“How did you end up in Texas?” she asked.
“That seems odd to you?”
“Not odd, but… well, interesting.”
“Why?”
She laughed. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know what I mean. I’ll bet you haven’t lived here very long. I mean, not many years, anyway. For one thing, your card: ‘Paul Davies, Dealer in Fine Art.’ Why not ‘Harold Strand’? You bought someone’s business.”
“Harold?”
“Well, whatever.”
“You didn’t ask Truscott? He can be very informative about dealer gossip.”
“I don’t know Mr. Truscott. He was just a ‘trustworthy’ name a London dealer gave me.” She paused. “You’re being evasive.”
“Okay,” Strand conceded. He hated talking about himself and had several stock responses to such questions. “Here’s a cheap version of how I got here. When I was just out of the university-Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina-I went to work for a jewelry importer in New Orleans. I’d gotten a liberal arts degree, which prepared me for nothing in particular and everything in general. The jewelry importer was stingy with his employees and generous with himself. Collected art. It was my first exposure to fine art, and I fell in love with everything about it. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in art history. I worked for a gallery in San Francisco for a while. Learned the business. Opened my own gallery, but apparently I hadn’t learned enough business. I went broke. Got a job with a private collector in New York, an old man who had recently developed a passion for drawings and was raiding Europe. By this time I’d already zeroed in on drawings, too. We continued to educate each other.
“One day he walked in and told me he was dying of cancer. He wanted me to oversee the liquidation of his holdings. He said he wanted to reward me for my services, and since I was putting myself out of a job I might as well get a commission on it. So I became his broker rather than his employee. It was a generous gift. In one form or another, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
“You’ve spent most of your career in New York?”
“No. London. Rome. Paris. Geneva. Vienna. Those are the places where I’d built my connections when I was buying for the old man, so that’s where I headed and stayed. The old guy was good to me. He knew what kind of education I was getting.”
“Did you meet your wife in Europe?”
“My first wife?”
She nodded, but he saw immediately that she had actually meant Romy. He told her about his first wife. She had been the daughter of a British MP who was a promoter of the EC when it was even less popular in England than it was now and who had more money than his profligate daughter could spend even in her most irresponsible binges. He told her briefly of their life in London, of his wife’s indiscretions, of her destructive addictions, of her hair-raising escapades in polite society, and of her attempts at suicide.
After all that, Mara didn’t have the heart to ask about Romy. He knew she wouldn’t.
“So you lived mostly in London.”
“A lot over the years, but not mostly.”
“Always as an art dealer?”
“Always.”
“So…” She repeated her first question: “How did you end up in Texas?”
Strand reached out and closed the portfolio. Behind her the courtyard was losing its light as the Gulf clouds built up outside. It was beginning to look like rain. The contrast of light and shadow in the library was softening to a monochromatic gray.
“Paul Davies went to Europe every year to buy art,” Strand said. “He was from California, but he’d married a woman from Houston and moved here nearly thirty years ago. He was a very fine dealer, and I’d known him most of that time. When he died five years ago, his wife called me and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying his business. Romy and I were feeling adventurous. We took her up on her offer and moved to Houston. Paul had built a respectable reputation in the U.S. Since I’d spent most of my time in Europe and was less well known here, it just seemed to make good business sense to retain his name.” He opened his hands. “It was that simple.”
“No ego involved? You didn’t want to use your own name?”
“I have to make a living. Ego follows that.”
Mara looked around at the library and the house. “Just how good does your living have to be before you can give your ego a little satisfaction?”
Strand shrugged. “I have a low-maintenance ego.”
Mara stared at him, her head turned ever so slightly at an angle, almost as if she were listening for something. Her face was a study in thoughts that seemed to venture far beyond the present conversation.
“I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be interested in going to an art exhibit with me this afternoon?”
“The Menil surrealist exhibit?”
“Yes… exactly.”
“You know,” he said, “I would.”
CHAPTER 7
Strand asked her to stay for lunch, suggesting that they go to the Menil Museum immediately afterward. Though surprised by the invitation, she agreed. Strand called Meret to join them, and they went across the courtyard to the kitchen.
While the two women started a tuna salad, Strand began cutting potatoes into thin strips, which he then deep-fried until they were nut brown and crispy. When everything was ready, Meret put on a Wynton Marsalis CD, lowered the volume, and they sat at the long refectory table in the middle of the kitchen.
It was their usual custom that Strand and Meret lunched together in the kitchen. Sometimes she went out and sometimes he did, but generally they prepared casual lunches of sandwiches or salads in the kitchen nearly every day. They talked or didn’t talk, read, listened to music. It was relaxed and without ceremony. On occasion one of Meret’s girlfriends might join them, which Strand always enjoyed. Now and then another art dealer who was visiting Strand when lunchtime arrived might be asked to stay. But Strand’s invitations were reserved for the few people with whom he felt especially comfortable.
The conversation never flagged, and the two women quickly established an easygoing rapport. They could easily have lingered at the table for the rest of the afternoon, but soon the telephone began to ring, and Meret excused herself. Strand and Mara put away the food, cleaned up the dishes, and then left for the museum.
The Menil’s surrealist holdings were famous, and Strand had seen exhibitions from them as often as they had been presented over the four years he had been in Houston. The surrealists were always popular, and he was not surprised to find a crowd at the museum. Which suited him perfectly. He had come not to see the exhibit, but to see Mara Song.
When they entered the museum Strand stayed with Mara for the first fifteen or twenty minutes and then gradually moved to drawings on an adjacent wall, then to those on the other side of the room, periodically separating himself from her by allowing the ebb and flow of the crowd to come between them. At first she sometimes would glance around to find him, but eventually she became entirely absorbed in the drawings and forgot about him altogether. Carrying her bag over one shoulder and holding her sunglasses in her hand, Mara moved slowly from image to image, concentrating on each drawing as if she were trying to peer into the very fiber of the paper itself. She ignored the unavoidable jostling of the crowd, having eyes only for the individual pieces of art before her, often remaining so long in front of an image that she reminded Strand of one of those photographs in which the central image was the only thing in focus, while the crowds surrounding the subject appeared as a blurry swirl of movement.
He watched her from every angle as they moved through the exhibition rooms, sometimes observing her from only a few feet away, sometimes through a doorway, sometimes glimpsing her through the movement of heads and bodies and limbs of the crowd. What he saw was a woman who was captivated by a form of art that, compared to other media, was an unobtrusive world apart. To genuinely appreciate drawings, one had to be attracted to their inherent subtlety, to their modesty and intimacy. Most collectors of drawings believed that in some elemental way a drawing was a direct link to the mind of the artist in a manner that other forms of expression could not be. When one peered closely enough at the accumulated lines of a drawn image, or even at a few solitary strokes, one could almost believe that one saw the intent of the artist, and sometimes his discipline and sometimes his abandon, in a way that was bracing in its immediacy.