Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  And why did he add a dangling pearl ornament in the exact same place on each woman?

  Because the Latin word for pearl is margarita.

  Margherita. As in Margherita Luti, La Fornarina.

  Which brings us back to the painting upstairs in the studio. Big-eyed beauty? Check. Right hand also held to her left breast? Check. Pearl in hair? Check. I held my breath as I put down the monograph: the resemblance was undeniable. There was just one question. Why was the Madonna in my painting so forlorn and Raphael’s Fornarina always so radiant?

  • • •

  A few days later, I found a slip of paper under my front door from Bodhi: “K’s diner, 10:00 A.M.? PS: Get a cell phone.”

  Bodhi was back. It was time to compare notes.

  I grabbed a few of the most relevant library books, ready to debate the finer points of the School of Raphael vs. Style After Raphael. But there was one puzzle I hadn’t been able to crack: the paint itself.

  I was still stumped by why the rubbing alcohol had removed the top layer of paint while leaving the bottom intact. I’d been dipping in and out of a book called The Chemistry of Paint and Materials for Working Artists. But I could never get more than a few pages in without admitting defeat. Seventh-grade biology hadn’t given me much of a basis for advanced chemistry.

  At ten minutes to, I left the house, the books straining my sweater bag and my eyes glued to The Chemistry of Paint (with the occasional glance at the sidewalk to avoid stepping in anything).

  “Look out, miss. This is how you are going to get hit by a car.”

  Without looking up, the scent of roasted vanilla told me I had reached Sanjiv’s Toasty Nuts cart.

  “You want the toasty nuts today? Cashews are very good today.”

  The smell, so seductive on a cold winter’s day, was overpowering when it mingled with the smell of smog and urine rising from the hot sidewalk. Despite my hunger, I shook my head.

  Sanjiv sighed. “Yes. No one wants the toasty nuts in the summer. In Mumbai it would not make a difference. In Mumbai I would be reaching for my—”

  “Yes, reaching for your sweater, I know.” I smiled kindly as I cut him off. Some days, this little joke accounted for my only human interaction, even though Sanjiv had been on Jack’s list, something involving permits and the legally restricted vendor space on the sidewalk. But since Jack died, this small exchange had become something I looked forward to, despite—or maybe because of—its predictability.

  But today I had a mission and, what’s more, a real, live friend waiting for me.

  “Yes, you have heard this one.” Sanjiv sighed again.

  “Well,” my eyes automatically went back to my book as my feet started moving again, “stay cool, Sanjiv.”

  “Ah, I see you are now a chemist like me.”

  “What?” I stopped.

  Sanjiv pointed at the book. “You read about chemistry? This is what I teach, back in India. At my school, you know?” He gestured at the picture next to the empty coffee can marked DONATIONS PLEASE, where Toasty Nuts customers were encouraged to drop a few coins for the school where Sanjiv once taught. Twelve or so high school kids were posed around a single Bunsen burner, proudly wearing the safety goggles Sanjiv had sent them.

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. Maybe you could explain some of this to me.” I handed him the book. “But it’s about paint chemistry, so—”

  “Yes, paint, I know about paint. Before I became a teacher, I worked in a lab in a big chemical company. They made roof coating, waterproofing materials, paint . . .”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I am serious. Why would I joke about this?” Sanjiv looked confused.

  “So you know about oil paint, for example?”

  His laugh was almost a sneer. “Yes, miss, I know about oil paint. This is a very important kind of paint! But I want to know—what do you know about oil paint?” He handed me back the book.

  I told Sanjiv about the painting: the rubbing alcohol, the top layer coming off in strips, the bottom layer pristine. “So what I can’t figure out is why the alcohol removed one layer but not the other.”

  “Okay, this is easy. You say your grandfather painted over the first painting? That is why the top layer came off. This top layer was young. It was painted later.”

  He scooped a few cashews into a small paper bag and handed it to me. “The bottom paint was much older. It would have to be very old if your rubbing alcohol did not harm it.”

  I nodded, chewing slowly on the cashews. “My grandfather used to say that the best thing about oil paints is that they took a long time to dry. So he could work on a painting slowly and change things over time.”

  “Not dry, no.” Sanjiv wagged his finger at me. “Oil paint does not dry. It reacts with the oxygen in the air and hardens. ‘Polymerize’ is the word in English, I think. But your grandfather was right, it takes a very, very long time before the paint is hard enough to resist a solvent like turpentine or rubbing alcohol.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe one hundred years?”

  My voice shook slightly with excitement. “So if you rub alcohol on some—let’s say—forty- or fifty-year-old oil paint, it will just come off, right?”

  “Eh, this I am not so sure.” Sanjiv rubbed his smooth chin as if searching for a beard. “It would smudge, yes, but wipe off so easy? I do not know about this.”

  We stood thinking, over the steaming sweet cart, sweat droplets trickling down our temples as if we squeezed them out with our brain power.

  “But maybe your grandfather uses another kind of paint: maybe acrylic, maybe something else. Something that is not so stable as oil paint.”

  Something engineered to be easy to remove, I thought. “But whatever he used on top, whenever he painted it—the bottom layer would have to be old? If it didn’t peel off?”

  “If it is oil paint, then yes, at least one hundred years. Maybe two hundred.”

  “Maybe five hundred?”

  Sanjiv laughed. “Yes, yes, my friend, maybe five hundred. Maybe one thousand. Maybe it is a painting from the cavemen.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “You think it is valuable, yes? You should sell it, and then you would have enough money to buy toasty nuts.”

  I dug out a dollar (bringing me down to $320) and handed it to him. “Sanjiv, if this painting is what I think it is, I’ll buy the whole cart.”

  • • •

  “It’s real! It’s real!”

  I attracted the attention of half of Katsanakis’s Diner—except Bodhi. Her head was down, as usual, over her phone, the white line of her part stark between the two tight braids. “What’s real?” she mumbled.

  I rolled my eyes as I slid into the booth. “The painting, of course.”

  “What painting?”

  My head spun. “What painting? Are you kidding me? The painting in my—”

  Bodhi looked up with a grin, her face tan against her white button-down. “Gotcha. Did you really think I’d forget? C’mon, this is my new independent study project. I take that very seriously. And I got a lot of digging done on the retreat.”

  Oh. A joke. I settled back into the vinyl, relieved. “How was Morocco anyway?”

  “Hot. How was New York?”

  “Same.”

  A waitress stopped by and dropped two menus on the table. “What can I getcha?”

  Bodhi looked at me. “Pie?”

  “No, I just ate.” I handed one of the menus back to the waitress. “Just ice water for me.” The waitress frowned, but I didn’t want to get into a habit of Bodhi paying for things. Or worse yet, to be expected to pick up the check next time.

  “Okay,” Bodhi shrugged. “One piece of cherry pie for me.” She handed the menus back. “And water,” she called after the woman’s swishing backside befo
re turning to me. “So what makes you say it’s real?”

  “Well, it’s real old, that I know. See—”

  “Did you look into hyperspectral imaging?” Bodhi cut me off.

  “Well, no. It’s just—”

  “Or X-ray fluorescence mapping?” She was back tapping her phone again. “Or maybe dendrochronology, since it’s painted on wood.”

  “Dendro-wha—no. What did you do—get a forensics degree? I thought you were camped out in some Moroccan monastery.”

  “I was. With Wi-Fi, remember? And since my mom spent most of her time whirling with the dervishes, I enrolled myself at the University of Interwebs. Learned a lot about the dating techniques that are out there.”

  The waitress came back and placed a slice of pie, a generous slice of warm, flaky pie overstuffed with glistening cherries, in front of Bodhi.

  I rattled my free ice cubes. “Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research, too. Listen to this.” I laid out the whole conversation with Sanjiv, strengthening my grasp on the science as I reviewed it point by point. The more I talked, the more convinced I became.

  Bodhi looked skeptical. “No offense to Sanjiv, but do you think Cadwalader’s is going to accept expert testimony from the Toasty Nuts guy?”

  “Who cares what they think? If the bottom layer of oil paint is as old as Sanjiv says it is, we know Jack didn’t paint it himself. It’s not a fake. Gemma was wrong. About that, at least.”

  “Welllll, maybe.” Bodhi chewed thoughtfully, then stuffed another bite of pie in her mouth while I gnawed my ice cubes. “I would want to see an infrared reflectogram before I came to any conclusions. And what about the missing provenance? Did you find any reference to the painting, any list of former owners?”

  The atmosphere in the booth shifted, and separated by the formica table, we suddenly felt more like rivals than teammates.

  “What’s going on?” I said, maybe a bit too defensively. “You’re the one who said, ‘Oh, this thing’s worth thirty-seven million.’”

  “That’s before I did my research. Based on the evidence, I think it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to suddenly find a Raphael or a Leonardo or even a Fra Angelico”—now she knew about Fra Angelico?—“just sitting around your house. I mean, these were big-time artists. They didn’t just go around misplacing paintings.”

  “You sound like Gemma.” Now I was the one spitting out her name.

  “Well, that’s a low blow,” said Bodhi calmly. “I’m just telling you what my research is showing, and it’s pointing—”

  “Yes, and I’m telling you what my research is showing. And my research hasn’t been spent on”—I hitched my chin at the phone cradled in her palm—“that thing. It’s been spent really looking at real paintings by real painters in real museums. You’ve never even seen a Raphael. A real one, I mean,”

  “And you have?”

  “Sure, plenty of them. At the National Gallery. At the Frick. At the Met—”

  “Okay, show me then.” Bodhi’s fork clattered to the table.

  “Show you what?”

  “A real Raphael. The Met’s here in New York, right?” She threw some bills on the table, then scooted out of the booth, smearing a line of cherry juice across her white button-down. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “What, right now?”

  “Why not?” Bodhi looked down at me with a smirk. “Unless you’ve got something else on your agenda today?”

  She knew I didn’t. With one last look at the half-finished pie on the table, I slid out of the booth and followed Bodhi out the door.

  Chapter Eight

  Our debate-filled subway ride ($317.50) was interrupted by two separate mariachi bands, and an hour later we arrived at the Met. I wanted to head straight for the Italian Renaissance gallery, but Bodhi stood in the middle of the marbled main hall and declared that she wanted to see everything.

  “Everything?” My head swiveled around to take in the North, South, and West entrances and wobbled briefly to imagine what lay behind them. “That would take weeks. Months even. I came here every single week, sometimes twice or even three times a week, with my grandfather, and even I haven’t seen everything.”

  “Well then, we’d better get going.”

  I led Bodhi to the admissions desk, where I handed over my usual penny ($317.49) and Bodhi put the full, recommended amount on her Platinum Card. We affixed the green metal “M” buttons to our collars and headed straight for the perennial tourist favorite, the Temple of Dendur.

  Bodhi was fascinated by the temple. She insisted on viewing it from every angle, she snapped photos of the hieroglyphics and tried to decode them via an app she downloaded then and there. She was particularly taken with the eighteenth-century graffiti. “OnDa1 would not believe this!” she said as she took another photo and sent it off to her rapper friend. “We did a whole unit on graffiti trends as part of my history of hip-hop study.”

  When she finally grew tired of the temple, she wandered over to the wishing pool and flipped in a coin.

  “Guess what I wished for?”

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “Nah, I can’t tell you or it won’t come true.” She arranged her braids behind her ears. “Okay, what’s next?”

  It seemed that the research Bodhi had performed over her vacation had not only made her a self-styled expert on art authentication, but had also sparked a love of art in general.

  Bodhi’s enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself racing to show her all my favorite spots in the museum. The room-sized optical illusion of the Gubbio Studiolo. The Chinese garden. The giant Buddha and his outsized sense of peace. The psychedelic “figure five in gold.” The Islamic prayer niche, like a stained-glass window in tiles, festooned with actual prayers. The two self-portraits of French women painters, canvases hung side by side, shown at their craft in the dead middle of a museum full of craftsmen. Craftsmen.

  Bodhi developed her own way to experience the museum. For example, taking on the pose of a Greek statue and waiting for a tourist to bump into you. Or loudly browsing the galleries like a rich housewife. (“How much for the Warhol? Nah, I’ll wait for the sales.”) She invented an elaborate scavenger hunt that involved finding items in paintings whose first letters spelled out a secret message. And came up with a game called Attack!, which involved nothing more than hiding behind the suits of armor and jumping out to yell “Attack!” at each other.

  “Hey, girls, knock it off! This is a museum, not a playground.”

  I recognized the Trinidadian accent and turned around to see Bernadette, one of the guards who’d worked with my grandfather.

  “Theo, is that you? Come over here and give me some sugar, girl.”

  Bernadette wrapped me in a warm embrace, her buttons cold against my cheek, like Jack’s.

  “If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have talked so rough. But you got to keep it quiet. The muckety-mucks are punchy these days.”

  “How come?”

  “I’ll tell you how come.” Bernadette looked around and then leaned in. “A painting’s been stolen.”

  Bodhi and I froze.

  “Really?” I whispered. “When did that happen?”

  Bernadette savored the piece of news in her mouth like a slowly melting chocolate. “About a month ago. Maybe even longer. They don’t really know, you see. The painting had been sent down to storage a while back, but when they went to collect it for some exhibition—poof!—it was gone.”

  “Poof, huh? Just like that?” Bodhi looked at me.

  “Just like that. So now they don’t want no funny business in the galleries. You girls keep it down, you hear me? And Theo, baby girl, don’t you be a stranger. I miss your grandpa. He was a tough old nut, but he was a good nut, still.”

  • • •

  Bernadette’s news had a sobering effect on
us, and without exchanging a word, Bodhi and I both directed our feet to the task at hand.

  In the Met’s Italian Renaissance rooms, we passed Ghirlandaios and Mantegnas and Botticellis and soon found ourselves in front of the Met’s only resident Raphael, the Colonna Altarpiece

  We stood there for quite a while, frozen in a hushed awe.

  “Wow,” Bodhi finally murmured.

  “Yeah,” I responded.

  “It’s so . . .”

  “Yeah, so . . .”

  “So . . .”

  “So . . .”

  “Eh,” Bodhi finally pronounced.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Eh.”

  “I mean, it’s—”

  “Beautiful,” I nodded.

  “And—”

  “Refined.”

  “And—”

  “Ethereal.”

  “I was going to say boring,” said Bodhi. “But I can see ethereal.”

  “It’s just that our painting,” by now it was known as ours, “is so—”

  “Deep,” mused Bodhi.

  “And—”

  “Sad.”

  “And—”

  “Real.”

  “I was going to say complexly nuanced,” I said, retrieving a phrase from some book somewhere. “But real is right.”

  We fell into silence again.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” Bodhi finally ventured gently. “But I know you see it, too. The painting in your attic does not look like this one.”

  I readjusted the strap of my sweater bag, which was digging into my shoulder. “I know. But—”

  “But nothing.” Bodhi pointed at the altarpiece, with its serene Madonna and bouncing baby Jesus and John the Baptist, and its grave and pious saints. “This is, you know, so still and . . . well, flawless. Ours has . . . edge?”

  “Soul,” I corrected her.

  “Yeah, soul,” Bodhi nodded.

  Bodhi was right.

  But I knew I was, too.

  “You know, this altarpiece is a perfect example of something that’s been bothering me.” I plunked myself in the middle of the floor and laid out the books from my bag. “Stylistically, our painting is a match. The brushwork, the coloring—the technical aspects, Jack would call them, the ways that the painter actually designed the painting and applied the paint. They look just like this altarpiece.” I flipped around the books until I found reproductions of Raphael’s famous Madonna and Child compositions, side by side. “But in tone, it’s no match at all. See these Madonnas? Just like the altarpiece, right? They’re perfect. They’re perfectly loving, perfectly peaceful—”