I shake my head.
“Did you find it in the Fleas?”
“No. Stella’s apartment,” I say, propping it up on the sideboard, where we keep our paints and brushes. “It’s a Van Gogh.”
Both women laugh. It’s the kind of laughter we’ve filled this apartment with for two years now. I want Colette’s and Lucie’s laughs to be the last thing I hear before I die. Lucie’s is low and grumbly just like her voice. It starts in her belly and swells through her throat. Colette’s laugh starts small, barely audible as her whole body shakes with it, and it just gets bigger and bigger until she hiccups. I can’t help myself; I start laughing too. It’s ridiculous.
“It really is Stella’s,” I insist. “And I think it is actually a Van Gogh.”
“So it belongs to the Swanson collection,” Colette states. She definitely knows the most about this family.
“No. It is Stella’s and Stella’s alone.”
Colette reaches out as if to touch the canvas and then thinks better of it because we’ve been so trained not to touch things we believe to be valuable. Would she have touched it if it were simply a painting from the Fleas? Of course she would have. “Is it signed?” she asks.
“No. But he didn’t sign them all. We know that.”
“Why do you have it?” Lucie asks.
“She wants us to sell it for her. I think. She was getting tired at the end of the night and a little drunk, to be honest. She begged me to take the painting home with me. She’s terrified of her stepson, Louis Swanson, and her granddaughter, Caroline. It sounds like they truly do want to lock her away. But she swears this is her painting, that she inherited it from her own family, though she doesn’t think anyone will ever believe her.”
“Do you believe her?” Lucie eyes me curiously.
I honestly hadn’t given it much thought. I’d immediately taken her at her word, and maybe that was incredibly stupid of me.
“I think I do.”
And from there I explain Stella’s whole story. From her grandmother’s relationship with Jo van Gogh to how Maxwell tracked her down for the painting and then promised he would never take it from her. How she locked it away to keep it from her stepson. How the painting was only ever meant to be sold in a time of great need and how for Stella that time is now.
“She says there are letters proving the painting is real, letters between her grandmother and Jo van Gogh that prove its provenance.”
“Letters?” Colette stands, her curiosity piqued. She loves sorting through old documents and correspondence. “Did you see them?”
“I saw one.”
The adrenaline of the day is draining out of me, replaced with intense fatigue and confusion. “She wants us to help her prove the painting is real first and then she needs help selling it,because as you said, who will believe her if she says it isn’t part of the Swanson family collection? Everyone will think she stole it from them no matter what kind of proof she presents. Her stepson has already bankrupted her and taken everything that should have rightfully been hers. He’s already proven he can do almost anything he wants. I think she needs us.”
“Us?” Lucie asks. “Or you?”
“Us. She specifically mentioned the two of you. She chose all of us more than two years ago when she funded the scholarship. This may have always been her plan, or her secondary plan if she didn’t inherit more of the company. I don’t know. Nothing makes sense right now. She said she wanted us to be part of her plan B.”
“I’m so sad for her,” Colette finally says.
“I’m not,” I say with confidence. “Stella lived a life. And she will be the first person to tell you that. She doesn’t want us to feel bad for her. She’s a fighter.”
Another bottle of wine is opened. We’re all getting more friendly with the painting as our inhibitions decrease. Lucie even goes so far as to scratch at the corner with her fingernail and taste the paint.
“Don’t!” Colette scolds her. “You know old paint is loaded with arsenic. Especially blues.”
“It tastes old,” Lucie says with a grin. “Come on. Lighten up, my lovelies. How much did the last Van Gogh sell for?” Lucie asks Colette and her encyclopedic brain.
“Portrait ofDr. Gachetsold about six years ago for eighty-two and a half million dollars at Christie’s,” Colette says. “Bought by Ryoei Saito, rich guy from Tokyo. Before the Japanese bubble burst, they were spending billions on European art. I believe theGachetsale was around the peak of it before the crash. The Swansons may have bought it back by now. They’ve been gobbling up the art back from the Japanese at a discount.”
A million dollars doesn’t seem like a real amount to me. It’s all like Monopoly money. The three of us have had conversationsabout what we would do with tens of thousands of dollars. Those numbers may be astronomical to us, but they also feel within reach someday. We know we would need twenty thousand to pull off the exhibition we’ve been desperate to get off the ground—an all-women salon. There’s an old precedent for what we want to do, for how unknown artists can create their own buzz. When Monet was getting started, he was consistently rejected by the national Salon in Paris, much as the three of us have been rejected over and over by the established galleries. I don’t think most people realize how maligned the Impressionists were in those early days. Some reviewers referred to the paintings as the result of a mental derangement. The term “Impressionism” originated as an insult, a sarcastic reference to Claude Monet’s loose, atmospheric depiction of the Le Havre waterfront. Berthe Morisot was privately urged by her former teacher to visit the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and seek his forgiveness.
But finally, Monet was fed up. He formed a cooperative with thirty other independent artists. They put on their own show in a studio rented from the photographer Nadar, sharing the costs and the profits. The salon turned into a David-versus-Goliath competition between the young Impressionists and the vaunted Salon.
Our Goliath isn’t the state. It’s capitalism and the whims of a fickle art market. Colette is mostly involved in the business side of art, but she is also a gorgeous fresco painter. She created a dozen murals in her small village in the South of France. Lucie does absolutely everything: sculpture, multimedia collages, modern dance, painting. Her latest is a series of massive portraits of real women’s breasts in oils. Small ones, perky ones, saggy ones that hang like shriveled sun-dried tomatoes, lopsided and lovely ones that appear to wink at you. No one has accepted any of us for a show except that one friend of Pascal’s. We’re up against the market forces that determine what is art and what is ART. Rightnow we are working with ten other women artists, all of us saving our money. None of the others know that three of us are also saving to remain in school and in Paris or that I am paying for my mother’s care back in the States ever since her latest breakdown, the one I keep pushing out of my mind, the reason I wake up every morning cursing myself for being a wretched daughter.
