He’s famous for that. You can’t see the brush strokes or true pigments in this photo, but Da Vinci’s style is recognizable anywhere. Fakes can’t quite capture the haunting quality the master packed in his work. What counterfeiters do is create sketches they try to pass off as authentic drafts. Right now they’re the bane of the market. And who wouldn’t want an original sketch with all its delicate and intricate lines? He was an engineer, remember? A master designer of bridges and war machines. They were in huge demand in his day. But if you’ve ever seen the originals, then you recognize a fake the moment you see it. What’s so aggravating, however, is that today’s counterfeiters can create the spidery cracks and multiple coats of varnish so common to masterworks. But what they fail to capture is the authentic dress and hairstyles of an era, or the right length of a nose, or brow, or a smudge that plagued the original. But, damn if they don’t come close.
“Now take a look at these Impressionist pieces of Van Gogh and Renoir,” he continued as he turned several pages. “They’re unique, and you can generally detect a copy in an instant. Nonetheless, they’re out there and hanging in a lot of galleries, too. You just don’t know about them until they show up at an auction.”
“I fear I’d be duped in a second,” Darby confessed. “Of all the courses I neglected in college, art appreciation leads the list.”
“Don’t they, for most!”
“As a young man my wife and I saw our share of great paintings in galleries all across France, Spain, and Italy. I can still see the Mona Lisa, Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, and Goya’s May 3 Firing Squad. For that matter El Greco’s Annunciation also, along with Raphael’s The Transfiguration, and Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. I especially enjoyed the battle paintings that hang in one of the galleries at Versailles, along with Jean-Louise’s Napoleon’s Coronation. What a colossal scene!”
“And color!” Tunstan added. “Speaking of which, I can never behold autumn leaves without thinking of the Austro-Italo-French War. At the Battle of Solferino, the multi-sided forces lost a total of 38,000 maimed and dead. Think of it! The battlefield glowed with blood as evening fell across the carnage. Armies of 242,000 troops had fired volley after volley into each other. That was on June 24, 1859. The Minnie ball had just come into vogue. My God, if the South had had an observer present, would there have been a Civil War? The color solferino was coined that day. See those trees. Those tall ones with the purplish, blood-red hue?”
“Sweet gums. They’re called ‘Sweet gums.’”
“That’s the hue artists call solferino. Imagine! A field scintillating in purplish-dark red! Several painters tried to capture it. You might have seen the more famous of the paintings at Versailles. Aldophe Yvon painted it. You probably wandered right past it without realizing the savagery that Yvon’s work masks. Forgive me, but all these sweet gums ooze of that sorrow.”
Darby looked up at the rich, purplish red leaves. Soon they would be gone. “Solferino,” he whispered. “I think I’ll take a walk. See you at dinner.”
Once past the Garden, Darby sauntered around to the front of the Villa, entered, and sought out Garnett’s study. As he jiggled the key in the lock, he glanced quietly over his shoulder. He didn’t want to be observed. Surely Garnett’s office housed enough books to cast light on Celeste’s behavior. He opened the door, entered the room, and locked it silently behind him.
He switched on the light and began browsing through the shelves. Books on schizophrenia, psychotherapy, the borderline patient, and other disorders lined Garnett’s many bookcases. Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind caught his eye, along with a host of pop-therapy books. A brown accordion folder tied with a shiny shoelace lay wedged between several volumes on sexual disorders. He slipped the folder out and unwound the lace. He peered in. It contained sheets of printed studies on “Compulsive Sexual Behavior,” all of which lay loosely shuffled together. He glanced inquisitively through several. They covered everything from symptoms to causes, from risks to treatment. It was a comprehensive study by the Mayo Clinic.1
Darby clutched the folder in his hands and sought out the leather couch. Within seconds, the research drew him into its well of hypersexual definitions and warnings of how an enjoyable sex drive can become a compulsive obsession, a trail of fantasies pursued beyond the boundaries of accepted behavior. If untreated, its writers claimed, its end would lead to destroyed relationships, the loss of self-esteem, and one’s own career, if not physical and mental health. Some of its forms disgusted Darby. Cross-dressing! Pedophilia! Scatology! Asphyxiation!
The symptoms varied from mild-to-wild: intense impulses beyond one’s control; an inability to refrain even from disgusting activities; the need to escape boredom, anxiety, depression, and stress; an indulgence in spite of recognizing risks, all resulting in the ultimate disparagement of committed relationships. The warning signs equally disillusioned him. As he read them, Darby sensed the unraveling of a cultural heritage he had valued since childhood. Yet, in truth, he had fantasized them all. Why pretend otherwise? Here was the universal dark pit of the soul, Freud’s libido in all its erotic allurement—from the desire for multiple partners, to sex with strangers, free of any and all emotional attachment, to the twisted and exacerbated world of lurid pornography. No wonder Celeste had come home silent, ashamed, haunted by her inner darkness, or was he over-reacting, jumping to conclusions never meant to be drawn. Was he staring into the heart of Julia’s own soul? Were the lusts symptomatic of her disorder? Or of his? Yes, his? Reading the study had aroused him! He could feel his own groin swelling.
Somewhere in his memory, a youthful girl leaned across his desk. It was winter, cold. She was clad only in a yellow cashmere sweater, white shorts, and red sneakers. He could see the impression that the slight tips of her nipples made under her sweater. Her breasts were full, firm. With a smile, she watched him pore over them. “My parents will die if I don’t get a B,” she stated. She leaned in a little closer, her lips glistening with just enough lipstick to entice even God. “It’s not like you’re married,” she whispered. “No one will know.”
She wasn’t the only one. As he sat there he began sweating. His groin tightened more. He was no saint, at least not in his heart.
He read on. That the symptoms were caused by an imbalance of serotonin, dopamine, or other neurotransmitters struck him as absurd. How sterile! Was human desire, including his own, nothing more than frustrated neural circuits? At what point were one’s own desires indicative of a self in search of itself, or of a self, crying for its own wholeness? Whatever happened to plain old hedonism, with its revulsion of manipulation by prigs and self-righteous monitors? Damn! He sighed. He wondered what Nietzsche would have thought. He slid the sheets back into their folder, placed it in its niche on the shelf, and returned to the Garden. Any earlier euphoria he had felt had dissipated. As he gazed up into the avenue of the Villa’s oaks and hickories, he remembered Woodworth’s lines from “The Tables Turned”—
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
He thought of the girl at his desk. Thank God his super-ego, or own wretched heart, had said, “No, Darby. No! Never! Never! No! No!”
1. See Mayoclinic.org. Compulsive. Mayo Clinic Staff.
Chapter 5
Evening came quickly. In what seemed like only seconds, the sun’s warm rays turned into a pale soft pink, before sinking into a blur of iridescent
