The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber Page A

me just this morning that we couldn’t swing it for one of our lots-a-bucks trustees who called from there to see if our director could pull strings. Every minute is spoken for—it’s like the last plane out of Saigon.”
    “I’d like to see your
Music Lesson,”
Mickey said softly.
    “Not mine. The queen’s, actually. Anyway, it usually takes weeks for pictures to get reinstalled after a loan show like that. There’s a trip to the conservation lab to check condition, and some curators are big believers in ‘resting’ the paintings, if you can believe that. So it could easily be a month or two before
The Music Lesson
is back on the wall. How about it—are you up for a trip to London, maybe in the spring? She lives at Buckingham Palace. I think they let commoners in these days. They need the cash or something. ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/Christopher Robin went down with Alice.’ I’d love to go to London with you, Mix, and take you to the National Gallery. There’s so much good art there. My favorite van Eyck.”
    Mickey didn’t speak. Somewhat self-conscious about my tendency to ramble and instruct simultaneously, I stopped, and looked down into those eyes of hers again, studied that faint smile, the bemused air somehow also present in the hands playfully splayed on lute strings centuries old.
    “Maybe she’s friends with her neighbors up the road at the National Gallery, the Arnolfinis,” I said, breaking the silence. More silence. “They both keep fruit on their windowsills.” Mickey could not have known what I was talking about. Silence again.
    We bent our heads and studied her together for a long time then. I held back on any little lectures oniconography or painterliness or Northern European sensibility or the hilariously named nineteenth-century art dealer Jeronimo de Vries, or anything at all, to let Mickey look at the painting through his own eyes and not mine. In truth, from then to now, Mickey has never indicated to me if he feels anything personal at all for this painting.
    “So,
The Music Lesson
it is,” he murmured after a while, as if to himself.
    I could sense him looking at me thoughtfully as I studied the color plate in the book some more. I found that I was staring at it without seeing it, I became so conscious of his gaze. He was quiet for so long that it began to spook me, and finally I broke the silence, with a tease.
    “Is this my next birthday present? I have to admit I was thinking a little smaller for you, Mix, maybe a nice plain Jaguar XKE. What color would you like? Green, don’t you think?”
    “It’s worth millions, isn’t it?” he said quietly, resisting my kidding.
    “Well, millions, I guess, sure. Maybe hundreds of millions. Who’s to say? Vermeers don’t just come up at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. There are only—what, not even forty paintings known? Thirty-seven? Thirty-five? I never can quite remember which ones are in and which ones are out of favor. It depends on whom you talk to. Some very orthodox scholars count only about twenty-eight for absolute certain. I myself have a funny feelingthat the girl in the red hat in Washington is not entirely quite right. That one’s on wood, too. But the other little panel portrait in Washington, that girl with a flute, she’s definitely got a problem. She’s way too direct somehow, too enthusiastically present. More of a Maes kind of face, you know? No, of course you don’t, but I can show you and you’ll see it. She’s had a major exfoliation or something in the last couple of hundred years, too, which hasn’t helped. Though it’s my sense that some of the questionable ones were unfinished at the time of his death, and then greedy people messed them around in order to sell them. That would account for what’s right with them as well as what’s wrong with them.”
    I sneaked a peek at Mickey to see if he was listening. He seemed to be, so I kept talking.
“The Music Lesson
has never been