Olivia and River don't (shootempolitely) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-30 21:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | doctor, nick fury |
Who: Olivia and Sunny
What: Art. And snootiness. And general conflict.
When: Recently.
Warnings? None!
There were major benefits to working on the legal side of things. Brushes were a big one. It might sound romantic to use badger hair brushes to forge a Vermeer, but they didn’t have the precision of modern artificial brushes, and Sunny didn’t have to worry that a microscope and a sharp eye would pick out a hair that didn’t belong. Paint was a big number two. She didn’t need to grind blue out of lapis lazuli, she could just diminish a shade out of a tube and find the right lacquer. Thank God this collector wasn’t interested in Vermeer, because these days Sunny had a hard time sitting still, and if there was anything the Dutch painter commanded, it was patience and precision.
No, this wealthy businessman was trading on her name, her new reputation as an exemplary forger, and he wanted her work even if he didn’t necessarily want her name on it. She put it on there anyway, of course. He’d never be able to see it, but anyone using ultraviolet and an x-ray would. It was meant to be there, hidden in the curve of a leaf, and it made her smile in her heart to think of it, even as she explained to him the different techniques she had used to replicate the young Italian’s mastery of light. She tried to keep some of her own romanticism out of the interpretation, but she felt that the crippled greenery displayed something of Caravaggio’s tumultuous and dangerous soul. Criminal to criminal.
The display and the narrative complete, client happy, Sunny waited in a breathtaking marble and damask sitting room for someone in charge of the money to explain how she was going to be paid her six figure commission. Quality did not come cheaply, after all. She was satisfied, but deeply tired, and she found her mind wandering off to strange places and garbled tongues. The Doctor was muttering to himself in his native tongue just on the edge of her awareness, and though she could hear it, she wasn’t listening, staring instead out of the staggering windows at the outline of the mountains in the desert beyond the Strip. Her mouth tasted like the sweet tea the client’s wife had offered, and the suitcoat and dress pants felt unnaturally confining.
She had advised against it. She had advised against it from the very beginning. Legally it was gray, a delicate blend of black and white. There was no evident wrongness in possessing a piece of artwork that copied another - grander - more famous one. Legality shattered when certificates of dubious authenticity came into play, when the piece was seen as an investment to be sold on. It could not, Olivia had said, her syllables snapping crisp as shattering glass, with her delicate tea-cup in her hand and her ankles neatly crossed behind her chair-leg. She had been polite, sitting in the inner-sanctum, the polished rosewood desk between them both - she and a client who knew better, for heaven’s sake - and then she had been blunt, explicit butting up against the soft, expensive silence that curtained the study.
“It is worthless,” Olivia had said with her hands in her lap, her head high as she sat beneath a vivid Pollock that could take your breath away, able to see the Lowry out of the corner of her eye. “It is not even worth collecting.” Whatever the artist had said -- artist, used as loosely as the word could stretch because no artist would be satisfied just copying someone else, someone’s technique and execution, no artist would wrap themselves around in a stifling cocoon of someone else’s creativity and be content not to create -- you did, and Olivia bit the inside of her cheek until the taste on her tongue was like pennies.
They had sent her in, ‘just wait until you see it’, and Olivia saw only the account-worth falling, the knowing she had failed a client she liked, had respected. ‘The sitting room’, and Olivia had shaken his hand with the strong and deceptively capable clasp she had always given him, a salutation to his own folly.
The door swung open a little too sharply and Olivia was the sort of woman who carried presence, enough to fill the doorframe the way a man might. She was tall and her shoes were more practical than usual although still impossibly high and the kind of elegant that is exceptionally expensive, along with the suit, a burned charcoal color that looked soft and fitted impeccably. She looked at the artist and she saw a woman -- Olivia’s surprise did not show around the eyes, the mouth, it was veiled with the unconscious skill of someone well used to keeping their own opinions neatly out of the way. She had expected a man, one perhaps practiced in being charming, in taking money for things that should not be bought. Instead it was a woman, dressed severely but despite it, feminine. Olivia did not smile, nor did she say anything at all. She looked at the painting for a long minute, and then she looked at the artist.
“You’re very good,” she said, calmly. It was good. Technically brilliant. It was still a copy.
Sunny turned. She did not look at the painting; she had seen it before, and didn’t need a constant reminder of its existence. She tilted her head in what could have been a polite acknowledgment of the canvas, but missed it by a hair and plowed into resilient amusement. Her dark hair was up the only way in which it could be up, a messy bun with stiff hair in all directions, and it shone with a brass-like resilience that matched her eyes. Sunny had skin the color of grated cinnamon, and it was her best feature, highlighted in the curve of a swan’s neck and a waifish form wrapped up in stiff cotton. The slacks were tailored, but she didn’t look comfortable in them.
“You don’t have to say it if it hurts coming out,” Sunny said, grinning with a copper glint as she wandered back toward both Olivia and the painting. She knew the accountants generally didn’t understand the unique appeal of her work, and she enjoyed baiting them. Sunny’s eyes did a flush walk down Olivia’s front, a glimpse that traced the hem of her finely businesslike attire. “It might get stuck and I’ll have to do mouth-to-mouth.” She collapsed, heels up, on one of the overstuffed armchairs, ignoring the designer finish of the room. She was too tired to give off the real arrogance of someone recently awarded the gold, and besides she was distracted giving all the sideways looks she could.
Olivia was not a woman who shied at looks. She was used to taking them up in places where
the lights were dim and the music loud and the glass on a napkin could be abandoned in favor of a good, long look. Looks were harmless, they could be endured or incur amusement, or invoke the slightly bored tug at the lines of her mouth that was the frank extent of her expression when the attentions of clients were inappropriately drawn. Now Sunny’s eyes and where they fell slid over her as unaffecting as water over oiled feathers, and Olivia’s own gaze rested as lightly on the artist as they might any unarresting sight, as if to look too long or too heavily might be felt as directly as a touch to the shoulder or shake of the hand.
She sat - neatly. Olivia moved the way someone both infinitely aware and implicitly comfortable with their own body might, a gracefulness that was as smooth as her own appearance. It was neither explicit, nor was it sexual - she could have been anyone or no-one at all, but she moved as though she knew how to do so in the most concise way possible. Her ankles crossed, one dove-colored shoe hooked behind the other. She studied Sunny’s sprawl with the floating, hidden smile of being comfortable in the surroundings and she looked at the lines of the woman’s face because she could and because the artist -- translated from paint and canvas to living woman (the art, of course, being far more important than the individual) was of interest.
“It is, of course, worth absolutely nothing.” Olivia’s voice was silvery, strangely kind even as she clipped the ends of the words down to clarity.
Sunny felt Oivia’s cool response on her skin, and it made her toss her head as if to protect the back of her neck with a fall of sun-warmed hair that she temporarily forgot was swept away at the top of her head. “To you, obviously. But I can tell you, baby, that that painting has plenty of my blood, sweat, tears and talent crusted under that varnish, and you’ll not find another one that looks closer. He can’t afford the original, but he can afford me, so that’s what he’s going to get.”
Sunny leaned forward and tapped the manila folder on the sitting room table between them. It was new, like her suit. “There are papers here...” She was watching the woman and thinking idle thoughts the way you do when you’ve first met someone--like whether or not someone did her nails and if she let her hair go chaotic when there wasn’t anyone around to see--when a sudden yawning chasm in her mind swallowed all that up. Sunny was abruptly awash in a litany of facts that didn’t matter, genetic notations about the curve of Olivia’s ears, the smell of some cleaner and its chemical composition, an old song that sounded like German but actually hailed from some far more foreign shore. Her eyes went temporarily glassy and she seemed to vacate the conversation entirely for about two seconds, and then she picked up right where she left off without seeming to know the difference, “...with everything he needs to verify that it’s mine. Not that I imagine he’ll be displaying them.” A faintly bitter smile.
There was going to be a near-withering response, chilly enough to shrivel leaves on the large and lustrous plants that cluttered the room, the sill of the windows. Something clipped that implied more than was made explicit, about blood, sweat and tears and relative values. Something about the artist - whose name had been lost in the shuffle of paperwork, in the fond enthusiasm of a client Olivia was quite convinced had gone quietly mad - made it quite clear that she was closer to the sweat and the blood than the tears, here in a too-obviously new suit and lacking in the mannerisms and comfort with wealth that a true artist expecting to be treated as one would acquire.
And then the record skipped. It was a blip, a moment too long for comfort or normalcy. Silence pressed in, got cosy in the gaps; Olivia notched one thumb over the other and pressed slightly as she waited for the artist to return to wherever it was she had obviously gone. The expression on her face altered, it shifted from a practiced, businesslike and peaceful comportment of lines that gave nothing away to concern bleeding through, splintering the calm. The artist blinked, came back from that glassy sleep. Olivia, in turn, tried to gather the fragments of her own understanding back together.
“I imagine not,” she said. Do you do that often? She didn’t ask. She didn’t even shape her tongue around the syllables. There was something strange, strangled in the words when spoken, not quite unruffled anymore.
Sunny was an extremely bright woman. She had been leading the life she had chosen for over a decade despite her youth, and she was not only alive but forging an unconventional career for herself. Even with all her screws coming loose, she noticed the shift in Olivia, something in her eyes, and it made her warier than the cold comments. She brought her heels firmly down onto the floor and leaned forward with her knees slightly spread, a gesture all angles and not suited to a suit at all. The blazer’s cut tails swung out on either side of her elbows, and her bright eyes were suddenly enhanced by an interior lining of tawny gold. The effect was feline.
In one movement she picked up the manila folder and held it out like a fencer with a rapier. “But it’s part of the deal. Painting is a legit copy and believe me, it’s not going to pass muster with a pro.” A little flick of the paper. “What?” she asked, unable to identify the newness in the air. It made her want the cigarettes she’d quit six months ago.
“Of course it’s not going to pass muster.” Olivia was too quick for professionalism, she’d turned her head toward the painting - looking at the artist with her bright-gold tones and her strong angularity, the sharp distinction of her cheekbones and the unconventionality of her - the artist - within the heavy weight of wealth of the room itself, made her fingers curl quietly with an old ache to paint herself. The scorn, a kernel of it deep below the velvet of a professional meeting, was all art and feeling, nothing to do with letters of note and certificates of authenticity and relative value sat deep in a vault beneath the bank. She’d re-aligned herself in her chair, Olivia gone sleek the way of people who wish to be perceived as undisturbed at all and it was with her hands neatly folded, her ankles tucked out of sight and the lines of her suit unrucked. The professionalism was like water, smooth, pouring over the moment of distinct difference that rang out like a wrong note and sweeping it away. “If it were - God forbid - examined by any of the auction-houses, professionals in the field or even,” her smile was cool, sweet as the tea in the glasses, “Someone who knew a little about the art, it would not pass muster at all.”
She took the manila folder with her fingertips, a small reach across the space between the two and flicked it open, her head bowed over the paperwork as the question slid in like a knife, “Do you have moments like that often?” Olivia lifted her head, looked back at Sunny with a gaze steady and discerning and somewhat too direct. There were times when the truth - even if it was embarrassing, even if it was illegal, even if it stripped dignity from the room, was all too necessary in Olivia’s line of work and the tone and the look both reflected a woman well used to asking questions nobody ought to ask. It was not polite. It was a world from polite.
Sunny gave Olivia a wary look, as if this observation of the unknown was the most disturbing thing about her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She didn’t even look down to watch the arrangement of the ankles and the pretty smoothed skirt. Sunny took in the whole of the woman instead, and though the smooth shell made her want to crack her like an egg to see what was soft on the inside, that was nothing new. She was pretty sure she’d had that quality before the Doctor, but he enhanced it, so it was hard to be sure. Sunny rocked back off her knees and pushed her fingers through her hair; they got stuck because it was still tied up, and she had to shake them free.
Rising, Sunny drifted over to the canvas and crossed her arms to view it. “You sound like someone who knows a little bit about art. You want to point out a flaw to me, baby?” She used that affectation like a needle, nudging and nudging.
Olivia was not one who could be easily needled or nudged, and if the affectation was intended to do anything at all, it barely skimmed the surface. She was used to being called a number of things, both pleasant and unpleasant and a diminutive that did not apply (she was not, she had never been anyone’s ‘baby’) only wrote itself somewhere about the mouth, alike to a smile of disguised amusement. She sat in the chair as if it were a throne and she watched the artist’s fractured, jerky movement with veiled interest. She did not look like she was used to the surroundings but she was not awed by them, or made small by them. It was like putting a tiger in a tea-room, infinitely ridiculous and uncontainable.
“I know a little bit about art,” and it came out dry as Sahara sand, because there were realms between someone who drank too much at dinner and spoke loudly about Michelangelo, and classes in cold classrooms, digging in to the library with a spread of books around her hips and overlarge tomes in her lap, of painting until her fingers numbed down to nothing. “I’m sure you’re very good. You are very good. But this is a copy. It’s a copy with a different hand and different techniques. The light is a copy rather than reality and light is what matters, in a painting. And you have my client believing he ought to pay five figures for something he could buy in a gallery gift-store.” She shaped the syllables with precision.
But it was good. Even from her seat, looking at the glow of the colors and the shapes, it was exceptional. And that - not the endearment that wasn’t, not the strut of the artist who had the cocky air of someone who already had that check in hand and banked and cashed - needled. She stood before she meant to, she took a step closer to the canvas. No doubt, all sorts of promises had been made, lavish praise heaped upon herself by the artist who wasn’t even an artist if all she did was copy. Oliva did not take her eyes off the painting, but she said, conversationally, “You clearly were not there, for a minute or two. Closer to two. One minute you were speaking and then you were not.” She tilted her head, looked more closely at the blend of color. “You should see a doctor.”
Sunny acknowledged that “baby” was a really terrible nickname for a woman like Olivia. She brandished it back and forth in her mind like a dull knife, and she considered how it felt before packing it away. She would try something else as it came along. Sunny could be deliberate about such things, when she felt like it. If she was angling to get a date, it probably would have been different, but nothing could be so horribly mis-timed as a date right now. Didn’t matter who it was with. Sunny turned eyes dark as flint to Olivia at the lovely turn of her phrase and then laughed, a snorting snicker of sound not at all concerned with femininity. And with that she waved the suggestion off like a waft of unwanted smoke.
Turning again to the painting, Sunny shifted her weight on her hips and leaned forward in long lines, letting her crossed arms hang over the curve of her silk-wrapped ribcage. “Very early, circa 1595. But he was developing already, taking the naturalistic realism and throwing it forward. So much fruit to be sitting so still, taking up the center, the whole eye. Bruises in the apple, grapes going soft, autumn in the leaves. Early examples of tenebrism here...” she drew a filed oval nail in the air to curve an invisible line inches from the paint, “bold, angry chiaroscuro.” Her pronunciation was nearly perfect. “All this egg-white cream space was a bitch.” She straightened back from the 18 inch square canvas and chewed on the edge of her thumb. “But when I said an expert could figure it out with an x-ray, that would be because my name is on the first layers of paint, not because there’s a drawing or a trace. The master didn’t sketch anything out, neither did I. You won’t find a better copy. Unless it hasn’t been discovered.”
Sunny winked at Olivia and spun back around for her seat. “I guess you need all my legal information to give me the money.”
Had she been considering it (and Olivia was not) ‘baby’ would not have suited the artist, even if she had been prone to vocal tics and endearments that were neither meant nor addressed to those particularly dear. ‘Baby’ did not sum up the woman before her, a woman who was clearly intelligent, blade-sharp and prepared to swindle a client of whom she was fond (if the fondness encompassed an understanding that the client was also foolish, then that was understood; he was a man and one who had been easily convinced all his life of anything). Olivia listened to the recitation, something that reminded her of the heavy, over-large art books she’d cradled on her lap in college, and now flicked through with a wine-glass in the drifts of a late evening, and her head tilted to one side, as if indicating how intently she was listening.
“Chiaroscuro,” she said, softly. It was delicate, as if the correction were made simply because it was something incorrect, as if giving knowledge of pronunciation rather than correction or reprimand. She looked at the painting and she saw all the technique and all the beauty of it, cut into pieces and slotted beneath the arch of the original painter’s intent as if it were a jigsaw assembled with palette and paint. “You’re very clever,” Olivia acknowledged, even as she watched the artist behave nothing like an accomplished artist at all, and her gaze lingered a little on the damp thumb, as if noting the details of it.
“But it is still a copy. It is not an original. And if I were to stand and look, the patina would not be the same. It could not be the same. The materials are not, the age is not and it is not yours - it is a copy. It’s a pity. It looks as though you have technique enough to be an artist. Perhaps you lack imagination?” Olivia spoke quietly, gently as if her words were a present, something wrapped in ribbons and not a knife-blade all her own.
“Do you have a contract?”
Sunny’s eyes flickered with the impact of the blow. She was not immune to such things, fully warm and intense heart that she had despite the thin black failings that ran through her personality like veins of rust in flawless metal. The hurt registered, quite clearly, and it came to her that this woman was being intentionally cruel with her comments, ruthless from some kind of vengeance against whatever Sunny represented to her. Sunny assumed it was money, but Sunny could be shallow that way, and when she hurt she had other things on her mind, vast things, old wounds that cracked open over and over.
She stood up. “The masters all took technique from others. The greatest had workshops and they used people like you and me to create their art. Rodin made molds and bronzes, copied things fifty and a hundred times over. I would like it if you were to say he lacked imagination.” She rubbed an eyebrow with her forefinger. The Doctor was thinking something in her mind, and it felt like clockwork made of blades. “Have a secretary call me. I don’t want to talk to you any more.”
Olivia was not cruel enough to see hurt and feel pleasure. Vindication, perhaps, a small sense that her client was not going to be cheated without the swindler going away flinching a little from the encounter. But the hurt was real enough, raw enough to register, to be visible and Olivia was first ashamed and then she was ashamed of being ashamed, and color, high and faint rose up on her cheekbones with a heat that made her keep her head high against the urge to duck. The reprimand felt like her knuckles being rapped, and she thought of the sweeping great lines of Rodin without being able to help it. Her lips went taut, and she let the manila folder go.
“There is no secretary,” she said quietly, as carefully as she would have done if they had been nothing but polite. “There is a banker’s draft.” The papers flickered, like silk catching the light as she laid them on the chair behind her and the check - signed in the office before she’d even walked into the artist’s room - was tucked neatly on top of the papers of ownership.
“My clients deserve the best that money can buy, whatever it is,” and it wasn’t an apology and it wasn’t a compliment and it wasn’t an insult, it was fact that sat squarely in the greyed area beyond the conversation, strange as it was, that they had had -- with someone, Olivia was surprised to note, she didn’t even know the name of.
“You should try your own artwork.” She picked up the soft, practical purse, and she glanced briefly -- just long enough to catch the light -- at the painting and Olivia felt twist and cramp that was not envy but almost and walked toward the door.
Sunny was nettled that she wasn’t going to be the one who got to leave first in a flurry of snowflake hurt and annoyance, but she needed that check for her first rent payment so she went to retrieve it, allowing practicality to take the place of pride the way she always did. Sunny brushed away the papers she’d brought for the folder, ignoring the ownership statements meant to be left for the client and focusing on the paperwork meant for her. She turned her back to Olivia and the door and raised the paper to the light, a practiced eye for more than paint, and finally, satisfied enough, she rolled everything together on her palm in the most casual way, ready for her legal name’s inscription. It was safe to leave, but she lingered because she wanted the angry accountant to be far away with her bladed comments before she had to brave stairs or elevator. Sunny rocked on her heels, watching the view instead of the painting and not interpreting the look at the canvas correctly. “It’s just like you to assume I haven’t,” Sunny said flippantly. She did like having the last word.