Page 93 of Flirting with Forever

“Hey, I don’t need you to read it. I just need you to buy it.”

He laughed and pointed toward the former carriage house. “Everyone’s around back.”

Everyone?

She nodded her thanks and cut through the English garden Ball and wife had designed to complement the Tudor house and made her way to the massive brick structure that ran along the north edge of the property. Ball had replaced the wooden doors with a deceptively secure set of sliding ones. Cam pressed the bell and waited while two roving cameras turned their steely eyes in her direction. She smiled, waved, and a moment later, Ball’s voice crackled to life on the speaker.

“There you are, my dear. Come in.”

The bell box made an unobtrusive click, and the door gave way.

She could hear the buzz of voices atop the narrow set of stairs to Ball’s office. Rather than interrupt, she stepped around the Klee and the Kelly he had leaning against the wall of the entry hall and walked toward the huge, well-lit gallery.

The change in lighting made her gasp unexpectedly, but when her eyes adjusted, she saw why. Every wall, every ledge, every nook held a stunning white-painted canvas. Not just white. There were occasional undulating waves of black line and flashes of orange, and the white was not just white but a silky, warm, soft white, like gardenia petals, that made her want to leap onto the canvas and roll in it. At first she thought the works were identical in execution, despite the fact some were rectangular, some were square, and the sizes ranged from three-by-four or so to well over ten-by-ten. But, no, each painting held a different piece of the puzzle, a different nuance of the artist’s message. In some the lines were curved, in others the lines were angular, and in still others there was no line at all. Then there were the intriguing swatches of orange in two or three of the canvases that seemed intended to shock. And the sheer number of canvases! There had to be forty paintings here.

She was dimly aware of the opening of the security door behind her and the Post-Gazette guy stepping in. He was still chattering on the phone, and while she was wholly focused on the work in front of her, she picked up enough bits and pieces to figure out he was working on a story here.

She took a step back to try to let the sense of the work come to her. She had been taken in by the enormity of the effort and had then focused on the details. She wanted to clear her head to see the collection as a whole.

She closed her eyes and opened them.

This time her gasp reflected a sensibility struck to its core. The paintings weren’t simply a collection of variations on an abstract theme. In a gestalt of understanding that nearly knocked her off her feet, she saw the lines transformed into the rise of a hip, the sensual extension of an arm, the peak of a nipple, an eye, the lacing of fingers. It was a woman—or the semblance of one—stretched over many canvases, first in the act of love, a hand over her head, gazing, half lidded, in a primal rapture with her lover, then, postcoitus, resting languidly, and finally, locked in her lover’s protective arms as she slept, peaceful and secure.

The room grew warm. She could feel the heat of the desire, the plain, unspoken need, and afterward, the joy in closeness. This artist—clearly a man, but not just any man—knew what it was to possess and to be possessed—by sex, by love, and by joy. Cam, who had seen many an untoward canvas, found herself almost uncomfortable to be witness to such unfettered emotion, and especially to be sharing the experience with a reporter she hardly knew. It was like peeking into the bedroom of happily married close friends without their knowing, the idea embarrassing and pornographic, yet in some way immeasurably reassuring.

As a work of art, it was amazing—breathtaking in its scale and knee-shaking in the range of emotions it portrayed, from lust and desire to pleasured weariness to deep love. And everything sprang from no more than a few dozen expertly scribed lines. She thought of Wyeth’s Helga paintings, the last time she had seen such an affecting opus, and as she did, she heard Ball enter the room, talking. She pushed that aside momentarily, though, too engrossed in the thought of Wyeth’s paean to his model, the Scandinavian Helga Testorf, whom he painted scores of times, standing and lying down, dressed and nude, over the course of fifteen years, keeping the paintings secret until he sprang the whole collection on an amazed art world. In fact, it was Helga’s Teutonic red hair that—

Cam froze. The flashes of orange were not just an artistic embellishment. They were patches of hair—long waves falling gracefully over shoulders or shorter coarse patches slipping intimately between pale thighs. And in a single heart-stopping instant she realized the patches, all of them, were hers. The slightly lopsided mouth, the upturned nipples, the beauty marks on the neck and cheek. Everything was hers, hers, hers.

“…amazing, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tell me, Cam?” Ball said. “How long have you known? It’s such an eyeful. And from a complete unknown.”

Ball was talking to her, though she could hardly hear him, so horrifying was this assault on her privacy. She wanted to run, but her legs seemed to be made of rubber. She wanted to cry out, but her tongue was paralyzed.

“He won’t sign any of them,” Ball went on blithely, “but at least he titled it. It’s called Wednesday Afternoons.”

Suddenly she felt prickles on her neck and knew with complete certainty Peter was behind her, watching her reaction.

“As for more details,” Ball said, “I have nothing to contribute. That’s just what I was telling this reporter here. I know he thinks it would be a huge story in the art world, but our friend is quite insistent that the identity of the woman—”

Cam wheeled around and looked at Peter. “How dare you paint me!”

“—was not to be revealed.”

Ball’s eyes widened, but not as much as the reporter’s. The reporter looked at Cam, then said into his phone, “Put me through to Reuters.”

Forty-one

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Cam said to Peter.

Chaos had exploded in the gallery. The reporter reeled his story into the phone at double speed, like he was afraid it might slip away, while Ball, who knew how much the directorship meant to her and the deleterious effect this story would have on her chances, essayed a series of urgent, low-toned, and undoubtedly fruitless pleas as to why the story, or at least the revelation that the subject of the paintings was Campbell Stratford, should be buried. Three art collector types trooped in on the heels of Ball’s wife, who could be heard saying, “…It’s absolutely the Mount Everest of public fornications.” They were followed by a server carrying a tray of coffee and pastries who called, “Careful, Natasha, careful,” as she tried not to trip over the family dog, and Natasha herself, who in true Labrador fashion bounded among the humans with a mouthful of a plush woodpecker toy as if she were the only creature on Earth.

“Painting is what I do,” Peter said irritably. “It’s my livelihood, you may recall.” He wore a suit the color of midnight, a pale blue shirt open at the neck, and a meticulously groomed three-day growth of beard that brought to mind an older Clive Owen. His hair had been cut short, bringing out the curl, and the dog made such a beeline for him one would have thought he had a pork chop in his pocket. Dogs, she thought philosophically, should be taught not to reward the wicked.

“That,” she said, pointing to the cyclorama of embarrassment that surrounded them, “is not your livelihood.” She began a silent list of the people to whom she’d have to explain this horror—a list that began with her mother and Lamont Packard and ended with Rusty the maintenance man and the nice old lady at the dry cleaners. “Nor, might I add, is it the truth.”

“Which part?” Peter crouched to offer a vigorous two-handed scratch to Natasha, who dropped the woodpecker devotedly at his feet.

Cam glanced at each unexpurgated vignette, looking for the one that would prove him a liar, but at each detail a blurred memory of the evening they’d shared sharpened into embarrassing focus. And yet the details together gave the impression of a much different liaison than had occurred. Why, the title alone suggested secret meetings and a long, clandestine affair—the sort, she thought with a bitter shake of her head, she had actually wanted to share with him once. But there was no one detail to which she could point and say, “That did not occur.”