Flirting With Forever (27 page)

A book cal ed
The Carnegie Museum of Art Collection
Highlights
sat on the table in front of a couch, and the cover showed a painting of a woman stepping into a tub. Again he was in awe of the loose technique and the highly unconventional color choice. According to the credit, the artist was one “Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.” Despite what Peter’s teachers had impressed upon him, it seemed breaking the rules hadn’t destroyed the art of painting after al .

Campbel had slipped a piece of paper in to mark a page. He turned to the page and nearly laughed. It was his painting of the Duchess of Portsmouth. She was looking particularly pleased with herself, in red silk, with the sterling and leather appointments of an archer across her lap. But what had made him laugh was the short, blunt mustache Campbel had drawn above her lip.

He was starting to get irritated. The assistant had promised him Campbel would be here. If Campbel didn’t arrive, she’d be sorry. He would chance the moving room again, find a place to sleep and return to the museum at first light. He didn’t know how her master world would react to finding out she had discovered a time tube hole and used it for personal gain, but he suspected it wouldn’t add appreciably to her professional credentials.

Not that he wanted to destroy her career—that is, unless he had to. But the book had to be stopped. He would die before he’d al ow the story of him and Ursula to become fodder for the reading public’s amusement. And if doing so destroyed what he hoped was at least a mild regard for him

—how pathetic it was that he clung to such a hope—he would live with the results of his actions.

He’d wait a few minutes, no more.

Biding his time, he flipped through the Carnegie book, which seemed to hold a surprise on every page. There was a Van Dyck, of course, and a painting of a merchant by his old friend, Frans Hals. He saw the steady progression of techniques as the book covered successive centuries, just as he could trace the changes in style as he walked through the gal eries of Hampton Court or Whitehal . But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, everything seemed to change. It was as if a new vision had come into being, and al the old rules had been thrown out the window.

He turned the page and gasped to see a shimmering pond—which a part of his mind recognized immediately, though no sort of close examination of the brush-strokes would have yielded anything like water—upon which gleaming white blossoms floated. “Claude Monet,
Nymphéas
(Water Lilies), c. 1915–1926,” the attribution read. Rembrandt had once observed, “There is more to blue than azure and ivory black, my friend.” Nothing could have il ustrated the point better than Monet’s breathtaking work of art.

But it was the paintings noted to be mid- to late-twentieth-century creations that most amazed Peter. The luxurious palette of colors and softly blurred images had been replaced by an urgent and exhilarating clarity of vision, a vision so different from that of the paintings and sculptures and friezes he knew, he hardly knew how to approach them.

There was a painting of numbers—just numbers—by an artist named On Kawara, and a series of painted boxes by Donald Judd and even a painted chain. He found the vivid distil ation of a single idea that these pieces seemed to represent startling, and the businessman in him couldn’t help but note that the production of such pieces of art, if indeed that’s what they were—though they had to be if col ected by museums alongside Van Dycks, Lelys and Monets—would be infinitely quicker to produce than his portraits. He himself had made a smal fortune sel ing prints of his paintings, prints that took only a moment or two to produce once the plate had been prepared compared to the twenty to thirty hours it took to complete a canvas. This twentieth-century ease of production was bringing the same notion to a more noble scale. Bril iant ideas coupled with straightforward manufacture. He liked it.

He flipped more pages and saw a nearly white canvas containing a few narrow lines and an absolutely thril ing work of nothing but paint splatters, but paint splatters applied with so much passion he could almost feel the blood pounding in the artist’s ears. He had just found a simple line-drawing of a woman or a bul —he wasn’t sure which one—done in a wonderful y ironic hand that seemed to dispel everything he had ever learned about portraits, when the music stopped and the muffled voices of two people somewhere else in the apartment made him jump to his feet.

He heard a door bang open, and a man’s voice, clearer now, said, “No, you stay there. Let’s see … she’s got a Pinot and a Chardonnay.”

“Chardonnay,” a sultry-voiced woman said drol y. “For the times when making an impression doesn’t matter.

Pinot, please. Hold the cherry.”

The two laughed, an intimate, shared-story laugh.

Peter had no wish to eavesdrop. “Hel o,” he cal ed and walked into view.

The man, dressed in a pair of tight, rough-cloth breeks and nothing else, stood alone. He was instantly identifiable as the man in the picture who’d had his arm around Campbel . He was in the middle of a room that bore a vague, otherworldly resemblance to the scul ery in Peter’s town house, holding open the door of something that looked like a large, lit wardrobe in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. He stared at Peter in amazement.

“Who are you?”

A Londoner, Peter thought, from the vicinity of Borough Market. So the Irish part of her story was a lie as wel . “I’m here for Miss Stratford.”

The man’s eyes flicked from Peter’s breeks to his hair to the name on his pocket. “Are you here for the radiators?”

Peter considered saying “Aye.” It would certainly be expedient, so long as it didn’t entail actual y transacting with the “radiator,” whatever that might be. But there was something in the man’s demeanor that made him refuse.

“No.”

The man waited for an explanation of his presence. But Peter had learned long ago that the person who provides the least amount of information in a situation like this usual y has the advantage.

Peter inclined his head toward the easel he saw in the next-door room, the room from which the woman’s voice had come. “Are you a painter?”

The man swung in the direction Peter was looking. “I am.”

“May I look?”

Surprised, the man shrugged. “Sure.”

The woman had disappeared, Peter noted as he made his way into the room. The painting was perfectly square, already a discordant note for someone who was used to a more classic ratio of height to width, and the space had been slashed diagonal y through the center with a line of brown to separate one working area from another. Below the line, the canvas was blank, though smal notes of yel ow paper printed with phrases such as “steamed buns—hips,”

“Rhubarb/barbed wire?” and “meat grinder” hung there.

Above the line, though, the man had laid in the rough groundwork of a classic and sensual nude. The woman was exotic and angular, like a crane on a Chinese vase, with her hair cut short like a boy’s. She was reclined, not unlike his Nel or Rubens’s Angelica, and gazed directly at her painter. Peter felt a knot in his stomach loosen, and he realized he’d been afraid the woman on the canvas would be Campbel Stratford.

“The scale of light in your painting is amazingly wel conceived,” Peter said. “As is the composition, at least those parts I can see. I did not expect it.”

The painter’s brows rose. “You didn’t?”

“No.” Nor had he. The techniques were not far from what he employed himself. His eyes flickered to the un-made bed, and he felt a pang of uneasiness. “Were you guild trained?”

The painter looked at him askance. “Goldsmiths,” he said careful y. “University of London.”

“Ah. I am not aware of Goldsmiths. What is the purpose of the notes?” Peter pointed to the squares of yel ow paper.

“Just some ideas for the reaping.”

“Reaping?”

“I translate the part of the figure below the line into everyday objects, which I then enclose in clear acrylic.

Look, nothing personal, bloke, but who the hel are you?”

Peter did not need to ask the same question of his host.

The moment the man said he enclosed everyday objects, Peter realized with a start this was the same painter who had created the odd amalgam of traditional and naïve in the portrait that hung in the other room. It stung him that the man had earned not only a place in Campbel Stratford’s bed, but the place of honor in her drawing room as wel .

Nor did Peter need to answer, for a thunderous rush of water sounded from an adjoining room and the painter cal ed, “Yoy! Heads up. We have company.”

The door rattled open, and a woman knotting a towel around her chest cried, “Jesus, is it—Oh!”

It was the woman in the painting. There was no question in Peter’s mind.

“Hel o,” she said disinterestedly, then added to the painter, “Jacket, where’s the wine?”

When he pointed toward the kitchen, she strode out, and Peter caught the discreet brush she gave the man’s hand as she passed. Peter’s gaze returned to the bed, and he felt a sickening wave of anger mixed il ogical y with sorrow, sorrow for Campbel Stratford.

“Jacket?” Peter forced the cold ire under control.

“I’m Jacket Sprague,” the man said, and he was clearly just about to add, “And you are?” when Peter beat him to the punch: “I’m Peter Lely.”

Jacket’s gaze went to the name over Peter’s pocket.

“Not Rusty, then. Peter.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the name of a painter, you know.”

“I’ve heard that.” Peter tilted his head in the direction of the kitchen, where he could hear the faint pop of a cork.

“You work from a model?”

Jacket blinked for a minute, then remembered the painting. “Yeah.”

“Usual y?” Peter said, then added when Jacket’s eyes narrowed, “I only ask because Miss Stratford told me you work from memory.”

“Cam told you that?”

“Yes.”

“I usual y do,” Jacket said after a penetrating look in Peter’s direction, “but not this time. Look, did she give you a key or something? Is that why you’re here?”

“Pardon me for saying so, but I hardly think it’s any of your concern.”

“Is that so? I’m her fiancé.”

The storm in Peter’s ears drowned out the music for a moment. Had she actual y accepted him? He wasn’t sure he could believe it. “Are you indeed?”

“She wears my ring, pal.”

“I do not wish to quibble, but I saw her most recently. She wore a ring from her mother, nothing more.”

“She wears it on a chain around her neck. Has for a while. Listen, you’re starting to annoy me.”

Peter knew he was getting dangerously close to getting tossed out, and now that he’d made it here, he didn’t want to go. “For that, I am sorry. Your fiancée and I have friends in common—in London. She gave me her card and told me to stop by the next time I was in town. I arrived at her office, and her assistant, Jeanne, graciously brought me here and let me in.” He relaxed his face into something he hoped would pass for a smile. “Jeanne should arrive momentarily.”

The ridiculously named Jacket grunted. “Wel , Cam’s out with a donor. We’re not likely to see her for a while.”

Convenient for an early evening idyl , Peter thought. It was nothing short of vil ainous, especial y conducted on the lady’s own doorstep. He would have scarcely believed it possible, but the mores of the twenty-first century had sunk lower than those of the seventeenth.

“I was told otherwise.” Peter held the man’s gaze. “Has Miss Stratford seen this portrait? I am of the understanding she has a particular appreciation for painting, and I’m certain this one would interest her.”

“No.” Jacket shifted uncomfortably. “It was begun this evening.”

“Ah.”

The dark-haired woman cal ed out, “Can I get a wine for you?”

“A beer, please,” Jacket said. “And a second for our friend here.”

The woman returned with two bottles and a glass of wine. She handed out the bottles and gave Peter a predatory look. “I’m the model, by the way.” She held out her hand.

Peter took it and bowed. “A remarkable kindness. ’Tis not an easy job.”

After an uneasy silence, Jacket lifted his bottle. “To Budweiser.”

“To Budweiser,” Peter repeated. “King of beers.”

“L’chaim,”
the woman said, and they drank.

Jacket wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I think,” he said careful y to the woman, “you had better get dressed. Cam is on her way.”

The woman pul ed the glass from her lips, coughing.

“She is?”

“So it seems. She asked Peter to meet her here. You might want to use the other door.”

She scurried into the room she’d come out of, snatching up a pile of clothes from the floor as she went.

When the door closed, Peter said, “I should like to buy it.” He pointed to the canvas.

Jacket raised a brow. He drew his eyes over Peter’s clothes and returned to his work. “It’s not finished,” he said dismissively.

“I don’t care. Name your price.”

“You can’t afford it.”

“My means are extensive.”

“A mil ion,” Jacket said, and Peter swayed a little. “A mil ion and four weeks.”

“I want it now.” Peter pul ed off the emerald and thrust out his hand. When Jacket took the ring, Peter felt as if a great weight had been removed.