Jessica Wentworth, An Oil on Canvas
© William Olson, 2011
When I opened my gallery, there was no bound to my excitement. I invited everyone I knew that first night, everyone. It had taken me six years since coming to Naperville, and now I finally had my own space. I named it McClintock Gallery—after my mother’s side, and in her memory. I had commissioned one of my artists to make the party favors—ceramic bowls with glass embroidery—they were so cute.
My gallery looked incredible. The lighting, the hardwood floors, the fresh paint—everything was new. My sister had brought me a gorgeous mirror as a gift too, and I put it next to the Buddha statue my mother had found in Bangkok. My gallery had my touch everywhere. I was meticulous about its entire arrangement.
I made only one announcement that night. I did it just after the first round of hors d’oevres were served. It was just to thank everyone. But the two artists whom I had invited to display a few pieces spoke also, and, well, you know how self-aggrandizing artists can be. I had introduced myself as an ‘established critic and dealer,’ and the two others as ‘impressive contemporaries.’ Maybe I went a bit overboard there; one of the artists seemed to take it as invitation to share his life story. Anyway, I mingled like mad and had way too much to drink. I recall bumping into Daniel a few minutes after eight o’clock, and thinking of my luck at the early hour.
I laughed so much that night; I’ve got pictures with my eye-liner running down my cheeks. I recall Daniel telling me he was interested in building his collection, and that he was into abstract expressionism. He really loved one of my oils in particular, but we left it there—there were so many people in attendance, and the night was for celebration, not for business. I had the worst of hangovers Sunday morning.
My doors didn’t open to the public until Monday and, though I felt great, it was a total chaos. There was this and that, and that and this—which precluded this and that—you know how it is. Nothing seemed to work. Nothing. There was a problem with the heat, the front door kept locking from the outside, the printer wasn’t working, and the only credit card merchant I could use was American Express. Ugh. I had only a few customers too, so I was very excited to make an impression on them.
I made two sales my first day. Funny how the firsts of everything are the ones we remember best. Anyway, the first went to a young guy—he was maybe twenty-five—who told me he was a restaurant developer—thought he looked and spoke more like a trust-fund baby whose parents had finally died. The other was to an older man, perhaps in his late forties, who introduced himself as Doctor So-and-so. Not a bad day for an opening, I thought, but the sheer thinness of traffic worried me a bit. At least the local newspaper had come by and taken a picture and quote. In any event, I was tired, and after I closed shop, I stopped for Thai at Lemon Grass and took it home packed. I was asleep by ten o’clock, I’m sure, and I slept like a stone.
During my first week, I calculated that I had lost upwards of $1,000 a day. There were so many new kinds of bills to pay, and I had taken out more loans than I could count in order to get everything started. I had even put off purchasing a business license until the day I opened for business, and I didn’t make enough that first week to cover the hourly wages of my two part-timers. But I put my heart and soul into my gallery from the very start, and that’s the only reason, I’m sure now, it didn’t go under.
It wasn’t until the following Tuesday morning that Daniel returned to my gallery. He was there, already waiting outside the front door, when I arrived. I was late, I thought.
I’ll confess: I no longer believe in love at first sight. Though love at second sight sounds even more cliché. In any event, it was upon seeing him the second time that I felt that familiar tingling on my mons verneris. I saw him then as one of those people whose every detail stands out; not quite ostentatious, but something like this. And that morning, I took in all of him.
The most noticeable things about him I found the most adorable. There was his diminutive height—he was perhaps a full two inches shorter than I. And his eyes—a dark emerald green. (O, they were like mint chocolates above his marshmallow cheeks—you could just eat them up.) He was wearing blue jeans and a green silk shirt that drew out his shoulders too. And it was chilly as I recall it—he was wearing a cashmere jacket. I spotted his Italian shoes too.
As we swept into the fore of my gallery, he told me he was looking for something dramatic. ‘But not overstated,’ he added. I thought he sounded a bit foolish—and even this I found adorable. I had noticed the ring on his finger too, and this was something I had spotted just as we entered my gallery that morning—well before I spotted his shoes.
The ring? It was a thick band of white gold studded with diamonds—six by my count. We spoke at length of his desire to purchase one of my pieces. He told me he’d return later in the week to pick them up—he was having some painting in his home done. So I placed a hold ticket on each of three that were his favorites, and I placed the most expensive of them very prominently near the gallery’s entrance—the same oil on canvas he had raged about at my private party. I thought the price of the piece was slightly obscene, but Daniel clearly had money.
He waited in the gallery while I shifted the pieces around—it was something I thought as superfluous for him to do. He gave me what I thought was a pretty mischievous smile too. Was he flirting? Jesus, he was cute. And as he left, I saw something fall from his jacket’s pocket.
I hesitated. I know I hesitated. Then I panicked. And I did so fully conscious of the time that was passing. But not until he were clear out of the gallery did I finally scurry to where he had been standing. There on the ground, in front of the oil on canvas, I saw a set of three keys.
I bent down and picked the keys, then stepped outside the gallery to see if he were still there. But he was gone, and I felt an uneasy sense of shame flush over me that I were somehow glad this were the case. Then the phone rang. It was the school nurse calling for my niece.
I was surprised. ‘Your number was listed as the emergency contact,’ the nurse told me. So I hung up and called one of my part-timers, Margaret, and asked her to come in a bit early to help out. Then I left to get my niece—Daniel’s keys the while still in my front pocket. I knew what I was doing was wrong.
It was a pretty nasty flu bug my niece had come down with, but my sister had made it to my place by noon, and so I returned to the gallery after lunch. Margaret was already there, and she told me that a man had come been back looking for his keys. She described him in perfect detail.
I didn’t tell Margaret that I had found his keys. I hadn’t mentioned a thing about him. She went on and on about him before her ultimate embellishment: ‘He drives a Mercedes too,’ she had said.
Her words did something to me. I saw in her all of her petty insecurities. She reminded me of myself—after William had left me for what’s her name. I saw in her smile something false too, and her laugh resonated more with each chuckle as somehow thinner and hollow. She seemed to shrink right there before me and, when I finally looked past her, I saw myself in the mirror next to the statue of my mother’s Buddha. Seeing my reflection over the shoulder of Margaret affected me deeply—I felt a transformation rolling within me, something at the core of my being, but it came with only more confusion.
The following day, I stayed home. I felt like hell and was sure it was influenza. I called the gallery a few times that morning, and Margaret gushed again that ‘the cute blonde guy’ had returned again for his keys. As she spoke, I thought of his keys lying idle at the bottom of my purse.
Carrying his keys around with me, I began to think more and more about him. The way he smelled, his purposeful gait, his learned speech—these things which were immediately a part of him. I assigned him a complete set of peculiarities too: tics, habits, a refined hygiene, a favorite book, and of course—a sign in the zodiac. Aquarius. And I thought about his wife too.
A week passed. Daniel hadn’t returned. I began to feel all the more guilty about the keys. I wished, then, that I hadn’t held onto them. I had underestimated how keeping his keys would take a toll my conscience. What I was doing, I came more to realize, was worse than deceptive or unfair—it was cruel and wrong. Perhaps this was part of the transformation that I had begun to sense from my reflection next to the Buddha. Or perhaps I was only getting closer to my base sense of self.
Then, on the following Saturday, a woman showed up at my gallery. She was quite beautiful and looked to be only slightly older than I, and this struck an instant fear within me. She was exceedingly blonde and fair too. And she was tall—taller than I. She came straight to me and gently asked,
‘Did you find a set of keys?’
By the fashioned looks and urbane mannerisms of Daniel, I had presumed his wife would be polite and beautiful. But I had underestimated this too. Nor had I fathomed that I’d meet her in this way. I had imagined a vague confrontation with her—a sort of fantasy in which I was I willingly hurting her and in complete control of the situation; and I had placed this preposterous fantasy in Daniel’s bedroom, or some neutral place—like a park or garden. Cetainly not in my gallery.
I was boggled. Here was the wife I had so callously refused to admit as susceptible to hurt and duplicity. Dumbly, I answered in the affirmative, ‘Yes. Someone did find a set of keys. Let me check behind the front desk.’ I’m such a terrible liar.
I moved to the desk and she watched me closely. She had, by then I’m sure, seen through my deceit. She said coolly, almost mockingly,
‘They are a set of three.’
My heart pounded within me and I felt heated and rushed. I tried to meet her eyes as I pushed and pulled the many things that had been forsaken to the shelves of the employees’ front desk. This was the best I could do.
I spoke now as a scared child. I sounded so foolish! I refused to allow her to see me retrieve his keys from my purse. I said,
‘Please feel free to look around. I know they’re here somewhere.’
She didn’t flinch. ‘Oh, I’ll wait here,’ she said with an air satisfaction and cunning.
Finally, I turned away from the desk and reached into my purse, which was sitting in plain view on a shelf behind me. Her eyes combed over me like doctor’s hands upon a sick patient. Blindly I plunged my hand into my purse and felt an awkward smile crawl across my mouth. I fumbled further into the purse, and then pulled from it—in all my treacherous clumsiness—my gun. In a jerking fit, I jammed it back into my purse and toward its bottom.
The far-fetched consequences of a mad and jealous rage flashed over me and I felt still more sick. No, this wasn’t me.
I went on feeling for his keys in my purse, my face still adorned with that obnoxious smile I couldn’t shake off. Then I had them in my palm—that jingling ring of three—and I squeezed them one last time in all my embarrassment. I looked into her face, the while sensing that I were presently blushing profusely, as I held out the keys. Her words were flat and achingly cold:
‘You were waiting for him, weren’t you?’
She reached out and yanked them from my hand. I didn’t resist. The smile had fallen from my mouth and my jaw slung loose. An hour later, the police were at the front desk of my gallery.
I couldn’t believe it. She had seen the gun. And I had let my license expire in light of all my expenses at the gallery. A fortnight prior, the Naperville Sun had run an article on my gallery’s big opening, and now my name was in the police blotter.
I thought that would be the end of it. I pulled the three pieces Daniel had liked and removed the hold tickets from them. Two of them sold within the month—and they comprised a third of my total sales for November. Turning a profit in an art gallery proved to be much more difficult that I had anticipated, and the publicity I had received of late was equivocal at best. I was losing money faster than I could borrow it. My father gave me another loan, and my sister helped me out too. But it wasn’t enough. Then he showed up again.
This time he was dressed in a brown business suit. I could tell he had just had his hair cut too. He began, ‘Jennifer, I’m so sorry about my wife.’
I was dumbstruck. He was offering an apology. But for what? I said, ‘No. It’s fine. It’s in the past.’
‘She can be very controlling and jealous,’ he added.
I waved him off, ‘No, no. It’s just...it was nothing. Misunderstandings happen.’
I couldn’t believe what was coming out of my mouth—nor of what was coming out of his. To deny a lie, I always felt, was to invite ruin. To share a lie was to invite disaster.
I began to ease toward the rear of my gallery and he followed me tepidly. I asked, ‘Are you still interested in anything. I think I still have one of the pieces you had picked out.’
‘Yes. Yes, I am interested. I’m very interested in what you have.’
And he continued to follow me, only much more closely now as I made toward his favorite piece. He said something as we walked, as well, but I don’t recall it what it was; my thoughts were lining up at the fore of my mouth faster than I could process them.
We finally came to a stop at the oil on canvas. I had reduced the price, and this only embarrassed me further. All I could manage was, ‘Here it is.’
I looked him over again—he was nearly on top of me now, looking up at me. And I saw, over his blonde hair, my reflection in the mirror next to my mother’s statue of Buddha.
‘I’ll take it,’ he said, ‘for its full price.’
Fate has a way of keeping things in order—of keeping us from getting too big or shrinking too small. It has a way of giving us what we need more often than what we want. It was my fate to own an art gallery.