Cheyney Fox Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nothing. A forlorn kind of emptiness, accentuated by the hissing sound from a radiator valve somewhere in the gallery.
    She draped her jacket over an empty packing case, placed her handbag on the carpeted bottom stair. She stepped out of her soggy shoes and damp stockings and slipped very carefully out of her wet skirt. Not dripping on that newly polished oak floor seemed essential.
    She walked barefoot across the gallery to stand in the main exhibition hall. Cheyney felt herself sliding toward despair, lonely to the very core of her being, and she couldn’t understand why. Because her electricians had not waited for her? Her staff had left the place unattended? Her supreme effort to get to the gallery on time had been in vain? Max and Morris had gone, without finishing the job as promised? Hardly reasons to feelherself spiraling down, down, down, as if pulled by some dark and dangerous vortex. Or was it because Christopher was not there to support her, love her? She steadied herself in the momentary void by grabbing for a rationalization.
    “Goddammit!” she said aloud, unable to hold back her frustration. “This is definitely not my day.”
    The door from the entrance hall swung open, and the gallery lit up. “When Max and Morris Abrams make a promise, Max and Morris Abrams keep a promise. You were already crossing us off, no?
A mistake
. Oy, a drowned rat she looks like!” said Max.
    Morris gave his brother a poke in the ribs. Max pressed his lips tight together, screwed up his face, and quickly added, “Mmmm, well, maybe not a rat. That’s just a phrase to be going on with, you understand. No offense meant. You shouldn’t take it personal. Let’s just say, it’s
some
cold you’re gonna catch.”
    Cheyney, as if riding the golden disc of a pendulum, swung from despair to delight. For an instant the white of the gallery walls stung her eyes. Then it receded in deference to the paintings. She caught her breath and clapped her hands together. Everything but the gallery and the paintings ceased to exist for Cheyney.
    It was always that way when she looked at paintings, sculpture, or architecture. At any art form that had vestiges of greatness in it. And it had always been that way for her. Often she was asked what were the first works of art she could remember — those primal encounters? Several times she had told, and then she stopped telling. Art people sought a rather more erudite and sophisticated answer than the green-and-white Rinso box that was on permanent exhibition on the draining board of her mother’s kitchen, mealtimes included. To Cheyney at the age of three, it had been as impressive as the Mona Lisa had been, when, at twenty-three, she had seen it in the Louvre. When other children had been running around being cutely precocious and reciting, in baby whines: cat, C-A-T, dog, D-O-G, little Cheyney Fox was saying and spelling Rinso, R-I-N-S-O. Her very first word.
    This object of her earliest appreciation just never satisfied her art-world friends. They would have found it more acceptable had she dredged up a memory of a Matisse, a Braque, a Botticelli,
The Birth Of Venus
, say? Surely there had been a toddler’s assignation with a Duchamp, a Kandinsky? Or was it a nice, straightforward Picasso — any title or period — that had got to her first? Rinso was just no dice.
    A big smile on Cheyney’s face. “Max, Morris, the lighting is great! Just brilliant! Exactly the way I wanted the recessed spotlights fitted, and the surface-mounted fixtures are not at all offensive as I feared. They wash the walls with just the right subtlety of light. Oh, God, it works! Does it ever work!” She clapped her hands together once more and walked around the gallery viewing the exhibition as a whole. It almost sang to her. Every painting hung in perfect harmony with the others.
    “Max, Morris,” she said as she went up to them and hugged them both at the same time. “Thanks, thanks for everything.”
    The two