90. Interview with Felicia Veicht: Part 2

25 June 2011

– I’ve always fancied young men.

– Younger than me. Since the day I turned thirty and realized that a woman’s desires rise exponentially as a man’s fails.

– And these men nowadays, with their youthful, vibrant bodies and so much…vigor. I’m assuming that Les Palmer was no different.

– Catherine helped me quite frequently around this gallery for almost two years before he showed up. And she was depressed everyday of those two years.

– I offered her everything. As one of very few of my family members I am on speaking terms with, I could have given Catherine anything she needed to be comfortable. But alas, Catherine is a rare breed: the type of person who actually enjoys working for her own. But I could always tell the one thing she wanted more than anything was love, something I could not financially provide for her.

– She never spoke to me about it, and she wasn’t outright miserable. Most of the emotions would have been invisible to anybody else. But I have a certain…flair for that sort of thing. For seeing the other sides of people, the veiled emotions they try so desperately to keep hidden from the public.

– Catherine was disheartened until Les came around. Then she was ecstatic, for a while at least. Then, of course, she was unhappy again, as is typical of relationships.

– It was all Les. That young man had a hold over her, physically and mentally. He was an intricate one.

– I heard of him for the first time the day Catherine brought in that drawing of his and asked me what I thought of it.

– We have a trend at our gallery of splitting our exhibitions each season between veteran artists and new, aspiring talents. The more prominent names draw the crowd, and the younger artists get their evening of exposure. The gallery gets half the profits regardless.

– Catherine asked me if I would take a look at a piece of Les’s work, and I obliged because I’ve always believed the bond of family is indomitable. My niece is a decent judge of quality as well—it is a blood trait, I believe, for our women to have a good eye for that  sort of thing—so I sat here in my office chair, leaned back, lit a cigarette, and put my hand out. She placed the paper on the tip of my fingers and I turned it towards my face and [Ms. Veicht pauses, shaking her head] absolutely stunning.

– Astonishing, truly astonishing.

– Astonishing is not the type of word I tend to throw around lightly.

– What Catherine brought to me that day was truly art, at its finest.

– I didn’t know then that Mr. Palmer was her bed buddy. I believe Cathy was going for the objective viewpoint in not telling me. Which, though an understandable move on her part, was unnecessary and willfully deceitful, hence the reason it is a sore point for me. But I digress.

– If I had known she was sleeping with the next Brett Whiteley, it still would not have deterred me from viewing Mr. Palmer’s work as a genuine masterpiece. Mr. Palmer had managed to take a sketching pencil—a simple 2B, it seemed—and create a landscape of desolation so potent, my eyes watered the moment they lay upon it.

– It was a fairly simple image, night time, with the focal point of the piece directed more upon the sky and the gray moon than the burning house at the bottom. The old truck out front was like decoration on a Christmas tree.

– Not just any drawing. I received my Master’s in Art History from Duke University, and I’ve enrolled in more art appreciation courses than you could put your mind around. Fire is, by far, the hardest thing to depict in a piece of work. Impossible to do in black and white. Absolutely impossible. Except, it seemed, for Mr. Palmer.

– The burning house was of photographic quality. So real it was almost hard to look at.

– Bright, burning the retinas, yet I couldn’t take my eyes away.

– I asked Catherine who had created this masterpiece, and it was at that point my sixth sense kicked in and I forced her to reveal to me the true nature of her and Les Palmer’s relationship.

– My own niece, hiding something so pressing from me as a new romance with a natural artistic prodigy? That cannot be tolerated.

– If she can withhold such a significant development, what else can she do? Divulge the inner workings of my gallery to competitors?

– That’s how it starts.

– Sure, I wasn’t going to throw away the chance to exhibit such talent. But not before I gave Catherine a stern talking to. And if it were to happen again, family or not, I would be finding new help around here.

– I could not be more sincere about anything. There are no secrets in my gallery.

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