Archive of Our Own ^beta

There are two things Vanessa has always loved: Art and dangerous men.

Her father is never dangerous to her (but she knows, in her heart, how dangerous he could be to those who threaten her). He wears dark suits and dark ties and white shirts, with gemstone-inlaid cufflinks the only glint of color around him. Her mother is the opposite, always in jewel-tones, prints, pastels—but she wears patterns of spring leaves when his cufflinks are emerald, blue chiffon when they are aquamarine. They are always united, no matter what; a perfect portrait.

It is her father who teaches her how to shoot, pressing a slim revolver into her twelve-year-old hands. They line up in front of a target, his hands on her shoulders, teaching, directing, and her first shot misses the target by a mile, and the rest are even worse. He shows her how to reload the gun—“Gently,” he says, “like so”—and lets her try again. This time she hits the target, but only once, only barely.

“Good,” he says, patting her on the shoulder. “Tomorrow we try again.”

Each night, after dinner, he takes her for a drive and she shoots and mostly misses. Each night, after her second try, he says, “Good.”

“How is it good?” she says after a month, frustrated and furious. “It’s not good! It’s awful! I miss every other time!”

Her father raises an eyebrow calmly, taking the gun from her and reloading it. “Do you think I was born with a gun in my hand?” he asks, then raises the gun to the target. It is the first time she has ever seen him shoot.

Every shot hits the bullseye.

“Perhaps you think I should focus on your aim,” he says, now cleaning the gun with a soft rag. “Or your stance or your posture. But what is all that if you are not comfortable holding it? So we practice every night until you are as comfortable with a gun as you are with your own body.”

“I hate my body,” she says, because she is twelve, and beginning to get hips and breasts and hormones. Her equilibrium is thrown off, not that she would use that word. But she knows she used to be able to pirouette without wobbling, and now she falls almost every time.

“Tch!” her father says, crouching a bit before her so their eyes are at level. “God created your body, and it is a good body, and you should be proud of it. Perhaps now you feel like a half-finished painting, true, but wait until you see what a masterpiece it will be.”

“I don’t want to be a painting,” she says sullenly.

“No?” he asks. “How about a gun?”

She looks at the weapon in his hand, silver and gleaming, all delicate curves and danger. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe I could be a gun.”

--

The summer she is sixteen, her mother takes her on tour of Europe. Partway through the trip, they visit the Louvre. “What do you see?” her mother asks.

Vanessa scowls. “I see twenty people blocking my way.”

“And what do they see?”

“Probably the backs of the people in front of them.”

“And when the people in front of them move, then what?”

“Then—eventually they get to the front, I guess,” she says. “And they see her. It?”

“Her,” her mother agrees. “Who is she?”

“The Mona Lisa?”

“She’s the person they came all this way to see,” she corrects. “All the paintings in this museum, and people make a pilgrimage for La Gioconda. Look at how they treat her, how they practically fall to their knees in front of her. They have come halfway around the world, just for her.”

They are to the front of the crowd now, standing before her. “She doesn’t even have eyebrows,” Vanessa says.

“No. But she has power,” says her mother. “That is true art.”

--

Vanessa earns a degree in art history from Cambridge, then an MA in Museum Studies from University College London. She interns at the Louvre, works as an assistant curator at the Museo del Prado, and it should be a dream come true—

But the truth is, she is terribly bored, and her dreams are nothing like her reality.

“I need something to call my own,” she tells her father, for that is the worst part: She sees the power within the art, but these tourists, they all come and worship, and the art feeds on that worship, but she is neither nourished nor fed. She has perhaps selected a handful of it for display, but this collection has existed for centuries. She is but one in a series of anonymous caretakers.

“So go out and take something for your own,” he says, and she does.

--

It is slow going, of course. She moves to New York and gets an MBA from Columbia, all the while cultivating the artists she meets in the city, adding them to her collection of artists from Paris and Madrid. “One day,” she promises them, “together, we will show the art world what it’s been missing.”

Some of them don’t believe her, but she never breaks a promise.

--

The gallery is small to start with, then stays small by right of exclusivity. Her father, she knows, sends a few friends her way, but the fact is that she has an eye for art, and she rightly claims the success as her own. Some critics say her selections are derivative of Rothko or Pollock, but more say that her gallery is comprised of the subtleties of color: An oceanscape of greens and blues beside what can only be a treeline of blues and green; the minimalism of white-on-white across the room from stark white-on-black.

“There is power in what we see,” she says, when a browsing customer asks her. “There is power in what can’t see, as well.”

The most power, she doesn’t say, is in what we feel.

--

“Hello there,” she says, and smiles at the man’s stammered “Hello,” remembers how he had told her, It makes me feel alone. “How are you enjoying Rabbit in a Snowstorm?"