Picture This

by Tobsha Learner

  ‘Oh, there was plenty.’ Just then Latisha noticed the locket dangling around Susie’s neck, the ruby catching the light. ‘That from Felix Baum?’

  Susie nodded.

  ‘He gave Maxine the very same pendant, only a week before she died. He’s particular that way, Maxine used to tell me. He likes to control everything… ’

  Just then another nurse appeared in the doorway and informed them that visiting hours were now over. Susie stood reluctantly.

  ‘Here’s my number, ring me when you’re ready. I’ll have my driver take you home, then you can show me all you know.’

  Latisha closed her eyes. There was still a space inside where she knew she’d been living for the past ten days. Maybe it had been with Jesus, maybe not. To her dismay, she couldn’t remember. ‘You realise I’m going to finish this for Maxine. Whatever you decide to do, I’m going to see that someone pays for her death.’

  *

  The mask felt smooth between Felix’s fingers; red cast plastic, he guessed, wondering how Susie’s people had accessed such an accurate portrait of Lincoln. He pressed it up against his face. He hadn’t seen Susie for a few days; she’d been avoiding his calls. He’d heard through Dustin that both Susie and her team had been working nonstop to coordinate and complete the other photographs, so he’d assumed it was simply that she had become consumed by the work. He wasn’t worried; he knew Susie had agreed to attend his client Felicity Kocak’s party in the Hamptons, and that was only a week away. He could wait another seven days.

  As for Latisha Johnson, she appeared to have stopped harassing both himself and Gabriel since falling into a coma, and the ghost, after-image or whatever had also disappeared. It felt safer – his life had resumed a recognisable shape. All he had to do now was to wait for Susie to finish her work and for the gallery to open. Everything else was in place: the sale of the next Hopper, the new show for Baum #1, the works requested by his new Russian client. Being Felix Baum was good again.

  He rested the mask against the wall, at the foot of the blank space in which he intended to hang his print of the Triumph of Pan edition once it was available. The mask would serve as his provenance; it would be the joker in the pack.

  *

  Latisha sat at the edge of the hospital bed, dressed, but a little disorientated in her old clothes; they felt loose and alien, as if she’d slid into someone else’s skin. She glanced around the hospital room. Her bag was packed, and the nurse had made sure there was a good supply of insulin within, as well as some new toiletries for her to take home. They had banned her from smoking her pipe, but one of the nurses she’d befriended had snuck some pipe tobacco in, and that too was waiting for her the moment she stepped outside the building. Now she just had to make a decision. Just then she felt the cool soft imprint of an invisible hand slipping into her own, pulling her toward the window. She let the ghost guide her.

  Looking down, she had a clear view of the entrance of the hospital. The distinctive gait of a man crossing the road toward the hospital caught her attention. Felix Baum walking determinedly toward the entrance.

  Panicked, Latisha swung back round, grabbed her bag and coat and stepped into the corridor. To her relief there was only one nurse in sight, walking away from her. Unseen, she ducked into a supply cupboard next to her room.

  Minutes later, she overhead Felix asking a nurse for directions to her room. Standing in the dark, she held her breath as she heard the click of the door, then through the wall the muffled thumps of his footsteps as he searched the room for her. Moments later the door clicked again as he exited.

  *

  Felix stood in the corridor, befuddled. The reception desk had told him the Latisha woman was still in the building, but from her room it looked as if she had already been discharged. He cornered a passing nurse.

  ‘Excuse me, can you tell me whether Latisha Johnson is still here?’

  The nurse, a young Latina carrying a tray of equipment, stopped reluctantly. ‘If she’s not in her room she’s left already. She was due to be discharged today anyhow.’

  ‘In that case do you have an address for her?’

  ‘Not unless you’re an immediate relative, which I’m guessing you’re not.’

  ‘No, but I have important business to discuss with her… ’

  ‘Can’t help you, mister. We have a strict policy on giving out personal information. Now if you excuse me, I have a patient to attend to.’

  Inside the supply cupboard Latisha exhaled in relief as she heard Felix’s footsteps recede into the distance.

  *

  Latisha carried the box over to Susie, cradling it like a child. She was reluctant to hand it over; it felt like surrendering her memory of her time with Maxine, the exclusivity of it.

  The first thing Susie pulled out was the photocopy of Girl in a Yellow Square of Light. The yellow patch of light on the floor had been encircled, with a question mark in the centre. Gabriel Bandini’s address and phone number were scrawled over the top.

  ‘I went to his place,’ Latisha explained. ‘I think he’s working with Felix, making the Hoppers. There was old pigment, old gesso, old paintbrushes and them blank sheets of paper I sent you – dozens of them hidden under the bed. Lord knows what he needed them for.’

  ‘The provenance,’ Susie informed her. ‘But I’ve never heard Felix mention anyone called Gabriel, and he’s definitely not one of his artists.’

  ‘He keeps him hidden, like he keeps parts of himself hidden. Even Maxine knew that,’ Latisha replied. ‘Didn’t stop her from falling in love with him,’ she added ruefully.

  ‘He’s dangerous and dangerous is exciting: reminds you why you’re alive. Besides, we all compartmentalise, in one way or another. And he’s one of the most talented people in my world.’

  ‘Some of us have enough danger just making a living and putting food on the table,’ Latisha snapped back, wondering what she could do to make the woman wake up to the evil of the man. She looked back inside the box, and spotted a photo at the bottom. ‘Maxine was lost. See how lost she is here.’ She held the photo up.

  It was an image Susie recognised immediately: Maxine and Felix on Felix’s balcony, mugging for the camera in crazy hats, a half-eaten meal in front of them. It was almost exactly the same setting and atmosphere she’d experienced at Felix’s apartment the first night she’d slept there. It was as if he’d duplicated the whole event – only with a different woman.

  ‘And here’s the pendant.’ Latisha drew the chain and pendant out of the box; it had exactly the same small ruby set into a rose-gold Celtic cross. ‘The only reason I can think that she wasn’t wearing it when she died is that they’d had a quarrel, and she’d taken it off.’

  Susie stared down at the pendant, trying to assimilate all the information at once. The psychology of a man who needed to seduce two very similar women – both English, both artists – with exactly the same gestures, marking them with the same jewellery, perhaps even taking them to the same places, possibly playing the same humorous maverick role? Why, what was he after? What could Maxine and she give him in return? Art? He had that anyway, so why go to so much trouble? A sudden nausea swept through her, distracting her.

  Noticing the change in her expression, Latisha put her hand on Susie’s arm. ‘You okay? You need a bucket or something?’

  Susie took a couple of deep breaths. ‘It’ll pass.’

  Sighing, Latisha got up heavily and put a kettle on her gas ring.

  ‘How far gone are you?’

  Startled, Susie crossed her arms over her stomach. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘No. Four, five weeks, I’m reckoning.’

  ‘I’m not going to keep it.’

  Latisha waited until the water had boiled, filled the coffee pot, then carried it over to the table. She studied the artist’s face. ‘How old are you?’ She had difficulty telling how old some white women were; sometimes they appeared much younger, sometimes much older. She found it even harder with red
heads.

  ‘Thirty-eight. I never planned to be a mother, it’s an alien concept to me.’ Susie didn’t like exposing herself this way, yet Latisha had a way of pulling out the truth.

  ‘Big logical complicated words for a simple truth.’ Latisha laughed, pouring out two cups of hot liquid, putting one in front of her. ‘Chicory. Good for nausea. A 38-year-old woman with more money than she knows what to do with. You’ll keep the child. She’ll be a daughter to you.’

  ‘How do you know it will be a girl?’

  ‘Symmetry of nature. So you going to help me prove the truth about Felix Baum or not?’

  Susie sipped the chicory drink. It was bitter but it pushed the nausea back down. She pulled the image of the Hopper towards her. ‘First thing we need to do is get hold of some of the letters Felix claims are the provenance for the painting and compare the ink and paper to the blank sheets you found.’

  ‘We also need to study the painting again. And I mean real close, with a magnifying glass at both the front and back of the canvas. That’s going to be difficult. I’ve already been there once. I think the guy who let me in would be suspicious if I ask to see the painting again.’ Latisha went on: ‘But when we’ve got possible evidence, I know exactly the right scientist who will prove the forgery.’

  ‘Don’t worry; I can get us access to the painting. And I think I might know of a way I can get hold of a piece of the provenance.’

  ‘You’ll have to keep that Felix Baum on the hook. Don’t make him suspicious by rejecting him. Think you can do that without falling in love?’ Latisha asked.

  It was a question that made Susie avert her eyes.

  *

  Much later, after Latisha had left, Susie stripped all her clothes off and placed the pendant around her neck, and with the use of a full-length mirror photographed herself naked. It was a way of distancing herself from the woman who had been falling in love with Felix and becoming instead this new creature. A creature fuelled by an emotion far darker and more complex.

  Chapter Twenty

  Gabriel was searching for a theme for the next Hopper. He’d taken his usual thinking route, finding the rhythm of the pavement and the stimulus of the faces and figures walking by both soothing and inspiring. But Hopper was not a painter of real people; his women were really ciphers, a metaphor for the one inherently inaccessible young blonde woman, emotionally detached, intellectually aloof. Or so Gabriel had concluded. He’d read every biography on the artist available to get into his psyche; used Jo Hopper’s diaries to help compose some of the false provenance of his forgeries; studied the various theories on the complexities of the artist’s marriage. He was fascinated by the fact that their courtship hadn’t started until they were in their early forties, decades after they’d first met at art school. At the high point of her own success as a painter, Jo Nivison had facilitated Edward Hopper’s career greatly, first by introducing him to watercolours (up until then he’d been struggling as a graphic artist in advertising, with little acclaim for his own painting), and then by persuading the curator of the Brooklyn Museum to include a few of his watercolours in a group show she herself was being shown in. That show, in 1923, turned out to be the pivotal point in Edward Hopper’s career – the springboard for a stellar rise to fame. By 1935 he was a household name.

  Gabriel was also fascinated by George Bellows, Hopper’s fellow student and peer, and in some ways the nemesis of his early and failing career. Bellows died unexpectedly of appendicitis in 1925, clearing the way for Hopper to become the figurehead for the new American aesthetic. Fate and the way it shaped a career obsessed Gabriel; he saw his own trajectory in this, and in Jo Hopper’s sacrifice. Gabriel knew she’d insisted on posing as the model for all Hopper’s female figures, dressing up to throw herself into the role. He thought it unnatural, controlling, and he’d used this emotion to try to place himself into the frigid psyche of Edward Hopper himself, imagining his anger, his frustration. His relationship with Felix helped; the way the gallery director played him, giving him just enough sexual and emotional involvement to keep him on the hook, but never enough to make him truly believe he loved him; a netherworld of emotional ambiguity, which was both painful and erotic. Sometimes Gabriel’s own perversity depressed the hell out of him, but he’d never known another way of loving a man.

  Early that evening, knowing Felix was at an event in the Hamptons with Susie Thomas, Gabriel, restless and unable to face another evening alone in his apartment, torturing himself with thoughts of Felix, had decided to seek out a new scenario, something the younger Hopper might have painted: a flat streetscape, perhaps, with one or two of his usual protagonists: a streetwalker, a middle-aged woman in a hat, the facade of an upper midtown apartment block. Felix had instructed him that he wanted a companion piece for Girl in a Yellow Square of Light, supposedly painted around the same time.

  It should be an interior, but Gabriel liked the idea of an exterior – a view into an apartment with some domestic drama occurring inside, framed by a window. So, armed with his camera, he’d ventured to the backstreets of midtown in search of 19th-century apartment blocks with old-fashioned fire escapes.

  It was a warm night with no breeze, a sultry precursor to the summer; the faint scent of brewing coffee and various foods drifted out of the back doors of restaurants, while air conditioner units dripped water onto the pavements below. Although he knew he’d fallen victim to the habit of solitude, Gabriel couldn’t help liking this feeling of anonymity, of being an invisible voyeur, spying on other people’s lives. Sometimes he wondered whether this was what an artist should be: a silent, undetectable observer, a consumer of other people’s memories, of visual impressions immortalised in a series of stills. Why shouldn’t this be enough commentary to give the world? It should be, he concluded, angry again at how, in the contemporary art world, this was no longer enough. These days it wouldn’t be considered clever or ironic or conceptually convoluted enough to sell or make an impression.

  He walked past a window at street level behind which a couple were arguing. The man, his dark forehead beaded with sweat, was gesturing wildly, punching at the air as if he were fighting a swarm of invisible bees, while his wife stood at the kitchen sink stacking pots and pans in sullen protest.

  In an apartment on the next block the bluish light of a television played against the semi-opaque half-pulled-down blind; he could see the silhouette of a lone plump man smoking, while the outline of a child darted backwards and forwards like a shadow-puppet against the thin fabric: the semi-aquatic world of someone else’s life. In this, Gabriel observed, there was hope, hope of company, of the end of the kind of perpetual isolation he found himself in. This hadn’t been how he imagined his life, he reflected darkly after catching the two framed scenarios on his camera, which he held close to his chest, like a weapon, like a third eye.

  But it was the scene he came upon a block away and ten minutes later that halted him in his tracks.

  At first he thought he might be hallucinating; the entire scene already had an unreal quality, with the street lamps in that humid particular heat unnaturally bright against a sky in which the moon – a timorous crescent – hung like a cheap Christmas tree decoration. The window on the first floor was large and half-open, as if the room within lacked air conditioning and the occupant, desperate for some respite from the stifling humidity, had yanked it open and then forgotten this would mean letting the world in. Quickly, Gabriel climbed the tall front stairs of the building opposite, granting himself a full view into the room. The girl was blonde and young and standing in profile to Gabriel, her white summer dress a sheath against her thin body. The juxtaposition of a single chair and the lower end of a bed visible behind her was classically Hopper in composition, embodying that cool, haunting detachment of place, figure and relationship the artist was so good at. But there was something familiar about her that Gabriel couldn’t quite identify. He lifted his camera and waited for her to turn to the window. As she turned, he hit
the shutter and in the same instant realised why he recognised her – it was Maxine: that distinctive narrow face, her eyes staring directly at him as if she could see all in the dark. By the time he looked up again, the figure had disappeared.

  He turned back to the camera and hit the replay button. The image reappeared; the same window, the same single chair and bed frame, but there was no evidence of the girl he’d seen framed in the window.

  ‘Ghost,’ he said out loud, yet it wasn’t fear he felt but attraction, as if Maxine’s spirit had been beckoning him, as if she alone understood both his loneliness and the dilemma of loving a man like Felix Baum. The difference between them was that she, at least, had found a kind of peace.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The limo swept into the driveway. Susie, who had slept ever since they left New York, was jolted awake.

  ‘Jesus, it’s Windsor Castle and the Addams Family mansion rolled into one.’ She peered out at the massive facade – all turrets and grey stone – in front of which lay a huge swathe of manicured lawn, with fountains and topiary reminiscent of Versailles.

  ‘Try Gothic and mock Tudor – built on a foundation of oil and shipping. Mamet was no fool, and neither is his widow, but as a collector she’s a little too wilful. She built a whole annexe to the mansion specifically for a Chapman Brothers installation I did my best to dissuade her from buying. Then again, she did buy the Hopper – that compensated for a lot.’ Felix settled back against the tan leather. ‘Bringing you here was part of the deal. Thank God you agreed – Felicity so wants you in her collection.’

  ‘I was always going to come. Isn’t she one of your most important clients?’