She had an unassuming manner, and Clymer quickly felt comfortable being with her. They lingered for a long while over their meal and then coffee, and when it seemed time to go she surprised him by asking him if he would like to join her for a drink. She knew a quiet place nearby with tables in a garden.
They drank more than either intended, so much so that Clymer forgot his habitual cautiousness when she asked him if he would like to see where she lived, perhaps have a last drink with her. They walked down Avenue Louise underneath the overhanging chestnuts that bordered the boulevard and turned into a side street in a historical residential district dating from the 1890s. She rented the top floor of an old three-story home, and it was there, his head lightened by alcohol and his mind full of the scent of sachet, that he had sexual relations with her, eventually falling asleep against the softest, palest breasts he had ever imagined.
The affair was born full-blown and unhesitating, surprising them both. Clearly they were inexperienced in such adventure, and the swift pace was inflammatory. Clymer could not stay away from her. Still, he was a man habituated to discipline, and that did not change. Having reflexively invented Paul Franck in the leather shop, he stayed with it. He did not invite her to his rooms in the Stéphanie, and she never asked to go there. At night, as they lay in the quiet of her bed and talked about their lives, he discreetly re-created himself. He gave little thought to where all this was leading, and apparently, neither did she. The affair itself was its own reward. They didn’t think about the future. It was not that sort of affair. They merely were enjoying the thrill of unexpected sexual abandon. Somehow it seemed entirely benign because it was not calculated. It was as surprising as a snowfall in July.
He told her he had only tonight and the next before he had to return to Los Angeles. They had finished eating and were lingering over a second bottle of Bordeaux.
She considered this a moment, pensively.
“And tomorrow? What about tomorrow?”
“I don’t have any more business here.”
“Then stay with me. Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night.” She raised her eyebrows, allowed a wry smile. “I will call my office and say to them that I am ill. It won’t matter.”
Her expression was anticipatory and hopeful. Clymer hesitated at the suggestion.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know?” She mocked surprise and leaned toward him gently, the small candle between them throwing a timid, flickering light over the tops of her breasts. “How could you
not
know?”
They walked arm in arm along Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, a couple lost in an outdated gesture of romance, naive characters in an old movie. The wine had made them uncaring of such a simple demonstration of affection, and they were oblivious of the chic scene through which they strolled to Avenue Louise. Yet again they walked unhurriedly under the dark, looming chestnuts and soon turned into her street and followed the slow, descending curve, the globes of the street lamps lighting a pale beaded glow in front of them.
They must have passed the parked car, but Dennis Clymer didn’t remember seeing it. Two isolated images were embedded in his consciousness in those stunning last moments: first, one of the men who grabbed him and forced the drugged cloth over his nose and mouth smelled of a sickly cologne; second, in the confusion he saw her step back, unaccosted, unafraid. In the lamplight their eyes met: she was calm.
The Belgian police
judiciaire
did not identify Dennis Clymer’s body for nearly three weeks, and only then because of a birthmark under his left arm. His head and hands were never found.
When Mara Song arrived at Strand’s house the next morning, Meret went to the front door to answer the bell. Strand was finishing a letter when he heard their voices. Through the windows near his desk he saw them coming out of the central hallway into the peristyle. Mara was carrying a single large portfolio, and Meret was leading her around to the library door.
Strand stood and walked into the library, meeting them at the door just as Meret was pushing it open. Her face turned away from Mara, she flashed a sly smile at him. She excused herself and retreated to her office.
Mara Song’s hair was pulled back and knotted behind her neck, and she was wearing a loosely cut linen shirt tucked into tailored linen trousers. Her smile was relaxed.
“Beautiful place,” she said, looking around the library as she laid her portfolio on the library table. “Would you mind showing me around a bit? Have you got time?”
“Sure,” he said.
Though she was careful not to be too intrusive, Mara was nevertheless very interested in everything having to do with the house. She asked about its history, how long Strand had lived here, whether the garden was already designed as it was now. She asked about the furniture, much of which Strand and Romy had bought in antique shops in Europe, and she asked about his own collection of drawings, where he had bought them, and why.
Strand watched her as he talked. She was as curious about him now as he had been about her, but she was far less reserved in satisfying her curiosity. With every exchange in their conversation he learned as much about her as she did of him. She was proving to be complex, though he was reasonably sure that she would not have characterized herself in that way. He was slowly beginning to suspect that Mara Song’s personality was like the clear, bright sliver of the new moon: what you saw was stunning, but by far the greater part of it was hidden in shadow and would emerge only slowly.
In a little while they came full circle to the library. They sat at the long table, both on the same side, and Mara opened the portfolio and took out a folder.
“I think I can help you a little and save you some time on the appraisal,” she began, laying out several sheets of paper with densely typed lines. “I have a fair amount of data on the provenance of each drawing.”
She put the pages between them, then began going through her documentation beginning with the Klimt drawing, citing its catalog references, a history of its sales, and a brief description of the work, whether it was a fully executed drawing or a study for a later work.
When she finished, she sat back and tucked a loose bit of hair behind an ear. “It’s a beginning, anyway,” she said.
“It’s more than that.” Strand was still looking at the last document. “You’ve saved me a lot of work. I appreciate it.”
“The truth is,” she said, “I was afraid of getting ripped off. I’d never paid that kind of money for anything before in my life. It made me uncharacteristically thorough.”
Strand was skeptical about this last remark. He was quite sure that Mara was, in fact, a very methodical woman.
He paged through the portfolio, looking at the seven drawings once again. They were superb, all of them, each in its own special way.
“This last one,” he said, “Delvaux’s
Réticence.
He’s a different kind of draftsman from the others. What were your thoughts behind this purchase?”
She smiled as if he had caught her in a deception.
“It was the most spontaneous purchase of them all,” she said almost reluctantly. She mused on the drawing. “Delvaux tended to simplify his technique, which of course fits perfectly well with the psychological content of his eerie imagery.” She reached out and touched the edge of the paper. “But here, in this drawing, it looks as if he is going to allow the classical draftsman in him to take over—and here and here—then he reins it in. Here, for instance. Then again it emerges here.” She tapped the paper. “That sort of thing goes on all over this drawing. In that sense, it’s a kind of schizophrenic image. I’m not sure he knew what the hell he was doing.” She tilted her head, looking at the drawing. “But then there’s the title… so… Anyway, when I saw this I thought I sensed a different kind of Delvaux psychology hiding here, which instantly appealed to me.”
For a little while neither of them spoke. Strand concentrated on the drawings, appreciating her eye and her astute sense of what she valued. Then, uneasily, he became aware of her studying him.
Though he had done precisely the same thing to her the morning before, their proximity—he could easily have put an arm around her—made him self-conscious. When he looked up from the drawings, she was watching him with an expression of keen interest. Having been caught, she quickly altered her expression to one of benign, but uninformative, pleasance.
“How did you end up in Texas?” she asked.
“That seems odd to you?”
“Not odd, but… well, interesting.”
“Why?”
She laughed. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know what I mean. I’ll bet you haven’t lived here very long. I mean, not many years, anyway. For one thing, your card: ‘Paul Davies, Dealer in Fine Art.’ Why not ‘Harold Strand’? You bought someone’s business.”
“Harold?”
“Well, whatever.”
“You didn’t ask Truscott? He can be very informative about dealer gossip.”
“I don’t know Mr. Truscott. He was just a ‘trustworthy’ name a London dealer gave me.” She paused. “You’re being evasive.”
“Okay,” Strand conceded. He hated talking about himself and had several stock responses to such questions. “Here’s a cheap version of how I got here. When I was just out of the university—Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina—I went to work for a jewelry importer in New Orleans. I’d gotten a liberal arts degree, which prepared me for nothing in particular and everything in general. The jewelry importer was stingy with his employees and generous with himself. Collected art. It was my first exposure to fine art, and I fell in love with everything about it. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in art history. I worked for a gallery in San Francisco for a while. Learned the business. Opened my own gallery, but apparently I hadn’t learned enough business. I went broke. Got a job with a private collector in New York, an old man who had recently developed a passion for drawings and was raiding Europe. By this time I’d already zeroed in on drawings, too. We continued to educate each other.
“One day he walked in and told me he was dying of cancer. He wanted me to oversee the liquidation of his holdings. He said he wanted to reward me for my services, and since I was putting myself out of a job I might as well get a commission on it. So I became his broker rather than his employee. It was a generous gift. In one form or another, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
“You’ve spent most of your career in New York?”
“No. London. Rome. Paris. Geneva. Vienna. Those are the places where I’d built my connections when I was buying for the old man, so that’s where I headed and stayed. The old guy was good to me. He knew what kind of education I was getting.”
“Did you meet your wife in Europe?”
“My first wife?”
She nodded, but he saw immediately that she had actually meant Romy. He told her about his first wife. She had been the daughter of a British MP who was a promoter of the EC when it was even less popular in England than it was now and who had more money than his profligate daughter could spend even in her most irresponsible binges. He told her briefly of their life in London, of his wife’s indiscretions, of her destructive addictions, of her hair-raising escapades in polite society, and of her attempts at suicide.
After all that, Mara didn’t have the heart to ask about Romy. He knew she wouldn’t.
“So you lived mostly in London.”
“A lot over the years, but not mostly.”
“Always as an art dealer?”
“Always.”
“So…” She repeated her first question: “How did you end up in Texas?”
Strand reached out and closed the portfolio. Behind her the courtyard was losing its light as the Gulf clouds built up outside. It was beginning to look like rain. The contrast of light and shadow in the library was softening to a monochromatic gray.
“Paul Davies went to Europe every year to buy art,” Strand said. “He was from California, but he’d married a woman from Houston and moved here nearly thirty years ago. He was a very fine dealer, and I’d known him most of that time. When he died five years ago, his wife called me and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying his business. Romy and I were feeling adventurous. We took her up on her offer and moved to Houston. Paul had built a respectable reputation in the U.S. Since I’d spent most of my time in Europe and was less well known here, it just seemed to make good business sense to retain his name.” He opened his hands. “It was that simple.”
“No ego involved? You didn’t want to use your own name?”
“I have to make a living. Ego follows that.”
Mara looked around at the library and the house. “Just how good does your living have to be before you can give your ego a little satisfaction?”
Strand shrugged. “I have a low-maintenance ego.”
Mara stared at him, her head turned ever so slightly at an angle, almost as if she were listening for something. Her face was a study in thoughts that seemed to venture far beyond the present conversation.
“I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be interested in going to an art exhibit with me this afternoon?”
“The Menil surrealist exhibit?”
“Yes… exactly.”
“You know,” he said, “I would.”
Strand asked her to stay for lunch, suggesting that they go to the Menil Museum immediately afterward. Though surprised by the invitation, she agreed. Strand called Meret to join them, and they went across the courtyard to the kitchen.
While the two women started a tuna salad, Strand began cutting potatoes into thin strips, which he then deep-fried until they were nut brown and crispy. When everything was ready, Meret put on a Wynton Marsalis CD, lowered the volume, and they sat at the long refectory table in the middle of the kitchen.
It was their usual custom that Strand and Meret lunched together in the kitchen. Sometimes she went out and sometimes he did, but generally they prepared casual lunches of sandwiches or salads in the kitchen nearly every day. They talked or didn’t talk, read, listened to music. It was relaxed and without ceremony. On occasion one of Meret’s girlfriends might join them, which Strand always enjoyed. Now and then another art dealer who was visiting Strand when lunchtime arrived might be asked to stay. But Strand’s invitations were reserved for the few people with whom he felt especially comfortable.