Page 26 of Under the Stars

After Steve died, Meredith refused to return to the house in Santa Monica where we had lived together.

She hired some movers to pack everything up and put it in storage until she could find our dream house, as she called it.

We rented a couple of mansions, one in Malibu and one in Calabasas and then very briefly in Santa Barbara until Santa Barbara drove her bananas—too far from the action, too aggressively perfect—and she finally returned to Malibu and bought her dream house from that actor who played the exiled prince in that fantasy series set in ancient China.

This was right after his marriage broke up, so Meredith was able to drive a hard bargain, which gave her almost as much pleasure as the house itself—white and spare, perched on an eroding cliff right where the Pacific Ocean crashed into North America.

Every good rainstorm, I expected us to slide into eternity on a river of mud.

I think Meredith relished the frisson of danger.

On the day our stuff arrived from storage, she stood in the gigantic living room that reminded you of the lobby of a Mondrian hotel and watched the men carry the furniture and the boxes of clothing and décor and toys and kitchenware and set them in the appropriate rooms. Meredith’s assistant (she had a PA by now) directed all the traffic while Meredith, wearing a sleek white maxi dress and her hair pulled up in a high ponytail like an ancient goddess, observed the unpacking of merchandise, object by object, with an expression that you—the casual onlooker—might think emotionless.

I knew better. Once the movers had left and the sun sank into a spectacular orange bisque beyond the acreage of windows, I was not remotely surprised when Meredith turned to her assistant and said we’d have to get rid of it all and start fresh.

That old phrase, start fresh . How many times did I hear those words? Like the om of my childhood.

So we started fresh. Bought all new things to fill the gaping house on the edge of the ocean.

Then she filmed The Golden Hour and, as you know, fell infamously in love not with her co-star but with the married actor who played his father in the flashback sequences—make of that what you will, Dr. Freud—and we sold the dream house with all its contents so they could break up with their respective partners (his wife, her boyfriend) and start fresh together on a cattle ranch in Montana, far from the public’s disapproving gaze.

By then I was fourteen and off to boarding school, so her Montana years bounced off my windshield—wood and antlers and cowhide, then the inevitable return to California for a fresh start.

My point is that I do not, personally, feel a sentimental attachment to objects.

Just about nothing I own dates back earlier than, say, college.

I think about the look on Meredith’s face when the trucks arrived and unloaded all the stuff she’d put in storage years earlier, all the detritus of her life with Steve—the almost imperceptible way her nose wrinkled and her beautiful brow flattened.

I don’t know if it was disgust or discomfort or something else.

I think she didn’t want to be reminded of the past, that’s all.

To attach yourself to old things was to indulge in sentimentality, and sentimentality was a sign of weakness. She was someone who moved on.

So I can’t explain my curiosity to see what lies inside this trunk from Mike’s cellar, any more than I can explain my visceral reaction to the smell that rises from the interior when Sedge Peabody swings open the lid.

I can’t describe it, exactly, except as the smell of things left undisturbed. Of boxes unpacked in a Malibu mansion.

I peer over Sedge’s shoulder. “Anything special in there?”

“I don’t know. Looks like a bunch of rolled-up papers. Maps or something.”

“Are we allowed to touch or do we need a specialist?”

He sends me a puzzled look and reaches inside to pull out a long, stiff cylinder like a pipe. “It’s not paper, though,” he says. “I think it’s canvas.”

“You mean, like art?”

Sedge peels back a few inches from the roll. “Like art. Here, hold this end.”

I grasp the edge with my thumbs and forefingers. The paint feels cool and crackling, like lacquer, while the bare canvas on the back side is soft. Sedge stands before me and unrolls inch by inch, wincing as he goes as if he’s afraid of breaking it.

“I think it’s a woman,” I observe.

“I’ll say.”

The image unfurls in luscious detail—so real you could touch her, so vivid you could almost expect her to rise from the surface and say hello.

The creamy legs, the curve of her backside, the swoop from her hip to her waist, the delicate spine tracing up, up, until her face appears, looking puckishly over her shoulder at you.

“I’ll be damned,” says Sedge.

Unrolled, the painting is about the size of a backyard picnic table.

The subject stretches all the way from the bottom to the top, where the mass of her dark hair disappears into the universe.

She’s lying on her stomach on what seems to be a bed of leaves and grass, leaning slightly to her left side, right knee raised, joints loose, fingers tangled in the vegetation, hair tumbling everywhere, so you can’t help thinking that her lover painted this image of her in the moments after he rose from her body.

Sedge doesn’t seem to be breathing. Neither am I.

He makes this downward motion and I follow his lead, placing the canvas gently on the floor.

Sedge reaches for the crowbar to anchor the top and walks around the perimeter to crouch next to me at the bottom, elbows on knees, and study the image before us.

“I don’t know a whole lot about art,” I say, hushed voice, “but this feels kind of special to me.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not an expert, for sure, but I’d guess mid-nineteenth century, just by the style of it. But there’s something—I don’t know, not that she’s naked, but the pose itself. The earthiness. It doesn’t fit, right?”

“It’s good, though,” I say. “Really good. Don’t you think?”

“Skilled, you mean? Yeah. Look at the light, the way it washes her and glints in the leaves.”

“Any idea who it might be? I don’t see a name at the bottom or anything.”

Sedge straightens to his feet. “My knowledge of nineteenth-century American art is definitely not up to that challenge. Does Mike know about this?”

“Does Mike know about what?”

We both whip toward the door from the kitchen, where Mike looms in a Mo T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans stained with white paint, holding a wrench in one hand and an expression of annoyance on his face.

“This trunk,” I tell him.

Mike points the wrench toward us. “You mean the trunk I told the plumbers to take to the dumpster? Now back inside and spilled out all over my fucking taproom floor?”

“Where’d it come from, though?”

“Down cellar.”

“I know it was in the cellar. But how’d it get there?”

“Fuck if I know,” says Mike. “It’s just junk. No key. Get it out of my taproom.”

Sedge motions with his arm. “Hold on a second, Mikey. You gotta see this first.”

Mike strikes a pose like an exasperated teenager. “Not again, bro. Like the arrowhead you found under the kitchen baseboard? Wanted to call out the fucking archaeological society?”

“I was not going to call out the archaeological society. I just thought it was cool, that’s all. Show some respect to the ancestors.”

“Peabody, we open for Memorial Day weekend in six days. Six fucking days, all right? And I got an entire kitchen to install in that period of time, so—”

“Just shut up and come over here, Mike, okay?”

Mike lays out a pained sigh and crosses the room to stand next to us, in front of this canvas stretched on the freshly sanded taproom floor, anchored by the crowbar at one end and my right hand at the bottom.

“Nice ass,” he observes.

“Well said,” says Sedge. “What about the rest of her? Do you recognize her?”

“Yeah, she looks like your mother. I mean, what the fuck? Am I supposed to know her?”

“Mike, I realize you’re a little stressed right now—” I begin.

“No, honey. I’m not a little stressed. I’m a lot fucking stressed, and the two of you…” His voice trails away. He walks around to the side of the painting and crouches down to peer at the half-turned face, the arched eyebrow, the mischievous eye.

“What is it?” I ask.

He looks back up at us. Blood sucked from his skin. “Follow me,” he says.

—

The portrait hangs from the wall of an upstairs sitting room.

The family sitting room, Mike says, where he and his parents and siblings would hang out, away from the public side of the inn.

The woman inside the dusty wooden frame is primly clothed—dress of dark blue, white lace collar, shawl draped over her shoulders.

Her dark hair splices down the middle, falling in wings over her ears.

A tiny white lace cap peeks over the crown of her head.

Within the shelter of each arm, she clasps a child—a sturdy, fair-haired boy and a slightly younger girl with rosy cheeks and brown hair.

She isn’t quite smiling, but you can sense the smile that lurks just inside her lips. In the arch of her eyebrow.

“You think it’s the same woman?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Just kind of reminds me of her. My great-great-grandmother, I think. Or is it three greats? Can’t remember. Mary. Mary Winthrop.”

“Not by the same artist, I’m guessing.” Sedge points to her right hand, wrapped around the upper arm of the girl. “The perspective’s a little off. Look at her fingers, they’re stiff. The posture and the expression on her face?”

“Who the fuck appointed you the art expert around here?” says Mike.

“Never said I was an art expert.” Sedge turns from the portrait and looks at me. A smile glints in the corner of his mouth. “But I do know someone who is.”

—