The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

  Bob ceded her the apartment, but at times Caroline wished she had started over in a new place, perhaps a new city. She’d welcome a new job, but she didn’t know what else she was fit to do other than try and solve the familial problems of people she didn’t know. After reconnecting with Hazel at her father’s funeral, she and her aunt started talking weekly on the phone. Hazel was sympathetic about the divorce and would say things like, “I never got the sense that Bob was there there, you know what I mean?”

  Since this was based on the one time she and Bob had met, Caroline didn’t know what Hazel was talking about, and sometimes she suspected Hazel didn’t, either. Often when she called her aunt, Hazel sounded sleepy, even when she insisted she wanted to talk, and she’d drift off into a tangent. Still, she was someone who would listen, and who understood what it was like to be single, unlike Caroline’s friend Rose, who evinced the same amount of dismay when Caroline told her that she was getting divorced as when Caroline had told her that her father had died.

  Then one night, after Caroline had complained yet again about how she wished she could start over, Hazel said, “Why don’t you move to New York?” She sounded unusually alert and serious.

  “What would I do? Where would I live?”

  “You could stay with me. As for a job, you could help me at the gallery.”

  “I don’t know anything about art.”

  “You don’t need to know anything about art. Just what other people think they know about art.”

  Caroline thought Hazel was getting a little loopy again. But the idea of moving to New York City, where she’d been so close to growing up as a child without actually experiencing it, filled her with a sense of hope she hadn’t felt for a long time. Within the month, she put in her notice at work, gave up her and Bob’s old apartment, and moved across the country.

  Caroline arrived at Hazel’s apartment in Chelsea in the middle of the day. Hazel had left instructions to pick up the keys from a neighbor, as she would be out. When Caroline let herself in, her nose was instantly accosted with the smell of smoke—not cigarette smoke, but the skunky pinch of marijuana. That must explain Hazel’s sounding so sleepy over the phone, the aimless trajectory of her conversations. Caroline pictured her aunt reclining on the sofa in one of her embroidered caftans, joint held between thumb and forefinger, a different kind of glamour.

  In the noon darkness, the apartment looked older and more decrepit than Caroline remembered from her previous visits. The Moroccan glass chandelier that she’d thought so cheerfully bohemian, the Indian batik wall hangings that seemed so cosmopolitan—so international—struck her as tawdry now. No wonder she’d loved her aunt’s apartment as a teenager. For the first time, she noticed that Hazel had no art at all on her walls.

  By the time Hazel got home later that afternoon, Caroline had put away her few things in the spare room and was sitting at her old refuge, the kitchen table, drinking tea and flipping through a magazine.

  “Welcome back, darling,” Hazel said in the doorway.

  Caroline nearly dropped her mug. In the year since she’d last seen her, Hazel’s appearance had altered dramatically. All of the scarves and other layers of fabric draped around her body couldn’t disguise how thin she’d gotten. Her face was long and gaunt, the grooves of her clavicle deep. The only aspects that were the same were the red of her hair and the corresponding crimson slash of her mouth.

  She helped Hazel sit down and offered her some tea.

  “Thank you,” Hazel said. “I should be acting the hostess here. But this is your home now.”

  There was no point in trying to hide anything. “Aunt Hazel,” Caroline said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid that I’ve gotten you here under false pretenses. You probably thought I was being so generous, offering you a place to stay and a job. But the truth is, I need someone here to help me. For the first time in my life, I can’t be alone.”

  “You’re sick.” When Hazel did not bother to contradict this statement, Caroline asked, “What is it?”

  “Cancer. Not breast cancer, like your mother,” Hazel added quickly. “Lung cancer. We’re a lucky family.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Before your father passed away. I didn’t want to tell you then, with you having to deal with the funeral and selling the house.”

  “And then Bob and I got divorced.”

  “It was easier just to talk to you on the phone as if nothing was wrong.”

  “I could tell something was going on with you. With the way you talked.”

  “Ah.” Hazel pantomimed smoking a joint.

  “Is that wise?”

  “It’s the only thing that keeps my mind calm. And am I really going to do more harm to my lungs?”

  Unexpectedly, Caroline laughed, which she tried to hide behind a cough, but Hazel just nodded in understanding.

  Caroline took a deep breath and then took her aunt’s hand, fragile and clawlike, in her own. “You are being generous. Thank you for letting me help you.”

  Gratitude was the overwhelming emotion Caroline felt in the final few months of Hazel’s life, accompanying her to doctor’s appointments, cleaning up after her, cooking and keeping house; gratitude that she could be there when she had been too young for her mother and too distant and unaware for her father. On days when Hazel was feeling well, they’d take walks in the neighborhood, usually ending up by the Hudson River. On days when she wasn’t, they’d stay inside and smoke pot, until Caroline felt like her existence was being drawn out as thin as thread.

  When Hazel died, five months after Caroline had come to live with her, Caroline inherited the rent-controlled apartment, the gallery, and, although she only came to realize it years later, despite the friends and lovers that rotated throughout the years, the solitariness of her aunt’s life.

  * * *

  This morning, when Caroline looked around her kitchen, she thought how not much had changed about the kitchen since Hazel’s day. She had kept the avocado-green appliances, the Formica table, the curtains, now yellowed with age. The rest of the apartment, however, Caroline had gradually converted to her own style. Gone were the Middle- and Far Eastern influences, replaced with modern furniture. A few paintings hung on the walls, by artists she’d been unable to sell in the gallery but considered too promising to let go. None of them ever turned out to be worth much, but she felt she owed these artists something.

  She couldn’t do much else to mitigate the age of the apartment, which hadn’t been renovated since Hazel had moved there in the 1950s, since she didn’t own the place. If she’d been smart, even as late as ten years ago, she should have borrowed to purchase the apartment and the gallery below. But rent control had lulled her into complacency, and now she was in danger of losing both places.

  A few weeks ago, her landlord had sent everyone in the building a letter stating his intention to turn co-op, meaning they’d have to purchase into the building at its current value or leave. This wasn’t the landlord whom Aunt Hazel had dealt with, who’d given her an unprecedented deal for renting both the apartment and gallery space sixty years ago, but that landlord’s grandson, who lived out on Long Island. Caroline had commiserated with her other neighbors—an elderly couple who was fit for the retirement home anyway, a young couple who needed more room for their growing family, and two female roommates in their twenties who should be living in Brooklyn instead—but she doubted that any of them were in quite her situation. Simply put, Caroline had no other place to go if she wanted to stay in business. She was willing to find another place to live, but if she lost the gallery, she’d lose the only thing she’d inherited from her family.

  The gallery didn’t make enough money to warrant moving it to another location; and, if Caroline was being honest with herself, to preserve its current one. When Caroline had inherited it, it was in a steady decline. Resuscitation had come from an unlikely source. After Hazel’s death, Caroline discovered her aunt had a storage
space in the basement of the building that contained paintings by artists whose work had become quite sought after. At first Caroline had wondered whether Hazel had some kind of sentimental attachment to them and if so, why she hadn’t displayed them in her own home. Then she realized they were collateral, to be used judiciously when needed. So she moved the paintings to a climate-controlled storage locker and sold them one by one during lean times at the gallery, usually when she was on the brink of shutting it down, and somehow they always pulled her through.

  Now, though, there were no more paintings, and even if there were, she’d need something spectacular to save the gallery. What she currently had on exhibition wouldn’t do. Sandro Hess, a middle-aged painter of German and Argentine descent, used vibrant colors but his work paled in comparison to what other galleries in the area were showing: multitextual, multimedia installations by artists barely into their twenties. Also, for some reason, Sandro had gotten fixated on the motif of Mickey Mouse. Caroline didn’t know if this was indicative of the artist regressing in age or nostalgia for a childhood he’d never had. When she asked her assistant, Molly, who was in her early twenties, what she thought, Molly merely shrugged and said, “It’s all subjective, right?” As if she were talking to a professor and afraid she had been asked a trick question.

  Caroline had been concerned Molly would turn out to be the kind of assistant she saw at other galleries, girls who thought that their proximity to art meant they needed to dress up like abstract paintings themselves, who hung on to artists and buyers with the hope that some of their fame or wealth would rub off on them. But Molly came to work every day wearing interchangeable tops and skirts of mismatched shades of black, scuffed black ballet flats, and her mousy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Without complaint, she did whatever task was given her, whether it was cleaning up years of spreadsheets and files on the computer or running minor errands for her boss.

  This morning, when Caroline made the ridiculously short commute down the front stairs of her apartment building and into the gallery, Molly was sitting at the front desk looking at her laptop screen. The vase of flowers next to her were half dead, which went against Caroline’s belief that there be fresh flowers on the front desk every day.

  She was just about to comment on it when Molly said, “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to pick up fresh flowers this morning. The train was late today.”

  Caroline wondered why young people always seemed to place the blame on anything other than themselves, and preferably on inanimate objects. She handed Molly a twenty-dollar bill. “You can get the flowers now, please. Plus a tea for me.” She assessed the dark circles under the girl’s eyes and added, “And a coffee for you. You look like you could use it.”

  As Molly stepped out from behind the desk, Caroline prompted, “Were there any calls waiting for me this morning?”

  “Just Sandro Hess.”

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “The usual, whether you had any potential buyers lined up.”

  Caroline rolled her eyes. The opening of Sandro’s show had been almost a month ago, at the beginning of summer, and while he’d gotten more media coverage than she’d expected, nothing had come out of it. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought it was a mistake to take Sandro on as a client. Really, as more than a client. But he had been so charming when they’d met, with his dark eyes and unplaceable accent. Sandro’s money woes were well known to anyone who spent more than five minutes in conversation with him—the support to an ex-wife and child—and while it could garner some sympathy, it usually just made him look vulnerable and weak.

  “If he calls again, just say I’m out at a meeting,” Caroline told Molly.

  The girl nodded and said, “And I’m not sure when you’ll be back, but you’ll call him if you have anything positive to report.”

  “Exactly.”

  How different Molly was from her vivacious mother, Caroline’s college roommate, Rose Calhoun. She was Rose Schaeffer now, of course, had been for more than thirty years. When Caroline moved back to the East Coast, she and Rose had started meeting up for lunches in the city every few months or so. They managed to keep it up for years, as Caroline went from one financial struggle at the gallery to another, and Rose went from new mother to PTA volunteer to empty nester.

  At one recent lunch, Rose mentioned her daughter, Molly, who was the youngest of her three children. For some reason Molly had quit school two months before she was set to graduate, and was moving to the city that summer to live with her college boyfriend.

  “She was studying art history,” Rose said. “Guess she was influenced by all the postcards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art you sent her over the years.”

  “May I remind you that I never studied art history?”

  Rose laughed. “True. Well, it’s not like an art history degree will get you a job.”

  Caroline knew what Rose was going to ask next, but she tried to stave it off by pretending to be interested in other aspects of the girl’s life. “And you think it’s a good idea that she’s moving in with her boyfriend?”

  “Sam’s nice enough. They’ve been dating since the beginning of senior year. He works in a municipal garden.”

  Caroline pictured one of the city’s green-clad sanitation workers, moving through the park with their plastic bags and trash pickers. Surely Rose meant something else.

  “As for moving to the city, even though it’ll be the two of them sharing a place, Caleb and I are probably going to have to help cover her part of the rent. I know, but it’s hard for her father and I to deny her anything, especially after what she’s been through at school. She had this roommate . . .”

  Mentally, Caroline checked her schedule and wondered whether she could cut this lunch short by saying she had a meeting with a client.

  “. . . so, I was wondering if maybe Molly could come work at your gallery? As your assistant? She did have some experience working as an admin at school.”

  Caroline was reluctant to admit to her old friend that she hadn’t been able to afford an assistant in years. As if aware of what she was thinking, Rose added, “You wouldn’t have to pay her much.”

  “She’s probably overqualified, but I’ll give it a chance,” Caroline finally said.

  “Great.” Rose’s smile lit her face in the way that Caroline remembered. “Thanks so much, Caro. I know she’ll do well. She already looks up to you.”

  Since Molly had studied art history, Caroline thought of pawning her off on her friend Peter, who had been Hazel’s assistant at the Lowry Gallery back in the day. Peter was now an art historian who was currently copyediting the arts section of a free newspaper and living off of his wealthier partner. But when she’d suggested it to him, Peter had said, “What would she help me with, catching all the times someone writes a letter to the editor and spells Pollock as Pollack? It’s the fish, not a misspelling of the ethnicity.”

  Now whenever they met for dinner, Peter would inquire after Molly.

  “How’s your little protégé?” he asked at their most recent encounter.

  “She’s not my protégé.”

  “You must be teaching her something.”

  “I guess she’s about to get a master lesson in the business of running an art gallery.” Caroline told Peter about her landlord’s ultimatum concerning the building. “The situation is just as bad as when Hazel left me the gallery the first time, if not worse.”

  “And there’s nothing left in her private gallery in the basement?”

  “Not one thing.”

  Peter had been instrumental in identifying the valuable paintings in the basement and instructing Caroline on what to do with them. Now he regarded her thoughtfully. “Too bad she never had an Andrew Cantrell.”

  “You’d think she would, given their relationship. But maybe she felt it was too painful after all they’d been through together.”

  “All the more reason to have one. Tell me, is Cantrell’s wife still alive?�
��

  “Naomi Cantrell? She must be in her eighties by now. She supposedly doesn’t have anything by him, either—all his work was in his studio in East Hampton when it went up in flames.”

  “Now, that’s hard to believe.”

  “No one bothered to dispute it. They didn’t have any children or relatives who laid claim to his estate. Cantrell didn’t have money of his own anyway, it all came from his wife.”

  Peter looked around the dimly lit restaurant with an exaggerated air of secrecy. “I’m not disputing that fact about Naomi Cantrell. But I think Hazel had an Andrew Cantrell painting.”

  “She didn’t . . .” Caroline trailed off when she was beginning to grasp what he was saying.

  “Have you ever heard of Zhang Daqian?”

  “Who?”

  “One of the most influential Chinese artists of the twentieth century, in his country and outside of it. Of course, outside of it he was better known as a forger. He produced paintings attributed to the great Chinese painting masters from centuries ago that were sold to places like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “He was a skilled artist, but he also made sure all of the technical details lined up—the age of the paper, the kind of ink, the appearance of the seal, that kind of thing. That’s what makes forgeries of classical art so much more difficult than, say, post–World War II art, because the painting has to use materials plausible from that age and the artwork itself has to seem hundreds, or in Daqian’s case, thousands of years old.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you, my dear, need to find yourself a Zhang Daqian.”

  “And if I find him?”

  “Give him something worth copying.”