The Art of War

I am not a proud man. I sell ceramic owls and midcentury ashtrays on eBay from my apartment. I vacuum up packing peanuts every night and wake up to more of them, like they're breeding. I have an art history minor I've never once used for its intended purpose. I also have an eviction notice taped to my door that says I have until the end of the month, which is eight days from now, and a voicemail from my landlord that I've listened to once and will never listen to again.

But when I walked into the Willoughby estate sale and saw that painting leaning against the foyer wall, something primal took over. Something stupid. Something that felt a lot like last-chance desperation dressed up as hope.

It was a 1970s black velvet painting of a sad clown playing chess with the Devil. The clown had one tear on his cheek the size of a quarter. The Devil had a mustache. The chess pieces were painted so poorly they could have been salt and pepper shakers. It was, without exaggeration, the ugliest thing I had ever seen in my life.

I had to have it.

See, there was a rumor in certain eBay forums (yes, those exist, no, I will not elaborate) that a reclusive pop-art painter named Gerald Fisk had done a series of unsigned velvet works in the seventies before his stuff started selling for six figures. The brushwork on this clown's tear. The specific shade of crimson on the Devil's tie. I was looking at a potential $200,000 painting leaning against a wall between a coatrack and a dead fern. I was looking at eight more months of rent. Maybe a year. Maybe enough breathing room to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life.

I lunged.

My left hand closed around the frame at the exact moment another hand closed around the right side. I looked up. She had dark bangs cut straight across her forehead, a canvas tote bag with the logo of a auction house I recognized, and the expression of someone who would bite me if necessary.

"I saw it first," I said.

"Your hand says otherwise," she said.

We stood there in the foyer, two grown adults holding a velvet clown between them, while a woman carrying a box of doilies squeezed past us and muttered something about parking.

Neither of us let go.

The estate sale manager was a woman named Brenda who wore a fanny pack and a lanyard with seven keys on it and radiated the energy of someone who had seen every possible human behavior and found all of it disappointing. She appeared between us, clipboard against her chest.

"You two. Buy it or move it. You're blocking the credenza." She checked her watch, the kind with both hands and numbers, like she didn't trust digital. "Also, estate closes in thirty minutes. Everything unsold goes to the auction house tomorrow morning, and they take a forty percent cut." She looked at us like this information was supposed to mean something, which it absolutely did. "So decide fast or decide later, but either way, move."

We looked at the credenza. We looked at each other. We looked at the clown. The clown looked at both of us with his one visible eye, the other lost in a shadow that I think was meant to be artistic but came across as a birth defect.

"I'll buy it," I said.

"I'll buy it," she said.

"One of you let go," Brenda said. "I'm not a marriage counselor." She walked away to yell at a man who was trying to unscrew a doorknob.

The woman, whose tote bag read "Hargrove Auctions" in faded gold lettering, narrowed her eyes at me. "You know what this is."

"I know exactly what this is."

"Then you know I'm not letting go."

"Then we have a problem."

What happened next was not discussed or negotiated. It was understood. We simply began to walk. Together. The painting held between us, frame out, the sad clown facing the ceiling, as we shuffled sideways down the first-floor hallway of a dead stranger's Victorian house.

I want to be clear about the physics here. The painting was roughly three feet by two feet. The hallway was roughly four feet wide. We moved through it the way you'd move a couch through a doorway, except the couch hated you and so did your moving partner.

"You know the brushwork suggests his Blue Period," she said, casual, not looking at me. Looking at a shelf of porcelain birds.

Now. There is no Gerald Fisk Blue Period. I made up Gerald Fisk's relevance to this painting in my own head about four minutes ago based on a forum post by a user named VelvetDaddy88. But I couldn't let her know that.

"Obviously," I said. "The cerulean undertones in the Devil's lapels are a dead giveaway."

"Cerulean," she repeated. She almost smiled. "You're good."

"I have a minor in art history."

"I have a master's in fine art appraisal."

This was a problem. A potentially real one. But the way she said it, too fast, too flat, told me she was running the same con I was. We were two liars in a hallway, holding a clown, and we both knew it.

"I'm Ben," I said. Because if we were going to do this, we might as well have names.

"Chloe," she said. "And I'm not letting go."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

We turned the corner into the dining room. The air in there was thick with dust and old wood polish and something floral that had stopped being pleasant a long time ago. Crystal glasses lined a hutch. A rolled-up Persian rug sat against the baseboard. And on three separate pedestals along the far wall stood three vases, each about two feet tall, each painted with the kind of elaborate scene that either meant "Ming dynasty" or "Pier 1 Imports, 1997."

I did not yet know those vases were about to ruin and improve my life simultaneously.

"The texture is wrong for Fisk," Chloe said, running her free thumb across the velvet surface while we crab-walked past the hutch. "Too dense. His later velvets had a nap you could lose a nickel in."

"That's his early nap," I said. "Pre-1974. Before he switched suppliers."

"There was no supplier switch."

"There was absolutely a supplier switch. It's documented."

"Where?"

"In the literature."

"What literature?"

"The Fisk literature, Chloe."

None of this literature existed. We both knew none of this literature existed. But the commitment to the bit was extraordinary on both sides, and I respected it in a way that made me uncomfortable.

We had stopped moving. We stood in the center of the dining room, the painting between us, the dust catching the light from a window with half-drawn curtains. Chloe's bangs had shifted slightly to the left. She had a smudge of something on her jaw, possibly from the frame, possibly from whatever she'd been doing before she arrived to destroy my morning. Her eyes were brown and locked on mine and absolutely not giving an inch.

"You don't know the first thing about velvet texture," I said.

This was the wrong thing to say. I knew it the second it left my mouth, not because it was rude, but because Chloe took a full step toward me to respond, and her heel caught the rolled-up Persian rug.

She pitched forward. I pivoted to catch her weight, which shifted the painting, which swung the frame's corner directly into the nearest pedestal. The pedestal wobbled. The vase on top of it wobbled. Then the pedestal tipped into the second pedestal, which tipped into the third, and suddenly all three vases were airborne in a slow, horrible sequence.

I don't remember deciding to let go of the painting. My right hand simply released the frame and shot out and caught the first vase by its neck. Chloe's left hand did the same with the second, her body twisting past mine, her shoulder against my chest. The third vase rolled off its pedestal and dropped straight down between us and we both dove for it, our free hands meeting underneath it, fingers overlapping, catching it together about three inches from the hardwood floor.

We froze. Chloe's face was directly below mine. I was holding one vase overhead. She was holding another against her hip. Our joined hands cradled the third between us. We were breathing hard. Dust floated around us in the window light. Somewhere in another room, Brenda was counting cash and had no idea.

Behind us, the painting hit the floor with a flat, definitive crack.

The sound of old canvas splitting open is not dramatic. It's just a dry rip, like tearing a paper bag. But it carried real weight in that room.

The clown was in two pieces. Decapitated right down the middle.

We set the vases down. All three. Gently, the way you'd set down a baby, or a live grenade, or anything else that would cause a stranger named Brenda to end your life. Then we knelt beside the clown.

The Devil's half had landed face-up. He still had his mustache. He looked smug about the whole thing. The clown's half had landed face-down, and the dry-rotted canvas had split clean away from the wooden backing of the frame. And there, stapled to the inside of the backing with two ancient, rusted staples, was a yellowed envelope.

Chloe saw it first. She pulled it free and turned it over. No name on the front. The flap was unsealed, just tucked in, the glue long gone. She looked at me. I nodded. She opened it.

The letter inside was written in blue ink on paper so thin I could almost see through it. The handwriting was tight, precise, the kind of penmanship they used to teach in schools when schools still taught penmanship. It was dated June 14, 1946.

Chloe read it out loud.

"To my dearest Martha. I bought this hideous thing because I know you hate it. You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met, and arguing with you is the only time I feel truly alive. Marry me, you magnificent headache."

The dining room was very quiet. Dust settled on the dead clown between us. From somewhere deep in the house, I could hear Brenda telling someone that the grandfather clock was not negotiable.

Chloe read it again, silently this time. Then she set the letter on her knee and looked at the painting. At the clown. At the Devil. At me.

"So it's not a Fisk," she said.

"It was never a Fisk."

"I know."

"I know you know."

"I know you know I know."

We sat there on the floor of a dead man's dining room, surrounded by vases that were almost certainly from Pier 1, next to a bisected velvet clown, holding a love letter that had outlived the people who wrote and received it. Chloe's bangs were fully sideways now. There was dust on both of her knees. I probably looked worse.

"He bought her something ugly on purpose," Chloe said. "Just to fight about it."

"Sounds unhinged," I said.

"Sounds familiar," she said.

She folded the letter carefully and put it back in the envelope. Then she picked up the clown's head, and I picked up the Devil's half, and we stood up together.

"There's a coffee place two blocks east," I said. "We could argue about whether this letter is worth anything."

"It's not worth anything."

"See, that's where you're wrong, and I'd love twenty minutes to explain why."

She looked at me. I looked at her. The clown looked at nothing, on account of being ripped in half.

"You're buying," she said.

"Obviously."

We carried the two halves of the painting out through the foyer, past Brenda, past the credenza, and into the street. We did not let go.