Flirting with Forever

by Gwyn Cready

  “Well, it’s not like I need the warning. You slept with my first boyfriend. You slept with my second boyfriend and told me he was gay. You stole my major in college, and now you’re working at my museum. I’d offer you an apology, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to take it whether I give it to you or not.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Campbell. Man up.”

  “Yes, clearly I ought to keep a pretty deep inventory.”

  Anastasia gave a howl of frustration, reared back again, and threw the bowl, but not before half a dozen paper clips tumbled down her arm and attached to her bracelet. The bowl smashed into a dozen pieces, and Anastasia shook her arm like two attack dogs were hanging there. When the pink wire didn’t release, she stormed out.

  “Wow,” Jeanne said. “It must have been a red-letter day for you when Anastasia left the house to start kindergarten.”

  “Why does she have to be so mean? You know, I remember it killing me when she ignored me in high school. Who’d have thought I’d look back on those days so fondly?”

  Cam plopped in her chair and returned to the computer. There, on her monitor, the manuscript she’d been kicking around for two months looked out at her. Sex it up, eh? She supposed there were a few ways to do that. She could add sex. Lord knows there was enough of that in the art world even then, and she knew Van Dyck had had a long affair with a woman named Margaret Lemon. She could add a competitive rivalry, going for the Shaquille O’Neal/Kobe Bryant sort of thing. Even better, though, would be a competitive rivalry over a woman.

  Hmmmm.

  Cam scanned her memory banks. Surely there had been some woman somewhere who’d been shared by Van Dyck and another artist. Unfortunately most of Cam’s research had been about the man and his work. Sure, there had been the various bits of information about his life, but Cam had used that to flesh out the story of his painting. The sources she’d found had been somewhat dry regurgitations of where he studied and how he progressed to being the chosen painter of Charles I. If she was going to sex this puppy up, she needed something else. She was just starting to clear a path to her keyboard when her cell phone rang. She dug it out of her purse and checked the display. It was Joe. She hit the answer button. “How’s my favorite sibling?”

  “Gee, I’d feel more flattered if I didn’t know my only competition was Stacy.”

  “That’s Anastasia to you, pal.”

  “You guys still going strong?”

  “You know I can’t get enough. What are you up to?” she asked lightly.

  Joe had lost his wife and son in a car accident ten months earlier. It would be a long time before she’d feel him living inside their conversations again.

  “You know. Same old. I just wanted to tell you I’m making my reservations for Christmas—”

  “Oh, you’re coming up!” she cried happily and instantly regretted it. The accident had happened shortly after the holidays.

  “Yeah, I want to do it. I-I can’t promise you a lot of Christmas spirit—”

  “God, if you can just promise to sit between me and Stacy at dinner, that’ll be holiday enough.”

  He laughed. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Gotta run.”

  “Yeah.” His conversations were often cut short by unexpected short waves of tears, and Cam had grown used to allowing it to pass without comment. “Love you. Bye.”

  She clicked the phone and cursed the Fates for punishing such a great guy.

  “Is he okay?” Jeanne asked.

  Cam shrugged. “The same. It’ll be a while, I guess.”

  She dropped the phone in her clutch and checked to see if she still had that half of a Mounds bar left over from breakfast yesterday. Nope. Oh boy. Not a good sign. No wonder those Spanx were getting tighter. With a sigh, she dropped the bag on her desk.

  She pushed the folders off her keyboard, where she found her smashed hot dog. Sighing, she tossed it in the wastebasket. Then she pushed aside her tubes of paint and the little, half-finished still life of the stapler and pencil cup she’d work on when she wanted to be reminded that she’d once studied to be a painter, and called up Amazon.

  She hated to resort to mass-market research, but if she found something that offered a meaty tidbit, she could count on having the book in her hand by tomorrow. If she ordered it from the library, it might take weeks.

  She typed “Anthony Van Dyck” into the search box and got 241 results. Sighing, she began to page through. Most she’d seen before and either passed on or read. On the eighth page something caught her eye.

  Inside the Artist’s Studio: A Glimpse into the Personal Lives of the Greatest European Painters of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Well, that certainly had an interesting ring to it. Cam clicked to open it and read the description. There was no review from Publishers Weekly, which surprised her, since they were usually all over that stuff, but the first reader review—the only reader review—was eye-opening.

  “Everything I wanted to know about my favorites. Reads like Jansen’s History of Art meets Sex and the City. Felt like I was there. Hot, hot, hot.” From a “Madame K” in Sofia, Bulgaria.

  This will definitely be worth the overnight delivery charge.

  Cam added it to her cart. Her computer made a loud, angry buzz, like she’d given the wrong answer in Jeopardy! The screen didn’t change. Her cart was still empty.

  Hm.

  She tried again and got the same angry buzz. On the third try, Jeanne looked up.

  “Something I can help you with there?”

  “No.” Cam tried two more times with no change in outcome. She tried exiting the screen and returning. No luck. She tried another book site, but they didn’t have it listed. She went to the website of her local library and couldn’t find it there, either. She even tried the biggest used-book site she knew. No go.

  Crap!

  This book seemed like the answer to her prayers. She tapped her fingers. Well, there was a “Look Inside!” feature. With a little luck and a hell of a lot of patience, she might be able to find what she needed.

  Cam ran her mouse over the cover of the book and the image of the book changed.

  Now, that’s a little weird.

  What had been a bland detail of a Rembrandt painting became a full portrait of a red-haired woman in a gorgeous olive satin frock. Cam looked closer. If she didn’t know better, she’d almost have to say the woman looked like, well, her.

  “Wow.”

  “What?” Jeanne asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Cam didn’t recognize the painting, which didn’t surprise her, though she certainly recognized the artist. It was a Peter Lely, a minor painter of the late-seventeenth century—interestingly, the successor to Van Dyck as royal portraitist to the English court—whom the professors in grad school had only touched on.

  She had to admit, though, the painting—what she could see of it—was exquisite. Like Van Dyck, Lely had had a way of rendering fabric that made it practically jump off the canvas. But there was something else about Lely that stuck in her head. What was it? Something that made him a bit out of the ordinary in the art world.

  She went to the bookcase and scanned the volumes of art books, looking for the exhibit catalog. And there it was. It had been in the office when she moved in. Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II. She pulled the book off the shelf and instantly gasped.

  On the cover was a portrait by Lely. She recognized it now, had seen the original at the Yale Center for British Art a few years back. The young woman, a courtier of some sort, face framed in light auburn ringlets, gazed at Lely with a look of relaxed and bemused understanding, as if she’d shared her innermost secrets with him and knew they’d be safe. Her frock, if one could call it that, was rendered in a stunning pumpkin silk that draped in gleaming folds so realistic Cam c
ould almost hear the rustle. In the woman’s left hand was a pale peony, open and tinged with pink. She held it toward the viewer. But the most eye-catching part of the portrait was the woman’s porcelain white breast, curving upward to a firm rose nipple that sat unashamedly above the neckline of the silk.

  Cam put a hand to her cheek. “Wow.”

  “You’ve been using that word a lot,” Jeanne observed.

  Taken as a whole, the portrait packed a hell of a punch. A woman of the court, whose hair, makeup, and clothes suggested a position of wealth and importance, yet who gazed upon her portraitist with unveiled sensuality, and who, more important, let her portraitist gaze upon her in dishabille. Even in the licentious court of Charles II, this would have excited the attention of viewers—heck, Cam’s own belly was tingling. And yet the portrait was not pornographic or leering in any way. It was a masterfully executed study of classic beauty: the proportions of the woman’s face, the gleam of her skin, the delicacy of the blossom, the living, moving silk. But it was something beyond mere craft that provoked Cam’s admiration. It was the trust the artist had built with his subject and the obvious appreciation with which he had portrayed the woman’s assurance.

  Cam found herself wondering with some intensity what sort of man was capable of seeing a woman like that.

  “Look at this,” she said and turned the book toward Jeanne.

  Jeanne’s head tilted slowly. “Wow.”

  “I told you. It’s by Peter Lely.”

  “Was he her lover?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

  “Look at the way she looks at him. I mean, jeez. It’s like they just…”

  Cam nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Her eyes, that smile.”

  “And let’s not forget that breast. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “But what sort of woman…”

  “Peels the papaya? Yeah, I don’t know. A damned at-ease one, I guess.” Cam opened the book and began to page through it. “Holy moly. There’s more.”

  Lely’s women didn’t all have a breast on display, though a decent—indecent?—proportion of them did. But every one of them beheld their portraitist with the same worldly, self-assured, half-lidded gaze.

  Jeanne squeezed in next to her. “Did he do all of them?”

  “Probably,” Cam said. Painters generally considered themselves the absolute center not only of their own universe, but everyone else’s as well. She had to admit, though, this was like thinking-women’s porn—being adored from across the room by a man, master at his art, who saw you, fat or thin, beautiful or plain, as the most stunning, empowered, attractive woman on Earth. “He’s Jake Ryan,” Cam said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Jake Ryan, the hero of Sixteen Candles. The man who falls for Samantha Baker even though she isn’t cheerleader beautiful. Lely is the man who loves the woman posing for him for what’s on the inside.”

  Jeanne flipped a page and found a woman with both breasts on display. “That’s what’s on the inside?”

  “But look at her. Look at the way he sees her. And look at the way she looks at him in return.” Cam felt her breath quicken. Her eyes met Jeanne’s.

  Jeanne said, “I’m gettin’ a little—”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  But that had always been Cam’s problem with artists. That is, until she found Jacket not deep in his latest reaping, as he’d told her that night on the phone, but deep in Cam’s jewelry designer. That’s when Cam decided she wasn’t ever going to be painter-stupid again. If men in bars had beer goggles, women who fell for artists looked at the world through a magnifying ass, a special lens you could only buy in New York or West End galleries that made egomaniacs look like geniuses.

  For a moment, neither woman said anything, then Jeanne pulled her eyes away from the book and regarded Cam closely. “So what’s it like posing for a portrait?”

  Cam flushed. “How the heck would I know?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you lived with a guy who paints portraits for four years? I mean, even with your boobs laid out like oranges in Lucite cages, it’s got to be kinda flattering.”

  Cam felt the pins of embarrassment sting her cheeks. Jacket’s pieces had always been done without a model. He claimed they were amalgams of many women he’d known, and he did them from memory. Thus, she had ended four roller-coaster years of happiness, hot sex, and knock-down, drag-out fights with not so much as a sketch on a napkin to show that she had inspired anything in his work.

  “Jacket doesn’t use models,” she said. “His work isn’t about people in particular. It’s about both the objectification of subjects in art and the rising of the human spirit against it.” She’d repeated this phrase so often in her life, she felt like she had it tattooed on her forehead.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Cam returned with the book to her desk. She flipped by two more pages, but the self-portrait that dominated the third made her stop. Where Rembrandt’s self-portraits projected impishness and Van Dyck’s a quiet self-confidence, Lely had chosen to portray himself as both knowing and seeking, as if his life’s experiences had left him slightly adrift. His hair, luxurious and auburn, framed his face in loose curls that reached to his shoulders. A strong nose led to a pliant mouth with full lips that looked capable of both an easy smile and something more complicated. The gentlest curve of a cheek hung by the corners of his mouth, a signal of middle age in an artist unafraid of such trivialities. The shadow of a late-day beard burnished his cheeks and chin, but it was his eyes that struck her most.

  Cam eased her glasses out of her purse and slipped them on. She didn’t like to wear them and only needed a little magnification, but for this she would endure the potential embarrassment.

  Lely’s eyes were dark and liquid—Sierra Nevada Porter on a warm summer’s night. And the single dot of cream in the irises—a painter’s trick, she knew, but in Lely’s capable hand a trick for which she willingly suspended disbelief—signaled such a potent mix of pain and joy it made her heart cramp.

  She exhaled, unaware she’d been holding her breath. “Wow.”

  “Wow again?”

  “It’s Lely.” Cam’s gaze returned involuntarily to the self-portrait. “He was, uh…uh…uh…” Those eyes seemed to be looking right at her.

  “Such a well-nuanced argument. I don’t understand why you’re not on the lecture circuit.”

  Cam ran her finger across the portrait’s glossy surface, recalling her grad school reading. “He was German, I think. No. No. Born in Germany to Dutch parents. That’s it.”

  “Who? Van Dyck?”

  “No, Lely. And he moved to England young, I think. Like twenty-one or twenty-two. After being admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke, the trade association for painters in Holland.”

  “Have we changed the subject of the book? Because I’d sure hate to lose that first sentence. It’s a killer.” Jeanne picked up the Lely exhibition catalog and returned to her desk with it.

  With an effort, Cam returned her gaze to the screen. Sex and Van Dyck, she reminded herself. You’re here for sex and rivalry, and ran the mouse past the picture on the screen, to where the large “Look Inside!” was perched, and when she did, a menu popped up. “‘Front Cover,’ ‘Back Cover,’ ‘Table of Contents,’ or ‘Surprise Me!’?”

  The choice was obvious. She let the cursor hover over the words and pursed her lips, saying a quiet prayer that the click she was about to make would deliver her directly into Van Dyck’s bedchamber, with a tale of sex, lies, and oil paint that could be knitted directly into her biography. Oh God, please surprise me.

  As she brought her finger down, Cam’s gaze slipped to the cover of the Lely catalog in Jeanne’s hand, wondering once again what sort of man it took to earn such a bemused, smoky look from an obviously entranced subject.


  Click.

  A noise like a giant vacuum cleaner filled the room, so loud Cam clapped her hands over her ears, and wind blew everything off her desk, flinging her purse like a rugby ball into her lap and her chair into the radiator behind her. It was like the blast of a jet plane, only Jeanne, who looked at her, horrified, didn’t seem to be affected by it at all. Cam was on the verge of dropping to the floor for protection when the wind stopped, the room went black, and the edges of her laptop stretched out like arms to envelop her.

  Six

  Boom.

  Cam exploded into the doorway of a high-ceilinged, rococo-trimmed room filled wall to wall with naked women—a good thing, she thought with a part of her brain that apparently processed input even in the face of chaotic upheaval, since she, too, was naked. She flung her arms around herself and gasped for air.

  A thousand questions flew through her head. Where am I? Who are these women? Where’s my laptop? Am I dead? She felt confused, slightly nauseous, and hugely exposed.

  “My apologies,” she said as the women’s heads swiveled. “I, ah, tripped.”

  Several had been playing cards on a heap of cushions, two were admiring a horned hat, one was leaning on a carved club, another was dangling a loop of yarn over the batting paws of a kitten, and one, holding a shield and wearing an armor helmet with an enormous plume on top, was swinging a wooden broadsword, chanting “I am Athena. I am Athena.” None seemed even moderately concerned by their state of undress or the arrival of an equally undressed companion.

  The women were long-limbed and shapely, and Cam scrambled to determine which prospect of her body would be the least revealing to share, deciding at last on a foot-forward beauty pageant stance, with forearms taking the place of both an underwire bra and Spanx, and her ass tucked beside the door frame. The woman with the kitten said, “Oh, look, Kate, ’tis the new girl.”

  Kate tucked the club under her arm and ran over with an amiable smile. She wore cuffs of maple and oak leaves around each ankle.

  “Oh, thank the Lord,” Kate cried, “a tall one! At least we are matched.” Kate drew a hand along an invisible line between the top of Cam’s head and her own. She extended the club, which, after a spit-second deliberation, Cam accepted with her Spanx hand, and picked up another. “Supporters make a very poor showing if they are not matched, I think.” Kate laid the club across her shoulders like a Highlander ready to do battle and took on what Cam assumed to be a supporter’s proper sneer. “We are the wild men on the Danish coat of arms, do you see? The lord-general of the Danish army is coming. Peter said it would amuse him. Are you cold?” she added, looking with curiosity at Cam’s still-rigid arm.