Free The Girl in the Face of the Clock by Charles Mathes Page B

come.
    â€œCome on,” said Perry, laughing. “We better get that magazine and scram out of here before you have to give Olinda a karate chop or something. I think it’s in my study.”
    He was already in motion. Jane followed her employer though the long room. At the far end, he opened a pair of double doors. Two big, beautiful Irish setters excitedly rushed up to meet them as they entered a smaller room (this one only four times the size of Jane’s entire apartment). Perry squatted down, gave the dogs hugs, and happily let them lick him all over.
    There were clocks here, too, though not as many as outside. Mostly they sat on end tables and on the gigantic Louis XV rococo and gilt bronze desk that dominated the room. On three walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leatherbound books. The ceiling was elaborately detailed plasterwork, and the wood of the bookcases matched the paneling on the single exposed wall behind the desk.
    It was the painting on this wall that took Jane’s breath away. It was about six feet high and perhaps seven feet across. The subject was a naked woman sitting on a staircase. She stared out defiantly at the viewer, her bare chest arched forward. In between her carelessly parted legs was a garishly glazed ceramic clock without hands that Jane recognized right away.
    It was Grandmother Sylvie’s clock. It was just as hideous as Jane remembered: blue columns, red base, yellow central dial. No wonder she had decided to keep it in the basement. And she knew very well the worn wooden stairs with too-high treads on which the nude sat, too. They were the stairs from Aaron Sailor’s loft on Greene Street, the stairs he had fallen down eight years ago.
    â€œMy father painted this,” said Jane in a subdued voice.
    â€œIsn’t it great?” demanded Perry. “A clock with no hands. It says something about the fleeting nature of existence, don’t you think?”
    â€œI suppose so,” said Jane, somehow doubting that philosophy was why this painting had appealed to Perry Mannerback. Was he one of those guys who bought Playboy for the stories? Perry might be a little boy, but he was a little boy who had been through three wives, Jane reminded herself. She was a little disappointed with him for wanting such a painting. And perhaps with her father for having painted it. There was something blatantly sexual about this nude that Jane had never seen before in Aaron Sailor’s work. It was almost a portrait of lust.
    The two dogs came over to sniff Jane’s scent and lick her hands as Perry rummaged through his desk for the magazine he was looking for.
    â€œI’ve never seen this painting before,” Jane said after a moment, unable to take her eyes off the nude.
    â€œI was just walking down the street and saw a picture of it in the window of this gallery on Madison Avenue,” said Perry, closing the final drawer of the desk and turning his attention to a basket of papers underneath a gilded French library table. “I went right upstairs and bought it. That’s when I met your father. He was there with the dealer lady, and we discussed art and everything. And the fleeting nature of existence.”
    â€œI wonder who the model is. She’s very beautiful.”
    â€œI don’t know her,” said Perry, suddenly shooting bolt upright. “I have no idea who she is. No idea whatsoever.”
    â€œI didn’t say …”
    â€œIt’s just a painting of a woman,” Perry declared indignantly. “It was the clock I was interested in. Only the clock. I never met her. I have no idea who she is, none at all.”
    His denial was so overstated that Jane again wanted to laugh at what a dreadful liar he was. Only this wasn’t funny.
    â€œThose are the stairs of my father’s loft that she’s sitting on,” Jane pressed. “The stairs he fell down.”
    â€œOh really?” said Perry