by Wendy Lee
“This is all very nice,” she finally said. “But this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. Or rather, what my client has in mind.”
So she was acting on someone else’s behalf. “What do they want?” I asked.
From her handbag, Caroline removed an old catalog listing of shows at the Lowry Gallery in 1970. She opened it to a painting called Elegy, by an artist named Andrew Cantrell. The name was vaguely familiar to me, although more to do with the artist’s reputation than his work. According to the description, the painting had been done in 1969 and measured five feet by three feet. The image was of a swirling gray background with a nimbus of white in the center; representative, I guess, of the era’s tastes. As to how it was elegiac, I couldn’t tell.
“This,” Caroline said, “was one of Andrew Cantrell’s most famous works, that he supposedly was offered two million dollars for—a good amount back then—but he refused to sell. It was only shown once, at the Lowry Gallery, and then he kept it in his East Hampton studio until five years later.”
“Until the fire that killed him.” I was beginning to remember more about the artist. Andrew Cantrell had achieved some fame in the late 1960s, but he was perhaps best known for his death in a fire in 1975 that was supposedly set by his old mistress. Even I had read about that.
Caroline raised her eyebrows. “Yes. This was the most well-known painting that was lost. My client wants to resurrect it, so to speak. He’s hoping to get a replica made.”
“A copy?”
“As close as you can make it. The client is prepared to pay a good price for it.”
“How much?”
“Two thousand dollars.” She must have read the shift in my face because she quickly amended, “I can probably get him up to three thousand. Will that be enough?”
Now it was my turn to guess what was going on behind her funky reader glasses. Some impatience was there; if I didn’t agree, she could easily find a starving art student to take my place. Plus, this was the most lucrative job I’d had in ages. If only Jin could see me now.
“Okay,” I said.
“How long do you think it would take you to do it?”
The canvas she was asking for was larger than I usually worked with, but I didn’t let on. “I’ll need a month. Do you have anything I can work off of?”
“Anything that wasn’t in a museum or private collection was lost in the fire. There’s one piece in the Museum of Modern Art. I’m sorry, but all I can give you is the catalog.” Caroline paused. “To make it look as authentic as possible, you’ll have to make sure the right kind of materials are used. Materials from the appropriate time period. Do you know how to do that?”
I nodded, certain I could figure this out. “When will the payment be made?”
“I can give you half the money next week. It’ll be in cash, of course.”
“Of course,” I echoed, and we shook hands on it.
After I cleared the tray with the tea, which Caroline had hardly touched, the first thought that something might not be quite right with this scenario entered my mind. Copying a painting was common. Selling a replica was, as well. However, if Caroline’s intentions were to try to pass this off as a genuine Andrew Cantrell, then that could mean trouble if the painting was traced back to me. But why would she do that? Say that she didn’t, in fact, have a prospective client lined up and was intending to sell it on the open market? I had never heard of there being a market for Andrew Cantrell’s paintings, as much as I knew about these things.
And, if she were intending to sell the painting as authentic, how could she be so sure that I wouldn’t go to the police? Perhaps she was banking on the possibility that I had issues with my citizenship, which I did. I had come over on a student visa that had never been renewed, and throughout my scattershot work history I’d never been forced to provide anything as official as a green card. Look at where and how I lived. There had been no opportunity before for anyone to come after me.
Yes, I’d keep silent about a forgery, if that was what Caroline intended. But I couldn’t tell what was going on in her glossy, bobbed head. The gallery that bore her name had once shown the painting, so she obviously had ties to the painter. Whatever it was, I would stick to the story, that she wanted me to paint a replica for a private client. There was nothing wrong with that.
After Caroline left, I looked again at the page in the catalog she had left me. It contained a brief bio of the artist, but not anything about what might have inspired him to paint such an obscure work. I squinted at the page. If I looked hard enough, the gray swirls turned into a version of my own mountain, the one that I painted over and over. Perhaps Andrew Cantrell had something he was compulsive about, as well.
When my eyes started to cross, I closed the catalog. It was clear that in order to pull this project off, I needed expertise I didn’t have.
I pulled out my phone. “Wang?” I said. “I need your help.”
Chapter 2
Although no one had asked her in years, Caroline Lowry told people that her first memory was at her mother’s funeral, when she was five years old, at a cemetery on Long Island. It wasn’t of her father, who had been a dark, shapeless mass standing off to the side, consumed by grief. Instead, she remembered her aunt Hazel Lowry, her mother’s younger sister. Hazel, always fashionable, wore a brown fur pillbox hat above her black lambskin coat.
Caroline tugged on her aunt’s glove. “Can I hold your hat?” she asked.
Hazel looked down at her distractedly. “Of course, darling.” She removed her hat, exposing her smooth, chestnut head to the chilly autumn day, and handed it to Caroline.
Instead of putting it on her own head, or even stuffing her hands into it like a muff, Caroline cradled the hat against her cheek, as though it were an animal. In fact, she was pretending it was a cat, the cat that she had always wanted as a pet and her father had promised to get her after her mother recovered from her illness. Now that her mother would never get better, she supposed this was closest thing she would ever have to a pet.
Caroline’s father told her that her mother had died of bone cancer. Caroline didn’t know what that meant, and even when she was a little older, she assumed that some kind of disease had eaten out the insides of her mother’s bones, the way you could lick the marrow out of the beef bones her father bought from the butcher’s down the street. Later, when she was fifteen, she happened to mention this to Hazel when she was spending the weekend with her aunt in the city.
“Your father told you what?” Hazel turned around from the stove, where she had been fixing them cocoa before bed.
“Mom died of bone cancer?” Caroline repeated tentatively from her seat at the kitchen table.
Hazel slammed her hands down on the sides of the stove. “Your mother died of breast cancer. Honestly, Catholics!”
Later that night, from the living room sofa where she was sleeping, Caroline could hear Hazel talking to her father on the telephone in the kitchen. “John, I don’t care that you’re not supposed to talk about certain parts of a woman’s body. This is a life-and-death matter. What if Caroline ends up with the same disease as her mother? What are you going to tell her then?”
Caroline knew that Hazel believed in women’s progress, and controversial things like the Pill; embarrassingly, she had asked Caroline whether she was dating any boys and assured her that she could get her contraception if necessary. Caroline shook her head so that her long, dark brown hair covered the flush creeping up her face. She barely spoke to the boys in her class, and they to her.
If she’d looked like her aunt Hazel, she was sure that boys would do more than want to talk with her. Hazel was in her early thirties but she wore her skirts short, her hair long, and her heels high. When Caroline walked down the street with her, she could see how men’s eyes followed Hazel: deliverymen, businessmen; black, white; young, old. Hazel was an equal-opportunity attractor.
One weekend a month, Caroline’s father allowed her to take the train
to the city to visit Hazel. She much preferred Hazel’s cheerful, eclectic apartment in Chelsea, even though there was no hot water and the rooms were stacked one after the other, railroad-style. In the decade after her mother’s death, her father had never remarried and had hired a housekeeper to do the cleaning and the cooking. Once a week he went out with a coworker from the insurance company, a gray-faced woman named Jeanine Smalls. Caroline shuddered to think what went on during their dates, or if Jeanine stayed over on the weekends when she was visiting her aunt.
Hazel took her to nice restaurants, art galleries, snuck her into nightclubs, calling Caroline her younger sister. She knew a number of artists and later represented them, making enough to open her own gallery in the first floor of the apartment building she had lived in since her twenties. By that time Caroline was in college, at an all-girls’ school in Massachusetts, and she mostly only saw Hazel at holidays. Once she took her roommate, Rose, with her to an art opening, an experience Rose inevitably reminisced about years later whenever the two women met for lunch in the city.
“Do you remember what Hazel was wearing, Caro?” Rose would say over a glass of white wine. “Do you remember when she introduced us to Andrew Cantrell? I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
While the Lowry Gallery was relatively small, it could accommodate fifty people, tightly packed, within its walls. Giggling, Caroline and Rose secured themselves drinks and wove through the crowd of people who all looked more sophisticated than they could ever hope of growing up to be.
They pretended to be absorbed in looking at the centerpiece of the art opening, a painting that commanded the entire room and that people stood back from in a reverent semicircle. The canvas was all gray except for a white blur in the center, like an indelible thumbprint. It was called Elegy and the painter was Andrew Cantrell. Both Caroline and Rose knew who Andrew Cantrell was, since he had been in the papers recently for turning down two million dollars for this very painting. Caroline looked at it again to see if she could tell what made it so special, what made it worth so much money, but she had no idea. The longer she looked at it, the more it resembled an inkblot out of a Rorschach test, which she’d recently learned about in psychology class.
Next to her, Rose was shaking her head. “I don’t get it. Doesn’t it look like a child could have painted it?”
Privately Caroline agreed, but she wasn’t going to admit that to her friend, and especially in this company. Imagining what her aunt might say about it, she observed, “Well, that’s the beauty of it. It’s deceptively simple. But when you look closer at the brushstrokes—”
She was saved from trying to expound further on something she knew nothing about by Rose clutching her arm. “Is that her? Your aunt?”
Hazel was standing in a corner wearing what could only be described as a beaded caftan with a plunging neckline, paradoxically both modest and revealing. Her hair, which over the years had graduated to more red than brown, towered over her head. She looked like some kind of demented goddess.
“Caroline!” Hazel called. “Who is your darling friend?”
Rose looked like she was seriously contemplating whether to curtsy. The thing Caroline liked best about her roommate was that even though she came from an ordinary family unmarred by death or divorce, Rose often seemed more awkward and unsure of herself than Caroline was.
After Caroline made the introduction, Hazel placed her hand on the arm of the man behind her, turning him neatly to face them. “Girls, I’d like you to meet my darling friend, Andrew.”
Beside her, Caroline could sense rather than see Rose’s mouth falling open. What a Rose-ish response, she thought, which fortunately saved her from a similar reaction. Both of them had forgotten that they had been unimpressed by Andrew Cantrell’s work, hadn’t been able to understand the first thing about it, and were instead completely taken by being in the presence of the artist.
Later, when recalling the only time she’d met him, Caroline realized Andrew Cantrell was quite short, only coming up to her aunt’s shoulder and barely taller than Caroline herself. What little hair remained on his head formed a fringe that partially obscured his ears, but his shoulders were broad and powerfully set. He shook hands with each girl with calloused fingers, looking intently into their faces as if resolving to remember the color of their eyes (Caroline, brown; Rose, blue).
“I will remember this night for the rest of my life,” Rose declared afterward. She and Caroline remained at the edges of the room for the rest of the night, tipsy from their drinks and closeness to fame, but somehow Caroline was aware of where Hazel was all night. For one thing, it was hard to miss her red beehive bobbing above everyone else’s heads. And always by her side—or rather, shoulder—was the gleaming orb of Andrew Cantrell’s head. The two of them rarely touched or spoke to each other all night, but at one point Caroline realized, with astonishing clarity, that her aunt and the artist were lovers. She tried to picture a recent photo spread in Life magazine of Andrew Cantrell’s summer home out on East Hampton, his studio overlooking the sea. His wife stood next to him with the afternoon tea she’d prepared on a tray, an apron tied around her trim waist.
Caroline never mentioned these thoughts to Rose, or her father, or anyone. After graduating from college, she moved to San Francisco for a job with a women’s rights organization, as far away as she could get from her father’s somber house. Two or three years later, she caught the headline in a newspaper that the artist Andrew Cantrell had died in a fire at his East Hampton home. The article suggested that it had been set by his former mistress, the gallery owner Hazel Lowry, but that paper was no better than a tabloid anyway. Still, Caroline was tempted to call her aunt to ask her if that was true, but decided against it. She’d talk to Hazel the next time she went back East to visit her father.
That visit didn’t take place for another decade, when her father died of a stroke in the middle of winter. Caroline had become a social worker and was married to another social worker, Bob Kleinman, chosen primarily because his warm, unassuming demeanor was so different from her father’s. Bob came with her to her father’s funeral on Long Island, where he’d be laid to rest next to her mother.
Although she hadn’t seen her aunt for many years, Caroline immediately spotted Hazel, her hair more brilliantly red than ever, in a leopard-print coat and hat. They kissed each other on the cheek, and then Hazel removed her hat and held it out to Caroline.
“Do you want to hold it?” she asked.
Caroline didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She introduced Bob to Hazel, and then saw a sallow-faced woman approaching her.
“You probably don’t remember me,” the woman said by way of greeting.
Caroline took in a breath. “Jeanine Smalls.”
“Yes.” Jeanine gave a small smile. “I was very close to your father. I even wanted us to get married, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to you.”
“Fair to me?” Caroline echoed.
“He thought you didn’t like me.”
Caroline hadn’t known that her father had had such consideration for her feelings. Out of guilt, she invited Jeanine to come out to dinner afterward, but Jeanine declined, so Caroline, Bob, and Hazel set out on their own. They ended up in a diner off the highway, which wasn’t very festive, but it had the kind of hearty, unembellished food that her father would have liked.
“How’s business at the art gallery?” Caroline asked Hazel.
Hazel sighed. “Sales are down. But there are starting to be some foreign investors, from the Middle East and such, that’s giving me hope.”
Caroline noticed that her aunt’s bright lipstick was bleeding into the fine lines around her mouth as she talked. For the first time in her life, she thought Hazel looked old. And why shouldn’t she? Hazel must be around fifty by now.
When Bob left the table to settle the bill, Caroline said to Hazel, “I know it happened years ago, but I’ve always meant to tell you how sorry I was to hear your artist friend died.�
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“Who?”
Caroline flushed like a teenager. “The one who lived out on East Hampton. You introduced me and my friend Rose to him one night at a party in your gallery.”
“Oh, Andrew Cantrell.” Hazel tapped the ash off her cigarette and let out a stream of smoke from between her pursed lips. “That was an unfortunate death.”
“The papers said . . .” Caroline paused.
Her aunt fixed her with a stern gaze. “I know what they said. Andrew and I weren’t in a relationship anymore by that time. His wife had a better reason to set that fire than I did. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I was just wondering . . . It was such a big news story at the time.”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “Scandalous, I know. Well, that was a decade ago and people had a lot less to gossip about then. Speaking of friends, how’s your old pal Rose?”
It was Caroline’s turn to be confused by the abrupt change in subject. “She’s fine. She lives in Connecticut now, married to a lawyer. She has two children, both boys.”
“Sounds like a delightful life. Not something you want with Bob?”
“Children?” Caroline wondered where she and Bob would find the time, with their overload of cases, seeing every day what happened when parents were unable to provide for their own children. “You never had children,” she pointed out, suddenly feeling bold.
Hazel took a long drag off her cigarette. “Not that I didn’t have the opportunity. I just chose not to.”
At that point, Bob came back to the table, and they left the diner, Hazel to take the train into the city, and he and Caroline to the house in which she’d grown up, where she spent the next week disposing of her childhood.
Not long after they got back to San Francisco, Bob announced he wanted a divorce, and Caroline calmly gave it to him. The transaction was relatively simple; they had no children or shared property, and had always kept separate bank accounts. There wasn’t even a typical reason, such as an affair or a deadly disease or a midlife crisis, behind their disunion. Their lives had just gone off course, like a zipper that no longer went up to the top. The only saving grace, Caroline thought, was that her father hadn’t been alive to see his daughter divorced, something his staunchly Catholic heart wouldn’t have endured.