The High Season(31)

He swiveled. “You know Adeline?”

“She’s renting my house.”

“Ah. You’re the one with the nice husband.”

“Ex-husband.”

“I see.”

A blue slate floor, and out the back, the sudden shock of ethereal blue of sea and sky through the enormous wall of glass. White and blue everywhere. She tried to tiptoe. This was a space in which even a footfall felt unseemly.

    “The house is extraordinary,” she said. “It’s like heaven, if God had taste.”

“Ha. I like that. It’s a sacred space, isn’t it,” Daniel agreed. “The volumes are so carefully articulated, yet you get no sense of effort. I look at this and I can’t see schematics or blueprints. Just inspiration. It’s as though it was always here, isn’t it? Yet the modernity grounds you in the now.”

His stump speech, she could tell. He recited it as though someone else had written it for him.

“Come, I want to show you something. I can tell you’ll appreciate it.” He moved farther into the vast cathedral of the house.

She could glimpse the formal dining room. A long table that could seat twenty or more, the wood polished and rich. A stunning Cy Twombly on the wall. “The chairs are beautiful.”

“Jacques Adnet.” He stopped. “Sometimes I just stand here for twenty minutes at a time. It’s the exact center of the house. And of course the Rothko right in your center sight.”

That Rothko, floating blue and anchoring black.

“The Richter abstract to your left.” A knockout-punch Richter, skeins of bright paint over navy. Ruthie estimated maybe forty million. It was a guess; it could be worth more.

“Now look down.”

She looked down at a tiny square of golden tile in the middle of the stone floor.

“I had the architect put in that square. The guy argued with me, like he was the boss. Look up.”

She looked up into a blue sky through a skylight.

“I think of this space, right here, as art. Just here. Do you feel it? It’s like my own Turrell. I walk in every Friday, and I stop. This is where I center. This is where serenity kicks in.”

Could serenity actually kick?

“Do you feel it? Like you’re at the center of a turning world?”

What does one say to a billionaire except “Yes.”?

    “Let’s exhale.”

Obediently she blew out a breath.

“I like to come here right after meditating, before espresso, without any chemical buzz. And now, the Rothko again. Do you see it now through a different lens?”

Ruthie struggled for the right thing to say, something that wasn’t a hearty Bullshit. A riff. “When I first saw it I was struck by how well it reflects the elements of the house. Repeated forms, that deep blue. Now I’m seeing something within the painting, maybe back to the intent of the artist himself. I’m seeing that Rothko didn’t suck out light, he infused the painting with it. Even the black.”

“Exactly. It’s a spiritual exercise, standing here.” Daniel beamed at her.

He didn’t command her to exhale, but she did.

“And now, the dialogue with the Clay.”

“From the Dowager Series. A good picture.”

They walked closer. On the opposite wall from the Rothko hung a signature Peter Clay portrait, a piece Ruthie was intricately familiar with, being that she had been the one to paint it. Peter had become bored with the actual process of painting later in his career, spending all of his time thinking about art rather than doing it. That was for his studio assistants. She’d gone from mixing colors to underpainting to painting under Peter’s direction as he sat in the red upholstered armchair, drink in hand, and yelled instructions across the studio. She had a sudden plunge backward, remembering the smell of the studio, the blare of the music—the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention.

In the beginning, just being in the studio with Peter was thrilling—she’d started when she was still a student. There were long stretches of boredom while he sat in a chair, talking to his dealer or collectors, and then sudden, brilliant bursts of talk and, occasionally, sketching. Peter could draw a line on a page and she could identify it as his mark, and probably still had the muscle memory to replicate it. She had been in the presence of something that ordinary people didn’t have, maybe even couldn’t comprehend, and she’d felt privileged to see it.

    For a while.

She wasn’t surprised that Daniel had a Dowager painting. Society portraits, Peter had called them, most of them commissions. Peter hadn’t thought much of them but now those portraits turned out to be the ones that survived to influence contemporary artists, with their thin washes of paint and simple lines, close to cartoons. The subject matter made art critics foam and lather. He painted daring young socialites as dowagers, their older selves, and dowagers as ingénues, vacuous or rapacious. Some of them awkwardly, splendidly nude. They all loved the recognition but no doubt hated the portraits. “What a hoot,” they had said, “how marvelous.” They were rarely flattering, and most of the subjects had sold them.

“A dialogue? I’m not sure,” she said. “More like a standoff. Rothko liked a raw, rough canvas, and Peter of course was the opposite, a very tight weave. He was all about precision, that sort of eggshell Renaissance quality. It’s like Peter is saying, You think you know blue, Mark, my friend? Now, this is a blue.”