Picture This

‘We also need to study the painting again. And I mean real close, with a magnifying glass at both the front and back of the canvas. That’s going to be difficult. I’ve already been there once. I think the guy who let me in would be suspicious if I ask to see the painting again.’ Latisha went on: ‘But when we’ve got possible evidence, I know exactly the right scientist who will prove the forgery.’

‘Don’t worry; I can get us access to the painting. And I think I might know of a way I can get hold of a piece of the provenance.’

‘You’ll have to keep that Felix Baum on the hook. Don’t make him suspicious by rejecting him. Think you can do that without falling in love?’ Latisha asked.

It was a question that made Susie avert her eyes.

*

Much later, after Latisha had left, Susie stripped all her clothes off and placed the pendant around her neck, and with the use of a full-length mirror photographed herself naked. It was a way of distancing herself from the woman who had been falling in love with Felix and becoming instead this new creature. A creature fuelled by an emotion far darker and more complex.

Chapter Twenty

Gabriel was searching for a theme for the next Hopper. He’d taken his usual thinking route, finding the rhythm of the pavement and the stimulus of the faces and figures walking by both soothing and inspiring. But Hopper was not a painter of real people; his women were really ciphers, a metaphor for the one inherently inaccessible young blonde woman, emotionally detached, intellectually aloof. Or so Gabriel had concluded. He’d read every biography on the artist available to get into his psyche; used Jo Hopper’s diaries to help compose some of the false provenance of his forgeries; studied the various theories on the complexities of the artist’s marriage. He was fascinated by the fact that their courtship hadn’t started until they were in their early forties, decades after they’d first met at art school. At the high point of her own success as a painter, Jo Nivison had facilitated Edward Hopper’s career greatly, first by introducing him to watercolours (up until then he’d been struggling as a graphic artist in advertising, with little acclaim for his own painting), and then by persuading the curator of the Brooklyn Museum to include a few of his watercolours in a group show she herself was being shown in. That show, in 1923, turned out to be the pivotal point in Edward Hopper’s career – the springboard for a stellar rise to fame. By 1935 he was a household name.

Gabriel was also fascinated by George Bellows, Hopper’s fellow student and peer, and in some ways the nemesis of his early and failing career. Bellows died unexpectedly of appendicitis in 1925, clearing the way for Hopper to become the figurehead for the new American aesthetic. Fate and the way it shaped a career obsessed Gabriel; he saw his own trajectory in this, and in Jo Hopper’s sacrifice. Gabriel knew she’d insisted on posing as the model for all Hopper’s female figures, dressing up to throw herself into the role. He thought it unnatural, controlling, and he’d used this emotion to try to place himself into the frigid psyche of Edward Hopper himself, imagining his anger, his frustration. His relationship with Felix helped; the way the gallery director played him, giving him just enough sexual and emotional involvement to keep him on the hook, but never enough to make him truly believe he loved him; a netherworld of emotional ambiguity, which was both painful and erotic. Sometimes Gabriel’s own perversity depressed the hell out of him, but he’d never known another way of loving a man.

Early that evening, knowing Felix was at an event in the Hamptons with Susie Thomas, Gabriel, restless and unable to face another evening alone in his apartment, torturing himself with thoughts of Felix, had decided to seek out a new scenario, something the younger Hopper might have painted: a flat streetscape, perhaps, with one or two of his usual protagonists: a streetwalker, a middle-aged woman in a hat, the facade of an upper midtown apartment block. Felix had instructed him that he wanted a companion piece for Girl in a Yellow Square of Light, supposedly painted around the same time.

It should be an interior, but Gabriel liked the idea of an exterior – a view into an apartment with some domestic drama occurring inside, framed by a window. So, armed with his camera, he’d ventured to the backstreets of midtown in search of 19th-century apartment blocks with old-fashioned fire escapes.

It was a warm night with no breeze, a sultry precursor to the summer; the faint scent of brewing coffee and various foods drifted out of the back doors of restaurants, while air conditioner units dripped water onto the pavements below. Although he knew he’d fallen victim to the habit of solitude, Gabriel couldn’t help liking this feeling of anonymity, of being an invisible voyeur, spying on other people’s lives. Sometimes he wondered whether this was what an artist should be: a silent, undetectable observer, a consumer of other people’s memories, of visual impressions immortalised in a series of stills. Why shouldn’t this be enough commentary to give the world? It should be, he concluded, angry again at how, in the contemporary art world, this was no longer enough. These days it wouldn’t be considered clever or ironic or conceptually convoluted enough to sell or make an impression.

He walked past a window at street level behind which a couple were arguing. The man, his dark forehead beaded with sweat, was gesturing wildly, punching at the air as if he were fighting a swarm of invisible bees, while his wife stood at the kitchen sink stacking pots and pans in sullen protest.

In an apartment on the next block the bluish light of a television played against the semi-opaque half-pulled-down blind; he could see the silhouette of a lone plump man smoking, while the outline of a child darted backwards and forwards like a shadow-puppet against the thin fabric: the semi-aquatic world of someone else’s life. In this, Gabriel observed, there was hope, hope of company, of the end of the kind of perpetual isolation he found himself in. This hadn’t been how he imagined his life, he reflected darkly after catching the two framed scenarios on his camera, which he held close to his chest, like a weapon, like a third eye.

But it was the scene he came upon a block away and ten minutes later that halted him in his tracks.

At first he thought he might be hallucinating; the entire scene already had an unreal quality, with the street lamps in that humid particular heat unnaturally bright against a sky in which the moon – a timorous crescent – hung like a cheap Christmas tree decoration. The window on the first floor was large and half-open, as if the room within lacked air conditioning and the occupant, desperate for some respite from the stifling humidity, had yanked it open and then forgotten this would mean letting the world in. Quickly, Gabriel climbed the tall front stairs of the building opposite, granting himself a full view into the room. The girl was blonde and young and standing in profile to Gabriel, her white summer dress a sheath against her thin body. The juxtaposition of a single chair and the lower end of a bed visible behind her was classically Hopper in composition, embodying that cool, haunting detachment of place, figure and relationship the artist was so good at. But there was something familiar about her that Gabriel couldn’t quite identify. He lifted his camera and waited for her to turn to the window. As she turned, he hit

the shutter and in the same instant realised why he recognised her – it was Maxine: that distinctive narrow face, her eyes staring directly at him as if she could see all in the dark. By the time he looked up again, the figure had disappeared.

He turned back to the camera and hit the replay button. The image reappeared; the same window, the same single chair and bed frame, but there was no evidence of the girl he’d seen framed in the window.

‘Ghost,’ he said out loud, yet it wasn’t fear he felt but attraction, as if Maxine’s spirit had been beckoning him, as if she alone understood both his loneliness and the dilemma of loving a man like Felix Baum. The difference between them was that she, at least, had found a kind of peace.

Chapter Twenty-One

The limo swept into the driveway. Susie, who had slept ever since they left New York, was jolted awake.

‘Jesus, it’s Windsor Castle and the Addams Family mansion rolled into one.’ She peered out at the massive facade – all turrets and grey stone – in front of which lay a huge swathe of manicured lawn, with fountains and topiary reminiscent of Versailles.

‘Try Gothic and mock Tudor – built on a foundation of oil and shipping. Mamet was no fool, and neither is his widow, but as a collector she’s a little too wilful. She built a whole annexe to the mansion specifically for a Chapman Brothers installation I did my best to dissuade her from buying. Then again, she did buy the Hopper – that compensated for a lot.’ Felix settled back against the tan leather. ‘Bringing you here was part of the deal. Thank God you agreed – Felicity so wants you in her collection.’

‘I was always going to come. Isn’t she one of your most important clients?’

‘She is, but you’ve been so elusive these past few weeks.’

‘Stop exaggerating – you were travelling for two of those three weeks. So who’s going to be at this party?’

‘Everyone. The Guggenheim, Whitney, MoMA, Bilbao and Miami – and those are just the institutions. You can be as charming or as difficult as you like. They are expecting a show. Your reputation precedes you – I made sure of it. Now everyone wants a piece—’

‘And no doubt you’ll make sure they get it,’ she retorted. She was finding it difficult even to be near him. As she looked down she couldn’t help thinking how those hands had made love to Maxine – and possibly engineered her death. He really was like a Russian doll, she observed, appalled by his duplicity. Who knew how many personas were hidden within? Layer after layer…

The limousine rolled to a smooth stop in front of a huge granite archway. Two valets in uniform stepped up to the car, along with a handsome young man in a suit holding a clipboard. As one of the valets helped Susie out, Felicity Kocak appeared in the huge doorway, in a fishtail evening dress covered in diamanté crystals.

‘Elie Saab, I’m guessing,’ Felix commented, appraising the dress.