A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 4

  “Excuse me.” He turned to find a woman standing behind him. Her blond hair framed a face slightly older than his, skin taut across its prominent cheekbones. It took him a minute to place her. Lise. He had been so in love with her at school, consumed by thoughts of her. He loved her Frenchness, the unthinking way she was able to summon a check or ask if someone was using a chair without drawing stares or questions, when it felt to him that clearing his throat was announcing his foreignness.

  Last he’d heard she was working as an assistant to Mikhail Ambrosine, a popular painter-turned-gallerist. And had she married? Yes, he’d heard that. Someone not French.

  “It’s okay, I have another foot.” Lise smiled. “How are you, Gabi?”

  Only his mother had ever called him that. When other people used the diminutive it usually annoyed him, but he was happy to hear the familiarity.

  “Fine. Good.” He kissed her on each cheek. Remembering his love for Lise amused him. It had to have been, what, six, seven years since he’d last seen her? Where did people go when they left your mind? When you no longer thought about them daily, weekly, yearly, at all? They ceased to exist for you, but yet their lives went on.

  “How is it possible that in a city as small as Paris we don’t run into each other?” Lise asked.

  Gabriel shrugged. They moved in different circles, that was obvious by her expensive clothing: a black silk sheath that covered one shoulder. The exposed one was freckled and tiny. The dress hung down, skimming her breasts and hips and stopping just above the floor.

  “Have you ever met my husband, Giancarlo? Gio, my old friend from school, Gabi.” The man, who was in his early fifties, looked distracted and slightly bewildered. They shook hands and Gabriel saw that the man wore a diamond ring. Gio’s eyes alit on the bar.

  “What do you want? I’ll go,” Gabriel offered.

  “Thanks,” Gio said, with the gruff trace of an accent. “She’ll have champagne. I’ll have a bourbon.”

  Gabriel fought his way to the bar and found his bartender friend, who quickly filled three drinks. Hans was truly brilliant. Gabriel squeezed through the crowd to find Lise and her husband laughing with a dark-haired woman in a print wrap-around dress.

  He handed the couple their drinks. “What would you like?” he asked the woman. Her features were sharp but attractive; she wore the kind of makeup that looked as though she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all, an unseasonal glow.

  “Are you the waiter?” she asked.

  Gabriel blushed, and Lise introduced them. “This is Colette; she’s at Tinsley’s, you know, the famous auction house. Gabi was one of the best in our class.”

  It was interesting how living for so long in a foreign country had changed Gabriel. If they were conversing in his own language, he might have made a joke or asked a question about her job. But in French, while he could come up with the words, he would probably mangle the grammar. Anything he said would invite a question about his origins, or at least a confused smile while the person parsed his accent. So he said only, “Hello,” kissing her on both cheeks.

  Colette smiled, which made her nose crinkle upward fetchingly. She was darker than a typical Frenchwoman, with curly brown hair she’d pinned back into an unruly chignon.

  Marie-Laure, another classmate with whom Gabriel shared studio space, approached Lise and gave her a hug. The women squealed in excitement to see each other, which left Gabriel and Colette standing awkwardly together. Gio was typing rapidly on his phone.

  “So,” Colette said. “You know Lise from the École?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  The woman stood as if she were smoking, her left hand across her body, her right hand held up in a peace sign, an imaginary cigarette between her fingers.

  Gabriel struggled to think of something to say. “You work at Tinsley’s,” he finally sputtered. “What is your job?”

  “Oh, it’s mostly clerical, though, you know, I went to school in conservation and connoisseurship. We are merely an outpost of the New York house, arranging for European transportation and acquisition.”

  “Old art?” Gabriel said. It was a question, though he didn’t phrase it with the long French interrogative.

  “Mostly. Some contemporary, if it’s well-known, though, you know most of the interesting stuff is coming out of developing countries, or America, not Europe so much. And so much is undisplayable junk, video, or ephemera.”

  Gabriel nodded. He had been a video artist, once upon a time. Colette looked bored. He could see her eyes darting around the crowd.

  Lise and Marie-Laure rescued him. “It’s like an École reunion!” Lise exclaimed.

  “Because we’re all hoping to meet de Treu,” Marie-Laure said. She was dressed like a little girl, in knee socks and a pleated skirt.

  “Or Cosimo de’ Medici,” Gabriel interjected. It came out more glumly than he’d planned, and as he said it he realized he was looking at Giancarlo.

  Lise narrowed her eyes and took her husband’s arm. “Well, I say, good for Didi.” She raised her glass.

  “To Didi,” Marie-Laure echoed. Gabriel drained his glass. He was on his way to being very drunk.

  “Colette, did Gabi tell you that he is a descendant of Connois?”

  “No.” Colette turned to him with renewed interest.

  “Yes,” Lise said. “He does fantastic imitations. Colette is a specialist in Impressionist painting. You’ve handled some Connoises, right?”

  Colette nodded. “How fascinating.”

  Didier came upon the group and kissed everyone on both cheeks. “Thank you so much for coming,” he said earnestly. He was sweating in his tuxedo jacket. “I really—it means so much to me.” Gabriel wasn’t sure if it was the lights or if Didier’s eyes were moist. For some reason, perhaps because of nervousness, this tearing struck Gabriel as irresistibly funny. Involuntarily, he giggled, and an embarrassed silence descended on the group, graver for the noise around them.

  “Well,” Lise said. “We have to pay the babysitter, so …”

  Everyone repeated the kisses to say good-bye, and congratulated Didier again. As Lise leaned into Gabriel, she whispered sternly, “Behave,” like she was scolding a naughty child. He felt his face flush.

  Colette placed a hand on his forearm. “Do you have a card?” she asked.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Here,” she said, presenting him with the postcard of the show, “write down your number. I’d like to talk to you about Connois, if you don’t mind.” A strawberry-scented curl of hair fell in her face as she opened her small pocketbook.

  He wrote down his cell number and she put the postcard in her purse, snapping it tightly and patting it to confirm it held something valuable. “I’ll be in touch,” she said.

  Hans appeared. “Who was that?” he asked. “Pretty, for a Frenchwoman. And was that Lise?” Hans was drunk, slurring his words slightly. “She looks good,” he said. Gabriel couldn’t tell if he was smiling behind his beard. “Are we really in our fucking forties?”

  Gabriel turned to him: “I would like to get blind, stinking drunk.”

  The next day, after slogging, dehydrated and irritated, through work, Gabriel made the trek to his studio. The space was cheap and illegal, so far out beyond the Périphérique that it almost didn’t deserve the title “suburb.” A friend from school had jury-rigged the place, pirating electricity and erecting crude walls of corrugated cardboard.

  Gabriel nodded at Didier, who sat on a supermarket crate near the front door, smoking. Didier had been a part of his life since he arrived in France twenty-one years ago. They weren’t friends exactly, but years of proximity had cultivated a mutual fondness. When Gabriel slipped on the ice outside Galeries Lafayette last winter and hit his head, they wouldn’t let him leave the hospital unless someone came to get him. He called Didier, thanking him by taking him out for a beer.

  If Gabriel hadn’t seen Didier’s finished canvases, he wouldn’t have believed that Didier got anyth
ing done, so often did cigarettes interrupt his day. In fact, Gabriel thought that it would be fairer to say that painting interrupted his smoking. But it seemed to work for him. Gabriel wished, not for the first time, that he was a smoker too, so he’d have something ostensibly productive to do while avoiding painting.

  The air had grown cold now that the sun had set, and Gabriel hugged his arms to his torso and shifted from foot to foot. Didier emerged from the darkness, pushing himself upright from his smoking squat.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” Gabriel replied. He hadn’t expected to see Didier in the studio. If it had been the day after his solo show, Gabriel would be lying in bed, or getting a massage. “Your show was really great.”

  “Thanks,” Didier said hollowly.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” Gabriel said. “I thought you would move out of the studio, you know, after the show.”

  “Not everything sold. What did sell, you know, the commission, materials. I mean, I’m not dirt poor anymore, but it’s not like I’m buying a mansion on Avenue Foch or anything.”

  Gabriel was surprised that he and Didier were still peers. He had expected that Didier’s show would enable real studio space, shows in other countries, attention for his previous work. But it seemed that Didier’s brush with greatness was just that, a slight catch of the wrist, a fleeting touch. Gabriel should have known better than to be surprised, should have known that the art world never simply anoints royalty.

  Didier pinched the end of his cigarette and threw it on the ground. “You look terrible.”

  “I have a hangover.” Gabriel hugged himself tighter. “My work’s going badly.”

  “Sorry, man. That sucks. I’ve been there. But, I mean, work through it. You’ll have a show soon. It’ll be your turn.”

  Gabriel frowned.

  “Seriously, man. I mean, you won the student choice award at the École. You have massive talent. It’ll happen for you. Hey, have you ever sent de Treu your slides? You know, he reps Gutierrez, he might like your stuff.”

  Gabriel was often compared to Gutierrez, a Spanish abstract imagist whose artwork bore nothing in common with Gabriel’s.

  “I’m not really ready,” Gabriel said. “I’m transitioning.” Gabriel never sent out his slides. He considered it akin to hawking his wares on a street corner.

  “Come on, man. You gotta put yourself out there. Otherwise, it’s like some previous century dream of poverty and burning canvas to stay warm. There’s no noble artist anymore, no purity. There’re just working artists, and that’s us, so we work it.”

  Didier patted his pockets to make sure his lighter was secure. “I gotta head back in. Take care, man.” He clapped Gabriel on the back twice and made his way inside.

  Gabriel waited a minute, then followed. Inside, he wound around the maze of walls, the clip lights throwing harsh shadows. It was cold in the studio. Space heaters brought little warmth and tended to blow the electric lines. Fires were sometimes started in barrels, hobo style, but often smoked more than warmed, and tended to draw attention. Usually, the starving artists slaved away in the cold, wearing an unofficial uniform of scarves and fingerless gloves.

  When Gabriel came to his area, it was dark and shadowed. A silhouette of a chair, the can of turpentine, a bouquet of brushes. He stood in the gloom for a moment and looked at his painting. He was painting large scale, much larger than he had at school. Édouard lent him stretchers; canvas was not too expensive; he mixed his own gesso. His paintings were Classical Realist, an evolution of the atelier method taught at the École. They usually showed public French spaces occupied by dozens of French figures who were not French: gypsies, Africans, Arabs.

  After graduation, he thought he had left painting forever. In the rush of new technology, the increased digitalization of the world, he began a series of video installations. There was so much money at the end of the nineties that patrons practically gave him equipment and walls on which to project his art. He’d worked with a computer programmer, synchronizing screens and creating sound pieces to accompany them. But then everyone started manipulating video. His work became passé.

  So he revisited his thesis, a series of canvases. They seemed to him now to show talent, a skill for color and composition, but they were also naïve, the work of someone who had yet to live in the real world. He was not embarrassed by them, but it was like looking at someone else’s work.

  Occasionally he could conjure up that young, idealistic person again, but only in the realm of memory, swift flashes of sentiment that left as quickly as they arrived. He had changed, yes. Had he grown?

  He’d spent a year away from his studio. It made him anxious to hear the industry of all the others in the space. He drank more than he should have. His right motorcycle boot developed a hole that the Russian cobbler couldn’t repair. And then one day he felt like painting again, and he went back to the studio, where nothing had changed, really, everyone still tossing paint at the wall or plastic in the mold, ending up with an anti-aesthetic, ugly and formless. He was rusty. He tried not to judge himself too harshly, but the inner critic was loud and unforgiving.

  It took him six months to paint something halfway decent. Another year to perfect his canvas preparation technique (he liked a surface as smooth as poured resin, a process that required endless gesso and sandpaper).

  Now Gabriel lined up his tubes of paint. He didn’t feel like painting tonight. He felt like lying on a couch and watching an old John Wayne movie on television. He felt like sitting in his mother’s kitchen watching her fry morcilla, hovering above the hearth like a medieval archangel. But he had no television (nor couch, for that matter) and his mother had been dead for a decade. He longed for a home, and that made him angry with himself. An artist thrived on imbalance, on the edge of deprivation, which made him strive for more. Comfort bred complacency. He leaned against the studio wall, which bowed under his meager weight. He straightened, steadied the wall.

  This painting wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure why. It was like a sentence left trailing off. It was like his French: fine, but not eloquent, not quite right. He was calling it La Gare, and it was simply the corner of a nonspecific railway station, a gypsy beggar and a woman having a nervous smoke. He was trying to work mostly with a gray palette, branching out into olives and mauves, but the subjects refused to blend adequately, almost like he had cut out and collaged separate paintings. There was something unfluid about his work. Gabriel’s professor at the École had called it “brutal.” The gallerist he’d convinced to pay a studio visit said it felt “unfiltered, diffuse.” But it wasn’t that. The canvas was somehow always present in his work. Like a helium balloon tethered to a chair, it was never able to transcend its medium.

  When Gabriel was stuck, he liked to copy paintings in his sketchbook. He opened the dog-eared coffee table book he’d bought off the quai for ten euros at the end of a long, rainy day. A plate of Canaletto’s The Feast Day of St. Roch was most interesting because of the trio of figures standing along the canal edge. Though blurry, there was a naturalness to their poses; something had caught their eyes while they were busy with other tasks. A man in robes, two women, one of whom was carrying her shopping. Quickly, Gabriel got absorbed, picking up his pencil and sketchbook. He sat on the high stool and began to draw. He sketched the form of the man, his female neighbor next.

  He hummed nearly silently, “The doge is coming, the doge is coming,” to remember why the figures were staring at the palace, though nothing was happening. “The doge is visiting. It is an important day, a day to keep heads up and eyes bright. A day to shade foreheads to see farther in the setting sun.” Gabriel sketched a sharp shadow, a raised flat hand. “The robes swirl in a sudden gust of wind. The sleeves of the woman puff and undulate. She clutches her basket. She has purchased … a chicken and …”

  His own preparatory sketches looked anemic, incomplete, yet this one, in Canaletto’s style, for Canaletto’s painting, that had already
been long completed, was alive. The lines were fluid, like Canaletto’s, the hand sure, the graphite thick. This was not the way art was done. This was backward, drawing sketches of museum pieces would get him nowhere but the weekend swap at the marché aux puces.

  Disgusted, Gabriel lit a piece of incense, aware that if Marie-Laure were here, she’d yell over the partition. He felt constricted—roommates, studio-mates, boss, even his fucking pants were too tight. Fuck mother-fucking Canaletto.

  Sure enough, Marie-Laure’s tight soprano summited the corrugated walls. “We agreed you wouldn’t light that in here,” she said. “You know it bothers my lungs.”

  And yet the turpentine and oil paints and fixative are mountain air, Gabriel thought. Out loud he said, “Sorry.”

  His phone vibrated. It was a text message, which he had to hold far from his face to read the small letters. “What’s up?” it read.

  It took him several minutes to type out, “Who is this?” Why did everyone think texting was so much faster than calling? He could not get his phone to put in the correct accent marks.

  “Colette :)”

  Was that a sideways smiley face? Still, he sat up straighter. This was an interesting development.

  “What are you up to?”

  He tried to make his fingers hit the small keys, but he kept passing up letters and turning them into numbers. Without meaning to, he pressed call.

  By the time he realized what he’d done it was too late. Colette answered on the fourth ring. She sounded out of breath.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Hello?” Colette said. “Who’s this?”

  “Gabriel,” he identified himself.

  “Oh, hi!” she said. She was someplace loud. The gym? A restaurant? A train station? His left hand worried the seam of his jeans against his thigh.

  Colette let the silence sit over the phone. She was obviously not going to help him. But why would she have contacted him if she didn’t want to see him?