Death of an Artist (8 page)

Her voice rose as she neared Van's door, then began to grow fainter as she went down the stairs, calling him names, yelling at him all the way.

After a few seconds, Van opened her door a crack and peered out. They were both downstairs, Stef still yelling. Van slipped out of her room and fled down the hall to the studio door and out, to return to Marnie's house.

*   *   *

D
OWNSTAIRS,
S
TEF RACED
through the living room to the kitchen, back, without a pause in her tirade, and Dale sank into a chair and covered his face.

“Just listen a minute,” he pleaded. “Please calm down and listen a minute. Then I'll leave if you want me to. Stef, I'd cut off my arm if you wanted me to.”

She was at the window and turned to face him, but for the moment she became silent.

His body was shaking as if he were weeping. “It's been agony thinking you were leaving. I thought you'd be pleased to find out that a multimillionaire had seen your art and thinks it's the work of a genius. It could be important to have someone like him promoting your art. I know it's not for sale and I didn't tell him it was, but he made the offer.”

“You put price tags on everything in the gallery! Behind my back!”

“I explained, Stef. For insurance, that's all. You need insurance, darling. For such work to be unprotected is unthinkable. Please sit down and let's talk about all this. I beg you. At least we can talk about it.”

She perched on the edge of a chair across the coffee table from him. “So talk.”

“I'll have our attorney draw up a contract, a real business contract, between you and me, that will give you an ironclad guarantee that I'll never sell or offer your art for sale without your express approval.”

“What's the point? You went behind my back, and now you come up with a billionaire dickhead of a patron, acting like I'm a starving medieval peasant grateful for crumbs off his table.”

“I'm a businessman. If I break a contract, you sue and I go to jail, or lose my socks, lose everything I own. And I'm totally ruined. No sale I made would be legitimate, you could reclaim anything I sold. But that's not going to happen. Never.” He looked down at his hands and said in a low voice, “I've lost your trust and I want to get it back. If a contract will reassure you, that's how we should do it. As soon as possible, we should do it.”

“What if I want out of it?”

“It's standard to have a clause that says plainly that if you decide to terminate the contract, you can do it. I guarantee that such a clause will be there. But I hope that neither one of us will ever even think of it again.”

Stef jerked up to her feet. “I want a drink.”

He continued to sit and watch her at the counter with her back to him. A few more weeks, he thought at that garish, skinny back. He could endure anything for a few weeks. But, God, he added to himself, he wanted a woman he could take into a fine restaurant or club, one who looked as good as he did, someone like Jasmine. She knew how to dress, what clothes to wear and how to wear them, how to walk and sit. She had been his perfect accessory, one that he dared not show off where anyone he knew might see them. Angrily he pushed aside the thought of Jasmine. Other Jasmines were out there, just waiting until he was free.

He stood and went to the counter, where he put his arm around Stef's shoulders. She did not push him away.

*   *   *

W
HEN
V
AN
ENTERED
Marnie's house she paused in the living room long enough to say, “Gale-force winds, storming up and down stairs. I'm going to bed. I think he wants to sell
Feathers and Ferns
. Good night, Marnie.”

It was the painting Stef had hung at the shop that week, and Marnie knew beyond doubt that Stef would not sell it.

 

6

NO
VACANCY
SIGNS
began appearing on the coast during the middle of the weeks, apartments that had been dark most of the winter began showing lights in windows, empty driveways were being used. The summer people were arriving.

Marnie and Molly Barnett had agreed to let Molly's two teenaged nieces work in the shop all summer, giving Marnie time to spend with Van and Josh. The girls were eager for the jobs since they were saving for college, and Marnie had little desire to be closeted most of the day when she knew how little she would be seeing of Van during the coming year.

Barney Stokely brought Marnie a large piece of halibut one day and would take nothing in return. He had bought the fishing business after Ed's sudden death from pneumonia, and she had permitted him to retain the name, Markov's Fisheries, which had built up a good clientele over a seventy-year history and had an excellent reputation. Barney frequently showed up with a such a gift.

It was too much not to freeze most of it, Marnie knew, and the texture changed with freezing. She wanted to serve at least some of it while it was still freshly caught, in its prime. Van was back in Portland, and for the past several days Stef had been in Portland also. Marnie cut off a big piece of fish and took it to Harriet McAdams for her and Dave, then, after cutting off two steaks and freezing the rest with a sigh of regret, she called Tony and invited him to dinner.

When he arrived, he brought a book as well as a bottle of nicely chilled pinot grigio.

“It's a history of maps,” he said. “I've had it a long time and thought you might like it. I noticed the maps on the wall the last time I was here.”

“They were Ed's maps. My husband was in the navy for years, and at ports he prowled in book stalls and began collecting maps he came across. He didn't keep most of the books, not enough storage room, but he kept the maps.”

They went to look at them and she said, “I tried comparing one of them to other maps and got hopelessly confused. Some of them are so wrong. Ed said they were egocentric. I liked that, egocentric, geocentric. You put the important thing in the center and never apologize.” She pointed to a map of Japan after drawing it down. “See? The emperor's palace, dead center, instead of off in the province where it actually was.”

“Did he paint the navy ships?” Tony asked when they moved away from the maps. He indicated the two naval ships hanging near the maps.

“Yes. Stef said they were baroque, done in that style, before they got the hang of perspective.” Marnie had a flash of memory of the night Ed had come home to find them hanging. She'd had them framed for a surprise. How husky his voice had become, how his eyes had softened …

Briskly she turned away and said, “Come keep me company while I toss the salad. I didn't want to broil that nice fish until we were ready to eat. It won't take more than ten minutes, and you can have a glass of wine. Are you finding it hard to get service in restaurants yet? Our little town is starting to fill up again.”

“Do the locals hate the summer people?” he asked, sitting at the dining table while she finished cooking.

“Can't live with them, can't survive without them. Isn't that the way with most tourist towns? The traffic on 101 gets impossible, and speeders don't see the stop signs. The usual complaints, I guess.”

How easy it was to talk to him, she thought later that night. He asked few questions, but somehow she had kept finding herself telling him things that surprised her. Such as her early life with Ed, how it worried her if he was out on one of the boats and a storm was coming in, how colicky Stef had been.

At least, she thought then, she had not mentioned that her mother had come to meet her new granddaughter when Stef was two months old. She had said Stef's constant crying was just punishment, that babies conceived in sin were never happy. She had not liked the coast. The mountain roads were dangerous, the mountains might erupt or something, and all those dark trees had been forbidding. Also, she had felt threatened by the ocean. It was too rough, too violent. She had never come back, and Marnie had never taken Stef to Indiana. Marnie had not been willing to expose her to the kind of criticism she knew her mother would heap on Stef for not doing as ordered, things she was incapable of doing. Sit still. Stop racing around. Go to bed and stay there. Keep out of those cabinets. Clean your plate. A visit to her old home, her mother's house, would have been a nightmare, and she had never gone to the Indiana farm again.

Also, she thought, reflecting on what she had not talked about to Tony, she had not said why she and Ed had bought a house obviously too big for them. Stef was three, and Marnie had been pregnant again, with twins. They would need a big house, Ed had said. The twins came prematurely and one died two days later, the other one a week after that. There was never another pregnancy, and the big upper room had remained empty until Stef claimed it as her studio when she was thirteen. When Stef married the first time, Marnie and Ed had moved into the front house, leaving the rear house to the new family. That family history remained locked within her.

Having coffee after dinner that night, Marnie told Tony about Stef's name. “Ed filled out the birth certificate and he spelled her name
Stefany
. I said I'd never seen it spelled like that, and he said there had been a distant relative in his family who spelled it that way, and besides, she was unique, no one else on earth like her, and she deserved a unique name. What could I do?”

Marnie laughed softly. “Stef liked it and insisted on keeping the spelling. God alone knows how many times she had to defend it during her school years.”

And she had talked about Ed's last days, Marnie thought with a sense of wonder. “We took turns staying with him,” she had said that night. “I had gone home to shower and put on clean clothes, and when I returned, at the door, I could hear her talking to him. She was reminding him of the good times, a hike up Mount Rainier, picnics, the time he took her out on one of the fishing boats. She was holding his hand, just talking, and he was dying. She called him Daddy. When I went inside the room, he was smiling.”

How had that come into the conversation? she wondered after Tony had left and she sat at her windows and watched lights at sea vanish as darkness fell. She had no answer to her question.

Then she was thinking only of Stef. She was playing with Dale, Marnie knew. He was her fish and she was playing him, pretending to accept his apology for not telling her about insurance and why he had put prices on her work. Marnie didn't know if Stef believed that excuse, and she didn't know the rules of the game Stef was playing, but she knew the signs, and they were there in abundance. She had seen the same pattern more than once over the years. It varied little from man to man. Big fights, a lot of yelling back and forth, contrition, a loving relationship restored, then the exit line and the door slam. Over. They had reached the reconciliation stage. There was no way of knowing when the next act would begin, but begin it would. Dale had betrayed her and he could not be forgiven. Period.

It was cruel, merciless, and Marnie could do nothing about it beyond hope that Dale would go quietly. Sometimes they did, sometimes not.

Only the town lights were visible when she left the window, sat in her favorite chair across the room, and started to read the book Tony had brought.

*   *   *

T
HURSDAY
, V
AN
WAS
graduating that week.
Dr. Vanessa Markov.
Marnie mouthed the words silently and basked in the glow they afforded her. Marnie planned to drive to Portland on Saturday, attend the graduation ceremony, and return that night. She hoped it would not be as tedious as Van's undergraduate ceremony had been, with an endless line of students marching onstage, the handshake, receiving the diploma, off, like a lot of windup robots, Marnie had thought, at least until it was Van who was marching up. It wouldn't be like that, she reminded herself, if only because there were far fewer students.

As she finished up in the kitchen before going to the gift shop, she kept hearing Stef going in and out from the studio, and finally Marnie opened her back door, descended the few steps to the passage, and went to the studio to see what was going on. The studio door was open with Stef inside still in her oversize nightshirt.

“I decided to take the charcoals in,” she said. “Might as well sell them, for all I care. Marnie, why don't you come in with us? You could come back with Van on Sunday.”

Marnie shook her head. “Van doesn't need a houseguest right now. Probably the apartment is unlivable anyway, all packed up, ready for her to leave. She's already shipped a lot of her things.”

“Stay in our apartment.”

Marnie would get a hotel room, sleep under a bridge, or walk home in the middle of the night before she would stay in Dale's apartment. She shook her head. “I'll be there early Saturday, that's time enough.”

“Maybe I'll take a couple of the landscapes,” Stef said, turning away from her. “They're just about bad enough to appeal to someone.”

Marnie nodded, aware that Stef was talking about some of her conventional landscapes that she claimed to despise. “I'll see you on Saturday,” she said, leaving. Below, Marnie saw the gallery van in the driveway with the side door open. Apparently they had already taken the charcoals down.

*   *   *

I
N
THE
SHOP
a few minutes after one, Marnie heard sirens and paid little attention. The highway invited accidents, with impatient motorists irritated past reason by slow-moving camping trailers, house trailers, strangers on the road taking chances on passing, inviting disaster. The police car or rescue unit, whatever it was, did not pass the shop.

Minutes later the phone rang, and Harriet, her voice high-pitched and frightened, said, “Marnie, something's happened at your house! The emergency truck is there and Will just drove in.”