by Gwyn Cready
“Yes, well, I’m certain you’ll find other uses for it,” he said uncertainly.
Well, wherever he’d been in his life, he hadn’t been anywhere in the western world in the 1980s. She should have introduced herself as Pat Benatar.
“I also want to talk with you about your book.”
“My goodness,” she said, “it’s just a festival of fun tonight. I think I would have preferred the insurance pitch.”
“This is a bit awkward, I know, but I’d like you to consider dropping it.”
“Drop my book?”
“Yes.”
“Did Peter send you?”
“No. In fact, he would be considerably unhappy to know I was here.”
“Well, I’d certainly hate to be the cause of any unhappiness for him.”
Mertons paused, clicked his pencil a time or two. His gaze cut to the rolled-up paper, then back to Cam. “May I show you something?”
“Sure.” She picked up her wine and tossed back a large gulp. It seemed only a moment ago that the Cabernet had had flavor.
He turned the paper facedown on the table and went over to the suitcase. It was a large beige hard-sided valise with leather straps and buckles, the sort her grandfather might have traveled with. “Gee, where are you heading? Nineteen forty-two?”
He gave a weak laugh, but only enough to remind her that that might be exactly where a time-jump accountant was traveling. She wondered if he used Amazon too. Jeanne swore the laptop had been turned off the night he and Peter arrived, which had baffled Cam. But he must not know about Amazon’s unique “Look Inside!” feature, since he clearly didn’t have the faintest idea how she traveled.
He opened the buckles and cracked the top. Using both hands, he pulled a painting out of the case and set it on the table.
It was her. Done by Peter. She wore the olive dressing gown she had worn that night, but it was not quite the pose she remembered. Her hair, which had been pinned up that night in his studio, fell loosely over her shoulder. Instead of frank eroticism, the look in her eyes was one of relaxed delight. And most important, she was clothed. The painting was an imagined moment of quiet joy, one that had not occurred, and she looked at it without knowing quite what to say.
“That’s not the painting from that night, is it?”
“No, but it was painted soon after. And many more were painted here.”
“Here? Peter’s still here?” She’d assumed Peter had left. “Why?”
“He says his desire is to stop you from writing your book.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not going to suggest that that isn’t his desire, are you?”
“No. I just wondered if there might be another reason for his single-mindedness.”
Her gaze went from the painting to the veiled hint in Mertons’s eyes. “Look,” she said with an iron edge, “the man gave me a bullshit story that nearly ruined me as a writer.”
“He did it for a friend. Under duress. I know. I helped make it possible.”
“Well, thanks a hell of a lot. You and Peter can take your little two-man Mean Boys act and go back to the seventeenth century.”
“Peter can’t go back.”
“What? Is his foot caught in a time crack? Tell him to hook that DeLorean up to a lightning rod. One-point-twenty-one jiggowatts of electricity shooting up his ass is just the thing to get him moving on his way.”
“You’re thinking of the Peter of 1673. The Peter you and I know lives in another place. The Afterlife. He’s dead.”
She nearly dropped her wine. “What are you saying?”
Mertons sighed. “The Afterlife is where we go when we die. You, me, Peter, anyone you’ve ever known. Some stay forever, but only if they’ve reached the end of all the lives they were meant to live. Most wait for a new life to be assigned. While Peter was waiting for his new-life-to-be, he was asked to return to his former life for a short assignment—stopping you. He had no wish to return and accepted the task with great reluctance.”
“He didn’t appear very reluctant.” She thought of those lips as she and Peter stood on the balcony that night. There wasn’t a movement he’d made that had seemed even remotely hesitant.
“Then I’d assert you don’t know him very well.”
She made a peremptory sniff, and her eyes returned to the painting. It certainly seemed to have been drawn with honest regard. She looked at the curls framing her shoulders and felt a shiver as she remembered him removing that hairpin. “And this is what he’s been working on?”
Her companion’s moral superiority appeared to weaken. “Peter’s been working on a number of projects,” he said obscurely.
“So what are you telling me? I should stop the book because Peter found a conscience and now has feelings for me?”
Mertons let out a long sigh. “Yes.”
How much of her book was revenge, she asked herself, and how much was a story that should be told? She shifted uncomfortably. “Mertons—”
“Look, I’m not saying you two are another Romeo and Juliet—”
“You’re aware they ended up dead?”
“Fine, a Scarlett and Rhett—”
“Estranged and unhappy. But you’re getting warmer.”
“What I’m trying to say is, look at the work. You’re an art expert. What does that art tell you?”
She allowed herself to remove the lens of anger that had colored her thoughts about Peter since they’d parted. She was a seasoned art expert, after all. What would she see if she really let herself look?
She closed her eyes and opened them. What she saw made her heart ache, not just because Peter had painted the sort of moment of comfortable intimacy that makes the best part of a relationship, but because that moment reflected what she herself had desired for the two of them. If this is what Peter’s art said about Peter, she thought, what does my book say about me?
Touching the corner of the canvas with care, as if it might spark under her touch, she said lightly, “It tells me a lot of things, actually.”
“You see! I’ve seen his work! He’s not painted something like this ever before, not even of his wife. Don’t you see the impact you’ve had on him?”
Wife? Ursula was his wife? She fought to keep her hand from shaking. “He painted his wife?”
“Oh, any number of times. She was his muse, I’m told. But it was never like this.”
No, one never paints one’s wife the way one does the woman one draws into adultery. She felt ill.
“I think,” she said softly, “you’d better leave.”
Mertons frowned, obviously confused. “But—”
“Go. Please.”
“I should like to leave you the painting.”
“That’s unnecessary. Peter will see it’s missing.”
“No. No, he—” Mertons came to a dead stop.
“He what?”
Mertons shifted his weight. “He asked me to dispose of it.”
“Then I’ll ask you to do the same.”
“Miss Stratford, all sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market?”
“Not enough to tempt me a second time. Take it.” Cam made her way to the entry hall, hoping Mertons would take the hint.
His shoulders fell. He slipped on his coat, placed the canvas under his arm, and picked up his briefcase and valise. “And the book?”
She pressed the security button to call the elevator. “Tell Peter he’s been my muse. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Cam made it all the way to her bedroom before she began to cry.
* * *
Jacket had been sneaking into the kitchen, hoping to grab a beer without being forced into the torturous conversation, when he heard an odd tone in the conversation Cam was having with the insurance agent. He’d turned in the directi
on of the living room and strained to hear. What he’d picked up had been garbled, as the ice maker had dropped a fresh batch into the storage compartment, but then, clear as a bell, he’d heard the insurance guy say, “Miss Stratford, all sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market?”
Peter Lely again? What the hell was going on? Who were these guys?
Then she’d rushed by the kitchen and into her room.
When he heard the door close, he stuck his head out for a look. The insurance guy stood in front of the elevator with a canvas frame under his arm. The door opened, and the man hesitated. He held the door with his foot, put his cases on the floor, and placed the painting down, front side against the wall. Then he picked up the cases and got in. The door closed.
Jacket ventured from the studio, not sure what to think. He went to the row of windows in the dining room, the ones that faced down onto Washington Road. He saw the man exit the building, cross the street, and head into Orbis Coffee Shop.
Then Jacket crossed to the elevator and turned the painting. Jesus, it was Cam, and worse, it was good. He wondered if she’d keep it. He wondered if she wanted him even to know about it. He looked to see if Cam’s door was open. It wasn’t. He pulled his cell phone out and took a snap.
What the hell was going on?
Thirty-five
“Did you ever hear from that weird guy again?” Anastasia asked, tucking the sheet around her. Jacket had been still so long she wondered if his heart had given out. Was it her fault orgasms required somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-eight minutes of hammering friction? She’d done it once in nineteen minutes, but that had been with a vibrator and the sex scene from Wild Things, and she could hardly ask Jacket to incorporate anything more into his already overloaded routine.
“Wh-what weird guy?”
Christ, he sounded like her eighty-three-year-old grandpa waking from a nap. “Rusty the repairman-slash-millionaire.”
“Ahhhhhh, no. Not really.”
“Not really?” Anastasia had wondered about the guy. Despite the lowbrow togs, there had been something incredibly sexy about him, that capable, workingman sexy, the kind of guy that could pound you over the breakfast counter while he’s digging out the nail file that accidentally chewed up your garbage disposal—not that that had happened to Anastasia, of course, except that once, and then the guy had still insisted on being paid, the Neanderthal. She had wondered what Rusty was doing with Cam. Cam was not exactly known for sexy boyfriends, a generalization that firmly included Jacket, whom Anastasia found to be too plain-faced to be good for anything except proving she could get whatever her sister had.
“Well, his ‘associate’ was over the other day talking to Cam.”
“An associate? Plumbers have associates now?”
“He’s not a plumber. Apparently he’s a painter.”
“Really?” Not that painters had associates, either, as far as she knew. Nonetheless, this was getting interesting.
“Yeah, come over here and look at this for a minute.”
Jacket dragged himself up to sitting and pulled himself out of bed. She padded over beside him.
He grabbed his cell phone from the easel and opened the photo album icon.
Jesus, it looked like a Peter Lely!
“It’s supposed to be a Peter Lely,” Jacket said.
“No shit.” But what was infinitely more amazing was that it was a Peter Lely–style portrait of Cam. Or so it seemed to be. Anastasia grabbed the phone and expanded the image with her fingers as much as she could. The artist had captured his sitter in a timeless, ethereal glow and, typical of Lely, who had nothing of the realist about him, her face was idealized, as if the veil of imperfection had been entirely lifted. She could have been Cam, an English queen, or even Venus.
The woman in the painting wore an olive-gold dressing gown that hung off one shoulder, the folds of the fabric falling gracefully down her arms and across her lap. Her hair was loose, hanging in tousled waves over flawless, pale shoulders and a hint of bosom that disappeared into the gentle curve of the gown’s neckline. But it was the expression on her face that set it apart from the usual Lely. The woman’s eyes were crinkled in pleasure, as if he’d captured the moment after shared laughter. With its mix of formal and intimate, it was exactly like Lely.
“It looks like him,” she said, “but I don’t know.”
“I saw it. Trust me. The overpainting, the glazing could have come straight out of Vermeer. The draping and use of light was remarkable. Hasn’t been anything like it in the last century except maybe Hopper.”
“Where did she get it?” Anastasia asked, but Jacket did not answer. He was staring at the painting, obviously distressed. “What is it?”
“Look at it,” he said. “The painter loves her.”
Anastasia looked again. Jacket was right. Taken as a whole, the painting was an ode, a paean, and if the woman did not love the painter in return, then she was on the verge of it. Her eyes glittered, her carriage was loose and open, like that of a woman who’s letting herself go for the first time.
“C’mon,” she said. “If it’s a Peter Lely, it can’t be Cam.”
Jacket moved the screen until the woman’s hand showed. “The ring,” he said. “It’s hers.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen her wearing it almost every day for the past four years. It was your mother’s.”
“Nothing personal, but I think you’re imagining things. In any case, though, if it is Cam, it’s not a Peter Lely.” Anastasia frowned. “The technique… It just looks so much like a Peter Lely.”
Jacket snorted. “Maybe it is, just a different Peter Lely. Did I tell you that this Rusty guy told me his real name was Peter Lely.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, that day he was here. I didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“And what’s even weirder is what the guy who brought the painting here said.”
“Yeah?”
“Apparently he was trying to give it to Cam, and he said to her, ‘Sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Lely is worth in today’s market?’”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did Cam say?”
Jacket sighed. “‘Not enough to tempt me a second time.’ She didn’t want it. The guy left it next to the front door, which is when I took a snap of it. And it’s a good thing I did because it was gone an hour later.”
Well, the answer to how much it would be worth, Anastasia knew, was more than a million dollars—that is, if it were a real, undiscovered Lely. The question now was, what the hell was it really, and more important, what were Cam and the associate up to?
“So now Peter-slash-Rusty sits over in Orbis there across the street every afternoon.” Jacket jerked his thumb toward Washington Road.
Anastasia peered down into the lighted streetscape. Orbis Coffee Shop was directly across from the building. “How do you know?”
“Well, the associate headed there after he met with Cam, so, just to find out, I went down to look. And there they were. That’s how I figured out he was working with the guy. Then I started to check. He—Rusty, Peter, whatever his name is—is there every day. Just like clockwork. Jesus, I’d swear to God he and Cam were having an affair, but I don’t know how since I’m here all day and she’s at work.”
“Poor Jacket. Infidelity is such a trial.”
Jacket didn’t reply, and the look in his eyes, still locked on the portrait, suggested he hadn’t heard.
“‘Not enough to tempt me a second time,’” he said. “That goddamn well means there was a first.”
Thirty-six
“Wow, you’re in early.”
Jeanne flipped on the overhead light. Cam did not usually make it to the mu
seum before nine or nine thirty, but ever since she’d switched the Van Dyck book to a Lely book, it was like she’d been working off some sort of cross-century caffeinated rocket fuel, appearing in the office before sunrise, shooting off emails in the middle of the night, and generally being even more of a pain in the ass than usual. Of course, it didn’t help that the gala was tomorrow and the board meeting to decide the new director the day after that. Jeanne prayed Cam would be chosen. That way Jeanne could ramp down to only helping run one of the biggest art museums between New York and Chicago instead of helping run the museum and serving as gopher on all this Lely crap.
Jeanne said, “Are we supposed to be reviewing the interpretive stuff?” One of Cam’s jobs for the exhibition was ensuring every piece of art was properly notated and, whenever possible, put into context.
“Done.”
“And the insurance riders?”
“Done.”
“And the docent guide?”
“Reviewed and approved.”
“What about your Van Dyck? No promotion, you know, without that little two-point-one-million-dollar line item on your résumé.”
“It’s not my Van Dyck. And it’s in transit as we speak.”
Cam had been a powerhouse of efficiency for the last three weeks, clearing away mountains of museum work like a battalion of snowplows in order to preserve as much time as possible for her writing.
“So,” Cam said without looking up from the monitor, “is this all we can find on him?”
Jeanne sighed. By “him,” of course, Cam meant “Lely.” It had been the only “him” in her life for the past few weeks. It was a wonder Jacket hadn’t given up on Cam and gone back to London. Jeanne dropped her bag on the floor and hung up her coat. “Yes, you’re now officially the most knowledgeable person on Earth about a subject no one really cares about. I believe there’s a special wing of the Star Trek Society that will be honoring you soon.”
“No, I mean is this all? Weren’t you getting an article from Burlington Magazine?” Cam was at her desk surrounded by a dozen open books. When she was really engrossed in what she was writing, as she was now, the keyboard clicked like a Geiger counter, punctuated by cracks loud enough to make Jeanne jump when she hit Enter at the end of a paragraph.