Page 71 of Flirting with Forever

Peter stared, amazed. An orange for a breast, a plum for her mons, an ancient lock on the finger of her left hand, and a small metal circle with wavy, folded-in edges emblazoned with the words “Budweiser—King of Beers” for a nipple. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, but the artist’s purpose was instantly clear, and he smiled. The artist’s mark, in the lower right-hand corner, was the outline of a knife and the letters JKET.

Another bell rang, and he jumped. It rang, stopped, rang, stopped. The noise came from a small, multibuttoned object on a hallway table. After the third ring, he heard a click and Campbell Stratford’s distinctive contralto.

“Jeanne? Jeanne? Are you there? Pick up. Oh, Christ, I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

The click sounded again, and the noise stopped. It pained him to be reminded that she’d masked her real voice with an English accent to deceive him.

A book called The Carnegie Museum of Art Collection Highlights sat on the table in front of a couch, and the cover showed a painting of a woman stepping into a tub. Again he was in awe of the loose technique and the highly unconventional color choice. According to the credit, the artist was one “Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.” Despite what Peter’s teachers had impressed upon him, it seemed breaking the rules hadn’t destroyed the art of painting after all.

Campbell had slipped a piece of paper in to mark a page. He turned to the page and nearly laughed. It was his painting of the Duchess of Portsmouth. She was looking particularly pleased with herself, in red silk, with the sterling and leather appointments of an archer across her lap. But what had made him laugh was the short, blunt mustache Campbell had drawn above her lip. Oh, Campbell.

He looked at the clock and his irritation began to rise. The assistant had promised him Campbell would be here. If she didn’t arrive soon, he’d chance the moving room again, find a place to sleep, and return to the museum at first light. He didn’t know how her master would react to finding out she’d discovered a time tube hole and used it for personal gain, but he suspected it wouldn’t add appreciably to her professional credentials.

Not that he wanted to destroy her career—that is, unless he had to. But her book had to be stopped. He’d die before he’d allow the story of him and Ursula to become fodder for the reading public’s amusement. And if doing so destroyed what he hoped was at least a mild regard for him—how pathetic it was that he clung to such a hope—he would live with the results of his actions.

He’d wait a few minutes, no more.

Biding his time, he returned to the Carnegie book, which seemed to hold a surprise on every page. There was a Van Dyck, of course, and a painting of a merchant by his old friend, Frans Hals. He saw the steady progression of techniques as the book covered successive centuries, just as he could trace the changes in style as he walked through the galleries of Hampton Court or Whitehall. But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, everything seemed to change. It was as if a new vision had come into being, and all the old rules had been thrown out the window.

He turned the page and gasped to see a shimmering pond—which a part of his mind recognized immediately, though no sort of close examination of the brushstrokes would have yielded anything like water—upon which gleaming white blossoms floated. “Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Water Lilies), c. 1915–1926,” the attribution read. Rembrandt had once observed, “There is more to blue than azure and ivory black, my friend.” Nothing could have illustrated the point better than Monet’s breathtaking work of art.

But it was the paintings noted to be mid- to late-twentieth-century creations that most amazed Peter. The luxurious palette of colors and softly blurred images had been replaced by an urgent and exhilarating clarity of vision, a vision so different from that of the paintings and sculptures and friezes he knew, he hardly knew how to approach them.

There was a painting of numbers—just numbers—by an artist named On Kawara, a series of painted boxes by Donald Judd, and even a painted chain. He found the vivid distillation of a single idea that these pieces seemed to represent startling, and the businessman in him couldn’t help but note that the production of such pieces of art, if indeed that’s what they were—though they had to be if collected by museums alongside Van Dycks, Lelys, and Monets—would be infinitely quicker to produce than his portraits. He himself had made a small fortune selling prints of his paintings, prints that took only a moment or two to produce once the plate had been prepared compared to the twenty to thirty hours it took to complete a canvas. This twentieth-century ease of production was bringing the same notion to a more noble scale. Brilliant ideas coupled with straightforward manufacture. He liked it.

He flipped more pages and saw a nearly white canvas containing a few narrow lines and an absolutely thrilling work of nothing but paint splatters, but paint splatters applied with so much passion he could almost feel the blood pounding in the artist’s ears. He’d just found a simple line drawing of a woman or a bull—he wasn’t sure which one—done in a wonderfully ironic hand that seemed to dispel everything he had ever learned about portraits, when the music stopped and the muffled voices of two people somewhere else in the apartment made him jump to his feet.

He heard a door bang open, and a man’s voice, clearer now, said, “No, you stay there. Let’s see…she’s got a Pinot and a Chardonnay.”

“Chardonnay,” a sultry-voiced woman said drolly. “For the times when making an impression doesn’t matter. Pinot, please. Hold the cherry.”

The two laughed, an intimate, shared-story laugh.

Peter had no wish to eavesdrop. “Hello,” he called and walked into view.

The man, dressed in a pair of tight, blue, rough-cloth breeks and nothing else, stood alone. He was instantly identifiable as the man in the picture who’d had his arm around Campbell. He was in the middle of a room that bore a vague, otherworldly resemblance to the scullery in Peter’s town house, holding open the door of something that looked like a large, lit wardrobe in one hand and reaching for a bottle of wine with the other. He stared at Peter in amazement.

“Who are you?”

A Londoner, Peter thought, from the vicinity of Borough Market. So the Irish part of her story was a lie as well. “I’m here for Miss Stratford.”

The man’s eyes flicked from Peter’s breeks to his hair to the name on his pocket. “Are you here for the radiators?”

Peter considered saying “Aye.” It would certainly be expedient, so long as it didn’t entail actually transacting with the “radiator,” whatever that might be. But there was something in the man’s demeanor that made him refuse. “No.”

The man waited for an explanation of his presence. But Peter had learned long ago that the person who provides the least amount of information in a situation like this usually has the advantage.

Peter inclined his head toward the easel he saw in the next-door room, the room from which the woman’s voice had come. “Are you a painter?”

The man swung in the direction Peter was looking. “I am.”

“May I look?”

Surprised, the man shrugged. “Sure.”

The woman had disappeared, Peter noted as he made his way into the room. The painting was perfectly square, already a discordant note for someone who was used to a more classic ratio of height to width, and the space had been slashed diagonally through the center with a line of brown to separate one working area from another. Below the line, the canvas was blank, though small notes of yellow paper printed with phrases such as “steamed buns—hips,” “Rhubarb/barbed wire?,” and “meat grinder” hung there. Above the line, though, the man had laid in the rough groundwork of a classic and sensual nude. The woman was exotic and angular, like a crane on a Chinese vase, with her hair cut short like a boy’s. She was reclined, not unlike his Nell or Rubens’s Angelica, and gazed directly at her painter. Peter felt a knot in his stomach loosen, and he realized how much he’d been afraid the woman on the canvas would be Campbell Stratford.

“The scale of light in your painting is amazingly well conceived,” Peter said. “As is the composition, at least those parts I can see. I didn’t expect it.”