Twilight Apprentice

 

by Rita Signorelli-Pappas

 

    Oh he knew now it had been madness to hire her, but she had en­tered his studio late in the day, at twilight, when dreams of loss con­densed and danced across the soul like clusters of wind-tossed bubbles. He was rinsing the paint from his brushes and looking down the twelve floors below at the glowing street lamps, the bowed heads of the people filing pensively down the avenue, the inviting outdoor cafes. He was marvelling that every day reduced to this same gentle moment when the golden sunlight had already deepened into umber without anyone’s taking notice. Then the sunlight vanished, the faces retreated into shadow, and the candles glittered like fireflies among the cafe tables. So gentle, happening almost without one’s notice, that was how Tatiana had entered his studio that afternoon, at the moment when he had just opened the window and stood there drying his hands on a linen towel. Although he lived only ten blocks up Second Avenue, he was thinking of staying the night if there was the usual soft breeze, but he was about to pick up the phone to tell the su­perintendent’s wife, Sarina, please not to send up the frittata, for the doctor had found his cholesterol high that very morning and wanted to check it again in two weeks. Sarina would send up the frittata just the same, and just the same he would lie to her—a harmless white lie—the next morning in the lobby and say it had been delicious, yes, squisito.

    Then Peter Schlatter had dropped by, saying that he had seen Luca’s exhibition of drawings at the Jules Rosenquist Gallery on 58th Street. Peter kept smiling in his sly, condescending way whenever he mentioned the exhibition, which, of course, he had found wanting. The room was too dark, and the paintings had been hung way too high—a deplorable performance by Jules, really not Luca’s fault at all, he supposed, though heaven knew, such a disaster would never have occurred in his gallery. But there it was: that was the differ­ence between the dealers on Second Avenue and Madison Avenue. Finally, Peter had understood Luca’s silence as the dismissal that it was, and he had ceremoniously strolled out of the studio, smugly stroking the knot in his tie.

    Luca had opened the window wider, for suddenly he found there was no longer air enough to breathe; in fact, the tiny, white-walled room was stifling. Again he asked himself why he had allowed the walls of the room to remain a flat, stony white when for years he had meant to paint them an enigmatic topaz, a shade neither green nor blue that would heal the anguish in his soul. Always at dusk he passed through this familiar moment of widening despair, when all his memories seemed to fade at once and he found himself yearning for the end of life. And yet it was at that moment that his new life began.

    Tatiana entered and stood still in front of the open door of the stu­dio, a tall, thin-shouldered girl with the long, delicately molded face of a gazelle. Looking into her lustrous, black animal eyes, he read only one message: don’t disappoint me. When he asked, gently so as not to frighten her off, what she wanted, she began biting her pale, thin lips and murmuring that she had looked up his name in the tele­phone book after seeing it listed under Recent Exhibitions in the Art Dealers Directory of The New York Times. He noticed that her lips seemed fuller when she parted them, and he wanted suddenly to grab his brush and paint those lips a deep, vibrant red; he wanted to give her a full, beautiful painted mouth. She asked for a job then, any­thing he liked; she could pose for him, be his agent, answer his tele­phone. When she noticed that there was no phone in the studio, she simply gave a graceful shrug. She exclaimed how intolerable the life of a secretary was to her, that she didn’t belong at I. Montreaux, it was a wretched place and she could no longer breathe there. When she did try to breathe she felt her lungs tighten and got a choking sen­sation at the back of her throat. All day long she sat at her dreadful typewriter inhaling the bitter scent of French cigarettes. For four years she had suffered there, though she was not uneducated, she had a degree in the fine arts. She had really wanted to be an artist, she said, an artist like him. As she spoke, she kept tossing her head with a quick, restless motion. She fixed her pleading, dark eyes on him so that he was compelled once again to divine their singular mes­sage. She was a fragile girl, luminous and fine as a piece of embossed china, and so slender that her upper arms were almost as slight as her wrists. As she stood there in his studio, motionless and miserable, he began to imagine her fleshed out, with breasts full enough not to keep one guessing, and broad, quilted hips.

    There was a knock at the open door, and Sarina had entered bear­ing the frittata. She laid the silver tray in front of him with confi­dence, pretending not to notice his visitor. She told him how fresh the eggs were, brown eggs, they were the only ones worth buying, worth the two-hour weekly commute to her friend’s farm in New Jersey. “Taste that, Luca,” she told him, jabbing the air with her forefinger, “and then decide if you have ever really tasted eggs before, stop and ask yourself what it is you’ve been eating all these years.” She turned then and leveled an openly assessing stare at the narrow, lithe figure of Tatiana. Sarina’s mouth widened into a strained, solicitous smile; when she spoke, her voice betrayed jealous disbelief. She told Tatiana that there were some people in the world who had too much will power, who were too disciplined; she said that every day she thanked God she was not one of them. Then she shook her head, as if rejecting the delivery of an item that she had never ordered and bus­tled out the door, pulling her wine-colored shawl about her bosom, which jutted out ahead of her like a wide shelf.

    Tatiana had shrugged and looked away, blinking so rapidly he had thought she was struggling to hold back tears. But he saw that her eyes were dry, that Sarina’s meddling remarks hadn’t offended her in the least. He had fumbled then for his cigarette lighter, the small one inlaid with onyx that he had searched all of London for early that spring. The truth was it had been a long, indifferent sum­mer on Second Avenue, and by the end of each tiresome day he was too eagerly craving his cigarettes and gin. When he looked back at Tatiana, her eyes were pleading with him. He felt enclosed, sur­rounded by her needs and desires. For he saw right away that she was an expensive girl: the sleek style of her hair, the finely hemmed linen skirt, the pale legs waxed so carefully of hair that they gleamed like ivory. She asked timidly if he would care to see a re­sume, and he remembered having frowned, for it was by now an unnec­essary question. Already she was seamed into the future of his life: he had seen her right away from the corner of his eyes when she first appeared in the door of his studio like an elegant apparition. She had such a vulnerable, girlish quality that moved him deeply; her movements were hesitant, dreamy, she kept blinking her eyes rapidly as if expecting to be hit. He felt a widening compassion for her. She was like a lithe, lovely animal that unexpectedly crossed one’s path in the midst of a shadowy forest, an animal whose dark, luminous eyes one memorized forever.

    He told her that if she truly wanted to be an artist, why not sim­ply quit her job and be one? Do as you like, he told her, and be quick about it or one morning she would wake up and find that she was al­ready in her fifties like him. She leaned forward anxiously and said that yes, one morning she would wake up and be fifty, but she would never wake up as anything but a woman and that was the crucial dif­ference between them. She told him then her poignant history, about the tradition-minded immigrant parents who had insisted she attend business school. She had refused and moved to New York, where she had found the job at I. Montreaux and earned a fine arts degree by go­ing to night classes at Hunter College. She frowned at the end of her terse life summary, a faint frown that did not linger. She had al­ready broken the dangerous habit of furrowing her brow; she was a careful, disciplined girl, close enough to thirty to understand the per­ils of premature age. He had been stung with pity for her and said aloud that he understood how difficult it was these days to be a woman, yes, still difficult, despite the quantity of empty words and the forlorn gestures of liberation. To be born a woman was already to have failed, and he supposed the sense of failure persisted, even in­tensified, after one was educated.

    She had stared at a point directly past him as he spoke, moving her lips to form soundless words, as if she were reading a private, in­visible text. He had felt suddenly awkward, as if he had surprised her in an act of self-intimacy. She was a strange, hypnotic girl, who would look better at forty and still be desirable at fifty; not a girl a man would ever want to let go of or throw away. He wanted to invite her into his darkness forever. He felt elated all at once, elated and safe too, for the mechanics of acquiring a mistress were a skill he had mastered years ago, unlike his lifelong craft of art, the practice of which left him forever unsatisfied. But it was actually a limited pro­cess—the art of sexual possession—so simple, so primitive really, that no man need feel incapable. It was not unlike acquiring a piece of important silver at an auction; by this time he understood the preci­sion of placing a winning bid: the thing to hold in mind was that the sought object was not priceless but only a beautiful thing with a fixed value, something one could display proudly in a room but still be com­fortable and intimate with.

    When he asked all at once if she would be his apprentice, he had noticed right away the faint undulation of her brow. She repeated the word apprentice slowly, as if he had addressed her in a foreign tongue. Her nostrils flared out slightly, and she restlessly lifted her hair back behind her shoulders. Their unformed relationship lay before him like an ancient riddle whose answer he was slowly clarifying for himself. “Yes,” he mused aloud, addressing himself more than her, “the twilight apprentice of Luca Tolomei. Come here every afternoon at this time when you have finished at I. Montreaux.” He mentioned then how a young artist needed to have a mentor, not just one, but two or three in a lifetime, and if she would come, he would be pleased to teach her all he knew. Her shoulders sagged slightly as she leaned forward; her bowed, blond head seemed suddenly swollen with light like a ripe, ardent sunflower. In a taut whispering voice she answered that he did not understand: she could not return to that horrid office every day. She couldn’t sit on the seat of that hard chair poking at that tedious keyboard. He didn’t understand the way most people treated secretaries, not just the bosses in the back office with their short, fat fingers and bitter breath, but everyone, visitors to the office or people who called on the phone: they poured their words right through her as if she were a funnel. “Ask yourself what that would be like, Luca,” she said, “to be a funnel that people keep trying to force words through.” She paused as if waiting for a surge of applause, like an actor who has just delivered an important soliloquy.

    But his only response was weary silence. He wanted to seize her by her delicate shoulders and cry that there was violence to life’s te­dium, that it attacked the senses and robbed one of the will to con­tinue. He had continued, advancing on the sheer thread of his imagi­nation; he had lived beyond the day when life had lost its savor, de­spairing to discover that he still drew breath. But he said nothing, he simply looked at Her: a pale, glowing girl, a frosted glass of cool, sweet water. He imagined her clothed in an opulent long gown with a black velvet bodice that kept loosening, and a wide, whispering taffeta skirt. Her flesh was carved from pure, unveined marble and exuded no noticeable warmth: cool, dry expensive flesh. Yet he knew the precise weight of that body, the uniform, shockingly high value of each separate pound. Her measured smile was no more than a sly, necessary ploy; only the eyes betrayed intense, clear emotion, dark eyes that blinked and beseeched him not to disappoint her.

    When he finally spoke again, his voice had been low, and, to his surprise, breathless. He told her he could pay her only a little now while she was learning, but when she had finished the apprentice­ship, he would help her find a loft of her own. He would put money in a bank for her, a small amount actually, but enough for her to have a free first year, a year of quiet, sustained work. These words seemed to please her; she walked quickly toward him and in a swift, intimate gesture, offered him her cheek to kiss, like a gladdened child. He felt his heart lift and fill with light. Grasping her gently by the shoul­ders, he found her mouth and kissed it, but she did not respond. Her eyes remained wide open, and her lips stayed together; she hardly moved except slowly to bow her head. She leaned against him, her body heavy with regret, like a sunflower vanquished by strong rain. Cautiously, he released her. The only fear he had ever had of women he loved was that they would somehow lose their passion. He liked women easily aroused, easily handled; a woman hollow of passion disconcerted him. All his life he had loved women and needed much more from them than flat submission: he had needed their animal vi­brancy. He had accepted and understood without question their con­stant need to exhibit their bodies; he had always known how to help them love themselves, indeed, he had found their wild narcissism moving. Women knew instinctively that they could trust him, that a moment of intimacy with him had value, for he was past an age of boyish vanity.

    Perhaps he was rushing the girl; he was a man of sensitivity, though not without a certain impatience. He was still thought to be handsome though the years had stamped a deep furrow in his brow, thinned his silver-brown hair, and patterned the tops of his hands with thick lavender veins. He was still young enough to be touchy about anyone sneaking through his discarded mail, like Sarina or the cleaning woman, Clara. Yes, he was touchy about discarded letters, particularly the ones that he sometimes received from young women desperate to break into the New York art world. Of course he would hire the girl and teach her what he knew about watercoloring and pastels; oils were perhaps beyond her, he had begun to suspect that right away. And the truth was that she had time too; she had hoped by now to be the arch, showy bride of an aristocrat, but that had not happened. Certainly she still dreamed it would happen, was even dreaming of it now with a secret, lonely desire. Again he pictured her in that opulent gown, imagined himself caressing the black velvet expanse of the bodice with bold, dazzled fingertips.

    He ached suddenly to take her arm and descend with her into the restless dark of the avenue. Perhaps she was hungry; immediately he considered Stefano’s and asked if she had eaten yet. When she said no, he gently took her arm and turned off the light. She stiffened and murmured a series of indistinct words about hair and makeup, and he was obliged to show her the bathroom, apologizing for the naked lightbulb and absence of toilet paper, though she barely seemed to no­tice as she focused her rapt gaze on the mirror. Within a few minutes she swept back through the bathroom door, tossing her head in that quick, impetuous way of hers, blotting her newly vivid lips on a bit of tissue that she hurriedly discarded. In the elevator he kept staring at her moist crimson lips; he kept imagining his fingertips testing the buoyancy of her pale breasts, smooth, soft, like rubbed velvet. He cau­tioned himself to be patient but wondered how many weeks he would be obliged to wait before she slept with him.

 

    Tatiana did very well all the things he taught her. Under his in­struction she was able to achieve fine, delicate effects in her water colors. Her technique was clean and meticulous; the usual watercolor­ing problems—hard edges, bad spots—never once troubled her. She painted flowers mostly: crocuses, narcissus, periwinkle. The paper­white narcissus was her favorite, as was the color white, which she preferred above even the most exquisite tones of violet and pink. She quickly developed a firm hand with her brush, consistently painting thin but confident lines that glided, spiralled, crossed, and curved. He was by turns buoyed and troubled by her easy progress, which was so deft, so rapid, that at moments he almost felt it was she who taught him.

    Once afternoon at dusk as he waited to hear her step in the hall­way, he found himself gazing at her latest painting, a graceful white snowdrop with five elongated petals. Suddenly he understood that she had exhausted his knowledge of watercolors, that her technique was, in fact, subtler and more masterful than his own. Her coloring was restricted but haunting; she used her soft whites, blues, and grays so boldly that it almost seemed as if she were using oil. He realized then that he had been wrong to confine her and began to think of in­troducing her to oils: a few simple still lives at first, and, of course, she could continue with her enchanting flowers. She would like that, he thought, and her happiness might cause her to soften sexually, for her responses over the months to his amorous overtures had remained stiff and uncertain. She was like a sealed oyster, a shut bud; he knew there had to be a way to loosen her passion but he had not yet discov­ered what it was. Meanwhile he affected kindness and a long pa­tience; like a panther, he was practiced enough to outwait his prey. In the entire year of her apprenticeship they did not once make love. Rarely did she allow him to kiss her on the lips; instead, like a child, she continued to offer him her cheek. Needless to say, he lav­ished a profusion of gifts upon the girl, presenting them to her steadily, confidently, one immediately after the other. But she had refused his offer of a trip to Italy, complaining that she had no desire whatsoever to view the colossal sculptures of the Italian Renaissance; Michelangelo’s work she found garish and deeply offen­sive: the painted vault of the Sistine Chapel, she complained, was no more than a violent pastiche.

    In truth, Tatiana remained an enigma to him throughout that dreamlike first year, as unpredictable, virginal, and direct as a child. And slowly he felt less the prospective lover, more the protective father. He had no children, would never have them; his internist had made that quite clear years ago. So Tatiana, his exquisite, treasured apprentice, seemed more and more like his heir: the flesh and blood successor he had not, could not, biologically produce. As his paternal feeling toward her deepened, his seductive impulse faltered; his physical longing seemed suddenly shameful and unnatural, akin to incest really, though even as he lived out the confusing range of his responses, he also knew that finally he must have her.

    Surprisingly, she proved equal to the challenge of oil painting; she knew instinctively, without his prompting, how to manage colors, that the surest way of bringing out the full richness of a color was to add a bit of her beloved white. She easily mastered the skill of stretching a canvas, and when they ran out of canvas and were forced to use the large sheets of illustration board stacked on the shelves of the studio, she automatically cut and coated them with a layer of gesso thinned to a consistency of light cream. She worked swiftly, silently, with a remarkably dense quality of concentration. He loved simply to sit and look at her as she painted, so thoughtfully, with such utter sincerity; it was apparent to him right away that painting in oil was the work this girl was born to. Her oils of shells and stones and flowers were richly nuanced; she understood that she could achieve unusual effects with the color gray. As she progressed in her work in oil, she continued to limit her palette to a mere half dozen colors, and, to preserve their exquisite clarity on canvas, she insisted on the most expensive paints that his money could buy. For his part, there was never any question of hesitating or relenting; he simply did what Tatiana wished, procured whatever she asked for. To fulfill her material needs became his joy in life; to see this wondrous, ethe­real creature happy was all he asked.

    As the end of her first breathtaking year of progress drew near, it was only natural that they began to speak of her leaving I. Montreaux and launching her career as an artist. Immediately he suggested rent­ing a loft to help her shape a public profile. After a period of looking, they found a small but airy place downtown on thirty-eighth street; of course, the rental fee was exorbitant, but as he made out the check to the overeager agent he was aware only of Tatiana and the look of chaste adoration that she had fixed upon him. As ever, he could not bear to disappoint her.

    In the week that followed, Tatiana resigned her job at I. Montreaux, giving them a scant forty-eight hours notice. He accompanied her to Christie’s where they purchased in auction a few choice, though gently worn, pieces of continental furniture for her loft. Then there was the question of those blank white walls; he volunteered some early oils of his own, but she demurred, protesting that it was her career they were launching, not his. Certainly that was true, but he began to ponder then the important matter of fortune and fame; at first he hesitated to mention it, but finally concluded that she would at once perceive his irreproachable good will. As they climbed the stairs of the white brick building that housed the loft to await delivery of the auction pieces, he began to speak of women broadly, of their limited but real accomplishments through the ages; there were some who had achieved notice as scientists, writers, yes, even as saints. “But surely you are aware, tesoro,” he had murmured, tapping her shoulder warmly, “that we have no real record of a woman painter of the very first order.” She stiffened her upper lip in annoyance and complained that next he would quote Barnett Newman to her, or propose the toast of that dreadful Hans Hofmann: Only The Men Have Wings. He had laughed in mild protest and assured her that it was after all the early sixties and women artists were at least respected. Who knew? Anything was possible. “Yes, anything,” echoed Tatiana, but there was an abrasive edge to her voice that he had never heard before. He hastened to reassure her then that he thought she had a lovely talent, and he had friends, important dealers right there in the city, who would listen to his opinion. She had smiled thoughtfully and answered yes, he was right, it was the men, finally, who would help her. It was enough; they never spoke of the subject again, not even during the astonishing events of the year that followed.

 

    On the night, two weeks later, when Tatiana moved her belongings into the loft, they finally had made love. He had designed the sce­nario with elaborate care: a long, leisurely dinner at Stefano’s, where the male waiters were coyly attentive, discreetly whispering behind their trays about his singular good luck in acquiring such a lovely creature. After dinner Tatiana allowed herself a scant cup of espresso, which she had now grown fond of, though as a child dining at her grandmother’s table, she had loathed its bitter taste. She had tossed her head more than usual, and held her chin and nose high, but he was not misled by her outward aloofness; already he saw she had yielded, answered the question that had hung unanswered in the air between them for the past year.

    Even now the memory of that first sweet evening stirred in his mind like a solitary leaf blowing. She seemed an awakening child who trustingly placed in his hands the secret of a night’s unaccount­ably wild dream. As she sighed and quivered beneath him, he com­prehended why she had paused so long on the threshold of sexual passion: she was afraid to let it draw her in; she had sensed that she would swim the depths of its sea with such abandon that she might never rise back to the surface. Meanwhile, he moved in a quiet fever through the lush topiary of Tatiana’s hidden sensuality, and when, finally, he laid his head on her pillow and fell asleep, he assumed that she did the same. But now he realized that she had waited be­side him for a brief time, then rose, dressed, and went swiftly to her easel, where she had worked steadily until dawn.

    He had awakened to the still, velvet gaze of a gazelle: there upon the easel at the foot of the bed was a remarkable self-portrait of Tatiana. Startled, he quickly sat up and leaned forward for a closer look; the portrait was like no other painting Tatiana had done, for none had such an arresting, hypnotic effect. The head of the girl was long and narrow, the arms slender, and the dark eyes gently slanted. He could barely move under the spell of the portrait, couldn’t go away at all; he simply wanted to sit there and look at it forever. The girl gazed out of the picture at him with a piercingly familiar expression as if she were asking him not to disappoint her. With the artist’s unconscious deftness, Tatiana had given expression to her own essence.

    As their erotic relationship deepened in the weeks and months that followed, so did her creative ardor; everywhere she looked she saw a possible painting. As he hired the models, arranged the travel plans—for she had a sudden desire to paint places outside the con­fines of the city—and brought up to the loft virtually every kind of flower available at the local florist shops for her to study, he won­dered where this sudden frenzy would lead, what she would accom­plish next. She seemed never tired; she worked all day from seven in the morning until seven in the evening, pausing a scant ten minutes at midday to take some coffee and biscotti that he brought daily from a neighborhood bakery. She seemed to see each new painting with ex­traordinary clarity, as one recalls vividly a dream in the first few moments of waking. Her sexual vivacity kept increasing; night after night as they made love, she turned to him new depths of sensual power, like a kaleidoscope revolving endlessly into vibrant patterns of color and form.

    In the autumn he had to leave the city unexpectedly for Connecticut, where his widowed sister was fatally ill. For four long, anguished weeks he watched helplessly as Simona lay in a coma; when she finally died in mid-October he endured the awkward te­dium of her burial and swiftly returned to New York, shaken but ea­ger to resume his life.

    He was shyly excited about seeing Tatiana again and decided to surprise her with an evening that would stir the memory of their first night together. Striding into Lucerne Floral, he ordered a dozen—no, two dozen—white narcissus, smiling to himself as he recited Tatiana’s address. Then, on to Stefano’s, where he reserved the table secluded in its own separate alcove at the very back of the room. He imagined Tatiana’s look of enchantment when the flowers arrived as he strolled slowly down Second Avenue. Then, on a sudden impulse, he abruptly turned and headed in the direction of her studio. But as he walked downtown, he felt the palms of his hands grow cool, and he struggled to slow his quickening breath. Unexpectedly, he began to feel resentful. The monthlong wait had been a punishing strain on his mind and senses, and now, as the moment of repossession rushed to meet him, he found himself irritably wondering, who was this crea­ture who had manipulated him so adroitly, who would surely con­tinue to flash through his money until finally it ran out? And what then? Perhaps he should try to live without her: she had her vani­ties, and an aloofness that at times seemed insupportable.

    Yet even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he saw again the elegant curve of Tatiana’s jaw, the sudden tenderness of her smile; he remembered the deft grace of her slender hands as they moved over a canvas or gently stroked the sleeve of his jacket. The very at­tempt to imagine life without her pained and astonished him—whenever he left her, things would always go bad for him; swiftly, the boredom of life recondensed and threatened to suffocate him. It was simply no longer possible to live without her—she was the whorled conch, the jewel-eyed owl—his unknowable, beautiful friend.

    When he reached Tatiana’s loft, he hurried up the three flights of stairs barely pausing for breath; he felt very light, very young once more: twenty-two, no, even nineteen years old! He did not bother to ring but simply used his key to unlock the door. When he heard the click, he pushed it open, and smiling hopefully, he entered an empty room.

    No. He was not dreaming. Empty. The walls of the loft had been freshly painted and the floor newly polished to prepare for the next tenant. Slowly the silence of the room encircled him in a cruel em­brace. Walking to the single window, he looked down into the street below. Yes. There was a sudden, strong sense of familiarity in this moment, like uncovering a text that he had read once long ago. Yes. His absence had propelled Tatiana back out into the capricious auc­tion that was the New York art world. And the rules of auction never changed: he had simply been outbid.

    Now, a mere dozen months since Tatiana had left, she had risen to national renown. She was the expensive property of Peter Schlatter, the gallery owner to whom she had defected. Perhaps it was a good thing she left, though Luca made no secret of his enduring regret; she had had it very good with him, but he knew Peter’s clever, hawkish way. He knew that in his absence Peter had convinced her that her career would flourish under his direction. And Luca was nothing if not honest: he saw that that was just what had happened. Her paintings had begun to sell, and in one scant year, she had already had two major shows. Meanwhile, Schlatter had remodeled the entire top floor of his gallery to exhibit her newest work: a series of oils on vel­vet surfaces. There were rumors starting that she would soon leave him, although he was reportedly philosophical about her possible departure.

    A long article titled “The Velvet Palace of Tatiana Donzella” was the cover piece of Art News just this month. The article mentioned the rumors about Tatiana’s leaving Schlatter and speculated about who would next handle the Donzella oeuvre. Luca knew only that it would be a gallery owner who could hand her twice the money that Schlatter had. Although Tatiana had protested publicly that she was with Peter only because he alone understood her work, Luca dis­believed her, knowing Peter’s aesthetics to be those of a common bro­ker. What Peter understood was that Tatiana was an attractive pos­session, and for now, a deeply lucrative one.

    For the entire past year he had not seen Tatiana, and he did not know if he would see her again. He had used his inheritance from Simona to move farther uptown to a larger apartment on Third Avenue. At his age, the conservative instinct deepened: he smoked less, paid more attention to the delicacy of his food, and took long, solitary walks. His paintings kept getting inexplicably smaller, and recently he had developed a modest reputation as a collagist. His studio was less cluttered now, and he had finally painted its walls a soothing topaz. About two months ago he had taken on another ap­prentice, an Irish girl, quiet but industrious. He had advertised in the Times for days, but only she had appeared. Like a tame, captive ani­mal, she was eager to take bread at his hand, and in bed she did not disappoint him.