilda said. “Well, clients. He told the same story to four different collectors. My great-uncle would never keep a national treasure. Borrow, yes, steal, no. And the clients deserved it because they were stealing a national treasure. Greed.”

  “Classic con,” Davy said. “As long as the mark is crooked, he can’t go to the cops. Come over here and discuss this with me.”

  “And if he’s crooked, he deserved to be taken,” Tilda said. “I know this part. My dad used to drill it into me.” She went over to the last of the cabinets and pulled out another painting.

  “What if they buy it because they like it?” Davy said, wishing she’d come back to him.

  “Then they’re getting what they paid for, aren’t they?” Tilda said, turning the painting so he could see it. It was of a woman with protruding eyes hovering over a well-fed mother and her disturbing-looking baby. “This is our prize, a Durer Saint Anne,” she said. “A Goodnight Durer, of course, but still.”

  “Okay,” Davy said.

  “Antonio painted it in 1553,” Tilda said. “But it wasn’t his usual good work, so the family kept it. For four hundred years. If it was good and we sold this as a Durer, analysis of the paint and canvas would show that it was real. It would go for millions at auction, and nobody would ever catch on.”

  “But it’s bad?” Davy said, tilting his head to look at it. “It looks okay to me. Old.”

  “It’s not bad,” Tilda said, “but it’s not good enough. There are half a dozen paintings down here, any one of which would solve all our problems if we could sell it. But we can’t.”

  “Your morals do you justice,” Davy said. “Give them a vacation and come upstairs with me.”

  “It’s not my morals,” Tilda said. “We can’t afford to get caught. Nobody has ever tied the Goodnights to fraud, if you don’t count Great-uncle Paolo. If a fake turns up, everybody starts looking at everything they’ve ever bought from us. And we can’t afford to give decades of dissatisfied customers their money back.” She put the Durer back. “And I’m not good enough to stonewall them on it. I’m just not the wheeler-dealer my dad was. The guilt...” She shook her head. “I get upset. So this stuff stays down here, and it drives me crazy. I’d burn it all if I could, I really would, but I can’t. My family made these.” She picked up another canvas to put it back. “And a lot of them are good. They’re not good forgeries, b
ut they’re good paintings. They should be on people’s walls.”

  “Sell them as fakes.”

  “Right,” Tilda said. “Nobody will notice that.” She bent over to slide another painting away.

  “You have a great butt,” Davy said.

  She straightened, and he waited for her to snap at him.

  “Thank you,” she said, and picked up another painting. “But I also have this problem here.”

  “Sell them,” Davy said again, waiting for her to bend over again. “Publicize the sale as all the paintings that Goodnights bought thinking they were real and then couldn’t sell when they found out they were fakes. That’s why there are so many of them, because the Goodnights are such honest dealers.” He looked around at the riot of color.

  “Yeah,” Tilda said. “I could bring that off. Because honesty is so easy to fake.”

  She looked down at the forgeries, so much pain on her face that Davy forgot he wanted her. “Okay, there’s something else going on here. This is the thing that got you last night, isn’t it? I’m not getting why this is so awful, or how the Scarlets fit into it.”

  “What?” Tilda looked up from the Durer. “Oh. They don’t. I wasn’t trained to paint the Scarlets, I was trained for this.”

  Davy shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “My dad trained me as a classical painter,” Tilda said. “The same way his dad trained him and his dad before that. But then one day Dad showed up with a Homer Hodge and said, ‘Paint like this,’ and they were so simple that—” She broke off. “I painted six of them and left.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “Why did you leave?” Davy said.

  Tilda bit her lip. “It was a bad time,” she said offhand, but her voice shook a little. “I was a kid. It doesn’t matter. Long time ago, all over now.” She started to put the paintings away.

  “How old a kid?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Davy straightened. “What the hell happened?”

  “You know, it really isn’t—”

  “Tilda, stop lying and tell me.”

  Tilda pressed her lips together in a caricature of a smile. “I wasn’t lying. It doesn’t matter. Eve and Andrew found out they were pregnant, that’s all. He was my best friend, we were the way Nadine and Ethan are now, but he was Eve’s friend, too, and she was so beautiful, and he took her to the prom, and...” She waved her hand. “No big deal.”

  “That’s why you left?” Davy said back. “No. It’s something else. What happened with your dad?”

  Tilda turned her back on him and put another painting in the cabinet.

  “We’re not going upstairs until you tell me,” Davy said. “Spill it.”

  “It wasn’t anything,” Tilda said. “We found out Nadine was on the way, and I came down here to work on the last Scarlet.” She forged a smile for him. “The one you scammed from Colby. The dancers.”

  “The lovers,” Davy said.

  Her smile disappeared and she nodded. “I was working on it, down here, crying, and Dad came in and said...” She swallowed. “He said, ‘When will you learn you were born to paint and not to love?’”

  “I hate your father,” Davy said, rage slicing through him.

  “No,” Tilda said. “He was trying to ... make me see my destiny. And, really, he was pretty much right. I mean, I’ve been loved. Scott loved me.”

  Davy felt that spurt of jealousy again.

  “But Dad was right,” Tilda went on, trying to smile. “I was happier painting than I was with people. I loved painting the furniture and the Scarlets, even the forgeries I was doing were more interesting than people. I just...” She sighed. “I just really loved Andrew. And I loved Eve. There weren’t any bad guys. It just didn’t work out for me, I’m just not... But I didn’t want to hear it then.”

  She gave Davy a wobbly smile. “My dad had really bad timing.”

  “He was an exploitive son of a bitch,” Davy said.

  Tilda took a deep breath. “So I scrubbed the paintbrush through the faces in the painting and threw it at him and walked out. I took the bus to Cincinnati, and found a job waitressing there and let Eve know, and she told Gwennie, and Gwennie sent money, every week, and never told Dad where I was, and it turned out okay. I’d graduated from high school the year before because he’d had me test out of a bunch of stuff so I could paint, and that meant I could work if I lied about my age. Eventually he found out and called and yelled and disowned me, but by then, the scary part of being on my own was over.” Tilda’s face eased a little. “And one day, the guy who owned the restaurant was talking about fixing up the place, and I said, ‘I can paint a mural for you,’ and I did, and one of the people who came into the restaurant saw it and wanted one, and the mural business just sort of evolved. And there I was, painting forgeries for a living just like all the other Goodnights.” She looked down at the paintings at her feet “Just like my dad said I would. He was right.”

  “He was wrong,” Davy said grimly.

  “The bad thing,” Tilda swallowed. “The bad thing was that the Scarlets ... were... the way ...” She swallowed again. “The way I really paint. So when he sold them, I couldn’t paint that way anymore unless I was Scarlet for him, so I couldn’t paint.”

  “How could he do that?” Davy said. “He was an artist. He knew what that meant. How could he do that to his own kid?”

  Tilda took a deep breath. “He wasn’t an artist.”

  “What?”

  “He was a terrible painter.” She leaned against the cabinets and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet, collapsing there like a rag doll in her pretty, silky dress, looking so tired Davy ached for her. “You can learn all the craft you want,” she said. “But if you’re not born with a sense of light and color and line and mass, you cannot paint. And he couldn’t paint. He was a great teacher, but he couldn’t... It was like being born tone-deaf in a family of musicians.” Her face crumpled. “Eve couldn’t paint, either, he tried to teach her but she couldn’t. But I could.”

  I can’t stand this, Davy thought and went over to sit beside her.

  “I could paint before I could write my name,” Tilda said as he put his arm around her. “I loved everything he taught me.” She sniffed, trying to hold back tears, and he tightened his hold on her. “I think he resented me for it. He loved Eve so much, but he couldn’t... I couldn’t... I didn’t get it. I thought if I just painted better, he’d love me more. I didn’t get it that he ... So I tried harder and harder and got better and better and he—”

  “Oh, God, Tilda.” Davy held her close. “I’m so sorry. And I really hate your father.”

  “No,” Tilda said into his shirt. “He did his best. And I got out. I walked away. I just didn’t get to take Scarlet with me.” She lifted her head. “Do you know that he wanted me to sign them as James? James Hodge, Homer’s boy. I was the one who named me Scarlet. I signed them Scarlet.”

  “Good for you,” Davy said, holding her tighter.

  “No,” Tilda said, her pale eyes swimming as she looked at him. “Good for you. He sold them, but you got every damn one of them back for me. Every damn one.”

  “Oh, honey,” he said and kissed her, feeling her tears on his face, and then he held her tight as she wiped her face on his shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I look like hell when I’m soggy.”

  “Yeah, that’s an issue now,” Davy said, still holding her. “Christ, Tilda.” He looked around at the Goodnight forgeries and suddenly they looked like bodies to him. “We have to get rid of this stuff.”

  “I can’t,” she said tiredly. “I want to, so much, but I can’t even talk to you about them without sobbing all over you. Imagine me trying to—”

  “I can,” Davy said grimly. “And you’re getting out of this damn basement, too.”

  “It’s a good studio,” Tilda said.

  “It’s the pit of hell,” Davy said. “I don’t care how white you paint this place, there
’s blood on the walls. We’re moving your stuff up to the attic. Tonight. There’s plenty of room up there. You can paint in the sunlight tomorrow.”

  “He wasn’t a bad man,” Tilda said. “He—”

  “Right. He just couldn’t paint. Fuck him.” Davy let go of her and pushed himself off the floor. Then he held out his hand to her and hauled her to her feet. “What stuff do you need from down here?”

  “Davy, I don’t—”

  “Upstairs, Matilda,” he said. “All of it. I can’t beat up your father because the son of a bitch died on me, but I can get you out of this basement. Pack.”

  He started shoving Goodnight forgeries back into their crypts, and Tilda said, “Did you mean it?”

  “Mean what?” he said, giving a van Gogh a shove.

  “That you could sell them.”

  “I can sell anything,” he said. “But I don’t want to touch this stuff. I’m thinking we consign it to an auction house.”

  “I had thought of that,” Tilda said. “People collect forgeries. We could do it anonymously. But somebody will find out and ask about them. Somebody always finds out, and then I’d—”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Davy slammed another painting into a cupboard. “Pack.” When he didn’t hear her move, he turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing there in misery. “I didn’t mean to unload all of this angst on you. I didn’t mean to be so ...” She waved her hand. “Melodramatic. Drama queen.” She tried to laugh. “You must hate weepy women.”

  “Yeah, I do.” Davy walked over to her and put his arms around her and held her tight. “But not you, Scarlet.” He kissed the top of her head. “You can do anything you want, and I’ll still love you.” She went still in his arms, and he said, “I know. I can’t believe I said it, either.”

  “You can take it back,” she said into his shirt. “It’s just because I cried all over you, and you’re feeling sorry for me.”