Picture This

by Tobsha Learner

  She turned back to her computer screen and pulled up a photograph of Girl in a Yellow Square of Light. She stared at the image, wondering why it resonated so powerfully with her. Then, sifting through her files, she discovered a photograph she’d taken of Maxine, half-naked, her face in three-quarter profile, her expression characteristically pensive, her long hair loose to her shoulders. Looking down at it she was suddenly overwhelmed by a great sense of loss and her own mortality. ‘I might have lost you, but I will live for you, for the rest of my life, Maxine, I promise,’ she whispered.

  *

  Felix waited until Susie’s phone clicked over to voicemail. He hadn’t heard from her since they’d driven back from the Hamptons.

  The show was opening in a week and, apart from his secret appearance in The Triumph of Pan, he’d seen nothing of the other photographed scenarios, nor officially been allowed into the studio. Nevertheless, determined to exploit this unusual arrangement, he’d instructed Martha, the publicist, to spin it into a fantastic publicity hook: the all-powerful Felix Baum being forced to blindly trust an artist right up until the day of delivery. The ruse had worked brilliantly – Martha had even managed to ‘auction’ the rights to Felix’s live reaction to the exhibition, the winning bidder being HBO, who planned to have camera coverage on the night.

  Chloe was already fielding dozens of calls a day from interested members of the public. Every significant collector this side of the Atlantic was harassing Felix for committed sales. It was going to be huge – he felt it in his bones – and yet he’d sensed a change in the way Susie related to him.

  Leaning against his desk, staring at the driving rain outside, he remembered their last lovemaking session. She’d been somewhere else, he’d known it. It was as if she’d been trying to obliterate any kind of intimacy through sex, perhaps even obliterate him in some way. After they’d finished he’d been left trussed up, blindfolded and spent, alone and spiralling into an emotional darkness, until the housemaid freed him, much to his humiliation. So many things he did – the cocaine, the amphetamines, the frenetic pace of his career – were means of avoiding introspection, running from moral responsibility, from his past and the possibility of forming a committed relationship. There on the bed, his chafed ankles and wrists beginning to ache, it had felt like he’d reached the nadir of loneliness, forced to face up to a very real and profound isolation. Worst of all, he realised there in the darkness, he’d engineered it all himself.

  And then there was the phone call he’d received earlier that day. A friend – an art journalist who liked to think of himself as a celebrity watcher – had rung to smugly inform him that Susie Thomas had been seen coming out of the Whitney the night before with a physically striking (in that she was massive) African-American woman in her sixties. As the woman was not recognisably part of the art community, the critic surmised she must have something to do with the upcoming artworks, the contents of which were still subject to a complete embargo. Could Felix confirm this? he’d asked, hoping for a lead.

  The woman fitted the description of Latisha Johnson and the conversation had left Felix panicked. Was it possible Susie had been contacted by her, or had learnt something of his relationship with Maxine Doubleday? He didn’t know if that troubled him more, or less, than the fact that they were seen coming out of the Whitney, where Girl in a Yellow Square of Light was being exhibited.

  He picked up his phone again and keyed in Susie’s number but her mobile was switched off. It was not a good omen.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was raining heavily, long raindrops that seemed to hit Susie at an angle and with a hiss. Vindictive rain: a ridiculous concept, she told herself. She stood on the pavement, reflecting on the past few months and her time in New York as the pedestrians rushed by, blurry arrows of humanity, each individual oblivious to everything except the pouring rain and their own fate. The show was due to open the next evening and the media interest had been intense, ratcheting up in the days before they were due to open. The publicity department of the gallery had fed the frenzy with tantalising snippets about Susie’s previous record of shocking the art world, the possibility that this new work – inspired and made specifically about New York and America – would hit new heights of transgressive sensationalism. The rumour that Susie and Felix Baum might be lovers was also encouraged with overly emphatic denials by Martha, who had simultaneously fed the scandal sheets details of photo ops where the two could be found together, something Susie neither discouraged nor encouraged, instead surrendering herself to acting out what she felt were the last days of their affair.

  In reality they had not spent a night together since the bondage session. Over the past week Felix had withdrawn and there was a new formality to their relationship. For the first time he seemed a little fearful, although publicly he continued to play the excited impresario. But by now Susie couldn’t bear for him to touch her, and it was difficult not to see everything he said as disingenuous. He still hadn’t guessed she was pregnant, and she had no intention of telling him. The pregnancy had become a growing secret that pervaded her dreams. There was a poignant logic, she’d concluded, to her having been drawn to New York to exorcise a death, only to find months later that she would be leaving filled with a new life.

  Gathering her courage, she walked up to the small entrance, sandwiched between a laundry and a Korean barbecue restaurant, that led to the apartments above. She paused for a moment, resting against a lamppost, the umbrella holding off the tumbling sky. Looking up at the building, she steeled herself, then pressed the buzzer.

  *

  The diminutive Korean narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

  ‘So let me guess, you another aunt?’ Chung, Gabriel’s super, asked, as he blocked her entry into the building.

  ‘Why? Has Mr Bandini got a lot of aunts?’

  ‘Too many, and he doesn’t like them. Why don’t you just ring on his doorbell?’

  ‘I want to surprise him.’ Susie looked up at the second floor of the building. Visible above a neon sign was the window she was convinced must be the artist’s, and there was a light on inside.

  ‘Not a good idea. The last aunt surprised him, he was very unhappy. Mr Gabriel has a sensitive soul. He is an artist.’

  Susie reached into her handbag and pulled out a couple of hundred-dollar notes. ‘Will this help make his soul less sensitive?’

  Chung hesitated, then took the money. ‘Maybe – but I didn’t let you in.’

  *

  There was heavy metal music coming from inside the apartment, a roar of white noise that seemed to shake the walls. Susie knocked on the door, banging the brass knocker as hard as she could.

  ‘Go away, Chung!’ came the shout from inside.

  She knocked again. This time Gabriel Bandini answered the door, barefoot, dressed in what appeared to be his painting clothes: an old T-shirt and jeans covered in smears of oil paint.

  Shocked, he stepped back. ‘Jesus! What are you doing here?’

  Susie pushed past him into the apartment. It was like walking into a wall of sound.

  In the centre of the room a new canvas was half blocked out – the sketch of the outside of an apartment building and the figure of a woman framed in a window, apparent in ghostly outline. It had the unmistakable look of a Hopper composition. Opposite, propped up on another easel, was a painting of Gabriel’s own work that looked as if it had only recently been completed. Unable to think or hear, Susie walked over to the CD player. While she was there she noticed Gabriel’s mobile phone sitting by the machine. With her back to him, she slipped the phone into her pocket, then clicked the CD player off. Immediately the apartment was plunged into silence, except for the whirling of a fan and the chatter of Korean floating in from the open window.

  Susie swung back to the artist. ‘So you know who I am?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I’m figuring this isn’t a professional call, right, Ms Thomas – or can I call you Susie? I suppose that witch La
tisha Johnson gave you my address?’ he asked. He returned to his palette and began wiping his paintbrushes clean.

  ‘I’m guess those are vintage sable, right?’ Susie pointed to the paintbrushes, then walked over to the canvas with the blocked-out Hopper composition. ‘You’re really good, but Felix probably told you that already. Same flat planes, same taut sensibility, even the atmosphere. And your research is almost impeccable. Almost.’ She picked one of the brushes out of a jar of murky turpentine. ‘See, brushes moult, they shed fine hair and sometimes that hair gets stuck in a thicker brushstroke, a slightly heavier layer of paint, and they can stay there for years, decades even. Which is fine if they match the kind of brush and hair the so-called author of the painting used. The trouble starts when maybe one day you run out of the right kind of brushes, and there’s this tiny area that needs correcting and you think no one’s going to notice or ever know, and you pick up a nylon brush… ’

  Startled, Gabriel began searching for his mobile phone.

  ‘Looking for this?’ She held up his phone, then threw it out of the open window.

  Gabriel watched in horror, then sank heavily down at the kitchen table. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, fishing out a package of cigarettes from his jacket.

  ‘I want to know all that you knew about Felix and Maxine, the last weeks of her life.’

  He lit up a cigarette. ‘You won’t like what I have to say. Especially if you’re in love with him.’

  ‘I’m not in love with him. But you are.’

  ‘Then why don’t you let him go? You know he belongs to me. He always has; he just doesn’t know it – not consciously anyway.’

  Sighing, Susie sat down opposite him. ‘Listen, I don’t give a fuck about your relationship with him. All I want to know is whether he was behind Maxine Doubleday’s death.’

  ‘Who was Maxine to you?’

  ‘My girlfriend. We lived together for five years before she came to New York.’

  Gabriel got up and began pacing the room. Now she could see how thin the artist was, wired with nervous tension, manic in his movements.

  ‘I’ve watched her on YouTube, you know. You were lucky, just as Felix is lucky – only neither of you know it. You just throw people away, like old books you’ve grown tired of.’

  ‘I never threw Maxine away. She left me.’

  ‘So? She had to. I get that. You don’t know what it’s like to be involved with a really big personality, one that squeezes you up against the walls, flattens your personality, sucks away time and your own talent without even realising it. But Maxine and I, we know. She was a real cult hero, your girlfriend. I bet you didn’t even know that. I never met her, at least physically, but I know we could have been friends, you know, like really friends. She was talented. Just misunderstood. I think if we’d actually met we would have liked each other. I got her, like her relationship with you, right? I bet you pushed her down, like Felix does to me. You didn’t mean to, but your ego was too big for her, too loud, too fucking noisy. That’s why she left you in the first place.’

  ‘Shut up. You know nothing.’

  ‘But I do, see. Maxine and me, we were the same, don’t you get it? Soulmates. I agree with her philosophy; she was against all the commercialisation of art, the way big money has made it into the latest hip stock, taken it away from anything spiritual. That’s why I do the forgery: to expose the hypocrisy of it all. It’s not the money—’

  ‘All I want to know is did Maxine commit suicide or did Felix arrange for her to jump!?’

  ‘And why should I help you?’

  ‘If you do, I might be able to help with your plea, tell the cops you were manipulated into the forgery—’

  ‘Why don’t you just leave us alone!’

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Gabriel.’

  He stubbed his cigarette out, grinding it into a saucer.

  ‘They were lovers, and I know that she knew something. See, I kept getting these phone calls, for about two weeks before she drowned. She worked out I was painting for Felix, and that it was to do with the Hoppers. She kept telling me the yellow was wrong, wrong hue, wrong pigment. It was haunting her, that colour, like she’d decided she was the girl in the painting, trapped there, waiting in that yellow square of light.

  ‘He screwed her over, you see, with her own career. After that group show, I think she thought he would promote her, but when her work failed to make any sales – it was the only work in the show to get panned – he dropped her. That’s when, I think, she started fishing around for information about the source of the Hoppers. I think she might have threatened him with exposure. I don’t think she jumped. I think she was pushed.’

  ‘But why was she up there at all?’ Susie asked, now consciously fighting a blind anger that was sweeping through her.

  ‘She loved him. Do you have any idea about what it’s like to discover the man you love is capable of such compartmentalisation, such manipulation that suddenly you feel you don’t know him at all?’

  He was shaking now. Susie reached out and placed a hand on his bare arm. He shrugged it off.

  ‘I don’t need your pity! I watched it all from a distance. Like looking into a fishbowl I wasn’t allowed into. That’s what I do, that’s who I am: Felix’s other eyes. I watched you too. You might have him now, but it’s me he always returns to.’

  She stared at him, at his thin, young frame, shivering slightly with… what? Fear? Lack of affection, shock? He was like a beaten dog and yet, as she glanced about the room, she could see that the youth wasn’t without talent. That must have been the real reason Felix recruited him, perhaps even seduced him. That was the dealer’s Achilles heel: a fatal attraction for talent.

  She walked up to the other canvas, Gabriel’s own work, and studied it. ‘This is good, maybe even better than good. That’s a bigger tragedy, the way he screwed you over professionally. You didn’t have to become his whore. You had a career, only you didn’t know it – and he made sure of that. As for Felix and me, I’m a mirror for him. On some screwed-up level he doesn’t want to have me; he wants to be me.’

  ‘And what do you want from him?’

  She touched her womb; the slightest of gestures, but clear to Gabriel.

  ‘I have everything I need from him now,’ she told him, then pulled out a camera from her bag and took a photo of him. ‘And now I have everything I want from you.’ She picked up her bag, ready to leave. ‘My opening’s tomorrow, I expect you to be there as my guest.’

  *

  Maxine’s figure flickered across the screen; the old black-and-white YouTube footage was strangely compelling. Gabriel sat in front of it, his fourth beer that night in hand, watching with the sound off. It was the third time he’d watched the footage. Mute, the artist looked more vulnerable than ever, a childlike thinness to her physique, the pale lips moving dumbly beneath those huge haunted eyes. Suddenly she gestured toward him, as if beckoning him closer. It was not what he had seen when he’d watched this before. Shocked, he stared at the screen, thinking he was mistaken, but again the pattern of her gestures that he’d memorised was abruptly broken as she lifted her hand and beckoned him, staring right out of the screen at him. In a daze he reached over and turned the sound up.

  ‘Gabriel. Stay true to your natural expression, the intuition we carry as artists, as a sixth sense. You and I, we are both prisoners. Break out of the jail Felix has put you in, fly free like I did. Is this a life, Gabriel? This half-world he’s forced you into living in? He has cut your throat as an artist, stolen the only thing you had the day he met you at that final show at college, dismantled your future piece by piece. Is that how you want to keep living? Whoring your talent?’

  She paused and smiled at him, directly at him, waiting for a response. He moved closer, pushing his face up against the screen.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he whispered, wondering whether he was now truly mad, yet in the same moment not caring, for hers was the kindest voice he’d heard in months.
She made him feel connected to someone, to something, a movement, a belief that had the potential to lift him out of the moral chasm he’d been swallowed up by over the years. Yes, that’s what Felix had done – he had corroded Gabriel’s political beliefs, the clear idea he held like a single pure note that afternoon, standing by his graduation artwork; the idea that art was to transport the spirit, bring the extraordinary to the mundane. Felix had destroyed that – and something even more profound: he had destroyed Gabriel’s belief that he was worthy of love.

  ‘You know what you have to do,’ Maxine whispered from the screen.

  *

  After Gabriel had slipped the stamped envelope addressed to Susie, a signed confession folded neatly inside it, under Chung’s door for him to mail, he went back up to his apartment and climbed out to sit on the edge of his window. He stared down at the bottom of the light well. From five flights up it seemed like a glinting mirage at the end of a long dark tunnel. There was water down there, a rain puddle catching the last rays of the evening sun, the dancing light beckoning Gabriel like the notes of a flute. It was easy to fall. As easy as flying.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After reading Gabriel’s text, Felix had come as fast as he could but the afternoon traffic was murderous. In the cab he kept thinking about the first day he’d met Gabriel, how the young artist had stood by his work so silently, so entirely without ego that it had been minutes before Felix even noticed him. It was as if all of what he was went into his painting – a pure conduit; Felix knew it then and he knew it now. That’s why he made such a perfect forger: Gabriel had always been an observer, a sponge. It was also why he was vulnerable.