The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  Berenice was willowy in a blue slack suit with lemon, quarter-inch lines forming windowpane checks, and the four tightly grouped buttons of the double-breasted jacket were genuine lapis lazuli. The bells of the slacks were fully sixteen inches in diameter, and only the toes of her white wedgies were exposed. There was a silk penny-colored scarf around her neck. She had done her nails in Chen Yu nail varnish, that peculiar decadent shade of red that resembles dried blood (the sexiest shade of red ever made, and so Germanic thirtiesish that Visconti made Ingrid Thulin wear it in The Damned), and she had painted her lips to match. During her six weeks in Palm Beach, Berenice had learned some peculiar things about fashion, but the schoolteacher from Duluth had not disappeared.

  She giggled and pointed to the tray on the coffee table. “These are supposed to be Gibsons!”

  There were two miniatures of Gilbey’s gin and another of Stock dry vermouth (two tenths of gin, an eighth of vermouth), a glass pitcher with chunks, not cubes, of ice, and a tiny glass bowl containing several cocktail onions.

  I shrugged. “I don’t think they’re allowed to serve mixed drinks in this Georgia county, although the waiter would’ve mixed them for you if you’d tipped him. Actually”—I twisted the metal caps off the two gin miniatures—“it’s better this way. Most bartenders overuse vermouth in Gibsons, and I’d rather make my own anyway.”

  “It just struck me funny, that’s all,” Berenice said.

  While I mixed the Gibsons, I tried to work out a simple plan and a way of presenting it to Berenice to keep her away from my room until we were ready to leave.

  “Did you go to a movie this afternoon?”

  She shook her head, and sipped her cocktail. “I wouldn’t go to a movie alone back home, much less in a strange town. I’m not the scary type, you know that, James, but there are some things a woman shouldn’t do alone, and that’s one of them.”

  “At any rate, you got through the day.”

  “I slept like the dead. How’s the article coming?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I finished it.”

  “Already? That’s wonderful, James!”

  “It’s a good rough draft,” I admitted, “but it’ll need a few things filled in up in New York—”

  “Am I in it? Can I read it?”

  “No. It’s an article about Debierue and his art, not about you and me. When did you become interested in art criticism?” I grinned.

  “When I met Mr. Debierue, that’s when.” She smiled. “He’s the nicest, sweetest old gentleman I ever met.”

  “I’d rather you’d wait till I have the final draft, if you don’t mind. I want to get back to New York as soon as possible to finish it. So after dinner, I’ll take a short nap until midnight, and then we can check out of here and get rolling. If we trade off on the driving, we can reach the city in about thirty hours.”

  “You won’t get much sleep if we leave at midnight . . .”

  “I don’t need much, and you’ve already had enough. You wouldn’t be able to sleep much tonight anyway, not after being in the sack all day.”

  “I’m not arguing, James, I was just worried about you—”

  “In that case, let’s go downstairs to dinner, so I can come back up and get some sleep before midnight.”

  During dinner, Berenice asked me if she could see Debierue’s picture, but I put her off by telling her it was all wrapped up securely in the trunk of the car, and that it wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to see us looking at a painting in the basement garage. I reminded her conspiratorially that it was a “hot” picture, and we didn’t want anyone suspecting us and making inquiries. Because I half-whispered this explanation, she nodded solemnly and accepted it.

  The food was excellent—medium-rare sirloins, corn on the cob, okra and tomatoes, creamed scalloped potatoes, a cucumber and onion salad, with a chocolate pudding dessert topped with real whipped cream, not sprayed from a can—and I ate every bit of it, including four hot biscuits with butter (my two, and Berenice’s two). I felt somewhat logy following the heavy meal, but after drinking two cups of black coffee, although I was uncomfortably stuffed, I still wasn’t sleepy.

  I signed the check and penciled in my room number. “After all that food, I’m sleepy,” I said.

  Berenice took my arm as we left the dining room to cross the lobby to the elevators. “Wouldn’t you like a little nightcap,” she squeezed my arm, “to make you sleep better—in my room?”

  “No,” I replied, “and when I say No to an offer like that you know I’m sleepy enough already.”

  I took her room key, opened the door, and kissed her good night. “I’ll leave a call for eleven thirty, and then I’ll knock on your door. Try and get some more sleep.”

  “If I can,” she replied, “and if not, I’ll watch television. Let me have another one of those good-night kisses . . .”

  My room was musty and close again, although I had not turned off the overhead fan. I didn’t want to go through the too-hot—too-cold routine with the reverse-cycle air-conditioner—which had far too many BTUs for the size of the small room—so I cracked the door again and clamped it open with the brass hook-and-eye attachment. I stripped down to my shorts and T-shirt, took the art materials out of the closet, and got busy with the picture.

  I mixed Prussian blue, adding zinc white a dollop at a time, until I had a color the shade of an Air Force uniform. I thinned it slightly with turpentine and brushed a patch on the bottom of the canvas. It was still too dark, and I added white until the blue became much bolder. I then mixed enough of the diluted blue to paint a slightly ragged border, not less than an inch in width, nor more than three inches, around the four sides of the rectangle. To fill the remaining white space with burnt orange was simple enough, once I was able to get the exact shade I wanted, but it took me much longer than I expected to mix it, because it wasn’t easy to match a color that I could see in my mind, but not in front of me.

  But the color was rich when I achieved it to my satisfaction. Not quite brown, not quite mustardy, but a kind of burnished burnt orange with a felt, rather than an observable, sense of yellow. I mixed more of the paint than I would need, to be sure that I would have enough, and thinned the glowing pile with enough linseed oil and turpentine to spread it smoothly on the canvas. Using the largest brush, I filled in the center of the canvas almost to the blue border, and then changed to a smaller brush to carefully fill in the narrow ring of white space that remained.

  I backed to the wall for a long view of the completed painting, and decided that the blue border was not quite ragged enough. This was remedied in a few minutes, and the painting was as good as my description of it in my article. In fact, the picture was so bright and shining under the floor lamp, it looked even better than I had expected.

  All it needed was Debierue’s signature.

  I had a sharp debate with myself whether to sign it or not, wondering whether it was in keeping with the philosophy of the “American Harvest” period for him to put his name on one of the pictures. But inasmuch as the burnt orange, blue-bordered painting represented the “self” of Debierue, I concluded that if he ever signed a painting, this was one he would have to sign. I made a mental note to add this information to my article—that this was the first picture Debierue had ever signed (it would certainly raise the value for Mr. Cassidy to possess a signed painting!).

  Debierue’s letter to the manager of the French clipping service was still in my jumpsuit. I took it out and studied Debierue’s cramped signature, sighing gratefully over the uniqueness of the design. Forgers love a tricky signature: it makes forgery much simpler for them because it is much easier to copy a complicated signature than it is a plain, straightforward signature. There are two ways to forge a signature. One is to practice writing it over and over again until it is perfected. That is the hard way. The easy way is to turn the signature upside down and draw it, not write it, but copy it the way one would imitate any other line drawing. An
d this is what I did. Actually, I didn’t have to turn the canvas upside down. By copying Debierue’s signature onto the upper left-hand side upside down, when the picture itself was turned upside down the top would then be the bottom, and the signature would be rightside up and in the lower right-hand corner where it belonged.

  Nevertheless, it took me a long time to copy it, because I was trying to paint it as small as possible in keeping with Debierue’s practice of writing tiny letters. To put ebierue inside the “D” wasn’t simple, and I had to remember to “write” with my brushstrokes up instead of down, because that is the way the strokes would have to be when the painting was turned upside down.

  “James!”

  Berenice called out my name. I was so deeply engrossed in what I was doing I wasn’t certain whether this was the first or the second time she had called it out. But it was too late to do anything about it. I was sitting in the straight-backed chair facing the canvas, and I barely had time to turn and look at her, much less get to my feet, before she lifted the brass hook, opened the door, and entered the room.

  “James,” she repeated flatly, halting abruptly with her hand still on the doorknob. She had removed her makeup, and her pale pink lips made a round “O” as she stared at me, the canvas, and the makeshift palette on the low coffee table. The sheet I had used to wrap the once-blank canvas was on the floor and gathered about the chair I was using as an easel. I had spread it there to prevent paint from dropping onto the rug.

  “Yes?” I said quietly.

  Berenice shut the door, and leaned against it. She supported herself with her hands flat against the door panels. “Just now . . . on TV,” she said, not looking at me, but with her rounded blue eyes staring at the canvas, “. . . on the ten thirty news, the newscaster said that Debierue’s house had burned down.”

  “Anything else?”

  She nodded. “Pending an investigation—something like that—Mr. Debierue will be the house guest of the famous criminal lawyer Joseph Cassidy in Palm Beach.”

  I swallowed, and nodded my head. I am a highly verbal individual, but for once in my life I was at a loss for words. One lie after another struggled for expression in my mind, but each lie, in turn, was rejected before it could be voiced.

  “Is that Debierue’s painting?” Berenice said, as she crossed the room toward my chair.

  “Yes. I needed to look at it again, you see, to check it against the description in my article. It was slightly damaged—Debierue’s signature—so I thought I’d touch it up some.”

  Berenice pressed her forefinger to the exact center of the painting. She examined the wet, bemerded smear on her fingertip.

  “Oh, James,” she said unhappily, “you painted this awful picture . . . !”

  3

  Looking back (and faced with the same set of circumstances), I don’t know that I would have handled the problem any differently—except for some minor changes from the way that I did solve it. Ignorant women have destroyed the careers, the ambitions, and the secret plans of a good many honorable men throughout history.

  It would have been easy enough to blame myself for allowing Berenice to discover the painting. If I had locked the door, instead of being concerned with my physical discomfort in the hotel room, I could have hidden the painting from her before allowing her into the room. This one little slip on my part destroyed everything, if one wants to look at it that way. But the problem was greater than this—not a matter of just one little slip. There was an entire string of unfortunate coincidences, going back to the unwitting moment I had allowed Berenice to move in on me, and continuing through my foolhardy decision to allow her to accompany me to Debierue’s house.

  And now, of course, caught red handed—or burnt orange handed—Berenice was in possession of a lifelong hold over me if I carried my deception through—with the publication of the article, with the sending of the painting to Joseph Cassidy, to say nothing of the future, my future, and the subsequent furor that the publication of an article on Debierue would arouse in the art world.

  Berenice loved me, or so she had declared again and again, and if I had married her, perhaps she would have kept her mouth shut, carrying her secret knowledge, and mine, to her grave. I don’t know. I doubted it then, and I doubt it now. Love, according to my experience, is a fragile transitory emotion. Not only does love fall a good many years short of lasting forever, a long stretch for love to last is a few months, or even a few weeks. If I think about my friends and acquaintances in New York—and don’t consider casual acquaintances I have known elsewhere, in Palm Beach, for example—I can’t think of a single friend, male or female, who hasn’t been divorced at least once. And most of them, more than once. The milieu I live in is that way. The art world is not only egocentric, it is egoeccentric. The environment is not conducive to lasting friendships, let alone lasting marriages. And that was my world . . .

  My remaining choice, which was too stupid even to consider seriously, was a bitter one. I could have destroyed The Burnt Orange Heresy (such was the title I assigned to the painting), and torn up the article I had written, which would mean that the greatest opportunity I had ever had to make a name for myself as an art critic would be lost.

  These thoughts were jumbled together in my mind as I confronted Berenice, but not in any particular order. Emotionally, I was only mildly annoyed at the time, knowing I had a major problem to solve, but bereft, at least for the moment, of any solution.

  “You may believe that this is an ‘awful’ picture,” I said coldly to Berenice, “and it’s your privilege to think so if, and the key word is if, if you can substantiate your opinion with valid reasons as to why it’s an ‘awful’ picture. Otherwise, you’re not entitled to any value judgments concerning Debierue’s work.”

  “I—I just can’t believe it!” Berenice said, shaking her head. “You’re not going to try to pass this off as a painting by Debierue, are you?”

  “It is a painting by Debierue. Didn’t I just tell you that I was touching it up a little because it was damaged slightly in transit?”

  “I’m not blind, James.” She made a helpless, fluttering gesture with her hands, her big eyes taking in the evidence of the art materials and the painting itself. “How do you expect to get away with something so raw? Don’t you know that Mr. Cassidy will show this painting to Debierue, and that—”

  “Berenice!” I brought her up sharply. “You’re sticking your middle-western nose into something that is none of your damned business! Now get the hell out of here, get packed, and if you aren’t ready to leave in twenty minutes, you can damned well stay here in Valdosta!”

  Her face flushed, and she took two steps backward. She nodded, nibbled her nether lip, and nodded again. “All right! There is obviously something going on that I don’t understand, but that isn’t any reason to blow off at me like that. You can at least explain it to me. You can’t blame me for being bewildered, can you? I can see that, well, the way it looks is funny, that’s all!”

  I got up from the chair, put my arm around her shoulders, and gave her a friendly hug. “I’m sorry,” I said gently, “I shouldn’t have woofed at you like that. And don’t worry. I’ll explain everything to you in the car. There’s a good girl. Just get packed, and we can get out of here and be on our way in a few minutes. Okay?”

  I held open the door. Still nodding her head, Berenice crossed the hallway to her room.

  The moment her door closed, I wrapped the art materials in the sheet, washed the ashtray palette under the bathtub hot water tap and dried it with a towel. I slipped on my trousers and a shirt, and took the painting and the small bundle of art materials down to the basement garage on the elevator. I dumped the bundle in a garbage can, and placed the painting carefully, wet side up, in the trunk of my car. It took another three minutes to unfasten the canvas covertible top, fold it back, and snap the fasteners of the plastic cover. It would be chilly riding with the top back at this time of night, but I could put it up again late
r. The night garage attendant, a young black man wearing white overalls, stood in the doorway of the small, lighted office, watching me silently as I struggled with the top. Finished, I crossed the garage, handed him a quarter, and told him I was checking out.

  “Call the desk, please,” I said, “and tell the clerk to send a bellman with a truck to get our baggage in five-ten and five-oh-five in about fifteen minutes. Tell the bellman to pile it on the back seat when he comes down. The trunk is already filled with other things.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  I returned to my room, packed in less than five minutes, pulled a sleeveless sweater on over my shirt, and slipped into my sports coat. Berenice wasn’t ready yet, but I helped her close her suitcases, and advised her to wear her warm polo coat over her slack suit. The bellman came with his truck, and when we got off at the lobby to check out, he continued on down to the basement to put our luggage in the car. Berenice paid the bill, which was surprisingly reasonable, by cashing two traveler’s checks, and the bellman had the car out in front for us before we had finished checking out. The night deskman didn’t ask questions about why we were leaving in the middle of the night, and I didn’t volunteer any information.

  The night air was chilly when we got into the car, and there was a light, misty fog hovering fifty feet or so above the deserted city streets. I lit two cigarettes, handed Berenice one of them, and pulled away from the curb. She shivered slightly and huddled down in her seat.