Picture This

‘Let’s speak tomorrow, Susie and I have some Goyas to look at.’ Felix grabbed Susie’s arm and led her quickly away.

‘What was that all about?’

‘We were close for a while, and Donald has never really forgiven me for it. But he’s far more useful as friend than foe.’ He grabbed two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter and handed one to her. ‘To us, not them,’ he toasted, then downed his glass and took another.

‘By the way, I agree with you on the Jo Hopper question. Without a doubt she changed his whole trajectory. Hopper reacted to people; he was not an initiator. She made him and sacrificed her career in doing so. It’s only been fashionable to be female for the last few years, people forget that. I don’t. Another reason why I’m such a brilliant gallerist.’ He grinned cheekily.

‘And modest too.’

‘Hey, this is Manhattan, not some demure dinner party in Hampstead. By the way, have I told you how sexy you look in that dress? Kind of Red Riding Hood meets dominatrix, totally my thing… ’

‘I thought we were here to see some art?’ she teased.

They walked into the next gallery, filled with Goya’s miniature ivories displayed in glass cabinets. As small as they were, the beautiful ink paintings had a fluidity of line and naturalistic expression that made them infinitely more contemporary-seeming than the work of the artist’s peers.

Susie stared down at one particular miniature. It depicted a woman in a voluminous dress and with bare feet standing in a landscape, her whole body battling a fierce wind that was blowing the ankle-length dress against her and her shawl over her shoulders, while her half-turned face was completely obscured by her flying hair. In a monochrome landscape of blue-black ink she was a lone figure set against the elements.

Suddenly she felt the heat of Felix’s body as he stood beside her.

‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured reverently.

‘It’s amazing how he’s managed to get so much movement in such a tiny drawing. You can really feel that wind stinging against her legs and shins, her hair swirling madly and getting into her eyes and mouth, the struggle to get her shawl back over her shoulders, the spongy grass under her naked feet,’ she said, speaking to herself as much as to him.

‘Apparently he used to drop ink onto the ivory and the way it spread and bled, leaving whiter areas, fired up his imagination. He’d work the figures out of the ink, not the other way around.’ He was thinking about another figure the miniature reminded him of: the waitress standing on his balcony wall, her wings fluttering in the breeze. Had that actually happened? The next morning he’d found a trail of paint-encrusted gold feathers and the footage he’d shot. Part of him was appalled and part of him intensely intrigued and excited by the experience, and he knew he would not be able to stop himself from watching it all over again, on his laptop, furtively, like porn. Sometimes he felt as if there was another man buried within him – a golem, a mud man blind with rage he couldn’t stop from bursting out.

‘Do you think if we stole one they’d notice?’ She looked up at him, grinning.

‘I think if you smashed that glass a million alarms would go off and I could forget all about launching you. I’ll buy you one, one day.’ It was a throwaway comment, but to his surprise he found he meant it. ‘Do you want to see Enredos de sus vidas? It’s in the room upstairs.’

Susie stopped in her tracks. ‘You know that drawing?’

‘Sure, the title has haunted me ever since someone introduced me to it a couple of years ago… Apparently it was originally entitled The Entanglement of Her Life – which sounds more sinister. I guess Goya had a reason to change it.’

Again Susie wondered how he’d stumbled across the relatively obscure work, and yet instinct warned her not to reveal how the drawing had come to be in her own life.

Marked 46, it was set against cardboard behind the glass front of a cabinet. The artwork itself was fairly small – seven and a half inches by six. A simple drawing of two women embracing against a background of macabre faces leering out of heavier shading. The title was scrawled in black crayon in Goya’s own handwriting beneath. Susie’s heart clenched; for her it embodied a simpler time, a period in her life when intimacy, sex and creative inspiration had joined together seamlessly and had felt as if it would go on for ever.

She peered closer. The reclining woman had her arm raised as if drawing the other woman down into an embrace. The figure atop, younger, round-faced, was smiling, but her gaze seemed to extend out of the drawing and fall upon the artist, the unseen participant. The shadowy cloud that backed the two figures was more nightmarish in execution than she’d remembered: grotesque half-faces looming out of darkness, bat wings, dogs’ heads, with some lighter touches like butterfly wings. To Susie’s mind they now appeared to represent societal disapproval but at the same time, perhaps, the doubts and fears of any couple, the unspoken anxiety that you never quite know the true nature of your lover, her history, what she’s really thinking… And the poignancy of this, in terms of Maxine’s suicide, hit her like a blow.

‘You’re very quiet,’ Felix said tentatively.

‘I think Goya must have known these women. Maybe he knew the older one first and originally intended to make a more judgemental drawing – The Entanglement of Her Life, the emphasis being on the corrupting lesbian lover – but when he saw the two women together he realised that there was so much joy between them it would be immoral to pass judgement, so he changed the title to Entanglements of Their Lives, and refocused the theme and the drawing on the encroaching, judging world around them,’ she told him, astonishing herself with her own honesty. Felix listened, an intensity playing about his eyes that, she decided, must be sincere.

‘When I first read the title, the word “Entanglement” seemed to encapsulate exactly how I was feeling – caught in a web that tightened every time I moved,’ he told her, his voice now uncharacteristically free from artifice. ‘At the time it reflected my own life; keeping everything compartmentalised was getting increasingly difficult. I think it was then that I decided to opt out of relationships altogether and only focus on career.’ He was lying, calculating that she would empathise with such a story. Well, he thought, it was more a half-truth than an outright lie. But her response was a sceptical frown. ‘For people like us, intimacy is like psychological ice,’ he elaborated, hoping to win her over. ‘We skate above it, terrified of falling through when the ice is too thin.’

‘You fell through?’ Susie asked, incredulous.

‘Momentarily, but I didn’t drown, right? And that’s the main point, isn’t it?’ he answered. Both of them were now acutely aware of each other’s physicality.

‘I did,’ Susie murmured. She returned her gaze to the drawing but, overwhelmed by the awkward tension, somewhere between fear and strong sexual attraction, she couldn’t step away.

‘Hey, we’re all human,’ he answered softly.

He inched towards her and their shoulders touched. The sound of a loud hooting laugh broke the moment.

‘Oh Christ, that’s Joanna Fleisch.’ Felix grabbed Susie’s hand and pulled her out into the hallway outside the gallery. Looking around, he spied a service cupboard; in seconds they were inside.

They were eclipsed by instant