Flirting with Forever

by Gwyn Cready

  “I hope you get what you want, then.” She gave him a sly smile and walked past the loft’s floor-to-ceiling windows, her stilettos clicking out the ball-tightening code of a streetwalker. “Let me ask you something,” she said when she finished a long sweep of the skyline. “Why is it you’re asking me for help with Ball and not Cam?”

  He took a breath. He didn’t really understand all the rules about women, but he had a sense talking about Cam in this way was crossing the line. “She doesn’t like to get involved in that sort of thing.”

  “For her fiancé?”

  “We haven’t quite gotten to that stage yet.” He shifted from one foot to the other. “We’re still in negotiations.”

  “Jesus. Are you fucking her, or are you actually stuck in the guest room like it looks?”

  He rubbed his hands on his jeans. “C’mon, Anastasia.”

  She dug a cigarette out of her purse and held out a pack of matches. He struck one for her and lit the cigarette. The sound made his heart do a weird sort of jump step, even though he’d never been a smoker.

  “What’s this?” She looked at the sketchbook on his work desk.

  “Oh, that. A detail. For a portrait.”

  “You’re going back to portraits?”

  “Well, just one. The last, probably.”

  “The last portrait of Jacket Sprague,” she said with an interested glint. “Now there’s something that sounds interesting. Who’s your model?”

  “Well, I don’t usually work with models, but in this case—”

  “How about me?”

  “What?”

  “Me. How about me?” She lifted herself onto the table and crossed her legs. Her hair was as straight and shiny as a slice of onyx.

  “I, uh…”

  His cell phone buzzed. It was Cam. He held up a finger and stepped into the hall. “Where are you, doll?”

  “At a restaurant in Regent Square. With Mr. Ball. We just sat down.”

  “Oh God. Not another fuzzy navel night.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not driving. What are you doing?”

  “You know. Meeting with a potential buyer.”

  “Cool. See you soon—well, maybe not soon, exactly.”

  He laughed. “Take your time.”

  He walked back into the studio. Anastasia was naked, perched effortlessly on heels that seemed to be an extension of her body. The glossy black triangle below her waist looked like a small, hibernating animal. She walked to the bed and lay on her stomach, her lovely tight ass flexing as she crossed her ankles above it. Her breasts, boyish and firm, were visible by her bent elbow.

  She looked at him through long, thick lashes. “Perhaps we should start like this.”

  Twenty-nine

  “He’s here,” Jeanne said over the phone.

  “Who’s here?” Cam held up a finger to Ball and excused herself from the restaurant’s booth.

  “Peter Lely.”

  Her chest made a vigorous thump. “What do you mean ‘here’?”

  “I mean here. In the museum. Whatever you did on your way back from Shakespeare land, you forgot to lock the barn door, and now a very large, very oddly dressed cow is walking around the admin wing.”

  “Holy cripes! Stop him!” She ran out the door for the privacy of the sidewalk.

  “Honey, I’m doing everything I can. He’s in the men’s room now.”

  “Hiding?”

  “Changing.”

  Cam’s stomach felt like a dozen marathoners were running through it. “You’ve got to make him go back.”

  “Tried it. The man’s got no interest in going back. He wants you.”

  Oh Christ! “I can’t.”

  “According to him, you’ve got two choices. Either meet with him now or he comes back to the museum tomorrow to talk with ‘your master’ and goes from there to the ‘gentleman who prints your books.’”

  When worlds collide. Cam tried to speak but no words came.

  “Where’s Jacket?” Jeanne demanded.

  “Meeting with a potential buyer.”

  “I’m stowing the guy at your place, then. Get your ass over there.”

  Thirty

  Peter gazed down at the thick boots; the stiff, formfitting brown breeks; and the odd tan shirt with half sleeves and its owner’s name sewn over the pocket. “Rusty,” he said again.

  “I told you, he’s a maintenance man.” Jeanne turned the wheel of the horseless vehicle she called a “car.” “He works with the boiler and pipes. That sort of thing.”

  “In that line of work, such a name does not instill much confidence.”

  “Look, you’re lucky he’s always had a thing for me. Otherwise you’d be wearing our intern’s spare pair of running shorts and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.”

  Nothing after “Otherwise” had made the slightest sense, though it sounded as if the clothes he’d been given were better than what he might have had. He looked at them again. He had always taken great pride in his clothes and frequented the finest tailors in London. But despite the exquisite workmanship of the seams, everything else on the shirt and breeches seemed utilitarian and plain. There were no ribbons, no lace, no dash of color, no delicacy of design. And the sharp, intricate teeth of the device holding his breeks closed were more than a little disconcerting. But he liked the boots. Sturdy and comfortable, they reminded him of his days as a lad in Westphalia, conquering the Soest hills with his friends.

  “How much longer?”

  Jeanne gave him a look. “It’s rush hour.”

  Peter marveled at the name given the stately pace at which they were proceeding. He could have covered the same ground on foot in half the time. Nonetheless he took the opportunity to drink in his fill of the new world. Peter had known the future would look different. Everyone in the Afterlife had the sort of general understanding of what existed by hearing reports from the Guild, but it was quite different to see it all laid out in such a frighteningly crowded and tall landscape. On one side of the river beside which Jeanne drove, the houses were small and close, sitting in row upon row along a rising hill, not unlike Cornhill or Hampstead Heath. But on the other side, the structures were almost magical—massive silver and glass things rising hundreds of feet in the air. He spotted a breathtaking building, right out of a storyteller’s imagination, all of shining blue glass, with pointed peaks and battlements around its towers. “Is that a castle?”

  Jeanne laughed. “Well, it was designed to look that way. It’s the PPG Building. A glass company.”

  The glaziers Peter had known were not so well compensed, though Donovan, the glass merchant he frequented most, had raised his prices sometimes twice a year, so it was not beyond reckoning that by the twenty-first century they would have acquired great wealth.

  “What about artists?” he asked. “Where do they live?”

  “Depends how well you do. Cam’s lives in a row house in Notting Hill.”

  Cam’s artist. His heart sank. Campbell did have an artist fiancé. Peter had hoped, foolishly, that that part of her deception had been untrue. His hand went to his emerald ring, and he thought of Ursula. He didn’t want Ursula to be shamed by Campbell’s book. Someday, at the end of Ursula’s new life, she would return to the Afterlife, and while he himself had no recollection of the other lives he’d lived on Earth, he had heard of those who did.

  His plan was to stop the book, return to 1673, and get Charles to sign that writ. How foolish he’d been not to just hand over Campbell that night. It would have been exactly what the minx deserved.

  Oh, Ursula. In whatever life you’ve been reborn, I hope you are happy.

  Jeanne maneuvered the car into place in front of a smaller version of the buildings he had admired in the vicinity of the glass castle. There was a sign on the front that read 650 Washington Road.
r />   She towed him toward the door at a run.

  “Why are you hurrying?”

  “I’m parked illegally.” Through the door they went, and on a wall at the end of the low-ceilinged entry hall, she pressed a button, which promptly lit up.

  Peter gestured toward the entrance. “Look. Someone is admiring your carriage.”

  She turned and let out a surprisingly vivid oath. “She’s not admiring it. She’s going to write me a ticket.”

  The door before them opened. Jeanne pulled him inside the tiny room, inserted a key into a lock at the bottom of a row of numbered buttons, and turned it. Then she jumped off, stopping the door, a sort of sideways portcullis, while the door registered its unhappiness with loud bells.

  “Go up,” she instructed. “Her place is at the top. When you get there, remove the key and the door will open. I’ll be up as soon as I can.”

  The doors closed. For an instant he looked for a way to ascend, then the floor jerked upward and his heart jumped into his throat. He grabbed the narrow railing that ran the circumference of the space.

  After a moment that seemed to last a lifetime, the room stopped. He dove for the key and turned it as the woman had said. The portcullis slid back, and the space before him had transformed from a tiny room to a high-ceilinged space lit from floor to ceiling with windows. The sun had set, and the view, past a dining table with high-backed chairs, was of a horizon sparkling with stars. Two churches sat high on a hill in the distance, and around them dozens and dozens of charming cottages were visible.

  He thought of the view from his attic and of the moments he’d shared with Campbell Stratford there. She’d captured his heart, joined him in his bed, then varnished it all with a veneer of lies. It had been a cruel punishment for his dormant heart. The nearly spent flame there had fluttered weakly to life, then been pinched out and destroyed.

  But that wasn’t why he was here, he reminded himself. He had been a fool, but men do foolish things. The evening had served as a painful reminder that his rightful place was not in his old life, but in a life that had yet to be chosen for him. He couldn’t rest, however, in any life until he knew that Ursula would be protected.

  He took a step. “Miss Stratford?” No answer. He heard music playing in the distance and wondered where the musicians were. It was a plaintive song, and a woman began to sing about how hard she’d try to show a man that he was her only dream. He’d never heard any song that sounded like this. The voice, haunting and low, sent a chill down his back.

  The space was open and light, so different than any home in London. It was opulent but in a spare, unadorned way. The furniture was low, bookcases lined the room, and an asymmetrical fireplace presided at the room’s far end.

  He approached the closest bookcase, drawn by an array of portraits—or pictures, as he knew they were called here. There was one of a mother pinning a ribbon on a cherubic child. The child was Campbell Stratford. He’d have recognized the red-gold hair anywhere, but the freckles and missing tooth added unexpected charm. In the next picture she was an adult in a gallery of some sort with other people her own age. They held pints of ale and were giving the artist exuberant smiles. The last picture showed her from behind, perched beside a railing with a man’s arm around her, looking at Notre Dame on a sunny summer day.

  Peter assessed the man—the position of his hand, the strength of his profile. He wore no wig and his light hair had been shaved very close, and though Peter couldn’t see the man’s eyes well, his affection for Campbell was clear.

  This was the last thing he wished to see. He turned, and the work of art on the wall opposite him took his breath away.

  It was a woman, half a woman, whose portrait was divided diagonally through the center, like the shield on a coat of arms. Above the dividing line, the woman was represented by an oil painting. Below the dividing line, clear cubes of varying sizes, holding pieces of fruit and other household objects, represented the rest of her.

  Peter stared, amazed. An orange for a breast, a plum for her mons, an ancient lock on the finger of her left hand, and a small metal circle with wavy, folded-in edges emblazoned with the words “Budweiser—King of Beers” for a nipple. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, but the artist’s purpose was instantly clear, and he smiled. The artist’s mark, in the lower right-hand corner, was the outline of a knife and the letters JKET.

  Another bell rang, and he jumped. It rang, stopped, rang, stopped. The noise came from a small, multibuttoned object on a hallway table. After the third ring, he heard a click and Campbell Stratford’s distinctive contralto.

  “Jeanne? Jeanne? Are you there? Pick up. Oh, Christ, I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  The click sounded again, and the noise stopped. It pained him to be reminded that she’d masked her real voice with an English accent to deceive him.

  A book called The Carnegie Museum of Art Collection Highlights sat on the table in front of a couch, and the cover showed a painting of a woman stepping into a tub. Again he was in awe of the loose technique and the highly unconventional color choice. According to the credit, the artist was one “Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.” Despite what Peter’s teachers had impressed upon him, it seemed breaking the rules hadn’t destroyed the art of painting after all.

  Campbell had slipped a piece of paper in to mark a page. He turned to the page and nearly laughed. It was his painting of the Duchess of Portsmouth. She was looking particularly pleased with herself, in red silk, with the sterling and leather appointments of an archer across her lap. But what had made him laugh was the short, blunt mustache Campbell had drawn above her lip. Oh, Campbell.

  He looked at the clock and his irritation began to rise. The assistant had promised him Campbell would be here. If she didn’t arrive soon, he’d chance the moving room again, find a place to sleep, and return to the museum at first light. He didn’t know how her master would react to finding out she’d discovered a time tube hole and used it for personal gain, but he suspected it wouldn’t add appreciably to her professional credentials.

  Not that he wanted to destroy her career—that is, unless he had to. But her book had to be stopped. He’d die before he’d allow the story of him and Ursula to become fodder for the reading public’s amusement. And if doing so destroyed what he hoped was at least a mild regard for him—how pathetic it was that he clung to such a hope—he would live with the results of his actions.

  He’d wait a few minutes, no more.

  Biding his time, he returned to the Carnegie book, which seemed to hold a surprise on every page. There was a Van Dyck, of course, and a painting of a merchant by his old friend, Frans Hals. He saw the steady progression of techniques as the book covered successive centuries, just as he could trace the changes in style as he walked through the galleries of Hampton Court or Whitehall. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, everything seemed to change. It was as if a new vision had come into being, and all the old rules had been thrown out the window.

  He turned the page and gasped to see a shimmering pond—which a part of his mind recognized immediately, though no sort of close examination of the brushstrokes would have yielded anything like water—upon which gleaming white blossoms floated. “Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Water Lilies), c. 1915–1926,” the attribution read. Rembrandt had once observed, “There is more to blue than azure and ivory black, my friend.” Nothing could have illustrated the point better than Monet’s breathtaking work of art.

  But it was the paintings noted to be mid- to late-twentieth-century creations that most amazed Peter. The luxurious palette of colors and softly blurred images had been replaced by an urgent and exhilarating clarity of vision, a vision so different from that of the paintings and sculptures and friezes he knew, he hardly knew how to approach them.

  There was a painting of numbers—just numbers—by an artist named On Kawara, a series of painted boxes by Donald J
udd, and even a painted chain. He found the vivid distillation of a single idea that these pieces seemed to represent startling, and the businessman in him couldn’t help but note that the production of such pieces of art, if indeed that’s what they were—though they had to be if collected by museums alongside Van Dycks, Lelys, and Monets—would be infinitely quicker to produce than his portraits. He himself had made a small fortune selling prints of his paintings, prints that took only a moment or two to produce once the plate had been prepared compared to the twenty to thirty hours it took to complete a canvas. This twentieth-century ease of production was bringing the same notion to a more noble scale. Brilliant ideas coupled with straightforward manufacture. He liked it.

  He flipped more pages and saw a nearly white canvas containing a few narrow lines and an absolutely thrilling work of nothing but paint splatters, but paint splatters applied with so much passion he could almost feel the blood pounding in the artist’s ears. He’d just found a simple line drawing of a woman or a bull—he wasn’t sure which one—done in a wonderfully ironic hand that seemed to dispel everything he had ever learned about portraits, when the music stopped and the muffled voices of two people somewhere else in the apartment made him jump to his feet.

  He heard a door bang open, and a man’s voice, clearer now, said, “No, you stay there. Let’s see…she’s got a Pinot and a Chardonnay.”

  “Chardonnay,” a sultry-voiced woman said drolly. “For the times when making an impression doesn’t matter. Pinot, please. Hold the cherry.”

  The two laughed, an intimate, shared-story laugh.

  Peter had no wish to eavesdrop. “Hello,” he called and walked into view.

  The man, dressed in a pair of tight, blue, rough-cloth breeks and nothing else, stood alone. He was instantly identifiable as the man in the picture who’d had his arm around Campbell. He was in the middle of a room that bore a vague, otherworldly resemblance to the scullery in Peter’s town house, holding open the door of something that looked like a large, lit wardrobe in one hand and reaching for a bottle of wine with the other. He stared at Peter in amazement.