1
My guest’s name is Sebastian. I think he’s in his early twenties, a reasonably good-looking individual with glasses and a nervous manner.
He’s ostensibly a student of art history who’d like to write about a painting in my collection for his dissertation, but I’ve been aware for some time that he’s a liar.
This is our first meeting. I gaze intently at him, but turn down the volume on his words, which is a trick I learned by necessity some years ago, in an era when my late wife and I were spending too much time at dinner parties.
I visualize a still pool and let his ripples play across the surface.
I observe, and then it comes to me. I set my glass down so abruptly that he stops talking.
“You know what would be interesting,” I say.
“What?” He looks a little alarmed.
“It would be interesting if this whole dissertation story were just a cover and in actuality you turned out to be an art thief.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, but a furtive tone has crept into his voice.
Oh, dear boy, I almost say, but I pull back at the last minute.
A decade ago—in my late fifties—I was in the habit of referring to young men as boys, but it’s never too late to rid oneself of bad habits.
“Sebastian,” I tell him, “please don’t be offended, it’s just that I’ve met several of you, over the years. ”
He’s looking around for his umbrella.
“Please don’t leave,” I say. “You’re the most interesting visitor I’ve had in some time.”
“Well, thank you,” he says, trying his best to sound offended, “but I’m not a thief, Ms. Soriano.”
“Okay,” I say, in my brightest tone. “I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Please, go on.”
“What was I saying?”
“Something about Post-Collapse Formalism.”
“Oh. Right.” He’s playing with his glass, rotating it on the table. “I had a health scare, a couple years ago. Have you ever had an MRI?”
“Several. It’s like lying in a coffin, isn’t it?”
“Exactly.” He looks up. “Something about the distance from your body to the walls of the tube, right? Those dimensions are very coffinlike. Anyway, I found it awful, but in a manageable way. I stayed calm. After a while I got used to it, and I’d asked for classical music, so as time passed it became peaceful.
I just listened to the music, and to the voices of technicians, and the clicking noises that the machine made.
And then afterward, I stepped out of the clinic, and stopped just outside the door.
I found myself completely mesmerized by the trees across the street. ”
“Was there something unusual about them?” This section of the apartment has expansive skylights, installed illegally and at great expense by the apartment’s previous owner, and I’ve been aware for some time of the sky darkening. It’s beginning to rain, a soft percussion over our heads.
“I had a feeling of sensory overload.” He sips his drink.
“After the tube, which was extremely featureless, the ordinary details of the world were overwhelming to me. I was caught up by the details of branches, colours, the way the leaves moved in the wind. It was almost too much. I just stood there for a while, staring. I think of Post-Collapse Formalism as that, but in reverse.”
“In reverse.”
“Yes.”
“Tortured analogy,” I say after a moment.
“I’m saying that if a person had too much in the way of sensory overload, you might want to retreat to the equivalent of the MRI tube.” He’s a little flushed.
“Okay.”
“I was born in the thirties,” he says, “so obviously I don’t really remember the collapse years. But there was this prolonged period of unrest, to hear my mother speak of it, and then afterward, this longing for order and stillness. Does that sound right?”
“Yeah,” I say, “I’d agree with that.” But I’m watching him very closely now, because prolonged period of unrest is a quote from the Post-Collapse Formalism Wikipedia page.
There’s movement on the periphery of the room: Pilar, my housekeeper/assistant/French tutor/manager-of-my-entire-life, coming in to switch on the lamps.
She’s lived in this apartment with me for twelve or so years, in a little suite off the library, and she keeps the whole operation going.
There are no overhead lights in this part of the apartment, but there are lamps everywhere, on all the surfaces.
It’s raining harder now, and light slides down the skylight glass.
Pilar switches on the lamp at the table by my side, and the painting I was looking at earlier—Swan Dive, by Lucas Alkaitis, a wash of deep blue with feet disappearing into the waves—is altered.
Warm light works strangely on the blue, turns it into a dark sea filled with menace.
When I observe the painting by lamplight, I fear for the diver.
“Pilar,” I say, “might we have some espresso?”
“I think if I drink espresso at this hour, I’ll be up all night,” Sebastian ventures.
“I don’t like to sleep.” I lean forward, confidingly. “Can we play a game? Just a kind of thought experiment.”
“Okay.”
“What if we said, just for the sake of argument, that you were an art thief.”
“I’m not—”
I give him my warmest, most harmless smile. “Do you know what ‘for the sake of argument’ means?”
He settles back, arms crossed.
“The truth is,” I continue, “I’ve been appallingly bored.”
“Really?” But he’s being kind. My life is objectively boring, and he can probably perceive that even after only knowing me for an hour.
My beloved wife has been dead for two years, and after the first year my grief distilled into a deep stillness that has, over the passage of months, solidified into a set of unchanging routines.
I drift about in my beautiful apartment.
I go to my favourite café and watch the passersby or chat with friends while I eat pastries.
I go to the opera, not because I like opera—I don’t—but because several of my most interesting friends love the opera, and I love chatting with them in the splendour of the lobby.
I sense danger in isolation, and when I’m there I feel closer to Eddie, who went whenever possible.
I still pay for her seat, because I cannot bear the thought of a stranger sitting there, and when I’m mingling with friends in the lobby I like to imagine that she’s just gone to the ladies’ room, or stepped away to speak with someone, and that she might at any moment materialize from the crowd, smiling in one of her oversized suits.
The shiny black oxfords she liked to wear to the opera are lined up neatly by my apartment door. Pilar dusts the shoes and says nothing.
In the mornings I go for walks in parks, very delicately, because some years ago I was caught in an explosion that shattered my left leg.
I like sitting by carousels and watching children glide by on wooden horses, shouting out triumphant reports to their parents as they capture brass rings—“J’en ai cinq!
”—and I like the pool where more serious children and their parents float small sailboats.
I like observing the procession of dogs with their stylish owners.
Hey, buddy, I say quietly, to the dogs who come closest, and this is the only scenario in which I use English in my day-to-day life.
I like spaces in the world where there’s sound and movement, other people, because in those spaces I feel the irrational possibility that my wife might momentarily appear.
After the park I return to my apartment and read books, watch films, stare at paintings, and sometimes—but not very often now, because I’m out of wall space—buy other paintings.
I’m known for my collection of Post-Collapse Formalist art, and to a lesser extent for my paintings from New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There’s a great deal to recommend this life, and it’s certainly a wildly better life than I would’ve imagined for myself, say, twenty years or so ago, when I was imprisoned in what was then the United States.
But it is not, shall we say, exciting. Just in these last few months I’ve begun to wonder if a peaceful life is maybe ever-so-slightly overrated, though that thought pierces me with guilt.
Sebastian is staring at me, and I realize I’ve been gazing up at the rain slipping down the skylight.
My thoughts take longer now than they did before my wife died, or perhaps it’s just that it takes me longer to come back from them.
“You were saying,” he says gently.
“Right, yes. Here’s the question, my friend. If you were an art thief, which I’m not saying you are, what painting would you steal?”
He smiles. “Okay.” He’s looking around the room, playing along.
“That one,” he says finally. He’s pointing at a small painting called Olivia on Yellow Sofa.
And it’s exquisite, I’ll grant him that.
It’s a head-and-shoulders portrait of a beautiful, pensive young woman.
But I was watching him closely just now, and I saw the way he considered all of the paintings except one.
The one he carefully didn’t look at hangs on the wall to his right. He means to steal Swan Dive.
“That’s an excellent choice,” I say. “Olivia on Yellow Sofa. A portrait of the artist Olivia Collins. Exact date unknown, but it would’ve been sometime around 1960.”
“Painted by whom?”
“That I do know. Lucas Alkaitis.” How strange it is to speak normally with this person, to carry on a conversation, when he wishes to steal the object I love most in the world. Swan Dive means more to me than the entire rest of the collection taken together.
“The colours are striking,” he murmurs, returning to his drink. “Do you think we . . . could we take a tour of your other paintings?”
“Of course,” I say, and rise carefully from my chair. Sebastian passes me my cane.