The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  Thomas nodded. “Of course, Mr. Cranston. That has always been my intention. That the work be sold in its entirety. Only in its entirety.”

  “Marvelous,” Cranston said.

  Finch’s throat tightened. Of course. Never a good sign with Thomas. He felt the need to sit down, the weight of a promise he hadn’t wanted to make sitting like a stone in his gut.

  “So, Mr. Cranston. You will contact me with a plan, I assume?”

  “A plan?” Cranston’s brows arched closer to his hairline, but he smiled indulgently.

  “A plan for finding the other two panels, of course.”

  Finch put his hand to his forehead.

  Cranston blanched, the color quickly leaving his face. “You don’t have them here?”

  Thomas smiled, and shook his head.

  “But you know where they are?” Stephen asked.

  “Well, if he did, it’s unlikely there’d be a need to find them, Mr. Jameson. Look here, Bayber . . .” Cranston’s mood had abruptly sharpened, which was understandable. Finch himself was becoming less enthused by the minute.

  “Please, Mr. Cranston.” Thomas opened his hands to them, as if offering the most obvious of explanations. “Don’t alarm yourself. It’s a simple matter. The other two panels were sent to the Kessler sisters many years ago. I believe they’d be happy for the income the sale would presumably bring.”

  “You’ll call and ask them?” Stephen appeared to wait for another rebuke from Cranston, but evidently Cranston was wondering the same thing.

  Thomas walked to the window, staring at the velvet curtain as if he could see through it, out onto the street and into the flat afternoon light. “I’ve lost track of them, I’m afraid.”

  Finch coughed. The situation was clearly getting out of hand. This wasn’t anything he’d signed up for, shaky promise or not. He needed to extricate himself from the looming mess as rapidly as possible.

  “Thomas,” he said, “surely this would be better suited to an investigator of some sort? A professional person who could locate the Kessler sisters and find out whether they still have the paintings in their possession? Then Murchison & Dunne could approach the owners regarding an acquisition. And Jameson could authenticate the works. I doubt anyone in this room has the particular skills required to track down missing persons.”

  “Yes,” Cranston agreed. “That sounds quite reasonable.”

  “Oh, but you have the skills,” Thomas said, pressing his fingertips together. “Denny, I believe you and Mr. Jameson are exactly the right people for the job.”

  It became alarmingly clear that Thomas had thought the whole thing out, and that Finch and Stephen had just been tasked with a quest, their fortunes now intertwined.

  “If I might ask, Mr. Bayber, why is that?” Stephen appeared to be completely baffled.

  “Who better to look,” Thomas said, “than those who have a vested interest in the outcome? Financial, and otherwise.”

  * * *

  “So, Professor, should I make the reservations, or should you?”

  “Reservations?” Finch was distracted. Drops from one of the umbrella’s ribs funneled down the back of his neck. His wool socks were damp, driving the chill straight into his ankles.

  “For our flights. We can get to Rochester from JFK in no time. It’s probably not much of a cab ride from there.”

  “I’m not entirely convinced this is the best way to go about things. Cranston shouldn’t have left so quickly.”

  “Is there a problem?” Stephen asked, shifting his briefcase to his other hand and waving at a taxi that slowed briefly before speeding past them. At Finch’s hesitation, he blurted, “You do believe it’s his work, don’t you? It was only a cursory examination, but I’m reasonably sure . . .”

  “You may be only reasonably sure. I have no doubt of it.”

  Finch knew it was Thomas’s work the moment he saw it. Not that the portrait was like anything else Thomas had done, but Finch recognized it, nonetheless. The black, white, and yellow pigments of his verdaccio deftly knit to produce an underpainting of grayish green that toned the warm bone of the primer. He could identify Thomas’s technique as easily as he could Lydia’s childish scrawl on a piece of paper. Besides which, his reactions to Thomas’s paintings were immediate and visceral: a sudden drop in his gut, a tingling at the tips of his fingers, a knockout punch to any prejudices he harbored regarding what defined art.

  This was the gift of knowing an artist’s secret language, a gift that came with age and focused study: the ability to interpret a brushstroke, to recognize colors, to identify a pattern the artist’s hand created instinctually from comfort and habit. Finch could look at Thomas’s work and read his pride and frustration, his delight in perfection, his obsessive desire. But he would be forced to leave it to Stephen, with his arsenal of toys and gadgets and technology, to officially christen the work a Bayber. That fact lodged in his craw like a rough crumb, making a home for itself in the darkness of his throat, refusing to be dislodged. He was an expert of one sort, Jameson of another. Money followed the word of only one of them.

  “Yes, it’s Bayber’s work, Stephen. I’m sure a closer examination will confirm it.” Finch was furious with Thomas. The holidays were coming, the anniversary of Claire’s death only a few weeks away. He didn’t want to embark on some ill-defined mission. He wanted to be hibernating in his own apartment, waking only when the darkness of the months ahead had passed. But he’d given his word. That meant something to him, as Thomas well knew. He was trapped.

  “You think we should start looking somewhere else then? Not go to the cabin first? Do you want to start at the house instead?”

  Finch steeled himself for the inevitable abuse. “I don’t fly.”

  “What?”

  “I said I don’t fly.”

  Stephen dropped his tool case and started shaking violently until he finally bent over, hiccuping into his knees.

  “I don’t find it all that humorous,” Finch said.

  Stephen righted himself, dabbing at his eyes with the edge of his jacket. “Oh, but it is,” he said. “I can’t drive.”

  * * *

  Finch drummed his fingers on the corner of his desk, waiting for his computer screen to refresh. Once Stephen found out he didn’t want to fly, he’d somehow ended up with the mundane task of handling logistics. Who, in this day and age, didn’t have a driver’s license? How did the man function? On the other hand, Finch could think of hundreds of people, both well-known and obscure, who chose not to fly. The laptop screen finally blinked and offered up a home page for the car rental agency; a form with questions to be answered, boxes to be ticked, numbers to be filled in, felonies to be reported; all required before they would deem him worthy to drive one of their Fiestas or Aveos. He lingered over the “Specialty” class, tempted by the bright red of a Mustang before coming to his senses. Late fall, unseasonable weather, and Stephen Jameson. None of these screamed sporty roadster. He squinted and punched a key, squinted and punched, paused to review, then punched once more—“Submit.”

  He pushed the curtain aside and looked out the window. The October sky was a gray flannel, streaked with ragged clouds. There’d be frost if the rain let up. He tapped his fingers again, waiting for confirmation of his reservation. Why this nagging sense of urgency?

  The painting unsettled him. There was the age of the girls, obviously. And the expression of the older sister, disturbing in its intensity. Anger radiated from the canvas, yet her expression was contained, a quality both knowing and unnerving. Kessler. The name was vaguely familiar, and he racked his brain, searching for the connection.

  That Thomas had inserted himself into the piece was significant. As an artist, he always maintained a certain distance. Patrons or admirers might think they knew his work, but in truth, they would only be seeing what he wanted them to. That is the small space where I hide, Denny, Thomas had said to him once before. That thin line between the painting and the public persona, tha
t’s where I exist. That’s what no one will ever see.

  But what made Finch most uneasy was the atmosphere of the painting. Everything artfully staged, with the exception of the emotions of the people in it. Those seemed overwhelming to Finch and painfully real. The sadness he’d felt after leaving the apartment and returning home lingered, and he shivered, wondering if there was anything he knew about Thomas with certainty, outside of the depth of his talent.

  The talent he was certain of. It was confirmed time and again, most recently by the hush in the room when Stephen and Cranston first saw the painting, their expressions of awe and discomfort. He remembered his own reaction upon seeing Thomas’s work for the first time, the brilliant marriage of insight and imagination with untempered physicality. The discomfort came in the emotions Thomas drew from the viewer, emotions that, for the sake of propriety, were usually cordoned off or tamped down. Scrutinizing his work left one exposed, a voyeur caught in the act. Thomas’s true talent, Finch had realized long ago, was the ability to make the viewer squirm.

  However, this painting made the artist uncomfortable as well. Finch had stood between them, Thomas and Stephen, the two of them dwarfing him by equal measures, and looked from one to the other—their heads tilted at the same attitude, their sharp noses fixed toward the canvas. But while Thomas’s look shifted from longing to sadness, Stephen stared at the painting with an intensity that suggested he could divine what lay beneath the pigment.

  Given a spread of three or four years, Finch had a good idea when the work had been done. In spite of its subject, the colors used, the intensity of brushstroke, and the level of detail in the background objects all pointed to a certain period in Thomas’s work. He would leave it to Stephen to supply the finer details. What caught him off guard was the ache in the eyes of the young man in the painting. Finch had noticed that same ache in Thomas as the artist viewed his own work. There was arrogance, too, but that was not nearly so prominent as the brokenness of someone standing outside the bounds of love. It frightened Finch. In the years he’d known Thomas, he couldn’t recall a time he’d ever seen him want after something. He’d never wondered whether there might be something desired yet missing from Thomas’s life. Until now.

  Finch had constructed a skeleton of Thomas’s history from the few bones offered up to him. The rest was obtained through diligent research, but it was an incomplete picture, nothing Thomas had volunteered to flesh out. Finch knew Thomas’s parents had been remote and disinterested. They quickly tired of what they perceived as laziness on the part of their only child—a lack of interest in contributing to the family business—and cut him off when he was twenty-eight, despite numerous accolades and his growing success, considering art no more deserving of attention than any other hobby: flower arranging, winemaking, table tennis.

  Thomas was ill-equipped to deal with the world on his own. He had grown up knowing only wealth and privilege, surrounded by people his parents had hired to do things for him: feed him, transport him, educate him, work a fine grit over any inexplicable rough edges. Though his paintings sold for large sums, money circled away from him like water down a drain. Visiting his studio some fifteen or so years after their first meeting, Finch had been alarmed to find groceries lacking, the cupboards bare save for cigarettes and liquor. Noticing Thomas’s gaunt frame, he’d wondered what the man subsisted on. There were stacks of unopened mail spread across the floor: long-overdue bills, personal correspondence stuffed into the same piles as advertising circulars, notices threatening the disconnection of utilities, requests for private commissions, invitations from curators hoping to mount retrospectives. Finch had waded through the detritus of monthly accountability. For Thomas, these were the peculiarities of a normal person’s life, so he chose to ignore them, leaving the burgeoning collection of envelopes to form a sort of minefield he stepped across day after day.

  “You should look at some of these, you know,” Finch had said, rifling through a handful of envelopes that carried a charcoal trace of footprints.

  “Why would I want to do that?” Thomas had asked.

  “So you aren’t left in a studio with no heat, no running water, and no electricity. And before you bother with some clever retort, remember you’ll have a hard time holding a brush when your fingers go numb from the cold. Besides, what if someone’s trying to get ahold of you? Is there even a telephone here?”

  Thomas had only smiled and asked, “Who would possibly want to get ahold of me?”

  Finch made a sweeping gesture at the floor. “I’m guessing these people, for starters.”

  Thomas shrugged and went back to painting. “You could keep track of it for me.”

  “I’m not your secretary, Thomas.”

  Thomas put down his brush and stared at Finch, studying his face in a thoughtful manner Finch imagined was normally reserved for his models.

  “I didn’t mean to insult you, Denny. I only thought you might find it useful, while doing the catalogue, to have access to my papers. You must know I wouldn’t trust anyone else with my personal correspondence.”

  In the end, Finch had made arrangements for an assistant, an endearingly patient middle-aged mother of four with salt-and-pepper hair, whose familiarity with chaos made her the ideal candidate for the job. She visited Thomas’s studio two days a week in an effort to bring forth order from anarchy. She seemed to take a great deal of delight in sorting, and before long Thomas’s affairs were more settled than they had been in years, with the assistant, Mrs. Blankenship, leaving his letters and personal correspondence in a file for Finch, and the due notices wrapped and taped around various bottles of liquor like paper insulator jackets.

  “It’s the only place he’ll notice them,” she’d explained to Finch, when he questioned her slightly unorthodox methods. “And they’re getting paid now, aren’t they?”

  It was true, and at some point Mrs. Blankenship had attempted to make inroads in Thomas’s apartment as well, coming over a few times a week to collect the glasses deposited on various flat surfaces in various rooms and move them all to the sink.

  “Why can’t you leave him be?” Claire had asked.

  “He’s a friend. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “He uses you. And you let him. I don’t understand why.”

  How to explain it to her when he couldn’t explain it to himself? He’d reached the age when his possibilities were no longer infinite; what he had now was all he was going to have. He could detach his personal satisfaction from his professional . . . what? Disappointment? Too strong a word. Averageness, perhaps? To his mind, the personal and professional were separate; one did not diminish the other. But Claire would see any discontent in him as some partial failure on her part, as if she could will him to greatness. Within these rooms, he was blessed to be the most important man in the world. Outside of them, his success had been limited. He was not destined for accolades; there would be no superlatives conjoined to his name.

  “If not for Thomas and the notoriety he’s achieved, we might well be eating beans from a can, my dear, instead of . . .” He’d waved his fork over their meal, a beef tenderloin in marrow sauce, chanterelles with chestnuts, and the ruby sheen of a fine pinot noir coloring his wineglass.

  “I suppose your books wrote themselves, then? That your accomplishments count for nothing?” Claire hid her face behind her napkin for a moment, and when she put the napkin back in her lap her cheeks were wet.

  “What is it?” His mind entertained a score of disastrous scenarios.

  “Do you feel you settled? With marriage and a child, I mean. For less than what you imagined you’d have?”

  His response had been immediate. He’d shaken his head vehemently, attempting to interrupt her. He might have wished for greater success, but never at the expense of his family. If he had to choose, no choice would have been easier. She’d squeezed his arm tight and he’d let her continue.

  “It’s the way you are when you come home after being with him.
Anxious. At odds with yourself. You look around these rooms as though something’s changed in the time since you left and came back. As though everything’s become smaller. More drab.”

  He was stunned. “I didn’t realize I did that.”

  “That makes it worse. More true.” She stared at the tines of her fork.

  He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed the insides of her wrists, first one, then the other, stricken by the idea that he’d planted any doubt in her mind as to how much she meant to him. “I didn’t settle, Claire.”

  “I don’t believe you did. I think you are exactly what you were intended to be. A man of great value. I’m just not sure you recognize it in yourself.” She closed her eyes, then looked at him carefully. “And Bayber? What would you say of him?”

  “I would say he, too, is exactly what he was intended to be. A man of great talent.”

  “He’s the one who’s settled, Denny. For only his talent. And when his time comes, he’ll find himself wanting what you have more than anything else.”

  He’d loved her all the more for saying it, though he doubted Thomas would be thinking of him at the end. Yet there was still a small particle in Finch, an uncontrollable element that coveted what Thomas had, not at the expense of his own bounty, but in addition to it. Thomas’s talent was the cover that kept him warm at night, the meal that sustained him, the air he breathed. His talent would outlive him for generations. Finch was honest enough to admit, at least to himself, a legacy of that sort was worthy of envy. Was it so great a crime to let some of Thomas’s sun fall on him? To feel just the outer rim of that warmth?

  The rest, he had no desire for. The queue of women waiting for Thomas was as long as the span of time each lasted was short. When Thomas tired of an admirer’s company, it was expected that the woman in question would decamp gracefully, minus the drama of a scene or hysterics, to be quickly replaced. In Thomas’s opinion, no explanation was required.

  But for years to go by without having the companionship of anyone of consequence? Finch tried to imagine a different life for himself, but could not. The loss of his wife had been devastating. Even now he woke in the middle of the night to find his arms stretched out to her side of the bed, encircling her missing form. Painful as this was, a life she had never been part of would have been worse. The same held true for Lydia. The lilt of her voice, the sway of her arms when she walked, the way she nibbled at the cuticle of her index finger when faced with a serious decision. All these had been imprinted on his core. Erasing them was impossible.