Circles of Confusion (14 page)

"You mean like the apple and the crushed snake?" They lay on the black-and-white-tiled marble floor.

"You got it. That's why this painting doesn't work. Vermeer did his best work when he painted mysteries, not allegories."

"Mysteries?" Claire echoed, thinking of the woman in her painting, her enigmatic expression, the letter containing unknown news.

"Think of the first painting we looked at, Girl Asleep at a Table. It's a common genre theme, but no one remembers other paintings like it. What makes it different? I think it's that other artists of the day always spelled out what everything meant. Another artist would paint an empty jug of wine, so everyone would know the woman was drunk. Or children gone wild so the viewer would know it's about a housewife neglecting her duties. Instead, Vermeer painted a sleeping beauty and left the viewer to figure out what it meant." Dante's rough voice was oddly soothing. "The interesting thing is that when Vermeer first painted her, there was a man waiting for her in the doorway. Later he painted him out."

"How do they know that?"

"You can X-ray a painting to see the underlayers, and with Vermeer, there are always changes to the underlayers." He turned to her, and Claire saw that his irises were flecked with gold. "Am I boring you?"

"No, this is fascinating!" Claire protested, afraid he might disappear. She was enjoying seeing things through the eyes of an artist.

"Let me know if you change your mind. Here's a painting that's more typical of Vermeer—Portrait of a Young Lady."

Against a nearly black background was a three-quarter view of a girl's head and shoulders. She appeared to be in her early teens. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face, her shoulders covered with a white satin shawl. A pearl earring glinted at her lobe. Her expression was calm, with a hint of a smile. With thin lips and seemingly lashless eyes, she was no beauty, yet she had been portrayed with a serene self-possession that Claire found appealing. The small painting was itself astonishingly delicate, a complex play of light and rich shadows.

Surreptitiously, Claire also examined Dante as he examined the painting, his thick lashes and generous mouth. He spoke softly, keeping his eyes fastened on the small portrait. "This girl could be one of his daughters. There's no way of knowing. But he was so poor and worked so slowly that he probably couldn't afford a professional model."

The next painting Dante showed Claire was Lady Playing a Lute. In it, a young woman played a bowl-shaped stringed instrument. Her head was turned to the side, her expression a half-smile. Diffuse golden light poured into the room through the leaded window on the left of the painting, glinting off the woman's earring and the yellow satin of her fur-trimmed jacket.

That jacket! Claire thought. It seemed to be the same jacket as the woman in her painting was wearing, although not as much of it was visible. And again there was the chair with the lions' heads on the posts. What had Troy said? That her painting was a pastiche of every known Vermeer cliche?

She looked again at the woman's face, at her high forehead and wide-set eyes. "This looks like the same person in the last portrait, only a few years older," Claire ventured.

"But Portrait of a Young Lady was probably painted a year or two after Lady Playing a Lute. It could be a family resemblance. This could be Vermeer's wife, and the other one his daughter."

Dante took Claire's hand and led her a few more steps, then released her fingers as easily as he had taken them. I’ve saved the best for last. Young Woman with a Water Jug." At first, Claire had difficulty paying attention to the picture, her mind still on the light pressure of Dante's fingers.

In the painting, a woman stood with one hand on the frame of an open window. The other rested on a brass pitcher set in a matching shallow basin. She wore a starched and pleated white headdress attached to a cape-like collar. Dante pulled a small black plastic oval from inside his jacket, surprising Claire. He flicked it open to reveal two black-framed clear circles—tiny magnifying glasses—and bent forward to squint at the canvas.

Claire wondered if he were allowed to get so close, even though he wasn't actually touching the painting. But when a guard walked by, he took in Dante's actions without even breaking stride. She relaxed enough to look at the same spot where Dante was focused, at the underside of the brass basin. It was a mosaic of tiny chips of colors reflecting the carpet on which it rested.

Dante's voice was a near whisper. "It all seems so simple, but when you look closely, you realize you can't find the edges of anything. And look how much light is in the map behind the woman, and then compare that to the blue haze underneath it. Even the wall is more like a rainbow than pure white. There's pink-white, yellow-white, blue-white, purple-white. But he makes it seem like one color."

"Is that why you like Vermeer so much?" Part of Claire was listening, but another part was wondering how she could keep the conversation going. She was absurdly conscious of her heart beating, of her mouth pushing out each breath. She knew it was silly to lust after a stranger, but the combination of his looks and intelligence was proving irresistible.

Dante straightened up and slipped his magnifying glass back into his pocket.

"That, and I guess I like all the mysteries—knowing so little about his personal life, or who taught him to paint, or whether he used the camera obscura."

"What's that?"

"It was a kind of early camera. You took a completely dark room and admitted only a pinhole of light. A box with a lens captured the image of a scene on ground glass. Some artists used it to trace the projected image. There's no way to tell for sure if he used it, but many of Vermeer's paintings have optical effects like those of a camera. See what he did here?" Dante pointed to the woman's dark skirt silhouetted against the white wall. "He accentuated the contrasts of light and dark, like a camera would. And everything he paints has blurred edges, like they're slightly out of focus. And many of his paintings, especially his later ones, are marked with circles of confusion."

"Circles of confusion? What are those?" Claire was beginning to feel more than a little confused herself. She had never looked at anything so closely before.

"Highlights that are slightly out of focus, the way you often see them in photographs. See this luminous spot? It's a circle of confusion." Dante pointed to the liquid white dot that sparkled on the plump curve of the woman's lower lip. He turned his attention back to Claire. "I'm afraid that's it for the Vermeers. I've probably bored you with my lecture."

"Not at all," Claire said, not wanting the conversation to end. A way to prolong it suddenly occurred to her. On top of Charlie's list of "must see" sights had been the Met's sculpture garden. "I really enjoyed it. It was like having my own private tour guide." She took a deep breath. "Can I thank you by buying you a glass of wine on the rooftop garden? I've never been up there, but I hear the view is incredible."

Dante hesitated before answering, and Claire could feel a flush crawling up her neck. But then he said, "I think I'd like that."

Claire made a quick decision. "I need to get my stuff from the front desk."

"I'll save us a good spot."

After retrieving her backpack, Claire entered the elevator and waited for it to groan skyward, amazed at her own daring. Last week she had been vetting LUVBABY, now here she was at the greatest museum in the world, about to have a glass of wine with a fascinating man. A bead of sweat traced the length of her spine, and she shivered.

Just as Charlie had promised, the view from the rooftop was breathtaking. The museum rested on the eastern edge of Central Park, which cut a green swath through the city's brownstones and highrises. The avenues bounding the park squared it off like great garden walls. Viewed from this vantage point, New York City was gorgeous, the litter and crowds and homeless people invisible. And for the first time since she had left Oregon, Claire could see the full sweep of sky. Belying the fall chill in the air, the sky was a clear blue with scudding white puffy clouds.

Dante was waiting on a bench, watching her with a half-smile, a glass of red wine in each hand.

"That's not fair!" Claire protested. "I was going to treat you!"

"You can buy next time."

Claire accepted the glass of wine from him and took a sip. To cover her nervousness she studied the bronze sculpture facing them. It was of a nude woman who stood on tiptoe, her arms raised shoulder-high, fingers spread. She was larger than life, with a rounded stomach and full breasts. The sculpture was sensual rather than sexual, but even so Claire felt awkward facing her breasts and belly.

Dante saved her by asking her a few questions about what she did. He seemed gratifyingly amused by her descriptions of bizarre license plate requests.

"What drew you to painting?" she asked.

"The magic of it." He took a sip from his glass. "How do you take a stick with hairs on it, rub it in colored dirt, wipe it on a piece of cloth wrapped around some wood—and make something that didn't exist before?" Dante looked away as if embarrassed, turning his face to the sun. "You're lucky to have such beautiful weather for your visit."

"Could you tell right away that I was a tourist?" Even though she wasn't dressed in black, Claire had secretly hoped she fit in.

"No real New Yorker would put up with a guided tour from a stranger who accosted her in front of a painting. But you had such a look of wonder on your face that I thought you would enjoy it."

"I did enjoy it, very much. In fact," Claire took a deep breath, "I had a special reason for wanting to know more. I came to New York because I inherited a painting, and I wanted to find out more about it. Someone at Avery's told me it was a Vermeer imitation, a"—she searched for the word Troy had used—"a pastiche. In those paintings you just showed me I saw a lot of the same things it has: a white pitcher with a brass top, an Oriental carpet—even a chair with those lions' heads on the top."

Dante straightened up. "Really? So where is it now? Locked up in the safe at your hotel?"

"Actually, it's right here. In my backpack." She patted her lap. Dante's eyes opened wider, but at least he didn't curl his lip the way the receptionist at Avery's had. "Would you like to look at it?"

When he nodded, Claire unzipped the backpack and undid the bubble wrap. After having spent the last hour scrutinizing real Vermeers, Claire was surprised to find that her own painting had lost none of its power over her. The woman still intrigued her, with her parted lips, calm gaze and mysterious letter.

"May I?" She wondered if she saw a quiver in his outstretched hands as he gently lifted it close to his face. He was quiet for a long time, and when he spoke, his voice was reverential, pitched so low that Claire wondered if it were meant only for his own ears. "We have an oil painting, about fifteen by fourteen inches." He slipped the magnifying lens from his pocket again and began to examine the surface, inch by inch, exactly as Troy had two hours before. "The support is a plain-weave linen. The frame seems of a more recent period. The paint surface is slightly abraded. Very free brushwork." He lifted his eyes to her. "My God, where did you get this? And why do you think it's a forgery?"

Dante listened intently as she quickly summarized for him Aunt Cady's death, the suitcase with its Nazi memorabilia, and what Troy had told her about the painting.

"What reason did this guy at Avery's have for telling you it was a forgery?"

Claire tried to remember what had made him so sure. "He said that's what he does for a living, evaluate things. He said it was awkwardly painted and lifeless." At this, Dante shook his head but didn't interrupt. "And he said it was a compilation of every Vermeer cliche. That's why he called it a pastiche."

"But there's a lot of repetition in Vermeer. He was poor, so he used the same objects over and over again. I don't know that I would call this a pastiche. But on the other hand, I don't know that I would call it a Vermeer, either. That's a big leap to take simply because everyone has Vermeer on their mind these days. Let's forget what that guy told you, and assume for a moment that it didn't begin life as a fake. To me, it looks genuine, even old enough to be an Old Master, that is, a painting before 1800. Not a lot of painting was going on then. The way she's dressed, the things in the room, make me think the painter was Dutch."

"So it could be a Vermeer." Claire realized she was holding her breath.

Dante traced a finger an inch above the surface of the painting. "I'm leaning in a different direction than your friend at Avery's. The jacket, the white pitcher, this chair with the lions' heads, the carpet—it could be a Vermeer. But there are literally hundreds of genre paintings—paintings of the upper middle class's daily life—with one or more of those elements. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Jan Steen, Nicolaes Maes, Pieter de Hoogh, Gabriel Metsu. There were probably half a dozen other Dutch painters who were painting at the same time. It was the fashion to paint peaceful interior scenes with one or more figures. And not only that, painters all borrowed subject matter from each another. Instead of Vermeer, or a person forging Vermeer, the person who painted this might have simply been influenced by Vermeer."

Claire was impressed. "You know a lot." She felt more at ease now that his focus had been transferred from her to the painting.