“You still have time?”
“All the time in the world, Ms. Daulair.” To reassure her that she has his full attention, Nick removes his mobile from his pocket and turns it off. Damn whoever this is, pestering him. He will call Silas from the car when he returns to the city. He will sit back and take whatever bollocking he’s due.
And though she still does not put him on less formal terms, Ms. Daulair leads the way toward a back door. She takes a man’s barn jacket off a nearby hook and shrugs it on before he can offer an assist. It occurs to him that she’s taken excellent care of herself as well as Mort Lear, that dependent as she may have been on the prosperity of another, she is also independent as can be.
As she strides ahead of him along a flagstone path through the garden, a flash of orange leg catches the sun. Nick has to jog a bit to keep pace.
“You’d like to see the studio most of all, I’m sure,” she says, and he heartily agrees, as he would if she had proposed they tour a potting shed—which only reminds him of the bind he’s in, the things he knows that he’s beginning to wish he didn’t.
He watches her take a key ring from a pocket in the jacket (Lear’s?) and unlock two separate locks. “Morty never worried that anyone would steal his work,” she says as she pushes open the door, “but he kept some valuable items in here. As you’ll see. Even out here in the country, you can’t be too careful.”
Stepping into the cool interior, Nick sighs. “Wow,” he says, sounding as childlike as he feels. All around him—on the walls, on the surfaces of tables, no doubt in the many drawers and cabinets—are hundreds, probably thousands, of artifacts defining a life. Not just any life, and not just the life of a famous man, but the next life Nick will wear like a masterfully tailored suit. A bespoke role. A self as captivating and rich in varied destinations as an entire country.
“I know,” says Ms. Daulair, “and it’s the real thing. Or so we believe.”
Only then does he see the Greek vase, in a fixed case, on a shelf above the great man’s desk. “Oh, all of it,” he says, “looks like the real thing to me.”
Two
THURSDAY
In what circle of hell do apparently spiteful, possibly demented artists punish unto eternity the patrons and curators who devoted themselves to polishing the artists’ reputations and lavishing expert care on their work…only to be spurned, kicked in the proverbial jaw, when the artists finally keel over? Meredith Galarza now knows there is precisely such a place and that, undeservedly in the extreme, she has won a skip-death-do-not-pass-Cerberus ticket, express to that very station.
She takes out the folder of correspondence for what must be the hundredth time in a week. She reads the letter on top, the most recent (unless others went astray and, considering the state of the postal service, why not?) dated three months ago. One of the several ways in which she and the writer of this letter had bonded, or so she believed, was through their love of handwritten communication. How painfully she remembers the glow she felt whenever her office mail contained a square envelope of the sturdy saffron-yellow stock on which he had written his personal letters for twenty-seven years. And how na?vely she took for granted that she would be the one to sort and archive thousands of missives written on that stock to hundreds of people over those years and possibly many more beyond.
Dear Merry,
As always, what a reliable pleasure to share lunch with you in the sultriest corner of our secret bistro, so outdated that even the canniest critics would pass it witlessly by—and a good thing, as they would sneer at its dowdy-yet-timeless offerings, its blessed blindness to the Next Nouveau. I seem unable to veer from my “usual” sole bonne femme, and I like to flatter myself that Jacques keeps it on the menu just for codgers comme moi. Vive le senescence!
While I won’t deny a certain disappointment, I see the wisdom in shooting for what one might call “aesthetic diversity.” Stuart’s work and mine may not see eye to eye, but they occupy the same planet in relative peace, don’t they? And what’s in a name, especially the name of a gallery, some pompous engraving on a wall? Puts me in mind of tombstones.
I’m feeling in decent fettle—we won’t talk about the heavy cream on that sole—and thus am not overly impatient, either. It’s good news that the building is well under way, and how shrewd of you to aim for “carbon-neutral”[sic??]. Green-minded efforts do more than feather one’s cap. They pull in the $hekels. In all affairs related to the arts, deep pockets are the only true insurance nowadays.
To have a “wing of my own” (pace Mrs. Woolf) would have been a dream come true, but if Stuart’s on board for a “shared” enterprise, so be it. If anything reveals how swiftly times change, it just might be Stuart and his apocalyptic fantasias.
BTW, I am impressed by Enrico’s work on the Ivo drawings. What would the slapdash memo-pad artists of the world do without magicians like him? He is our passport to posterity. Please be sure to pass on my gratitude and awe.
A bowl of soup summons; my nostrils detect ginger, that noble cleanser of arteries.
Yours as ever,
Mortadella
She can find no sign of his impending desertion here. He signed off with one of his playful, self-appointed nicknames (others she loved: Mortopoulos, Mortissimo, Mordred the Malcontent). And in the margin, he penned a steaming bowl of soup, above it a nose with flaring nostrils, beneath it a forked gingerroot…hinting, now, at a forked tongue…from which a long curlicued tendril of ink descends to become a kite string in the hand of a scrawled boy. Merry remembers the relief she felt on reading this letter—her conviction that she was more secure than ever in their partnership, in her future as the guardian of all things Mort Lear. (She feels another stab at the thought of his Wonderland collection, a further loss. Oh, that pair of 1920s evening gloves embroidered with the Mad Hatter on one sleeve, the March Hare on the other; how she had itched to try them on!)