Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction Read Free Page A

done them herself. Still, she was his sitter and he was being well paid. They would have to get along for several days. As for his misgivings, he kept his mouth shut. But whoever had painted these two was alarmingly gifted in some incomprehensible way.
    He painted into the afternoon, when they stopped for dinner. Sanborn cleaned up and walked out into the sunshine. He squinted into the streets, trying to get his bearings. Above the roofs, ship masts swayed and flashed and flickered like silver in the golden light of early afternoon. Would it be possible to paint just what he saw, he wondered, as his eyes began to adjust. He did not allow his mind to think about how it might be done. He was hungry. Moreover, people would not pay for paintings of town or harbor before they would pay for portraits. He had better heed his own true interests; he had better garner more portrait commissions soon if he wished to survive here. He wandered down to the waterfront where he found a huckster selling quick meals of sausage and bread out of his cookshop.
    When he returned to the manse, he tinkered with the portrait for an hour more and then quit out of fatigue. His long journey and his careful painting had left him exhausted still. Yet after a few hours of sleep that night he awoke fretful. He kept seeing the paintings behind his closed eyes. As he dozed he dreamed of them. At times he grew angry for her apparent lying to him. A certain trust must be established between the painter and the sitter. If she was a sweet little flower, might there be some bitterness to be discovered behind the floriferousness as well?

Chapter 2
    R EBECCA, IN A NEW WHITE DRESS, sat for Sanborn the following morning. He had prepared his canvas and carefully arranged his smudgepan, pencils, and maulstick. On his palette were vermilion, burnt ocher, Indian red, pink, umber, black, and, finally, a stiff lake and, closest to his thumb, white.
    He tried to make pleasing conversation with her. The painting went very well, he thought, during the first hour or so. Despite his lack of sufficient sleep, he found he had energy and attention. They began to relax in one another’s company. Still, somewhere during the second hour the constraints of posture and labor began to wear on them and his mind turned to what he suspected were her betrayals. In the third hour both of them were feeling impatient. He decided to give up for the day.
    She looked at the painting, as they had agreed she might. She said, “Oh, yes. Now I see,” but made no other comment upon her face and form as it more clearly emerged from the canvas.
    â€œBy next sitting this should be quite recognizable,” he said. “I’ve little more than dead colored the face.”
    â€œOh, yes,” she repeated. But she kept her promise to make no comment or judgment. She seemed to wait for him to speak.
    â€œMay I see more of yours?” he said as he cleaned up.
    â€œPerhaps tomorrow,” she said. “I have sundry responsibilities this afternoon.”
    He found her way of speaking odd, too—not like a child’s speech, even a well-bred child. Maybe it was all that reading she spoke of. What he really wished to see was how she painted, or, more accurately, whether she herself actually painted such things. He would devise some ploy.
    T HE NEXT DAY, he finally finished the portrait. Perhaps it was not his very best portrait to date, but certainly respectable and rather accomplished. Even his own mentors—Highmore, Hudson, Kent, and other masters of the Academy of St. Martin’s Lane—might have to agree. The Brownes would not be disappointed, surely. He might well garner other commissions hereabouts. He no longer felt tired or anxious.
    â€œWhat do you think, Rebecca?” He had to ask, finally.
    â€œWhat do I think, sir?”
    â€œYes, how does it seem to you, now it’s finished?”
    â€œI promised not to comment, Mr. Sanborn.”
    He laughed.