The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “And you are . . . Caroline Lowry?” The faintest hint of confusion on his face.

  I laughed. “No, I’m her assistant, Molly Schaeffer.” I had no idea why I had given my full name.

  “Molly Schaeffer,” he said, “can you tell me where I can find Caroline Lowry?”

  His use of the first and last names made me feel like I was in a language textbook exercise. I couldn’t keep from speaking loudly and slowly. “Caroline has stepped out for a moment, but she will be back soon. I’m sure she will be pleased to see you. Would you like to sit down?”

  “I prefer to walk around and look at the art,” he said.

  “Would you like something to drink? Water? Coffee?” Reminded by his Asian-ness, I blurted out, “Tea?”

  I hadn’t meant to sound so pushy, but he nodded. I went into the back room, looked through the various boxes and tins that had migrated downstairs from Caroline’s apartment, and decided on Earl Grey. In the gallery, the client had paused thoughtfully in front of what was my least favorite of Sandro’s work, a variation on Manet’s Olympia except the nude’s head had been replaced with that of—who else—Mickey Mouse.

  I handed the man the cup of tea and he nodded again in thanks.

  “What do you think?” I asked, tilting my head toward Olympia-Mickey.

  “It is—how do you say—humorous?”

  “Yes,” I said, laughing a little too forcefully. “It’s very funny.”

  He took a sip of his tea and I noticed a barely perceptible frown cross his face. Had I picked the wrong flavor? Maybe I should have asked him if he took lemon, like Caroline. Flustered, I excused myself and went into the back room to tidy up. When I returned to the gallery space, I noticed the cup had been placed on the front desk, apparently not having been touched again.

  Thankfully, Caroline came in through the door a few minutes later. I said to her in a low voice, “The client’s here. The one you told me to expect.”

  On cue, the client stepped out from behind one of the walls dividing the gallery and, putting a wide smile on her face, Caroline stepped forward to greet him. “You must be . . . Mr. Yu.”

  “Harold Yu.” He removed a slim, silver card case from an inner pocket in his jacket and presented her a card with both hands.

  Then, to my surprise and secret delight, Mr. Yu turned to me and gave me a card, as well, which I took with one hand.

  “Please come with me,” Caroline said to him. “We can speak privately in my office. I’m so glad that you’re interested in this acquisition.”

  I couldn’t hear any more as they went down the hallway.

  From the conversation I’d overheard on the phone between Caroline and Peter the other day, I knew Mr. Yu was here to purchase a painting by Andrew Cantrell, which I’d never heard Caroline speak of, nor seen mentioned in any of the files, records, or papers I’d been assigned to organize since I’d been hired at the Lowry Gallery. Caroline would probably keep a painting as valuable as a Cantrell in a vault. I recalled seeing records from a warehouse on Long Island that detailed paintings from well-known contemporaries of Cantrell. Those, I guess, had been sold or moved elsewhere long ago.

  Then I pictured the interior of Caroline’s apartment. I wondered if the Cantrell was one of the paintings on her walls. Nothing I had seen looked like a Cantrell to me, as much as I knew what they looked like from an art history class. Idly, I typed Andrew Cantrell’s name into my laptop’s search engine and looked at the images. Some of his most famous paintings came into view, including Meditation, which was at the Museum of Modern Art. That had been the painting in my class textbook, a black canvas with a single, horizontal, dark-blue band in the middle that seemed to shimmer off the surface.

  There were a few pictures of Andrew Cantrell, as well. He was not a very good-looking man. I found a black-and-white photo of him with an aproned woman who I guessed was his wife. Then another photo of him, in color, accompanied by a different woman with shimmering red hair. I had seen that woman’s face before, in the framed photograph on Caroline Lowry’s end table.

  Feverishly, I clicked on that image, which led me to an article about a show at the Lowry Gallery run by Hazel Lowry, a “good friend” of Andrew Cantrell. I scanned the article, but didn’t find much else that was of interest, just a list of names of famous artists and celebrities who had attended the event. Then, at the end, a single line: “Notably absent was the artist’s wife, Naomi Cantrell, but Hazel Lowry eagerly stepped in to fill that role.”

  So Hazel Lowry had been Andrew Cantrell’s mistress? I searched both their names together and found a number of tabloid articles about their being seen together at dinner, at the theater, walking down Fifth Avenue. Then I spotted an article about Cantrell’s death in a suspicious fire that destroyed most of his work, suggesting that Hazel Lowry had been involved. “Scorned Mistress Sets Artist Studio Ablaze!” was the headline.

  Caroline and Mr. Yu came out from her office, and I quickly closed the page.

  “I look forward to showing you the painting in person,” Caroline was saying to Mr. Yu. They shook hands, and I watched as Mr. Yu exited the gallery. In the same, deliberate fashion as when he’d arrived, he looked up the street, down the street, and began walking toward the corner.

  Caroline had a distant but pleased look on her face.

  “So he was interested in a Sandro Hess?” I asked innocently.

  Her face shifted. “He’s interested in another painting. It isn’t anything you need to know about.”

  So, for whatever reason, Caroline wasn’t going to tell me that Mr. Yu was interested in an Andrew Cantrell. And why should she? It was none of my business.

  That night, when Sam was comfortably ensconced on the sofa for his nightly binge-watching, I went into my studio and called my mother. Her overjoyed response to find I was on the other end of the line, as always, sent a pang of guilt through me.

  “Did you know that Caroline’s aunt, Hazel Lowry, was the artist Andrew Cantrell’s mistress?”

  “Why, yes. I remember when we were in college, we went into the city for a show exhibiting one of his paintings.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. This ridiculously dark painting that neither Caroline nor I could make any sense of. But Hazel was there. She was just sublime.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sublime’?”

  “She was wearing this incredible dress. And her hairdo! So red and massive. You have to remember, this was the sixties.”

  The way my mother sounded, I could easily imagine her around my age, awestruck by a famous artist and a beautiful woman, even if she didn’t understand why. I was having a harder time picturing Caroline, even though I had once seen an old college photo of my mother’s, her fair head next to Caroline’s dark one. Caroline must have started dyeing her hair red, just as Hazel must have done, because there was no way Hazel’s hair color was found in nature.

  “Did you know Hazel was Cantrell’s mistress?”

  My mother hesitated. “I don’t think so. I remember when he died, though, and the awful tabloids that came out afterward about her.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died of cancer, poor thing. Less than two years after Caroline’s father died. She was very important to Caroline, her only family, really. Caroline’s mother died when she was young, and her father didn’t sound like the warmest man. And then she got married and divorced out in San Francisco. She had pretty much no one but Hazel when she came back to New York. And she’s lived like a nun ever since.”

  Not quite like a nun, I thought.

  After I had assured my mother that I was being careful walking home from the subway, I hung up. I looked at the unfinished canvas before me, the portrait of my great-grandmother. In the blank space where her face should have been, I imagined the fine features, the radiant smile, from the photograph I had seen in Caroline’s apartment. For the first portrait in my triptych, I needed
a strong-willed, self-assured woman like Hazel Lowry.

  Chapter 4

  On the flight home to Taipei from New York City, Harold Yu thought about the painting by the American artist he was going to buy, which he’d only seen in a catalog presented to him by the woman gallery owner.

  “We’re currently restoring it,” she told him as they sat in her office, which was shabbier than he’d expected. The gallery was small and displayed some kind of child’s artwork. The picture of the painting she’d presented him was quite different, though, a moody, gray-and-white piece.

  Harold didn’t pretend he knew anything about art, or that he wanted to buy this particular painting because it spoke to something within him. He didn’t even know anything about the painter, Andrew Cantrell, whom the dealer said “would have been considered the next Jackson Pollock if he had lived.” But one of his works hung in the Museum of Modern Art, and that was good enough for Harold.

  “Where did you get this painting?” he asked the gallery owner.

  She didn’t miss a beat. “My aunt knew the painter himself and received it from him as a present. She kept it a secret and I only found out recently that she had it, while looking through the things I inherited from her after she died.”

  “You don’t want to put it up for auction?”

  She sighed. “Mr. Yu, I’ll be honest. I would hold on to this painting if I could afford to. The next best thing is to sell it to an individual buyer rather than an investment group, and that’s not likely to happen if I take it to an auction house. I want it to have a real home.”

  Harold wasn’t sure what she imagined his home environment to be like. “I will need independent verification,” he told her.

  “Of course. I can direct you to an expert if you want.”

  Harold knew most people would consider his decision foolhardy. Perhaps he should have looked for something via a reliable auction house like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, but that would have raised the price. He was willing to pay the two million dollars the gallery owner had asked for, with the hope that the value would increase over time. Besides, he liked taking a risk, for perhaps the first time in his life.

  At Taoyuan International Airport, he flagged a taxi and was soon on his way home, north of Taipei. Last year his wife had convinced him to buy a town house out in Shilin District at the edge of Yangmingshan National Park. She convinced him the air would be better for their son, and Harold had to admit that being surrounded by greenery, with the promise of more greenery in the park just beyond, was refreshing. Like his wife, he’d grown up in the middle of Taipei, in an apartment block where the streets were overrun with stray dogs and cats howled late into the night. This apartment was newly constructed and would have not looked out of place in Singapore or Hong Kong, even Manhattan.

  At first, he’d been a little discomfited by the change. Traditionally, the suburban area of Shilin District had been populated by politicians and diplomats, since they were the ones who had money. Then, all sorts of people who made their fortunes off of real estate, transportation, and the manufacturing business, as Harold’s father had done, became well off enough to live there, too. The area was somewhat isolated, but Harold’s wife could still employ a Filipino housekeeper, and she was able to take trips into the city to go shopping with her friends at the latest Western stores in the Xinyi Planning District.

  Then, he started to appreciate how, on the commute to and from the office, sitting in the back of his chauffeured car, he could allow his mind to wander. When he passed the National Palace Museum, the ornate, palatial complex filled with artifacts brought over from the mainland in 1949, he began to draw together his thoughts, either toward work or home. Usually, on the way home, he’d wonder what expensive purchase his wife had made when she was out shopping.

  On his trip back from New York, when he stepped through the door, he was greeted by his four-year-old son, Adrian, who had been allowed to stay up past his bedtime.

  “I have a present for you,” he said, after disentangling himself from the child’s clinging arms.

  “Where?” Adrian grabbed at the pockets of his jacket.

  “Not there, silly. In my bag. I’ll get it for you in a moment.”

  But his son was already crouching at his suitcase and tugging at the zipper so that Harold’s careful packing spilled out onto the varnished floor.

  “Did you get me something, too?” This from his wife, whose English name was Victoria; she went by the nickname Vicki. She stood backlit in the hallway so he couldn’t quite tell whether there was a welcoming look on her face or not.

  “Of course.”

  A squeal from Adrian as he discovered inside the shopping bag from FAO Schwarz a twelve-inch-long replica of the Staten Island Ferry. Harold hadn’t known exactly where Staten Island was, but he remembered how much Adrian loved taking the ferry from Keelung Harbor, just outside of Taipei, to Xiamen Island off of mainland China. Vicki had wondered why they couldn’t take their vacation on an island in the Pacific, like her friends, and the entire time they were in Xiamen she’d been critical of the Chinese tourists, so crude and unfashionable. The worst thing anyone could say to Vicki was that she was Chinese instead of Taiwanese, despite—or because of—the fact that her grandfather had come to Taiwan from the mainland in 1949 as part of the nationalist government. In college, as she liked to remind people, she’d been the first runner-up to Miss Taipei.

  Meanwhile, Harold thought it was important that his son have some exposure to the mainland, where much of his business had shifted over the past ten years. Someday, when Adrian was old enough to take over the company, as Harold had when his father died, it would be useful not to consider himself so different from the people across the Taiwan Straits. When they’d arrived in Xiamen, Harold couldn’t see much difference between it and a Taiwanese city, except for the signage.

  “The way they speak is terrible,” Vicki would say. “My ears are bleeding. And the simplified characters on the signs everywhere hurt my eyes.” Obviously she thought that mainland people were inferior, possibly more stupid, because instead of using traditionally written Chinese characters, as the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan did, mainlanders used characters with fewer strokes.

  Adrian, however, seemed perfectly happy and excited by everything, the ferry, the beach, the guesthouse they stayed in, even if it did, as Vicki pointed out, lack the amenities of a five-star hotel.

  Now Adrian rushed off to his room to play with the ferry, while Harold knelt and rummaged through his suitcase for Vicki’s present.

  “This is for you,” he said, holding out a dark brown shopping bag.

  As Vicki stepped into the light, he thought, as he almost always did when first seeing her after some time away, how lovely she was. Although in her midthirties, her face was as dewy as it had been when she’d competed for Miss Taipei. Of course, a lot of that was due to the various skin-whitening, wrinkle-reducing creams she applied every night.

  “How thoughtful,” she said, when she opened the bag to discover a Louis Vuitton purse with a pattern by a Japanese artist. She seemed pleased enough, even though he suspected she didn’t know who the artist was and might have preferred a monogram that her friends could understand. And he hadn’t thought very much about it all, other than passing by the flagship store on the way to FAO Schwarz.

  “Glad you like it,” he said. He glanced toward the kitchen. “Is there anything to eat? The meal on the plane was awful.”

  “I think the housekeeper left something.”

  Their housekeeper, Maribel, had been hired expressly because she could cook simple, traditional Taiwanese dishes. Every morning she took the bus from the city, laden with fresh produce, fish, and meats from the market, arriving just after the sun rose. Harold had no idea what she did when she wasn’t at their house, on her day off, or whether she even had a family of her own.

  After Harold had eaten some leftover three-cup chicken and made a few preparations for work the next day, he got
ready to turn in for the night. In the meantime, Vicki had put Adrian to bed—Harold could hear Adrian’s wails as his mother took his new toy away from him. Harold expected Vicki to be asleep, too, when he went into their bedroom, but she stirred when he lay down beside her.

  “I got something for myself while I was in New York,” he told her.

  Drowsily, she asked, “What?”

  “A painting.”

  “That’s nice.” She turned over so that her back faced him.

  Beyond them, the night pressed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Harold wasn’t quite used to the noises this environment presented: crickets instead of fighting cats, the sighing of the wind through the trees instead of rumbling mopeds. Sometimes he missed where he’d grown up, the aging apartment block where all the kids knew one another and played in the streets among the trash and stray animals. Here, Adrian’s nanny took him to scheduled playdates with the children of families he didn’t know, although the mothers were often friends of Vicki’s. None of these women thought this was unusual, having been raised by nannies themselves. Harold was an only child, and although his family could have afforded a nanny by the time he was born, his mother had preferred to take care of him herself. At times, when watching his son, he wondered whether he should have let Vicki decide how their child should be raised.

  But altogether, this kind of life, he told himself, was better for Adrian and for Vicki, and thus better for him, too.

  * * *

  At around the same time Vicki’s grandfather had come to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Harold’s grandfather had smuggled himself over the Taiwan Straits, although as a merchant fisherman. He lived in Keelung Harbor, raising his children on the docks. Harold’s father was the youngest son and thus promised nothing. But when he was six years old, he was spotted and taken in by a wealthy but childless couple who put him through school. It was not a formal adoption, and Harold’s father kept the last name of Yu, but it was very unusual for someone to take in a non-relative.