Prologue
I will diein this box.
I can scream all I want. I can try to kick down the bolted door. I can claw at the thick stone walls and the bulletproof glass. None of it will be of any use.
Until they threw me in here, no one had been in this climate-controlled chamber for at least a decade. It could be ten more years before anyone returns.
I know I’m not the first person they’ve made disappear…and I certainly won’t be the last.
At least the view isnice.
1
Emma
1996
“It is absolutelyterrible to be rich,” Stella Swanson wheezes in my general direction as I vacuum the thick layer of dust beneath her feet.
What a ridiculous thing to say to the person cleaning your apartment, but I nod in sympathy. Of course, it must be incredibly difficult to live in this massive two-story penthouse apartment in Paris overlooking both the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.
Maybe she’s joking? When I glance up, I spy a small twinkle in the elegant older woman’s striking blue eyes, but it could be a trick of the light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“I can imagine it’s very stressful.” I smile sweetly, which makes her raise both her legs in the air with her toes pointed toward the ceiling like a toddler so I can reach further under the couch. This plush velvet sofa probably costs more than my yearly rent. The black fur coat she has wrapped around her tiny frame,despite it being at least seventy-nine degrees in this place, could support my roommates and me for a month.
Madame Swanson has a haughty, moneyed accent that’s distinctly American with enough of a European lilt to inform you she’s frequently traveling between time zones, that she’s the kind of person who belongs everywhere.
This woman isn’t just rich. She’s stinking, filthy, disgustingly rich. The kind of rich that’s impossible for the average person like me to even comprehend. Before the secretary at school recommended this cleaning job to me a couple of months ago, she suggested I read Monsieur Swanson’s obituary.
So you know what you’re getting into, dear, she’d said kindly.The Swansons are the largest art dealers in the world.
The obit detailed the family’s $10 billion art empire in addition to their obscene list of properties. The remaining Swansons—Stella; her stepson, Louis; and his four offspring with three wives—have at least seven homes on three continents; half of a private island; personal chefs; chauffeurs; a stable of racing horses in Chantilly, France; a permanent box at Wimbledon in London; an entire floor of one of the most coveted buildings on the Upper West Side in New York; and their name on thousands of little plaques in museums all over the world reading “on loan from the Swanson art collection.”
“Do you recognize that painting?” Madame Swanson gestures to a piece of art on the wall across from her. I crane my neck to admire it even though I clocked it the second I walked through the door. It’s clear from her tone that she wants me to say no so she can spend the next twenty minutes explaining the piece to me. It’s a framed print, not an original, which seems strange for the widow of the most powerful art dealer in the world, but then again, the real one is probably in a museum somewhere.
Stella Swanson is definitely the kind of rich person who loves explaining things to people she considers beneath her. She alsoseems terribly bored. Maybe that’s why it’s so awful to be rich. You can’t pay for friends.
But the joke’s on her. This painting has always been a favorite of mine. It’s a simple peach tree in blossom, a frail little sapling fighting the wind, desperate to hold on to its pale pink flowers but knowing that it will lose the battle. By filling the entire canvas with it, Vincent van Gogh managed to turn the tree into something much more majestic.
I want to tell her I know plenty and that I have mixed feelings about Van Gogh. Many of his paintings have the power to move me to tears, to shift things around in my brain and make me notice things in the real world that I had never noticed before. But as an artist I find him complicated. I’ve always wondered if the art world doted on him merely because of his compelling backstory. How many women artists from the same time never had their stories told, never had their paintings shown in grand salons? All because no one kept their letters and their diaries, all because they never had a patron to celebrate them after they died like Vincent van Gogh did.
Even if a female artist’s diary or letters had survived and been printed from back then the way Van Gogh’s had, it wouldn’t have been the same. As my roommate Lucie always says, “Hysteria is a bad look on a girl.” A man with demons gets to be a madman genius, a martyr to his delusions who overcomes it all to become a master, one of the “greats.” A hundred years ago absolutely no one would have guessed that this man would go on to become one of the most celebrated artists of all time. None of the critics or dealers who dismissed him as dark, crude, and unskilled would have dreamed that his turbulent vision of the night sky would be tacked on the walls of a million dorm rooms and bear witness to so many college students awkwardly losing their virginity.
But this particular series of paintings, these frail trees, havealways captivated me, have held my attention every time I spy one in a book or on the wall of a museum.
Stella Swanson doesn’t know I know any of this. She didn’t hire me to be a docent in her own home.
“It’s lovely,” I say, instead of saying I know it well. I’m eager to finish up and that would lead to more small talk.
“Isn’t it!” Mrs. Swanson claps her bejeweled hands together so her thick rings clash like cymbals. “It is one of Vincent’s best, in my opinion.”
Why are wealthy people always on a first-name basis with important dead people? At a gallery opening a few months ago I met the CEO of a private bank in Lichtenstein who, after a few drinks, kept referring to William Shakespeare as Bill.
Stella’s still going on about her pal Vincent.
“This is just one in a series. He painted dozens of them, maybe more, at the rate of about one a day. To him they symbolized renewal, hope, the chance at a new kind of life when he was at his lowest,” she explains eagerly. “And he thought these would be lucrative as well. He heard from his other artist friends that blossoms were appealing to collectors and buyers, and so he focused on painting dozens of them in the hopes of bringing himself some income. Alas, no one bought them. This one hung on the wall of the Parisian apartment owned by Vincent’s brother, Theo, and his new bride, Jo. Have you ever heard of Jo van Gogh?” She pronounces the name in the Dutch way,Yo, instead of Jo. Being from Philadelphia, home ofRocky, I enjoy calling anyone Yo!
I also know a little about Jo van Gogh, Vincent’s sister-in-law, though some mistake her for his wife or sister. I know she inherited almost all of Vincent’s paintings after he and his brother, her husband, died within a year of each other. I know her son, Vincent, went on to found the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She was a footnote in a single textbook I read on Impressionism, an asterisk in the story of the world’s most famous artist. I’m always a sucker for the women in footnotes.
