The Proviso (57 page)

Only tonight, she’d seen his face and she was
horrified. It was everything she had never expected. Terrible.
Frightening.

Sebastian’s face. Ford’s body.
How
had that
happened?

First her company, then her garden, then her vault,
then her fridge, then her diet, then her body, and now her dreams.
Would that man leave
nothing
of hers untouched?

Eilis clicked on her bedside light so she could look
at her painting, her
Morning in Bed
. She wished she could
bleach her brain so she could get rid of that visual.

She didn’t want them mixed. It was . . .
wrong
.

Ford she had wanted to do a specific thing,
once.

Sebastian she needed. For a long time, maybe
forever, if she thought he wouldn’t turn away from her on learning
of her past.

But she had burned that bridge because she never
suspected he resented Ford until he left her on her conference room
table. She certainly wouldn’t have known
how
deep his
resentment of Ford went until he’d lashed out at her at
Christie’s.

In retrospect, she saw it clearly: Chanel and
Ford—the two things guaranteed to make Sebastian’s expression
freeze, his body tense, his temper flare.

Her breath came short in panic when she thought of
the look on his face, the anger of a man utterly betrayed, and in
that moment, she understood how foolish she’d been not to take what
Sebastian had offered her to begin with.

But had he offered her anything, really?

Shouldn’t she expect that a man who wanted to offer
a woman something would
talk
to her, let her know his
thoughts? That he hated how she looked in Chanel? That he hated her
obsession with Ford? That he wanted to be with her and he found
these things hurtful?

Shouldn’t she expect him to open his mouth and
speak? In
words
?

She didn’t know because she had never had a
relationship like that, nor, apparently, had Sebastian.

Hurt to her soul, she sighed. It didn’t matter. He’d
turned his back and wouldn’t listen to a thing she had to say at
this point.

She knew because she’d tried. Every phone call she
made, she got voice mail. When she’d shown up at HRP to talk to
him, he disappeared. Every email and text message she sent, she got
the same auto-reply:
YOU’RE ON VACATION

Now she had nothing to hold onto but Ford.

* * * * *

50:
TIME TO SAY GOODBYE

MARCH 2007

Eilis sat on the floor with a magnifying glass going
over every inch of the painting leaned against the wall. She
sighed. If this portrait contained any clues as to Ford’s identity,
they were too cryptic. After years of studying it, she suspected
the rumored “clues” simply didn’t exist. The only option she had
left was to hire an art historian, but the thought made her
uneasy.

After several long teleconferences with the private
investigators she had spread out over the country, the truth had
started to gel: Ford didn’t exist. His ephemeral trail stopped in
Chicago.

Eilis dropped her forehead in her palm, at her
breaking point. She
must
find Ford.

Soon.

After that dream, she’d barely slept again and spent
every waking moment playing Sherlock Holmes. In the last three
days, she had managed to doze off only far enough for the dream to
start again. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate; it wasn’t
important.

Frustrated, she gave up for the time being and
dressed to go turn her compost, something she could do in the dark
by the light of the floodlights. She headed out the back door only
to stop when the phone rang. At first, her heart thudded, but then
she remembered: She’d dismissed her private investigators at their
last conference call when each agreed Ford could not be found and
they all had better things to do. She nearly ignored it, but she’d
never ignored a ringing phone in her life.

“Hello?”

“Um, hi. Is this Eilis Logan?” said a woman whose
voice Eilis didn’t recognize.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“I’m an agent for the artist Ford. You can stop
looking for him.”

Her heart thundered and her breath caught. Her mouth
was so dry she could barely speak.

“What does that mean, precisely?” Eilis asked
carefully.

“It means you got his attention. He’ll paint
you.”

They’d done it. Whichever PI had done this would get
a nice fat bonus.

Eilis paused. “Is this a joke?”

“Unfortunately, no.” The woman’s voice was hard,
flat. “If you really do want him to paint you, you’ll be picked up
from your house and taken to his studio blindfolded.”

“He’s here?” Eilis whispered. “In Kansas City? I
thought—”

“No. You’ve been looking in all the wrong places.
And F-Y-I—there aren’t any clues in the painting, either. If you
want Ford to paint you, these are the terms. You won’t be able to
find him on your own.”

“Does he even know what I look like?”

The woman gave an unamused bark of laughter. “You
have your people. He has his. So. Can you be ready in an hour?
Eleven o’clock? I’ll pick you up. I’m driving a silver-blue
BMW.”

An hour!
“What— I can’t— Not that fast.”

“You have an hour,” she repeated. “And pack a bag.
You never know with him.”

Eilis dropped the phone and looked around her
kitchen like she’d never seen it before. She couldn’t breathe,
couldn’t think, couldn’t move until she walked like a zombie up to
her room to shower and pack.

Then she closed up her house and sat down in her
courtyard to wait, her bag by her side, unable to do anything but
stare at the cleverly lit obelisk in her roundabout, wondering what
she had set in motion and why she felt so . . . not thrilled.

Sebastian’s words came back to her:
Do you
remember
how you ended up in the saleroom at Christie’s?

And so now, instead of having sex with and then
marrying David in the aftermath of a front-row seat to September
11, or begging Sebastian to make love to her after watching the
sacrifice of her precious art, she intended to go to an unknown
place blindfolded with an unknown woman presumably to be painted by
an unknown man who painted pictures of nude women. After he’d had
sex with them.

She knew her judgment was severely stunted and she
figured she’d deserved to lose those paintings. Still here she sat,
willing to play this through to the last hand to see if she could
win anything back.

You’re not a good gambler.

Not when she gambled on emotion, she wasn’t.

Like tonight.

Soon she heard an engine outside her gate and opened
it. As promised, a silver-blue BMW drove up to the courtyard and
obscured her view of the obelisk. A woman emerged, and Eilis stood
to walk toward the car, bag in hand.

She stood much shorter than Eilis and had a very
compact body, muscular yet slightly curvy. Wisps of her
shoulder-length curls flickered different shades of a rich blonde
in the light from the obelisk, but then she turned—“You— You’re the
Virgin,” she whispered.

“Yup, that’s me. Only not a virgin anymore. Got your
stuff?”

Eilis breathed a sigh of some relief, her
unarticulated fear of a hoax laid to rest.

The Virgin, who didn’t seem particularly happy to be
there nor inclined to tell her her name, picked up her bag and put
it in the trunk. She gestured to Eilis to get in the car and then
she did. Once they reached the end of the driveway, she stopped for
Eilis to close the gate. That done, the Virgin tied a wide black
scarf around Eilis’s face, making sure she could see nothing.

Eilis tried to track their course from the map in
her head, but after the first turn north and the first turn east, a
curve threw her. She’d lost her bearings.

The ride was a long one.

Eilis didn’t speak because the Virgin didn’t until—
“Eilis, do you
really
want to do this?”

What an odd question from the model of the most
infamous Ford painting since
Morning in Bed
.

Eilis swallowed. “Yes. Why?”

“Mmmm, seems to me you could go about gathering
enlightenment in a less dangerous way.”

“And . . . you’re different from me how?”

Jealous I’m taking your place?

“Ha! That’s funny. He badgered me into it.”

Eilis blinked, not having expected such an answer.
“Did you— Him—” Eilis stopped. It was rude and no, Eilis didn’t
really want to know.

“Not on your life,” she replied anyway. “Dude
doesn’t do anything for me. Eww.”

Eilis bit her lip. “
Morning in Bed
. Is that
really him?”

“Yes.”

A thrill ran through her, curiosity hard on its
heels. “And he doesn’t attract you?”

“Absolutely not,” she said flatly. “Does it look
like he fucked me?”

No. Which was why it was notorious.

Eilis started when she felt the Virgin’s hand
lightly cover her clenched fist. “Eilis,” she said, her voice
softening. Eilis was only too eager to listen to any conversation
because she couldn’t see. One more second of silence would crush
her. “That painting happened because I had met a man I thought I
couldn’t have, so it made me ache for the rest of what would come
with a man, a lover, a husband. So I was in pain. And he wanted to
capture that.”

Eilis let that settle. “It is devastating,” she
murmured. “I almost cried when I saw it.”

“I guess that’s a common reaction. Neither of us
thought it would be that powerful.”

“What—what’s the significance of the books on the
bed? It was a Bible and— I don’t remember the other one.”

“
Intercourse
, by Andrea Dworkin.” The Virgin
took a deep breath, then expelled it with a whoosh. “Religion and
radical feminism have one thing in common: They seek to denigrate
women for wanting sex with men. In religion’s case, woman is the
enemy, the sinful Eve figure if not the Lilith one, the succubus,
the seducer of righteous men into evil deeds. It presupposes that
men are without evil inclinations in the first place. It’s the
thinking that positions a rape victim as asking for it because
obviously, the rapist was just an innocent bystander. A woman
should have only one interest in sex, and that’s to procreate.

“In the case of radical feminism, man is the enemy
because, of course, all men seek to dominate and entrap women into
indentured servitude or worse. While this is true for
some
men, it isn’t true of all men and not all women want the same
things from a sexual relationship with a man. A woman who wants sex
with a man is seen as unenlightened at best and weak at worst. It
gives no quarter for women who, you know, maybe want sex with a man
because they like it and maybe want to have a baby. And that’s not
even getting into any kink. I knew what I wanted and that painting
was a statement on the fact that I couldn’t get it.”

“Was all that symbolism your idea?”

“Between us, we narrowed it down to those two
factions and those two books, but he already had a solid idea of
what he wanted to do. Ford can cut through bullshit faster than
anybody I know and distill everything down to its essence. He
looked at me and that painting is what he saw.”

“What’s he like?” Eilis whispered, eager to know
more about him, more about the way he thought, more details that
would give her two-dimensional painting its third dimension.

“Not sure how to answer that. He just is. He’s
different things to different people. I mean, he’s pretty much
always the same; it’s just that people see him differently
according to context and their own issues.”

“Everybody sees everybody else like that.”

“Mmmm, yeah, but with him? You know how people say,
‘Actions speak louder than words’? Not true with him. His
reputation—undeserved—speaks way louder than his actions. So loud
that nobody sees what he actually
does
.”

Eilis suddenly felt like they were talking about
someone else; Ford didn’t
have
a reputation. She opened her
mouth to ask more, but the car stopped and died. “We’re here. Don’t
take off your blindfold or I’ll take you back home right now.”

She sat in the car until the Virgin came around to
help her out onto a steeply sloped sidewalk. The Virgin walked on
the downside of her and guided her to a door that opened to cool
air reeking of turpentine and oil paint.

The Virgin came back with her bag and closed the
door behind her. “Okay. You can take off the blindfold now.”

She didn’t know what she’d expected Ford’s studio to
look like, but this wasn’t it.

It was an enormous concrete rectangle with harsh
fluorescent lights overhead. A heavy canvas tarp haphazardly
covered most of the concrete floor. Boxes of art supplies were
piled high along an entire stretch of wall beside which stood a
large cabinet with an enormous sink. Five-by-five-foot canvases
lined another wall. One very large tarp-covered canvas, perhaps ten
feet wide and eight feet high, leaned against a different wall.

A magenta Victorian velveteen chaise, the only
furniture in the room, stood in the center of the room. Just ahead
of her, a switchback staircase rose into darkness. To the right of
that, eight wide, richly carved cherry panels with elaborate
filigree iron wheels at the top and bottom floated between tracks
in the ceiling and floor.

“Come with me,” said the Virgin and led her to the
cherry panels. She pulled back two panels and turned up the lights.
Eilis stopped and gasped. The Virgin stepped aside to allow Eilis
to take in details.

A massive dark cherry four-poster bed, hung with
velvets and chiffons of green, gold, and purple, sat on a broad
two-step dais at a diagonal. A footstool sat on the floor to its
left. The linens, the pillows, neck rolls, shams of all sizes and
textures, and decorated with beads, fringe, and tassels, perfectly
matched the fall of drapery from the bedposts. In the corner above
the deliciously carved headboard of the bed hung a matching shelf,
both color and carvings. Candles of all different shapes and sizes,
in all the colors of the room, jockeyed for position.