“It seems silly to me this can’t be done over email or phone, but this is tradition and I’m not going to be the first to break it, you know what I mean?” the man said. “What do you want to know?”
Instead of answering, Declan said, “Jordan, Mikkel was on the MFA board for—”
“Fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years,” Declan agreed. “He has dealt with several sweetmetals.”
Jordan looked at Declan instead of at Mikkel.
A boat ride. A fine, pretty boat ride.
“There’s quite a bit of legend around them,” Mikkel went on. “I don’t want to say a secret society because that makes it seem organized, and it really isn’t. It is more that anyone who deals in much art quickly learns to tell what is good art and what isn’t, what is going to make a splash, what isn’t. You get that sense in your head for what is worth your time. And it is not hard to tell after a while of dealing with art, high-end art, that some of them are these sweetmetals. They are special, you know? People like them, they have that something. They sell for much more than you would think, because of that something, so it pays to keep your eye out for it. But they are an open secret. You don’t really talk about them. You wouldn’t advertise something as a sweetmetal. It’s—what’s the word? Gauche. The mystery is part of what makes them what they are. There is just a tradition of not putting anything about them in writing if you can help it, and if you do, burn it, it’s all very Ouija board. What do you want to know?”
Declan held his hand out to Jordan, the universal gesture for After you?
“How are they made?” Jordan asked. “How is it put into them? Do you know?”
Mikkel squinted, as if the question wasn’t exactly logical to him, but then he answered, slowly, “Oh, I see what you are saying. The artist does it. It is something about how they are feeling when they make the art. I thought when I first saw one that it was because the art was special to the world in some way. A real original, you know? But it was explained to me later and this makes more sense. They are special to the artist in some way. They are an original for the artist, something new for them, something personal for them. The subject matter, sometimes, how they felt when they were painting it, others. That is what seems to make some of them into sweetmetals. I do not think it is the artist who does it. It is, like, the spirit of the time. There is a French term for that, isn’t there? There is a French term for everything. Does that answer the question?”
Declan looked to Jordan to see if it did.
“And you don’t know what this is, what the specific bit is about the artist’s process that does it,” she said. “You don’t know anything more specific about this … spirit of the time.”
“All I know is that artists who produce sweetmetals don’t always make sweetmetals,” he said. “They can make two in a row, maybe, and then none for the rest of time. Now, most of them are in private hands … but you know there are a few in the city, right? Open to the public?”
“El Jaleo,” Declan said.
“Yes,” Mikkel said. “Sargent was good at them, but I suppose he was very prolific, too, wasn’t he? Have you ever seen his Madame X?”
Of course she had. Of course. Madame X was Sargent’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, with all its checkered history. It was one of the first Sargents Jordan had ever tried to copy. She and Hennessy had taken turns at it, sometimes even working on the same copy as they did it over and over again. There was a full-length copy of it back in the McLean mansion with a bunch of bullet holes in its head, just like the poor girls who might still be there, too.
Mikkel saw from their expressions they had. “It’s a sweetmetal, too. Off the charts. Whatever those two have in common, that’s what makes a sweetmetal.”
His teen son jogged up to give Mikkel his house keys; he’d locked away the portrait of Declan’s mother safely inside the house.
“Thank you for making the time before your trip,” Declan said.
“Thank you for facilitating,” Mikkel replied. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch again. That text number is good for you, right?”
Handshakes were exchanged again, more murmured pleasantries, and then, finally, Declan, Jordan, and Matthew were left standing on the pier. The wind whipped at them. The masts behind them were skeletons. The pretty evening was turning into something even more feral.
“It’s kind of weird that water shows you your own face,” Matthew said, but in an absent way.
Jordan said, “That was the painting of your mother.”
“Yes,” Declan said. “It still is. I just don’t have it anymore.”
“You traded it for this information.”
“Yes.”
They studied each other. He looked less ordinary as the sun disappeared and deepened the shadows beneath his eyebrows, obscuring the shape of his eyes, his expression.
“This was a good time, Pozzi,” she told him.
Declan turned his face into the wind so that the darkness would hide his smile from her. He said, “I expect great things from my portrait.”
Hennessy knew that everyone had secrets.
Secrets were what made you who you were. Once, Hennessy had read a book on drawing that said the key to getting a good likeness was getting the shadows right. It wasn’t by the positive forms that one was recognized. We know people’s faces by their shadows.
Hennessy thought secrets were like that. Each of her girls started life as Hennessy, thinking like her, acting like her—but eventually something happened, and they got a secret. And that was when they became their own person.
It was possible Hennessy believed people simply were their secrets.
J. H. Hennessy’s secret was that she could only love one person at a time. It might appear as if she loved other people, like her daughter, or other activities, like painting, but she really only loved Bill Dower. Everything went well for painting and for Hennessy as long as everything was going well with Bill Dower. But if it wasn’t, anything could be sacrificed in the service of preserving that love. Daughter, career, friends, house—these were just well-treated pawns in a board game with only two players.
Jordan’s secret was that she wanted to live apart from Hennessy. She might have denied this to save Hennessy’s feelings, but Hennessy had followed her; she’d seen the apartments Jordan daydreamed about. She’d looked through Jordan’s phone as she slept and seen the zip codes she fantasized over. She knew the galleries Jordan ogled, she knew the schools Jordan pictured herself attending. No matter how exciting Hennessy made their lives, no matter how many high-end jobs she had them take, how many lowbrow parties she had them attend, how big she made their shared life, Jordan still wanted her own. No one wanted to live with Hennessy forever, not even Hennessy.
Hennessy’s secret was that she didn’t want the ley line to get any more powerful.
“When one engages in havoc all the time,” Hennessy said, “it becomes a kind of unhavoc.”
The three dreamers were in an older neighborhood. Hennessy had long since lost sense of where. City and state were all negotiable. The light was peculiar and yellow-green. It was the end of the day, which ordinarily made ugly places more paintable. But tonight the clouds were hanging low and wrong over this town, raggedly caught on telephone wires, and the last of the dying sun came in sideways and murky. Snow was drifting down here and there as if the clouds were sloughing. The streets were muddy with fallen and melted snow and sand.