The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,55
a long moment we spoke as if in a single voice.
“Denise,” we said.
Chapter Seventeen
“Hold this,” Denise Raphaelson said. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I stretched a canvas. Who bothers nowadays? You buy a stretched canvas and save yourself the aggravation. Of course I don’t usually get customers who specify the size they want in centimeters.”
“It’s becoming a metric universe.”
“Well, you know what I always say. Give ’em a gram and they’ll take a kilo. This should be close, Bernie, and anybody who takes a yardstick to this beauty will already have six other ways to tell it’s not the real thing. But the measurements’ll be very close. Maybe it’ll be a couple millimeters off. Remember that cigarette that advertised it was a silly millimeter longer?”
“I remember.”
“I wonder whatever happened to it.”
“Somebody probably smoked it.”
Denise was smoking one of her own, or letting it burn unattended in a scallop shell she used as an ashtray. We were at her place and we were stretching a canvas. We meant Denise and me. Carolyn had not accompanied me.
Denise is long limbed and slender, with dark brown curly hair and fair skin lightly dusted with freckles. She is a painter, and she does well enough at it to support herself and her son Jared, with the occasional assistance of a child-support check from Jared’s father. Her work is abstract, very vivid, very intense, very energetic. You might not like her canvases but you’d be hard put to ignore them.
And, come to think of it, you could say much the same of their creator. Denise and I had kept occasional company over a couple of years, sharing a fondness for ethnic food and thoughtful jazz and snappy repartee. Our one area of disagreement was Carolyn, whom she affected to despise. Then one day Denise and Carolyn commenced to have an affair. That didn’t take too long to run its course, and once it was over Carolyn didn’t see Denise anymore, and neither did I.
I could say I don’t understand women, but what’s so remarkable about that? Nobody does.
“This is gesso,” Denise explained. “We want a smooth canvas so we put this on. Here, take the brush. That’s right. A nice even coat. It’s all in the wrist, Bernie.”
“What does this do?”
“It dries. It’s acrylic gesso so it’ll dry in a hurry. Then you sand it.”
“I sand it?”
“With sandpaper. Lightly. Then you do another coat of the gesso and sand it again, and a third coat and sand it again.”
“And you on the opposite shore will be?”
“That’s it. Ready to ride and spread the alarm through every something village and farm.”
“Every Middlesex village and farm,” I said, which was the way Longfellow had put it. Middlesex sort of hung in the air between us. “It comes from Middle Saxons,” I said. “According to where they settled in England. Essex was the East Saxons, Sussex was the South Saxons, and—”
“Leave it alone.”
“All right.”
“‘Every bisexual village and farm.’ I suppose No Sex was the North Saxons, huh?”
“I thought we were going to leave it alone.”
“It’s like a scab, it’s irresistible. I’m going to see if I can’t find a book with the painting reproduced. Composition with Color, 1942. God knows how many paintings he did with that title. There’s a minimalist I know on Harrison Street who calls everything he paints Composition #104. It’s his favorite number. If he ever amounts to anything, the art historians are going to go batshit trying to straighten it all out.”
I was sanding the third coat of gesso when she returned with a large book entitled Mondrian and the Art of De Stijl. She flipped it open to a page near the end, and there was the painting we’d seen in the Hewlett. “That’s it,” I said.
“How are the colors?”
“What do you mean? Aren’t they in the right place? I thought you took my sketch along.”
“Yes, and it’s a wonderful sketch. Burglary’s gain was the art world’s loss. Books of reproductions are never perfect, Bernie. The inks never duplicate the paint a hundred percent. How do these colors compare to what you saw in the painting?”
“Oh,” I said.
“Well?”
“I don’t have that kind of an eye, Denise. Or that kind of a memory. I think this looks about right.” I held the book at arm’s length, tilted it to catch the light. “The background’s darker than I remember it. It was whiter in—I want to say real life, but that’s not what I mean. You know what I mean.”