The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

by Dominic Smith

  She looks up. “Oh my goodness, you walked, didn’t you?”

  “I had no idea this was down here.”

  “Claude’s?”

  “The southern half of Manhattan.”

  She smiles. He rests a hand at the edge of the table but doesn’t sit.

  She says, “Don’t you get down here for meetings?”

  He has to yell to be heard. “The Wall Street firms pretend this isn’t here. They put a bag over your head on the taxi ride down.” He looks around and takes in the scene. “I’m going to go get us a drink. If I’m not back in three days read Keats at my funeral. What would you like?”

  “Surprise me,” she says. “Something clear with ice.”

  He jostles into the crowd and makes for the bar. En route, he watches the band play, five black men in white suits. In high school, he played the trumpet and jazz always makes him sad for the kid who was forced by his fiduciary-minded father to put down the instrument. The trumpeter swivels his horn out toward the room as he murders a fat note, eyeless under his trilby. The fleet pianist angles his ass off the bench to dig into the keys and the drummer is tightly coiled and half in shadow, his knuckles glinting above a cymbal. Marty finally reaches the bar—a barge-like colossus of wood that looks like it’s been dredged from the East River. The line is three deep and he holds a twenty in the air to get some attention. He orders himself a neat whiskey and Gretchen a Pimm’s Cup loaded with ice. When he gets back to the booth he sets the drinks down and settles on the other side of the table. In this light her face is softened—the delicate spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks looks like a tan.

  “I’ll never hear you unless you sit over here,” she says. “I should have chosen somewhere else.”

  He smiles and makes the move. He leans toward her ear to speak, but the sudden smell of her hair forces him into a pause. Swallowing, he says, “I feel like an anthropologist in the jungles of Borneo.”

  “Cheers,” she says, lifting her drink. “Here’s to Marty de Groot making partner.”

  “Here’s to you,” he says. “Because I never would have made it without you. All those times you told Clay that I was meeting with a client when he was in a temper. Thank you!”

  They clink their glasses and each take a sip.

  “Pimm’s makes me think I should be playing tennis.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “You live nearby if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes, this is my secret life. Uptown paralegal by day and weekends in Washington Square Park.”

  “It seems to suit you,” he says.

  She smiles into her drink, her breath smoking against the ice. He has never cheated on Rachel, not in fifteen years of marriage, but there’s been a lineage of near misses, office infatuations and lunches with protégées in barrettes and woolen skirts. It took him years to realize it was the flirtation and admiration he craved, not the actual conquest. But he feels something shifting in the space between them, a hesitation and nervousness that suggest he’s readying to cross a new line. Even though Gretchen has always been attentive to him he knows there’s a chance he’s misread everything. It’s possible he’s followed the wrong set of clues, just like the matching of shoes to faces and lives out in the street. He makes two more forays to the bar, each time holding up a twenty to suggest a ridiculous tip. He can feel younger men glaring at him. Back at the booth, he flattens one palm against the grain of the leather and asks her questions. They talk about her childhood and her family, about road trips to Montreal and the difficulty of learning foreign languages. He knows a handful of Dutch phrases and trots them out like drunken Middle English. It gets her laughing. “Better than your Russian,” she says, sipping, letting the ice clink against her teeth. He listens attentively, but he’s aware of the heat coming off her stockinged legs under the table, the warm hollow behind her left knee. Her thigh is inches away and it wags toward him when she speaks.

  He imagines placing his hand squarely on her leg, or touching the back of her hand, but then there’s a commotion that draws his attention. The drummer has just come off a hell-bent solo, giving out a Comanche war cry at the tail end, and now something shifts in the crowd—voices pitch, somebody gets jostled. The atmosphere becomes charged. Marty can smell the room come alive with body heat and beer and something primal. He can smell the violence taking shape even before it happens—molecules heating before a lightning strike. He leans in and says to her, “We should go. I think it’s about to get rowdy in here.” He rests his hand on her elbow and leaves it there while she zips up her purse. As they get up from the booth, the scuffling escalates into thrown punches they can hear but cannot see through the welter of packed bodies. As they get to the stairs, Marty looks back down to see a man being hurled across the bar, shards of broken glass in his wake like ice from a comet’s tail. He’s surprised by how beautiful it looks and how the band keeps playing their tight, syncopated rhythms during the whole thing. Then there’s a shift, something telegraphed from the stage. At the outer edge of a solo, the trumpeter gets distracted. His tone goes thin and flat, like he’s developed a sudden head cold, and this is the signal to the rest of the room to start running in panic.

  * * *

  They stand on a street corner sometime after midnight. People are spilling out of clubs on MacDougal, couples holding hands and whispering boozily to each other. A few musicians heft their instruments into station wagons and pickups. Marty buys two hot dogs and they stroll under the pretext of him walking her home. The club is still ringing through his whole body, his ears buzzing under the streetlights. They stand in front of her apartment building, a stone facade zigzagged with fire escapes. “There used to be an elevator, but now they’re all walkups,” she says. “If you don’t mind the alpine hike we can have a nightcap.” When she says it her eyes are on his shoes and then a slight shrug works into her shoulders. He feels a surge of tenderness toward her; he wants to assure her that he’s honorable and no matter what will always be kind to her. Instead, he says, “Lead the way, my little Sherpa.” Climbing the darkened stairway behind her, he watches the authority of her ass swaying in her knitted skirt. He feels lust rankle through him, a pound of lead dropping into his stomach. Her apartment is decorated in a mandarin style—blond wood floors and earthen jars and books on lacquered shelves. There’s a stack of novels on the low coffee table and a bedroom, faintly visible, where he sees a guitar on the wall and a scarf tossed over a lamp. She decides to make them a drink and goes to the small kitchen and begins opening cupboards filled with neatly stacked crockery and glassware. He suspects dinner parties, a circle of friends that includes bon vivants and actors and photographers. She opens the freezer door and starts in about the buried ice cube trays and how she hasn’t defrosted in ages. He watches her as she stares into the diorama of snowmelt and frosted meat hilltops. The freezer ticks and breathes. He imagines pulling the wooden pin from her barrette and her cedar-colored hair falling down her shoulders. He pictures hiking up her woolen skirt from behind and pressing her into the refrigerator door. Then he notices the snapshots attached to the front of the fridge with magnets—a middle-aged couple on a country front porch; a marine, possibly a brother, in uniform; a young girl in polio leg braces leaning up against a tree beside a sunny-faced teenage Gretchen. The tableau, the sudden window into her rural upbringing, might have given his longing a new edge, further particularized his lust, but instead he feels it dissipate. He’s never felt for one moment fatherly toward her until now, as she rinses off a handful of frostbitten ice cubes and divides them equally between two glasses.

  When they have their drinks, they take them into the living room and she puts on a jazz album for Marty’s benefit—Miles Davis’s Blue Haze. He gets her talking about her childhood in Michigan. The sister with polio who still lives at home with her Lutheran parents, the brother who served in Korea and now runs his own appliance store in Kalamazoo. These details siphon off the last of Marty
’s desire.

  As the album bottoms out, Gretchen asks, “You never wanted a family?”

  It catches him off guard and he finds himself staring into his drink. He says, “We wanted children very much, but the odds were stacked against us. Both times we already had names picked out, two separate lists that I kept in my pocket at all times.” He takes a sip of his drink and looks up at the wall.

  She says, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Marty. I had no idea.”

  The sound of his first name is alive with intimacy and he hopes that tonight—the near miss—won’t ruin their productive working relationship. He can feel himself folding up the old childless ache just like that, glancing one more time at her fridge covered in photos and thinking of his own blank refrigerator door.

  When the silence unravels, she gets up and says she’ll make him some coffee for the road. A while later he’s standing in the doorway and kissing her on the cheek. “Thanks for helping me celebrate,” he says. As she closes the door, she bites her bottom lip and looks down at the scuffed floorboards, slightly embarrassed by what she’s laid before him.

  * * *

  He heads west through the quiet of the Village and then north along the Hudson, the water dotted with fishing boats and the murmuring lights of the Jersey shoreline. He feels lightened, as if he’s narrowly escaped something terrible in the world. These streets belong to someone else’s map of the city, but he feels suddenly fond of them. He sees taxis going by but lets them pass. He wants to walk as far as he can before going home to begin the next phase of his life. He wanders into the flower district, where men in coveralls unload blooms from truck beds and florists are preparing their stores for business. He convinces one of the deliverymen to sell him a bunch of flowers in newspaper, but he only has a twenty-dollar bill, so he gestures for the man to keep the change and walks some more, taking in the strange sights of Sixth Avenue over the crown of his gardenias. A locksmith’s window with a vein of cracked glass, a dry cleaner’s with a single blanched shirt hanging in front. He stops for a moment to consider the forlorn, white shirt, finds himself wondering about the man who once owned it. Then he turns and flags down a taxi heading north.

  He walks into his building lobby as quietly as possible, nodding to the night watchman. In the private elevator he takes off his shoes and carries them inside when he gets to 12. The penthouse is quiet and he takes the stairs in his stocking feet. Carraway doesn’t bark and he suspects he’ll find his wife and dog curled and asleep in bed. At the top of the stairs he rests the flowers on a hall stand and continues down to their bedroom. As suspected, he finds Rachel in bed sleeping, the dog at her feet. The bedside lamp is still on and she has a book splayed across her chest. He can tell that she stayed awake as long as possible and now the guilt courses through him. Although he didn’t sleep with Gretchen, he briefly intended to, and now he has to carry that. She startles when he opens the bathroom door and she begins talking, though he knows she isn’t awake. The sleeping tablets do this to her, dredge words from her stupefied dreams. “Nobody likes that house … It smells like burnt toast,” she says. He stands in the doorway of the bathroom and looks at his wife’s face as she talks up at the ceiling. “The stairs don’t lead anywhere for one thing…” He lets his eyes move to the painting and the girl standing beside the birch. It never fails to still his thoughts, this moment of wintry suspension. Then he notices something odd about the outer edge of the frame. For years he’s watched the antique copper nails turn verdigris inside the flesh of the wood, afraid they would eventually cause rust damage that would tarnish the canvas. He’d always thought that he would need to get the painting reframed and remounted. But now he can’t see the nails. The outside edge of the frame is roughhewn and flecked with gold paint but he cannot detect a single nailhead. Quietly, he lifts the painting from the wall and carefully carries it into the bathroom. He closes the door and switches on the light. Resting the edge of the painting against the bath mat, he runs his hand back and forth, following the grain of the wood. It occurs to him that Rachel has secretly had the painting cleaned and reframed and this creates in him a moment of terrified obligation. But when he turns the painting to face him it looks dirtier than ever, the scene fogged beneath layers of antique varnish.

  Sydney

  JULY 2000

  What a sad little party. Ellie thinks it while she’s standing alone in her kitchen with a tray of food in her hands. Olives and Marcona almonds, a circle of water crackers with some aged Dutch Gouda in the center. There’s nothing wrong with the spread—it’s the sight of those five people standing awkwardly out on her veranda that sets something off in her. They’re nominally here to celebrate her recent lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art and the new edition of her book—Dutch Women Painters in the Golden Age. Two female colleagues from Sydney University, her sister up from the Blue Mountains, an art history graduate student, and an old friend from her boarding school days. Three years back in Sydney and this is all she can drum up. They stand out there with glasses of wine in hand, talking about the upcoming Olympics and watching the rosellas skirl in the treetops. At least the view is good.

  She ferries the plate of food out to her guests and tells them the quiche will be a few more minutes. She doesn’t even like quiche, but Kate had insisted and read out their dead mother’s recipe over the phone. How did she become a woman in her sixties who serves ham and cheese quiche to people she’s holding captive? The gathering was Kate’s idea, but Ellie did all the inviting and organizing and now she feels certain it was an imposition. Drive an hour or two on your weekend, catch a ferry over to Scotland Island, drink some cabernet, admire my view and my accomplishments. She heads back inside on the pretext of more wine. As she goes in, she hears Michael, her graduate student, trying to strike up a conversation with her sister. Kate is a retired actuary and competitive bridge player. It begins and ends with a tentative So are you into art as well? because Kate either doesn’t hear him or ignores him entirely, already narrating one of the rosella sorties as the birds swoop down from a treetop to the tray of seeds attached to the railing. Ellie closes the sliding glass door as Michael looks down into the glassy bay. The two art historians have colonized the other end of the veranda, their backs to the view, arms folded, deep in speculation, or perhaps airing the latest campus scandal.

  She sometimes wonders whether she bought this house with exile in mind. Perched among blue gums and overgrown sedge at the head of a sandstone gully, the house rises to a view of Pittwater on stilts. She bought it three years ago after fleeing her failed marriage in London and receiving a job offer from Sydney University. Everyone, her Realtor included, had tried to talk her out of the purchase. He’d called Scotland Island the little piece of Sydney paradise nobody wanted to buy. But she’d changed her life to accommodate the ferry ride and hour-long commute to the city, adjusted her teaching schedule so that she went to campus only twice a week. Most of the time she loves the isolation. And the house itself—cathedral ceilings and a wall of glass overlooking the bay—always buoys her spirits. On sunny mornings, she likes to stand out on the veranda in her robe with a pair of field binoculars and observe the waterways and shorelines, the estuaries and coppery mangrove creeks that flow in from Towlers Bay. The airy, stoic house and its impractical location remind her daily that nobody has any claims on her. She has broken free. And yet here she is with an exact replica of a social life out on her veranda, but not the thing itself.

  She’s back in the kitchen when the wall-mounted phone rings. Her first thought is that it’s the chair of her department, sending along his apologies, but instead it’s Max Culkins, the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, calling from the airport. He’s on his way to Beijing to speak at a conference. Even though she’s curating an exhibition on seventeenth-century Dutch women painters that’s opening next month at the gallery, she didn’t invite Max to her gathering. He’s an old-school art dandy in a pinstriped suit, a medieval Asia speciali
st who still calls himself an orientalist. Ellie had pictured him and her sister together in the same room and decided against inviting him. One less collision of worlds.

  He’s a little breathless on the phone and Ellie thinks of his nervous habit of wetting his lips with his tongue. It’s a tic that punctuates his lectures on clan art of the Ming dynasty. “I’m boarding soon, but I wanted to share the good news. I tracked down the current owner of At the Edge of a Wood through some old colleagues at the Met. I telephoned early this morning and asked for the loan directly. Just like that, as if I were asking for cab fare.”

  She feels her chest tighten, like someone is pushing the heel of their hand between her shoulder blades. She swallows and lets the silence gather for a few seconds. The quiche is burning in the oven—she can smell it, but she’s unable to move. She says, “That’s marvelous news,” but it comes after a long pause and the tone is all wrong. Her mind goes blank. Outside, her old schoolmate has taken up the binoculars and is scanning the bay.

  A month ago, Ellie learned that a small private collection in the Netherlands had recently purchased the painting and was willing to loan it for the exhibition. It was due to arrive later in the week. The loan was proof, she felt sure, of Marty de Groot’s passing, of an estate sale, that perhaps a widow had finally gotten that grimly beautiful harbinger off the bedroom wall. For a month she’s felt relieved, grateful. How is it possible, she thinks, that Max Culkins has not seen the registrar’s paper trail for the Dutch loan of the same painting? Then she sees an image of Max walking to the podium without his lecture notes, or the missing button from his shirt cuff, or the times he’s called her Ella.