False Impressions

by Laura Caldwell

  I nodded fast and swallowed hard now that she was getting specific about my upcoming responsibilities. A mood passed over me, almost a sense of dread.

  “You’re nervous,” Maggie said.

  “I guess I’m overwhelmed by the thought of managing a firm. One that I didn’t even work at a year ago. Not to mention the fact that I haven’t been practicing criminal law even a year.” I heard the anxious tone in my voice. “But I want to help, too. In any way. So I’m in.” Maggie and I had been there for each other since we met in law school.

  “You have been contributing,” Maggie said. “You’ve been great.”

  “But since I’m not a mom myself, there’s no advice I can give you.” Truth was, I still didn’t know if having kids would ever be for me.

  Maggie rolled her eyes again. “Thank God. Because I am so sick of mommy advice. It’s overwhelming.” She put her hand on her pregnant belly, draped in an empire-waist black dress. “But it’s reassuring to know you’re going to be at the office when I’m not.”

  “Are you just trying to make me feel better?”

  “Hell, no. I would be a nut job if it weren’t for you.” She paused, her eyes looked directly into mine. “So take the time you need. Now.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “Thanks.” I nodded at the bench. “How was your judge for the case?”

  “Good. But if we lose we are so screwed. You know what they call him?”

  “What?”

  “Father Time.”

  “Long sentences if there’s a guilty verdict?”

  “Yep. Looonnnng.” She sighed. “So, since you’re not going to be at the firm much in the meantime, where are you going to be?”

  “Michigan Avenue. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  “When do you start?”

  “Tonight, if it’s cool with you.”

  “Go get ’em, Iz.”

  3

  Much had been made of typography, but Madeline Saga had always viewed such art from a bit of a distance, never able to get too attached to an image comprised of letters or words. She usually felt that either the words selected or the final images were weak. She recalled a piece she’d seen in a Chelsea gallery, where one word appeared across the top of the canvas—FIRE. Throughout the rest of the canvas, the same word was turned over and over, sometimes right side up, other times facing backward. The repeated word formed a bloodred rose. Madeline supposed she understood the juxtaposition between the vaguely alarming word and the sweet flower. A rose was sometimes a sign of love, and love could be very electric and volatile—like fire. Madeline knew that well enough. But still, the result was too feeble for her. She’d often thought that maybe she wasn’t a literary person, maybe words just weren’t her thing.

  But now, sitting in her office behind the gallery, it was different.

  She looked at her computer screen, at her own gallery’s website and an image she had placed there—a photo of Dudlin’s Eight Days, a sketch she’d sold after she moved to this new gallery space.

  Eight Days was displayed on the gallery’s Past Works page. She liked to visit all the works she’d once owned, liked to see the comments below them, to behold what the world was saying about the pieces she’d sold or collected.

  But not now. She’d read these particular comments too many times.

  The words blurred until she forced herself to slow the panicked movement of her eyes and read one word at a time—each word, in black, appearing in a separate horizontal row. They were just words, just comments, but they struck her as a kind of typographic art. Perhaps she finally understood the power of that type of work.

  Madeline dialed up the brightness on her computer, alternately gazing at the image of Eight Days and the comments under it, the white spaces littered with terrifying insinuations. Some targeted the artist, and those angered her. But what scared her were the ones pointed toward her.

  The computer screen seemed to pulse as she stared at it. The screen seemed to gain heat. Finally, she hit the print button and waited for the two pages to come out of the printer—one showing the Dudlin piece that she’d sold, the other the comments beneath it.

  She stared cautiously, suspiciously, at the printer. Recently, she’d come into her office in the morning and found pages waiting in the printer tray. Always they were pages she’d viewed before—art from some of the artists she’d worked with, pieces sold by other galleries—and yet she didn’t recall printing them.

  Startled. Haunted. That was how she felt when she saw the pages waiting for her. She’d mentioned this to a few people, who’d suggested perhaps she’d had a glass of wine too many or smoked too much pot. But although Madeline did drink and sometimes smoked, she never did so to excess. Spirits and drugs didn’t ignite her like they did other people.

  Now, not wanting to think about the mystery of finding those pages, needing to get away from her office, she took the pages she’d printed and walked into the main space of the gallery. On a far wall hung a massive canvas, depicting a woman at two different times of the day and in two different eras.

  The first was a morning image harkening back to the early 1900s. The background was painted the pink-grapefruit color of morning and showed the woman in a cream-colored nightgown, thick and comforting. The second image was of a blue-black contemporary evening, the woman now wearing a white negligee, her skin golden against the sheer white fabric, her nipples black beneath it.

  In front of the painting, far back enough to gain perspective, Madeline had placed a navy-colored chaise lounge, made to resemble the one in the evening part of the painting.

  She sat on the chaise now and glanced at the print-out depicting Eight Days, which was a charcoal sketch of four street images. The sketch had been glazed with resin, giving it a vivid, sparkling finish that seemed to awaken the street images, seemed to call them to life.

  Madeline flipped her long black hair over her shoulder and switched the sheets of paper in her hands so she could read the page with the comments.

  Since some art aficionados thought Sir Arthur Dudlin had been lazy in using simple charcoal and then “tossing” glaze on it, Madeline hadn’t been surprised when she’d read the first comment months before. Dudlin, it said, gentleman though he was, faced the greatest challenge to an artist—age. And he did not fare well.

  “Poor Dudlin,” she had said when she first saw that note, then scoffed. She had known the artist well at the end of his life, had an immense respect for him. She’d even been the muse for another one of his sparkling charcoals. She had been irritated at how discourteous that comment had been.

  But it was the more recent comment that plagued her. As she read it, she felt something roil through her stomach—something hot, something angry. One hand held the pages, the other was on the navy chaise longue as if to brace herself for another reading, hoping she had been too hasty and judgmental the first few times around.

  The comment was from someone else, who posted anonymously under the name ArtManners.

  Dudlin, it read, not only aged at the end of his life, he went into a different profession—that of manager. He didn’t create art any longer. He issued directives to his assistants, who replicated his glazed charcoal pieces, then allowed the master to pass them off as his own.

  She braced herself for the next few lines. Check your Dudlin if you have one. Especially if you bought it from this gallery.

  There were two more lines, but she couldn’t bring herself to read them again.

  Madeline put the pages at the foot of the chaise and scooted back until she was reclining, far away from the comments.

  Thankfully, no one was in the gallery.

  Thankfully, John Mayburn was sending Isabel McNeil.

  4

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the hand of Madeline Saga. She was, as Mayburn had described her to me, a tiny, luminous Japanese woman with skin that seemed almost pearly. Her intent brown eyes were strangely bright, almost as if they could actually feel, as if t
hey had senses other than sight.

  “Lovely to meet you, too,” she said in a quiet yet strong voice.

  I looked around the gallery. It was almost triangular in shape, housed in a corner of the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue. Inside, the space had blond wood floors, white walls and white columns.

  “This is wonderful,” I said.

  “Thank you. Very much.” She looked around the room as if appreciating it herself. “Let me show you around.”

  With every step, the gallery was a surprise. First, she showed me a miniature stamp, decorated in an Indian sort of pattern, surrounded by a matte a thousand times bigger than it was, taking up half of a wall. Next, she pointed out a sculpture that looked like ice cubes with silvery insides, next to an ice bucket with real ice inside. “An installation,” Madeline said.

  “Interesting,” I said, looking at it.

  “What strikes you?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I guess it’s the combination of the real and the not real.”

  “But do we ever know?” Madeline asked in a musing voice. Then she added, “Nearly anything can be art. Most art simply shows different ways of looking at life, or a part of it.”

  Next was something more traditional and I adored it on sight. It showed a woman in side-by-side panels. It was clearly the same person, but the woman was portrayed in two different time periods. She was living two lives. I had felt very much the same over the last year and a half.

  “And then that piece of furniture?” I asked Madeline. I pointed again.

  “Ah, the chaise?” Madeline asked, her voice sounding lighter. “What do you think of it?”

  Her questions made me feel unsure. Aside from an art history class in college and visiting the Chicago museums every once in a while, I knew nothing about art or technique. And now here I was with a woman who had two master’s degrees, one in studio art, the other in art management, both from prestigious New York schools. She owned an art gallery, and according Mayburn, “lived for art and sex.”

  And yet Madeline looked at my face expectantly, with an eager expression.

  “The chaise looks exactly like the one in the painting with the woman in the negligee.” I pointed at it.

  “Yes.” Madeline wore a small smile. “I had the chaise made just as soon as the artist and I reached a deal for him to sell. He loved the idea. It’s an honor for me to be able to contribute.”

  “I know very little about art,” I said, “but I was thinking that your gallery is full of wonderful surprises—the matte that’s so much bigger than the stamp, the real ice cubes that you must have to refresh, the exact piece of furniture from the painting.”

  “Isabel,” she said, gently interrupting me. Although I’d told her to called me Izzy, she hadn’t taken to the name. And Isabel sounded wonderful coming from her lush mouth, ripe with a purplish gloss. “Isabel, you say you do not know art. But you know love. I can tell that.”

  I paused, about to ask her what she meant. But then I let the answer float up. “Yes,” I said. “I know love.”

  “Well, then.” She softly grasped my upper arm. “You know art.”

  I didn’t know precisely what to say. Or to think. I could only notice that even through my suit coat, I felt something electric. Or was it just what Mayburn had said about the Saga drawing energy?

  We walked around the gallery some more, often in silence as Madeline gave me time to look at each piece. Sometimes, she asked my opinion (“or just your feeling”).

  Once, when we reached a sculpture, she said, “An Italian designer. What do you think of it?”

  The piece was about two feet tall by two feet wide, a delicate iron tree painted in a shiny black, its leaves green jewels.

  “I think it’s stunning.”

  She smiled, gave a single nod.

  Madeline kept showing me around the gallery, and I watched as she talked about the art. As she spoke, her face seemed to acquire a peach glow and her eyes brightened. She was, I thought, an incredibly sexy woman. I could see why Mayburn had been mad for her.

  But then suddenly she stopped. “May I show you something?” There was a different tone to her voice now.

  “Of course.” I looked around the gallery, wondering what surprise was in store next.

  But Madeline turned and began walking toward the back. She wore high, nude-colored patent heels that made only the lightest tap, tap, tap on the floor. I followed her, noticing that my own heels seemed to clump, clump, clump compared to hers.

  The space behind the gallery, like that in front, had high ceilings and white walls. But where the front had been spacious, back here it was tidily packed. Slotted shelves held framed paintings and stretched canvases. Undisplayed, the artworks seemed diminished, whereas out front the art was allowed to breathe, to be surrounded by space and light, letting it shine, letting its viewer see it in many different ways.

  In front, the sculptures might sit atop a pedestal, as the jeweled tree had done, lit perfectly. Here, a small sculpture made of bronze bricks sat on a file cabinet. Another sculpture was on top of the refrigerator.

  Off to the side was a small office. On a table in the center of the room was a white laptop. We sat and Madeline pulled her chair close to mine, her laptop in front of us. She pulled up a website.

  “It’s your gallery site,” I said.

  “Yes,” Madeline said. “I have photos of nearly all our artwork on the site. I like to make it as interactive as possible. One of the features is the ability to comment freely on any piece of art.”

  She clicked to a page of tiny images, all showing various artwork. She clicked on one—gray on a white canvas, depicting four sketches of some urban landscape, the whole thing glossed to a high sheen.

  “It’s a very interesting piece by Sir Arthur Dudlin,” Madeline said. “I can tell you more about it later. But this is what I want to show you. The comments I received.”

  I read the first one—something about the artist getting older but not better.

  I stopped reading and looked at Madeline. “Do you have approval on the comments, so you can authorize them before they appear?’

  She shook her head. “I despise censorship. I feel with deep conviction that response to art is as important as the art itself.”

  Madeline showed me the next comment. Dudlin not only aged at the end of his life…. Check your Dudlin if you have one. Especially if you bought it from this gallery.

  I stopped reading and pointed at the sentence about checking a Dudlin artwork. “Is this the first indication you had that something might have been forged?”

  “The first public one,” Madeline said, her voice thin. “But it’s the last few lines that disturb me most.”

  I looked at the last two lines. Madeline Saga makes everything she touches rotten. She obliterates.

  “Obliterates,” Madeline said. “Obliterates. I don’t understand that. I try to bring things to life. I bring art to the world.”

  “Do you have any idea what they mean in context with you?”

  “No.” She sounded bereft. I wanted to comfort her, but I had no idea how one would do that with Madeline Saga.

  I looked at the comment again, then at Madeline. “I think it’s time to enable your approval settings on these comments.”

  Madeline’s face was distressed.

  “Let me run it by Mayburn.” I texted him what I wanted to do, and he agreed.

  But Madeline didn’t move when I told her that.

  “Do you want me to handle it?” I asked.

  Finally, Madeline nodded, gave me her passwords and watched in silence as I adjusted the controls of her website comment section and deleted those about the Dudlin.

  I was just about done when the sound of a bell startled me.

  “That’s the front door,” Madeline said softly. But she still gazed at the space on the screen where the comments had been; she was staring into it as if it were a long tunnel, one where she could somehow see many things. And t
hose things—whatever they were—were deeply disturbing to her.

  “Let me go see who it is,” I said, since Madeline wasn’t moving. I was glad to have something official to do for my new job.

  She looked at me. “Thank you,” she said earnestly, as if someone hadn’t helped her with anything for a long time. “But no, I’ll come with you. And Isabel, I don’t mean to be difficult but…Mayburn has suggested that you’ve had a lively few years.”

  I looked at her, unsure where she was going with this.

  “I was wondering if we could give you an alias. Perhaps we call you Isabel or Izzy Smith. I wouldn’t want anyone to search you on the internet and find out you’re really a lawyer and not an art dealer. It might raise more questions than I can answer right now.”

  “Of course. I should have already thought of that.” I stood and began to follow her out the door.

  But, one more time, she looked back to the computer screen, and somehow I could tell that she was pondering that one word—obliterates.

  5

  As I reached the front of the gallery, I felt the Chicago wind curling inside.

  I wrapped my arms around myself instinctively but I noticed that Madeline did the opposite. She faced the door, arms at her sides, her body somehow moving outward, stretching to its limits as if opening itself to whatever those winds brought.

  A woman had stepped inside. “Lina!” she called.

  The woman wore a peach-orange coat that looked like soft cashmere and an ivory scarf that surrounded her face. She was one of those women, like my mom’s friend Cassandra, whose age was impossible to tell—forty-five? Or a well-preserved sixty? She was lovely and elegant, her face smooth, so either seemed possible.

  Madeline introduced her to me. “Jacqueline Stoddard,” Madeline said. “This is my new gallery assistant, Isabel.”