The High Season(80)

Name a truly great woman artist. You see? You can’t. Joan Mitchell? Are you fucking kidding? She’s crap.

Women can’t paint other women. They can’t see them clearly enough.

Copying his stroke, pushing the brush.

Photos of Mike and Adeline had cropped up in the last three weeks. Adeline had said that she was in Orient to get away, but apparently this did not include eating at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton, attending the Artists & Writers Celebrity Softball Game or the Parrish Art Museum brunch in Water Mill, and being photographed with “artist Michael Dutton.”

The third canvas, she knew, would be perfect.





48


THE FIRST LEAF had crunched underfoot, and the summer was fall, falling away. Everyone was talking about Lark’s event at the Belfry. The party had its own hashtag. It would be covered by the Times. Dodge had done a special installation. Daniel Mantis was running yachts back and forth from Sag Harbor to Greenport for the Hamptons people. He’d hired cars and even a famous eighty-two-foot ketch. There was a rumor that all the museum members would be invited. This turned out to be untrue.

Ruthie carried the painting, wrapped in brown paper and in a canvas tote, to the car. She placed it in the backseat, suddenly worried about rear-end collisions. The car felt as inflammatory as a Pinto. The word collision was so close to collusion, she thought, and wondered if she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

She drove to Southold in the beginnings of holiday weekend traffic. They couldn’t meet in Orient, and Lucas had chosen a café with a large, busy parking lot. She pulled up next to him in a spot underneath some trees. He got out of his Jeep and they both slid into the backseat, as if they were teenagers ready for action.

    Ruthie unwrapped the painting and handed it over.

Lucas sat for a moment and then burst out with a laugh that sounded like a cartoon bird.

“Adeline! Oh, my fucking God, you painted Adeline!”

Ruthie bit her lip, then her thumbnail. “It made sense, right? She was his model in the beginning.”

“It’s delicious,” Lucas said. “She looks awful. So old! Wait. Why would he paint her like this? He was in love with her. This could be a mistake. We should have discussed this.”

“I needed a model, okay? And there’s lots of photos of her on the Internet. And he painted everyone that way. Look, I thought about this. The timing could be soon after they met. Maybe he did the painting before they were in love—she was his model, remember? He never showed it to her, he always worked from Polaroids. And so maybe he left it in the Sag Harbor studio, where your mother found it? It makes sense.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Sure. Genius. That’s the story, that’s the narrative.” He held the painting at arm’s length, as much as he could in the backseat of a car. “You caught her. It’s what she’d look like if she hadn’t had all the work done, right? If she just got progressively uglier, like most women in their fifties.”

“Did you just really say that?”

“You know what I mean. The ones who don’t care.” Lucas laughed that strange laugh again. “This isn’t just going to be easy, it’s going to be fun. Let’s get this sucker in my trunk.” He looked at his phone.

“Wait.” As soon as the painting left her hands, she would be committed. “Maybe we need to think about this again.”

“Jesus, will you take a Klonopin? I’m his son, they’re not going to question anything, all right?”

They had gone over this. “How can you be sure they won’t sell it?” she asked. “Someday it could find its way into a museum. They could do some kind of tests I don’t know about.” And they would see the word written under the paint, which wouldn’t disqualify it, but it certainly would gain it attention. That pleased her, that years and years from now, after she was gone from the world, that word could float through in damning pentimento.

    “You’re paranoid,” Lucas said. “This is getting boring.” He looked at the painting again. “Holy fuck,” he said again. “You did it.”

The signs of decay on that beautiful face, just as disturbing and awful as Peter meant them to be. Recognizably Adeline, those eyes of glass.

“Maybe I made her more grotesque than he would have,” Ruthie said.

“Nah. You caught her sad pathetic soul.”

She took the painting and slid it back into the brown paper. She taped it carefully and slid it into the bag.

His leg was jumping. “Come on.” He took the tote out of her hands.

Such a small painting, Ruthie thought. Not so important in the scheme of things. Ten million in a bag. Lucas was right about provenance. He could get away with it. She wouldn’t end up in a tiny apartment, scrounging money for rent and waving goodbye to her daughter as she jetted off to France with Adeline. She wouldn’t lose her place in the world.

“The thing is…” he started.

Ruthie felt something happen along her hairline, sweat springing up. The thing is was never a good way to start a conversation. The thing is, I’ve been unhappy for a long time, said Mike. The thing is, I met someone. In Italy, Joe said. The thing is, your father is a bastard crap person.

“…the Russian guy fell through.”