Paul Christopher: Michelangelo_s Notebook

Her back was smooth, sweeping down from the long neck that was hidden beneath the flowing hair. At the base of her spine there was a single, pale red dime-sized birthmark in the shape of a horn, resting just above the cleft of the small, muscular buttocks. Her legs were long, the calves strong, her well-shaped ankles turning down into a pair of small, high-arched and delicate feet.

The face framed by the cascading copper hair was almost as perfect as the body. The forehead was broad and clear, the cheekbones high, the mouth full without any artificial puffiness, the chin curving a little widely to give a trace of strength to the overall sense of innocence that seemed to radiate from her. Her nose was a little too long and narrow for true classical beauty, topped by a sprinkling of a dozen freckles across the bridge. The eyes were stunning: large and almost frighteningly intelligent, a deep jade green.

“All right, time’s up, ladies and gentlemen.” Dennis, the life drawing instructor at the New York Studio School, clapped his hands sharply and smiled up at the slightly raised posing dais. “Thanks, Finn, that’s it for today.” He smiled at her pleasantly and she smiled back. The dozen others in the studio put down an assortment of drawing instruments on the ledges of their easels and the room began to fill with chatter.

The young woman bent down to retrieve the old black-and-white flowered kimono she always brought to her sessions. She slipped it on, knotted the belt around her narrow waist then stepped down off the little platform and ducked behind the high Chinese screen standing at the far side of the room. Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan, called Finn by her friends. She was twenty-four years old. She’d lived most of her life in Columbus, Ohio, but she’d been going to school and working in New York for the past year and a half, and she was loving every minute of it.

Finn started taking her clothes off the folding chair behind the screen and changed quickly, tossing the kimono into her backpack. A few minutes later, dressed in her worn Levi’s, her favorite sneakers and a neon yellow T-shirt to warn the drivers as she headed through Midtown, she waved a general good-bye to the life drawing class, who waved a general good-bye back. She picked up a check from Dennis on her way out, and then she was in the bright noon sun, unchaining the old fat-tired Schwinn Lightweight delivery bike from its lamppost.

She dumped her backpack into the big tube steel basket with its Chiquita banana box insert, then pushed the chain and the lock into one of the side pockets of the pack. She gathered her hair into a frizzy ponytail, captured it with a black nylon scrunchie, then pulled a crushed, no-name green baseball cap out of the pack and slipped it onto her head, pulling the ponytail through the opening at the back. She stepped over the bike frame, grabbed the handlebars and pulled out onto Eighth Street. She rode two blocks, then turned onto Sixth Avenue, heading north.

The Parker-Hale Museum of Art was located on Fifth Avenue between Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth Streets, facing the Central Park Zoo. Originally designed as a mansion for Jonas Parker-who made his money in Old Mother’s Liver Tablets and died of an unidentified respiratory problem before he could take up residence-it was converted into a museum by his business partner, William Whitehead Hale. After seeing to the livers of the nation, both men had spent a great time in Europe indulging their passion for art. The result was the Parker-Hale, heavily endowed so that both men would be remembered for their art collection rather than as the inventors of Old Mother’s. The paintings were an eclectic mix from Braque and Constable to Goya and Monet.

Run as a trust, it had a board that was gold-plated, from the mayor and the police commissioner through to the secretary to the cardinal of New York. It wasn’t the largest museum in New York but it was definitely one of the most prestigious. For Finn to get a job interning in their prints and drawings department was an unquestionable coup. It was the kind of thing that got you a slightly better curatorial job at a museum than the next person in line with their master’s in art history. It was also a help in overcoming whatever stigma there was in having your first degree from someplace like Ohio State.

Not that she’d had any choice; her mom was on the Ohio State archaeology faculty so she had attended free of charge. On the other hand she wasn’t living in New York for free and she had to do anything and everything she could to supplement her meager college fund and her scholarship, which was why she worked as an artists’ model, did hand and foot modeling for catalogs whenever the agency called, taught English as a second language to an assortment of new immigrants and even babysat faculty kids, house-sat, plant- and pet-sat to boot. Sometimes it seemed as though the hectic pace of her life was never going to settle down into anything like normalcy.

Half an hour after leaving the life drawing class she pulled up in front of the Parker-Hale, chained her bike to another lamppost and ran up the steps to the immense doorway capped by a classical relief of a modestly draped reclining nude. Just before she pulled open the brass-bound door, Finn winked up at the relief, one nude model to another. She pulled off her hat, slipped off the scrunchie and shook her hair free, stuffing hat and scrunchie into her pack. She gave a smile to old Willie the gray-haired security guard, then went running up the wide, pink marble staircase, pausing on the landing to briefly stare at the Renoir there, Bathers in the Forest.

She drank in the rich graceful lines and the cool blue-greens of the forest scene that gave the painting its extraordinary, almost secretive atmosphere and wondered, not for the first time, if this had been one of Renoir’s recurring fantasies or dreams: to accidentally come upon a languorous, beautiful group of women in some out-of-the-way place. It was the kind of thing you could write an entire thesis about, but no matter what she thought about it, it was simply a beautiful painting.

Finn gave the painting a full five minutes, then turned and jogged up the second flight. She went through the small Braque gallery, then went down a short corridor to an unmarked door and went inside. As in most galleries and museums, the paintings or artifacts were shown within an inset core of artificial rooms while the work of the museum actually took place behind those walls. The “hidden” area she had just entered contained the Parker-Hale’s prints and drawings department. P amp;D was really a single long room running along the north side of the building, the cramped curators’ offices getting the windows, the outer collections areas lit artificially with full-spectrum overheads.

The collections were held in a seemingly endless number of acid-free paper storage drawers ranged along the inner wall. In between the shoulder-high storage cabinets were niches fitted with a desk, chair and a large flat light table for examining individual items. The light tables were made of a sheet of opaque white glass lit from beneath and held in strong wooden frames. Each table was fitted with a photographer’s copy stand for taking inventory slides of each print or drawing, and every second niche contained a computer terminal with the entire inventory of the collection entered on its database, complete with a photographic image, documents relating to the acquisition of the object and a record of the works’ origins or provenance.

Finn’s job for the entire summer consisted of checking that the inventory number, slide number and provenance number all matched. Grunt work certainly, but the kind of thing a twenty-four-year-old wet-behind-the-ears junior curator would have to get used to. What was it her mother was always saying? “You’re a scientist dear, even if the science is art, and everything is grist to your mill.”