A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 10

  “Who is this man?” asked Didier. “Our benefactor?”

  “He’s English,” Gabriel said. “A dealer or collector or something.”

  “Who cares?” said Marie-Laure. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s an angel from God sent to pay my rent.” Marie-Laure’s live-in boyfriend dabbled in heroin; he was always stealing money from her wallet and threatening to hurt her.

  “Angels pay your rent?” Didier baited her.

  Marie-Laure opened her mouth to answer, but Gabriel cut her off. “We have until next week only. The paper will arrive tomorrow.”

  The paper was delivered by messenger to Rosenzweig’s the next day. It did look like nineteenth-century artist’s paper, irregular and obviously not mass-produced. Gabriel took it to the studio, ready to hand it out, feeling a dry-mouthed panic. He was not used to being in charge. He was not a leader. He was an outsider, and this new role of cheerleader/whip cracker was an unfamiliar fit. He didn’t like being responsible, especially for other people’s work. He liked to work alone, rely on no one, and certainly not flaky Didier or weepy Marie-Laure.

  Today, Marie-Laure didn’t complain as Gabriel lit incense, and did him the favor of turning her American pop music selections down low. Gabriel sat down at his table. He took out the sketch he had started the day before, planning to transfer it to Klinman’s paper. Some of the elements weren’t working. The perspective was not quite uniform. The clock tower in the background was elongated at the top, the point of view low to the ground. Yet the women’s skirts were viewed from above. This inconsistency bothered Gabriel. He suspected this fussiness was related to the lack of spirit in his art, his preoccupation with structure at the expense of emotion. These kinds of imperfections further falsified the piece of art. Yet there was no time to obsess over details in his current assignment. It was all about production. Line them up, bang them out, pocket the cash.

  Gabriel put on the old earphones that led to his Walkman. He was the only one he knew who still listened to cassettes, but that’s how his music was recorded, and it wasn’t like he had money to buy some fancy new digital music player. He pressed play and the familiar Spanish rap music blasted from the headset. Gabriel turned it down. He picked up his pencil. He was more excited about this project than he could remember being in a long while, perhaps since he had copied Febrer. But that hadn’t been excitement; it was more like nervous apprehension.

  He was happy that his work would be compensated for once, instead of merely criticized and shunted. He was guaranteed money for his art, even if it wasn’t really his. He felt disappointed in himself; he had fallen into the trap of capitalism, into believing that an object was valuable only if it was monetarily valuable. But he lived within the culture, it was bound to have an effect on him.

  Unsellable art was bad art. So according to the cognoscenti, Gabriel was making bad art. And by this same perverse logic, any art that sold was automatically good art, in direct proportion to its sale price. Who were these buffoons who decided what sold and what sat out in the soggy cold of the marché aux puces? Soulless men who, no matter how they tried, saw only Swiss francs and yuan in the brushstrokes of the masters. They would never understand Gabriel. It was futile to try. Rather, give them what they want—eighty-six pieces of art by next week.

  He decided to get one of the pastels out of the way. Mediterranean blue was almost impossible to render without oil paints, but he could try. He layered on the pigment, swirling like he remembered the waves in Febrer. Then he completed the scene, a marketplace near the coast.

  Almost without realizing it, he drew a large figure in the foreground. A woman, selling bread. It was his mother: the waistless apron, the plaits in her hair, her uneven eyes, one lid heavier than the other, always winking.

  No time for nostalgia. An aesthetic assembly line; finish one, on to the next.

  On Saturday Marie-Laure and Didier came to his studio. Gabriel, concentrating, didn’t hear them approach until Didier tapped him on the back, startling him.

  “Sorry, man,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel rested his old-fashioned earphones around his neck.

  Marie-Laure said, “We can’t do it. Figure it takes us at least three hours for each one—”

  “That’s if they’re shitty,” Didier interrupted.

  “And we can only work like max sixteen hours a day. So that’s five per day, max, which is nearly impossible, and there’s three of us and five days. And I promised my boyfriend that I’d do Sunday lunch with his family. Do the math.”

  “I can’t,” said Gabriel.

  “I can’t either,” Didier said. “But I’m working my ass off and we’re not going to finish.”

  “Yeah.” Gabriel put down his brush. He hated watercolors. Something about them seemed so wishy-washy, so like a Sunday painter. The colors were too muted, the lines inexact. “So who should we get?”

  “Hans?” Didier asked. Gabriel nodded. “I’ll text him right now.” Didier busied himself with his phone as he walked out of the room.

  Marie-Laure said, “What about Antoine, on the end?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want the whole studio involved, you know?”

  “Okay …” Marie-Laure said slowly. She clearly didn’t know. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, Gabriel realized. She didn’t care that they were painting cheap knockoffs for money. But he did, and he didn’t want it spread around. Nor did he want to be the rainmaker for the people in the studio. He didn’t even really want Marie-Laure and Didier involved, to tell the truth.

  “What happened to that Russian girl who went to school with us?” he asked.

  “Back to Russia.”

  “What about Lise?”

  “Lise Girard? I just saw her at Didier’s show. Oh, wait, right, you were there. I can find her on the Internet,” Marie-Laure offered.

  “I’ll do it,” Gabriel said. Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? “She’s a good idea, right?”

  Lise had been the expert draftsman (draftswoman?) in their circle. She had specialized in technical drawing; as a teenager she’d considered becoming an architect. During one of their first conversations, in a smoky bar full of American students near the Sorbonne, she told him that to her lines were clearer than words. She saw the world in charcoal and lead, every person, object, and place an outline, shaded, smeared, or cross-hatched into its third dimension.

  “For example”—she picked a piece of tobacco from her lips using her pinkie and her thumb and flicked it away—“right now, in this bar? There are only curves and angles. I could close my eyes and sketch it.”

  “All I see is color,” Gabriel said. “I look around and I see sweaters and jackets and hair and surface texture.”

  “Together, we would make a great painter.” Lise laughed. Her front tooth was turned slightly inward, an imperfection that made her dearer to him, the way that flaws of unrequited love increase its indelibility.

  Lise could render anything, in anyone’s hand, practically effortlessly. Her room had been a shrine to the greats: she had sketches of hunters from the caves at Altamira, Fra Angelico studies, Whistler’s Mother … the lines as sure and exact as if the masters had drawn them. It was part of her final project: a history of the male torso. By copying the style, if not the subject matter, of art history’s most macho protagonists, she subverted their power somewhat, strengthening her own. Gabriel had thought it masterful, though by then he recognized that his judgment concerning Lise was somewhat suspect. Even now, he was motivated by wanting to see what her life was like so many years later.

  Gabriel was not well versed in Internet searches; in fact, the entire world of the computer remained opaque to him. In that sense, he had the perfect job—Édouard’s gallery was run as if they were living contemporarily with the old masters. Sales were recorded in double-entry ledgers. Occasionally, Édouard’s bookkeeper would come by and grumble at the lack of Excel spreadsheets. If Gabriel wanted to use a
computer, he had to go down the street to the seedy café and time his computer usage to the minute so as to avoid extra charges.

  Now, confronted with Google’s French home page, he typed in Lise’s name. It returned more than fifty-five thousand hits. “Lise Girard” was a popular name. He clicked on images, and saw, among an elderly lawyer and a teenager in an inappropriate see-through dress, a tall blonde with a hiking pack on her back, mountains behind her dwarfing her. He clicked on the picture to make it bigger, but Facebook wanted him to join in order to see it. He didn’t like the idea of his personal information being accessible to anyone and everyone. He knew this was silly—he had nothing to steal, and who would want the identity of a fucked-up Spanish artist who owed France Telecom two hundred euros?

  What the hell, he thought, and went back to Google’s home page to create a new e-mail address. Was it a good sign or a bad one that leshiverains@gmail.com wasn’t yet taken? He signed himself up for Facebook, and by the time he was able to navigate back to the picture of what might have been Lise, he had gone over his fifteen minutes and would have to pay an extra five euros.

  When he enlarged the picture he saw that it was indeed her. She had several photos up, including some with what Gabriel thought might be four or five children. It was hard to tell which were repeated in the various photos, so alike did they look. In the photos her eyes had gone starry with crow’s-feet and her freckles had taken over a good portion of her nose. He hadn’t noticed these flaws when he saw her at Didier’s show; makeup had done its trick.

  Had he gone through the same aging process? He was, granted, a bit lumpier than he had been. Not fat, but shaped differently, his belly developing a slackness that was sure to be a pouch should he ever stop drinking so much coffee and start eating regular meals.

  He wrote her a short note saying that it was nice to see her at Didier’s show, thanking her for introducing him to Colette, and letting her know there was money to be made; if she was interested, she should call him. He hated writing in French. He had never taken a formal French class, and the accent marks felt insurmountably arbitrary. Circonflexe, grave, aigu; it was like some strange superlanguage on top of the letters. He felt this way about French in general, and French people. He could understand the basics of conversations, of customs, of conventions, but there was always another level that he failed to grasp, people speaking over his head, looking down on him. But Paris wasn’t really France. Paris was Paris—and it had become his home.

  A small box popped up in the corner and there was Lise, virtually, telling him how glad she was to be back in touch, and, in fact, it was a particularly good time for her since her youngest was now in day care full-time. What was the project?

  Gabriel looked at his watch. There was one minute until he had to pay for another quarter-hour session. He typed, “Can we just meet?”

  “Sure,” Lise responded. “Where?”

  Gabriel replied with the first place that came to his head, their old haunt, the Biche Blanche.

  The Biche Blanche had the advantage of being across the street from the École. It lacked charm and originality, but was convenient and inexpensive, and the waiters let students linger at tables long after others would have cleared their throats to get the squatters to leave.

  The amazing thing about Paris in general, and its cafés in particular, was that they remained outside time. All had identical bistro tables in fake marble, the rounded wooden chairs that were comfortable for no ass. The same large blond Americans, trying to speak French with the pimpled French boys, the insouciant students, too bored even to take a drag from their burning cigarettes.

  Lise was already there when he arrived, reading a large book at a window table. As he recognized her she lifted her head, waving vigorously, so that he smiled. She stood and gave him two kisses which were not really kisses but cheek contact. He noticed she didn’t bother making the kissing noises, and he admired that about her. In the brief seconds their heads were touching, he noticed her lemongrass perfume.

  At first they made small talk. Lise showed him pictures of her children—three, as it turned out—on a smartphone. She seemed very proud of the fact that she took care of the children with no outside help. Two days a week she worked at Ambrosine’s gallery.

  “It’s good. I was actually managing the gallery before the kids. I used to think he was full of shit. He is full of shit, but he’s a genius at recognizing color,” Lise gushed. “You know how everyone always says color in my work is an afterthought? I think I finally get how important it is. Does that make sense?”

  Without prompting, Lise began to tell him about other people they had gone to school with. Most of the names did not conjure up faces in Gabriel’s memory, and some were completely unfamiliar. She was friends with them on the computer, she said, whatever she meant by that.

  Then there was a silence. Gabriel had noticed, in their brief friendship, and during the briefer-still time they were lovers, Lise’s way of asking few questions. At first he had assumed that she understood if he had anything important to say he would tell her, but he came to realize that she was not actually particularly interested in what he was doing or thinking.

  What had he seen in her? he wondered. He mooned for more than a year, despondent when he saw her talking to men at parties, until she cornered him, said she could feel his eyes on her, and would he please stop it? Yes, they had spent one night together, but there was alcohol involved and it was just that once. Gabriel felt hollow inside, his pain so great that he stayed away from school altogether for two weeks. Why? he wondered now. She was just a girl, or rather, now a woman nearing middle age.

  Lise smiled, accentuating the lines spreading from her eyes. “Now, what is this business proposition?”

  Gabriel explained Klinman’s visit.

  “Sounds great!” Lise said.

  Gabriel handed her an envelope full of euros and several sheets of Klinman’s paper in a portfolio.

  “Fantastic. I’m really excited.” She made a show of opening the envelope and removing a bill to pay for their drinks. “I insist. I’ll bring them to Rosenzweig’s after work on Wednesday?”

  “Or I could come by Ambrosine’s.” Gabriel thought it might be a bad idea to have his friends traipsing in to drop off portfolios. Édouard might get suspicious. Her face fell; quickly she recovered her smile. It occurred to Gabriel that she didn’t want him there with his motorcycle boots and ratty secondhand clothing. He felt hot shame curl up into his face.

  Lise said, “Could you come by the apartment? That might be easier.”

  The waiter took the bill away to make change.

  “So I’m, um, painting again,” Gabriel said.

  “Painting! Oh, my God, I just told Ambro that everyone was going to return to painting after plastics. It was the only natural progression. Painting! Both Didier and you. I love being right. You know, I really liked your final project,” Lise said. “I know you took a lot of—” She used a slang word that Gabriel didn’t know.

  “A lot of what?”

  “People criticized it a lot.”

  Gabriel didn’t know that was common knowledge. He always assumed that he was invisible to everyone else. If he wasn’t in the room, he ceased to exist. A thousand times something he said came back to him, proving him wrong, but his self-deprecation resisted logic.

  Hans had called him repressed. That was what his adviser LeFevre had said about his work too. The same day, as if in chorus. He’d argued with Hans—Gabriel had fucked both women and men, he said. He’d had sex on boats, on the beach, with strangers, in chicken coops. Hans said that it was perfectly possible to have repressed sex with both sexes at once, with hermaphrodites and dwarves and Amazons. It was emotional unconstraint he was talking about. Any asshole could do anything with his body if he was high enough. It took true courage to love the person you were sticking it in.

  And then Gabriel had gone back to his studio, where he had an appointment with his adviser. LeFevre had
stood with his hands on his ample hips and frowned before turning to Gabriel and saying, “The subject matter may be daring, but the line is repressed, censured.” And Gabriel had balled his hands into fists, his too-long nails leaving crescent indents in his palms.

  Now Gabriel quoted out loud: “ ‘Gabriel Connois’s work, though technically proficient, is devoid of any recognizable individual style.’ ”

  “Well, that was really petty, in my opinion. Your work was beautiful, organic. I don’t know what happened to aesthetics, but I think they count for something.”

  “Thanks.” Gabriel was embarrassed. He began to wonder if the waiter had thought the large bill was his to keep. “I liked your project too.”

  “You’re sweet.” She touched his arm.

  Finally the waiter tossed the silver tray containing the change down on the table. Lise gathered up all the large coins, sliding them into her jacket pocket. She had never removed her gray coat, and when she leaned back, it retained the shape of her hunched shoulders. “I’ll see you next week then,” she said.

  Gabriel stood up to follow her out, but she was quicker than he, and was out the door before he wove his way through the tables. As he walked toward the métro, he thought about what Lise had said about his work being beautiful. She meant: beautiful, but not profound. His adviser had offered a similar criticism. “It’s not that you’re not talented,” he’d said. “It’s patently obvious that you are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. There’s just not that spark. There’s no passion in your work. There’s competence, originality even, but no inspiration, no voice. I think you’ll find it—I hope you will. Your talent is too big not to, but so far you haven’t reached that place.”

  “And I am supposed to reach this ‘voice’ how?” Gabriel had asked, to his surprise and embarrassment, near tears for the first time in years.