Etonic something-or-other running shoes. I had to get out and take a run. Didn’t want to. Had to . . . breathe . . . sweat.
Sometimes when I run I forget where I am, even
My mind is clear and still in that jungle, and I can spot the black beast before it lunges, and dodge it or, worst case, catch its eye and get one laugh in before it sinks its long white teeth into my neck. I dodge for a living, and I already know what dying is like. I knew the second the roof caved in on my life, the second I let go of the sill. The last time I died I didn’t get to laugh. So getting the laugh in now, that’s important.
I did the 4.2-mile loop through the Malibu hills, stretched out in the driveway till I stopped sweating, then went in and showered. I cooked some scallops in ginger and fresh chives, opened a bottle ofwine, poured a glass, and moved into the living room carrying my dinner.
Beethoven’s “Pastoral” played softly in the background. My eyes glanced across the room, past the rows of art books that lined my bookshelves, to the dents in the recently laid carpet where a heavy Morris chair had been. I tried not to look at the empty space, but free will had all but eluded me since Emily left three weeks earlier, taking her chair with her. I didn’t ask her to leave, but we both knew our relationship was destined to fail. I came home from a shoot and found her packing her bags, dividing up the few things we’d bought together. Emily’s dents weren’t the first. At that moment I’d sworn, yet again, that they would be the last.
She’d said she wasn’t mad at me, she was mad at herself—being a therapist—forever thinking she could nest in a tumbleweed. I didn’t stop her from reciting the litany of my sins, though I’d heard them all before: risk-taking bordering on self-destruction, unresolved issues of pain and loss, fear of intimacy, inability to commit. Handing me the spare house key at the front door, she told me that I ought to look into my dreams, then closed with what she referred to as my “obsession with Ginevra de’ Benci.”
I apologized to Emily and meant it. I knew I wasn’t right for her— or for anybody. She patted my cheek tenderly, saying she took full responsibility for her own mistakes. I listened carefully to the sound of her shoes on the slate pathway, then to her car door opening and closing and the engine revving once and fading as she pulled away. Then I heard nothing but the cardinal’s song, to my ears forever the sad sound of being someone’s mistake.
I stepped over to the carpet dents and sat down cross-legged on the floor between them, cushioned by new Orlon and old grief. Tears pooled in my eyes. My gaze shifted to my framed print of Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci—my dear friend Ginny—the only girl I’d ever been able to hold on to.
“Ginny . . .” I said. “Help me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, massagingmy throbbing temples as tears trailed down around my nostrils and over my lip. Their saltiness saddened me even more. I began drifting back to before time had stalled, and landed in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where my dad had been the curator of Renaissance Art, and I’d strolled with my parents through the oak-paneled Widener Rembrandt Room.
In front of the luxurious paneling hung incredible treasures, each painting a burst of emotion, capturing forever the innermost feelings of the subject, rescuing all but the painter himself from the dust of time and forgotten bones. There among
We’d stand there, my folks and I, three feet from the great master’s face—his doughy, wrinkled, sadder-than- the-weepiest-willow face— and my dad would point a long finger at different parts of the dense painting and tell us Rembrandt was fifty-nine at the time he’d painted it, Saskia had died, and he’d lost favor with the upper-crust, gone bankrupt, and was desperate. “But look at his hat,” Dad would say. “How delicate and soft it is, how the black isn’t just black, it’s fabric.”
My mom would grab my hand, as she always did when we stood in front of the self-portrait, and a sorrowful wind would sweep through us from three hundred years ago. Mom and I couldn’t move our eyes away from Rembrandt’s; we both knew we were staring into the old man’s soul.
I raised my wineglass. “To pain and loss . . . and ruination,” I said to Rembrandt and myself, taking a gulp. “And to you.” I nodded to Ginevra de’ Benci, remembering the many times I’d slipped away from my parents, my Beatle boots tick-tocking past all the tourists packed in like clumps of lobster roe, to see my Ginny.
Her portrait, the only one of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings in the United States, had been the greatest acquisition of my father’s tenure as curator. He’d purchased her from the prince of Liechtenstein for fivemillion dollars, at that time the largest sum ever paid for a work of art. To Dad she was very special. To me, she was more than special; she had captivated my inquisitive heart long before I could touch the gilded, glassed-in frame that protected her from humanity’s grasp. And when I finally could reach her, Ginny became my sole confidante.
She listened patiently to my secret Christmas wish lists, never provoking the least nip of conscience. She was waiting to greet me the first day I soloed in on the bus, after third grade let out. And she was there every day after that when I came to meet my dad. Ginny and I hung out while he finished work, the two of us owning the whole place. We were a spectacle.
Leonardo painted Ginevra’s portrait in 1474 or so, when she was already twenty-six years old. My father told me that she called herself a mountain tiger, though Leonardo’s painting made her look as soft and sad as the last petal on a solitary rose.
I wondered what she must have talked about with him out there by the juniper tree. Leonardo had probably painted her hands—hands maybe even more beautiful than Mona Lisa’s—and it made me furious to think that someone had wantonly sawed off the bottom seven inches of the oil-on-wood painting. No one had the right to commit an injustice to Ginny—or to Leonardo. Nobody.
My scallops cooled. I pronged one, but laid my fork down, no longer hungry. I slugged the rest of the wine and a little dribbled down my chin and onto my shirt. The telephone rang. Setting my plate and glass down, I answered it.
A raspy voice whispered, “Rollo Eberhart Barnett?”
My first thought was Publisher’s Clearing House—a man with laryngitis.
“Is this the son of Dr. Rollo Barnett who was the curator at the National Gallery?”
“Yes . . .”
There was a harsh cough and some throat-clearing. “I knew your father.”
“Who is this?”
