She shrugged. "I miss that time. I still had Mother by day and a lover by night. It was a precious few months for me. After she died, I sold the apartment to pay off some of the medical bills. I kept the brass bed. Mother had bought it years ago at an estate sale. Mother said it had once belonged to a courtesan so she couldn’t resist buying it. Mother would buy anything if the origin story were good enough.”
"It’s a lovely bed. I’m certain it misses you. You should spend more time in it, with me preferably.”
She missed the bed as well. Although her affair with Ryan had been brief, only three months, it had been a delicious distraction. They were lovers for the summer and knew the end date of their affair when they started—September, when Ryan would start college. He’d been a virgin, a tabula rasa, and she’d taught him exactly how to please her…and please her he did, two and sometimes three times a night. He’d slip in around ten, joining her in the antique brass bed where she lay waiting for him, already naked. They’d make love for two hours or more before he returned to his apartment down the hall. They spoke of nothing to each other but the sex. It was all they’d had in common. Yet, she missed him, or more accurately missed it—the sex, falling asleep with damp thighs, waking up with tender lips, tender nipples, having a secret reason to smile when no one else was looking. Malcolm offered all that to her, plus the money to save the gallery. How could she refuse? And yet…
"Condoms?” Mona asked. She hadn’t used them with Ryan, but Ryan had been eighteen and a virgin.
"No,” he said simply.
She had guessed as much. No one paid a million dollars to fuck someone and then put a layer of latex between their bodies.
"But you needn’t worry,” he said. "I won’t give you any diseases.”
"That’s a comfort. Only one night every month or two?”
"That’s all,” he said. "But I assure you, they will be very long nights for both of us.”
"Ten nights is a hundred thousand dollars a fuck. You do realize that you’re overpaying me, yes?”
"I know it seems a bit, dear, but I will fuck you more than once a night. You’ll earn it, I promise. If you’re anything like the other Monas I’ve known, I have no doubt I’ll get my money’s worth and then some.”
Twelve months. A handful of nights. Four or five times a night, if not more. And all for one million dollars.
"If any of this art of yours is stolen—”
"I’m a whoremonger, a rake, and a degenerate, my dear, but I am not a thief.”
"Forgive me but I had to ask,” she said. "Art theft is the fourth largest international crime behind guns, drugs, and human trafficking.”
"Only fourth?” He sounded disgusted. He sighed, as if disappointed with the world. "No accounting for taste.”
It was that joke that did it. Until then she’d been sitting on the fence, torn between needing the money and wanting her dignity. But when he gave a little roll of his eyes as if affronted that anyone would consider drugs or guns more worth stealing and selling than art…she fell off the fence and right into Malcolm’s lap.
"One million dollars,” she said. "You have carte blanche for one year. We’ll meet here. Is that the agreement?”
"It is indeed. Are you saying yes?” he asked.
"The deal is done after one year? You won’t expect anything else from me? Any favors, sexual or otherwise? A stake in the gallery? Counterfeit provenance?”
"Nothing of the sort. After our final encounter you won’t even see me again. Ever.”
Ever?
"Well…you’ve certainly proven your bona fides with the Reynolds painting,” she said. "And I promised my mother I wouldn’t sell The Red.”
"Deathbed promises are the most serious,” he said. "We must keep them at all costs.”
"How did you know it was a deathbed promise?”
"An assumption. You see, I made one myself.”
"To your mother?”
"No. If she said anything about me on her deathbed it was to curse my name. Luckily I was elsewhere at the time,” he said and smiled. She had never understood the phrase "devastatingly handsome” before meeting Malcolm, but when he left this room, she would feel devastated to be in his presence no longer. It all made sense.
"My mother loved this gallery,” she said. "It was her life. Now that she’s gone, it may be the death of me.”
"I won’t allow that, Mona.” He seemed to find her name amusing.
"I have a feeling I’ll regret this…”
"I have a feeling you won’t.”
"You would say that.”
"I would,” he readily admitted. "But you’ll say it too in a year. I assume you’ll accept the fifty-thousand-dollar finder’s fee from the Reynolds as a down payment?”
"I think that’s reasonable,” she said.
"Then we’re in agreement?”
What did she have to lose? Other than her health, her sanity, her spotless criminal record, her business, and her life?
"We’re in agreement,” she said.
He clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and stood up.
"Excellent. Just what I’ve been wanting to hear for a very long time. We’ll start tomorrow night.”
"So soon?”
"Does your cunt have a prior engagement?” he asked, his tone mocking.
"Tomorrow night, then. Is there…” She paused, not sure what she was asking. "Are there rules? Expectations of me? Requests?”
He held up one finger, telling her to sit and wait. She sat. She waited. He walked to her bookshelf and perused the titles, the hand on his chin again like the first night. At last he seemed to find what he was looking for. He pulled a large white book from the shelf and leafed through the pages. Then he returned to her desk, bringing the book with him.
"That,” he said, laying the book open on the desk and pointing at a photograph of a painting. "I would like you to wait for me thusly.”
The painting in the photograph was one she knew well—Manet’s Olympia, a portrait of a young girl, naked, lying on a bed with her head up and staring directly at the viewer. It was an infamous painting, Manet making mockery of the tired old Venus-reclining-on-her-bed trope. Olympia was a prostitute and a shameless one at that. When it was first displayed, the crowds found it so vulgar they wanted to tear it to shreds.
"So I’m to be your Olympia.”
"For what I’m paying you, you’ll be everything I want you to be.”
She looked up at him, met his eyes. For the first time since they met, he touched her. He laid his hand on the side of her face, stroked the arch of her cheekbone with his thumb. Such a large warm hand. She truly believed she would regret making this agreement. But she didn’t regret it now.
"You were meant to do this,” he said softly. "You’ll see.”
"Why me?” she asked. "Millions of women in this country, millions in yours…why me?”
"Millions of paintings in this world. Only one Mona Lisa. Billions of women in this world. Only one you, Mona Lisa St. James.”
Then he left her in the office, blushing and shivering and undeniably aroused. She’d just agreed to become a prostitute to save her gallery.
Something told Mona that somewhere out there, her mother was proud of her.
Olympia
Malcolm had picked a good day for a tryst. Sunday was the gallery’s shortest day—open only from one to five. After she closed The Red, Mona went shopping. She didn’t need much—a velvet choker, a flower for her hair, clean white sheets for the bed, all easy to find. At her apartment she showered and shaved and waxed until she was as smooth as a marble statue. Malcolm hadn’t told her to remove her hair, but Olympia had no visible body hair in Manet’s painting. Mona should have asked him what he preferred. She knew he would have told her had she asked. A shameless man, he’d made her feel rather shameless. In fact, the whole conversation with Malcolm had been rather dignified. She hadn’t felt embarrassed or ashamed. It felt like a business transaction, which she had appreciated.