False Impressions. Laura Caldwell

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СКАЧАТЬ understood the juxtaposition between the vaguely alarming word and the sweet flower. A rose was sometimes a sign of love, and love could be very electric and volatile—like fire. Madeline knew that well enough. But still, the result was too feeble for her. She’d often thought that maybe she wasn’t a literary person, maybe words just weren’t her thing.

      But now, sitting in her office behind the gallery, it was different.

      She looked at her computer screen, at her own gallery’s website and an image she had placed there—a photo of Dudlin’s Eight Days, a sketch she’d sold after she moved to this new gallery space.

      Eight Days was displayed on the gallery’s Past Works page. She liked to visit all the works she’d once owned, liked to see the comments below them, to behold what the world was saying about the pieces she’d sold or collected.

      But not now. She’d read these particular comments too many times.

      The words blurred until she forced herself to slow the panicked movement of her eyes and read one word at a time—each word, in black, appearing in a separate horizontal row. They were just words, just comments, but they struck her as a kind of typographic art. Perhaps she finally understood the power of that type of work.

      Madeline dialed up the brightness on her computer, alternately gazing at the image of Eight Days and the comments under it, the white spaces littered with terrifying insinuations. Some targeted the artist, and those angered her. But what scared her were the ones pointed toward her.

      The computer screen seemed to pulse as she stared at it. The screen seemed to gain heat. Finally, she hit the print button and waited for the two pages to come out of the printer—one showing the Dudlin piece that she’d sold, the other the comments beneath it.

      She stared cautiously, suspiciously, at the printer. Recently, she’d come into her office in the morning and found pages waiting in the printer tray. Always they were pages she’d viewed before—art from some of the artists she’d worked with, pieces sold by other galleries—and yet she didn’t recall printing them.

      Startled. Haunted. That was how she felt when she saw the pages waiting for her. She’d mentioned this to a few people, who’d suggested perhaps she’d had a glass of wine too many or smoked too much pot. But although Madeline did drink and sometimes smoked, she never did so to excess. Spirits and drugs didn’t ignite her like they did other people.

      Now, not wanting to think about the mystery of finding those pages, needing to get away from her office, she took the pages she’d printed and walked into the main space of the gallery. On a far wall hung a massive canvas, depicting a woman at two different times of the day and in two different eras.

      The first was a morning image harkening back to the early 1900s. The background was painted the pink-grapefruit color of morning and showed the woman in a cream-colored nightgown, thick and comforting. The second image was of a blue-black contemporary evening, the woman now wearing a white negligee, her skin golden against the sheer white fabric, her nipples black beneath it.

      In front of the painting, far back enough to gain perspective, Madeline had placed a navy-colored chaise lounge, made to resemble the one in the evening part of the painting.

      She sat on the chaise now and glanced at the print-out depicting Eight Days, which was a charcoal sketch of four street images. The sketch had been glazed with resin, giving it a vivid, sparkling finish that seemed to awaken the street images, seemed to call them to life.

      Madeline flipped her long black hair over her shoulder and switched the sheets of paper in her hands so she could read the page with the comments.

      Since some art aficionados thought Sir Arthur Dudlin had been lazy in using simple charcoal and then “tossing” glaze on it, Madeline hadn’t been surprised when she’d read the first comment months before. Dudlin, it said, gentleman though he was, faced the greatest challenge to an artist—age. And he did not fare well.

      “Poor Dudlin,” she had said when she first saw that note, then scoffed. She had known the artist well at the end of his life, had an immense respect for him. She’d even been the muse for another one of his sparkling charcoals. She had been irritated at how discourteous that comment had been.

      But it was the more recent comment that plagued her. As she read it, she felt something roil through her stomach—something hot, something angry. One hand held the pages, the other was on the navy chaise longue as if to brace herself for another reading, hoping she had been too hasty and judgmental the first few times around.

      The comment was from someone else, who posted anonymously under the name ArtManners.

      Dudlin, it read, not only aged at the end of his life, he went into a different profession—that of manager. He didn’t create art any longer. He issued directives to his assistants, who replicated his glazed charcoal pieces, then allowed the master to pass them off as his own.

      She braced herself for the next few lines. Check your Dudlin if you have one. Especially if you bought it from this gallery.

      There were two more lines, but she couldn’t bring herself to read them again.

      Madeline put the pages at the foot of the chaise and scooted back until she was reclining, far away from the comments.

      Thankfully, no one was in the gallery.

      Thankfully, John Mayburn was sending Isabel McNeil.

      4

      “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the hand of Madeline Saga. She was, as Mayburn had described her to me, a tiny, luminous Japanese woman with skin that seemed almost pearly. Her intent brown eyes were strangely bright, almost as if they could actually feel, as if they had senses other than sight.

      “Lovely to meet you, too,” she said in a quiet yet strong voice.

      I looked around the gallery. It was almost triangular in shape, housed in a corner of the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue. Inside, the space had blond wood floors, white walls and white columns.

      “This is wonderful,” I said.

      “Thank you. Very much.” She looked around the room as if appreciating it herself. “Let me show you around.”

      With every step, the gallery was a surprise. First, she showed me a miniature stamp, decorated in an Indian sort of pattern, surrounded by a matte a thousand times bigger than it was, taking up half of a wall. Next, she pointed out a sculpture that looked like ice cubes with silvery insides, next to an ice bucket with real ice inside. “An installation,” Madeline said.

      “Interesting,” I said, looking at it.

      “What strikes you?” she asked.

      “I’m not sure. I guess it’s the combination of the real and the not real.”

      “But do we ever know?” Madeline asked in a musing voice. Then she added, “Nearly anything can be art. Most art simply shows different ways of looking at life, or a part of it.”

      Next was something more traditional and I adored it on sight. It showed a woman in side-by-side panels. It was clearly the same person, but the woman was portrayed in two different time periods. She was living two lives. I had felt very much the same over the last year and a half.

      “And СКАЧАТЬ