One Good Friend Deserves Another (17 page)

W
endy had come to the inescapable conclusion that Kelly Palazzo was the bravest woman she knew.

Granted, it was a crazy sort of courage. Self-delusional and heedless, and bound straight for heartbreak. Wendy knew her brother better than anybody, and Kelly better than most, and the two of them together was such an explosive combination that in the twenty-four hours since Wendy had sat in that hospital room listening to Kelly confess, she still hadn’t wrapped her mind around the news.

But Wendy knew this much was true: she herself was no Kelly Palazzo. Unlike Kelly, she’d given up her past. She’d tossed that studded leather choker in the trash. She’d settled herself in a fine, comfortable life, with a fine, comfortable man whose happiness lay in her hands.

So today, as she stood amid the maze of white tents that formed the display grounds of the Hudson Valley Art Fair, she thought of Kelly and tried to channel a measure of her courage. She would need it, to make this final good-bye.

“You like the painting.”

Wendy started. His low voice came from just behind her, like a warm breath against the nape of her neck. She wondered how long he’d been there. When she’d first arrived, the older woman in the next booth selling hand-painted pots had told her that the artist had slipped away for only a moment. Then Wendy had lost herself in the painting before her.

“I’m stunned, Gabriel.” She mustered her professional voice, a nice solid wall between them. “I’ve been standing here trying to figure out how you captured the light so well.”

“I washed the whole thing with a pigment I found in this art store in Rockport, Massachusetts,” he said. “It has crushed seashells in it. Gives it a sheen.”

He came to her side, blocking her from the frisky gusts of summer wind that billowed the sides of the tents and sent crumpled food wrappers skittering along the grass. He wore dark jeans and a black graphic T-shirt, but she couldn’t see any more out of the corner of her eye, with the wind whipping her hair around her face.

She focused on the large canvas propped up on an easel before her, depicting a collection of ordinary glassware. Four glass vases clustered on a windowsill. One was small and sleek and crystal clear. Another was classically shaped but shockingly scarlet. Exotic curves marked the third, in emerald green. The last stood behind, tall and arrow-straight, an earthy shade of amber. It was a simple painting of bottles. But light poured in through the painted window and seeped through the various colors, setting each one aglow. The whole effect was one of glorious contrast, of beautiful fragility.

“This reminds me a little of Derondi Raffick,” she murmured. She sensed the turn of his attention. “You wouldn’t know him. I’m afraid he’s struggling still. I met him when I worked in the city. His work was more abstract than this.” She’d been unable to sell Derondi to anyone but herself. Her inability to close a sale was the fundamental fault that hastened the end of her art gallery career. “He used bold, tropical colors but he painted them with clarity and an edge, as if they were cut from stained glass. This painting reminds me of that.”

It reminded her, too, of the first time she’d seen Derondi’s work, dragged into the studio by the frighteningly skinny artist in paint-spattered jeans and a T-shirt so big that his shoulder jutted out of the stretched collar. She’d been struck by the contrast of the richness, clarity, and color of his work compared to the world-battered appearance of the man.

It was a truth that always unhinged her. Artists were fearless. They poured their whole selves on canvas.

“I’d like to know how he managed that. I use a thin oil. It can be tricky, temperamental.” His voice dropped. “I’m glad you came.”

The familiar frisson washed over her, that tingling intensity of awareness. At the museum these past weeks, this had been her sign to back away, to beg off because of work, to end their conversation—whether it be about art or work or his son—because their banter had unwittingly slipped beyond some dark line.

But now his job at the museum was finished. He was no longer her contractor, she his client. Here, under this open sky, they were together in some sort of fluid in-between zone, their connection uncertain and dangerous.

“I was curious to see what you would paint.” She gestured to an image of candy-red geraniums straining toward an unseen sun, and then another, of a bowl of sea glass in a pool of summer light. “Your talent…it’s astonishing.”

“Those are strong words, coming from the assistant curator of a museum.”

“A regretfully small, very conservative museum,” she corrected, pulling her hair off her face again as the wind whipped it around. “A museum without a wing for contemporary art. The last time I suggested an exhibit of local artists in the foyer, the board balked.”

“Let me guess. Jesus in urine?”

“Not quite that bad. Just nudes. Lots and lots of nudes.”

“I imagine that wouldn’t go over well with school groups.”

“No, but I’m sure the seniors would have loved it.” She avoided his eye a little longer by squinting more closely at the painting, seeing how the green bottle now looked motherly, the scarlet, like a young girl growing into womanhood. “This is like a puzzle to me. The longer I stand here, the more I see.”

“Stop. You’ll give me illusions of grandeur.”

“I can’t possibly be the first to say this to you.”

“You’re different, Wendy.”

She stared more fixedly at the canvas, unnerved by the change in his voice.

“You and I have similar tastes,” he explained. “Every day in the museum, you stop in front of that little painting by Jervis McEntee, the one where the light is on the mountain.”

“I love that canvas. It’s bright. Hopeful.” She gestured at his painting with her chin, trying to focus the conversation where it belonged. “Like this.”

“If you’re not careful, my head will swell, and I’ll end up quitting my job, uprooting my son, and taking out a second mortgage.”

There it was again, that teasing vibrato, the light tone of voice that he used whenever their conversations veered to intimate territory.

“Well,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you cutting off an ear or anything.”

“Or losing myself in an absinthe binge in some Montmartre café.”

“That does sound destructive.”

Then, forgetting herself, she turned to face him, unprepared for the impact of those upturned eyes, the broad cheekbones, the flattened bridge of his nose, the exotic beauty of him bathed in the gauzy light of the overcast day. Thick fingers of wind tousled his hair.

Between them came a sudden stillness, a sharp contrast to the bustling activity around them—a young mother racing a stroller through the grass to make her child laugh, the whirling chaos of a vendor working his wares at a nearby wooden-toy booth, and the ringing of bells from handmade wind chimes being knocked about by the breeze.

With a slow, uneven breath, she absorbed a thought: A man shouldn’t be allowed to look like this.

Then she dropped her gaze to the graphic on his T-shirt: a smaller version of the very painting she’d been admiring. She told herself that a sailor could stave off seasickness by keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon. And she could stop the seismic shaking of her world if she just fixed her sights on returning their relationship to professional parameters.

“I still have some contacts in the art world,” she heard herself saying, in a little rushed voice. “It’s been a while since I worked in the city, but I know at least one gallery owner who’d be interested in looking at this.”

Something in his demeanor shifted. It was an imperceptible thing, like the slow ebbing of the wind. He squinted at the overcast sky, as if he were more concerned with the weather. “I can’t ask you to do that, Wendy.”

“I want to do it. My favorite thing to do, in my wild city days, was to find new talent.”

She felt a sudden, piercing ache for those days. For the unpredictability and the first excited rush upon seeing something new, something exciting, something exotically different. Like this painting.

Like this man.

“I can’t do gallery openings.” He shoved his fists in his pockets and tilted back a bit on his heels. “Evenings are difficult.”

Because of his son, she suspected. The one he spoke of with such affection, the one he left the museum early to pick up at school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The son whose mother was never mentioned, but also, apparently, never around.

“My friend Roger will love you even more if you act the recluse,” she said. “It adds a little mystery.”

Then he looked at her with the strangest expression. He looked as if he was about to speak but then his jaw went tight. In the uncomfortable silence, she slowly began to realize that her offer of help must have sounded condescending. That in her attempt to solidify the ground beneath her feet, she’d shifted the conversation from a discussion between equals to casting herself in the role of the rich patron—and him as the poor struggling artist.

She was saved from her own awkward attempts at apology by a few splatters of rain. Gabriel opened his palm, saw the moisture on his hand, and then squinted up at the sky. A thrumming patter swept across the field of canvas booths, the undeniable sound of a hard summer deluge.

“Oh, no,” she murmured. “Can I help—”

Before she could finish her sentence, the skies opened. He moved into action. He seized the big easel, painting and all, and hefted it around the wrapping table to stand it against the pole on the far corner of the booth. Panicked, she glanced at all the propped paintings and seized a smaller one, folded the easel flat, and followed his lead. He plunged back out, pulled in two more while she slipped out of the protection of the booth to seize another one as rain pummeled her shoulders. She bumped into Gabriel as he passed with two more crushed in his arms.

All around them, vendors pulled in their wares or drew in the jangling canvas flaps where they’d hung racks of beaded jewelry, children squealed while racing out of the maze, and couples jogged past, hunkered under twisted umbrellas, their feet sending up sprays of mud.

“Here, put those back there,” Gabe said, slapping two more paintings on the table before she could grab another. “I’m pulling the flaps.”

While Wendy braced the bigger easels and paintings as securely as she could against the far back of the booth, Gabe unhooked the booth’s canvas flaps—heavy with paintings—and folded them in, knocking the fringe flap over the grommets to protect the paintings from rain. He gathered the last of the smaller easels and leaned them against the table before cutting in to where she stood, in the small space between the back booth wall and the bristling forest of easels.

Trapped in the little canvas tent, she asked, “Are they okay?” She finger-combed her hair off her face. “Is there anything I can do?”

“If we wipe them, they should be fine.” He grabbed two clean rags from a box under the table and tossed one blindly toward her. “Especially around the edges.”

Wendy set to the work, clicking the frames against one another as she swiped the beaded water away while the rain pounded a fierce rhythm on the roof. A rumble of thunder rolled in the distance. They both looked up, as if they could see through the roof to the sky. And then, after a brief snagged glance, Wendy returned her attention to wiping a frame.

She thought, with a tremor,
We may be here for a while.

And she became keenly aware of the close confines of the space, humid with the pounding rain and cluttered with table, easels, paintings, boxes…and a tall, looming, strangely quiet Gabriel.

She shook out the rag violently, searching for a dry corner, reminding herself she was a Wainwright, socially finished at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, and surely she could make polite conversation with Gabriel for just a little while longer, until the rain ebbed and she could, with grace, say a last good-bye to him, his art, and his exotically beautiful, unforgettable face.

“It’ll pass,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. “I saw it on the Weather Channel this morning.”

“Occupational hazard, I suppose.” Another rumble of thunder rolled above them. “How much do you trust your weatherman?”

“I trust my senses more. I can smell it.” He collapsed one of the smaller easels, making a careful pile on one side of the table. “This is like an
abroholos.
A summer squall. Strong, soaking, but quick.”

“I guess we’ll just have to see.”

“You should stay for a while.” His voice was tight, as he continued to methodically wipe the frames. “Then you can leave without getting soaked.”

She hazarded a glance toward him. His back was toward her. The bent nape of his neck was beaded with moisture, and the rain had darkened his shoulders and back with an elongated
V
. And suddenly she found herself resisting the impulse to move across the space that separated them. She found herself battling an urge to wrap her arms around him and place her forehead on his shoulder blade.

Then she squeezed her eyes shut and did that dangerous thing: She dared to envision Gabriel in Parker’s place, sitting on the floral couches of the club parlor and eating lemon cake with her family. It was a reverie she found herself drifting into in the wee hours of the night, when sleep loosened her grip on her good sense. Inevitably, the whole scene morphed into some twisted Tim Burton version of
Alice in Wonderland,
where Gabriel swelled too big for the room and the teacup shattered in his hand.