False Impressions

Madeline flipped her long black hair over her shoulder and switched the sheets of paper in her hands so she could read the page with the comments.

Since some art aficionados thought Sir Arthur Dudlin had been lazy in using simple charcoal and then “tossing” glaze on it, Madeline hadn’t been surprised when she’d read the first comment months before. Dudlin, it said, gentleman though he was, faced the greatest challenge to an artist—age. And he did not fare well.

“Poor Dudlin,” she had said when she first saw that note, then scoffed. She had known the artist well at the end of his life, had an immense respect for him. She’d even been the muse for another one of his sparkling charcoals. She had been irritated at how discourteous that comment had been.

But it was the more recent comment that plagued her. As she read it, she felt something roil through her stomach—something hot, something angry. One hand held the pages, the other was on the navy chaise longue as if to brace herself for another reading, hoping she had been too hasty and judgmental the first few times around.

The comment was from someone else, who posted anonymously under the name ArtManners.

Dudlin, it read, not only aged at the end of his life, he went into a different profession—that of manager. He didn’t create art any longer. He issued directives to his assistants, who replicated his glazed charcoal pieces, then allowed the master to pass them off as his own.

She braced herself for the next few lines. Check your Dudlin if you have one. Especially if you bought it from this gallery.

There were two more lines, but she couldn’t bring herself to read them again.

Madeline put the pages at the foot of the chaise and scooted back until she was reclining, far away from the comments.

Thankfully, no one was in the gallery.

Thankfully, John Mayburn was sending Isabel McNeil.

4

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the hand of Madeline Saga. She was, as Mayburn had described her to me, a tiny, luminous Japanese woman with skin that seemed almost pearly. Her intent brown eyes were strangely bright, almost as if they could actually feel, as if they had senses other than sight.

“Lovely to meet you, too,” she said in a quiet yet strong voice.

I looked around the gallery. It was almost triangular in shape, housed in a corner of the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue. Inside, the space had blond wood floors, white walls and white columns.

“This is wonderful,” I said.

“Thank you. Very much.” She looked around the room as if appreciating it herself. “Let me show you around.”

With every step, the gallery was a surprise. First, she showed me a miniature stamp, decorated in an Indian sort of pattern, surrounded by a matte a thousand times bigger than it was, taking up half of a wall. Next, she pointed out a sculpture that looked like ice cubes with silvery insides, next to an ice bucket with real ice inside. “An installation,” Madeline said.

“Interesting,” I said, looking at it.

“What strikes you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I guess it’s the combination of the real and the not real.”

“But do we ever know?” Madeline asked in a musing voice. Then she added, “Nearly anything can be art. Most art simply shows different ways of looking at life, or a part of it.”

Next was something more traditional and I adored it on sight. It showed a woman in side-by-side panels. It was clearly the same person, but the woman was portrayed in two different time periods. She was living two lives. I had felt very much the same over the last year and a half.

“And then that piece of furniture?” I asked Madeline. I pointed again.

“Ah, the chaise?” Madeline asked, her voice sounding lighter. “What do you think of it?”

Her questions made me feel unsure. Aside from an art history class in college and visiting the Chicago museums every once in a while, I knew nothing about art or technique. And now here I was with a woman who had two master’s degrees, one in studio art, the other in art management, both from prestigious New York schools. She owned an art gallery, and according Mayburn, “lived for art and sex.”

And yet Madeline looked at my face expectantly, with an eager expression.

“The chaise looks exactly like the one in the painting with the woman in the negligee.” I pointed at it.

“Yes.” Madeline wore a small smile. “I had the chaise made just as soon as the artist and I reached a deal for him to sell. He loved the idea. It’s an honor for me to be able to contribute.”

“I know very little about art,” I said, “but I was thinking that your gallery is full of wonderful surprises—the matte that’s so much bigger than the stamp, the real ice cubes that you must have to refresh, the exact piece of furniture from the painting.”

“Isabel,” she said, gently interrupting me. Although I’d told her to called me Izzy, she hadn’t taken to the name. And Isabel sounded wonderful coming from her lush mouth, ripe with a purplish gloss. “Isabel, you say you do not know art. But you know love. I can tell that.”

I paused, about to ask her what she meant. But then I let the answer float up. “Yes,” I said. “I know love.”

“Well, then.” She softly grasped my upper arm. “You know art.”

I didn’t know precisely what to say. Or to think. I could only notice that even through my suit coat, I felt something electric. Or was it just what Mayburn had said about the Saga drawing energy?

We walked around the gallery some more, often in silence as Madeline gave me time to look at each piece. Sometimes, she asked my opinion (“or just your feeling”).

Once, when we reached a sculpture, she said, “An Italian designer. What do you think of it?”

The piece was about two feet tall by two feet wide, a delicate iron tree painted in a shiny black, its leaves green jewels.

“I think it’s stunning.”

She smiled, gave a single nod.

Madeline kept showing me around the gallery, and I watched as she talked about the art. As she spoke, her face seemed to acquire a peach glow and her eyes brightened. She was, I thought, an incredibly sexy woman. I could see why Mayburn had been mad for her.

But then suddenly she stopped. “May I show you something?” There was a different tone to her voice now.

“Of course.” I looked around the gallery, wondering what surprise was in store next.

But Madeline turned and began walking toward the back. She wore high, nude-colored patent heels that made only the lightest tap, tap, tap on the floor. I followed her, noticing that my own heels seemed to clump, clump, clump compared to hers.

The space behind the gallery, like that in front, had high ceilings and white walls. But where the front had been spacious, back here it was tidily packed. Slotted shelves held framed paintings and stretched canvases. Undisplayed, the artworks seemed diminished, whereas out front the art was allowed to breathe, to be surrounded by space and light, letting it shine, letting its viewer see it in many different ways.

In front, the sculptures might sit atop a pedestal, as the jeweled tree had done, lit perfectly. Here, a small sculpture made of bronze bricks sat on a file cabinet. Another sculpture was on top of the refrigerator.

Off to the side was a small office. On a table in the center of the room was a white laptop. We sat and Madeline pulled her chair close to mine, her laptop in front of us. She pulled up a website.

“It’s your gallery site,” I said.

“Yes,” Madeline said. “I have photos of nearly all our artwork on the site. I like to make it as interactive as possible. One of the features is the ability to comment freely on any piece of art.”

She clicked to a page of tiny images, all showing various artwork. She clicked on one—gray on a white canvas, depicting four sketches of some urban landscape, the whole thing glossed to a high sheen.

“It’s a very interesting piece by Sir Arthur Dudlin,” Madeline said. “I can tell you more about it later. But this is what I want to show you. The comments I received.”

I read the first one—something about the artist getting older but not better.

I stopped reading and looked at Madeline. “Do you have approval on the comments, so you can authorize them before they appear?’

She shook her head. “I despise censorship. I feel with deep conviction that response to art is as important as the art itself.”

Madeline showed me the next comment. Dudlin not only aged at the end of his life…. Check your Dudlin if you have one. Especially if you bought it from this gallery.

I stopped reading and pointed at the sentence about checking a Dudlin artwork. “Is this the first indication you had that something might have been forged?”

“The first public one,” Madeline said, her voice thin. “But it’s the last few lines that disturb me most.”

I looked at the last two lines. Madeline Saga makes everything she touches rotten. She obliterates.

“Obliterates,” Madeline said. “Obliterates. I don’t understand that. I try to bring things to life. I bring art to the world.”

“Do you have any idea what they mean in context with you?”

“No.” She sounded bereft. I wanted to comfort her, but I had no idea how one would do that with Madeline Saga.

I looked at the comment again, then at Madeline. “I think it’s time to enable your approval settings on these comments.”

Madeline’s face was distressed.

“Let me run it by Mayburn.” I texted him what I wanted to do, and he agreed.

But Madeline didn’t move when I told her that.

“Do you want me to handle it?” I asked.

Finally, Madeline nodded, gave me her passwords and watched in silence as I adjusted the controls of her website comment section and deleted those about the Dudlin.

I was just about done when the sound of a bell startled me.

“That’s the front door,” Madeline said softly. But she still gazed at the space on the screen where the comments had been; she was staring into it as if it were a long tunnel, one where she could somehow see many things. And those things—whatever they were—were deeply disturbing to her.

“Let me go see who it is,” I said, since Madeline wasn’t moving. I was glad to have something official to do for my new job.

She looked at me. “Thank you,” she said earnestly, as if someone hadn’t helped her with anything for a long time. “But no, I’ll come with you. And Isabel, I don’t mean to be difficult but…Mayburn has suggested that you’ve had a lively few years.”

I looked at her, unsure where she was going with this.

“I was wondering if we could give you an alias. Perhaps we call you Isabel or Izzy Smith. I wouldn’t want anyone to search you on the internet and find out you’re really a lawyer and not an art dealer. It might raise more questions than I can answer right now.”

“Of course. I should have already thought of that.” I stood and began to follow her out the door.

But, one more time, she looked back to the computer screen, and somehow I could tell that she was pondering that one word—obliterates.

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