his reactions to Thomas’s paintings were immediate and visceral: a sudden drop in his gut, a tingling at the tips of his fingers, a knockout punch to any prejudices he harbored regarding what defined art.
This was the gift of knowing an artist’s secret language, a gift that came with age and focused study: the ability to interpret a brushstroke, to recognize colors, to identify a pattern the artist’s hand created instinctually from comfort and habit. Finch could look at Thomas’s work and read his pride and frustration, his delight in perfection, his obsessive desire. But he would be forced to leave it to Stephen, with his arsenal of toys and gadgets and technology, to officially christen the work a Bayber. That fact lodged in his craw like a rough crumb, making a home for itself in the darkness of his throat, refusing to be dislodged. He was an expert of one sort, Jameson of another. Money followed the word of only one of them.
‘Yes, it’s Bayber’s work, Stephen. I’m sure a closer examination will confirm it.’ Finch was furious with Thomas. The holidays were coming, the anniversary of Claire’s death only a few weeks away. He didn’t want to embark on some ill-defined mission. He wanted to be hibernating in his own apartment, waking only when the darkness of the months ahead had passed. But he’d given his word. That meant something to him, as Thomas well knew. He was trapped.
‘You think we should start looking somewhere else then? Not go to the cabin first? Do you want to start at the house instead?’
Finch steeled himself for the inevitable abuse. ‘I don’t fly.’
‘What?’
‘I said I don’t fly.’
Stephen dropped his tool case and started shaking violently until he finally bent over, hiccuping into his knees.
‘I don’t find it all that humorous,’ Finch said.
Stephen righted himself, dabbing at his eyes with the edge of his jacket. ‘Oh, but it is,’ he said. ‘I can’t drive.’
Finch drummed his fingers on the corner of his desk, waiting for his computer screen to refresh. Once Stephen found out he didn’t want to fly, he’d somehow ended up with the mundane task of handling logistics. Who, in this day and age, didn’t have a driver’s license? How did the man function? On the other hand, Finch could think of hundreds of people, both well-known and obscure, who chose not to fly. The laptop screen finally blinked and offered up a home page for the car rental agency; a form with questions to be answered, boxes to be ticked, numbers to be filled in, felonies to be reported; all required before they would deem him worthy to drive one of their Fiestas or Aveos. He lingered over the ‘Specialty’ class, tempted by the bright red of a Mustang before coming to his senses. Late fall, unseasonable weather, and Stephen Jameson. None of these screamed sporty roadster. He squinted and punched a key, squinted and punched, paused to review, then punched once more—‘Submit.’
He pushed the curtain aside and looked out the window. The October sky was a gray flannel, streaked with ragged clouds. There’d be frost if the rain let up. He tapped his fingers again, waiting for confirmation of his reservation. Why this nagging sense of urgency?
The painting unsettled him. There was the age of the girls, obviously. And the expression of the older sister, disturbing in its intensity. Anger radiated from the canvas, yet her expression was contained, a quality both knowing and unnerving. Kessler. The name was vaguely familiar, and he racked his brain, searching for the connection.
That Thomas had inserted himself into the piece was significant. As an artist, he always maintained a certain distance. Patrons or admirers might think they knew his work, but in truth, they would only be seeing what he wanted them to. That is the small space where I hide, Denny, Thomas had said to him once before. That thin line between the painting and the public persona, that’s where I exist. That’s what no one will ever see.
But what made Finch most uneasy was the atmosphere of the painting. Everything artfully staged, with the exception of the emotions of the people in it. Those seemed overwhelming to Finch and painfully real. The sadness he’d felt after leaving the apartment and returning home lingered, and he shivered, wondering if there was anything he knew about Thomas with certainty, outside of the depth of his talent.
The talent he was certain of. It was confirmed time and again, most recently by the hush in the room when Stephen and Cranston first saw the painting, their expressions of awe and discomfort. He remembered his own reaction upon seeing Thomas’s work for the first time, the brilliant marriage of insight and imagination with untempered physicality. The discomfort came in the emotions Thomas drew from the viewer, emotions that, for the sake of propriety, were usually cordoned off or tamped down. Scrutinizing his work left one exposed, a voyeur caught in the act. Thomas’s true talent, Finch had realized long ago, was the ability to make the viewer squirm.
However, this painting made the artist uncomfortable as well. Finch had stood between them, Thomas and Stephen, the two of them dwarfing him by equal measures, and looked from one to the other—their heads tilted at the same attitude, their sharp noses fixed toward the canvas. But while Thomas’s look shifted from longing to sadness, Stephen stared at the painting with an intensity that suggested he could divine what lay beneath the pigment.
Given a spread of three or four years, Finch had a good idea when the work had been done. In spite of its subject, the colors used, the intensity of brushstroke, and the level of detail in the background objects all pointed to a certain period in Thomas’s work. He would leave it to Stephen to supply the finer details. What caught him off guard was the ache in the eyes of the young man in the painting. Finch had noticed that same ache in Thomas as the artist viewed his own work. There was arrogance, too, but that was not nearly so prominent as the brokenness of someone standing outside the bounds of love. It frightened Finch. In the years he’d known Thomas, he couldn’t recall a time he’d ever seen him want after something. He’d never wondered whether there might be something desired yet missing from Thomas’s life. Until now.
Finch had constructed a skeleton of Thomas’s history from the few bones offered up to him. The rest was obtained through diligent research, but it was an incomplete picture, nothing Thomas had volunteered to flesh out. Finch knew Thomas’s parents had been remote and disinterested. They quickly tired of what they perceived as laziness on the part of their only child—a lack of interest in contributing to the family business—and cut him off when he was twenty-eight, despite numerous accolades and his growing success, considering art no more deserving of attention than any other hobby: flower arranging, winemaking, table tennis.
Thomas was ill-equipped to deal with the world on his own. He had grown up knowing only wealth and privilege, surrounded by people his parents had hired to do things for him: feed him, transport him, educate him, work a fine grit over any inexplicable rough edges. Though his paintings sold for large sums, money circled away from him like water down a drain. Visiting his studio some fifteen or so years after their first meeting, Finch had been alarmed to find groceries lacking, the cupboards bare save for cigarettes and liquor. Noticing Thomas’s gaunt frame, he’d wondered what the man subsisted on. There were stacks of unopened mail spread across the floor: long-overdue bills, personal correspondence stuffed into the same piles as advertising circulars, notices threatening the disconnection of utilities, requests for private commissions, invitations from curators hoping to mount retrospectives. Finch had waded through the detritus of monthly accountability. For Thomas, these were the peculiarities of a normal person’s life, so he chose to ignore them, leaving the burgeoning collection of envelopes to form a sort of minefield he stepped across day after day.
‘You should look at some of these, you know,’ Finch had said, rifling through a handful of envelopes that carried a charcoal trace of footprints.
‘Why
