In a low, steady voice, he says, “For what it’s worth, I didn’t come here to ruin your life. You should know that at the outset.”
She says nothing.
He blows some air between his lips, as if he might whistle into the gaping silence.
She says, “How do you know you didn’t ruin my life forty years ago?”
“From what I can see, you never looked back.”
“I looked back, believe me,” she says.
“That makes two of us.”
She surveys the entrance court, the art groupies and laggards who are more interested in the free food and bubbles than a roomful of masterworks by baroque Dutch women.
Then she turns back to him: “Did you come all this way just to reminisce about old times?” Her voice takes on an edge she doesn’t like, so she dampens it with a sip of champagne.
“Is there somewhere we could talk privately? Also, I’m in desperate need of some aspirin and some Band-Aids.”
Ah, the sense of easy entitlement, as if she’s got pills and Band-Aids in her purse. It sets something off in her and she stops trying to temper her speech. Louder than she intends it to be, she says, “How is it even possible you’re still alive?”
Instead of flinching he leans in, enjoying his own response. This is the other Marty de Groot, the guy with a thousand quips and rejoinders in his pockets like tiny scraps of colored paper. “Wheat germ and beta-blockers for the most part,” he says. “A miracle combination. If FDR hadn’t been so run-down with hypertension, Stalin might not have taken Eastern Europe at Yalta. Do you ever think about that?”
She finds this infuriating. “No, I’ve never thought of that. Not a single time.”
Quietly, he says, “They say regret eats you alive,” then he looks down at his hands. “But, actually, it keeps you alive. It gives you something to push against. That’s why I’m here. To apologize. I wronged you and I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. I kept waiting for a sign, for a way to cross paths again. Then I got the call from the museum…”
He’s still looking down at his hands, as if the past is pouring through his fingertips. His eyes are still sad and dark, she thinks, when they’re not in the service of banter. She remembers the eddies of reflection, the quiet beneath all that brash worldliness. He says, “Also, I thought you’d like to see the painting again after so many years. You know it better than I ever did.”
It occurs to her that he still doesn’t know that the fake has surfaced. How could he unless Max has divulged the museum’s embarrassing situation? After much lobbying and letting Max drone on about his potential legacy and his retirement, Ellie was able to convince Max to let her be the one to return the forgery to Leiden. The painting is now in the basement storage closet, waiting to be packaged in the morning. She’d lied and said she needed to do some quick research in the Netherlands anyway. But she’d assumed Max would quietly let Marty de Groot know of the museum’s pickle with the Leiden shipment. That was just the word he’d use, she was sure of it. But from the relief on Marty’s face, he’s oblivious to the fact that the loaned painting and its double have brought her life and career to a crossroads.
He says, “Would you give me the chance to explain myself? Can we go somewhere?” He pulls up his trouser leg and shows her the dark stain on his sock. “I’ve lost a gallon of blood from these Italian shoes. They’re made of fucking wood, as far as I can tell.”
“Aren’t you too old to be swearing like that?”
He waves a dismissive hand, still looking at his feet.
She says, “It looks painful. Follow me.”
She leads him to an elevator and they go down to the loading docks and the packing area. She knows Q has an industrial first-aid kit in his office. The fluorescent lights blink on and Marty sits down gently in the swivel chair. She refuses to tend his wounds, such as they are, so she hands him a few Band-Aids and some Panadol and watches him with folded arms. He lifts one leg and gingerly takes off his shoe and sock with a sigh. His bloodied heel looks as if it’s been grated and she can’t help wincing. He says, “I can’t get the Band-Aid to stick.” It’s the voice of a child, she thinks, plaintive and willful.
She ducks out of the office and fetches a few paper towels from the packers’ break kitchen. When she comes back she hands them to him and digs through the first-aid kit for some antibiotic gel. After a few minutes of watching him blot his heel she eventually gives in and squats down in front of him. He doesn’t smell old at close range, that’s the funny thing. He smells like a walk in the woods, like breath mints and cologne and vintage luggage. It baffles her. “Let me do it,” she says impatiently.
She dabs the heel and holds it there before applying a thin film of clear gel that tints red as she rubs it gently around. Away from the heel, the skin of his foot is pale and somehow untouched by eight decades of walking the planet. There are no calluses, no unsightly toenails. She’s always assumed ruined feet and orthopedic footwear were inevitable in old age. Perhaps this is what a cocooned life might yield—ageless feet. Annoyed, she goes back to the first-aid kit and opens a packet of cotton gauze. Placing the gauze over his heel, she unpeels a Band-Aid and presses it down.
She tells him to take off the other sock and shoe. “I have to admit,” she says, “I don’t mind the sight of your blood.”
He brightens—she can feel it in his body even though she doesn’t look at him. She repeats the brisk triage on his other foot.
Looking down at his bandaged foot, he says, “I never forgave myself for what I did to you. I’m so very sorry for it.”
Something about the candid, fluorescent light of Q’s office allows this to reach her. Her face is suddenly hot and she doesn’t know where to look.
He says, “For what it’s worth, I really was in love with you, Eleanor.”
She looks at him squarely over his kneecap, determined to keep her voice under control. “It was unbelievably cruel. I thought I was going to marry Jake Alpert and have a weekend house in Connecticut.”
He looks away and the room goes quiet.
Eventually, he says, “I’m not going to justify anything I did, that’s the first thing. But you might want to know—”
“Know what?” she says.
“The context.”
“An odd word choice.”
“Agreed.” But he decides to continue. “Rachel and I were reeling from two miscarriages and my career as a lawyer was lunging toward its mediocre highpoint. Patents were a trifling puzzle to me, they meant nothing. Inheriting money ruined me as a lawyer, maybe as a person. Thank God I never stepped into a courtroom. I was bored and unhappy, looking for something to get me out of bed in the mornings. When the painting went missing it gave my life a ruthless kind of focus. I manufactured quite a display of indignation, talked about it until I bored everyone senseless, hired a private detective, and we tracked you down in your apartment.”
Swallowing, Ellie says, “Oh, God, that apartment…”
“I thought I would just bait the trap and then hand you and that Brit dealer over to the police. Then something odd happened.” He places one hand on the back of a bandaged heel, his lips thinning.
Ellie takes in the wall of hanging clipboards and the industrial-green filing cabinets. There’s a chance, she thinks, that he might cry, and she wants to avoid that spectacle for both their sakes. But when he continues his voice is suddenly animated.
He says, “Not only did I fall in love with this odd little Australian art expert who was way too young for me, with the way she talked about paintings as if they were extensions of her own flesh and mind, but also I liked myself around her more than I could remember. She buoyed me up. So, I courted her—and my new, better self—as if my life depended on it. None of that was fake…”
He says all this to the side of her face as she studies the walls.
Then he says: “But then the deceit set in, of course, eventually burrowed in like a cancer. I’d never had affairs but
I always felt like I was one phone call away from crossing over. So we dated, and I plotted because I was arrogant and stubborn. It was such a wild, audacious plan. And who the fuck were these people anyway stealing paintings off my wall? So I brought your forgery over that weekend we went upstate, knowing it would be there when you got back. That was supposed to be the unveiling. And then there we were in that sad little hotel upstate and you offered yourself up to me. And it was more than I could take. But I went ahead and took it anyway … and it’s dogged me ever since.”
It’s oddly comforting to her that he’s carried this burden with her name attached to it. She’d imagined herself to be the only one trapped like a speck in the amber of the 1950s. But then something else is pushing down on her and she turns her back to him, walking around the room. She looks up at a wall of graphed coefficients. Beneath the remorse and the sense of betrayal she suddenly feels a cavernous and familiar sense of shame. It is so familiar that she wonders if, in fact, it has ever not been swirling there at the pit of her stomach. She understands that she continued to paint the forgery for years in her mind, that she was forever tending the canvas because it was the last time she’d painted anything at all. She would summon it at her desk or on drives to the country with Sebastian—it would glimmer into view through the unsettled light of a dream—and it never failed to hold her attention. The shame was not merely in copying it but in the fact that it was the closest she’d ever come to creating something lasting. The forgery didn’t stop after she’d handed off the canvas, it continued into the unfolding of years—the plush academic job, the marriage to an art dealer, the publications and curating of exhibits, none of these spoils would have been offered if anyone knew what she’d done. She’d walk into London galleries and antique stores convinced she’d run into Gabriel with his battered attaché case and that everything would come undone, in an instant. She understands it now in Q’s bright, meticulous office. She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.
Marty says, “That was a dark period in my life.”
“You stayed married? Did your wife ever find out the whole truth?”
“It took years of therapy—a grim Freudian with Danish leather furniture—but we came back from the brink. I never took her forgiveness for granted, but neither did that look of betrayal ever go away when she looked at me. I became faithful, if you can believe that. It was like I’d had a near-death experience. The death of the soul, if that doesn’t sound like too much.”
“It sounds a little much,” she says. Then she softens, comes back to his side. “For what it’s worth, there’s nothing I’ve regretted more in my life than painting the de Vos. I never stopped looking over my shoulder, waiting for that ramshackle life to hunt me down.”
The air shifts between them. The silence, when it re-gathers, is unhurried.
He says, “Well, excellent, we have regret in common. I tried to make amends. The whole point of the reward and the newspaper ad was an apology. That money was meant for you. I imagined you making a fresh start to…” His voice trails off. Then, he says, “What happened to you after you left?”
“After the copy—” She begins again. “After the forgery, I went to England, where I was the most law-abiding citizen in the world. I admonished my ex-husband for taking bogus deductions on his taxes and never drove above the speed limit. I acted like a goddamn saint. It’s laughable, really.”
“So you married.”
She nods.
He smiles weakly. “Children?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t cut out for that.” She looks over at Q’s desk, at the cups of sharpened pencils and the goldenrod shipping forms. Something occurs to her. “Why were you heckling from the back of my lecture hall the other day?”
He grins. “That punk in the wool cap had it coming.”
“He’s all right. Just naive.”
“You spoke about the Vermeers like old lovers.”
“They are, in a way.”
The conversation falters again.
The thread is lost, he thinks. What else is there to say? You carry grudges and regrets for decades, tend them like gravesite vigils, then even after you lay them down they linger on the periphery, waiting to ambush you all over again. The world is full of noise again. He can hear the mechanical gears of the industrial clock on the wall. He has always liked plain, white-faced clocks with red needlelike second hands.
She says, “I want to show you something. Can you walk?”
“I’m not putting those shoes back on.”
“Well, you’ll have to come barefoot.”
She stands and grabs Q’s key chain from a hook on the wall. Q and Max are the only ones beside security with keys to every room of the museum. She leads him to a set of storerooms. He hobbles behind her, swearing under his breath.
“Did you know that almost every museum has a room full of fakes?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“They come in over the years. Bequeathed or sold to the institution. Every year the technology gets better and most museums keep finding fakes in their own collections. They’ve had them hanging for years a lot of the time. Of course, they feel compelled to take them down and keep things under wraps.”
She jiggles the storeroom door handle and tries a different key. She can hear Marty breathing beside her. The lock gives and she pushes open the steel door. Inside, it smells of aluminum and plastic sheeting.
She says, “They don’t want the fakes drifting into the open market and burning them seems a little draconian.”
She turns on the lights and the cluttered room sputters to life. The copy of At the Edge of a Wood has been propped up on a shelf, facing out. It’s surrounded by other paintings, some of them wrapped, some naked. A masterful Manet, a Julian Ashton, a Cézanne, a Picasso, a Brett Whiteley.
Marty blinks and says, “I left my eyeglasses back at the hotel. I can barely see my own hand. What am I looking at?”
“My beautiful lie, Marty. It showed up just before you kindly brought us the original.”
He cocks his head, as if listening to a voice from another room. He didn’t know his exact intentions when he decided to loan the painting, but this eventuality now seems hardwired into the fabric of possibility. His act of repentance was also, it seems, an act of malice. He remembers that day in 1959 when he met the British dealer at an uptown restaurant. The shabby little man had the original but not the fake with him; he said they’d destroyed the copy after the advertisement had appeared in the newspaper. He made a show of a manila envelope full of ashes and strips of canvas. Marty had asked about Ellie and he’d said that she’d gone back to Australia. It wasn’t Marty’s concern what happened to the fake, after all. The reward had been intended for Ellie—a sum of atonement, a payout against his own guilt—but now that this man was staring at him with bread crumbs on his lapels there was no backing out of the arrangement. He might have run out of the restaurant and thrown the painting into the East River. So Marty took the painting into the men’s room, unwrapped it, and studied it. The antique copper nails he remembered were gouged into the flesh of the frame. But what if that too had been manufactured in the interim and this was still a fake? He doubted his instincts even as he came back and put the cashier’s check on the table with the bitterly ironic word reward printed on the memo line. The foolish Brit said he would have preferred cash, to which Marty said, “I don’t pay thieving cunts in cash.” The whole episode was over before Marty’s rare steak arrived. He remembers eating alone because he sure as hell wasn’t going to share a meal with this weasel. Of course the fake was kept and resold. Of course the past was still alive and throbbing in the veins of the present.
* * *
They spend an hour talking in the closed museum restaurant, looking down through the big windows at the Woolloomooloo docks. From the darkened waters of the harbor, buoys flash blue and green, tossing shards of light back and forth from Bradleys Head to Garden Island. Ellie knows all the names and the fe
rry routes; her childhood is written into the crags and coves and bays. She tells him he should make it over to the zoo before he leaves and see some of the old houses in Mosman. She brings him up to speed on the other de Vos painting, the child’s funeral procession, because he confesses the gallery was a blur of colors loosed from their frames. She tells him she’s leaving for the Netherlands in the morning to return the fake. He asks her lots of questions: the name of the private museum in Leiden, what the funeral painting depicts in detail. She says, “When I’m over there I’m going to do some digging. I want to find out what really happened to her.”
Marty says, “Will you write to me and tell me what you find out?”
“I’d be happy to.”
“And not by e-mail. An actual letter.”
“On paper.”
They look out at the darkened parkland that leads down to the harbor.
She says, “You were the first man I fell in love with.”
He catches his breath and says, “I can’t imagine.”
“You knew exactly how to reel me in.”
“Because I was smitten myself. I’d stare at your exquisite forgery in my study at night and plan our next encounter. I think I fell for you the first time we met at the auction house, the way you talked about the paintings. I bought those four copper paintings just to impress you. Cost me a fortune. I don’t think I even knew what I was bidding on.”
“Do you still have them?”
“Of course.”
She smiles at this, staring at his reflection in the wall of glass.
From the entrance court, they can hear the sound of chairs being folded up, of the event winding down.
He says, “I’m suddenly very tired. I think it’s time this old man got to bed. I’ll be up in a few hours with jet lag.”
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 27