For a moment, neither woman said anything, then Jeanne pul ed her eyes away from the book and regarded Cam closely. “So what’s it like posing for a portrait?”
Cam flushed. “How the heck would I know?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you lived with a guy who paints portraits for four years? I mean, even with your boobs laid out like oranges in Lucite cages, it’s got to be kinda flattering.”
Cam felt the pins of embarrassment prickle her face.
Jacket’s pieces had always been done without a model. He claimed they were amalgams of many women he’d known, and he did them from memory. Thus, she had ended four rol er-coaster years of happiness, hot sex and knock-down, drag-out fights with not so much as a sketch on a napkin to show that she had inspired anything in his work.
“No,” she said. “Jacket doesn’t use models. His work isn’t about people in particular. It’s about both the objectification of subjects in art and the rising of the human spirit against it.” She’d repeated this phrase so often in her life, she felt like she had it tattooed on her forehead.
“Real y?”
“Yes.”
Cam returned with the book to her desk. She flipped by two more pages, but the self-portrait that dominated the third made her stop. Where Rembrandt’s self-portraits projected impishness and Van Dyck’s a quiet self-confidence, Lely had chosen to portray himself as both knowing and seeking, as if his life’s experiences had left him slightly adrift. His hair, luxurious and auburn, framed his face in loose curls that reached to his shoulders. A strong nose led to a pliant mouth with ful lips that looked capable of both an easy smile and something more complicated.
The gentlest curve of cheek hung by the corners of his mouth, a signal of middle age in an artist unafraid of such trivialities. The shadow of a late-day beard burnished his cheeks and chin, but it was his eyes that struck her most.
Cam eased her glasses out of her purse and slipped them on. She didn’t like to wear them and only needed a little magnification, but for this she would endure the potential embarrassment.
Lely’s eyes were dark and liquid—Sierra Nevada Porter on a warm summer’s night. And the single dot of cream in the irises—a painter’s trick, she knew, but in Lely’s capable hand a trick for which she wil ingly suspended disbelief—
signaled such a potent mix of pain and joy it made her heart cramp.
She exhaled, unaware she’d been holding her breath.
“Wow.”
“Wow again?”
“It’s Lely.” Cam’s gaze returned involuntarily to the self-portrait. “He was, uh … uh … uh …” Those eyes seemed to be looking right at her.
“Such a wel -nuanced argument. I don’t understand why you’re not on the lecture circuit.”
Cam ran her finger across the portrait’s glossy surface, recal ing her grad school reading. “He was German, I think.
No. No. Born in Germany to Dutch parents. That’s it.”
“Who? Van Dyck?”
“No, Lely. And he moved to England young, I think. Like twenty-one or twenty-two. After being admitted to the Guild of Saint Luke, the trade association for painters in Hol and.”
“Have we changed the subject of the book? Because I’d sure hate to lose that first sentence. It’s a kil er.” Jeanne picked up the Lely exhibition catalog and returned to her desk with it.
With an effort, Cam returned her gaze to the screen. Sex and Van Dyck, she reminded herself. You’re here for sex and rivalry, and ran the mouse past the picture on the screen, to where the large “LOOK INSIDE!” was perched, and when she did, a menu popped up. “‘Front Cover,’
‘Back Cover,’ ‘Table of Contents’ or ‘Surprise Me!’?”
The choice was obvious. She let the cursor hover over the words and pursed her lips, saying a quiet prayer that the click she was about to make would deliver her directly into Van Dyck’s bedchamber, with a tale of sex, lies and oil paint that could be knitted directly into her biography. Oh God, please surprise me.
As she brought her finger down, Cam’s gaze slipped to the cover of the Lely catalog in Jeanne’s hand, wondering once again what sort of man it took to earn such a bemused, smoky look
