She dismissed Corot quickly, remembering the joke: “Corot painted three thousand paintings and five thousand of them are in the United States.” The Rembrandt’s rich color held her rapt for several minutes, but ultimately she decided that the portrait of a single person, no matter how much narrative it implied, did not offer enough material for the two hundred fifty-six printed pages that made the ideal book-club novel.
Doubting her instincts, she wondered if she should have gone instead to the Whitney or the MoMA. Maybe a Lichtenstein was the thing; she could mimic the comic-strip pointillism. But, no, that would be too arty, too punk, would hit the wrong audience. Its audience would be too small. She smiled at the thought that Clarice Aames could write a Lichtenstein story. For that moment, she thought of Clarice Aames as another person, a someone she might phone and offer an idea for a story.
Amanda lingered at the Hobbema pictures. They appeared to be landscapes or scenes of empty houses and sheds in landscapes, but, at the right distance and angle, it was easy to see the people the artist had hidden in window frames, behind tree stumps, huddled in tall grass. A possibility, she decided, though she was concerned that the artist was not famous enough. It seemed a shame that he had quit painting so young when he might have made a real name for himself.
Amanda forgot Hobbema as she stepped into the frothy bizarreness of the Fragonard room. Of course, she thought, she needn’t have considered anything else! She must have known, in the back of her mind, that it would be the Fragonards, and that was why she’d started for the Frick rather than the Met or that godawful Dahesh shrine to ravished virgins and false exoticism.
Alone in the room, her faith in her instincts restored, Amanda smiled sideways. Fragonard was perfect: famous enough, weird enough but not too weird, historical, pretty, and — this was key — full of sexual possibility. That odd fellow heading off the canvas had to be sneaking off to do something kinky. She determined, on the spot, to title her novel The Progress of Love, to name her buxom heroine Libertine, and to write the book in four months.
Before leaving, she bought a copy of each of the gift shop’s publications on Fragonard and also a book about Hobbema, which she paged through on what she considered a well-deserved taxi ride home. After all, she’d walked all the way up the east side in the highest of heels and this was the day she was taking her fate into her own hands.
Eddie was busy in the kitchen when she opened the door. “I’m making you a real Caesar salad,” he said. “The kind the Hollywood types used to drive to Tijuana for.”
“They went to Tijuana for the liquor and bull fights,” she said. “The salad was secondary. But it sounds good, so long as you leave the raw egg out.”
His head dropped a little. “I sort of coddled it, and I washed it first.”
Amanda’s mood was so light that she couldn’t summon her nasty side. She kissed her husband’s cheek. “All right, then, but if I get salmonella poisoning I’m filing for divorce.”
“If I poison you, I’ll hold your hair back while you puke.”
“Don’t be gross, Eddie. Particularly not if you want me to eat.”
Over the chilled salad bowls, she told her husband the story of Meindert Hobbema. “You should write a novel about him. It’s perfect for you. He had all this talent, but he just stopped painting in his late twenties. Just stopped. And it’s apparently not because he was ill or tortured or consumptive or anything. He just up and quit and took some clerk’s job like the assistant important underling of weights and measures.” She paused to roll an anchovy onto her fork and bite into its saltiness. “Anyway, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out why he quit painting and write a novel about it. Think tasteful but not low-budget screenplay while you’re at it. You know, include enough dialogue and some cinematic scenes and images.”
Eddie shoved salad into his mouth at an impolite pace.
“Slow down,” she said. “Try to enjoy it. It’s really very good.”
She did not mention Fragonard, nor her intention to write a novel, and she most certainly did not state the small, important truth that she already had a title — or the much larger truth that she’d decided to quit her job.
Chapter thirteen
While Margot Yarborough felt a fragment of guilt over moving her snoring father back into her mother’s room and some embarrassment over her failure to make it in the city, she was happy to be back in her family home. Despite her parents’ years of bickering, she thought of her childhood fondly. And perhaps because of that bickering, she had made, from an early age, a sanctuary of her room. She thought of it as spring: the wall paint reflected fresh green, the few pieces of furniture and the floor planks were whitewashed, and her linens and curtains reminded her of meadows in April. Her father had contaminated the room with cigar smoke, but several days and nights of open windows and a vase of fresh lavender restored the illusion of the world emerging from winter even as the yellow and red leaves outside the window made it obvious that winter was still to come.
Her New York apartment had been small, furnished with the basics alone, so she’d moved home with only a suitcase of clothes, a box of kitchen objects, her writing materials, and forty-seven boxes of books.
“Unpack your clothes, honey,” her mother had said. “But these other things need to stay in the garage until you decide what you need at hand. Visual clutter actually inhibits mental clarity. There’s been research — not that your father will hear of it. I shudder when I walk by his office.”
Margot placed her clothes on hangers and in drawers. She set up her laptop, arranged her notebooks and pencils, and stacked both drafts of The Reluctant Leper on the antique white table at which she had made her first literary attempt at the age of six. It had been an Emily Dickinson imitation: a poem she’d called “The Long Grass Blade.” She wondered if a copy still existed and whether the poem contained a salvageable line, some phrase she could weave into her novel — a sentimental joke hidden to all but her.
After her mother left to take an exercise class she called “burning pilates,” which she’d begged Margot to try as soon as possible—“you need to build muscle and bone while you still can,” she’d admonished — Margot slipped out to the garage. There she unpacked the forty-seven boxes of her books in order to select ten volumes she would allow herself to keep inside. Several hours later, she had moved thirty-seven books into her room and still had to go back for a dictionary. About half the books she’d pulled out were favorites. The other fifteen were those she had at the top of her to-read list. Though she had many contemporary novels and poetry collections in the repacked boxes in the garage, not one of the books she took to her room, save the dictionary, had been published after 1910.
There was rap at her door, which swung open and was filled by her father’s substantial body.
“Just setting up my workspace,” she said.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, Margot. Quite a coincidence that you’ve come home now, actually. I’ve been doing some thinking, and I think you’re just the person to help out your dear old dad in his time of need. It’s time for old dad to get some more points on the scoreboard, however late in the game.”
Margot knew the conversation’s blueprint: it was her turn to remind him of his many accomplishments while assuring him that he was plenty young enough to do more. She got so far as to open her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come readily, as they once had.
“I’m not getting any younger,” he said when he registered her silence, “and there’s no use telling me otherwise because I know what I see when I look in the mirror.” He brushed back his hair, resting his other hand on the stomach starting to overhang his belt. “But I’ve still got time to make my mark, at least with the help of my loving daughter.” His tone was playful — mock sarcastic — but it seemed like a transparency overlaying something more serious, even worrisome.