The Color of Night

CHAPTER 6

When Mara Song arrived at Strand’s house the next morning, Meret went to the front door to answer the bell. Strand was finishing a letter when he heard their voices. Through the windows near his desk he saw them coming out of the central hallway into the peristyle. Mara was carrying a single large portfolio, and Meret was leading her around to the library door.

Strand stood and walked into the library, meeting them at the door just as Meret was pushing it open. Her face turned away from Mara, she flashed a sly smile at him. She excused herself and retreated to her office.

Mara Song’s hair was pulled back and knotted behind her neck, and she was wearing a loosely cut linen shirt tucked into tailored linen trousers. Her smile was relaxed.

“Beautiful place,” she said, looking around the library as she laid her portfolio on the library table. “Would you mind showing me around a bit? Have you got time?”

“Sure,” he said.

Though she was careful not to be too intrusive, Mara was nevertheless very interested in everything having to do with the house. She asked about its history, how long Strand had lived here, whether the garden was already designed as it was now. She asked about the furniture, much of which Strand and Romy had bought in antique shops in Europe, and she asked about his own collection of drawings, where he had bought them, and why.

Strand watched her as he talked. She was as curious about him now as he had been about her, but she was far less reserved in satisfying her curiosity. With every exchange in their conversation he learned as much about her as she did of him. She was proving to be complex, though he was reasonably sure that she would not have characterized herself in that way. He was slowly beginning to suspect that Mara Song’s personality was like the clear, bright sliver of the new moon: what you saw was stunning, but by far the greater part of it was hidden in shadow and would emerge only slowly.

In a little while they came full circle to the library. They sat at the long table, both on the same side, and Mara opened the portfolio and took out a folder.

“I think I can help you a little and save you some time on the appraisal,” she began, laying out several sheets of paper with densely typed lines. “I have a fair amount of data on the provenance of each drawing.”

She put the pages between them, then began going through her documentation beginning with the Klimt drawing, citing its catalog references, a history of its sales, and a brief description of the work, whether it was a fully executed drawing or a study for a later work.

When she finished, she sat back and tucked a loose bit of hair behind an ear. “It’s a beginning, anyway,” she said.

“It’s more than that.” Strand was still looking at the last document. “You’ve saved me a lot of work. I appreciate it.”

“The truth is,” she said, “I was afraid of getting ripped off. I’d never paid that kind of money for anything before in my life. It made me uncharacteristically thorough.”

Strand was skeptical about this last remark. He was quite sure that Mara was, in fact, a very methodical woman.

He paged through the portfolio, looking at the seven drawings once again. They were superb, all of them, each in its own special way.

“This last one,” he said, “Delvaux’s Reticence. He’s a different kind of draftsman from the others. What were your thoughts behind this purchase?”

She smiled as if he had caught her in a deception.

“It was the most spontaneous purchase of them all,” she said almost reluctantly. She mused on the drawing. “Delvaux tended to simplify his technique, which of course fits perfectly well with the psychological content of his eerie imagery.” She reached out and touched the edge of the paper. “But here, in this drawing, it looks as if he is going to allow the classical draftsman in him to take over-and here and here-then he reins it in. Here, for instance. Then again it emerges here.” She tapped the paper. “That sort of thing goes on all over this drawing. In that sense, it’s a kind of schizophrenic image. I’m not sure he knew what the hell he was doing.” She tilted her head, looking at the drawing. “But then there’s the title… so… Anyway, when I saw this I thought I sensed a different kind of Delvaux psychology hiding here, which instantly appealed to me.”

For a little while neither of them spoke. Strand concentrated on the drawings, appreciating her eye and her astute sense of what she valued. Then, uneasily, he became aware of her studying him.

Though he had done precisely the same thing to her the morning before, their proximity-he could easily have put an arm around her-made him self-conscious. When he looked up from the drawings, she was watching him with an expression of keen interest. Having been caught, she quickly altered her expression to one of benign, but uninformative, pleasance.

“How did you end up in Texas?” she asked.

“That seems odd to you?”

“Not odd, but… well, interesting.”

“Why?”

She laughed. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know what I mean. I’ll bet you haven’t lived here very long. I mean, not many years, anyway. For one thing, your card: ‘Paul Davies, Dealer in Fine Art.’ Why not ‘Harold Strand’? You bought someone’s business.”

“Harold?”

“Well, whatever.”

“You didn’t ask Truscott? He can be very informative about dealer gossip.”

“I don’t know Mr. Truscott. He was just a ‘trustworthy’ name a London dealer gave me.” She paused. “You’re being evasive.”

“Okay,” Strand conceded. He hated talking about himself and had several stock responses to such questions. “Here’s a cheap version of how I got here. When I was just out of the university-Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina-I went to work for a jewelry importer in New Orleans. I’d gotten a liberal arts degree, which prepared me for nothing in particular and everything in general. The jewelry importer was stingy with his employees and generous with himself. Collected art. It was my first exposure to fine art, and I fell in love with everything about it. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in art history. I worked for a gallery in San Francisco for a while. Learned the business. Opened my own gallery, but apparently I hadn’t learned enough business. I went broke. Got a job with a private collector in New York, an old man who had recently developed a passion for drawings and was raiding Europe. By this time I’d already zeroed in on drawings, too. We continued to educate each other.

“One day he walked in and told me he was dying of cancer. He wanted me to oversee the liquidation of his holdings. He said he wanted to reward me for my services, and since I was putting myself out of a job I might as well get a commission on it. So I became his broker rather than his employee. It was a generous gift. In one form or another, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

“You’ve spent most of your career in New York?”

“No. London. Rome. Paris. Geneva. Vienna. Those are the places where I’d built my connections when I was buying for the old man, so that’s where I headed and stayed. The old guy was good to me. He knew what kind of education I was getting.”

“Did you meet your wife in Europe?”

“My first wife?”

She nodded, but he saw immediately that she had actually meant Romy. He told her about his first wife. She had been the daughter of a British MP who was a promoter of the EC when it was even less popular in England than it was now and who had more money than his profligate daughter could spend even in her most irresponsible binges. He told her briefly of their life in London, of his wife’s indiscretions, of her destructive addictions, of her hair-raising escapades in polite society, and of her attempts at suicide.

After all that, Mara didn’t have the heart to ask about Romy. He knew she wouldn’t.

“So you lived mostly in London.”

“A lot over the years, but not mostly.”

“Always as an art dealer?”

“Always.”

“So…” She repeated her first question: “How did you end up in Texas?”

Strand reached out and closed the portfolio. Behind her the courtyard was losing its light as the Gulf clouds built up outside. It was beginning to look like rain. The contrast of light and shadow in the library was softening to a monochromatic gray.

“Paul Davies went to Europe every year to buy art,” Strand said. “He was from California, but he’d married a woman from Houston and moved here nearly thirty years ago. He was a very fine dealer, and I’d known him most of that time. When he died five years ago, his wife called me and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying his business. Romy and I were feeling adventurous. We took her up on her offer and moved to Houston. Paul had built a respectable reputation in the U.S. Since I’d spent most of my time in Europe and was less well known here, it just seemed to make good business sense to retain his name.” He opened his hands. “It was that simple.”

“No ego involved? You didn’t want to use your own name?”

“I have to make a living. Ego follows that.”

Mara looked around at the library and the house. “Just how good does your living have to be before you can give your ego a little satisfaction?”

Strand shrugged. “I have a low-maintenance ego.”

Mara stared at him, her head turned ever so slightly at an angle, almost as if she were listening for something. Her face was a study in thoughts that seemed to venture far beyond the present conversation.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be interested in going to an art exhibit with me this afternoon?”

“The Menil surrealist exhibit?”

“Yes… exactly.”

“You know,” he said, “I would.”