The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  They arrived shortly before ten o’clock. The hazy morning was ripening into apricot sunshine and men in identical open-necked shirts were mowing identical handkerchief lawns all along the street so that the air was filled with the cut-grass scent of a British summer. Juliet shuddered, unexpectedly homesick. The shop door was open and they entered, Juliet glancing about for George or Vera. It was perfectly empty. The children darted back to the rack of sunglasses, bickering happily, and Juliet stood quietly in the middle of the shop. The hand on the dusty wall clock crawled round and round and outside the lawnmowers whirred. Several minutes slid by and still no one appeared. Juliet looked about her and then slipped behind the counter. She hesitated, heart ticking in her ears, unsure what she was looking for. A stack of order forms lay on a spike beside the cash register and customers’ spectacles roosted inside a rack of cubbyholes. There was nothing personal. No photographs of grinning kiddies or oddly familiar golden ‘G.M.’ cufflinks. At the back of the shop stood two painted doors. Juliet opened one and peered inside. It was an empty optician’s studio: the high-backed leather chair, the eye chart, the wooden box stuffed with lenses like a selection box of chocolates. She closed the door and stepped towards the other. It was marked in small black letters ‘Private’. Beyond here waited George – she was sure of it. Her hand fluttered to her throat and she smoothed her hair. Closing her eyes, she pictured a blue-papered sitting-room with a sofa and a starfish lamp and inside George sipping coffee and reading the paper with a dab of toothpaste on his chin.

  ‘Mrs Montague?’

  Juliet opened her eyes and found herself face to face with the woman from yesterday.

  ‘I’m sorry, I was—’

  Having no explanation Juliet faltered, but Vera just smiled her white smile and shrugged.

  ‘I came early. Just in case,’ said Juliet.

  There was a clatter as Leonard collided with the display stand and expensive sunglasses began to hail to the floor.

  ‘It’s all okay. Nothing broken,’ said Vera hurrying over and scooping up the stand.

  ‘Is Mr Molnár here?’ asked Juliet, her voice casual.

  ‘Not today, ma’am. He doesn’t work much any more,’ added Vera. ‘He is nearly eighty.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Juliet, shoulders sagging with disappointment. She studied Vera, who smiled back at her, face empty as a mannequin. ‘The George I knew would be much younger.’

  Vera shrugged and went to retrieve Leonard’s spectacles from one of the cubbyholes. ‘It’ll be a dollar for the repair and five for the sunglasses.’

  Wordlessly Juliet counted out the bills. Disappointment flickered around her in waves until she felt quite dizzy.

  ‘Do you have a loo – a restroom?’

  Vera shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she answered too quickly. ‘Use the one in the drugstore across the street. Leave the kids here. I’ll watch ’em.’

  Juliet mumbled her thanks and hurried out into the sunshine, the cacophony of buzzing lawnmowers making her head ache. She rushed across the road, automatically looking the wrong way so that a fat blue truck had to swerve to avoid her, the driver honking his horn and shaking his fist. She fled into the drugstore, the door clattering behind her. Inside it was neon bright, the fluorescent tubes blinking even in the middle of the day. Rows and rows of red and blue and yellow cartons of soap powder screamed ‘THE BEST’, ‘THE BRIGHTEST’, ‘DAZZLING WHITES’ at her on both sides so that she felt she was walking through a tunnel of Pop Art.

  The restroom smelled of bleach and cheap vanilla perfume. Even in here the light was too bright, the bulb pulsing. She thought of Max and his hatred of electric light. Teasing him one night in bed, she’d called him a Luddite and an old grump but he’d smiled that sly smile and puffed out a lungful of pipe smoke and declared with a shrug, ‘What is it with Charlie and the rest of you? All of you want to shine neon lights into the dark places. Why do all mysteries need to be solved? There is a pleasure in uncertainty.’

  Juliet stooped over the sink, splashing cool water on her face and wrists. Was this her fault – was she guilty of wanting to shine light into the dark? She thought of Vera and her small watchful eyes. She reminded Juliet of some of the curtain-twitchers back home. There was something about her that Juliet didn’t trust. It would all be so much easier if whoever had scribbled ‘Try George Molnár’ on the scrap of newspaper had given their name. But whoever that stranger was, he or she had believed that George Molnár of Gorgeous George’s Glasses was her George and not an eighty-year-old man. Over the years she’d persuaded herself that she was reconciled to not finding George – in the way that one accepts a limp or a headache that never quite fades – but that wretched piece of newspaper with its scrawled note had given her hope, and all those years of careful resolve had been bulldozed in an instant. They’d travelled so far and unless she found George there would be no divorce. She’d never be free of him. And she’d never find her painting. Juliet straightened and reached into her bag for a comb. She thought of the little house in Chislehurst with its walls slowly filling up with pictures. Charlie’s portrait of her in the front room, Philip’s on the stairs, Jim’s sketches pinned to her mirror and Max’s bird-Juliet beside her bed so that it was the first thing she saw every morning. Over the years there would be more paintings, a lifetime of them, but there would always be one missing. That piece of her would remain lost, chained to George. She bent over the sink, noticed a grey crack in the porcelain and ran a thumbnail along it. She felt sure of only two things – that Vera was from Hungary and that she was lying.

  • • •

  In the optician’s store, Leonard and Frieda fidgeted, bored with waiting. Vera stood behind the counter, filing her nails and glancing at the door again and again.

  Leonard’s confidence had been restored with his sight and he was busy transforming a glossy flyer into a paper aeroplane. It waddled into the air, staggered a few feet and then landed ignominiously on its back like a dead fly. He sighed and gathered it up for a fresh attempt.

  ‘Your technique’s all wrong.’

  Leonard glanced up to see a freckle-faced boy of seventeen or eighteen grinning down at him.

  ‘I said you didn’t need to come in today, Jerry,’ said Vera, emerging from behind the counter.

  Jerry shrugged and gave a great yawn. ‘Yeah. I was bored.’ He turned back to Leonard. ‘You wanna know how to make a real paper airplane?’

  Leonard nodded, awed by the stranger. Jerry squatted beside him, grabbed another flyer and started a series of elaborate folds as the boy watched, trying to memorise each sequence with more concentration than he’d ever given anything before in his life. Jerry stood up and presented a perfect paper aeroplane to Leonard on the palm of his hand.

  ‘Try her out.’

  Leonard launched it with a hearty snap of his wrist and the plane glided the length of the shop before landing elegantly on the counter.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘You got how to do it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good job, champ.’

  Frieda eyed Vera, wishing that she could have such long crimson nails – she was even more elegant than the girls in the shiny magazines at the dentist. She wondered if her mother had painted her nails that colour before her father left. Men liked vermilion fingernails – all the magazines said so. She turned her attention to the new arrival, watching him from behind her sunglasses. He was very tall with reddish hair and strong freckled arms and he hadn’t even noticed her. She attempted to drape herself around the back of a chair. Jerry looked up and winked. She tried not to smile.

  ‘Hey, I know you,’ he said.

  Vera looked up quickly.

  ‘Yeah, take off those specs,’ said Jerry.

  Obediently, Frieda propped them on her forehead.

  ‘Yeah, for sure. It’s Elizabeth Taylor.’

  Frieda smiled and went bright pink, clashing beautifully with her orange sunglasses. Vera, who had stopped filing her nails
and had been staring at the children, let out a sigh that might have been relief and retreated behind the counter.

  Juliet returned from the drugstore and held open the door for the children.

  ‘Come on now. Thank you for watching them,’ she called to Vera.

  She did not notice the paper aeroplane clutched in Leonard’s hand or the tall teenage boy with black eyes who watched them through the glass as they hurried away.

  • • •

  Vera Molnár waited until Juliet Montague was safely down the street, not moving until a full five minutes after the car had disappeared past the window, the children’s faces a pale blur. Then she crossed to the door and silently turned the ‘Open’ sign to ‘Closed’ and clicked the lock. She leaned against it for a second.

  ‘Are you all right, Mom?’ asked Jerry.

  She smiled. ‘You’re a good boy, my little aidesh. I thought we’d take an early lunch.’ She reached into the till for a handful of change. ‘How about some of those hotdogs from the deli? Will you go get them?’

  Jerry shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  She waited until he’d gone and then disappeared through the door marked ‘Private’ into the house at the back of the shop. She measured out several spoons of thick ground coffee, slid the pot onto the stove and then, as she waited for it to boil, stepped into a small blue-patterned living-room. The curtains fluttered in the morning breeze and a bee landed on the television set in the corner. Vera perched on the worn sofa and looked at the wall where she’d pinned up a poster of some Van Gogh sunflowers. The print wasn’t very good, the petals more brown than sunshine, and it wasn’t straight. It also failed to conceal the unbleached rectangle on the wallpaper around it, where a larger picture used to hang. Vera remembered it well – that picture had been the one good thing they owned. It was a portrait of a young girl with brown hair and greenish eyes, her skinny legs folded beneath her as though she couldn’t stop fidgeting. If Vera hadn’t known otherwise, she would have believed it to be a portrait of the kid who’d come into the shop – what was her name, Frieda? But Vera knew it wasn’t Frieda. She knew the painting was of George’s other wife. Mrs Juliet Montague.

  • • •

  For the next week, Juliet prowled the walk path beside Venice Beach, pacing up and down as though George was lurking between the cracks in the cement. She wrote to the private detective in Brooklyn, asking him for the envelope the newspaper scrap had arrived in, but he’d replied on a postcard of the Empire State building to say that he’d already trashed it and couldn’t recall the postmark. He wasn’t a detective of the first rank. Meanwhile the children swam and squabbled and ate too much ice cream and surreptitiously watched their mother.

  • • •

  Leonard began to wonder whether he’d got it all wrong and that it wasn’t his father who was the spy on a secret mission but his mother. He kept a close eye on her, waking up in the night to check that she was still in bed and hadn’t sneaked off to go on a stakeout, but she was always there – he could hear her sighing in the dark or smell the burning cigarettes that she lit and did not smoke. Leonard, however, had read sufficient detective novels to know that covert means must be employed to catch her and so checked her pockets while she was in the shower. He discovered the frayed piece of newspaper and studied the gallery of photographs. So she was on a mission. A mission so secret that he and Frieda weren’t supposed to know about it. He sat on the kitchen linoleum and studied the photos of the assorted men, trying to insert the circled picture of ‘George Molnár’ into vague memories of his father. He screwed up his eyes in concentration and pictured the snap of his parents on their wedding day – Juliet in a white dress beside a man in a suit with a gouged-out hole instead of a head. Leonard replaced the hole with the face of George Molnár – like when Leonard had stuck his head through a cardboard cut-out of a cowboy at the fairground and Grandpa took his picture. He scanned the rows of men. If he could pick, who would be the father he’d choose? He was glad George didn’t have a beard because they tickled and stuff got lost in them – bits of lunch and keys and things. From the bathroom the sound of trickling water stopped, and Leonard heard the soft thud of his mother stepping out of the shower. Silently, he slipped the newspaper back into her pocket and considered whether to tell Frieda about his discovery. The door to the roof was ajar and he could see her perched on the edge of the wall (where they’d been told never ever to sit) dangling her legs, blowing fleshy bubbles the size of beach balls and then popping them with a grubby finger. Since they’d arrived in California Frieda was rarely without a sticky pack of Bazooka Joe.

  ‘Frieda, can I have a piece of gum?’ he asked, padding out to join her.

  ‘Bog off,’ she replied.

  Leonard turned around and went back inside. No, he decided, he wouldn’t tell her anything at all.

  • • •

  On Tuesday as Juliet hurried along the walk path to collect bagels for breakfast, she passed a few artists at work, easels sunk into the edge of the strand. Instinctively she slowed to look at the pictures. The first couple were unremarkable pastels of the sea by cheerful hobbyists – the colours flat, the water much too still – but the last caught her eye. She lingered behind the painter’s chair, not speaking as she watched him work. A girl with brown-red hair flew above a star-filled sky, the night sand drifting white below her. As Juliet waited, the sea turned choppier and blacker under his brush.

  ‘So, you like it, or no?’ asked the painter, not turning around.

  ‘Yes,’ said Juliet.

  She stood for a while, watching the white horses rise out of the painted sea and night-time gulls encircle the flying girl, until the man pointed with his brush to a bench.

  ‘Sit. You’re making my legs ache.’

  ‘But I won’t be able to see.’

  ‘Then I shall break and sit with you.’

  The painter stood and turned to face Juliet. He grinned, raising his sunhat, a herringbone trilby, in salutation. He was in his sixties, hair thinning and grey, eyes the same blue as the sea in his picture.

  ‘Tibor Jankay,’ he said, offering a smudged hand.

  ‘Juliet Montague.’

  They shook hands, smiling, pleased with one another, and settled side by side on the bench.

  ‘Who’s the girl in the picture?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘You,’ said Tibor.

  Juliet laughed.

  He pulled a large sketchbook out of a bag, passing it to her.

  ‘You can look, if you’re interested.’

  He lit a cigarette and pulled his hat low to shade his eyes, dozing contentedly in the sunshine, humming to himself. Juliet thumbed through a series of sketches, most of them in charcoal, most of them of the same girl drawn in bold, simple lines, her hair tumbling like rushing water and her profile displaying a good strong Jewish nose. Every now and then she was drawn in colour – her hair was usually red-brown, but here and there it was crimson or yellow, but it didn’t matter, it was always the same girl. Juliet sighed.

  ‘You don’t like?’ said Tibor, opening an eye.

  ‘I do, I do. I’m on holiday and I hadn’t realised how much I missed looking at pictures,’ she said.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘I like pictures too. Pictures and sunshine. This is the best quality sunshine in all the world, fifty-three per cent better than every other kind, did you know that?’

  Juliet shook her head, unsure if he was kidding. Tibor produced a fat Hershey bar from his pocket.

  ‘You want some chocolate? It’s not like the good stuff from Europe, but it was either good quality chocolate or good quality sunshine.’

  He spoke with the same Mitteleuropa accent as Vera, only the notes from the old country were stronger, closer to the surface. Not wishing to be rude, Juliet accepted a soggy square. Apart from this elderly man, the only person she knew who wanted chocolate for breakfast was Leonard. She supposed she ought to get back to the apartment and rouse the children, but it was pleasant sitting
on the bench with Tibor, basking in the warmth of the Californian morning. As he passed her another square of chocolate, Juliet realised with a jolt like a hunger pang that she was lonely.

  ‘You’re the first grown-up I’ve really talked to since we got to America,’ she observed.

  Tibor smiled. ‘I’m not so sure I’m a grown-up.’

  Juliet laughed. Most people would have asked why her husband didn’t keep her company, or else commented on the fact that she was a woman travelling alone.

  ‘Come back tomorrow, same time, same place and I’ll paint you.’

  Juliet started. She’d never even considered that she might have her portrait painted over here. She closed her eyes, filled with warmth at the thought. The city was so busy, everyone zooming from place to place in their cars, the Montagues had slid unnoticed into its slipstream and no one would notice when they left. But a portrait painted here on Venice Beach would connect her to this place. It would last even after they’d sailed for home.

  ‘It would be nice. I’ll try to come tomorrow,’ she said, regretting a vague promise to take the children to see the Hollywood sign.

  ‘You’ll come.’

  Juliet licked the chocolate off her fingers. Yes, of course she would come.

  • • •

  The next morning Tibor was waiting for Juliet as she traipsed along the walk path, a huge string beach-bag clutched in her hand and the children at her side. Leonard was curious and Frieda snarled in a temper. Why did everyone want to paint Juliet? But then she caught sight of Tibor and her mood improved. She’d assumed that most painters were like Philip or Charlie or Jim but this man was more like Grandpa. He was welcome to paint her mother – Frieda wouldn’t pose for him, even if he asked.

  The wind was up and the beach busy with tropical flocks of kites, while a handful of surfers dabbled in the waves – most of them flopping about in the shallows pummelled by the tide, but one or two galloped across the cresting surface like bareback circus riders.

  ‘I’m going for a swim,’ announced Frieda, wriggling out of her jeans and strutting off across the sand towards the surfers.