The Center of the World by Thomas van Essen

he had had affairs with perhaps half a dozen women; one of them he had almost loved. His wife, he knew, suspected, but they had never spoken of the matter, just as they had not spoken about her little fling with Mr. Preston in Newport. His business dealings were also conducted on the principle that only those who needed to would be told. Only fools and buffoons said more than necessary.
    But of all of his secrets, none was more important to him than his Turner. He hardly knew why. It was a shocking painting, to be sure, which the world would condemn. But Rhinebeck had stood up to senators and union bullies and he knew he had nothing to fear from ignorant puritans. He was what the world calls a brave man, but he also knew that he was afraid of others, especially his wife, seeing his Turner. He feared somehow that it would give her the key to his soul; once she saw it he would be at her mercy.
    It was all nonsense. He shook his head and lit a new cigar. All the preparations were complete. The ladies would arrive at any minute. He was suspicious of Lottie’s new friend, Mrs. Overstreet. He hadn’t met her, but the suddenness of her warm attachment to his wife and the fact that she worked for an art gallery gave him pause. He had heard rumors over the years of a Turner unlike all others; he himself had been asked ever so casually over brandy and cigars if he had ever heard of such a painting. He wondered if Mrs. Overstreet had heard similar rumors.
    He looked at the Renoir. She annoyed him. There was a time in his life, he knew, when he would have wanted a woman like that, but now he found her unpleasantly pneumatic. She was the sort of woman who would take hours to get dressed, who would feel an obscure and heartfelt hurt as he grew impatient with her comments about the weather and her friend’s dresses. After dinner she would question the waiter gravely about the relative merits of the napoleon and the éclair. Lottie had her faults, but she was much better than that.
    There was a commotion downstairs, signaling that the women had arrived. He greeted his wife with a polite kiss on the cheek. He shook hands with Mrs. Overstreet. The trip from New York had been dreadful; the hotel in Albany a disgrace; the train stopped for ever so long without a word of explanation.
    “But thank goodness for Maria,” Lottie said. “She never lost her nerve; she always knew what to do. She found blankets when there were none to be had. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
    Rhinebeck thanked Mrs. Overstreet for her assistance. He did not like the look of her. She was pretty, but somehow too pretty; charming, but too charming. A button, or perhaps two, had been negligently fastened and a good deal of her attractive bosom was on display.
    He showed them into the main room and led them out onto the balcony.
    “You have come at just the right time,” Rhinebeck said. “Look out across the lake to the island there.” The three of them stared at the green island and the blue water. Suddenly the island seemed almost on fire with color, the various shades of green more vivid and living than anything either of the women had seen before. They both gasped.
    “Happens every evening when the sun goes down, if the weather is fine,” Rhinebeck explained. Tears formed in his wife’s eyes.
    “I have never seen anything so beautiful. It quite takes one’s breath away. I can see,” she said, “why you intend to keep this all to yourself. It is not kind, but I understand.”
    At supper the conversation was indifferent. The glass eyes of the various creatures that decorated the room sparkled in the firelight.
    “I did not know,” Mrs. Overstreet remarked, “that you were such a huntsman.”
    Rhinebeck shrugged. “I confess to very little of the actual murder. I have a man who sees to these things.”
    “Does not the sight of all these poor creatures on the wall take away your appetite?”
    “No, it doesn’t. Nor does it, I