A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t know,” LeFevre said. “Think about what moves you. What frightens you. Access the place you don’t want to go.”

  “So now you’re a psychiatrist.”

  “That’s exactly the kind of defensive attitude that is apparent on your canvases. I’ve taken you as far as I can.”

  Asshole, thought Gabriel now. All that French psychobabble. If LeFevre didn’t like the work, why didn’t he just say so? Gabriel had been so proud of his final series of canvases, a pictorial essay on the travels of water. The paintings had turned out rather more conceptual than he would have expected his “research” to produce, but he was commenting on color and reflection, and no one seemed to understand that.

  And then video. No one really knew how to judge it, and he gained a foothold in the community without really understanding what he wanted to accomplish, now that he looked back on it. He was still obsessed with color, with the screen as canvas. He loved the graininess of the images—exactly what he was trying to get away from with his glass-smooth canvases now. He also loved the space between the images, found that to be the place where he felt most comfortable. Then he just … lost interest. When everyone moved to solid sculpture (plastic, resin), he moved on to film, making Super 8 reels and blowing up the negatives as stills, drawing on them. A sentence in Paris Match about his work in a group show called it “more interesting than its surrounding pieces.” Not exactly a rave, but it could have been worse, coming from that critic, known as a poison pen.

  And now he was back to painting, as though he had returned to the beginning of his career. He was reconvening schoolmates to create the camaraderie that didn’t exist the first time around. It felt like starting over.

  Gabriel looked at the address Lise had written down for him. He had never really been to the neighborhood known only by its victory-arch landmark: La Défense. The streets were cleaner here, wider. No clochards begged for change; tourists were absent. The boulevard was filled with midrange prix fixe bistros, punctuated by an authentic-looking Japanese restaurant and an upscale Chinese noodle shop.

  He should have brought his Paris de Poche. He wasn’t sure where to find the street, and surely none of the upper-class mothers pushing their prams would answer him, dressed as he was. He went back down into the métro to look up the street on the map.

  As he walked, he wondered what Lise’s life must be like. He hadn’t quite guessed she’d be living such a bourgeois existence. How could you go from studying art at France’s most prestigious school to living this far outside the action? She had fallen victim, then, to the vicissitudes and trappings of success. That made sense. The fancy phone, the job at Ambrosine’s. It all fit into a neat little bobo package. Maybe she wasn’t embarrassed by him. Maybe she wanted him to come to her apartment to seduce her, to get a little excitement of the art world that her life now lacked.

  There was an elevator attendant. That was rich; someone whose job was to press buttons all day. The cage rose slowly to the seventh floor. The attendant bowed as he held the door open. Gabriel stepped onto the landing and pulled the knocker on Lise’s front door, letting it fall back to its cradle.

  A very small person answered the door. He was blond like Lise, with streaks of Nutella on his face. Behind him loud children’s music was playing: synthesizer piano and high-pitched melodies. A small white dog turned circles, yipping excitedly.

  “Hello,” Gabriel said.

  “Maman!” the child yelled.

  Lise came around the corner, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Hey, Gabi, this is … Oh, for … Look at this.” She grabbed the little boy’s face and turned his head toward the door. “There are fingerprints on the door. Geraldine was just here. Go get a towel.”

  The little boy ran off. Lise shook her head. “Come in, Gabi. I’m sorry if the place is a mess.” She used the slang word for mess: bordel, the same word that had so confused him when he first arrived in France and couldn’t figure out why everyone claimed to live in a whorehouse. The living room was spacious, a thousand shades of white, and smelled sweetly chemically of new paint. The furniture was modern alto disegno—Noguchi tables, Eames chairs, a Nelson Home desk, a Mies van der Rohe bench, as if she’d received a bulk discount at a modernist design store.

  Reading his face, Lise laughed a little. “Giancarlo’s father was a design instructor at Iuav in Venice. He collected pieces.… Don’t make fun.”

  “I wasn’t,” Gabriel said. “This is amazing.” He walked toward the window; the apartment looked over the Boulevard Maurice Barrès for a full view of the Bois de Boulogne. The white dog panted at his feet, pink tongue hanging too long out of its mouth. Gabriel toed it away with his shoe.

  “Well?” Lise turned on a lamp next to the sofa. “Would you like coffee? I’ll make some.”

  Gabriel nodded and Lise disappeared into the kitchen. He looked around the room. A dining table, flat-screen television with hidden wires, an intricately pocketed coffee table. He opened one of the drawers to find a remarkable remote-control collection. There were photos on the mantel of the vestigial fireplace. Gabriel crept closer to look at them.

  Lise’s family at Euro Disney, at Chamonix, at someone’s house in the country. Gaggles of children piled in laps, smiling at the camera. Lise at someone’s wedding: A sister? A cousin? Early teenage years, dressed in a long, flowing pink gauze dress, arms folded, shoulders hunched forward to hide nascent breasts, hair straggly. Lise and Giancarlo at a scenic overlook, maybe somewhere in Italy, Lise’s face tanned, her chest freckly, and her nose beginning to peel, Giancarlo looking off behind the photographer with a surprised and pleased expression, as though he were seeing someone he knew unexpectedly.

  Gabriel felt like a detective on an American television show. He was looking for a problem, something off, a Photoshop mistake that would reveal the entire hoax. But he knew he would find nothing. Lise had real photos of her childhood, trips, birthdays, etc. Gabriel had only his memories and one photograph, the low-quality colors fading into oranges and reds, of his parents posed stiffly on their wedding day. That was it. The sum total of his past: one kitschy photo and a gaggle of memories. And his name. Maybe talent, if he had any.

  Lise reappeared with a plastic tray that Gabriel recognized as IKEA circa 2001. He could hear the cars outside honking as they entered the intersection, the horns muted through the windows. Lise went over and opened one slightly, hooking the handles together so the panes wouldn’t bang. The horns immediately got louder, drowning out the cloying baby music, and a cold breeze blew in, smelling faintly of fish.

  In another room a child began to cry. “Be right back,” Lise said.

  There was no sugar, so Gabriel put three small disks of sugar substitute into his coffee and sipped it. It was too sweet, sickening. He debated sneaking into the kitchen to pour it out, but in front of him, staring at him, was the same little person who had opened the door.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m Gabi,” he said. “An old friend of your mother’s.”

  “You talk funny. Are you foreign?”

  Gabriel nodded and tried not to be offended. Now that he had a chance to examine the child, he wasn’t sure it was a boy after all. He’d had so little experience with children that he wasn’t sure how to tell how old they were, or what it was appropriate to talk to them about. Plus, it always felt odd that someone who had lived in France—lived on the planet—fewer years than he should speak the language with much greater fluency.

  “Which foreign?”

  “I’m Spanish.”

  “My father’s Italian.” The child picked at the fringe on a throw blanket.

  “I know.”

  Gabriel shifted uncomfortably. The conversation appeared to have hit a dead end.

  “But you don’t talk as weird as he does.” Gabriel felt a silly flush of pride. Why was he in competition with Giancarlo? To live in this suburban aerie working a soulless job and raising some brats?

  Lise came back i
nto the room carrying a parcel wrapped expertly in brown paper. “Here they are,” she said. “Do you want to look at them? Oh, you’re talking to Gabi?” She held another child on her hip. This one’s face was wet with tears, and he/she was making small hiccup noises. Lise balanced the package on a chair.

  “He talks funny like Papa.”

  “Maybe you talk funny? Did you ever think about that?” She smiled and bent to tickle the child’s ribs. It giggled and ran out of the room.

  “My six-year-old,” Lise explained.

  Gabriel knew he was supposed to say something like “So cute” or “How precious,” but he wasn’t sure how to do so without revealing that he didn’t know the child’s gender, so he just smiled.

  “I’ll look,” he said.

  He unwrapped her package. The drawings were good, remarkable likenesses of Ganedis, his soft lines, his domestic subjects. There were the requisite charcoal still lifes, and a gouache of the child he’d just been talking to wearing a yellow dress and holding the small white dog.

  “Coffee’s no good?” Lise asked. She slid the child down her leg and it landed on its feet, rubbing its face into the back of her knee.

  “I put too many sugars in,” Gabriel said.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot to warn you. Saccharine. I’ll get you another one.”

  “It’s okay,” Gabriel said. “I should get going.”

  “Thanks for coming by. I’m sorry it’s so chaotic here. You must think my life is hugely boring. That’s because it is.” She sat down and the baby climbed up her, sitting on her lap and burying its face into her neck. She instinctively hugged it and began to rock. What would it be like, Gabriel wondered suddenly, to have something love you that much? He felt an urge to join them in an embrace.

  As he left her apartment, with its overpriced furniture and the small fingerprints on the preposterous white walls, Gabriel felt he should pity Lise for what she had become. And yet she seemed so at home in her world, far more content than he was in his. And while she could dabble in his world, work in an art gallery, create just enough to call herself an artist, he would be as lost in hers as if he’d been asked to join a troupe of circus acrobats. He was completely unsuited for a life of convention, unable to imitate it, let alone desire it.

  He’d lost Lise, that was patently obvious. And she was not the only one. A phenomenon he’d noticed on the far side of forty was his growing disdain for all his former friends. So many of them had made such boring conventional choices: marriage, children. Most were no longer making art; one had gone to law school, another worked for some sort of graphic design firm. He remembered the long nights, drinking red wine from a screw-top bottle that stained everyone’s teeth red, being told by neighbors to shut the fuck up for chrissake, talking about art like characters out of La Bohème. When was the last time he had a real meaningful conversation about art? Or anything more substantive than who was showing where and what vitamins everyone was taking? If this was what it meant to be middle-aged, then Gabriel vowed to forgo it.

  On Friday, Klinman met Gabriel at the gallery before it opened. Gabriel spread out the best of the art he and his École had drawn on Édouard’s light table. Édouard never came in before ten, so he and Klinman had an hour or so to go over them. Though Klinman’s expression remained stoic, Gabriel could tell by the way his eyes crinkled in the creases that the drawings, watercolors, and pastels were satisfactory. Gabriel’s shoulders opened up and he stood straighter.

  Klinman looked at the drawings carefully. He lingered approvingly over the pastel Gabriel was proud of, but then he turned to the next drawing and saw Gabriel’s mother repeated in a sketch. “This is the same woman, in both drawings.”

  “Sometimes Connois drew from the same models.”

  Klinman nodded. He also paused over Lise’s gouache of her child with that yippy white dog. He pointed.

  “Ganedis,” Gabriel said.

  Klinman nodded his approval. At the bottom of the pile, Gabriel had included his take on a Piranesi arch as well as a Canaletto plaza scene.

  “What are these?” Klinman asked.

  “Oh.” Gabriel was slightly embarrassed. “There were a few extra sheets of paper, and because they were so beautiful, I drew on them. It’s not the style you asked for, but it was so pretty.…” Gabriel was scared. Klinman’s expression was of rapt concentration on the drawings.

  “Might you be free on Sunday?” Klinman asked. “I have an idea. I would like you to come for a drink.”

  He wrote down an address in the Marais.

  “What time should Colette and I be there?”

  “Not Colette. Just you,” Klinman said. He took the art, placed it carefully in the portfolio, and left without saying good-bye.

  The bar Klinman had chosen was attempting to mimic a living room. It was decorated with low, ornate sofas, purple velvet worn through, and embroidered armchairs. Mirrors and candelabra adorned the walls. Klinman ordered a scotch, so Gabriel ordered one too. He was unused to the taste; he took large, infrequent gulps while Klinman sipped daintily. He was hungry, but didn’t want to order something to eat. It was sure to be expensive and tiny.

  Klinman was appraising him, looking him up and down. Gabriel was dressed inappropriately for the occasion, as usual. Though they were in the Marais, ground zero for hipsters and artists (wealthy hipsters, successful artists), everyone else seemed to be wearing couture while Gabriel was sporting thrift-store chic. He was the only one without a jacket in the bar, and certainly the only one wearing shit kickers instead of loafers.

  Klinman’s clothes, on the other hand, came straight from the set of a 1940s film, a three-piece pin-striped suit that clung to him like he’d recently outgrown it, his barrel chest swelling beneath the fabric.

  “So where in Spain are you from?” Klinman asked in Spanish.

  “How many languages do you speak?” Gabriel responded in Spanish, taken aback. The scotch was warming in his stomach and the room had taken on sepia tones, reflecting off the mirrors and ormolu.

  Klinman laughed. He reverted to French. “My Spanish is terrible, rusty. But I am good at two things.” He let his head fall back, searching the ceiling for words and then staring again at Gabriel. “No, three. I am good at communicating. Languages, puf, they just make sense to me. I am good at judging character. And I know art. My grandfather was a portrait painter to the aristocracy before they took his life. I inherited his eye, though not his talent. You, it seems, have inherited both.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I hoped that by now I would be better.”

  “Paris.” Klinman pronounced the city the English way. “What is Paris? And now they say it’s all about Berlin. Tomorrow it’ll be about somewhere else. At some point it will be someone else’s turn, besides Europe. You, Monsieur Connois, have a choice.”

  Klinman stopped speaking. He removed a cigarette from a silver holder and offered it to Gabriel, who shook his head. With affected slowness, he removed a lighter from his breast pocket. It looked heavy, in the shape of a lion whose mouth emitted fire. Its eyes were stones. Emeralds? Topaz? Glass? Klinman took another sip of his drink and then a long drag on the cigarette.

  “I have high blood pressure,” he said. “I allow myself two a day. You don’t smoke?”

  Gabriel shrugged. Klinman nodded his head. “Hmmm,” he said, as though this revealed something important about Gabriel.

  There was a long pause. “Your choice, señor, is the following: make art, or make money. Maybe you will make money with art. Not likely. Maybe you will make art with money. More likely. It’s up to you.”

  “I don’t understand.” Gabriel wasn’t sure if he wasn’t following the thread or if the man was not making sense.

  “You are dating Colette. She likes fancy restaurants. And maybe you’ll fall in love with her, and will want to make French babies. French babies wear couture, have you not noticed? They eat organic vegetables. Not inexpensive.” Klinman opened his wallet and threw a few euros down on
the table. “Come, I have something to show you.”

  Gabriel had a brief moment of fear that Klinman was going to take him somewhere and expose himself. That had happened to him once, with a gallery owner, right after he got to Paris. The man actually said, “Would you like to see my etchings?” And Gabriel had followed him into the back room, where the man turned around, fly open, half-erect cock waving. But Klinman’s interest seemed solely artistic and avuncular.

  They wove through the Marais, cutting across the Rue Bourgeois. The shops here were chic; their front bay windows abutted the tiny sidewalk, displaying mannequins that suggested figures rather than imitated them. Whimsical children’s furniture, a store devoted only to men’s cravats, heavy modern jewelry. Above the stores were the minuscule apartments of the old quarter, slanted floors and hallway bathrooms. Some were still occupied by elderly Jews who had returned after the war. The smaller side streets sold kosher food, hid yeshivas. From some second-story windows emanated Sephardic music, plaintive Moroccan wailing. Some of the other apartments held squatters: artists more interested in the bohemian lifestyle than in art. If they were real artists, they would live outside the city, as Gabriel did, in a rented room, with a separate studio. And the Marais was also the new place for wealthy Americans (“new money,” Édouard called it, using the English words).

  They turned left onto a small side street and were in the garment district. The sidewalks were wider here, but no less crowded. Though the racks of clothing seemed to part for Klinman, they closed back up immediately, so that to follow him Gabriel kept having to dodge mobile wardrobes and cudgels of cloth.

  Finally, Klinman ducked into a large courtyard. Flagstones surrounded a fountain in the middle, where the wan light drifted down from the cloudy sky. The fountain had obviously been functional rather than decorative at one time. The spray rose and then dripped down a symmetrical spindle with a wide base.

  “This is my office. Paris office,” Klinman said, waving at the portière. He led them straight across the courtyard and pulled a set of antique-looking keys from his pocket. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, hurrying to turn off an alarm on the far wall. When he flipped the lights, they were thrown back in time.