A Paradise for Fools Page 3

  “Little painting you might like,” Oona suggested, pointing toward a wall where pictures hung over an impossibly large buffet covered with glassware. The central place of honor on the wall had for the last month been taken by a ferociously green oil painting representing happy days in the Hungarian countryside, probably in the 1920s. Fat pink children rollicked in a field of daisies, backed by a village and some mountains. It was a better than competent work of decoration, signed definitely but indecipherably in the bottom left corner. Oona and Fred had talked it over in the past. It was Hungarian, yes—but even Oona couldn’t read the signature. In a portfolio she had seven watercolors and a handful of drawings by the same hand, all with the same illegible signature. Her prices on all these things were highly speculative, and open to negotiation.

  But it wasn’t the landscape with children she referred to. Oona knew perfectly well that this had long since been dismissed. No, she had caught Fred’s eye moving to the spot to the right of the Hungarian landscape with well-fed children. Dark picture around eight by ten inches, old varnish, beautifully executed, representing a kitten having its way with a peony left on a marble table top. Modest, battered, gilded frame. Signature, yes, hard to read under the dirt; probably French: the whole thing late 19th century.

  “You have a price on it? Fred asked.

  Oona shrugged. “It just came in,” she temporized.

  A woman bustled into the store, making the bell of the front door ring. She was encumbered with filled shopping bags: a customer, but dangerous to Oona’s displays of stuffed birds and otters, sword canes, étagères crammed with inkwells, paperweights and saltcellars, gilded embroidered moth-eaten chairs, flags, vases, silverware, clocks, lamps, chinaware, scrimshaw, cases of coins and stamps, antique tools and cookware—though probably the rugs and clothing were safe enough.

  “Leave the bags by the door, dear,” Oona commanded. “I’ll watch them. You’ll be more comfortable. Take your time.”

  “May I take it down?” Fred asked, doing so.

  The surface of the picture was smooth to the touch, smelled pleasantly old. No new varnish smell, therefore less likelihood of recent trickery. The gilded frame was of a reassuring age and dinginess that, because it was consistent with the rest of the package, affirmed that it and the picture had been together for a long time. Fred turned it over. Yes, it was on a wood panel, old, dark, with a few old marks in pen—yes, French—a title that would translate Idle Moments.

  “Haven’t had a chance to look at it,” Oona said. “You want, I make you a price. Lady, you like glass? Glass I have in the back room. You tell me, Fred. We make a price.”

  The wooden panel was fixed into the frame with old nails, one of which was missing. The panel chattered against its frame on that side. Fred looked carefully. He’d been learning. Any dealer who considers such a picture is going to want to see it out of the frame. But any dealer also knows that any customer for such a picture wants to hog for himself the pleasant romance of discovery. He wants the thing not to look messed with. And sure signs that a picture has been messed with are that it’s suspiciously clean; it has a bright new frame, or—if it’s old like this one—if the back shows bright scratches where the nails have been pulled and replaced after the picture has been examined.

  What the dealer does in order to maintain the illusion of virginity is to slip an index card back of each nail, remove the nail carefully with a pair of side-snips, look the edges over, then replace the panel and slide the nails back into the holes they came from.

  Fine and good. But in this case the dust had been disturbed and the nails showed bright scars where the snips had gripped them.

  “It’s pretty,” Fred agreed, flipping it over again. The front edge was concealed by the frame’s rabbet. If he cared—this wasn’t Clay’s cup of tea in any case—he could demand to see the panel out of its frame. In that case he might, or might not, confirm what he believed, and Oona must suspect, to be the case. This was one of many instances when, in the late nineteenth century, a good reproduction of a popular decorative painting, printed on paper, was laminated to a wood panel, possibly with a thin skin of actual paint applied to the surface before it was heavily varnished. It was its own day’s equivalent of a modern museum replica in which the customer is even treated to the irregular imitation of the three-dimensional surface of the Monet or the van Gogh. The darkness of the varnish sealed the deal. This was a trap and his friend Oona, from whom he had yet to buy anything, would be delighted to see him fall into it.

  If print was what it was, the paper had even taken on the slight variations of the wood’s grain.

  “I am watching your bags,” Oona called out to reassure the woman, who had gone past her to look at the glassware in the inner sanctum.

  Fred hung the little picture back where it had been. Even the picture’s hardware was of sufficient age. Nothing had been replaced. Oona, as passive mistress of illusion, would be perfectly willing to sell a nineteenth-century reproduction as an original work, cheerfully leaving it up to the unwary customer to make whatever sense could be made of the object’s identity and its authenticity.

  “I’ll keep looking.” Fred gave the bell on the street door a chance to do its thing.

  He hadn’t proved himself in certain ways. It would be pleasant to have a surprising painting waiting in the office when Clay returned. For the hell of it. Why not?

  Chapter Six

  Fred climbed Beacon Hill by way of Mountjoy Street. Clay’s place was halfway up the hill, on a corner that had long since lost all memory of having been farmland exploited by Tory families before the revolution.

  Clayton Reed was so irritating an enigma, it was good to have him gone. His sanity was accentuated by foibles that, in a man of lesser wealth and position, might lead to an asylum. He seemed oblivious to his wealth, whose extent remained inscrutable. His shock of thick, untidy white hair was so vigorous that it gave no hint as to his actual age, which must be other than what appeared. He delivered hints of his vast knowledge and culture only when it was appropriate to a matter at hand, and never for self-entertainment. And he was astoundingly lacking in certain basic information, such as the bus routes in the city of Boston—or even what bus fare was. His sexual orientation was unclear. He seemed equally ill-at-ease with both men and women. He had been married, briefly, to a woman from Boston’s social stratosphere who had died suddenly, unexpectedly, and catastrophically, of a wasting illness.

  His social mannerisms, habits of speech, sartorial affectations, and the exquisite care and interest he took in his domestic surroundings, particularly of his collection, all suggested the easy conclusion that he might be gay. Whether that was a fact or not, it didn’t seem to be an issue. What was apparently true, in so far as Fred allowed the question to preoccupy him—truth to tell, not much—was that Clayton’s capacity for, and interest in, the expression of any adult attraction of a romantic nature seemed to have flamed out in that brief, tragic marriage. Through his alliance to Lucy, Clay had come into a claim on being one of the Boston Brahmins—a position he defended with all the zeal of any convert. As far as Fred could read it—and this was not talked of—the town house itself had been maintained as a shrine to Lucy Stillton, Clay’s lost bride—her identity, her person, her existence, the marriage, and even the ghost of certain human comforts. The ghost of an intimacy so formal it seemed Victorian.

  Was that part of the diffident bond that had come about, almost instantly, between Fred and Clay? The fact that each had, for whatever reason, abjured the full implications of surrender to another human person? Clay, in his way, was also homeless. He lived in a museum that even had, for the love of God, a Kashmir shawl draped over a grand piano that was never played.

  And it was not remarkable that he lived alone. In many ways, he was impossible.

  Fred climbed the stoop and let himself in by Clay’s front door, disregar
ding the separate entrance that would have taken him directly to the basement floor where he had the run both of his own office and of the area where Clay stored paintings that were not presently displayed in his living area.

  Clay wouldn’t have an alarm system. Because of an instinctive paranoia, which he masked with the appearance of rational argument, he reasoned that as soon as one made an inquiry of an alarm company, looking for estimates and proposals, immediately an alert went out to all the villains wanting to know where objects of value were to be found in the world. Fred, by the fact of having entered the picture, and by default, had taken charge of Clay’s security. The need to install an alarm system was one of the issues he was working on. That is to say, he was working on Clay—but so far without appreciable effect.

  So, entering Clay’s house required no more than having a key and opening the door. No codes to punch in. No big dog to face down. But to walk into the house was to be assaulted by the dangerous vitality of the paintings on the walls. Here again, Fred had not been able to make out what it was that Clayton thought he had. When they looked at a painting, although both surveyed the same object, neither one saw the same thing.

  The entrance hall was lined with hanging scrolls of huge, almost abstract calligraphy—Japanese and ancient Persian. No daylight could touch or fade them here. Although they were aesthetic exercises intended to demonstrate the artists’ skills, Clay knew what the words were. He couldn’t read them, but he cared what they said, and he had taken the trouble to learn what it was.

  Once in the parlor, which was hung with paintings, Clay seemed to lose his ear. He wasn’t one of these dullards who seek to prove his wealth by purchasing, for large sums, trophy, and easily recognizable minor (or inferior) works by recognized masters. He didn’t care about names. And he went after good pictures. But he hadn’t a clue what any of the paintings said, although to Fred they screamed. On a wall next to the open double doorway that separated the two parlors—those sliding doors were never closed—hung a little abstract work by Arthur Dove. Though it might not be Clay’s cup of tea, because he relied on the reassurance he could take from more illustrative works, the little painting—seven by ten inches—in brown, black and poisonous green, presented a configuration of opposed globular forms that were witty, salacious, irreverent and, as they worked on Fred, pompous in an unreflective way, like a senator who has gone to work missing one shoe, and wearing socks that fail to match.

  The house was cool. It would stay cool as the day outside became warmer. He wouldn’t have an answering machine—“It lets them know what we are doing”—but Clay did accept the values of plumbing, heat, and air conditioning. And there was a telephone, which Clayton used as circumspectly as he could, instructing Fred to keep nouns at a minimum. So Clayton wasn’t a Luddite. Drove a nice car and the rest of it. But he would not allow a painting that he owned to be submitted to examination by X-ray. “It alters cells,” he explained. Argument was pointless. When he was wrong, his wrongness formed an impermeable shell. It was its own parallel universe. You couldn’t crack it. There was nowhere to begin.

  Clay was regular in his personal habits. Rose early, eschewed stimulants (he believed), read impenetrable books late into the night, and entertained a weakness for sherry or, worse, crème de menthe. Fred had never seen him close to inebriation—not that it would be easy for a human being to drink enough crème de menthe to achieve that happy resolution.

  After Fred had been settled into the work space in the office downstairs, though Clay often spent time down there, he had set up shop for himself at a desk off the first floor kitchen, in a room intended as a butler’s pantry. The desk there, fragile and inlaid with roses and incongruous mermaids, was more suited to the needs of someone’s grandmother—but it was where Clay liked to respond to his bills, consider his personal mail, write checks for whatever eccentric charities he favored, and plot his purchases and the occasional de-acquisition, as he called it—as if he were a museum.

  The work that had brought them together, a wooden chest that incorporated what they believed to be a Leonardo, had gone to a conservator in Brussels. It was the subject of noun-less telephone calls during which Fred, when Clay stopped in downstairs, occasionally overheard Clay’s end. The conservator was prepared to spend years considering the work before she lifted a hand to it, as if it were a large diamond that must be re-cut. Clay was delighted to have her take the time. He loved the contemplation of certain triumph more than he enjoyed the triumph itself.

  Fred was more inclined to, for God’s sake, get it done.

  But Clayton’s methods were remarkably productive. He knew what he was doing, and had assembled an extraordinary collection, chiefly of American paintings, but not limited to that field. He was willing to spend money when it was unavoidable, but he far preferred to buy a treasure for a song, and quietly (if only figuratively) thumb his nose at his competitors afterwards. Not long ago he’d left town for an overnight trip—he would not say where he had gone, but he had taken the car—and returned with a brilliant fragment. Oil on a rough canvas, almost the consistency of burlap, maybe twelve by fourteen inches, it was painted in large, jagged, parallel slashes of gold, white, red, and ochre, with here and there an accent of bright green. It looked almost like an exercise by a modern such as Jasper Johns until the whole business took focus on account of the single black double apostrophe of wings on the horizon. The subject was a field of wheat.

  Clayton unwrapped it on Fred’s desk, smirking, allowing Fred to acclimatize to the painting’s warmth and energy. “That signature on the right,” Fred had started, struggling to read it. “It says ‘Theo.’ Yes? That’s what I read. It can’t be Théodore Rousseau. It’s French, but it’s too jazzy, too modern-looking.”

  “It says ‘Theo,’” Clay agreed. “But that isn’t a signature. If it had been signed it would have cost over a million and I would have disregarded it. Not French, but done in France. It’s not a signature. I’d never get near it with the signature. No, it’s a dedication. To the painter’s brother.”

  “Holy mackerel,” Fred had said.

  “Indeed,” Clay agreed. “We will not trouble the so-called committee. Contention brings me no pleasure. We know what we have. It remains only to have it cleaned and framed. In due course. There is no rush, Fred. Find a place for it in the racks, would you? I must bathe.”

  A triumph like that, passed off as sleight of hand, could earn Clay hatred from the most indulgent colleague. He’d climbed the spiral staircase, oblivious.

  It was good to have him gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Fred gathered the mail from the box into which it fell next to the front door, and carried it in to Clayton’s desk. Four days had produced a small pile. Fred, acting on instructions, did not sort or deal with it beyond unwrapping and removing the auction catalogues to browse through downstairs. Sometimes there would be something. He had a lot to learn about the business. His recent association with a collector obliged him to learn a whole new language; the structure of the arcane and shifting rules by which art can be translated into and expressed as currency.

  The world of art was big here in the 1990s. If one was going to learn it, as Clay said, one must look at everything. Remember everything. Take nothing at face value.

  Fred’s office, mostly underground, was cool. A half-window above his desk gave daylight and a view of brick, ivy, and passing feet. The heat of today’s sun—did that alter the color of its light?

  Fred sat on the couch attempting to clarify and isolate the image he had seen during Kim’s brief unveiling at Cut - Rate - Cuts. Abstract the image from the girl. Turn it around to compensate for the mirror’s reversal. It was more than an idle pastime. Hadn’t the girl said that the basis for the pictures was a painting? “An old wooden painting,” she’d said, and “dark.”

  The intertwining of forms had been more stolid than the traditional Art
Nouveau reverse curves common in the more complex tattoo designing, which had its ultimate source in Japanese models. There was a lasting impression not only of small human figures, but of birds, and fish, and metamorphic creatures with both animal and human forms.

  “Arthur is working from something,” Fred said. “That much we know. Kim said so. Not that Clay would give a hoot about it, but let’s start with the obvious. Has Arthur got hold of one of those Victorian English fairy paintings?”

  Clay had an extensive library down here that could shed light on almost any aspect of Western painting after 1200. The Eastern stuff was upstairs on the third floor, in another study Clay kept off his bedroom. If Clayton could discover and acquire an unattributed van Gogh, why shouldn’t Fred respond in kind by landing, in Clay’s absence, a minor art historical footnote on his own?

  He started his research, one book pulled out leading to another, and another. At around the same time as Christmas cards and paper valentines were invented, and—who knows?—cheap color lithographic printing made it possible to mass-produce scenic wall calendars—introverts among the English painters hit upon yet another way to explore sex without getting too close. The theme they developed and illustrated was fairies. Or, worse, to be more accurately perverse, that excruciatingly Victorian literary wet dream, faerie. Though the fixation had links to spiritualism, mythology, and the patriotic jingoism of a revival of the Arthurian stories, it was also an excuse to portray scantily clad charming female bodies—with wings, granted, and of a scale so tiny that a grown man couldn’t even begin to achieve frustration. Or it could suggest other erotic misdirections such as might lead the unwary into Neverland. Or, more recently, to Star Wars and Tolkien and their fantastic bastard progeny.