The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  Scotty hesitated, then whispered, “Afterward I realized that I recognized her voice.”

  “Please speak up, sir.”

  This time he said it louder. “I recognized her voice.”

  Pratt preened for the judge. “And do you see the woman whose voice you recognized as belonging to Paulien Mertens in this courtroom, sir?”

  Scotty didn’t look at me directly, but he did point.

  “But that woman’s name is Vivienne Gregsby,” Pratt said with mock confusion. “Are you certain she’s the same girl you went to school with? The one called Paulien Mertens?”

  Scotty nodded, again reluctantly.

  “Could you please give us verbal confirmation of your identification, sir?” Pratt requested obsequiously. “For the record, please.”

  “Yes,” Scotty said. “It’s her.”

  24

  Vivienne, 1926

  The winter is trying for Vivienne; her disappointments weigh heavy, her choices prove muddy, and the new lawsuit turns out to be no more than an idle threat. But her spirits lighten as she and Edwin head to Paris in the spring. She’s sailing toward Henri, and there are a dozen copies of The Art of Henri Matisse by Edwin Bradley and Vivienne Gregsby in her stateroom.

  She keeps picking up the book, flipping through the pages, pressing her nose to the binding, running her finger over the engraved letters of her name. With the reproductions and the appendices it’s 464 pages. Four hundred and sixty-four pages. Over two years of work. But worth every minute. She’s proud. Giddy, in fact. Except when she imagines her father coming across the book and not recognizing that Vivienne Gregsby is his very own Paulie.

  The economic situation in France is much worse than in the United States. According to Edwin, the decline in textiles and the government’s refusal to devalue the franc have thrown the country into stagnation. Even Gertrude’s events aren’t as lavish as in the past, and all the artists and writers, from Pablo Picasso to Ernest Hemingway, are complaining about the lack of commissions and contracts.

  It’s a source of embarrassment to Vivienne that Edwin is doing so well, but Edwin doesn’t see it this way. Having pulled himself out of poverty, he believes that a man is who he makes himself to be, that blaming governments or economic situations or others’ poor judgment is spineless and cowardly. She tries to keep him from voicing this opinion too loudly or too often.

  There are many more artworks available for sale than there were on their earlier visits. Almost all at low prices. Edwin cheerfully prances through Paris scooping up bargains from those who have fallen on hard times. Although he often complains that an Australian named Ashton King is grabbing deals out from under him.

  When Edwin secures another eight paintings from Leo Stein at far less than they’re worth, Gertrude is beside herself and talks about canceling the party she’s throwing to celebrate the publication of The Art of Henri Matisse, and Vivienne doesn’t blame her. But rather than offending either Vivienne or Henri, Gertrude decides to downgrade from a dinner party to an after-dinner party. Since Hélène makes a fabulous sweet soufflé, no one protests. Criticizing Gertrude has the same result as criticizing Edwin: banishment from the premises. And no one in Paris wants that.

  The party is larger than Gertrude’s usual gatherings, full of guests who are both familiar and unfamiliar to Vivienne. After her encounter with Scotty Williamson, she’s watchful again. Because the crowd is so big, it’s difficult to see every face, but she tries to throw off her anxieties. She hopes Ashton King isn’t in attendance. King beat out Edwin for two Modiglianis the day before, and Edwin is not known for his composure when coming face-to-face with a rival.

  The celebration is for the book, and obviously for Henri, Edwin, and her, but from the start it’s clear Gertrude hasn’t cast Edwin in a leading role. Vivienne and Henri are seated at the head of the dining room table, flanked by Gertrude and Leo, while Edwin is relegated to the foot, flanked by no one of note. Vivienne is tickled to have Henri to herself but does feel for Edwin.

  Henri arrived just before the party and is leaving immediately after to resume working on the mural. “If it were not for you,” he tells Vivienne, “I would have stayed in Nice.” He’s buoyed by the commission and seems younger and spryer than she’s ever seen him. Edwin’s tight composure pales against Henri’s enthusiasm.

  She links her ankle with Henri’s and whispers, “When we come to Nice to see the mural, we will have to stay overnight.”

  “Ah,” Henri says, blowing a puff of breath into her ear. “And what shall we do then?”

  Before she can respond, Gertrude hits a fork against her champagne flute. When the room quiets, she makes a toast to the book, followed by one to Vivienne and a third to Henri. As an apparent afterthought, she raises the glass halfway and mumbles Edwin’s name. Even Leo, to whom the book is dedicated, only twice mentions Edwin when he reads the positive review out loud.

  Vivienne is annoyed with Gertrude’s underhandedness, so after the fruit and cheese course but before the soufflé, she stands and taps the side of her own flute. “Not enough credit has been given tonight to the true genius behind this book,” she tells the crowd. “I don’t mean to take anything away from Monsieur Matisse, but it’s another man who conceived of the idea, persuaded Henri to join the undertaking, and worked long and hard to bring it to fruition.”

  She walks down to the other side of the table, puts her hand on Edwin’s shoulder, and raises her glass. “So please join me in a toast to Dr. Edwin Bradley, collector, curator, and author extraordinaire!”

  The applause isn’t as extravagant as that which followed Gertrude’s tributes, but it’s strong enough not to embarrass. Vivienne nods to Gertrude, who tips her head in acknowledgment of Vivienne’s point. Gertrude might be a bit callous, sometimes even cruel, but she also has a keen sense of self-awareness that is redemptive.

  Henri surprises Vivienne by coming over and placing his hand on Edwin’s other shoulder. “My dear friend Edwin has done me a great honor,” he says to the guests. “I am humbled by both his belief in me and the depth of his consideration of my work.”

  Edwin stands and the two men hit each other on the back, then Edwin turns to Vivienne, nods his thanks, and raises his own glass. “And many thanks to our gracious hostess, Gertrude Stein, who’s always the first to recognize and herald the work of a friend.”

  There are a few coughs and a few snickers, but then another round of applause drowns them out.

  Henri has rented a large, empty garage at 8, rue Désiré-Niel, in Nice, where he’s creating the mural he’s calling The Dance II. He’s been hard at work on it since he left Merion last year and seems guardedly pleased with his progress. At Gertrude’s he explained that, based on the templates Edwin sent, he stretched three canvases the exact size of the arches and hung them adjacent to one another along a sixty-foot wall. The canvases are over twice his height, so he had a long bench built beneath the length of the mural, and he attached a stick of charcoal to a long bamboo pole to draw with.

  “My bamboo pointer,” he said, “is truly a magician’s wand,” giving it credit for performing the feat of completing the design, which he described as an amalgam of “color, shape, and movement—the materials that stir the senses.”

  He also developed a novel approach to make the work possible: he hired housepainters to cover massive sheets of paper with either gray, pink, blue, or black—the pigments he chose for the mural—which his assistants then cut into the shapes he draws. Using a few well-chosen lines, he roughs in the dancers on these cutout pieces of painted paper, which are then pinned to the canvases so he can assess the relationships among all the elements. More often than not, the cutouts are pulled down and refashioned.

  When Vivienne and Edwin walk into the garage, two of Henri’s assistants are on ladders pinning up an awkward section of gray paper. The cutout is about twelve feet tall and appears to be an abstraction of three or four dancers with over a dozen appendages.

  A
head, maybe two, five or six legs, and a swirl of seven or eight arms, most of which end beyond the mural’s borders. Energy and movement and pleasure. The intertwined nudes, cavorting, dancing, surging beyond the edges into an imagined space. Reminiscent of The Joy of Life, it’s more sophisticated, more compelling, owing to its size and simplicity. And it isn’t nearly complete.

  “Bravo!” Vivienne cries when Henri comes over to greet them. Even though Edwin is standing next to her, she gives Henri a warm hug.

  Henri releases her faster than she would have liked, and she looks at him questioningly. But he only has eyes for Edwin, who is, after all, paying the bill.

  Edwin studies the charcoal sketches of the slightly abstracted and slippery forms leaping across the canvases. He turns to the cutouts on the floor, then looks back up to the rounded gray bodies pinned against a background of elongated geometrical fragments of pink, blue, and black.

  Henri dismisses his assistants, and he and Vivienne glance nervously at each other. The silence is thick, Edwin’s expression inscrutable. She can’t imagine he’ll disagree with her—how could he?—but Edwin goes his own way.

  Finally he claps Henri on the back. “I knew I was right to choose you.”

  Vivienne and Henri laugh, both from relief and from their shared amusement at Edwin’s manner of framing everything in terms of himself. Then they dive into the details. Henri explains his times of despair and elation, his mistakes and victories, the intense strain the mural’s complexities have caused him.

  “Your solution to the problem of the support beams works well.” Edwin points to the two recumbent figures linking the panels below where the beams will be. “Moving the eye across the dancers around and above them. Linking the pieces while remaining a part of the whole.”

  “It seems like it’s the only way it could have been,” Vivienne says. “The only way it can be.” She counts the appendages. “Twenty-four limbs all gamboling together . . . I can’t imagine how you conceived of such a thing. Or how hard it must have been to make it work.”

  “It drove me nearly mad,” Henri confesses. “But I will tell you that when I finally saw the full mural in my mind’s eye, when the expanse of it was inside me, it was like a rhythm that carried me along, erasing all the difficulties that came before.” He pulls three chairs in front of the mural. “Please sit.” He opens a bottle of wine, and they discuss the plans for the mural’s installation, which is at least six months away.

  “Where are the templates I sent?” Edwin asks. “The ones based on your original measurements.”

  Henri looks around the messy studio. “They are here somewhere. I admit I have not seen them since I began the design work.”

  “Find them,” Edwin orders. “Then lay them on top of each other. I need to see what the largest dimension is in order to size the containers. To decide if we need to transport the three canvases together or separately.” Although the rounded arches at the top of the individual pieces are the same size, because of the placement of the support beams, the width at the bottom of each varies slightly.

  Henri begins pulling drawers open in the deep chests lining one wall. It takes him a while to come up with the templates. When he finally finds them in a far corner of the garage, Vivienne and Edwin help him spread the unruly pieces of paper on the floor. When they place the templates on top of one another, the middle section is longer by at least two feet.

  “It will be less expensive to send them in a single crate,” Edwin says. “But this is no place to cut corners. What do you think, my friend?”

  “I do not see any reason why we cannot ship them together.” Henri pulls the three pieces apart and lays them directly in front of their corresponding canvases. “The packing materials would be the same and—” He stops short, his gaze moving from the templates, to his mural, and back to the templates again. His face turns the same gray as the cutouts.

  “What?” Vivienne cries. “Henri, are you ill?”

  He grasps her arm, stumbles backward a few steps, and sits down hard in his chair.

  She kneels by his side and presses her wrist to his forehead; it’s damp and icy cold. A heart attack? A stroke? “We need to find a doctor,” she shouts at Edwin. “Right now. Go!”

  “No,” Henri says, his breath coming in shallow gasps. “It is . . . it is . . . it is not that.”

  “Then what is it, man?” Edwin demands, also alarmed.

  Henri points from the canvases to the templates. “The dimensions are wrong. They appear to be off by roughly a meter.” His expression is that of a man who has just heard of the death of a loved one. “I have made a terrible error.”

  25

  George/Ashton, 1926

  If he isn’t the smartest man alive, he doesn’t know who is. He set it up, waited for it to happen, and voilà, it did. There he is, at another one of Gertrude Stein’s parties, perfecting his Ashton King persona as wealthy Australian collector and businessman, when whom does he spy? Little Paulien Mertens, a.k.a. Vivienne Gregsby. With her sleek hair and chiseled cheekbones, she’s looking even better than when he last spied her in Philadelphia. Much better than in London. Losing that baby fat did her a world of good.

  He didn’t notice her at first. It’s a typical evening at 27, noisy and crowded, replete with all manner of self-satisfied “talent” and their awestruck sycophants. Sycophants with lots of money whom he’s spent the past six months charming, turning them into dear and trusting friends—potential investors all. Some of the talent also, but only those with money. There aren’t many.

  The party is a celebration for some new book about Henri Matisse, and he figured it would be the perfect place to begin the next step of his current project: the investment phase. The first stage of King & Associates, Inc., went just as planned, and the second will also. Intelligence, planning, and patience: three of his greatest strengths, the key to his continuous string of triumphs.

  He’s bought a number of authentic artworks by old masters as well as some by the current crop of artists touted to be the next old masters: Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, and Picasso. He rented a warehouse, studios, and office space, set up the required company, and hired half a dozen artists who have begun forging the four hundred or so paintings he needs. Once he finds more forgers, he’ll be on his way.

  He’s busy brewing up interest by whispering—to a select few—about the profits he’s going to make buying quality art from those hurt by the current economic situation and holding it until the markets correct. When two of these men ask if he would consider taking on minor partners, he reluctantly refuses.

  “It’s just not profitable enough yet,” he tells them sadly. “I wouldn’t dream of bringing anyone in as a partner until I can guarantee at least a twenty or twenty-five percent return. But maybe when the earnings get more consistent . . .” He pauses as they wait, greed shining on their faces. He taps his forefinger to his chin as if he were just struck by an idea.

  “Yes?” one of the men prods.

  “Maybe if that happens, I might consider selling shares of the business. Not as a partnership per se, more like buying stock.” He looks at them with wide, innocent eyes. “Would that kind of investment be of interest to you?”

  Needless to say, it would.

  In fact, he’s so engrossed in one of these conversations that he barely hears the first round of toasts Gertrude offers to Matisse. But when she mentions that one of the authors is Vivienne Gregsby, he abandons the German nobleman he’s speaking with and hurries to the dining room.

  He feels a pleasant stirring as he eyes Paulien, remembering the months he courted her, her enthusiasm once he bedded her. She lusted for him then, and she lusts for him now. Your first is always your first.

  He didn’t know she was a virgin when he approached her that day in London. All he knew was that the Mertens family was one of the wealthiest in Belgium, with social and financial connections all over the world—and that a Mertens daughter was on her own in the city, ripe
for the picking. The fact that she had never had sex before was an added bonus.

  Even though he has a full beard, unstylishly long hair, a deep tan, and is wearing eyeglasses, he moves off into the shadows. This isn’t the right moment to let his presence be known.

  Aside from feigned spontaneity when it suits his needs, he never makes a move without prior thought and planning. Now that he fully understands Paulien’s current situation and its resulting dilemmas, he knows precisely how he’s going to turn it to his advantage. In a week, maybe two, he’ll take his first step toward convincing her that what he wants is exactly what she wants.

  26

  Vivienne, 1926

  “I cannot believe I did not notice before.” Henri’s hands scramble wildly over his disorderly worktable until he finds a tape measure. He kneels in front of the templates and lays the tape along the bottom. Muttering numbers to himself in French, he moves the measure beneath the canvases and then back to the templates.

  Neither Vivienne nor Edwin needs to hear Henri’s conclusion. It’s obvious to the eye that the canvases are wider than the templates. By at least three feet.

  Henri rocks back on his heels and closes his eyes. “The templates are 13.3 meters and the canvases are 14.4,” he says in a monotone. “This is impossible, and yet it is so.” He looks up at them. “I am sorry, Edwin. Vivienne. More sorry than you can ever know.”

  Without a word, she and Edwin take hold of the ends of the tape and double-check Henri’s figures. There’s no mistake, or rather, there’s been a disastrous mistake.

  “It must have been the inches and feet,” Henri says. “The conversion to meters . . . when we cut the canvases. Somehow it was miscalculated . . .”

  Vivienne leans over and puts her arms around him. “You’ll fix it,” she tells him. “You created it once, you can create it again. You can redo it, reshape it, fit it to the new volume. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be better.”