New Story

In poetically well built museums,
formed from the heart's compulsions,
we are consoled not by finding
in them old objects that we love,
but by losing all sense of Time.

Orhan Pamuk

* * *

Cleveland Odyssey

Bad weather delayed his Friday evening flight to Cleveland by two hours. Not the least annoyed, Edwin opened his old laptop and used the time to scope through his newly configured Powerpoint about Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Included were images of the painting he had made for the occasion and the potential – thanks to more detailed views of Corot sketches and canvases than before – to express recent thoughts about the somewhat maligned French artist. Satisfied, he went on-line to study the Museum’s Medieval collection, aware of its importance to the course he was taking. Armor and weaponry – Gosh, they have a lot of dull stuff like we do. Why’s it even in an art museum? – occupied his attention not in the least. Jewel-set gilt crosses, wrenchingly wrought crucifixes, elegant Virgins of stone and wood, manuscript illuminations glowing with color – They beat us in this area, even the Newberry Library – carved ivories, and panel paintings. Awesome. But we’ve got the Ayala Altarpiece, which nobody can top.

“Tickled pink,” his hosts, Celita and Carter Wilson breathed relief that he had arrived safely. With his overnight bag and a large carton recovered from baggage claim, they whisked their guest home. That their car was a new Bentley Mulsanne did not register with the young man. Its luxury did remind him vaguely of his Boston friends’ Maybach. How to handle the imminent arrival of Nick Charleston was more on his mind. Nick would want sex.

Home for the Wilsons turned out to be a sprawling, half-timbered mansion, an amalgam of French and English styles. Night’s darkness permitted only fleeting impressions of the curving, tree-lined drive past looming iron gates. Headlights illumined a sort of turret with an arched front door. Quickly inside to escape penetrating, sleety rain, he was greeted by a spiral stair that swept up at least two stories. To its right, what obviously must be a study or den and, to its left, down three steps, the most spacious living room Edwin had ever entered.

He had no eyes for its furnishings. Not at all, for, centered on the opposite wall, glowing with a radiance all its own, hung the most beautiful Corot landscape imaginable. A dark woods through which, in the far distance, lay a sunlit city. His mouth opened silently. This is the one I heard about.

“We thought you’d like that,” Celita said in Edwin’s ear. “Frankfort’s got the smaller version. We’ve had this one for thirty years. My parents bought it at Parke-Bernet in the Fifties.”

It came back to Edwin that, when he met Celita Wilson with Miss Altshuler and friends at the Art Institute months earlier, she had told him, “We collect French art.”

Ignorant of me not to ask then about that.

“The Met wanted both of them – Frankfort’s and ours – for their show back in 1996,” Carter Wilson said, “but we decided not to let ours go.”

“We also thought the little ones on either side – you haven’t noticed those, have you? – should stay where they are, too,” added Celita.

Edwin took the prompt. Two small, early, plein-air Corots – Italian scenes in the artist’s still-lauded, simple slab-like manner – precursor by half a century of Cézanne’s chiseled landscapes – made him gasp, “My goodness. Where did you get them? They’re just wonderful. Oh, sorry. I’m being rude.”

Carter laughed, “At a Christie’s house sale in London. A rush job, estate thing. Thought to be fakes, or copies at the time. I don’t remember. We got them for a song.”

Across the room like a flash, Edwin looked closely at one, then the other. “To think, we haven’t a single example at the Institute of his Italian paintings and you have two. I can’t believe it.”

“Interested? We can show you our other pictures.”

Edwin turned to the couple and, in his most disarming way, used one of Dalton’s lines, “Surely you jest?” He followed with, “I’d love to see them.” As the words tumbled out, he spotted over the sofa what had to be a Millet – of workers in a field. Nearby, a group of four drawings of farm people. He went closer. “These must be by….”

“François Millet, like the scene,” Celita said. “If you like drawings, we have some others.”

“Dear, why don’t you show him to the guest quarter? I’ll get us some refreshments after I put the car away.”

“What about Edwin’s package?”

“Oh, that thing can stay in the trunk. I won’t need it until Sunday.”

Celita, who suspected what it was, said nothing as she directed Edwin toward the rear of the house. The wide hall led past an expansive, unlighted dining room. Lining the corridor were low bookshelves above which hung portraits. “These are somebody’s ancestors, not ours,” she breezed. “I sometimes talk to them. They don’t talk back.That’sGuérin. That one’s by Prud’hon. This is a Gros – we have another one upstairs.” They walked past a Vigée-Lebrun (“She does the sweetest faces.”), a Boilly (“My husband likes that stuffy thing. I never have.”), and a Cabanel (“His self-portrait at eighteen. That’s your age, isn’t it? The Athenaeum has a better one from the year before. I think he was in a hurry to do this one.”).

Edwin wondered why they were not in the front of the house. His jaw gaped.

An open door was reached. “In here,” she led the way into a sitting room. “The bath’s there and the bedrooms are on each side. We’ve put you in this one. Your friend Nick will be in the other. I hope you don’t mind.”

Nick.

Georgina floated the question, “You knew he was coming, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I thought he and the TV crew from Cincinnati would be at a hotel or some place.”

“They are, but he wanted to have time with you to discuss the documentary. Georgina says that she and Marlon think the world of him – after you, of course. He’s right for the job, isn’t he? I understand he’s worked on it ever since you were in Cincinnati.”

Edwin nodded. “He’s perfect. It’s just that, I’ve been so busy with school and with this talk and some other things. I’ve had to put him off ever since the first of the month. I’m a little embarrassed.” Privately, he thought about the sex Nick would want.

“I’m sure he’ll understand. Now, how about the gallery?”

“You have a gallery?” he asked in disbelief.

“We do. Follow me.”

They met Carter, who handed Edwin a booklet titled The Wilson Collection and punched in a code on the wall pad. An obviously heavy door slid open to reveal…

Edwin’s eyes could have rolled on the floor.

A stupefying wonderland of canvases of domestic and even institutional scale by a pantheon of French masters – Simon Vouet, Nicolas de Largillière, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Claude Joseph Vernet, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, William-Adolphe Bouguereau – terminated on the entry-door’s wall with a military colossus by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier. Interspersed on pedestals and the tops of tables and chests stood marbles, terracottas, and bronzes by names Edwin had to check against the list: Antoine Coysevox, Claude Michel Clodion, Augustin Pajou, François Girardon, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Francois Rude, Antoine Louis Barye, and Gustave Doré. A few pieces of porcelain – Sèvres? – added other colors and forms as accents against the gallery’s old-mauve wall coverings (silk brocade?) and dark-forest green carpeting.

A search triggered automatically in the prodigy’s mind. He had his own way – quite special – of observing and absorbing the reality of art. He flicked and sifted through what he knew of French painting in his books, on the Art Institute’s walls, in Paris’ Musée de Cluny, the Cincinnati Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the things he had looked through on-line weeks before of the Cleveland Museum’s holdings – shuffling subjects, comparing poses, noting arrangements, tones, hues, textures, light, depth, surfaces. In short, styles. Speculations about influences upon and from – esthetic debts incurred and paid – arose in seconds.

The Wilsons sensed his excitement. “Like what you see?” asked Celita.

“I must be one of the luckiest students on earth.” Ingenuously, Edwin continued, his words tumbling quickly, “Can anyone with my interests and my friends and their friends imagine how much it means to me to be in a place like this with people like you and artwork like this?” His recently shaven cheeks flushed. A smile spread.

Carter took over, “How about that snack I promised? We can talk about the art to your heart’s content. It’s important in our lives.”

Hummus and crackers with crisp sticks of carrot and celery whetted appetites and conversation. Subjects included the collection’s family origins (Celita), its additions (Carter), and the local Museum’s history. Edwin soaked it up. Enthusiastically, he cited parallels with the Indianapolis Museum’s background. They spoke, too, of friends – of “Thelma and her maps,” of “Joanne and Irwin’s modern eclecticism,” of “Barbara and Harold’s American treasures,” and of “Georgina and Marlon’s glass collection which you didn’t get to see.” Edwin’s impressions of the museums at which he had appeared – Indianapolis, Boston, Cincinnati – and of the staff members he had met were requested.

“My favorite: Jocasta Washington, a conservator at the CAM who’s just about the warmest human you can imagine – but they’ve all been nice. Deborah Udell at the IMA, she was the first to be … astonished,” he laughed under his breath.

Nick Charleston and his articles about Edwin came up.

“The first one was really the result of an accident, you know. A speaker at the IMA, where I chanced to be, had some sort of attack….”

“We know only too well. Frank Crittenden’s an old buddy of ours,” Celita said. “He’s told us how he felt ill when he started, how he ended up in the hospital with a cast on his arm, how he began recovering at the Wilkinsons’ where, with your friend Nick, he saw the video of your extemporized talk, and what he thought of you and your impromptu success.”

Carter’s turn had come, “Guess what, Edwin. He’s speaking tomorrow.”

“About Chenonceau, I hope – the lecture he was trying to give at the IMA?”

Carter nodded, “Absolutely. He’s been doing it around the country. Quite a success, we hear. We’ll attend. He wants to meet you, so we’ll introduce you tomorrow. One of our friends is sponsoring his appearance but she’s away. We’ll be putting him up, too. You two can meet. And, he will be at your Corot talk on Sunday.”

* * *

Sleet in high wind may have thumped the night through at his bedroom windows but he slept oblivious to it. A restful night in a good bed and a breakfast of sausages, waffles, and maple syrup behind him, Edwin spent three hours alone in the Wilsons’ gallery studying the art. For him, it was to experience heaven in private. Morning light streamed from a sort of clerestory just below the ceiling along both sides of the huge room. Everything about the two- and three-dimensional works on display looked completely natural. Simply there. They seemed to say, “See us as we are.” His mind luxuriated in the experience.

Lunch brought more conversation with Celita. In response to Edwin’s endless questions, she told of the items from their collection loaned occasionally to various museums (always anonymously) and under what conditions. The living room’s Corot, he was thrilled to hear, had never been out of the house.

All the rarer for me to see.

Between bites of his toasted cheese sandwich and spoonsful of steaming chili, Edwin exulted over his admiration for that canvas and all the other works of art he had seen; in fact, for most things French. He described his high school class in the language, his awestruck days in Paris last Summer – some of the particular things he saw in the Louvre and behind the closed doors of its Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France.

Celita repeated the name with perfect French inflection. Then, “Si vous étiez a consacrer le temps necessaire au projet, vous pourriez améliorer votre français beaucoup.” If he were to devote the necessary time to it, he could improve his French a great deal.

Chagrin flooded the boy. He looked down. I should have guessed she knew the language. “I wish I could. I wish I could,” he said softly, recalling the childhood story of the Little Engine That Could.

She brightened, “But you can, surely, at your University.”

A distant door opened. Carter’s voice called to them from the front of the house, “Hello there. We’re all here. Where are you?”

It was the man of the house with the lecturer for the evening fresh from the airport and, as well, reporter Nick Charleston, who exclaimed, “I just got dropped off by my crew. Took us five hours from Cincinnati, the highway was so wet. We had trouble finding your address but that’s what Map Quest is for. Your grounds are stunning.” He was overjoyed to see Edwin.

“I have a lot to tell you,” he said.

Carter stepped in, “We just met in the driveway. He brought us greetings from Marlon. Georgina was on an errand when they departed.”

Frank, an elder statesman among art historians and friend nationwide of collectors of French art, embraced Celita who, in turn, introduced him to Edwin. She said, “You already sort of know each other, don’t you?”

Edwin introduced Nick to their hostess. When it was clear that neither Frank nor Carter had had anything to eat, Celita offered to feed them. “Breakfast’s gone, but I’ll dream up some sandwiches and chili. Edwin can show you, Nick, the way to your room and, while we are busy, he can escort you through the gallery.”

The moment they were alone, Edwin swept Nick into his arms. “I’ve missed you.”

He kissed Edwin. Edwin kissed back.

“I’ve missed you,” the reporter emphasized. “Gosh, look at the flowers.” He indicated the framed charcoals and pastels in the guest sitting room.

“Oh, I hadn’t noticed. What? Can it…be…that,” his glance darted around, “those flowers and those over there are?... They look like,” he drew close to the signatures, “Fantin-Latour, Redon, and, oh me, Bazille – and that one, a Caillebotte!”

Nick, who did not recognize the names, asked, “What’s in the bedroom?”

“You mean bedrooms. One for each of us, can you believe? Last night, I was tired; this morning, too excited to take note. Let’s have a look.”

Over the bed in Edwin’s room hung three Gustave Doré black crayon drawings – studies of children’s heads looking up and around. Next to the closet door, another Doré, a satirical sketch of a pot-bellied judge grinning into the room. The other room available – shunned for occupancy by Nick – held more drawings, in charcoal, by Honoré Daumier. Caricatures of Parisian personalities.

“Wow.”

Nick, unswayed, pushed Edwin back to his room and closed the door. “Are we alone here?”

“Not for hanky-panky.” Edwin surprised himself by using a term his aunt liked. He changed the subject, “If you thought those portraits in the hall were something….”

“I barely saw them. I was following your body.”

“Fiend. Tonight, after the lecture,” he said with a devilish tone. “If you’re still interested, it’s yours – and yours will be mine. But now, you’ve got to see the gallery. That’s more pressing.”

When his vision took in the room’s fifty-foot length and the treasures it contained, Nick whistled. “It’s better than Marlon described. He told me I’d see ‘good stuff,’ he called it. This is spectacular. We should film you in here.”

“Uh, you’d better ask. They’re pretty private about their collection. That’s why this is under lock and key – that bank vault door we walked through – at the back of the house. Everything gets better the further you go here. Isn’t it extraordinary? I’ll give you a tour.”

In thirty minutes or so, without reference to the printed list of contents, Edwin showed his hot-to-trot friend every painting and each piece of sculpture. Unselfconsciously, he reeled off the artists’ names and canvases’ dates and pointed to features he found worthy of attention, absorbed by the very act of drawing someone into his perception of them.

So turned on was he to be in the teen’s presence again, Nick could not keep his hands off Edwin’s shoulders, arms, waist. A man fully mature at twenty-five, Nick had good facial features, a nice head of closely-cropped hair, fine carriage, and well-developed muscles. Trained as a sports writer, no less might be expected. His most distinguishing characteristic was apparent naivete. Open expressions were natural to his manner. Likable. Edwin had taken him by storm – unwittingly at first, then harmlessly, in Indianapolis, more alarmingly in Boston and Cincinnati. Nick was smitten. Marlon Thomas’s commitment of his television station to make the forthcoming documentary about Edwin had awarded the reporter the means of maintaining a relationship with the prodigious teenager. There was nothing equivalent in Nick’s limited gay experience to compare to the intimacies they had shared. He craved more.

Nick was on the verge of an indiscretion when the Wilsons and their other guest joined them. Frank Crittenden went straight to Edwin with enthusiasm. “How about these things? Aren’t they terrific? I’ve passed many an hour here on previous visits.”

“I’m speechless. I hope I get other opportunities to see them, too.”

“You must,” Carter said. “But now we are going to the Museum. Frank’s lecture needs to be checked out and you and Nick can see the Gartner Auditorium and what you can of the overall place.”

* * *

Back in their guest quarters and certain that the night’s speaker would be resting upstairs in a guest room near the Wilsons, Nick and Edwin took advantage of the time before supper – ninety minutes. The Gartner space, aisles, and control booth had allowed for the Cleveland equipment’s planned usage, the Medieval exhibit had quickened Edwin’s ideas of craftsmanship and symbols in relation to the practicalities of his course in Chicago. The rest of the whopping Museum and its colossal collections must surely draw them both to return in the future.

With light humor, Edwin commented on the musky aroma developing from Nick’s long ride north. Smiles. Avid with kisses and gropes, they showered together. If Nick thought his earlier forwardness might give him an advantage, he was mistaken. Edwin Owen, at eighteen, had far greater range and more guile. Doubtless, he meant to take charge as he had in the past.

That Edwin did. Although chronologically he may have been more the boy and Nick the man, it was Nick, overwhelmed by Edwin, who felt himself the boy and Edwin the man. A turn on the cliché of male relationships. Toweled off and led seductively by his erection to Edwin’s room, Nick watched as those bluest of blue eyes raked approvingly down the ripped plane of his torso – pursued by Edwin’s fingernails. His skin crawled in anticipation. Mouth dry, he closed his eyes.

He can do what he wants.

Edwin knelt. Nick’s length throbbed as it felt the lips kiss, the tongue’s tip touch and withdraw, the wild threat of teeth scrape and chafe its head, the claim of the mouth, its journey in a single, encompassing glide deep within Edwin’s throat, a slight slide back, the churning of Edwin’s swallows escalating beyond his control to result in outbursts intense to the point of hysteria. Nick seethed in terrible ecstasy, unaware that a foot away a condom was being fitted and lubricant added.

Without warning, his back fell to the bed; his legs were raised; something was entering him. Blinking away the queasy delirium of spots phosphorescent in the blackness of orgastic oblivion, Nick realized his core was Edwin’s destination. Heart thumping, he grasped the side of the bed to brace himself and heard his name.

“Nick,” Edwin’s voice a caress, “seize me yourself.”

The look in Edwin’s eyes conquered momentary conflict. Weak and stunned, Nick obeyed. He pulled against the bed to thrust onto his challenger’s rigidity an inch at a time. The sight of his seducer’s radiating smile melted Nick’s resistance. He shuddered from the burn of rapid insertion yet, within moments, his breath seized and his ass opened shamelessly for and relaxed into the comfort of being filled. Edwin was his.

Doré’s Judge looked on. Doré’s children’s heads, otherwise occupied, never looked in the couple’s direction.

* * *

Nick’s tumult of sensations – induced by Edwin’s possessive act of swallowing the first orgasm, followed by the young man’s probing a few inches of his interior for prostatic stimulation, and subsequent, second orgasm from the demanding intercourse – subsided slowly. Blurrily, he saw Edwin dressing.

The view seemed distant and, as if from a distance, he heard Edwin say, in some otherworldly mode, “My sucking and thrustings sent your prostate into apoplexy, didn’t they? That was the intent. If you think it meant something, wait for this evening. You will have me totally. Fair play, you know – turnabout.”

He turned to leave the room but reversed to say, “Better wash off and dress yourself, Nick. We’ll be expected for supper soon.

* * *

The Crittenden lecture proved a model of its kind, an astute, historical overview of the Château de Chenonceau, superbly illustrated with drawings, prints, and photographs. Known to Edwin only through books and what he had seen on-line of the building and grounds months before, the famed castle bestriding the river Cher in France’s Loire valley was more beautiful than any. The story of the site’s ownership from before Thomas Bohier’s construction and Diane de Poitiers’s possession, through the five French queens who lived in it, and from royal into private ownership enthralled the young scholar as much as did the architecture itself. The way in which Frank Crittenden described the building was so intimate that it dawned on Edwin, Frank’s been over every inch of the place. He must know the owners!

At the crowded reception, Edwin became acquainted with a number of people, trying to take care, through many handshakes, not to detract from his fellow houseguest’s success. Nick’s cameraman made that difficult. He followed Edwin’s moves and intruded upon his chats. The Wilsons adroitly juggled their friends and the Museum’s staff members between the night’s lecturer and the much-recognized teen who would speak the next afternoon. Celita nudged Nick, whose ass still tingled from its fuck hours before, into getting footage of “the two experts together.” That worked. The happy turnout dispersed.

In their living room, the Wilsons and guests had further drinks and rather spirited, prolonged conversation about the château and about various schools of French art – to Nick Charleston’s consternation. Time dragged. He feigned attention, impressed at Edwin’s ease with these knowledgeable people. He’s so remarkable. What he wanted, of course, was the promised Edwin.

By eleven-thirty when the gathering disbanded, he got what he wanted.

Mutual showers again roused the both of them. Tipsy from sipping a single, wonderful whisky (Glenlivet XXV, he noticed, with no notion of its rarity or cost), Edwin excused his admirer from the bathroom further to ablute himself – internally. With no doubt as to Nick’s intention, he wanted to be able to provide what Dalton had termed “maximal motivation for that documentary.” If not the exact language his aunt would have used, it was similarly intentional.

Nearly a year had gone into honing his bodily skills toward conquest to serve his advancement. The world, he had been told, was rife with influential men many of whom would want his company in bed. Edwin’s aunt Agatha Cobb, her neighbor Erich Wolfe, Summer tutor George Tanner, art collector Duane Wilderforce, Duane’s bought-and-paid-for slave boy Hassan Yasamin, Edwin’s eighty-year-old husband, sociologist Dalton Brawne, his friends the Chaudary brothers and their father, and Stephen Corbett and his lover Terry Lee in faraway George Town had contributed directly to the complex prowess Edwin possessed.

Nick was neither too drunk from the phenomenal Scotch nor too naïve to realize how effortless Edwin could be at the combination of physiology and psychology. Nick was being played, and that suited him fine.

Indeed. Edwin draped himself back to the bed – legs drawn together, arms held out – and smiled as he looked toward his erection. The invitation was obvious. Not to be passed up, not when the willowy teen was ready to provide a feast. Nick straddled the underdeveloped, smooth thighs intending his mouth for Edwin’s.

“My need is urgent,” Edwin said. “Please suck me.”

Nick sat back, for a second pondering the request. He acted. His fingers took Edwin’s length and, for advantage, its base. They tangled in the sandy-blond curls. They cupped the softness below, re-grasped the shaft, made it firmer by touches, and brought it to more quivering life. The fingers became a fist to squeeze, pump, and release. Nick watched Edwin’s eyebrows angle toward each other and his expression contract, his mouth open but emitting no sound. Inspired by his role, he shifted position to reach Edwin’s head, to stroke its hair as he stroked the slender sex.

“Let yourself go,” Edwin said. “We have all night.”

Desperation rose in proportion to maddening caresses. Edwin flexed away, a mistake. One of Nick’s hands grabbed his hair and pulled; the other took hold of his balls and applied pressure. His exposed Adam’s apple was being sucked. The shock rewound Edwin’s unreeling control. Through his teeth, he drew a hissing breath – pain and pleasure together. Edwin’s emotions, like his body, bunched and coiled at his position, neck exposed and under attack by tongue and teeth, head pinned in place. In his groin, a rising ache.

Nick’s decision to display dominance was unplanned. Spontaneous, it daunted Edwin for less than a moment. His ability to cope kicked in.

Nick growled rather more seriously than he ought. Edwin almost laughed. “You said you’d be mine tonight and you are, aren’t you? Totally?” Unmoving, he held on, a vivacious twinkle in his eye and a flirty smile beneath flared nostrils.

Edwin succumbed, Beta to Nick’s Alpha. He studied his aggressor and smiled cryptically. The blue of his eyes seemed to deepen, their muscles concentrating his gaze. “Yes.

Tentative at first – tasting him, teasing him, testing his sensitivity – Nick’s mouth took Edwin’s lips, his tongue, his entire mouth and drew in all that he could. Edwin tightened with tension before responding in kind. The death grip on his penis let go. Excited, Nick moved over to secure the subject of his attentions in place. He took his chin’s late-evening bristles down Edwin’s torso, scraping the skin of breastbone and stomach. There was a quick-drawn breath from the boy. Nosing his way along the underside of Edwin’s erection, he brought his stubble into contact with the rapidly contracting scrotum’s wrinkly pouch. This time, a groan.

He’s mine. I won’t suck him. I’ll fuck him.

Nick knelt back to hoist Edwin’s unresisting legs over his arms then to his shoulders as he moved through the deep divide to reach the butter-smooth passage that promised dreamed-of happiness. Lush heat surrounded his penetration. Thoughts fled. Sensations remained. Shallow thrusts, deeper ones. He gained confidence. As he pushed into Edwin’s depths – Velvet! – the swollen head of Nick’s penis seemed about to scream its joy. The instants of blooming pleasure threatened, with each advancement and withdrawal, to consume what remained of Nick’s hold on reality. Nerve endings vied to lash his consciousness.

* * *

Conviviality prevailed until the telephone rang. Breakfast for the guests and hosts was almost over. Nick had been telling of the news items from a Malaysian reporter about a certain young American’s artworks there. Edwin grimaced. Celita and Frank were impressed. The group tried not to pay attention to Carter’s rising voice. His report, “We’ve hit a snag. They can’t or won’t move the Museum’s Corot to the Gartner for your lecture. Seems the paperwork was misplaced.” Celita and Carter, thinking hard, looked back and forth in obvious efforts not to upset the others. Rather lamely, Carter said, “There’s no crew on hand today who can deal with both disarming the security and relocating the picture to and from the auditorium.”

Edwin fidgeted, “I, like, thought it would be on an easel. It’s in my presentation.” Disjointedly, he added, “There won’t be a real Corot,” and dropped his head as if thinking.

“We could take yours,” Frank spoke out. “You know, Carter, you and I can do that – with Nick’s help.”

An uncomfortable silence. The Wilsons regarded each other. Edwin saw how they were communicating silently. He looked to Frank.

“It would serve them right. Your painting’s never been seen there. If we appear with it for our young friend’s talk,” he said, “and immediately remove it after, quite a point will have been made.”

Nick, fascinated to witness to so singular a proposition, joined in with, “I could take some pictures of it with my phone – for Edwin to insert. Don’t you think that would be fun – unless you’ve already got the kinds of things he needs?”

“I think we’ll do it,” Celita told Carter. Her cheeks rose as she wrinkled her nose and squinted her eyes with pleasure.

* * *

“That was certainly memorable,” Carter and Celita heard Frank Crittenden say over the applause. “One for the books.”

“You mean for the TV.”

“Right. You couldn’t have made a better decision. If the documentary’s even half-way good, this event trumps the previous three at my friends’ museums.”

“You devil. Your idea.”

Edwin, sporting one of Carter’s neckties after having realized he had left his at home, finished fielding questions from the audience and was shaking hands. Two cameramen were in and among the crowd. Nick, microphone in hand, sought opinions which might have use in his film. Snapshots and selfies were being taken with cellphones by various people. An occasion worth remembering.

The event, longest so far in Edwin’s dealings with Corot as a subject, had begun with Joyce Kilmer’s poem, Trees, and proceeded through the display and examination of tree tops, tree forms, and treatments of masses of leaves, moved to the questions raised by a so-called Corot in Indianapolis and the work Edwin had done to make it “exhibitable,” included full views of all the landscapes from which only details had been shown, revealed the new one painted by Edwin for the occasion (minimally framed), downplayed the Museum’s own large Corot (the absence of which from the stage was apparent), treated quite fully a large, elaborately framed masterpiece, a quintessential Corot (no ownership mentioned) that, like Edwin’s own piece, had been covered by a cloth until the right moment. Heads bobbed as friends of the Wilsons and staff members recognized the one and were swept away by the other.

Keenly attentive to the curious affair of a teen speaking in a formal setting at Cleveland’s venerable Art Museum, Eloise Duchoveny, art writer for the Plain Dealer, had done some homework. Elizabeth Dunlap, her counterpart and friend in Detroit, had linked her to Joan Dearing at the Tribune. “Yes,” Joan told her, “Edwin is quite the phenomenon, as I’ve seen personally,” and “Yes,” she was “working on a story about him,” but “No,” she wouldn’t “share,” not “even as a professional courtesy.”

Indianapolis, Boston, Cincinnati – seemed “far-fetched,” she had concluded to her editor, “but not shams, because somebody’s filming the whole shebang.” He gave her the go-ahead to “do the story even if it’s not real. Be great if there’s a scandal there.”

She took notes. Edwin Owen “reprised the style of Corot.” He based his composition “on sketches in Corot’s hand which you people own.” The painting was a kind of “personal exercise in discipline.” At one point, he called it “a conjecture” – later, “a hy-poth-e-sis” (which he acknowledged to be “a new word for me about a painting”). Late Corot “touched people’s heartstrings with the calm of imagined reality, of realized beauty.”

He actually said that.

When Corot’s style “became too familiar,” critical opinion condemned what once it had deemed “prestigious.” Popularity, in the face of “all the to-dos over Impressionism’s advances,” meant a sign of “triviality.” “Such judgments after the turn of the century evolved into prejudices. The critics flip-flopped.” Corots lost market value. “The many slavish imitations by his followers, who failed to make transformations of their own, sank that world.” He used the adjectives “sterile” and “puerile” (another word he had just added to his vocabulary). He blamed the sycophants for “devitalizing the master’s ideals through lifeless canvases.” After a pause to think, Edwin looked at the treetops on the screen and observed, “With the least imagination, we can inhabit those boughs as the birds he never painted, and glide among them, rest, sing, preen our plumage, and fly back into our own, real world.”

This kid’s on a tear.

Edwin’s closing observations and the suddenness of Corot’s photograph on the screen to the statement, “This is the artist who gave us trees as lovely as poems,” escaped her ballpoint. Eloise used her position as a reporter to gain access to the Gartner Auditorium’s light booth for an immediate playback of the final minute, and wrote down every word that he spoke with disarming innocence.

“Corot’s blends – soft confusions of leaves, boughs, petals, hills, and grasses in light and shadows – invented an imaginatively moist atmosphere for his fantasy. Corot thus created his own world. And the rest of the world used to want in. His fortune was to transform existing prototypes into his own new landscapes, where fluffy trees gather nebulous greens together to cool and refresh their viewers. If the severe pace of existence today has not numbed us to such opportunities for refreshment of spirit through our eyes, then let us make a little room to welcome Corot’s paintings back into our lives. And remember, this is the artist who gave us trees as lovely as poems.”

On her way out, shaking her head in disbelief, she heard her name called. “Eloise, what did you think?” It was one of her many acquaintances, a woman whose name she could not place.

“I’m mulling it over,” she wanly replied.

“Oh, the lecture? No, I meant about the Wilson’s Corot. You know, the big one in the gold frame? Rumors are all over the place,” the woman confided, “that it’s never been loaned before, not even to the Met. Look, there’s Lonnie. We can ask her.”

Lonnie Milford, a mainstay among Museum supporters, looked for all the world like somebody’s housekeeper. Gray hair slightly awry, little makeup, no jewelry, plainly dressed, she showed no signs of her wealth – by design. People could be so damned nosy. She braced. That newspaper writer.

“Hello Lonnie. You’ve met Eloise Duchoveny, I’m sure. We want to know whether it’s true that….”

Lonnie’s hand stopped the question. “I don’t know whether anything’s true, ladies. I’m not even certain sometimes why anyone wants to know the truth, there’s so little of it these days. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”

They watched as Lonnie went to speak with Frank Crittenden, all smiles.

“My Lord, she’s the one who sponsored that guy’s lecture yesterday. I heard about it – on some old castle.”

The Wilsons, low keyed as always, appeared with Edwin Owen. A few exchanges of hugs and kisses later, the group, including Lonnie Milford, made for the side exit, a museum attendant wheeling a cart behind them with what only could be both paintings on it.

“There’s your answer, I’d say,” Eloise said.

* * *

The Ritz-Carlton’s Lobby Lounge had the widest range of named drinks that Edwin had ever seen. Its history was explained – engaging enough – but no one wanted anything from the list. Everyone except Edwin ordered doubles of Glenlivet (not, he was led to understand, its XXV). For him there was hot tea – until the waiter left. Lonnie leaned over and said, “Pour that in the flower arrangement. You’ve earned a good drink.”

Their glasses made a round-robin of the table, each relinquishing a bit of its palate-enhancing contents into Edwin’s cup. Soon, the mood was appropriately gala. Lonnie, it turned out, had been a classmate of Frank’s at Yale. They had known each other since before either married. She missed his lecture – third in a series of six honoring her late husband – because of an out-of-town bridge tournament that had run late. “You wouldn’t believe, I got partnered with a damn philosopher person who talked. About truth, the nature of truth,” she snickered. “He said, now get this, that ‘Verbal truths are cast as assertions, like opening bids in bridge,’ or something such. It was still on my mind, Edwin, after some of the truth you talked about in your lecture. I was crossing the hall before I spotted my dear Frank. Two snoops came up to me, wanting to know the obvious – if that was the Corot from your living room. I foxed ’em by telling ’em something about truth and how we can’t always know it.”

Edwin giggled into his Scotch. This stuff’s really good. I wonder if Dalton would like some.

“That reminds me, Edwin,” Carter sipped at his glass. “Nearly as delicious as ours.” It was an aside while he framed his question, “If you don’t mind, what is the destiny for your canvas?” Nick, Frank, and Celita looked expectant. Lonnie simply tossed down the rest of her drink. Carter said, “It’s awfully fine.”

“Thank you. Like my other things, it goes to my Aunt Aggie. Her walls are full!”

Nick was quick, “That’s true. I’ve seen them. Her house’s a gallery for Edwin.”

Dishes pre-ordered by Celita to save time arrived on the table: two dozen buffalo wings with plum sauce, six crab cakes with mustard remoulade, a big bowl of slaw, a platter of cheeses – Greek, French, American, Italian – with grapes and nuts, and a basket heaping with selected crackers. “We know Nick must be on the road with his people and Edwin’s got to make his flight,” Celita told them. “These nibbles will tide you over, I hope!”

Tea and coffee were brought, Lonnie asking for a glass of “any Barolo” instead. As they ate and talked amiably, Edwin asked, “That tournament you played wasn’t by any chance in Akron?”

“Why yes. How would you know that? Do you play bridge, too?”

He coughed on a piece of the cracker he was munching too rapidly, “Gosh, no. My Aunt does though, and she was playing in Akron.”

“Who’s your aunt?”

“Agatha Cobb.”

Lonnie’s turn to cough had come. “Agatha Cobb from that little town, whatever it’s called, in Indiana?” She watched as he nodded gravely. “No wonder you’re so smart. That woman’s a bitch on wheels. Scares people to death. Stares ’em down. Wins. By gum, next time I see her, we’ll have something to talk about.”

Frank was unsure whether to react at all. Nick whooped (I’m going to tell her!). Celita and Carter were much amused. Edwin ate a crab cake.

After goodbyes to Lonnie and Nick and in the Bentley where Edwin finally noticed “the quality of this leatherwork and the beautiful burl woods,” an idea surfaced. Carter instantly was more amused than minutes before, Frank as well. Celita wondered aloud whether Edwin might help her with a prank. She wanted to borrow the new “Corot” – “We’ll have it properly framed” – for a reception they were going to have at their home at the end of the month. “We’ll hang it in the living room and put ours in one of the gallery’s storage rooms. Those women that were nagging Lonnie – I know who they are – won’t resist being invited along with the senior docents. I’ll engineer that. We’ll see how many of them we can fool. It will be a test of your skill. You didn’t paint your Ceci n’est-ce pas un Corot noticeably, did you? I didn’t spot it.”

Yes, but…in thin lead white, right across the middle of the canvas before I painted the scene. It won’t show unless x-rayed. Something else will show, too, what’s left of the junky painting that was originally underneath – from a thrift store. But my piece is too small, isn’t it? Your real one’s much larger.”

Carter, laughing hard, was having difficulty with the wheel. “Darling, it’s brilliant. We’ll simply rehang the others closer to it on each side and move the lighting – and see what happens. Edwin, say it’s okay. We’ll see the picture properly shipped to your aunt afterward – in its new frame. How’s that?”

He did not hesitate. “What I would like is to be asked back to meet your Conservation people and see the work they’re doing. And to study your collection. Oh, and to take in more of the Museum. It’s huge.”

“Did you even get to see the old façade facing the lagoon? That’s particularly pretty.”

“Next time. Just say you’ll let me come. I could spend about a year in there.”

The conversation deteriorated after that, but its matters were settled. Where, they wondered, had the time gone?

* * *