nthposition online magazine

Rembrandt paints again

by David Finkle

[ fiction - february 06 ]

When Cleve Morris called to ask how soon I could drop over to scope out his new Rembrandt, I chuckled. I’m not sure why, since the remark struck me as a joke that hadn’t quite landed squarely.

“You’ve bought a new painting?” I said.

“Not bought,” Cleve said. “I guess you could call it a gift.”

“Who’s the artist? Another Fischl?” Some years before, Cleve had purchased an early Eric Fischl on a tip from a gallery owner pal, and I knew it had appreciated considerably. Maybe he’d decided he was going to concentrate on collecting Fischl. You know who Fischl is, of course: the Edgar Degas-influenced realist with a big Hamptons following. Considering some of Cleve’s, um, affectations, accumulating Fischls would make sense.

“I told you,” Cleve said. “Rembrandt Van Rijn. The Rembrandt you’ve heard so much about.”

I waited to hear more. I figured an explanation was coming for what I took to be some form of prank. Although when I thought about it for another second or two, I realized I never knew Cleve to be a prankster. Quite the opposite. The Cleve I knew and had known since childhood abhorred pranks and pranksters. He’d once had a severe falling out with Dave Radin over rattling cans outside Molly Eckstein’s windows to tick off her sour mother. “What’s the point?” Cleve asked Dave. “No point,” Dave said in his typical no-beating-around-the-bush manner. “Does everything have to have a point. Fun. That’s the point.” “Where’s the fun in rattling cans outside a nasty woman’s windows?” Cleve demanded. And it went on like that until Dave threw Cleve out of his rusty Ford and they didn’t speak for a few months.

Until they did speak. They were 17 going on immature then, but Cleve has never changed in that aspect. He’s still the same. I don’t know about Dave. I haven’t seen him or heard from him - or about him - in more than fifteen years. But I’ll bet he hasn’t changed either - probably somewhere playing dirty tricks on his golf buddies, loosening the wires on their carts or bribing their caddies (if they have caddies) to substitute exploding golf balls for the real thing.

Finally Cleve resumed. “I don’t expect you to believe me,” he said, “but it’s a Rembrandt, all right. You know I wouldn’t kid you. I’m not a kidder.”

As I said, I knew he wasn’t, but nevertheless something was fishy. “Someone gave you a Rembrandt,” I said. “Just like that. I know you have a few rich relatives, but I didn’t know any of them owned a Rembrandt.”

“Not a relative - no rich aunts,” Cleve said. “Rembrandt himself!” Cleve affixed an exclamation point at the end of “Rembrandt himself!” It was particularly noticeable to me, because he never was much of one for aural exclamation points. I don’t want to say that ever since childhood - and perhaps the cradle - Cleve had been a glum one, but despite (or because of) his intelligence (a reputed 173 IQ), he would never have been described by anyone acquainted with him as effusive. Certainly Dave Radin wouldn’t have summed him up that way.

Cleve - short and dark and with eyes so deep-set they look like subway-tunnel entrances - gave the impression of someone who’d had a major disappointment at an early age. (Could it be from glimpsing this aging world for the first time as he left the womb?) From then on, it was as if he’d determined never to put too much faith in the likelihood of only good things happening. He had the air of a man always listening for the other size 18 shoe to drop - and expecting to be directly under it when it did.

“I don’t count on you to believe me,” he continued. “Who would? I barely believe it myself, but if you come over, I’ll explain everything.” He stopped, waiting for me to say something. Which I didn’t. He appended, “As well as I can explain it. How soon will you get here?”

“Look, Cleve,” I said, “are you all right? If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t sound like yourself.”

“I suppose I don’t,” Cleve said, with an uncharacteristic note of cheer in his voice, “but what I’m telling you is the God’s honest truth. I’ve got a brand-new Rembrandt done by the man himself.”

“I’m coming right over,” I said, making a snap decision. I figured I’d better. I’d known Cleve for so long. We’d never been best friends, but our parents were chummy. I felt I owed them and him consideration, especially if Cleve were in some kind of emotional upheaval - hallucinating, losing a tenuous grasp on reality, whatever.

Cleve lives well. To begin with, the Morrises have money, and Cleve’s mother, Irene Benjamin Morris, has taste that she damn well made sure Cleve assimilated. And don’t you know, he did - and then raised Irene Benjamin Morris one. He developed the strain of good taste that doesn’t hit you over the head with its good taste - clean design, simple woods, plain fabrics, unobtrusive lighting, nothing showy, nothing screaming, “My dreckorator is better than your dreckorator.” Actually, I’d been led to believe Cleve selected everything himself after finessing his mother’s suggestions, and I had no reason not to believe it.

There were show pieces on view at his place, however, though not in excess. They were the paintings and the photographs. There was the early Fischl, of course, and there were a few other contemporary artists, but nothing, I’d been advised, that had ever carried an exorbitant price tag - other early works from Brice Marden and Elizabeth Murray, a few choice drawings (a Christo sketch for the Pont Neuf project). There was a Robert Frank photograph and something of extreme quality by Bruce Cratsley. Everything was tasty and classy and all secured out of Cleve’s pocket - or I should say, on the salary he drew as head of his own public relations firm, The Cleve Morris Agency, which specialized in theater and publishing.

I would never have predicted that the Cleve with whom I grew up would become a successful flack. I would have envisioned a more contemplative life for him. (Then again, I have often been wrong about foreseeing where people would end up, or if not end up, pass through on the way to the inevitable end I would or wouldn’t know about.) But it turns out that Cleve’s ruminative air is just what attracts clients to him. They’re the sort of artists - serious artists, not to say soi-disant (in their terminology) artists - who claim to disdain publicity but concede it’s a necessary evil. If they must endure it, they choose to do so with someone like Cleve, who at least gives the impression of gravity and who - getting down to the nuts and bolts of his appeal - lays off any use of the press-release exclamation point (see above).

I’ve occasionally witnessed Cleve with this author or that director or publisher or actor whose moues or eye rolls expose them when they think Cleve has momentarily deflected his attention. It’s their way of indicating they hate the game but know they have to play it and oh, well, that’s life. The fact is, Cleve is on to them but doesn’t care. Rather, he expects the behavior; he’s come to think of it as confirmation of his world view. Or weltanschauung, as a few of his fancier clients might put it. It’s possible to say that Cleve was skeptical enough about the nature of business to do very well at it and consequently to live well from it.

That’s on top of the family swag.

When Cleve had buzzed me in and I arrived at his eleventh-floor apartment overlooking Central Park, the tan door was open and he was waiting in it. I haven’t said he’s about five feet six or seven and built like the bantamweight wrestler he never was. He looked naturally athletic, but he’d never been much of an athlete - unless you count the debate team as a form of varsity wrestling.

Cleve was leaning against the doorframe wearing various shades of brown and tan (to match his furnishings, I imagine) and looking mighty pleased with his well-put-together self. The expression mixed expectation with the kind of pleasure at being who he is that makes you want to say something caustic just to clear the air. Anyway, it made me consider saying something sharpish, but I elected to suppress the impulse for the moment.

Not that I had the opportunity to slip in a mal mot, because I hadn’t even reached the door when Cleve said, “When you come inside, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. Let me lead you, and I’ll tell you when to open them.”

“Lord, love a duck, do I have to?” I said, as I approached him. I want to make it clear right off that I’m not the type of person who ordinarily says things like “Lord, love a duck.” But the occasion seemed to call for something along those lines.

Cleve didn’t acknowledge the comment but merely said that yes, it was imperative I close my eyes. I obliged, because I’m that kind of accommodating friend. As I did, I felt his left hand on my left upper arm and his right hand on my right shoulder, and since I knew the lay-out of his apartment, I knew I was being led through the generous entrance hall to his living-room. When we stopped walking and he turned me at a sixty-degree angle, I knew I was facing the sofa over which for some time the Fischl had been holding pride of place. I reckoned I was standing at about a ten-foot remove from it.

“You can open them now,” Cleve said, his low and resonant voice as fraught with mischief as I’d ever known it.

I did as bid, and here’s what I saw. There on the wall where the Fischl had been was a portrait of Cleve. I don’t mean just any portrait. I mean a magnificent specimen. Cleve, in a brown single-breasted suit, olive green shirt and green-and-brown patterned tie, sat against a black backdrop looking simultaneously intelligent, affluent and ineffably sad. The likeness was remarkable. Not because it was flattering, which in a way it was, but because it depicted him as someone wise enough to allow the painter - whoever it was - to paint what he (she?) saw (and saw into) and not what he thought would please the sitter.

“Not half bad,” I said. “It definitely looks as if it was painted by someone for whom Rembrandt is a big influence.” I was talking about the technique, the characteristic touches. More than that, I was talking about every nuance that makes a Rembrandt a Rembrandt. In the painting Cleve’s eyes were Rembrandt eyes. Not the eyes rendered by a Rembrandt follower - Gerard Dou or Frans Hals, say - who’d been evolving a separate but indebted style. Everything caught the Dutch master’s manner. Everything: the pose with the torso turned slightly away from the painter but the head facing directly out, the flesh tones, the bold brush strokes obvious even from ten feet away, the black backdrop palpable yet insubstantial, the impeccable understanding of humanity and the absolute disinclination to flinch from it, the sense that the emotion in the work had been intuited by an injured heart.

I shut up for at least three minutes while I studied it, and Cleve - looking from me to the painting and back to me again and then back to the painting - was more than ready to participate in the silence. I broke my staring only to look quickly around for the Fischl and located it on the wall behind me. Near it was a large, square glass vase holding an array of yellow and white tulips. After I spent a minute or two more taking the portrait of Cleve in and - I have to admit this - wishing I had one of myself like it, I said, “You’re right. It looks like a Rembrandt. Who’s the painter? And where did you find him or her?”

“I didn’t say it was like a Rembrandt,” Cleve replied. “I said it was a Rembrandt.” The emphasis in the first of those two sentences was on the “like”; the emphasis in the second of the sentences was on the “was.” “Okay, you’ve seen the painting. Now the back story.”

“As they’re always quick to say in the public relations arena.”

Cleve ignored the quip. “Let’s sit on the sofa. We have to look away from the painting. If we look at it, we won’t be able to concentrate. If we look away, we look at the Fischl. Which we both know and which looks good where it is now, don’t you think?” The reality was that the Fischl stood up against the portrait, even took on an added weight.

“It looks fine,” I said, as I sat down to face it as well as to face whatever else Cleve was going to present me with. But before I get to that, I ought to say that when I’d stepped closer to the portrait of Cleve, I saw it was signed. The name said “Rembrandt.” Faintly. To my mind, it was the only cheap element on the canvas, but it turned a work of art into a sight gag. I wondered how Cleve had allowed that to happen.

I wondered but I didn’t have the opportunity to ask, because once again Cleve got the conversational jump on me. “What I’m about to tell you is going to strain your credulity, but I want you to hold your questions until I finish. At that point, you may find you don’t have any questions. Just total awe.” As he said this, he fixed me with a look somewhere between imploring and stern.

“No questions?” I said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“For you?” Cleve said. “I know. But work with me here.”

I nodded assent, all the while thinking I may not stick to the promise. I decided the thing to do for the moment was not to look at the Fischl, which, by the way, is a domestic scene of a boy and an older woman, whom I always took to be the boy’s emotionally careless mother. What would serve the situation best, I thought, would be for me to gaze out the window at Cleve’s extensive, expensive view across Central Park. I followed my instinct.

“Okay, here goes,” Cleve said. “About two months ago, I got on the crosstown bus at Seventy-ninth Street. This was mid-afternoon. I was at Broadway. I’d left the office and was coming home to change for a meeting starting in the early evening that was going to keep me out until at least midnight. I was on one of those double buses, and I’d walked towards the back. I found a seat facing front and wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening around me. I was thinking about a few office matters. When the bus reached Amsterdam Avenue, I suppose I was idly watching the line of people getting off and getting on. You know, how you do. A few people came towards the back and found seats. A few stood, even though there were seats empty.

“Then as the bus pulled away from the stop, I saw a man heading towards me who looked familiar. I’d say he was in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. He was medium height - five eight, five nine maybe - was wearing loose fitting trousers, a vest and a loose off-white shirt. More like a blouse than a shirt. He had on a kind of out-sized beret. As he got closer, I realized he had a small goatee. He was carrying a medium-sized portfolio tied with a faded orange string. He spotted an empty seat at an angle next to me, sat down, rested the portfolio on his lap, untied the string, opened it and started flipping sheets of paper. I couldn’t see them.

“Nobody paid him any attention, but I couldn’t got over the feeling I knew him from somewhere. But I didn’t want to stare. So I didn’t. As we continued to Columbus and on to Central Park West, I kept giving him sidelong glances to see if anything about him jogged my memory. As we’re approaching Central Park West, it came to me. He looked exactly like Rembrandt. But I mean exactly. The Rembrandt in one of the earlier self-portraits. There was no missing the resemblance.

“So now I guess I’m staring at him, trying to convince myself I’m making this up. He catches me looking at him. I do one of those things you do when someone catches you looking too long. Small smile and turn away, as if to say, I wasn’t really staring at you - I was lost in a thought and happened to be turned in your direction. Now we’re speeding through Central Park, and the fellow reaches into a leather pouch he has around his waist and fishes something out. It’s a card. We’re now crossing Fifth Avenue to my stop. He hands the card to me. I rise to go towards the door and read the card on the way. It says “Rembrandt van Rijn” in - I don’t know - Dutch Gothic lettering? The only other thing on it is an e-mail address in all lower case: rembrandt@vanrijn.com. But now I’m getting off the bus, and someone is directly behind me. So I can’t stop. As the bus pulls away, I look up and there this fellow is in the window making typing gestures at me. He’s telling me to look for him online.”

This is too much for me. Hewing to Cleve’s dictates, I’ve held my tongue, but I have to make a comment. I have to say something about this being some guy’s clever ruse to drum up business for - for who knows what? But when all I’ve gotten out is an alarmed “You didn’t - ,” Cleve raises an index finger and goes, “Uh-uh-uh.” I remember the pledge of silence I made. I also remember childhood when more than once I saw Irene Benjamin Morris raise an index finger to Cleve and say, “Uh-uh-uh.”

I couldn’t tell whether Cleve was deliberately mimicking his mother because he knew I’d recognize the gesture and get the reference or whether he had simply become her for a second. And don’t forget, I knew he wasn’t ordinarily the jokester type. Whichever it was, I didn’t bother to finish my sentence.

“Of course, I got in touch,” Cleve said, knowing that’s what I wanted to ask. “For reasons you can figure out. After all, I’m in public relations. I assumed the guy was running some kind of Rembrandt business. Maybe - even though I couldn’t figure out how - it was on the up-and-up. He might need representation. How about if he could pull down big bucks painting in the style of Rembrandt? I know any number of people pretentious enough to want something that looks like a Rembrandt on their walls. My mother, for starters. Anyway, that’s what I told myself.

“But I also couldn’t get past the physical resemblance to Rembrandt. I mean the shape of the head, the cheeks, the chin, the angle of the cap on his curly dark hair, the glint in his slightly melancholy eyes. When I say, dead ringer, I mean dead ringer. But more than that. A brilliant plastic surgeon can only go so far in replicating a face. No plastic surgeon can instill affect an absolute duplicate.

“So I went home and before I changed, went online to rembrandt@vanrijn.com. What came up was a website with a home page that had on it only a signature - Rembrandt’s, and it looked like the full-bodied signature we all know. Like the barely discernible signature on the painting behind me. Nothing else on the page. So I clicked on the signature, and up came a drawing and the word “next.” How can I describe the drawing? It was a street scene with people milling about. In the background was a store window with Banana Republic above it. You have to understand it was a contemporary scene but drawn in Rembrandt’s style. Had whoever the guy is put the figure of Jesus in the foreground with followers gathered around, it could have passed for one of Rembrandt’s biblical drawings. Okay, the Banana Republic would have been anachronistic. I looked it over and over and then clicked on “next.” What followed was another drawing and then another - all contemporary scenes but all in uncanny reiteration of Rembrandt.”

The urge to speak rose in me again, but Cleve again raised an index finger - leaving out the “uh-uh-uh” this time. “I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing. Forgery. Whoever the guy is, he’s talented, he’d studied Rembrandt, he’d gotten him down pat. What he’s doing is a form of visual plagiarism. If so, it’s nothing to turn your nose up at. Have you ever looked at any of the work by artists in Rembrandt’s studio, the ones who schooled at his elbow? Much of what they did is, in my estimation, inferior to what whoever this person was doing. And there was the physical resemblance. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. So when the last drawing came up with the word “contact” underneath. I did. And received a return e-mail within the hour. Signed Rembrandt. Computer type face, of course, so not in the recognizable penmanship. He invited me to meet him.”

At that, Cleve leaned toward me, and there was something gleaming at me from deep within his deep-set eyes. “At his studio,” he said ;with an air of both confidentiality and conspiracy. He leaned back. “At his studio in Nolita, where it’s all going on these days. Next day I take a cab down to 37 Prince Street and ring 4D. The buzzer goes - the intercom doesn’t work - and I walk up the three flights. The door to 4D is ajar. I push it open. The studio is at the back of the building, so there’s northern light.

“The guy passing himself off as Rembrandt is standing in the middle of the room with an easel behind him and a blank canvas on it. On the walls are pinned a number of drawings - some of them, I think, sketches for paintings. There are a number of drawings of himself. Studies, maybe, for self-portraits in oils. Against one wall is a pipe rack with what look like costumes hung on twenty or thirty hangers. I don’t have to remind you that Rembrandt was fascinated by costumes and painted himself in more than a few. But this Rembrandt is still wearing the same outfit I’d seen him in the day before, and he’s still the spitting image of the painter the world knows and loves. Closer to me and facing the easel is an elaborate wooden chair on a small riser. On the wall directly behind it - one side of the door I’d just come through - a black muslin curtain is draped from a brass curtain rod with elaborate ram heads at both ends. On the other side of the door and along the wall is a long counter with long, narrow drawers underneath it. A few of them are partially open, and I can see more sheets of paper. I take all of these to be signs of great industry. On the counter are palettes, jars with brushes in them, tubes of oils. There’s a plastic bag that says Pearl Paints on it. It’s collapsed so that I only see the “P-e” of “Pearl” and the “a-i-n-t-s” of “Paints,” but I can figure it out. The guy shops at Pearl Paints. On Canal Street. I’m so astounded by what I see that I’ve forgotten to speak.

“It doesn’t matter. He isn’t waiting for me to say anything. Instead, he says to me, ‘Welcome, Mr Morris.’ In accented English, but only barely accented. You know how beautifully the Dutch speak English. ‘I’m Rembrandt van Rijn,’ he says, bold as you please.’ What do you say to that? What I say is, ‘Just like the great Dutch painter.’ When I’ve said that, he just looks at me, and his eyes well up, go soft. You know the look from some of his self-portraits - the later ones. ‘I am the great Dutch painter,’ he says. ‘I don’t expect you to believe me. I can hardly believe it myself. But I am Rembrandt. I am the man who painted the pictures they exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’re some of my best, don’t you think? Every time I go visit them, I go with trepidation. I expect they will disappoint me. As yet they have not. Perhaps I am as good as they say I am - and have said for over three centuries now. I am very impressed with “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer.” I thought I had overdone it, but it stands the test of time. And they purchased it at such a great price! I would never had been able to ask that much for it, although I could have used to money to pay off my many creditors.’

“He’s telling me this in his only slightly accented English, and I don’t know what to say. I’m flabbergasted. I’m flummoxed. I’m tongue-tied, which isn’t good for someone in public relations. But I’m looking at a man who looks like a Rembrandt self-portrait come to life, and he’s telling me in no uncertain terms that he is Rembrandt. I regain my senses, though, and remember I’m in PR and I’m the one supposed to be spinning the facts, not the other guy. ‘Look here,’ I say, ‘I like the approach, but I’m not sure what you hope to gain by it.’”

“‘I am Rembrandt,’ the man repeats. ‘I cannot tell you why I am here, only that I am here. One moment it was the year 1660, and I was in my home in Amsterdam - a painter in advancing age recovering from financial setbacks. The next moment I am a young man again and in this room, a room furnished something like my Amsterdam studio but not completely like it. I do not know how I arrived here. I only remember vaguely being dissatisfied with how a painting was progressing and saying aloud to myself, “I wish I were somewhere far away from here with the energy I had as a younger man.”’

“‘Nice try,’ I said, ‘I may look gullible, but I’m not that gullible. Do you really expect me to believe a man travels a few centuries through time and somehow becomes completely acclimated - to the point where he even has an a-mail address? ‘ ‘I am an intelligent man,’ he replies. ‘Do you think it is so difficult to understand the computer? In my home country I came to understand mercantilism as an outgrowth of the expanding tulip market. Next to that, computers are nothing.’

“‘Cute answer,’ I said, ‘but you have a studio. You’re paying rent. You’re getting around the City. You don’t seem to be experiencing culture shock?’ ‘What can I tell you,’ he said, ‘New Yorkers are friendly - as long as you do not interrupt them during rush hour. I have learned much in the three months I have been here. To pay my rent, I have drawn many likenesses in Times Square.’ ‘And signed them Rembrandt?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if I do enough of them, it keeps a roof over my head.’

“‘How many people have come here - to your studio?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You are the first, Mr Morris.’ ‘The first?’ I said. ‘Why me?” ‘It is simple,’ he said. ‘In the time I have been here, you are the only person who has looked at me as if he knew I was Rembrandt. I have needed the - what is your word? - validation, because for the longest time I thought I was Rembrandt, but I was not sure.’ ‘On the bus, you mean,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I looked at you because I thought you looked like Rembrandt - not because I thought you actually were Rembrandt.’

Cleve stopped there to catch his breath and to let what he’d just said register with me. I could also tell he was revving up to report something crucial. He also looked as if he were waiting for me to say something. I didn’t want to tempt the raised index finger, however, or the “uh-uh-uh.” So I kept quiet.

He gave me a slight smile of approval and took in a large preparatory breath. “When I said that about his only looking like Rembrandt to me, he shook his head and said, ‘No, Mr Morris, you did not look at me because you were merely thinking I looked like the Rembrandt about whom you have heard and whose works you have appreciated. You forget I am a painter who understands what people are thinking, what they are seeing. That is my forte. That is I how I earned my reputation. And why I have held on to it - from what I can tell when I watch people at the Metropolitan and the Frick study my paintings. I can discern the difference between you and the people in Times Square who think it is comical when I draw them and then sign my name. They have a genuine Rembrandt, but they will never know it. For you it is different. You looked at me and continued looking at me, because you recognized me. You did think I was Rembrandt. You did not know how it could be true, but you knew somehow it was. It is. You realize the man standing before you now is Rembrandt van Rijn.’

“Again I was speechless. He said, ‘You do not speak, because you can not bring yourself to deny what I say.’ Then he said, ‘Of course, there is only one way I can prove who I am beyond a doubt. I must paint your portrait. No one but Rembrandt can paint a Rembrandt portrait. The apprentice painters in my studio try to paint like me. They come close, yes, but not one of them paints as I do. Not one of them understands the human psyche as I do. When I apply paint to a canvas, I am not applying paint. I am empathizing with my brush. So,’ he said and pointed to the chair in front of the black curtain, ‘if you will please sit down, I will paint your portrait.’”

“What could I do?” Cleve said. “I sat down.”

At that moment, something rather strange happened to me. I recognized that I wanted to believe everything Cleve was saying. That’s not entirely correct. I wanted to believe everything Cleve had been told by a man whom I’d never seen - a man claiming to be Rembrandt van Rijn, a man who had lived and died in the seventeenth century and claimed to be living again. In lower Manhattan. On Prince Street. It’s the kind of feeling - no, intimation - that you’d think would give you a chill or some kind of tingling sensation in your spine or along your forearms. But that’s not what I felt. I just felt aware of my whole body. It was as if my body were suspended an inch or two above the sofa - not pressing into it.

Cleve was looking at me as if he knew precisely what I was experiencing. Then he turned around to look at the portrait, which I took to be a signal I could examine it again. I did and again was astonished at how much it appeared to have been painted by Rembrandt, the Rembrandt whom any number of art historians designate the greatest painter who has ever lived - or is, at the least, irrevocably established among the top five.

“You sat down,” I said, “and a man whom you truly believe is the reborn Rembrandt dashed off this portrait of you?”

“No,” Cleve said with a certain amount of impatience. “He didn’t ‘dash off’ a portrait. That’s not how Rembrandt works.”

“Oh, it isn’t, is it?”

“No. He takes his time. He requires many sittings.”

“You mean to tell me, you made more than one visit to his studio.”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen? Over what period of time?”

“Over nine weeks - pretty much twice a week for nine weeks.”

“You’re telling me you sat for Rembrandt seventeen times.”

“Absolutely. He’s not an Impressionist who does some sort of fast daubing - wham-blur-thank-you-sir, and that’s it. This is Rembrandt we’re talking about. He takes his time. He gets it right. I don’t have to tell you. You’ve seen his paintings.”

Well, yes, I had seen Rembrandt paintings - at a number of museums in the states and abroad. Even in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam home, now that I think of it. But Cleve’s adamant comments made me take stock. Here I was, on his sofa and listening to him tell me how Rembrandt van Rijn approached his work. Not an everyday occurrence by any stretch of the imagination. And I was sitting still for it - and was to continue sitting still.

Because Cleve picked up where he’d left off. “For Rembrandt, painting is painstaking. It’s very slow. He likes to get everything right the first time.”

“You had to sit absolutely still for seventeen sittings?” I asked.

“Oh, no. I could move. And I could talk. He likes to get you talking. I know now that’s how he gets all the feeling on the canvas.”

“What did you talk about?”

“We talked about him and me. He wanted to find out who I am, and I told him.”

“You talked about yourself.” I’d never known Cleve to be one for talking about himself.

“Why not? This was Rembrandt. The greatest portraitist in the history of art, and he was painting my portrait. I wasn’t going to make it hard for him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Funny you should ask,” Cleve said. His good-looking features relaxed. “I told him things I never told anyone.”

I leaped at that one. “Like what?”

“Like things I’ll tell you next time you paint my portrait.”

“Touché!”

“You can say that again,” Cleve said. “But you’ve seen the self-portraits. You know how disarming those eyes are and the round cheeks. If you want to know how Rembrandt got his results, I’m telling you. He listens to you when you talk. ‘Tell me more about that,’ he’ll say, and you tell him. Leastways, I did. I told him things about my childhood I thought I’d forgotten. I told him about work. He got me to admit I like what I do. He got me to admit I’m good at it. I’ve never said that to anyone.”

That was true enough. Cleve had never told me he liked running the Cleve Morris Agency. He’d always made it seem as if the agency was something he did because he didn’t have the gumption to do something he’d rather be doing. Come to think of it, I’d always imagined a life for him as a writer or producer and suddenly realized it was somewhat presumptuous of me.

“And all the while,” he went on, “Rembrandt is painting and then looking at you with those black eyes of his and then looking back at what he’s doing. You wonder what he’s seeing. He’s so empathetic, you begin to drop whatever defenses you’re put up consciously or unconsciously.”

I couldn’t contain my next remark. “Put up defenses? You, Cleve?”

“As if you don’t,” he countered. “But he has another fail-safe tactic, old Rembrandt does. He tells you about himself. Or maybe it isn’t a tactic. Maybe he needs to talk. I suppose I would also need to talk if I were a couple thousand miles and three and a half centuries away from home. You know, as long as I work with accomplished people, I remain astonished that for all they do, it doesn’t mitigate against unhappiness, depression, despair. And now I’m having my portrait painted by Rembrandt, and he has more tales of woe than I’ve ever heard.

“Saskia, his child bride dies at 30. When he talks about her she’s already been dead for eighteen years - and three hundred and sixty-plus years. But he’s not over her death yet. You should see how his eyes well up. The truth is, he didn’t need to paint my portrait to convince me he’s Rembrandt. He only had to talk about Saskia to me. How much he loved her when they married and she was only sixteen. How he dressed her up as Flora - the portrait is in London’s National Gallery, in case you didn’t know - because he quotes saw her as eternal spring end quote. She proved not to be eternal, though He was so moved when he described how she died that I was almost embarrassed to look at him. My heart went out to him.”

Something crossed my mind that should have crossed it much sooner.

“Cleve, what you’re telling me is all well and good, but anyone could look the information up in a good Rembrandt biography.”

“I thought the same thing, but you didn’t hear the way his voice broke when he talked about Saskia on her death bed. No one is that good an actor. The same when he talked about their son, Titus. He’s estranged from him now - I mean, then. And things just get worse. He declares bankruptcy in 1658. Did you know that? I didn’t. He thinks that’s why he’s landed here. He’s bankrupt. He feels he’s in some kind of disgrace. He doesn’t think he’s appreciated by the Dutch bourgeoisie who have been his subjects since he moved from Leyden to Amsterdam in 1631. This is Rembrandt, mind you. Those people never had it so good. No one anywhere ever had it so good as having Rembrandt as your neighborhood portraitist. Hendrickje Stoeffels, the woman in his life, isn’t well. He’s fifty-four and beginning to feel his age. Think of it. You’ve seen the late portraits - the ones he paints when he’s older than he is when he’s living on Prince Street. Would you say they are the portraits of a man who’s only sixty-three? Never. He looks like a man in his seventies, at least. Yet, he was only sixty-three when he died. The first time.”

While Cleve was talking, something occurred to me. I was thinking about how he’d described the Prince Street studio. I was fixing on the costume rack. “May I ask you a question,” I said.

“Not yet,” Cleve said, “I just wanted to say that with all his travails, it wasn’t surprising that Rembrandt wished he were somewhere else. He wanted out, and he got out, didn’t he? I’m here to attest to that. Now what did you want to know?”

“You said he has a rack of what looked like costumes.”

“That’s right,” Cleve said. “Sometimes he put on a funny hat to paint in - or a cape-like thing, which he’d wear until he decided it was hampering his movements.”

“But in your portrait you’re just wearing street clothes,” I said. “Did he ever suggest that you wear one of those fancy-shmancy get-ups?”

“He said that my street clothes were costume enough for him. Everything everyone wore in the twenty-first century looked odd to him.”

“What about painting himself in modern gear?” I asked.

“He wasn’t interested,” Cleve said. “He did a few self-etchings, though.”

“Were they gloomy?” I wanted to know. “Was he always gloomy?”

“Oh, no,” Cleve said, brightening right up. “When he talked about the low country - he called it the low country; I don’t think I ever heard him say “Holland” or “The Netherlands” - he was very animated. He could even be funny. He told a very funny joke about Peter Minuit buying Manahattan for twenty-four dollars. Apparently, it was an old joke, but of course I’d never heard it. Peter Minuit buys Manhattan for twenty-four dollars, and the news reaches the royal court. When the monarch hears it, he shouts, ‘Twenty-four dollars! Minuit never could drive a hard bargain.’

“A laugh riot,” I said.

‘I thought it was funny,” Cleve said. “He was also amusing the day we went to the Met.”

“You went to the Met. With Rembrandt.”

“The only time we did anything together outside his studio. He’d already been there a number of times but always to look at his own work. He said he’d like to go at least once to look closely at what other painters had done - painters who came after him, as you might imagine. He already knew Giotto and Duccio and Leonardo da Vinci and Titian. He knew about Velazquez, although he hadn’t seen much. He didn’t want to look at Rubens and called Anthony Van Dyke an upstart, although he allowed as how he had talent. You know what really impressed him?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“The Impressionists - no pun intended. He liked Manet and Monet. He liked Cézanne, although he thought the landscapes were too cerebral. ‘He paints too often with his head and not his heart, this Cézanne,’ he said. When he got to the Van Goghs, he stood before each one for a long time, saying nothing. When he walked away from the last one, he finally spoke. ‘There is a painter,’ he said. Then he said it again. ‘There is a painter. And he’s Dutch!’ By the time we left, he said he had learned a great deal. He wasn’t convinced by the changes in how colors were used, but he liked what he saw painters influenced by him were doing with form. What I find fascinating is if you look at the work he did after 1660, his colors become much more muted but his brush strokes are broader, looser. Look closely at some of them, and they are practically abstract. You’re going to tell me he wasn’t applying then what he learned here? And I was privy to it all.’”

“All right, all right,” I said. “I believe you. Rembrandt and you are not only painter and subject. You’re friends. You’re pals. You’re bosom buddies. Given that, when do you introduce me to him? How soon do I get to meet him?”

When I asked that, a figurative cloud came over Cleve. His dark eyes darkened. “That’s just it,” he said. “You don’t get to meet him. And before you jump to any conclusions about my not thinking you’re good enough to meet him, let me say you are good enough. The problem is, he’s not here to meet any longer.”

“Not here,” I said, sounding more miffed than I’d intended to sound - sounding as if I’d fallen for the entire tale and was now cut off from what was only my due after lending credence to everything Cleve had told me. I said before I could stop myself, “You get me over here to dangle the real Rembrandt van Rijn before me only to say he’s no longer on the contemporary premises?”

“Sorry,” Cleve said. “But that’s the way things are. He’s disappeared. He’s gone.”

I was crestfallen. My chance to meet Rembrandt, and I’d lost it. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Cleve said. “He finished the portrait last Wednesday. Or almost finished it. As I left the final sitting, he said he wanted to look at it, perhaps make a few adjustments, let it dry. I could pick it up the next day. On Thursday I went down to Prince Street to collect it. He showed it to me. Not to get my approval, you understand. It pleased him, and that was all that mattered. He wrapped it and handed it to me and showed me to the door.

“It’s not as if we said goodbye. We didn’t. We even made plans to get together on the weekend. He hadn’t had much Dutch cuisine since he’d arrived, but he’d heard of a restaurant he wanted to try in Brooklyn. Breukelen, he called it. I said that sounded like a plan to me and reached in my breast pocket for my check book. When I pulled it out, he took it and placed it back in the pocket and patted my chest. He said he wouldn’t accept payment, couldn’t accept payment. I’d done him the favor of believing who he was and therefore enabling him to believe in himself. He said that was a gesture on which it’s impossible to put a value.

“So I left. But I felt I had to thank him in some way. Aha, I thought - flowers. Tulips. To remind him of home. Maybe they would inspire Rembrandt to do a still life with tulips. It’s not tulip weather, of course, but I know Rennie Reynolds, and I knew that if there were any way to get tulips, he could do it. He could, and Friday I went down to 37 Prince Street with a bouquet of two dozen yellow and white tulips. I went to press the button for 4D, but there was no button for 4D. I looked at the set of buttons and noticed for the first time that none of the floors have a D apartment - only A, B and C.

“While I’m taking this in, a tall, blonde woman came through the door with a key out. I asked her about apartment 4D, and she looked at me askance. She said she keeps a studio in 4A, and as far as she knew, there is no 4D. There never was. I think she thought I was a masher. I ask her if she’s recently seen a medium-sized man with a goatee who usually wears a large beret-like cap going in and our of the building. ‘He looks like Rembrandt,’ I said. I obviously didn’t want to say he is Rembrandt. She was suspicious enough of me already. ‘No,’ she said, ‘nobody of that description living in the building for as long as she’d been there, which is twelve years.’ What could I say to that? If I insisted I’d been in 4D many times with a man who looked exactly like Rembrandt, she would only have thought I was crazy and might have run screaming from me. So I left - with the two dozen tulips.”

He pointed to the large, square glass vase across the room to the left side of the Fischl. “There they are,” he said. And there they were, at the moment looking especially triumphant. “I thought I might take them to the Met and place them under one of the Rembrandt self-portraits, but I didn’t see them letting me carry a large bouquet up to the Rembrandt room, no matter what story I gave them.”

With that, Cleve let go a large sigh and sank back in the sofa. It was as if he’d had a heavy burden lifted from his shoulders. I suppose he had. When he’d collected himself, he did something I’d never seen him do in all the years I’d known him: He smiled at me with as open a smile as you can imagine. There was nothing in it of melancholy momentarily suppressed, nothing in it of a profound awareness of ultimate letdown. Turning from me, he looked at the portrait. His smile widened.

Cleve was happy. I’m not sure Irene Benjamin Morris would be entirely pleased to know she has a happy child. But I thought it was a good sign.

“You’ve seen the portrait, and you’ve heard the story,” Cleve said. “If you want, you can leave now.”

As things were going, there really was nothing for me to do but exit. So I rose, and Cleve saw me to the door. Where he did something else I had never known him to do - with me, anyhow: He hugged me. As he did, he said, “You know you’re invited to see the portrait whenever you want.”

I said I knew I was and I headed for the elevator as he started to close the door behind him. “One more thing,” he called after me. I turned.

He was framed in the door, looking as I’d seen him when I arrived. “They say that every portrait a painter paints is a self-portrait. If that’s true, then I not only have a portrait of myself by Rembrandt, I have a Rembrandt self-portrait.”

With that he closed the door, and I pushed the elevator call button. While I waited, I thought about what had just occurred. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I couldn’t imagine who would be sure. I knew I wanted to believe everything Cleve so obviously believed. It would mean believing in miracles. What else could you call a portrait by Rembrandt painted in the present day? But was I ready to commit to such a belief? Put another way, was I ready to believe my eyes? I should be, shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t we all be less disposed to be cynical about our surroundings?

All right, I thought, if I can’t believe in miracles - if I can’t lend credence to Cleve’s story, even though he’s got a portrait to show for it - perhaps I can draw a moral lesson here. Perhaps I can draw a few. Moral lesson one: When people tell you who they are, it might be a good idea to believe him or her, because they could be telling you the truth and unexpected results could come of it. Moral lesson two: When you’re riding a New York City bus, you shouldn’t ignore the people around you, because you never know whom you could be meeting.