“Not Sister Bonaventura?”
“I’m afraid Sister Bonaventura regards this entire day as a foolhardy enterprise.”
“Because of me?” Grabianski grinned.
“Oh, no. Because of Degas. What does she call him now? An over-the-hill representative of a dying bourgeois art form, eking out a talent for repetitive misogyny.”
“She knows his work well, then. She’s been down already.”
Teresa laughed. “Not for Sister Bonaventura any of Thomas’ existential doubts. She’d no more need to see a Degas in the flesh than press her hand against Christ’s wounds before believing that he lived and breathed. Religion or politics, faith and dogma for her live side by side.”
“She sounds hard work.”
“Of course; it’s the life we’ve chosen.”
Grabianski finished his scone and washed it down with tea; summoning the waiter he paid the bill, careful to overtip generously.
“Shall we go?” he said, easing back his chair.
“Of course.”
The first room seemed impossible and Grabianski’s heart sank: what he had envisaged as an intimate afternoon, spent in close proximity and expressive silences, was instantly awash with earnest shufflers, shifting from painting to painting as slowly as breath would allow, parents with whimpering offspring dangling from backpack or sling, solitary listeners strapped into headphones listening to recorded commentary, girls from good homes sitting cross-legged, sketching.
Glancing around the walls, he glimpsed ballet dancers, bathers, hats, bouquets, a woman ironing, another standing, stern and staring out as if daring the artist to put a stroke wrong.
“Look,” Teresa said, “the color. There. Isn’t that wonderful?” At the center of a group of hats, the kind that for Grabianski existed only in the royal enclosure at Ascot, a scarf loosely knotted, hung down, lime green, so bright that it threatened to outshine all the other colors in the room.
When they moved on through the arch, the crowd already seemed to have dispersed a little, and they had an almost unimpeded view of five pictures hanging on the left-hand wall, five women drying themselves from the bath, or rather, the same woman in almost identical poses, the artist working on her again and again: ankle, leg, the deep cleft between the muscles of the back, broad swell of hips, arm raised to towel the now brown, now red hair, the curtains behind changing from orange fleck to fleshy pink, the wicker chair that is there and then not there. Working at it, Grabianski thought, until he got it right.
Except there was no right, he realized, each day a little different, the position, the light never the same: the way it would be if every day you were privileged to watch the same woman, unselfcon-scious, step, first one leg and then, steadying herself, the other, out from the bath and then bend forward to retrieve the towel that has slid to the floor, before drying herself slowly, then briskly, a snatch of song on her lips, a song she has surprised herself by knowing.
As Teresa turned in front of him, Grabianski followed her slowly into the next room toward the famous picture of a woman leaning back in a flame-red dress having the tangles brushed painfully from her flame-red hair.
“I never knew,” Teresa said some minutes later, standing close.
“What’s that?”
“That she was pregnant, look. That’s why she’s so uncomfortable. That’s why it hurts.” And she smiled the secret smile that would forever keep Grabianski excluded, an outsider, more so even than herself, who had forfeited all right to so much that was womanly, to enter into the marriage she craved.
Turning sharply into the fourth room, Grabianski came face to face with the painting he would later believe he liked best; the body submerged in a near-abstract pattern of color and light, blue to the left and orange to the right. As he stood in front of this, Teresa, at his back, hurried past a canvas showing a woman bending forward unclothed, presenting her backside in a way that none of the others had, more frankly sexual, an invitation that lodged a thought in Teresa’s mind and brought a rare blush to her throat.
When Grabianski looked closely at it later, it seemed to him the texture of the model’s flesh was that of skin seen through wet shower glass, spied on, unannounced.
Teresa, meanwhile, had been relieved to escape from all that flesh into the last room, three gentle landscapes on the far wall threaded through with violet and mauve, so still that you could almost smell the woodsmoke on the evening air.
They hesitated before the exit: they had been there an eternity; they had been there almost no time at all.
Released into the afternoon, they walked without talking, down across the Mall and into St. James’s Park: couples in deck chairs, a couple kissing on the bridge, couples holding hands.
“What did you think?” Grabianski asked.
“The exhibition?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I liked it very much.”
“But?”
“Is there a but?”
“I don’t know. Yes, probably.”
“I suppose I found it a little intimidating,” Teresa said.
“The nakedness?”
“No, oh no, not that. Naked and unadorned. We are used to that. But, no, the warmth, the color, the beauty that he found there. Never tired of. This old man-old for those days-and going blind.”
They sat on a bench near the lake, a group of shovelers and gray-winged teals arguing testily about some torn bread that had been tossed their way.
“I spoke to your friend, Charlie Resnick, not so long ago.”
“Your friend, too.”
“I think so,” Teresa said.
“Did he know you were meeting me?”
“He knew it was a possibility.”
“I see.”
“He says you might be going to help him.”
“I don’t know.”
When she moved, Teresa’s arm brushed the back of Grabianski’s hand, his wrist, certainly it was a mistake. “I think,” she said slowly, “that if you could, you should.”
He smiled, the skin wrinkling around the edges of his mouth, his eyes. “For the greater good?”
“For your good.”
“Penance, is this? Atonement for my sins?”
“Perhaps. If you believe. But maybe something more practical, too. I’m not saying I wouldn’t visit you in Lincoln, or whichever prison it might be, but that wouldn’t be the same as in God’s good air, would it now?” Briefly, she returned his smile. “No more exhibitions then.”
“There’s meant to be a good show in Cornwall,” Grabianski said. “The Tate at St. Ives. Rothko. I don’t know if you …”
“We’ll see,” Teresa said, already on her feet. “Maybe we’ll see.”
Thirty-five
“Someone to see you,” Carl grinned.
Resnick looked up from the interview transcripts he was reading through and there was Mollie, skinny black trousers, a vivid Lycra top, clumpy sandals, two styrofoam cups balanced one on top of the other on the palm of one hand, a plastic bag clutched in the other. “This coffee might not be so hot,” she said. “It’s already been to Canning Circus. They told me you were here.”
“Come on in,” Resnick said.
Carl Vincent closed the door behind her and walked off in search of Lynn. Something she had wanted him to do.
“Black, gay, and a policeman,” Mollie said with a backward nod of the head. “Things are looking up.”
“How do you know?” Resnick asked. “He doesn’t exactly advertize.”
Mollie gave a small, enigmatic smile. “Oh, you can tell,” she said. “You learn.” She perched on a table corner, taking in the bare walls, the lightbulb that still lacked a shade. “Promotion, is it, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“Smaller than the office I used to have and that’s saying something.” She jumped down and retrieved cups and bag. “We could have this outside. Better than being cooped up in here.”
There was a bench, battered and heavily graffitied, but a bench nonetheless, by the top of the broad crumbling steps that led down to Park Valley. Mollie handed Resnick his cup and delved inside the plastic bag, lifting out a package wrapped in aluminum foil, which she placed between them cautiously.