29. New York
NEW YORK
Otto called just moments after Greta woke up. She sat up in the decadent wrought iron bed, having slept surprisingly well, and stretched.
“Good morning,” she said.
“How is New York?”
“Interesting,” said Greta. “My mother is not having an affair with Tobias.”
“As I told you,” he said.
“But she is flying to Mexico, as we speak, to take a trip on a yacht with a group of young men she’s never met.”
“Lillian is full of surprises,” he said. “And you’ll never guess where I am going tonight,” he said.
“Where?”
“A party! I went to Sylvie’s house to cancel for you, and she invited me to come.”
“But I thought—”
“Yes,” he said, “I will be the only man there. She is making for me an exception.”
“I hope you enjoy yourself,” said Greta, marveling at how open and social Otto was becoming. “I think she’s in need of new friends.”
“I only hope the other women won’t be disappointed to have me there.”
“Bring wine,” Greta said. “And offer to help with the dishes.”
“ Ja, gute Ideen ,” he said. “How is your hotel?”
Through the draped sheer fabric enveloping the bed, she could see herself in the full-length mirror, her hair tousled, her nightshirt slipping off her shoulder. The room was working its magic on her after all. “It’s growing on me,” she said. “May I tell you why, meine Liebe ?”
“No, stop! Bad dog, no!”
Greta heard splashing; Tank had jumped in the pool.
“I have to go, Greta. Bis sp?ter ,” he said, and hung up.
Greta sighed. She got up, opened the curtains, and made herself a Nespresso. Settling onto the chaise, she checked her phone. She’d gotten a text from Lucy during the night: Just want to say thank you—FedEx arrived. I will Venmo you. Sorry the hotel isn’t to your liking.
Greta chided herself for having said anything negative about the hotel to Lucy. She responded: I apologize, Lucy. The hotel is fine. I don’t know why I complained. I’m out of sorts these days—about Emmi, my mother, Otto. Even Adam.
She hit send and almost right away, her phone rang. Lucy was calling.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, her voice tight.
“ I ’m sorry,” Greta said. “I like the hotel. I think when I first got here—”
“No, this is about Adam,” Lucy said. “I overstepped; I told him where you’re staying.”
Greta had not even told Adam she was coming to town, had not answered any of his messages. “I doubt he cares, and I won’t see him anyway,” she said. “But why did you tell him? I mean, I thought that you and Adam…”
“That Adam and I… what?” Lucy sounded genuinely curious.
“I heard you’re in his apartment all the time,” Greta said, putting her coffee cup down, “so I thought maybe…”
“What? You thought I was sleeping with him?” Lucy laughed. “Why would you think that?”
It was the second time in two days Greta had asked the same personal question, and she’d been wrong both times. She was acutely embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, Lucy. Adam keeps telling me how much he likes you, and—”
“No, no, no,” Lucy said. “Adam doesn’t like me, Greta. Adam likes you .”
Greta left her hotel for the third time.
The first time she forgot her purse, and the second time her phone.
Lucy was wrong, she had to be wrong. Adam wasn’t interested in her in that way, nor did it even matter.
It was a dead-end topic. She shook her head and walked faster.
She would not give such a troubling notion any room to percolate in her mind.
She had more important things to think about.
She took the subway uptown, but when she got off at Eighty-Sixth Street, she realized she was on the wrong side of Central Park.
Greta had never lived in New York, and it showed.
She walked east along the paths, through Central Park and past the Reservoir, until she reached Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She had already bought her ticket online, and with a museum map in hand, she went up the grand stairs and into the European collection in search of Gallery 614, the room that housed the museum’s five Vermeers.
The first thing she saw as she walked toward the room, past a seventeenth-century blue and white Delft vase, was Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith , centered on the dark blue wall.
The paintings directly to the left and right of it, Study of a Young Woman and Young Woman with a Lute, were the reasons she’d come; Binstock made a very convincing argument that Vermeer’s daughter had painted them both.
He described the “undeniable weaknesses” of Study of a Young Woman —the poorly depicted arm, the incorrectly scaled body and head, the badly rendered folds of fabric—and attributed them not to a lack of skill but to Maria’s young age and inexperience.
As Greta stood before the painting, she could see why he believed it had not been painted by the same artist who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring , or even A Maid Asleep , which was hanging on the same wall.
She waited for a couple to step away and then walked over to see the depiction of the girl seated with her head resting on her hand, her chin down, her eyes closed.
She read the label on the wall and learned that Vermeer had removed a male figure from the doorframe in the background, just as he had in Girl with a Red Turban .
Greta stepped back and closed her eyes, trying to remember the details of the x-radiograph image she’d been shown when Girl with a Red Turban was being authenticated: it revealed that Vermeer had removed the figure of a man standing in front of a crooked frame.
Even at the time, Greta had wondered why Vermeer would have perched the artwork in the painting on the wall at an angle, when everything else in the room was perfectly aligned.
That missing figure and the invisible, tilted rectangle raised questions Greta burned to answer.
What if Girl with a Red Turban was a self-portrait of the girl, rather than a portrait?
What if the figure in the background was Johannes Vermeer himself, standing beside his easel, working in his studio?
If that was true, then it was Maria’s name that should be on the wall, not her father’s.
But to say so, to raise these questions, would be like driving her career and reputation into a brick wall.
After a few more minutes, she walked out of the room to go someplace else to think.
She headed down the stairs and wandered in the direction of the Robert Lehman Wing, stopping when an eighteenth-century Meissen figurine caught her attention.
Called The Kiss , this exquisite German piece was no more than twenty centimeters high and featured a couple embracing, the gentleman’s arm wrapped around the lady’s waist, their lips just shy of touching.
The pair, properly dressed as they were, were leaning into each other with palpable desire, her floral skirt swaying, his jacket flung open.
It was beautifully made, this fine, porcelain object, and it left Greta feeling very alone and in desperate need of human touch and affection.
She walked out of the museum and sat on the steps, unable to shake the feeling that something—trouble or change—was coming, whether she was ready for it or not.
She watched the people milling around the fountain and tried to keep her mind focused on the concrete issues of her day: Was Emmi having a good first day at work?
Had her mother landed safely in Ensenada?
But she could not stop thinking about the Vermeer, of what the right thing was to do, what Emmi would want her to do.
Schei? drauf , she thought. She took her phone out and, without allowing herself another moment to be cowardly and change her mind, called Sebastian Schultz.
When Greta got in a cab to go back to her hotel, she knew she had committed some form of professional suicide.
She felt reckless. She didn’t regret telling Herr Schultz her new doubts about his prize painting, even after he hung up on her, but oh, how she feared the fallout, knowing she would be mocked, dismissed, attacked, and possibly even sued for placing herself in opposition to the Schultz family and the National Gallery in Berlin.
As the cab headed down the West Side Highway, Emmi texted:
Work is going great but can’t have dinner—sorry! :(
That was disappointing. She wanted to tell Emmi everything, that she’d sacrificed her own reputation so a young woman could be credited for her accomplishments, but it would have to wait.
A night on her own in New York wasn’t a bad thing under normal circumstances, but tonight, it sounded lonely.
Greta was practically vibrating with adrenaline.
Her cab turned onto Fourteenth in the direction of her hotel and she got another text, this one from Tobias.
He’d sent a picture in which Lillian was posing with him and three other men on the deck of a ship, all holding glasses of champagne.
Her mother was wearing the blue caftan and she looked positively radiant.
The cab stopped and when she looked out the window, she saw him and gasped. Adam was sitting on the steps of the brownstone, looking up and down the sidewalk with an expression of hope and expectation.
He was there, he’d shown up for her, and didn’t that make him a friend after all?
“I hope it’s okay I’m here,” he said, walking up to her after she stepped out of the cab. “I haven’t heard a word from you.”
It was funny seeing Adam here in this gritty spot, so far from home and from their perfect building in Charlottenburg. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. She closed the door and stepped away as the cab took off. “I have no excuse really other than I was being childish.”
He smiled at her. “I’ve never known you to be childish.”
“Can I ask,” she said, putting her purse over her shoulder, “why you never told me you’re married?”
Adam dropped his smile. “I’m sorry.” His face turned red, and he looked so young to her then, his slightly pained expression, his tousled hair, that she felt matronly and old in comparison.
“I guess,” he said, “I didn’t want you to know I’d failed.
You always seem so sure of yourself, so together, and I’m still figuring things out and making mistakes. ”
“I thought it’s because you find me stiff and formal and overly German,” she said, noting that she was standing stiffly and formally even as she said it. “Maybe you think I’m too uptight to be understanding.”
“No,” he said, “not at all. I think you’re— Look, can I take you out for dinner so we can catch up? And, I don’t know, toast the end of my marriage?”
“As friends?”
He hesitated. “I’ve missed you, Greta,” he said, his voice catching. “I’m sorry I kept my impending divorce from you. I thought you might think less of me, and I needed you.”
“You’re not obligated to share your personal life with me,” she said, with a casual shrug. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I do actually,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think I could have stood the loneliness of my first winter in Berlin.”
“You never showed it,” said Greta. “Or maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention.”
He leaned toward her, only for a moment, and then righted himself. “Fresh start?” he said.
She nodded. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I just did something that may ruin my career.”
“What happened?”
“Let’s just say I had a consequential trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he said. “You’re supposed to take me on a museum tour at some point, remember?”
“That’s right,” she said. “Come on in, and I’ll show you Lucy’s brothel instead.”
He nodded happily. “Onward ho,” he said.
Something was coming, she thought again—trouble or change—and all she could do was embrace it.