2. Berlin
BERLIN
On the rooftop deck of the Schultz Foundation offices, with its view of the verdigris cupolas of the Berliner Dom, Greta moved through reception, chatting with guests and reveling in her newfound milieu.
That these people had invited her, that they even knew who she was, was in itself a kind of fantasy fulfilled.
The events that day—a culmination of a full year of high-stakes decisions and one especially thrilling purchase—had started with the signing of documents at the auction house.
There was the unveiling of the seven paintings for a select audience at the National Gallery, followed by a private lunch with members of the Schultz family.
After a flurry of interviews with various media outlets in the early afternoon, the family and their close friends had gathered at the foundation offices.
Greta was thanked for her calm, steady guidance.
She was complimented for her expertise and aesthetic sensibilities.
She wanted to hold on to the day forever.
After the last speech had been delivered and the final trays of wine and H?ppchen had been passed, she said her goodbyes, starting with the family’s patriarch, Sebastian Schultz.
He shook her hand, smiling more warmly than he ever had before.
One of his matronly daughters, always in florals and pearls, opened her arms for a stiff hug and handed her a bottle of Taittinger in a gift box.
And then Sebastian’s granddaughter Vanessa, the family member who had shown the most interest in the art itself, the woman who had made this all happen, stopped her at the door.
“ Ich habe einen Vorschlag ,” Vanessa said. “If you’ll take me on, I want to be your next client. Only me this time around, so no family quarrels. And unlike my grandfather, I say Alte Meister be damned! I want contemporary art.”
Greta’s pulse quickened at the idea of starting a project. She’d quit her job at an auction house to work for the Schultz family and needed new clients now that their collection was complete.
“Of course my budget is a lot lower,” Vanessa went on, “but I think we could have some fun. Can we meet sometime next week?”
“I’d love to, but I’m leaving for New York Sunday,” Greta said, hoping that the distance between them wouldn’t put off her potential new client.
“Lucky,” she said. “When are you back?”
“In a year,” said Greta, and she loved the sound of it. “My husband’s taking a sabbatical. But there’s no reason we can’t—”
“ Perfekt ,” Vanessa said, waving her hand as though an ocean between them posed no obstacle. “Let’s catch up with each other in the fall. Meanwhile, you can keep me in the loop with all the galleries there.”
Apparently, whenever Vanessa appeared, doors opened.
“In that case, yes,” Greta said, “I’d love to work with you.”
Vanessa smiled with an air of wealth and possibility. “You and I,” she said with a spirited nod, “are going to shake things up.”
It was still light out when Greta’s taxi dropped her in front of her building in Charlottenburg.
She climbed the stairs to the top floor and turned the key, stepping out of her high heels in the entry.
The apartment was quiet, making her miss the days when she would have been greeted on a Friday night with the sounds of pop music and the high-pitched voices of Emmi and her friends.
She walked down the hall to find her husband in their bedroom, packing a large suitcase.
He’d closed the curtains, and the bedroom felt like a cave.
“Well, hallo ,” Otto said as she walked in. “How went it today? All was okay?”
From the moment Otto’s New York sabbatical had been approved, he’d insisted on speaking only English at home. Greta was happy to oblige because—while she spoke English almost as well as she spoke German, thanks to her American mother and years of summer camp in Maine—Otto needed the practice.
“The Schultz family was very happy,” she said.
“I hope they are, given how much euros they have spent.” He patted her shoulder affectionately. “You look changed.”
“They had a hairstylist and makeup artist at the television station,” she said.
Otto turned his attention back to his suitcase. “I can’t find my blue and white sleep-suit,” he said.
It was mostly Otto’s vocabulary that needed work; he had a habit of relying on direct translation, which often failed. Other times he picked the wrong word out of thin air.
“In the laundry,” she said. “I’ll have it all done tomorrow.”
“ Schau mal ,” he said, indicating his mostly full suitcase, “a good start, yes? I have not so much to do before we are leaving.”
Greta had already finished packing; her two suitcases were in the entry, ready to go.
“I thought you were having dinner tonight with one of your symposium speakers,” she said.
Otto checked his watch. “Yes, and he is so impressive,” he said. “He made a very good lecture today.”
“And your talk?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “I wish I had time to practice with you. My slides are, mmm, gut genug , but some of the English is schwer . I will never be as… liquid as you.”
“Fluent. And you’ll be fine,” she said, relieved not to be subjected to an hour-long presentation on the removal of bunions, at least not while she was still buzzing with energy from the day’s events.
“I must make myself ready for dinner,” he said, and went into the bathroom.
Greta talked to him through the closed door.
“I called Emmi this morning,” she said. Their nineteen-year-old was at the university in Freiburg—as far away from Berlin as she could have gone.
But this summer she would be living with them in New York.
Greta was so happy to know they would have coffee together every morning before Emmi’s internship and go to concerts and plays on the weekends.
“She says the firm is somewhere in midtown on the East Side—Weiss, Watkins, and something or other. It’s not the easiest commute, but she’ll manage. ”
Greta kept thinking they must be overlooking some detail for the trip, but it seemed they were really ready to go.
They had passports, plane tickets to Newark, and a furnished two-bedroom faculty apartment waiting for them on Riverside Drive.
While Emmi and Otto were at work, Greta would get fully versed on the American contemporary art scene, visiting galleries and meeting artists.
A former colleague, now working at Sotheby’s, had already invited her to the opening party for a sculptor who was having a solo exhibition at an art space in Brooklyn.
She straightened a frame on the wall that held a small woodcut by Kirchner that she’d found in Prenzlauer Berg.
“Otto,” she said brightly, over the sound of running water, “the Schultz granddaughter wants to hire me to build her art collection.” She could hear Otto gargling.
“Vanessa is a force. She has such confidence.” Confidence and very expensive-looking jewelry.
Greta ran her hand over her hair, still stiff with hair spray from the photo shoot where she’d smiled alongside Sebastian Schultz and the museum director in front of Girl with a Red Turban , a Vermeer that had been presumed forever lost and that Greta had managed to acquire.
“She’s only in her early thirties,” she said, “but she has great instincts, and she’s very”—Greta paused, trying to find the right descriptor for her new client—“bold.”
From inside the bathroom, Otto made a guttural yelp, half bark, half cry. Greta’s first thought was that he’d fallen.
“Otto?” She knocked on the door. “What happened?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are you okay?” she called out as the sound of running water stopped.
He pulled open the door, his eyes wide. He was holding a washcloth in one hand, his phone in the other. “He can’t do this.” He dropped the washcloth on the floor and walked off, staring at his phone.
“Who can’t do… what?”
“My new boss—the Arschloch —he halted my sabbatical funding.”
“Halted?” Greta felt the joy of the day evaporate in an instant. “That’s not possible. We’re about to—”
“?‘ Aufgrund von Budgetkürzungen,’ blah blah blah …” Otto said, scrolling through the message. “He says I can’t go.”
“No, but…” Greta’s face flushed in anger. “It’s too late—”
“He’s sorry for any problem this might cause.” Otto dropped down on the foot of the bed and put his head in his hands. “I thought I would get eine Pause from the politics of my work, and have more nicer colleagues at last.”
“Otto,” Greta said, overcome by a wave of disappointment for them both.
Otto stomped his foot on the floor. “Thirty years at the same institution, and I’m all the time disrespected.”
She had heard this refrain many times of late and had not wanted to believe it was true, but maybe Otto had seen the situation accurately.
“They have been looking for a way to push me down for months,” he went on, “and Moritz the Monster and the new Arschloch department chair have finally done it. Wie peinlich! ” he said.
“No, Otto,” said Greta, but it was embarrassing; they’d told everyone their plans. She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. One of them needed to keep calm. “ Schatz? ” she said. “As terrible as this is, I don’t think we can solve this crisis right now.”
“I will write a letter of protest—”
“Yes, but what about your dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Your dinner with the symposium speaker?”
Otto looked at her, panicked. “ Schei?e .” He jumped up. “What time is it? Oh Gott, Oh Gott , I have to go.”
“Try to breathe,” said Greta, following Otto to the front door.
He put on his raincoat. “I feel like I’m being demolished.”
Diminished? she thought. But that was almost worse.
Sliding his phone in his pocket, Otto stepped into his loafers, adjusting the arch inserts. “At least the man I’m taking for dinner is ein guter Typ . Friendly and… gro?zügig ?”
“Generous,” Greta said.
“Yes, he is the kind of colleague I wish to have.”
Greta patted his back. “Too bad you can’t join his lab,” she said sympathetically.
Otto gave her a nod and rushed out.
Greta closed the door and made tight fists with her hands, reeling from the dramatic shift in mood. It couldn’t be possible that New York was being stolen away from them, after all the planning, all the anticipation.
And she had no one to share in what had been—up until now—a most remarkable day, a day that had made news not just in Berlin, but across Europe.
She poured herself a glass of wine and took it out onto the balcony, where she saw Otto disappear into a cab and speed away.
Across the street, a young couple kissed under the light of a doorway.
A breeze caused Greta’s silk skirt to flutter against her knees, and she heard music coming from her American neighbor’s apartment below. The base was thumping.
She leaned over the stone balustrade, and there was Adam, sitting on his own balcony. He looked up and smiled at her.
“Hey, you,” he said, getting to his feet. “How did it go today?”
Now that her night had taken an epically unpleasant turn, Greta found herself at a loss for words. “It was… fine,” she said.
“ Fine? No need to be humble. You know, you were in the New York Times International Edition today: Under the careful guidance of Greta von Bosse, the Schultz Collection is a national treasure that… totally kicks ass, I’m paraphrasing.
I’d demand my personal tour if you weren’t leaving,” he said. “New York ho!”
For a split second, she thought he was calling her a ho. “Yes, westward ho,” she said.
She couldn’t bear to talk about Otto’s lost sabbatical, so she held up her phone, miming an incoming call, and ducked back inside.
She felt completely unmoored and tried to remember the pride and pleasure of the past weeks as the Schultz family, museum directors, and the press acknowledged her for having formed a collection of European masterpieces—all portraits of women, from every walk of life, from the lowly to the sublime.
The sixteenth- to nineteenth-century paintings, depicting femininity in every form, were now on display in a single room bearing the Schultz name, and she had done her part to create that.
She would not let the change of plans derail her.
She looked around her beloved apartment.
She’d recently had the old herringbone floors restored to a beautiful finish.
The apartment had all its original fixtures, the hardware on the doors, the medallions on the ceilings.
They’d lived here for fifteen years, and she had everything the way she liked it.
Leaving this apartment to go to New York had seemed worth it; she had hoped that she and Otto would find a new kind of joy there, on their own and, more important, with each other.
And that’s when the worst part of Otto’s news dawned on her: Emmi! Greta was losing the gift of a summer with her daughter living under her roof.
Madison???$1,278.26
Nell????$6.09
Katie????$3,247.90
Cynthia??? $337,221.20
Lilly????$17,620.37
Allie????$743.99
Maggie???$347.52
Becca????$73,247.00
Grace????$24,872.21