Catch 26

by Carol Prisant

  “Within this past year,” she answers evasively.

  “I’m sorry,” Courtney Bamber says, studying her. “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name.”

  “Fernanda Turner.”

  She’s openly surveying Fernanda now, her coat, her earrings, her hair, her shoes. Her eyes slide to Fernanda’s ringless left hand, then return to her face.

  “Well, Ms. Turner, what I can tell you today is that this picture interests me greatly. It’s possibly – and let me strongly emphasize that word ‘possibly’ – an important canvas by a very important artist. But I can’t be sure. Certainly not without a good deal more research and without consulting with several of my colleagues. I wonder …” and here, her pale fingers skimming lightly along the frame’s gilt edge, she almost pleads, “I wonder … would you consider leaving it here with us so our experts can take some time researching it? I don’t want to mislead you and I certainly don’t want to get your hopes up unnecessarily, but if you can let us have it for, say, two weeks or so, I think I’ll be able to give you a more intelligent – and possibly, satisfactory – assessment.”

  Fernanda’s thoughts dart back to the day she saw the painting. Wasn’t it right before her hair appointment? Meaning, before she met Randi. Meaning … if the painting should turn out to be something unusual (she doesn’t want to use a stronger word for fear of – what? – the evil eye?) she’s discovered it all on her own.

  But if it actually is something unusual, something good, should she really be handing it over to strangers?

  “If I leave it with you, Miss, er Mrs. Bamber, what about, um … insurance and things like that? What if something happens to it while you have it here?”

  “It’s Ms., and not to worry, Ms. Turner. I’ll give you a receipt and Berger’s insurance will cover it while we have it.” She rises from the chair. “Just let me get your phone number into my cell.”

  She hasn’t memorized her phone number yet, so Fernanda pulls out a little notebook and gives the expert her phone number.

  “Is that your landline or your cell?”

  “Uh, you mean my cell phone?”

  The woman looks at her quizzically.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t have one. But I’m planning to get one. Tomorrow I’m going to get one. But anyway, here’s my home phone number.”

  She tears out the page and hands her the slip of paper. She’d never owned a cellphone in St. Louis. Stanley disliked them, which hadn’t upset her at the time. She hadn’t been at all anxious, truth be told, to have Stanley able to reach her whenever he wanted; to find out what was for dinner and when she was coming home.

  Courtney Bamber squeezes Fernanda’s forearm briefly, reassuringly she thinks, and hurries away to start the paperwork.

  Fernanda doesn’t even see the lobby harpies as she wafts out of the auction house. Even the wild six-year-olds scootering past make her extraordinarily happy today, as does the tangle of traffic. The poor souls asking for money look so much less hopeless, somehow, too. Not one bit less heartbreaking, though. As she passes, she hands each of them a dollar or two. Will they think she’s condescending? The “great lady” dispensing her yet-to-be-confirmed largesse? Should she give them more? Give them nothing? Stanley had always been convinced that they spent what they got on liquor or drugs. But she’d privately believed – although she’d never have told him so – that whatever they did with it, it made them happy. And happy was something valuable. Like she feels right now. So happy, in fact, that at least a dozen times as she makes her way back to her apartment, she has to remind herself that nothing, nothing, nothing has changed. She’s still an unemployed single woman living alone in an indifferent, unfamiliar city in a small furnished apartment with silverfish and roaches and sour yellow walls. Who has no soulmate yet. And no baby. All she has is the pie-in-the-sky of those Old Masters experts – she imagines them as balding men in three-piece suits with pocket squares – looking closely at her possibly good painting. Which may be valuable.

  Or not.

  They love it a little. They love it a lot.

  Fernanda frowns at the silly rhyme. Nevertheless, a block before she gets to her apartment, she buys two fat bunches of deli daisies.

  CHAPTER 7

  The very next day, she also buys an inexpensive cell phone, and her very first call is to Courtney Bamber to give her its number. She’s extremely disappointed, therefore, to be bounced to a blandly polite voicemail. She hadn’t expected to have to leave a message. Frankly, she’d hoped to hear a cheery reiteration of yesterday’s enthusiasm, in case she’d heard it wrong.

  Reluctantly, Fernanda tucks the precious phone into a zippered pocket in her bag and keeps the thing beside her everywhere she goes. Even in the tub.

  A full two weeks pass before Fernanda allows herself to succumb to a growing anxiety about what’s going on at Berger’s.

  But meanwhile, because she needs both a job and some distraction from those thoughts, she’s been going out on interviews: restaurant hostessing, selling cosmetics, even waiting on tables, once. In the evenings, she sometimes goes out with Ben. Who’s, sadly, not the one. But …

  She told him about the day when a cultured-sounding restaurant manager told her he liked her phone voice and suggested she drop by for a meeting face to face. In fact, the manager’s face was quite attractive, but he took a long, far too appreciative and somewhat demeaning look at Fernanda before explaining he was sorry, she might create problems with the male clientele. Which sounded not just implausible, but annoying, as well, because she’d just endured a complicated subway ride to get there. She might have even mentioned it to him, but then he’d hit on her himself and she’d run for the door. Once she’d reached the sidewalk, however, she stopped. He was sort of appealing. She should have let him … what? Go further? Could she have gone with him into the kitchen? Upstairs? Into the ladies’ room? And done what? (She didn’t tell BEN about these musings.) Ben had been educating her, but stranger-sex still scared her.

  It wasn’t until later that same evening, after he was asleep, that it occurred to her that she was, well – you couldn’t call it anything other than an emotional virgin. Married to one man for forty-plus years and up till now, well, only Ben. Was she even capable of, er, opening herself up to men? To just anyone who appealed? She’d better find out fairly soon. It was almost May.

  Waiting for sleep most nights, Fernanda’s mind inevitably ricochets from men to love to jobs to – no surprise – the lengthening silence at Berger’s.

  Surely this means the painting is nothing, after all. Otherwise they’d have called, wouldn’t they? Or, maybe they don’t call because the losers are no fun to call. Or, okay, they really weren’t finished looking at it yet. Of course she could call them: because all this time, Courtney Bamber’s business card has been propped against the pencil cup on her little desk. But when she comes right down to it, Fernanda just wants to keep her fantasy alive a little while longer. So she’ll just wait it out – no calling. She just needs to find a job.

  So she steps up her search.

  She’d started the search with a lifetime’s belief in the fact that (according to Hollywood) pretty, relatively unskilled girls could always be receptionists. (Rosalind Russell? Jean Arthur?) It was such a jolt – no, a “wake-up call” – to find that “receptionist” didn’t seem to be a job category anymore. Which was one of the reasons she’d fallen back on the restaurant option. Another was that she’d discovered that small businesses don’t necessarily ask for CVs: a fact she fully grasped after applying one or two times for the few low-level jobs at larger companies, which always required complete résumés. For a few days, in fact, she’d had a lot of fun with those, sending herself to Harvard, MIT, the Peace Corps. She only stopped doing that when she discovered it made her over-qualified.

  New York’s art galleries had almost no openings at all, and museums wanted scholars. Eventually, based on her long familiarity with the professional vocabulary, she’
d phoned a dentist’s office to ask about a position. A brusque, officious voice suggested she email her résumé, and Fernanda had made the mistake of asking for the street address. The line had gone instantly dead. At a recording studio, an aging teenager with an alarming tongue stud had lispingly asked what her favorite group was, and thinking fast, Fernanda said Led Zeppelin. She even tried a few antiques shops, until she heard – too many times – that most could barely afford the rent, let alone pay for help.

  That was why she’d been toying recently with the idea of a hairdresser’s appointment desk – there were thousands of beauty parlors in Manhattan. Fear of bumping into Randi, of course, presented a major stumbling block to that, because, while it’s a really big city, you do sometimes see people you know. Like Marcia in the park that day. Which is why, just for the moment, she’s given all those beauty shops a pass. Her own hair, miraculously, is easy to manage herself. It never needs “doing” anymore. Or anything at all.

  On a very fine May afternoon, Fernanda is sitting on her sofa, idly stroking her stain-hiding afghan, fretting over two job offers and looking forward to meeting Marcia later at a West Side bar. Should she work for the high-end shoe store on Madison Avenue that’s offering twelve dollars an hour plus commissions, or the fire-trap art-supply store in the far West 20s – where they’ve offered her less, but it’s art – when her cell phone rings. She’s grateful for the interruption.

  “Ms. Turner? This is Courtney, at Berger’s.”

  “Oh.” Fernanda jumps to her feet, hurries to her desk and plucks up the business card. “Hi, Ms. Bamber.”

  She’s given more than a little thought to this moment, and had settled on seeming casually unconcerned. Perversely, though, her voice has decided to crack. Possibly because she hasn’t talked to a single person all day long.

  “I’ll get right to the point, Fernanda. Do you mind if I call you Fernanda?”

  “No, no, I don’t mind.”

  (‘Courtney’? ‘Fernanda’? Does that bode well?)

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called before now, but we’ve been so busy with loose ends from our last sale and then we decided to do some very comprehensive research on your picture. I told you we might when you came in and unfortunately, it’s taken a good deal longer than I expected to query the experts here in New York and abroad. So I hope you’ll forgive me that I never found time to reach out to you and keep you in the picture – so to speak.”

  Her laughter is lively and wholesome, and Fernanda knows in her heart, Courtney’s Midwestern.

  ‘I should have,” she goes on. “You had a right to expect at least a call to let you know where we were in the process. I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” Fernanda’s surprised to find she’s been holding her breath. She exhales softly, inaudibly, she hopes. “I’ve been so busy, I barely remembered.”

  “As a matter of fact, I hand-carried the painting myself to Paris a few days ago and I just got back.”

  For a second, Fernanda takes the phone from her ear. Paris?

  “Oh, was it nice there?” she takes a breath and says.

  “It’s always nice there, even when it’s gray or raining. Which it usually is. But anyway, all of this preamble is by way of explaining that well, you seem to be the owner of a major painting by a major seventeenth-century French artist. His name is Nicolas Poussin.” A dramatic pause. “And it’s especially important, your painting, because it’s been lost for centuries. In fact, the last time anyone knew of its whereabouts was in the late eighteenth century, when it turned up in Rome. After that, it disappeared.”

  Beneath Courtney Bamber’s professional demeanor and careful elocution, Fernanda hears … elation.

  “So. To start at the beginning. Your painting depicts a bacchanal.”

  “A what?”

  Courtney takes her own deep breath before continuing on.

  “A bacchanal. You’ve heard of the god Bacchus? I’m sure you have. You usually see him holding a wine cup and wearing a grapevine wreath in his hair? A big beard? Laughing? Well, the ancient Romans held orgies of drinking and hetero- and homosexual sex that went on for days sometimes. Frolics in the woods. Lots of nudity. Today we call them bacchanals. After Bacchus?”

  “Oh?” Fernanda responds, awareness beginning to dawn as, simultaneously, her heart begins to sink. Of course it would be something like an orgy. Does this mean Randi is involved?

  “And,” Courtney Bamber continues, “the only record we’ve ever had of the existence of the work you brought in was a single engraving of it in the collection of a member of England’s royal family. That was all. The painting itself hasn’t been seen or mentioned in the literature since 1750 or so. Until now.”

  Fernanda feels behind her for the plastic desk chair and lowers herself into it.

  “Oh, my God,” she says.

  “Wait, Fernanda. There’s more. It gets better. At least we’re fairly sure there’s more, since we still have to do more research before we can offer it for sale. Nevertheless.… ”

  Oh, I like this woman, Fernanda thinks, fingering the business card. I like a woman who can use the word “nevertheless” in everyday conversation.

  “Nevertheless, if everything works out as we hope it will, there’s an Important Old Masters sale coming up next month and we’d like to put your painting in it. I hope you don’t mind waiting. We need as much time as you can let us have to research it thoroughly and to come up with a reasonable, appropriate, estimate. It absolutely shouldn’t go into one of our smaller sales. Although you would get your money sooner.”

  Courtney pauses. Fernanda can’t speak.

  “This is an important picture. It should be well advertised, and I can guarantee a good deal of publicity for it. Actually …”

  Taking the phone from her ear and touching it to her lip, Fernanda discovers the sleek thing is warm. Her excitement is heating it up, she supposes.

  “I was thinking we might even want to do a separate catalogue just for this painting. Though, my God, I haven’t even asked you yet, Fernanda! You do want to sell it, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes. Yes, I do want to sell it. I was only hoping that you wanted to, er, handle it for me?”

  “We do. Of course we do. Berger’s will be delighted to handle it for you.”

  “And does this mean it will sell for more money than I paid for it, do you think?”

  It would be such a relief if the art-supply store job were no longer a priority.

  There’s another, longer, pause at Courtney’s end.

  “Good God, haven’t I mentioned that? I don’t know what you paid for it, Fernanda, and you know what? I don’t want to know. But, I think you’ll have some very substantial capital gains next year. And if everything pans out – and I hope I’m not going out on a limb telling you this – the estimated selling price for your painting looks like $12 to $15 million. And that’s a conservative estimate, by the way. It will probably go for more.”

  Fernanda drops the hot phone. It bounces twice on the parquet floor and skids beneath the sofa. She hears a tiny voice from that remote, unmappable distance.

  “Fernanda! Fernanda! Did you say something?”

  The phone isn’t broken, thank God.

  She makes her way across the room, staggering slightly, and stoops to feel around beneath the sofa skirt. Her hand at long last closes on the squawking phone.

  “I’m here,” she responds. Her voice sounds incredibly loud. “I’m here, Courtney. Sorry.”

  She wants Courtney to think she’s acting her age. Whatever that might be.

  “I’m sorry. I just needed to grab a pen. What did you say the artist’s name was again? I’d like to look him up.”

  Fernanda’s yanking madly at the tiny, stuck, desk drawer. No, not stuck. Her fingers have gone numb.

  “It’s Poussin. I said Poussin. Nicolas Poussin. I’ll send you an email, all right?”

  “Fine. Good. Thanks. And what happens now?�
��

  “Now you wait to hear from me. But I think first, you ought to come over here to the gallery and sign the consignment contract. Then we’ll begin to make a marketing plan.”

  “All right.”

  Abruptly, she remembers.

  “Wait. Courtney? I can’t get emails. My, uh, computer’s broken and I’m not sure when they’ll have it fixed. Could you just mail the information on –” she looks down at the paper in her hand “– on Poussin to the address you have for me there?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll do that. Let me know when you want to come in, though. And make it as soon as you can, all right? So, can we think of putting it in our next big sale?”

  “Okay. Oh, sure. And thanks.”

  Fernanda stares at the phone’s little screen as she carefully sets it down. After which, equally carefully, she makes an attempt to stand. She’s wobbly. She’s stunned. And not precisely happy. Not as happy as she should be.

  In the kitchen, she pours herself a Coke, adding chocolate syrup to kill the carbonation. Because, kind of “flat” is how she feels at this moment. And anxious. Carrying her glass to the window, she stares down at the street: at the nervy springtime crowds.

  What she hates most of all is the very real possibility of having to thank Randi for this. Does the puppet thank the puppeteer?

  Fernanda scoops the newspapers off the floor and looks for an ad for a computer store. She needs to buy herself a machine.

  And take that job at the art store. Just in case.

  CHAPTER 8

  The auction rooms at Berger’s are on the upper floors of the seven-story building. The coatroom is tended by two cheerful women of a certain age who dispense red plastic coat checks with the shiny gilt “Berger’s” logo impressed above the numbers on each side. To the left of the lobby are two very long escalators along with banks of speedy, silent elevators to whisk the clientele – the art dealers, museum curators, time-killing onlookers, self-styled art consultants, their wealthy, naïve clients, and the mega-mega rich, straight up to the glacial rooms with the moderately comfortable folding chairs where the paintings sales are held. Where the serious business gets done.