by Wendy Lee
The painting was propped against the wall of the garage under the light of a bare bulb, which I’d turned on even though it was early afternoon. I’d covered all the windows with black plastic trash bags in case my neighbors or passersby got too nosy. Nervously, I awaited my friend’s reaction.
Wang raised his cup to me. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve created a masterpiece.”
“Do you think?” I tried to look at the painting as if I’d never seen it before—or rather, only from a catalog, as Caroline Lowry’s client must have. The brushstrokes were assertive, indicating fluid and clear movement. Even more important, the painting looked forty years old. Without Wang’s help, I wouldn’t have paid as much attention to those details as I should have, instead dreaming about what might have motivated Andrew Cantrell to create the painting in the first place. I wouldn’t have concentrated on what was known, like the year the painting was made, and found materials that could convincingly be dated from then.
“This is all due to you,” I told Wang. “I should really split the money with you.”
“You must be drunk already,” Wang responded, and then grinned to lighten his words. “No, this is all your doing. You’re the artist here.”
“You’re right,” I said, deliriously. “I am the painter of this picture.”
If only for a moment. I still needed to add the signature. I had wanted to wait until Wang was with me to christen the painting. Ever since I’d seen it on Meditation, I’d practiced Andrew Cantrell’s signature until I had gotten it down quite well. I especially wanted to make sure that I spelled his name correctly, although perhaps it didn’t matter as much as one would think. I had heard about a Jackson Pollock forgery in which the artist’s last name had been signed as Pollack, a common misspelling, and no one, from the dealer to the buyer who had paid millions of dollars for the painting, had noticed until later.
“For the final touch,” I said, and dramatically poised my brush over the lower right corner of the painting. Wang cheered me on.
Then, in a moment, it was done. I was no longer the painting’s creator; that person was Andrew Cantrell. I was relieved, yet also a little regretful, as if something had been taken away from me. If I couldn’t claim ownership of something I’d painted, what kind of artist was I?
* * *
The ultimate test was whether Caroline Lowry would approve of this painting. After all, she’d seen it in person, although it had been many years ago.
“It made a great impression on me,” she’d said. “I can remember it like it was yesterday, hanging on the wall of my aunt’s gallery. I’d never seen anything so striking, so brooding.” I wasn’t sure if she meant what she was saying, or whether she was trying to impress upon me the importance of the task.
This time when she visited my studio, she came with a man whom she introduced as her art historian friend. Though he was small and unassuming, I immediately felt like I was being given some kind of test. I regretted not having asked Wang to join me as backup, but then thought Caroline would not like so many people witnessing this act of verification.
I made no preamble with costumes or tea and took Caroline and her friend straight into the garage, where they appeared a little disturbed by the trash bags covering the windows. I have to admit, they made the place resemble the scene of a crime about to happen. Then their full attention was drawn to the painting. Caroline acted as if she had seen a dead person come to life.
“This is exactly as I remembered it,” she said, more to her companion than to me.
I breathed an inner sigh of relief that she approved. But then her companion started asking me questions, such as where I’d purchased my materials. He seemed particularly interested in the people I’d dealt with, which made me glad that perhaps Wang wasn’t with me after all. I assured him that the antiques dealer that I’d gotten the canvas from was someone I’d dealt with many times before, that I’d paid cash. I decided to leave out the tea-staining and the hair dryer, as even those methods seemed a bit dubious to me.
Amid this interrogation, I shot a look at Caroline as if to ask her whether all the attention to detail was necessary.
“It’s just that the client is very particular,” she said.
“Can you tell me who he is?” Ever since I’d finished the painting, I’d felt some responsibility toward it. I’d spent a month of my life working on it. I wanted to know where it was going, whether it would be hung in someone’s workplace or bedroom, or tucked away in storage, never to see the light of day.
Caroline and her companion exchanged glances. “It’s a foreign businessman,” she finally said. “Actually, he’s from China, too.”
The knowledge that the painting was going to a compatriot helped a little bit, I supposed. “Where in China?” I asked.
“Taiwan.”
I shook my head. “Then he probably would rather be called Taiwanese than Chinese. If he’s in business, it’s likely his family came over after the communist takeover in 1949.”
Caroline nodded, but her companion appeared impatient at this impromptu history lesson. “Chinese, Taiwanese, whatever,” he said under his breath.
“Is the painting to your satisfaction?” I addressed the both of them.
“Yes,” Caroline said and handed me an envelope of cash. “Very nice doing business with you, Mr. Liu.” She paused. “You really are a talented artist.”
Talented as an imitator, I thought, but I thanked her.
She and her companion packed up the painting and took it out with them to a van parked at the curb. Her companion got behind the driver’s seat, and they left.
Afterward, I sat in my apartment, counting the money in the envelope. Caroline had given me a two-hundred-dollar bonus. I wondered what she would have done if she’d been displeased with my work. We hadn’t signed a contract or a confidentiality agreement. But the truth was, there was no one I could tell about this event in my life. Wang knew, but the only other person I would have told would have been my wife.
The day Jin left me, I had come home from one of my teaching jobs at the Chinese Baptist Church senior center to find she’d left a note saying she’d gone to stay with friends, for me not to worry about her, and most of all, not to look for her. I expected her to turn up, but after a few days with no further word from her, I went to the salon and asked if she was staying with anyone there. Other than her former coworkers, I didn’t know who her friends were. I also called Jin’s sister in Sunset Park, who told me she didn’t know where Jin was, either. I suspected the sister was lying, but had no way to prove it.
I wonder if my slowness in finding out where Jin had really gone was influenced by my reaction to her abandonment. I was angry at her, for leaving me for no conceivable reason. Unlike some stories she’d told me about her former coworkers’ husbands, I did not beat her when drunk, waste my money by gambling, or sit at home watching television while she worked overtime.
I should have known something was wrong when she left her job at the salon. At first I thought something must have happened there, a fight with a coworker, or perhaps her boss, Old Guo, had tried something with her. But from the times I had met him, he didn’t seem the type, and Jin was not the kind of person who would tolerate abuse from someone else by walking away. I asked her what she planned to do, thinking about whether I could pick up more classes at the senior center, but Jin admitted she didn’t know, mumbled something about getting her old clients to come to our apartment to get their hair cut.
I should have connected her decision with what had happened a month or so before that, when she’d fainted on the job. At first she’d thought she was pregnant and had been ecstatic. Maybe I’d blocked that memory because my reaction had been the exact opposite. The last thing I wanted, at my age and given my livelihood, was to bring up a child. I told her this, and we’d argued about it, and she called me a selfish bastard who was only interested in my art, and that we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place if I wasn
’t willing to make sacrifices for her happiness. This resulted in much time spent apart, even if we were physically in the same space, even after she took a pregnancy test and it turned out negative. A wedge had been driven between us, and she could not forgive me for the things I’d said.
Then I thought she had found someone else, someone who could give her everything she’d ever wanted, financially and otherwise. Perhaps she’d gone back to an old lover from her hometown in China, or she’d met a man who’d also gone into the salon asking for a haircut when what he really wanted was to get to know her better. If that was the case, if another man had bested me, I could accept it. To be left hanging from a precipice was infinitely worse.
I combined the money I’d just received for the painting with what remained from the first half of the installment. Most of it was still there, as I’d just paid a few hundred dollars for the materials. It was the most money I’d ever received for painting a single work. But it still wasn’t enough for me to give up teaching classes or selling replicas from a stall. Ten thousand dollars wouldn’t have been enough.
But I was beginning to realize that millions of dollars weren’t going to be enough for me to become the artist I wanted to be. And no amount of money would bring Jin back.
Chapter 6
Caroline leaned the copy of Elegy against the wall in her living room, just out of the light coming in through the windows but enough to illuminate its textured surface. In the many years since she’d seen it in person, it had taken on mythic proportions—the painting lost in the fire that had claimed its artist’s life. Now resurrected, its power was more palpable than ever. She was already beginning to think of it not as a copy, but as even more real than the painting she had seen hung in the Lowry Gallery as a college student, when she had met Andrew Cantrell and realized that her aunt Hazel was his mistress.
At the time, she’d thought their relationship so thrilling, so dramatic. Of course, Andrew Cantrell wasn’t much to look at—and neither was his work, she’d thought at the time—but the fact that Hazel had chosen him and his painting to exhibit made him rise inestimably in Caroline’s eyes. Suddenly, the boys she and her roommate, Rose, knew, like those from the coed college in town, seemed so young and flimsy. Take Caleb Schaeffer, for example, who took Rose on dates to the local diner or the movies or, on one memorable occasion, hiking. No wonder Rose thought Caroline’s trips to the city and Hazel’s life were so glamorous.
There was also something glamorous about being attached to a painter, and a married one at that. Had Cantrell ever asked Hazel to pose for him? Had he considered her his muse? How early had his wife known about their affair? From the Life magazine article, Caroline knew that Andrew and Naomi Cantrell had moved out to a farmhouse in East Hampton that year; the tabloids suggested the main reason was to get Cantrell away from Hazel, although it obviously hadn’t stopped him from coming into the city to see her.
When Caroline started to have her own flings with artists, they were always short-lived and never as exciting as she had been led to believe. It had taken her a few years to get over the divorce from Bob, who had essentially been her first and only real relationship, and then taking care of Hazel before her death and figuring out how to run the gallery afterward required much of her time. But then she met an abstract painter who was in town for the weekend to attend an art fair, and she surprised herself by her physical response. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed the touch of another person.
For about a decade starting from her late thirties, there had been one or two encounters a year, with men who were married and who were not, younger than her or not, some of them who went on to become artists she exhibited in her gallery or not. None of them lasted, not that she expected them to, but sometimes she wondered if she was lacking some personality trait. One that Hazel had. While Caroline didn’t envy a relationship quite like Hazel and Cantrell’s, given how tragically it had turned out, she wanted to radiate togetherness in the way they had, so strongly that it was apparent to everyone who looked at them.
Sandro Hess had started out just like the others. It had been years since Caroline had taken a lover, and she was beginning to resign herself to the trappings of old ladyhood—going to events and eating in restaurants alone, depending on her landlord to fix things in her apartment. Although she hadn’t had any work done on her face, she knew she looked at least ten years younger than her age. However, she didn’t count on a man who was actually ten years younger than her to be interested, as Sandro was.
When she met him, at the gallery opening of a South American friend of his, she was immediately struck by his accent and his old-fashioned, if a little sexist, behavior. The kissing of the hand instead of the cheek, the shirt that was open a little too much at the neck, the pomaded hair and equally groomed goatee. She found it all oddly attractive, especially that he paid her so much attention even though there were plenty of young, long-limbed women in attendance that night.
“Do you like what he has done here?” Sandro asked, indicating the celebrity death masks that made up the exhibition.
“It’s a unique idea,” Caroline admitted. “Rather . . . interactive.” While some of the masks were displayed in a traditional way, erected upon pedestals, others were suspended from the ceiling, where people accidentally walked into them. She considered that a safety hazard.
“But what do you think of the masks themselves?”
Caroline caught herself. Of course he wanted to know what she thought of the art rather than how it was being presented to an audience. She guessed he must be associated with the artist in some way, as a friend or a fan, so she replied cautiously, “It’s quite a commentary on pop culture.”
“Glad to hear it,” Sandro said, and introduced himself. When Caroline said she owned an art gallery in Chelsea, he seemed to be taken aback. “But surely you are an artist yourself.”
“Not in the least bit, I’m afraid.”
“You know, I would love to show you what I’m working on at the moment.”
Caroline expected this; almost every time she went to an event and revealed her occupation, someone would ask her to visit their studio. Usually she’d take their card rather than give hers out, saying she’d get in touch if she was interested, and throw the card away when she got home. But this time, something about the pleading in this man’s dark eyes made her offer her card to him instead.
Within the week she had visited Sandro’s studio. He had received a grant to work in a government-subsidized building in the West Thirties. The space had tall windows that let in the sunlight and possibly dazzled her into thinking his Mickey Mouse–rainbow pastiches were more clever than they were. In any case, by the end of the visit, she had agreed to give him a show that summer. She had made that deal before they slept together, she liked to remind herself, so there was no conflict of interest. No conflict of interest at all.
Even before the opening, Caroline was starting to tire of Sandro. Almost every conversation now, in and out of bed, was about his need for money to support his ex-wife, Claudia, and their seven-year-old son, Sebastian. Claudia and Sebastian lived in their former apartment in the East Village, and Sebastian had some kind of learning disability that required therapy. Claudia sounded high-maintenance, although Caroline wasn’t sure whether Sandro was portraying her accurately. Alternately, she pictured his former wife as a dark-haired Argentine beauty dealing with a difficult child or a stern Germanic woman obsessed with controlling her ex’s life. Sometimes Sandro would speak dismissively of her; other times he referred to her with such longing that Caroline wished long-departed Bob had felt that way about her.
Once, she asked Sandro where he and Claudia had met.
“In high school. We were what you call ‘high school sweethearts’?”
“This must have been in Argentina, right? Or Germany?”
“Ah.” Sandro looked a little embarrassed. “It is true that my mother is from Argentina and my father is from Germany. However, I g
rew up in the Bronx.”
“But the accent, the . . .” Caroline gestured feebly at Sandro’s entire person.
“You have to admit,” Sandro said, “it makes a much better story.” He spoke without any accent at all, not even a Bronx one. All at once, Sandro didn’t sound or look like he was from anywhere.
Neither of them mentioned his origins after this exchange, and Caroline continued to introduce Sandro as her “German-Argentine” client, but something about him was beginning to unnerve her. She wondered whether it had been prudent to give him the keys to her apartment, which she had never done with anyone else, but he had talked about how uncomfortable his studio was, which was where he had slept since Claudia had kicked him out of their apartment.
Finally, in the week before his opening, she told him she wanted her keys back.
“Is this it between us?” Sandro had asked.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know how long you thought this would last,” Caroline had replied. “Besides, your show opens next week. Haven’t you gotten what you wanted?”
Sandro put his hand over his heart. “It hurts me that you think our relationship was simply about that.”
“Oh, stop it,” Caroline snapped. “Stop talking like that.” She wasn’t sure whether she meant his words or his put-on accent. She gathered herself. “Again, I apologize for having to do it this way. But let’s just make this clean. Give me the keys, you’ll have a great opening next week, all of the paintings will sell, and you can give the money to your ex-wife.”
“That’s all I want.”
“And if you do as I say, you’ll get what you want.” Caroline held out her hand, and Sandro reluctantly dropped her keys into it.
During the opening, Caroline worried that Sandro might make a scene, especially if he drank a lot, but he seemed to be in good spirits and more attentive toward her assistant, Molly, than Caroline herself. She congratulated herself on having averted a crisis.
