The Wives of Beverly Row 3: Lust Has a New Address by Abby Weeks Read Free Book Online Page B

depicted a scene from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus in a boat with the apostles calming the sea during a storm. It was a stunning picture. According to art historians the extra person in the boat was a self-portrait of the artist himself.
    She sighed.
    “You’re insane, Gabe,” she said. “How do you ever expect to get away with this?”
    “You let me worry about that.”
    “How can I let you worry about it? If you get caught, I get caught. I’m worried already just from being here.”
    She looked at the blank canvas. It was massive. Sixty-four inches high and over fifty inches wide. This was from the almost four-hundred-year-old batch that Gabe had somehow managed to get a hold of. The canvas alone was worth tens of thousands of dollars. It was a forger’s wet dream.
    “Will you do it?” Gabe said.
    Ariel had to admit, the challenge was tempting. Even working on a canvas like that, it was a thrill just thinking about it. She was terrified at the thought of putting paint on that canvas though.
    “I presume you have paint that will match tests too,” she said.
    “I’ve got paint.”
    She looked at him. She hadn’t painted anything like this in years. She’d been good, she knew she could match Rembrandt’s brush strokes if she wanted to, she just wasn’t sure she had the courage to go through with it.
    “Gabe,” she said.
    “Ariel.”
    She wanted to bring up something that they hadn’t ever spoken of before. She usually wouldn’t have spoken of this to him, she was very private when it came to her art, but they’d just made love the night before and she was feeling close to him, connected in a way that she never really had when they were married. Now that they were divorced, now that he was cheating on another woman, and was cheating with her, she finally felt as if she was on an equal footing with him.
    “I never told you the full reason I dropped out of art school.”
    “You got pregnant. You married me. We opened the gallery. You did what you had to do. Life took over.”
    She looked out the enormous windows at the waves of the ocean.
    “But there was more to it than that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It wasn’t just because of Becky that I dropped out of college. It wasn’t just because of our marriage.”
    “What was it then?”
    “I dropped out because I felt like a fraud.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never really spoken about this to anyone.”
    “You were the real deal, Ariel. I remember the fuss they made over you at that school when they first saw your work.”
    “I was talented.”
    “Yes you were.”
    “But I felt like I was just going through the motions. Like I was just echoing the art I’d seen from others. I didn’t feel like I had my own voice.”
    Gabe was quiet. For once it seemed he didn’t know what to say.
    “I felt like I was too young, like I didn’t know enough about the world, or about life, to offer anything new or unique. I felt that I hadn’t seen enough of life to start mirroring it with my art.”
    “You were very young,” Gabe said, “but you were wise too. You knew as much about life as anyone else. You had as much right as anyone else to paint it.”
    “I know,” Ariel said. “I know that now. And I’ve seen so much more of life now, too.”
    “Enough to have a voice of your own.”
    “I think so,” she said. “I think if I wanted, I could create something original now, offer a perspective that hasn’t been seen before.”
    “So you’re saying you won’t do the forgery?” Gabe said.
    Ariel didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what she was saying. She hadn’t painted in years, at least nothing more than sketches and concept pieces that kept her skills honed. She hadn’t even seriously considered painting either. She’d long thought that the only place open to her in the art world was as a curator, a gallery buyer, a judge of the work of others.
    She looked at Gabe. He was