in. “You poor thing,” he said. “I wondered about you, out there in the deluge.” She was shivering a little, her clothes damp in the chill of the air-conditioning. There was a cashmere blanket on the back of the sofa, just within his reach. He put his laptop on the coffee table and held the blanket open to receive her. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s get you warm.”
5
OLIVIA
On a dark afternoon in August, a painter was standing under an awning in Soho when Vincent and Mirella passed by. Across the street, a yellow Lamborghini shone in the haze of the afternoon. The car had such presence that it was almost alive, all but vibrating with possibility, like something from the future. Olivia had come to this street because behind the Lamborghini was a doorway that she’d passed through once in the late fifties, when Jonathan Alkaitis’s brother was looking for models. In the summer of 2008, Olivia stood across the street under a red awning because it was obviously about to rain, eating a chocolate chip cookie even though the sugar would send her to sleep later—on a bench, in the subway, in a movie theater, wherever she might happen to land—and allowed herself to sink into memory. In 1958 she walked briskly up to the door in her new trench coat, which she was convinced made her look like the star of her favorite French movie because it’s possible to convince oneself of such things at twenty-four. When a voice crackled incoherently out of the buzzer she said, “It’s me,” which she’d found always worked at every building no matter which buzzer she pressed, and climbed four flights of stairs to Lucas’s studio.
Lucas Alkaitis was on the run from the suburbs just like everyone else, on the run from mediocrity and Brylcreem and gray flannel suits, and Olivia had met enough fake painters by then to recognize when she was in the presence of the real thing. In 1958, Lucas was working on a series of nudes: women and men, mostly women, all sitting on a sofa the color of the Lamborghini that would park outside his door a half century later. The sofa was much dirtier in real life than in the paintings.
The paintings were ravishing. But Lucas himself, to Olivia’s amusement and disappointment, was every cliché in combination: the too-long, artfully tousled hair; the white undershirt, streaked with paint; the work boots, which he’d also allowed to become streaked with paint, presumably to advertise his painterliness to the opposite sex. He looked her over and ran his hand through his hair in a way that made her think he’d practiced the motion in the mirror.
“Help you?” he asked.
“I hear you’re looking for a model.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” A slow, lazy smile as he appraised her. This was a profoundly self-satisfied man. “I can’t pay very much.”
“Actually, I have a proposition on that front.”
“Oh?”
What Olivia sometimes wondered—even in the present, on the other side of the split screen in 2008, where she was still standing under the awning, had moved on to a second chocolate chip cookie, and could already feel herself coming unmoored, her blood sugar rising in a way that always made her think of a doomed hot-air balloon, an unsteady giddy motion before a precipitous fall—is if it might be possible to send out a memo to the entire population of persons below the age of thirty, no, forty, men and women alike, a memo to the effect that it is not in fact necessary to raise an eyebrow every time the word proposition is uttered in conversation. “I would appreciate it,” she muttered aloud, in 2008, “if everyone would stop.”
On the other side of the gauze, in 1958, she waited for Lucas’s eyebrow to lower before she said, “Not that kind of proposition, for Christ’s sake. Payment in kind.”
He looked confused.
“My name’s Olivia Collins.” She watched as the name registered. She’d had some success, nothing earth-shattering but enough that a certain subset of the painting population south of 14th Street knew her name. She had gallery representation, which was more than most of these floppy-haired puppy dogs could say. “I’m a painter,” she said, unnecessarily, “and I’m looking for models.”
“Okay, yeah, so you’re saying…”
“You paint me, I paint you,” she said. “I’m working on a new portrait series.”
Lucas crossed the room to a cluttered windowsill, extracted a box of cigarettes from between two paint cans that had been repurposed as