“Sketches. The one painting my father owns still hangs in his office downstairs.”
I notice that she refers to the room as her father’s office, though he’s been dead for nearly three years.
“How long have you lived here?” I ask even as I dart into the room to look at the sketches. Picasso is a particular favorite of mine and when else am I going to get to see his sketches this up close and personal? And without a line on a museum floor that I’m not supposed to cross?
The sketches are everything Picasso drawings are known for. Cubist. Sexualized. Brilliant. I could stare at them for another hour—maybe even the rest of the day—but it’s obvious that Veronica is antsy. She wants to move on.
I can’t help wondering why as I reluctantly let her tear me away. But the thought evaporates when she nods toward the room across the hall. “That’s the Warhol room. If you want to take a look.”
The better question is who wouldn’t want to take a look? “Do you mind?” I ask. “Art’s a passion of mine. It has been since I was a child.”
She smiles serenely. “I know. I told you yesterday, you aren’t the only one who can research.”
Instead of dwelling on the implications of that, I push the door open and step into the room. This time, I don’t need to cross the floor to get a good look at the painting. It’s hanging above the bed and impossible to miss in the way of so many of Warhol’s portraits.
“I didn’t realize he’d painted your mother,” I comment without taking my eyes off the portrait.
“That’s because it never hung in a gallery. It was a present for my father’s fortieth birthday.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She is,” I agree. I stop short of telling Veronica that I think she’s a hundred times more beautiful than her mother, even though it’s true. There’s something very…cold about Melanie Romero’s beauty, something precise and studied and just a little too perfect. Warhol must have seen it, even back then, because he’d painted her all in cool blues and grays, with none of the bright joie de vivre of so many of his portraits. It was still exquisite, still fascinating, but it was a very different statement than a lot of his work regarding other pop icons.
“Ready to move on?” she asks after another moment, with a sharp, cool courtesy that would rival her mother at her coldest. “There are ten more rooms to see on this floor alone.”
“Do each of them showcase a different artist?” I ask, even as I slide my phone out of my pocket and fumble to turn on its recording device without making a big deal of it. I have her blanket permission to tape our sessions, but still I don’t want to draw her attention to it. Not when it’s this detached coolness I want to try to capture. That I want to examine later.
“They do,” she says, continuing down the hallway. “Four more in this wing and six more on the other side of the landing.”
“Who else do you have?”
“On this side of the house? Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Lucian Freud.”
I whistle, long and low. “Your parents have impeccable taste in art.”
“My father did. My mother’s focus has always been on very different things.”
There’s a story there, one I can’t resist picking at a little. “Is that why the paintings are still here, in what is now your house? Because they were your father’s passion and not your mother’s?”
“They’re here because this is where they belong.”
Once again, it’s a deliberate non-answer, doesn’t tell me anything about her or her family dynamics. I’m getting sick of them.
“Do you want to see the other pieces?”
“I do.” I really, really do—I wasn’t lying when I told her that art is my thing. In another life—one where Jason is normal and I’m not wracked by guilt—I would have been a sculptor. “But I know my interview time with you is limited, and something tells me that you’re planning on counting this tour as part of our allotted session.”
Her smile is razor-sharp and twice as deadly. “You know me so well.”
It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but then I don’t expect it to. Twenty-four hours in and I’ve figured out that the absolute last thing Veronica Romero wants is to be understood. The question is why. Most actors want nothing more…or less.
“Why don’t you show me the rest of the house—the part where you actually live? And then, if we have time at the end of the interview, maybe you’d be so kind as to let me check out the other guest rooms?”