The Burnt Orange Heresy

I was flattered that he knew my work as well as my name, or at least one article-I checked myself-written in English, at that, and not to my knowledge translated into French. But why did he mention this particular article on Vint?' Ray Vint was an abstract painter whose paintings sold sparsely-for a dozen good reasons I won't go into here. Vint was an excellent craftsman, however, and could get all the portrait work he desired-more, in fact, than he wanted to paint. He needed the money he made from portraits to be able to work on the abstracts he preferred to paint. But because he hated to do portraits, he also hated the people who sat for them and provided him with large sums for flattering likenesses. He got "revenge" on the sitters by painting a fly on them.

In medieval painting, and well into the Renaissance, a fly was painted on Jesus Christ's crucified body: the fly on Jesus' body was a symbol of redemption, because a fly represented sin and Jesus was without sin. A fly painted on the person of a layman, however, signified sin without redemption, or translated into "This person is going to Hell!" Ray Vint painted a trompe-l'oeil fly on every portrait.

Sometimes his patrons didn't notice the fly for several days, and when they did they were unaware of its significance. They were usually delighted when they discovered it. The fly became a conversational gambit when they showed the portrait to their friends: "Notice anything unusual there about my portrait?"

Artists, of course, when they saw the fly, laughed inwardly, but said nothing to the patrons about the meaning of the Vintian trademark. I had hesitated about whether to mention Vint's symbolic revenge when I wrote about him, not wanting to jeopardize his livelihood. But I had decided, in the end, to bring the matter up because it was a facet of Vint's personality that said something implicit about the emotionless nature of his abstracts.

As I guided Berenice into the house in Debierue's wake, holding her left elbow, I became apprehensive about the old painter's offhand remark and dry, brief chuckle. A chuckle, unlike a sudden smile or a sincere burst of laughter, is difficult to interpret. Whether a chuckle is friendly or unfriendly, it merely serves as a nervous form of punctuation. But to mention one particular incident, or paragraph, out of the thousands I had written, and the "fly" symbol at that, caused the knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach to throb. The fact that he had read my piece on Vint (not a hack job, because I don't write hack pieces, but it certainly wasn't one of my best articles-Vint's work simply hadn't been good enough for a serious in-depth treatment) could be a hindrance to me.

No one knew, because Debierue had never commented, what the old man had thought about Gait's article, with its fanciful "Chironesque" interpretations, but writers with reputations much greater than mine had been turned down subsequently when they had asked the painter for interviews. After the Gait article, Debierue had every right to distrust critics.

Damn Galt, anyway, I thought bitterly. Then I saw the gilded baroque frame on the wall and pointed to it.

"That isn't the famous No. One, is it?"

Debierue pursed his lips, and shrugged. "It was," he answered lightly, and entered the kitchen.

The moment I examined the picture I knew what he meant, of course. There was no crack on the wall behind the mount. The frame, without the crack, and not hanging in its original environment, was no longer the fabled No. One. My exultation was great nevertheless. It was something I had never expected to see in my lifetime. Berenice, after a quick glance at the empty frame, seated herself in a Sears-Danish chair and asked me for a cigarette.

I shook my head impatiently. "Not till we ask permission," I told her.

There was a narrow bar-counter built into the wall. It separated the kitchen from the living room. There was no dining room, and the living room was furnished Spartanly. The chicken farmer-tenant who had built the house had probably intended, like many Floridians, to use the large screened porch as a dining area. There was a square, confirming pass-through window from the kitchen to the porch.