AllFreeNovel
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I carry in a tray with chicken noodle soup and fresh bread, both made from scratch by the lovely Marina. “It’s still warm,” I say, placing it down on the work table behind her. “Come eat.”
“Not yet. I’m almost done. Did you ever notice this guy’s hair? It’s lank, greasy. He doesn’t wash it nearly often enough, while the women have lovely hair, done up in ribbons and curls. He’s like an ogre, ugly, round shoulders, barely a shadow. The women glow. Why do you think that is?”
“Vermeer understood who runs the house.”
Hellie’s clearly not impressed. She makes a mark, seems fine with it, makes another. Dab, line, dab. “No, I think Vermeer wanted to say something about the passivity of masculine dominance in a patriarchal society and the strong submission of the women that keep society running.”
“I doubt that very much.”
She pauses and turns to glare at me. “What do you think then?”
“I think he found these women attractive and needed an excuse to paint them. The father’s just a prop.”
“Typical dude. Women are always either hot or not, right?”
“Look at them. The focus of the daughter is her dress, look how much time Vermeer spent on the folds. And the mother? Her face? Come on, his dick was hard for these chicks.”
“You’re gross.” But she puts down her paintbrush and comes over. “How come you like this stuff, anyway?”
“Oh, because I’m a mafia criminal, I can’t like art.”
“Yep. Basically.” She eats some soup, drinks some tea, and seems to realize that she has a body with needs, and starts shoveling it down. “How’d you get into it?”
I look away. She’s eating like choking sounds fun. “My father had a collection. He didn’t really care about the stuff, only saw it as like status symbols and investments, but I used to run around the Sunrise, checking it all out.”
“Sunrise?”
“It’s the casino my family runs back in Atlantic City. It’s where I grew up.”
“You grew up in a casino? Really? You guys didn’t have, like, some big mafia family house in the suburbs?”
“Nope, just the casino. My brothers and I raised hell in that place when we were kids, getting into trouble all the time, at least until he started sending us to boarding school for half the year. But when I was back home, I used to spend hours walking around the halls, hunting down my favorite works of art, and staring at them. He had a pretty good collection, too. Renoir, Klimt, O’Keefe, Pollock, Monet.”
“Where are they now? The paintings, I mean.”
“Still hanging, mostly. He sold some of them a while back. I made Adler swear he’d keep the rest.”
“Are you close? You and your brothers, I mean.”
I grunt, considering how to answer. “It’s complicated. Yes, we’re close, we’re loyal to each other above anyone else, but we don’t see each other often.”
“I can see how that might seem difficult, but I’m kind of jealous, I wish I had siblings.”
“You were an only child.”
“That we know about.” She smiles to herself and cradles the tea in both hands. The soup is gone, devoured. “My father wasn’t shy about, you know, spreading himself around.”
“You were raised by your grandmother.”
“Yep, she was amazing. Grams got me, but she passed a couple years ago, right after I graduated from art school. I never knew my mom. Grams said I got dropped off on her front step one day, and that was that.”
“What about your father?”
“He came around sometimes.” She smiles at me. “I loved him. I still do, even though he got me in this fucking mess. He taught me all sorts of things, and he was the first person to encourage me to paint. I’m not sure he ever really believed I was serious about it, but here I am.”
“You wouldn’t be who you are without your father. I can empathize.”
“Family’s never easy, huh?”
