Chapter 6
Paul’s office window faced a crowded avenue of campus. Through the hairline gap between the curtains, Vivi could see the blur
of students on their way from the dining halls and dorms. For a moment, that blur expanded, like a portal, and she could almost
glimpse past versions of herself and Calla running to class as Frisbees zoomed past them. Her, yelling at Calla for making
them late; Calla scowling and laughing at the same time. I had to say goodbye to Way. Wayland, who pulled away after long weekends, honking outside their shitty apartment as Calla blew him kisses. Vivi holding
herself back, watching their blooming relationship and wanting to be anywhere but there.
“Find a place to sit, if you want,” Paul said.
Inside his cave of an office, sets of oak shelves lined the walls, each crowded with scholarly tomes Vivi would have given
anything to explore. His velvet curtains snuffed most of the light, giving the room a claustrophobic quality that had Vivi
unbuttoning her blazer. She smelled pine and tinned fish and mold, a silty edge of riverbed decay. Strangely, the office did
not repel her. Its disorder felt familiar to that of her childhood home.
There was a calendar on the wall. She saw crosshatches that delineated days past. Now, only nineteen days until the opening
for Sea to Earth. What would they do with the restored version of Blue Mirror?
Samuel had positioned it as the centerpiece of the exhibition; the sun around which the other pieces spun.
All the exhibition catalogues had already been printed with the overpainted version that Maxine had bequeathed; the marketing complete, the articles written.
Vivi had unwittingly begun a PR nightmare for the museum.
She had a knack for destroying good things.
Vivi had begun this madcap quest for her sister, yes, but she also did it for herself. A small part of her still believed
that if she could unravel the why of the overpainting, she might be absolved in Samuel’s eyes, maybe even the Forster’s. The discovery itself was significant,
but if she could prove that she had a reason for pursuing it, then perhaps she could find a way to set everything right again.
Her work wouldn’t be a rogue mistake, but a considered discovery. At this point, there seemed to be more reasons to pursue
the offering than to forget it. Not that she could.
And if there was another reason under the obvious ones that might explain this drive toward the unknown, she didn’t choose
to examine it. Not yet.
She cleared a stack of scholarly journals from a chair and leaned back to watch Paul dodge past his Baroque-inspired furniture,
fingers light on the piles of paperwork whose organization was legible only to him. Dashing to a shelf, he pulled out two
mugs and flicked the switch of an electric kettle. Once the water boiled, he poured it into the mugs and stirred in scoops
of instant Vinacafé.
Vivi sipped and tasted bitter earth, a slick of home on her tongue. “I enjoyed your lecture.”
“You ambushed me about Ly.”
She shrugged. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I was intrigued.” He fixed his slightly protuberant eyes onto her. “I heard about the exhibition that Samuel Noi
is putting on at your museum. Sea to Earth. And you all have that strange little painting of Ly’s in it. The crown jewel. What did you make of Blue Mirror?”
“I was unnerved by the women. And I never wanted to stop looking at them. I loved the painting.”
“Your first Ly?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I didn’t really think much of his work before.”
“I saw Blue Mirror in person once.” He spoke with distant awe, as if he were recounting a meeting with a celebrity. “I was in Chicago as a visiting lecturer
at the Art Institute. Maxine Ph?m had me over for tea; she wanted my opinion on it.”
“Which was?”
He smiled, his first since she’d met him. “I loved it too. That was the first time I felt like I understood Ly.”
“It was the first time I wanted to understand him. The painting had humanity.”
There was a shared sheepishness in their admiration for Blue Mirror. In their line of work, they bandied discourse about what was compelling or notable in a piece of art. Sometimes, even the
market, that gruesome engine of commerce. They were comfortable examining the art from the angles of history and technique;
materials and dates and numbers.
Yet it felt gaudy, somehow, to confess the simplicity of personal attachment. They loved the art, and that might have been
trite, but it was the only reason to keep going. Sudden kinship stretched between the two.
He hesitated. “But when I encountered Blue Mirror, something about it unsettled me. Those faces haunted me, even after I left Maxine’s. The painting felt—”
“Unfinished?”
“Unsatisfying.”
“Like a book that ends too abruptly.” He nodded, wariness settling around his sharpening gaze. Vivi took out her phone and
showed the screen to Paul. “Your instincts weren’t wrong. I believe this is the painting that Ly intended.”
He grabbed at the phone. “What is that? It’s not Blue Mirror.”
She explained her initial suspicions of pentimento, the difference of craquelure, a slight impasto atop the women’s faces.
As she talked about the process of restoring the original, Paul zoomed in and out on the screen with his fingertips, licking his lips in greed.
She was familiar with this sense of avarice.
It was difficult to be around such art and not want to make it yours.
She didn’t talk about the freckle, but Paul saw the resemblance immediately.
“Uncanny,” he said, looking from her phone screen to her face. She had the disquieting sense that he was regarding her not
as a person, but as another work of art. “You’re sure it’s not a copy?”
“Of course. I’ve done the authenticating myself. Everything except the frame is original. This restored version is the real
thing. But the public doesn’t know about it yet.”
“You’re afraid that they’ll worm in on your discovery.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “I need to know more before we—they—announce it. There had to be a reason for the overpainting. What
did my father write to you?”
Paul told her about how Tu?n had unearthed his old Artforum article on Ly’s use of blue.
It was one of the few pieces about Ly that’d gained any scholarly traction, but even so, it must have taken Tu?n some effort to find it.
Tu?n had written to ask Paul if he possessed any correspondence from Ly to Blanc.
He said that he was an admirer. Hinted that he had an original Ly somewhere.
Paul ignored all the messages. He got dozens of requests a week, most more convincing than Tu?n’s oddly punctuated missives.
“I assumed he was an idiot. Some person who sees a Michelangelo in a Crayola drawing.”
Vivi slid the manila envelope out of her bag and held it on her lap, wavering in her conviction. “Maybe not.”
His eyes narrowed. “What is that you’ve got there?”
“Did Ly ever mention in his correspondence to Emil Blanc a place where ‘time peels from light’?”
Paul frowned. “Strange phrase. I can’t recall. Blanc kept ample records but much of the correspondence with Ly had been burned after his death. Part of his will, it seems.”
“Just the correspondence with Ly?”
“Yes.”
The aberration hummed inside of Vivi like a struck tuning fork. She pressed her fists onto her knees, energized. “Even so, there might be something in Blanc’s archives. Even the smallest mention of Ly might help me.”
“In what? You’re only telling me half the story.”
“Let me look at Blanc’s letters.”
He laughed uproariously, nearly upsetting his coffee. “You’re an audacious one, aren’t you, Vivi Nguy?n? Would you also like to examine the contents of my underwear drawer?”
“I—no.”
“Why should I share my life’s work with you?”
She waited until his amusement abated, then lifted the envelope. For a moment, she held it against her chest. Inside was the
letter from 1945, along with the sketch. Calla would not want her to share either with a stranger. She would say that these
artifacts belonged to the family, heirlooms that no one could take away from them. But Calla wasn’t there.
Vivi handed the envelope to Paul and watched his eyes widen as he retrieved the letter. Studied the handwriting. Then the
sketch. His hands trembled as he held each.
“I think both are by K. P. Ly,” she said. “Actually, I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“The letter is in Vietnamese. From what I can tell, the handwriting matches his signature. I’d need a larger sample to be
certain. And look at the date. Two years after he disappeared.”
Paul scanned the page, mumbling to himself as he translated from Vietnamese to English. “‘The art is all that is left’…”
Doggedly, Vivi continued. “Plus, look at the sketch, really look at it—the linework is Ly’s. You must agree.”
“I mustn’t agree to anything, especially not some half-baked theory. Anyone could doodle anything on a piece of paper. Scrawl
some cryptic pronouncements and call it a long-lost letter.”
“No,” Vivi said, stubborn. “These are both authentic. I’d bet my career on it.”
He huffed out a noise of derision. “You might have done just that. How did you get them?”
“My father had them. This was why he was contacting you.”
“He thought that Ly painted your ancestor or something?”
“I don’t know. He died before he shared any of this with us. I was hoping you could help.”
Paul bit a nail as he pondered. Then, with a leap from his chair, he ran to his computer and pulled up a scan from his files.
He swiveled the screen to face her and placed Ly’s letter next to it.
In an instant, she recognized the same letterforms between the two documents. Squat bowls, long descenders, and gestural accent
marks. If a script could have a sense of expansiveness, of languor and musicality, this did. The ink waltzed on the page.
While the letter Calla had found was written in Vietnamese, Paul’s scanned document had been composed in French. But both
were written by the same hand.