CAPRI, ITALY
“When did you paint these?” Auden asked.
“Over the past two years. This one’s the most recent, it’s not really finished. I worked on it until I had to leave for Italy,” Lucie replied, pointing to an image of overlapping swaths of deep purple.
They were sitting in the salon of the hotel. Auden leaned forward from his armchair and stared at the iPad in astonishment. When Lucie had first told him about her paintings while they were swimming in the cove at Da Luigi, he thought he’d be seeing the pleasant abstract paintings to be expected of a nineteen-year-old—the sort of faux Franz Kline pieces one could find at Restoration Hardware that would go perfectly with your new curved velvet sofa and your fiddle-leaf fig plant.
Auden had led plenty of creativity workshops in his time and witnessed the artwork that came out of them from his artistically frustrated clients; most of it ranged from amateurishly angsty to downright awful. He would never have called himself an art expert, but the work flashing before his eyes seemed precociously accomplished. In looking at the canvases soaked in restrained monochromatic al nero di seppia tones, brushstrokes infused with a Dionysian physicality, he sensed an unresolved Lacanian tension that juxtaposed the lyrical gestures of early Helen Frankenthaler, the bold symbology of post–Los Angeles Judy Chicago, and the visceral fury of pre-Madonna Basquiat.*1
“Lucie, I’m absolutely floored by this work. I’m so impressed.”
“Really?” Lucie looked up at him blankly.
“You’ve only been painting for a year?”
“No, I’ve been doing art since I was very young, and I took art classes all through high school.”
“Your work is…dare I say…sui generis. It’s original, sophisticated, and fresh, and more importantly, I feel that you are channeling your soul into these paintings. I can’t wait to see the real canvases. Why, I’d love to buy one of your works and hang it at the new studio in East Hampton!”
Lucie’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I never kid about stuff like this. You already know what I think—you should be in art school and not wasting time studying semiotics or whatever at Brown. You have a true gift, and I think you could really be at the forefront of a new generation of artists. Think about it.”
“Thank you. I will.” Lucie nodded politely, not wanting to challenge him. She didn’t want to prolong this little vernissage any longer; she just wanted to get back to her room.
As Lucie strode across the lobby toward the elevator, Auden stared after her, even more intrigued than before. Seeing these paintings was like witnessing the work of a girl possessed. The girl who had just been seated before him with the perfect posture and her hair in a tight ponytail, so composed as she swiped through her artwork, did not for one second resemble someone who would be able to create those canvases. Where was the real Lucie Churchill hiding? Or better yet, why?
Auden could not have known that even before Lucie had boarded the Murphys’ super yacht, cruised back to Capri while being held hostage to another design tour by Mordecai, crammed into a taxi with the Ortiz sisters, waded through the wall of tourists on the walk back to the hotel, and placidly sat there presenting her artwork and pretending to listen politely, her mind was somewhere else entirely, and it was playing this over and over on a constant loop:
Did he kiss me or did I kiss him? Fuck, I think I kissed him first. Why did I kiss him? Why oh why oh why? Did it really happen? How much did Charlotte see? Why did she show up at that very moment? Where is George now? What is he thinking right now? What must he think of me now? Did he kiss me or did I kiss him?
Returning to her room at long last, Lucie closed the door behind her, fastened the security latch, and transformed into the girl whom Auden Beebe had sensed in the paintings. As she lay on her bed with her phone, she became a girl possessed as she searched desperately for anything and everything she could find about George Zao online.
First up was his Instagram account, which was easy to locate because he had liked Isabel’s first post from Capri. His account name was @zaoist, and Lucie immediately recognized the image that he used as his avatar—the rocks arranged in a spiral pattern was unmistakably a photo of Spiral Jetty, a sculpture created in the middle of a lake in Utah by the artist Robert Smithson. She had read all about it in her art history class last semester.
Curiously, there wasn’t a single photo of himself or any other person on George’s account. Did he not have a single friend? Actually, that wasn’t true. He had 4,349 followers! That
was 3,000+ more than she had. How in the world did he have so many followers when he was following only 332 people? He obviously wasn’t very active on the app, since there were only eighty-eight posts. Scrolling through his feed, she saw that it consisted of perfectly composed architecture, food, and travel images. If all he did was post photos from other travel and design sites, why was he getting so many likes? Lucie started to scrutinize the images in his posts more closely:
A chapel in Ronchamp. Okay, it’s that chapel designed by that famous architect.*2
Char siew bao in a bamboo steamer. Yum.
Dominique de Menil’s house in Houston. Is that an Yves Klein on the wall?
The swimming pool at the Amangiri resort. Take me there.
A vintage Airstream trailer in Marfa. Cool.
Zion National Park at sunset. Wow.
Spam sushi. Yuck.
A copy of Learning from Las Vegas on an empty desk. What’s this book? Lucie quickly googled it: “Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy upon its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of ‘common’ people and less immodest in their erections of ‘heroic,’ self-aggrandizing monuments.” George sure is an architecture geek.
A wooden shack in the middle of the desert. Whatever.
A bacon cheeseburger between two doughnuts. Yuck. Why are guys into gross foods?