by Meg Watson
“Oh, don’t be disappointed, please,” she said, clearly conveying that I was supposed to be honored to be included at all.
“You’re just like your mother, really. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
My breath caught in my throat all ragged and I barely stopped my jaw from going slack.
“I-- I didn’t know you knew my mother too.”
“Not for very long,” she said vaguely, beginning to walk away. I followed, trying not to look too far in any direction. The walls felt like they were closing in on me just a little, and I could feel the panic rising again. A whole montage of catastrophes flickered through my brain in fast-forward: floods, bridges collapsing, brushfires, tidal waves.
“You’re her spitting image. Beautiful girl. Brilliant, like you. But a little… reserved, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No of course not,” I muttered as she led me toward the staircase again. Our time was apparently done.
“I saw her play many, many times. She was simply ravishing. Technically unmatched… Unassailable in her musical choices… Yet, somehow cold.”
“I’m sorry?” I choked as we reached the library again. I could hardly command my lungs to breathe. Though I barely remembered her, the mother in my memory did not match up at all with the woman Edna described. She was warm, eager, excitable…
“No, what am I saying?” she said quickly, her hand reaching out sympathetically to my arm. I saw myself reflected in her eyes. I probably looked like a shock victim.
“She was a beautiful woman, your mother,” she continued, her posture softening. “I’m sorry, I can be a bit of a brash speaker at times. I only mean that she was so controlled, so unwilling to show us her heart… Everything had to be perfect. And in that perfection, some kind of, oh I don’t know… Some kind of connection was left out. Do you know what I mean?”
“You mean my paintings are… cold?”
“No, no, not cold… I’m sorry that came out that way. But I can see you’re an extremely technical and precise painter, which I commend you on. Too many self-declared ‘artists’ these days can barely hold a brush.”
“I agree,” I said defensively. Just what is it you want from me, lady? I thought.
“But painting is still a method of communication, you see. And if you’re unwilling to really expose yourself, to share yourself, then you’re leaving something out, don’t you think?”
“I think I know what you’re saying,” I answered mechanically, irritated that she was forcing me to agree with her.
“Leave some blood on the canvas!” she declared, raising a fist as though in triumph.
“Right, OK,” I replied.
She stepped forward and took both my hands, giving them a squeeze. I wanted desperately to be away from her, to go somewhere and lick my wounds, but she was staring up into my face with her bright, keen eyes.
“I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to finally meet you,” she said earnestly. “We will see each other again soon, yes? Raul will get your payment and show you out.”
I swallowed the hard pebble that had lodged itself in my throat. “Thank you very much for seeing me,” I said with as much sincerity as I could.
She patted my hands. “It was my pleasure, Margot. Truly it was. Have a beautiful day!”
As she turned away in a swirl of blue and green, I half-expected her to vanish like a genie. Instead I listened to her kitten heels clack across the marble tiles as she withdrew into the house, leaving me to find my way back to the foyer. I walked back the way I had come, shell-shocked and numb.
I looked for Raul by the front door and stopped, unsure what to do. Should I wait for him? It felt like I was missing a set of instructions on how to proceed. I knew I should retrieve the other paintings, but part of me wanted to burn them where they sat.
“Are you busy this afternoon?” came a voice.
I turned around. Jackson walked into the foyer with a cocky grin that seemed to dismantle as soon as he saw my face. “Hey… are you OK? What happened in there?”
In a flash he had crossed the foyer to me and somehow folded me in his arms before I crumpled. I felt myself fall against him as though falling in a dream.
“Hey, it’s OK, it’s OK,” he murmured into my hair, holding me tightly as I simply shook. A thousand voices in my mind gave me long lists of what I had done wrong simultaneously and I wanted to shrink, to fall into a pit, to turn into ashes and be blown away by a hot wind. Everything was ruined. Really ruined this time, and there was nothing else I could do about it.
“Shhhh,” he breathed, holding me up as solidly as anything I had ever felt. I commanded myself to breathe and get a grip for chrissakes.
For a long time I stood there with my ear pressed against his chest, counting his heartbeat and every breath to settle the irrational storm that had turned my thoughts to white noise. Slowly I came back to myself, gradually becoming aware that his arms were a very, very nice place to be. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had held me like that, if ever. Maybe never.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, pulling away. “It’s been such a week,” I added lamely.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, letting me go but not really. “I was sort of enjoying that.”
Me too, I admitted to myself. Gosh, he’s just rock hard all over, isn’t he?
His sky blue eyes searched mine. I could feel him gathering information.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said.
My heart pulsed with gratitude, happy that he wasn’t going to ask me to recount the entire meeting with Edna. I didn’t think I could, anyway. Not without totally losing it.
Well, you’re pretty much free as a bird, I reminded myself. In a few days, he can pick you up under the Santa Monica Pier.
“I have to get the paintings back to the gallery,” I objected.
He shrugged. “Raul can have someone do that.”
“But my car is in the driveway…”
“Your car will be fine. I’ll get it home for you. Did I overhear you live close?”
I nodded.
“Great. That’s settled.”
“I should change..”
“No, you’re beautiful.”
“Traffic will be horrible…”
“How do you feel about rope ladders?”
I stopped. “What? To climb?”
He nodded seriously. “There’s no place to land the chopper but I can have it here in twenty minutes. We’ll just have to take a more vertical path to get inside it.”
Squinting, I said, “You’re teasing me.”
“Just a little, Margot,” he said gently. “I’m just telling you that everything you think is a problem has a solution. Everything.”
“Everything?”
He nodded. “Absolutely. Now where do you want to go?”
Oh, dancing while Rome burns, I thought bitterly. That is just so me.
“How about the Getty?” he persisted. “That’s got to be like church for you arty types, right?”
I nodded uncertainly, not sure if that would make me feel better or worse.
“Great,” he answered. “Can I order the helicopter then?”
I scowled thoughtfully. “A car would be better I think. I didn’t bring my ladder shoes.”
“Good point, good point,” he agreed, finally releasing me from his arms. I let my fingers trail along his knit silk sleeve as he retreated, wishing already to be back in his strong embrace.
“All right then,” he declared formally. “I’ll be here to pick you up in thirty-eight seconds.”
I chuckled in spite of myself. “OK,” I sighed. “I will be right here.”
He pushed his hair back from his forehead and it all settled right back into place. Then he gave me a curt nod and dashed from the foyer without another word. True to his promise, in about thirty seconds I heard the low purr of a motor on the other side of the door and the muffled sound of a car door.
The doorbell gonged. Man, I was seriou
sly sad I was not going to get a gong of my own.
I looked around uncertainly, not sure if Raul was about to appear or something. Then I opened the door and grinned in spite of myself. He stood there politely with his hands clasped in front of his waist.
“Oh, good, you’re ready,” he said with a quirky grin.
“You rang the bell?” I asked, slightly dazzled and a little overwhelmed by his rambunctious charm.
“Well I wasn’t going to honk at you like some teenage punk, now was I?”
I didn’t know what to say and just shrug-nodded as though that was some kind of appropriate answer. He stood aside to let me pass and I walked down the bricked path to the tawny Mercedes that idled in the drive. Smoothly, he touched my waist as he passed behind me, maneuvering me to the left so he could open the car door just before I got there.
I slid inside the leather interior and looked around, appreciating the luxurious gleam of the dash, the elegant styling of the controls, and the gorgeous male who I could see through the windshield, heading for the door. Despite everything, some part of me thrilled at the sensation of imminence, knowing he was about to be right next to me again in a closed metal box.
My heart beat fast as he opened his door and slid in beside me, confidently placing his hands on the wheel and gear shift and offering me a simple, heartfelt smile.
If only it were this easy, I thought ruefully, reminding my galloping pulse that no date in the world was going to divert the brushfire that had already begun to smolder, and would turn everything to cinders in three days.
CHAPTER 3
JACKSON PUT THE TOP DOWN for me and I laid my head back for most of the drive to the Getty Museum, loving the way the California sunshine sank through my flesh, warming my bones.
As we climbed the curving, drastic drive to the white, mammoth building high above, I felt like I was really getting closer to something. In the tram that would get us the final few hundred feet to the summit, he held onto the overhead rail and I stepped easily into the space under his arm as though I belonged there.
“So, if you live with Edna, how have I never run into you before?” I asked, trying to sound casual while I huddled close to his ribs as the tram climbed the steep hill.
“We don’t exactly live there. We just stay there when we’re in LA.”
“So then… where do you live?”
He shrugged. “Oh, we have places here and there. San Francisco, of course. Portland, Butte…”
“Montana?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, Declan had a thing for bison for a couple years. And skiing. There’s Tahoe, Vail, Chicago, Manhattan… And then Mexico City, Panama City, Rome, Tuscany…”
“Geez.”
“Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t stay anywhere too long, and there’s family or friends living there when we’re not most of the time. We just go, you know, wherever.”
“Sort of a network,” I offered.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Every day’s an adventure.”
“It sounds like fun,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure it sounded like fun at all. It sounded like a pain in the ass.
“It can be.”
“OK, excuse this totally idiotic question,” I blurted, palms out, “but do you… you know… like, actually work?”
He laughed, showing off a perfect arch of white teeth. “Kind of,” he admitted. “We negotiate deals. We buy things, sell them to other buyers. Land, businesses, whatever. Our father worked. Our grandfather worked like crazy. He was a mad industrialist, the sort you see in movies clobbering striking workers and whatnot. What he made became what we have today.”
“Are you also a mad industrialist?”
“No, I am a fiction-avenging Mother Teresa,” he reminded me.
“Oh, right, haha,” I laughed, swaying against his side. Every time his hip brushed the back of my hand I got a little jolt of electricity.
“Declan works, I guess you could say,” he mused. “Though I think he works at things he creates out of thin air. But there’s always a deadline in his mind. Always. We always have somewhere new to go.”
“You go together?”
He nodded, he lips pressed together. “Yes, always, since we were young. Our father even held me back a year in school so we would be together. He said it would balance our competition, so we would always be neck-in-neck. He thought it would make us better partners.”
“And did it?”
“Almost always,” he said with a smirk. “And what about you... only child?”
“Yes, just me,” I replied, sort of sorry that he seemed unwilling to tell me more about his life. “And I’ve been in the same house since my mom passed when I was five. My aunt took me in but then she died when I was a teenager. I was old enough so I kept the house and the car and the gardener and just started working before the cash ran out.”
“That’s so sad, to have your whole life upended like that, twice.”
I shrugged, as usual. It was always weird to me when people commented on Aunt Winnie and my mother. The whole thing was as immutable as a stone block in my mind. Something twinged in my gut reminding me that the cash had, in fact, run out but I knew he wouldn’t understand so I tried to spackle over that thought and just move on.
“So,” I continued, “pretty much the opposite of how you were brought up in every way.”
“No, I think I can see similarities,” he said. “You’re a self-starter, I’m a self-starter. You live in the hills of LA, and I sometimes live in the hills of LA.”
“Ha, yes that’s true,” I admitted.
“Actually the very same hill of LA, to be precise,” he continued.
“Can’t disagree with you there,” I chuckled, wondering again how I had been there so long without ever knowing anything really about it. Not about Edna and her collection, and not about my aunt in any meaningful way. I had been so focused, it was like I had tunnel vision. I’d missed a lot.
The tram came to a stop and we got off and walked out onto the wide, white pavillion. The views of the mountains and valley were dizzying and glorious from this height. LA could be so frustratingly congested, it was nice to get above it sometimes.
Edna’s rejection hung over me like a dark cloud that Jackson seemed willfully determined to ignore. He made small conversation about people we saw as he guided me gently toward the wide, marble steps that stretched up to the building. I walked slowly, loving the formality of dozens of steps that I had walked dozens, even hundreds of times. The whole place really was very church-like, I realized. It struck me as funny that he knew that.
“Do we need a map?” he asked as we stood in the huge, cavernous entryway. We could see downtown LA in the valley below us through the far windows, blanketed under a soupy, green-grey layer of smog.
“No, we don’t need a map,” I said, looking over the rack of maps and brochures for exhibitions in the different wings of the massive buildings.
“OK, then lead on. Where do we start?”
I began walking across the marble foyer and to the left, to my favorite galleries.
“Let’s just start at the beginning,” I suggested.
I didn’t feel like talking, and we settled immediately into an easy, comfortable silence as we entered the gallery with the oldest oil paintings. They were small, detailed likeness on wood with realistic skin tones and sad, attentive expressions.
“What are these?” he asked in appropriately hushed voice.
“They’re funeral pieces, like snapshots of the deceased. They were buried with the dead so that their faces would remain forever. And since they were in the middle east, the dry weather preserved them.”
“That’s an oil painting?” he said.
I nodded. “Pretty much. The process hasn’t changed a whole lot in 2000 years. There were innovations, of course, and styles… religious and political ideas about how and why something should be depicted… but the basic materials and process have been around for as long as this.
”
“Huh,” he said. “I thought it was less old than that. I never would have guessed.”
I sighed deeply, trying to feel a connection with the displays of faces, each distinct and probably a tender recreation of someone beloved to someone else. “The history of Western art is usually taught from a thousand years later. But this is the very, very beginning of what I do. We use the same pigments made from sand and minerals, spread in oil to make something look like something. It’s all just dirt pushed around with fur on sticks.”
“Ha, that’s funny,” he said, and I could see how he would think that. But to me, it was downright miraculous.
As we walked through the galleries, combing our way through centuries, gradually following the thread to the 14th century, I began to feel more at ease. There really was something reassuring about being in a place with so much beauty and order.
We stood for a while in front of a lavish French floral, pristine in every detail and I could feel him breathing next to me. He seemed totally centered, as reliable and solid as a concrete pillar. I had the sudden urge to lean against him, hard.
As I looked at the floral still life, I tried to feel around in my memory for Edna’s words. Gingerly at first, as though testing a fresh wound in my mouth with my tongue, I prodded the memory to see if I could withstand it.
“You’re an extremely technical and precise painter,” she had said.
Why yes, I really am, I thought bitterly as I looked at the still life, noting its technical precision, the choreographed blossoms and each and every leaf in the best possible place. There’s nothing wrong with that. Being precise. Nothing at all.
“But if you’re unwilling to really expose yourself, then you’re leaving something out, don’t you think?”
Was I? I stared hard into the bundle of tulips and snapdragons, trying desperately to see what might have been left out. Or maybe it was just me? Maybe other people could use technique to express some connection, but I could only use it to cut the connection off?
And then something seemed to change. The painting began to look false, like a plastic bouquet of flowers.