Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

he’d al ow the story of him and Ursula to become fodder for the reading public’s amusement. And if doing so destroyed what he hoped was at least a mild regard for him

—how pathetic it was that he clung to such a hope—he would live with the results of his actions.

He’d wait a few minutes, no more.

Biding his time, he flipped through the Carnegie book, which seemed to hold a surprise on every page. There was a Van Dyck, of course, and a painting of a merchant by his old friend, Frans Hals. He saw the steady progression of techniques as the book covered successive centuries, just as he could trace the changes in style as he walked through the gal eries of Hampton Court or Whitehal . But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, everything seemed to change. It was as if a new vision had come into being, and al the old rules had been thrown out the window.

He turned the page and gasped to see a shimmering pond—which a part of his mind recognized immediately, though no sort of close examination of the brush-strokes would have yielded anything like water—upon which gleaming white blossoms floated. “Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Water Lilies), c. 1915–1926,” the attribution read. Rembrandt had once observed, “There is more to blue than azure and ivory black, my friend.” Nothing could have il ustrated the point better than Monet’s breathtaking work of art.

But it was the paintings noted to be mid- to late-twentieth-century creations that most amazed Peter. The luxurious palette of colors and softly blurred images had been replaced by an urgent and exhilarating clarity of vision, a vision so different from that of the paintings and sculptures and friezes he knew, he hardly knew how to approach them.

There was a painting of numbers—just numbers—by an artist named On Kawara, and a series of painted boxes by Donald Judd and even a painted chain. He found the vivid distil ation of a single idea that these pieces seemed to represent startling, and the businessman in him couldn’t help but note that the production of such pieces of art, if indeed that’s what they were—though they had to be if col ected by museums alongside Van Dycks, Lelys and Monets—would be infinitely quicker to produce than his portraits. He himself had made a smal fortune sel ing prints of his paintings, prints that took only a moment or two to produce once the plate had been prepared compared to the twenty to thirty hours it took to complete a canvas. This twentieth-century ease of production was bringing the same notion to a more noble scale. Bril iant ideas coupled with straightforward manufacture. He liked it.

He flipped more pages and saw a nearly white canvas containing a few narrow lines and an absolutely thril ing work of nothing but paint splatters, but paint splatters applied with so much passion he could almost feel the blood pounding in the artist’s ears. He had just found a simple line-drawing of a woman or a bul —he wasn’t sure which one—done in a wonderful y ironic hand that seemed to dispel everything he had ever learned about portraits, when the music stopped and the muffled voices of two people somewhere else in the apartment made him jump to his feet.

He heard a door bang open, and a man’s voice, clearer now, said, “No, you stay there. Let’s see … she’s got a Pinot and a Chardonnay.”

“Chardonnay,” a sultry-voiced woman said drol y. “For the times when making an impression doesn’t matter.

Pinot, please. Hold the cherry.”

The two laughed, an intimate, shared-story laugh.

Peter had no wish to eavesdrop. “Hel o,” he cal ed and walked into view.

The man, dressed in a pair of tight, rough-cloth breeks and nothing else, stood alone. He was instantly identifiable as the man in the picture who’d had his arm around Campbel . He was in the middle of a