“Elliott said you’ve agreed, Oscar. That’s grand of you.” With a graceful gesture, she laid her cool fingers on his neck and pulled him down so she could kiss his cheek.
“How pretty!” said Roger Shambley, who had approached unnoticed. “Portrait of the artist with harem?”
Thorvaldsen frowned. “That’s a tasteless remark, sir.”
“Unlike your taste?” drawled Shambley. “But then you and Oscar Nauman have identical tastes, don’t you?”
His eyes glittered beneath his heavy brows as they swept Francesca’s body with an insulting deliberation that was like a physical pawing. Thorvaldsen’s brawny hand shot out and grasped Shambley by the lapels and for a moment they could see the brawling stevedore he’d once been as his right hand drew back in a fist. Sigrid started forward, but Nauman had already caught his arm before it could throw the punch.
Immediately, Thorvaldsen released Shambley with a muttered apology.
Shambley straightened and drew himself up arrogantly. “I think you will pay for that,” he told Thorvaldsen, then turned from the room and walked up the wide marble staircase.
The restaurant was intimate and candlelit, but dinner had become strained.
“Will you stop projecting your guilt feelings onto me?” Sigrid said tightly. “For the third time, I’m not angry and I am
Her fork clattered sharply against her plate as she put it down and reached for her wine glass.
Nauman pushed a broiled scallop around his plate moodily, wishing all the hurtful words to come were already said so that he could touch her hand or make her gray eyes dance with laughter again.
“If you’d just let me explain-”
“Damn it, Nauman, there’s nothing to explain. ” Her gold-colored earrings swung back and forth with each word. “There can’t be many sixty-year-old virgins walking the land and what you did before we met is none of my business. Aren’t you going to eat your scallops?”
He handed them over. He didn’t know which annoyed him more: that she’d thrown his age in his face or that she could still be hungry after realizing he and Francesca had been lovers.
“You really
“It’s illogical to be jealous about things that were over and done with before I knew you,” she said, transferring his scallops to her plate. “I just mind that I was so stupid.”
“Stupid?” he asked hopefully.
“Stupid. I knew she seemed familiar, but I thought it was my imagination. And all the time, there was that portrait of her in your apartment.”
He paused in the act of signaling their waiter. “Portrait? I’ve never done a portrait of Francesca.”
“Of course you have. It’s hanging over that Spanish chest next to your door. I know it’s not a literal representation, but still-”
Nauman shook his head and his white hair gleamed in the candlelight. “That painting is a purely abstract construction generated from sets of inverse Cassinian ovals. That’s all there is to it.”
“It’s also-” She fell silent as their waiter approached.
“Everything all right? ” he asked.
Nauman handed him their empty wine bottle. “Another one of these, please.”
“It’s also a portrait of Francesca Leeds,” Sigrid said as the waiter left them. “The way her hair fells away from her face when she tilts her head back and laughs. All that orange and gold and brown. And those big canvasses in your studio up in Connecticut -the ones you said you painted year before last-most of those use the same colors, too. Francesca’s colors.”
He started to deny it, then looked at Sigrid with perplexed admiration. “I’ll be damned, Siga. You’re right.”
Nauman never tried to analyze why he painted as he did. Let others theorize after the fact; when things were working, he only knew that they felt right. Nevertheless, it was interesting to catch his subconscious off guard. He had enjoyed Francesca, her beauty, her sophistication, her body. But she was more uptown than he, more interested in the right social circles. It had exasperated her that he wouldn’t capitalize on his fame, so they had parted as amicably as they’d begun and he hadn’t realized that she’d affected his palette.
Now he remembered that violent purple-and-black study Francesca had pulled from the back of his storage racks up in Connecticut last weekend. He fingered his left ear unconsciously. Blacks and purples that sloped into somber browns.
Lila.
His mind shied at the thought of Lila, locked away all these years; and he willed himself to consider instead the vivid, almost garish colors he’d used during those exuberant postwar years with Susan; or those serene pastels that had echoed Cassandra’s quiet blond loveliness. Odd that he hadn’t seen-hadn’t let himself see?
Four women. All different.
And what would Sigrid bring?
“Don’t!” she said sharply, and gold sequins shimmered like moonbeams on water as she flinched from his gaze.
“What?” he asked, bewildered.
“You look at me sometimes as if I’m a-I don’t know. As if I were a thing, not a person.”
The waiter arrived with more wine, filled their glasses, and departed.
Nauman lifted his glass in tribute. “Oh no, my dear. Never that,” he said, and was glad to realize that their fight seemed to have ended before it ever began.
A clock was chiming nine-thirty when Roger Shambley came downstairs to use the telephone on Hope Ruffton’s desk. The caterers had long since gone and the rooms were dark and silent. He called information for the number he wanted, dialed and, when an answering machine beeped at the other end of the wire, spoke the cryptic words he’d rehearsed, then hung up.
He crossed the echoing hall to unlock the front door and as he returned, a figure appeared in the doorway of the darkened library.
“
In the warm snug Hobbit-hole room, the last tape had come to an end and Rick Evans was enjoying the comfortable silence when he suddenly stiffened like a burrowing animal that hears the dogs above him.
“What’s wrong, Rick?” Pascal Grant asked sleepily.
“Sh! I thought I heard a noise out there.”
Pascal raised himself to a kneeling position beside Rick. The only light in the room was a small amber lamp shaped like an owl near the door and both held their breath, listening. Rick looked around for a weapon of some sort. “You have a stick or something, Pasc?”
“Like my softball bat? Sure.”
Rick slipped off the mattress and pulled on his trousers. “Where is it?”
“Behind that chair.” Then realizing what Evans meant to do, Pascal Grant clutched at his leg. “No, Rick. Don’t go out there. Please!” His voice grew louder as he became more agitated. “I don’t like Dr. Shambley. He scares me.”
Of course, Rick thought, Shambley. That dirty little coward. What gives him the right to sneak around down here? Was he hoping to find Pasc alone? He thinks he knows what Pasc and I are, but we
With angry, confused thoughts running through his head,
Rick grasped the bat, unlocked the door, and stepped out into the kitchenette.
“Who’s there?” he called, suddenly caught by conflicting emotions.
In the dim warmth behind the half-closed door, Pascal Grant huddled uneasily on the bed, wishing Rick would come back and lock the door and they could talk some more and listen to the old Louis Armstrong tape Rick had brought and forget about Dr. Shambley. Before yesterday was bad enough, Pascal thought unhappily, but ever since last night when he put his hand on my face- And today, he keeps looking at me and he makes me feel dirty, like Mr. Gere at the training center-
