Quattrocento Read online

  “I didn’t write a journal. I wrote memos,” she said, turning the pages. She stopped. “Matt, this is beautiful.” She quickly glanced at the next page, and then the next. “You did these? They are superb.” She turned the pages back slowly, examining each one.

  Matt looked over the counter to see what she had found. “I’d forgotten those,” he said. “They’re from Gubbio.” He had spent a week there. Early June, when the days were long, but the heat had not yet settled into the stones and fields. It was the sun he remembered most of all. It was everywhere, saturating the air. Alone, he woke early in the cool bed, the bright lines that seeped through the heavy wooden shutters warm across his face. From the café he would walk the short distance to the palazzo to spend the morning sketching. Long and blue as he passed through them at that early hour, by midday the shadows would be folded tightly in on themselves, as black as the ink in his pen and razor-thin, hiding in the doorways and under the sills and overhanging eaves.

  “You should frame these,” Sally said. “Or at least mount them. They’re absolutely wonderful. The line, the way you have created that feeling of light.”

  “I love drawings,” Matt said. “They’re at the heart of everything. Like you said, distillation—paintings are novels, but drawings are poetry. And making one—you’ve got a blank page, and in your hand a pen. Two poles of nothingness, black and white. You draw a line, but it’s not a line. The black defines the white, they shape each other. It’s not what you draw or the places you leave blank. It’s not the shadows and the light, but finding that intersection where they meet. That’s where the world begins and ends. And if you can find it, if you can allow yourself to see it—there is nothing like that at all. Nothing.”

  “So why did you stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “You know what I mean. This is a major talent.”

  Matt stirred the clams and added some wine. “Haven’t you heard the news? Ask Kent. Or—” He almost said Karen, but caught himself just in time. He had completely forgotten the entire episode at the party; he had been too hung over the next morning to want to deal with it, and Sally seemed to have forgotten, so he allowed himself to just let it go. But she had talked to Karen. He knew she had. He briefly thought of asking again, but dropped the idea. While Sally might not remember talking to Karen—and she hadn’t really talked to her, they had only exchanged greetings—he was quite sure that she hadn’t forgotten being upset. “Or anyone,” he added, covering his change of direction by pretending to adjust the heat under the pasta, just coming to a boil. “Figurative art is dead. The world belongs to Alton.”

  “Oh, that’s bullshit. Yes, it is, Matt, and you know it. What about Hopper? Or Anselm Kiefer? Willem de Kooning made millions. Look at Jeff Koons. He’s getting rich.”

  “Koons has nothing to do with those other guys. Nothing. You’ve heard of puzzle pictures? They were all the rage in the Mannerist period. Veronese, guys like that. Their paintings were filled with allegories and allusions. The whole idea was to make a select group of viewers feel like insiders, because they knew what it all meant. The fact that the paintings were usually pretty bad didn’t matter because that wasn’t what they were looking for. Koons is doing exactly the same thing. He makes you feel like you ‘get it.’ You’re one of the cognoscenti. What’s truly sick is that the only thing to be gotten is how awful it is. So if you say that is total shit, people just nod and say yeah, with this knowing smile like some kind of secret handshake. Or they say you’ve lost your sense of humor. Yeah, right. When was the last time a great work of art—a really great work—made you laugh? Profound. Use that word now and people laugh at you.

  “This stuff isn’t art. It’s talk, with art as the prop. It’s only an excuse. Like a fund-raiser at the museum. The art is just the backdrop.”

  “What a whiner! Yes, you are! Listen to yourself. You can’t do exactly as you want so you take your ball and go home. It’s the real world, Matt. Do you think it was ever different? That Rembrandt lived in some paradise of painting as he pleased? You have to play the game, if what you want to do is paint.”

  “Okay, so it’s a game,” Matt said. “But people play games for fun, and for me it’s just not fun.”

  “But it means a lot to you. I think it means everything to you. What makes it sad is that you’re really good.”

  Testing the pasta, Matt just shrugged.

  “Are you willing to take a chance?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Be an artist.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m not independently wealthy. I can’t afford it.”

  “I can.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “I’m serious. I’ll back you. It’s a business proposition. You’ve got the talent and I’m willing to take a chance that the market is there.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sally, I know how things work. The critics would slice me up like the sushi chefs at Nobu working on a prime piece of tuna. If they even deigned to acknowledge what I do as art, which I seriously doubt.”

  “That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That they won’t even see you. All right, fine. It’s your life. For what it’s worth, the offer’s on the table. Think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “You mean, aside from the fact that I love you?” She turned the notebook around and put it down on the counter. “This is why.”

  The shadows echoed the graceful arch of the loggia, providing some shade from the sun. He had drawn the fountain underneath, embedded in one of the walls of the palazzo. A hot summer afternoon, the still air redolent with the soothing wetness stirred up by the water in the fountain—he felt it again, smelled its fullness, carrying with it the scent of wild rosemary and thyme. Feet crunched across the gravel drive outside, fading away, leaving Matt alone in the silence of the courtyard. It was soon broken by the harsh buzzing of a cicada, joined by another and then others until the air pulsed with a slow cadence, a Gregorian chant stretching unbroken across the length and breadth of Italy. It was the sound made by the radiant blizzard of sunlight that filled the courtyard to overflowing, dazzling him as it pelted against the walls and the tightly shuttered windows and the dusty flagstones, as smooth as a riverbed from centuries of wear.

  Matt was content to stand in the cool shelter of the arcade, the plastered groins in the reflected light a creamy yellow overhead. In the palazzo wall next to him was the fountain, the water slipping out of the gargoyle’s gaping green marble mouth, his eyes wide in a look of perpetual surprise. Startled out of him, the water ran wet and dark down the glistening wall into the basin, deep and cool, the surface of the water unbroken and smooth. There had been a pool in the river that ran down through the ravine, he remembered, just as still and undisturbed, the stones of the bottom magnified, crystal clear. Which river? He thought back, trying to remember. Was it also Gubbio? He saw the river cascading down the steep defile, pulsing like a vein through the old stone town, the water white and cold against the granite rocks. No; there had been no pool there, no quiet unbroken spot—no sunny afternoon that he now could see so clearly in his mind’s eye, the water invisible but for the few patches where the sun gleamed, or where delicate arrows traced the passage of water spiders.

  A fig tree, there had been a fig tree—still flowering, it rose by the tall grass to the side of the clearing where they had the picnic. Walking along the path through the hemlocks, catching sight of the gleam of the water under the late morning sun, hearing the voices behind calling back and forth and laughter and the calls of the songbirds—there was grass underfoot, and the sun sparkling through the still leaves, the woods merging into a translucent depth of the steep hillside, echoing with the bright call of birds. The brilliant sun, and the leaves, tossing overhead in the wind, and shadows and then the terrible dissonance he could not forget, the harsh roar of the wolf tone, rising from deep inside—

  “Matt!” Sally said. “The pasta�
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  Sally reached past him over the counter and turned the heat off under the pot as a mountain of white foam towered up.

  Matt, dizzy, leaned his weight on his hands, feeling the marble, smooth and cool, reassuringly solid.

  “Matt, are you okay?” Sally asked, holding him by one wrist.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s this dream.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so vivid, and then— I’m in the woods. It’s sunny. Beautiful. But then there’s this shadow, and this terrible sound—”

  “Have you had it before?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “I told you—at the party. When I was looking at Charles’s painting.”

  Sally looked at him, as though she were waiting for him to go on.

  “The painting of the hunt, in his study—” Matt stopped. It was obvious that she had no idea what he was talking about. “I’d better strain the pasta,” he said.

  “Let me do it,” Sally said. “You sit down. I think you’ve been working too hard.”

  “Yes,” Matt said, easing onto a stool. “We both have. I don’t know if I can wait until June.”

  “What happens then?” Sally asked, the pasta sliding into the colander in a gush of boiling water.

  “We’re going to Italy,” Matt said.

  “We are?” Sally asked. She set down the colander and came around to Matt. “That’s such a lovely idea,” she said, embracing him. “How long have you been thinking about this? June. I hope I can still get away.”

  “Look, I know I sound like the worst reactionary iconoclast in the world,” Matt said, as they began to eat. Perhaps if he returned to the earlier conversation—maybe it was him, after all. It wasn’t that things didn’t add up, it was what wasn’t adding up that was so confusing. It was all equally believable. Had they planned on going to Italy? He knew they had, but now he knew just as well that they hadn’t. First Karen, and now the painting, and the trip; yes and no, it could go either way, he remembered it all. So if he went back and tried again, found some connection—

  “No, not at all. You’re right about Koons.”

  “But I can’t help it,” Matt said, relieved to be back on safe ground. “I work surrounded by great art. It’s my life. They frame it in terms of then and now, old and new. Great to me means timeless. I mean, take this portrait of Anna. She could be alive right now. I don’t look at her and think Quattrocento, to me she is just a beautiful woman caught at a moment anyone can immediately relate to, looking at her child.”

  “Anna?” Sally asked.

  “The name I use,” Matt said. “It personalizes her. I’ve spent a lot of time with her in the past two months.”

  “No kidding.”

  Matt looked at her. “You’re jealous,” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re jealous of a painting. You think I’ve fallen in love with her or something?” Matt laughed. “Like the guard at the Louvre. Did I ever tell you about him? He fell in love with the Mona Lisa. Worse than that, though, he was convinced she felt the same way. It got to the point that he would tell people not to stare at her because it made her nervous and she didn’t like it. They had to retire him.”

  “Could we not have this conversation right now?”

  Matt stared at her in surprise. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

  “Anna. She sounds wonderful. Why don’t you take her to Italy?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Matt snapped, all his fear and confusion boiling over into anger.

  “No, it isn’t! What am I supposed to think, Matt? I don’t know what’s happening with us. You’ve become so remote, it’s like I don’t even exist for you anymore. I’m not jealous of a painting because, yes, I frankly don’t think she is just a painting to you! I think this idea of yours for us to go to Italy is just because you feel guilty. No, that’s not fair. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” Sally covered her eyes.

  She’s crying, Matt thought. I don’t believe this is happening. What did I do?

  “I just don’t know what’s happening, Matt,” Sally said. “I love you. But it doesn’t seem to matter.”

  I know, Matt wanted to say. I know; it doesn’t seem to make any difference, and it should.

  chapter 6

  Matt, waiting for the signal, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, legs flexed and body sideways to his opponent. The thin blades of the foils hung in the air, tips almost touching, a double image dressed in white with silver ovals where faces should be. At the harsh buzz the two men dropped slightly, testing their legs, the tips of their blades circling each other like dragonflies engaged in a mating dance. Matt let his adversary take the advance, short step by short step, ready for the lunge. When it came, a blur of silver, the sharp zinging of the blades as they sliced against each other raced up his forearm. A quick circle of his wrist threw the oncoming blade aside and then Matt was headed in, fast, only to find himself again turned aside just before touching home. With a quick circle his opponent disengaged his blade and then retreated. Matt, continuing the attack, lunged ahead in full extension, but with a deft movement his blade was deflected into the emptiness between his attacker’s torso and arm and Matt was brought to a halt by a dull point resting lightly on his pectoral muscle, a bare inch from his heart. The buzzer sounded.

  Twice more the dance was repeated, each time ending as it had the first time, once with Matt’s blade being the one to make the touch. The final buzz caught him in the midst of a last desperate attack to try to even the score. He stopped, rose to his full height and saluted. The air felt cool on his drenched head when he took off his mask. Holding the foil and mask under his arm, he shook Klein’s extended hand.

  “Next time,” Klein said.

  “You haven’t even broken a sweat,” Matt protested.

  “Economy of motion,” Klein replied. He glanced at the clock. “It’s still early. If you’re free, perhaps you might like to see that drawing I mentioned.”

  “Sure,” Matt replied, his curiosity piqued. Klein hadn’t said anything more, just mentioned a drawing that he thought Matt might find of interest, whatever that meant.

  The cold air outside the gym was bracing after the humid warmth inside. A light snow drifted from the enveloping black of the night sky, a fine white silt that vanished before it reached the sidewalk. As the two men descended the steep hill to Riverside Drive a breeze off the river ruffled through the tall trees of the park, making the snow dance and eddy through the luminous pools of light held aloft by the old cast-iron streetlamps.

  Klein opened the door of his apartment to the sound of a piano. It wasn’t until a slight faltering of the tempo that Matt, taking off his coat, realized it wasn’t a recording. Like music remembered rather than heard, the notes had a dreamlike timbre, the faint dry echo of hail on a frozen field. The apartment, spare and modern, was almost devoid of furniture. The hallway was bare but for a series of photographs, chrome frames against a white wall, and a narrow carpet on the wood floor, the subtle pattern of blue on blue barely discernible. Matt, as he followed Klein into the living room, caught a quick glimpse of a pool table through a door opposite, the splash of black and white on the wall above it unmistakably a Jackson Pollock. The walls of the living room ended in the night, a curtain of glass that framed the lights of the city and the wide emptiness of the river. The snow transformed the view into a lithograph, a thickly textured abstraction of gray and black.

  Seated at the keyboard, a young woman with short black hair, spiked and dyed silver at the ends, played with a delicate grace, barely touching the keys. Bach? Matt thought, knowing that he was probably wrong, that anything Baroque sounded like Bach to him. He realized why the sound had been so distant and ethereal, for the instrument was not a piano at all, but some earlier ancestor—a harpsichord, perhaps. The small oblong case of dark fruitwood had two keyboards, one over the other, the white keys not ivory but the honey yellow of old boxwood.
Inside the cover, propped open by a stick carved in the shape of an elongated sylph, was a painted scene of sprites dancing in a sylvan glade.

  As they paused for a moment, listening as the young woman played on, unaware of their presence, Matt gradually realized that something was out of place. What was wrong? Not false notes; while no expert, he could still tell that the music had the proper flow to it, that what he was hearing was what he was supposed to hear. It wasn’t the distinctive timbre of the sound, for he had quickly gotten used to that. It was out of tune. That was it—he could hear it right there, in a long scale, up the keyboard—the instrument was simply out of tune. Wincing, he glanced at Klein. Unbelievable. Head tilted to one side and a faraway look in his eyes, he was oblivious to the discordant notes.

  The doorbell rang, and the music immediately halted, the player’s hands poised above the keyboard. She stood and turned, stopping as she caught sight of Matt and Klein.

  “Excellent,” Klein said.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” the girl said, and then left to answer the door.

  Klein went to the keyboard and sat. He stretched, rubbed his hands together, and then attacked the keys. An explosion of notes poured forth, a cascading series of scales that finally resolved into a series of repeated eighth notes. Matt heard the door open and a familiar voice say, “Ciao, baby. Are you ready? Let’s go.” He watched Klein’s hands as they rhythmically stroked the keys, abruptly shifting to a crashing series of chords that shook the delicate case on its spindly legs in a quick closing cadence.

  “Does our friend Charles know?” Klein asked in the ensuing silence, his hands still resting on the keys.

  “He doesn’t want to know,” Matt replied. “He says that Kent is his own man.”

  “I see.” Klein’s left hand began to sound a note that on each third repetition filled out with a chord. “Before I forget,” he said, as his right hand added a melody on top of the rhythmical base. “On the wall behind you.”