Read Online Artist's Proof by Gordon Cotler - Free Book Online Page B

dinner of his choice. Just the two of us, we haven’t talked in a while. And no, in answer to your reminder, I haven’t forgotten I have a daughter at college.”
    I glanced at Sarah’s laughing photo at the back of the desk and I was reminded again how close in age she was to Cassie Brennan. I said, “And yes, I will come up with my half of the tuition—if I have to earn it painting the white line down the middle of the Montauk Highway.”
    And suddenly the phone was being answered. Perkily. “Hello?… Hello?” It wasn’t Lonnie. “Leona Morgenstern Gallery. May I ask who’s calling?”
    â€œJackie, is that you?” It was; I had recognized her voice. Lonnie’s assistant.
    The voice dropped an octave. “Oh, Officer Shale.” Meaning, I wasn’t a customer, just her boss’s dreary ex-husband, and a hard sell, to boot. Jackie could get all of that into three words. Even Lonnie had told her not to call me “Officer Shale.”
    I bit my tongue and made nice; this woman was sometimes the bridge between me and a possible buyer. I said, “Hi, Jackie, how you doing? Leona around?”
    â€œMs. Morgenstern?” God, this woman was exasperating. Did she think I meant Leona Helmsley? “I’m expecting her in about an hour. I’m just opening up.”
    â€œAt two o’clock? You open the gallery at two o’clock in the afternoon?”
    â€œThis isn’t a doughnut shop, Officer Shale. Our clients don’t buy paintings in the morning.” Subtext: They’re unlikely to buy yours at any time of day and maybe your work would do better hanging in a doughnut shop.
    She went on in that fake cultivated voice that probably fooled nobody, “Did you wish to leave a message?”
    â€œThanks, Jackie, it’s on your tape.” And I got off before I said something that would be reflected in my future sales.
    *   *   *
    O N A FRIDAY afternoon at three I would be driving against the main traffic flow between here and the city, and well before local people left their jobs in the area for home. If there was no major repair work on the LIE, I could make it to the gallery in well under three hours. Lonnie claimed that my usual beachcomber attire failed to inspire confidence in the “collectors,” as she always called them, so I would have to trick myself out in city clothes before I left. That gave me about an hour to work on Large.
    Before I climbed up the scaffold I took a moment to pull out the sketches of Cassie that I hadn’t looked at in months. They hurt. My drawing hand had been more cunning than I remembered. The girl came alive on the paper, her body lithe and playful, her pixie face alternately sly and open. I was no doubt reading more into these drawings than was there, but Cassie Brennan invited that.
    These maudlin thoughts were doing me no good. I put the drawings down on my worktable. Next to them were the two I had done this morning—the beachscapes.
    Was it only this morning? The second drawing, pen and wash, with the Sharanov house filling the foreground, held my eye—as that same elevation of the actual house had held it half an hour ago, when my troubled contemplation of it was interrupted by the arrival of Paulie Malatesta.
    I picked up the drawing. It was true to the occasion; it caught the feeling of that harsh early sun flooding the beachside façade of the many-windowed house—the windows, in my wash, throwing the blinding light back out to sea. The ocean was fretful, the dunes unruly, the rubble-strewn beach forlorn. It said, Will summer never come? A good sketch.
    And yet, something about it bothered me. Was it too facile, or what? Was it the sketch that bothered me or the house itself? Because I had this same feeling when I looked at the house, life size, half an hour ago.
    Maybe bothered was the wrong word. Miss Clavell popped into my