A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

  Elm covered his hands with her own. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m a Tinsley, for chrissake. And as long as I’m here, you’re here.”

  “Yes, okay, Elm, so what if you get moved to some ceremonial post dealing with midcentury African masks or something? And then you can’t protect me. You have a family, another income. I can’t be looking for new employment. Not now.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Elm said. “You’re valued even beyond me. I mean, you’re a valuable employee. And don’t be so sure about the two-income thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Colin said they’re restructuring at Moore.”

  “What does that mean for you two?”

  “No telling.” Elm sighed. She knew Ian could see her worry. He knit his brow into a large V.

  “We’ve got to get our acts together,” Ian said. “We have to quit moping about.” He stopped, realized what he said. Elm’s heart lurched. Was her moping that obvious? Then: a flash of anger. She was just supposed to get over the death of her son? Her face must have registered her reaction because Ian immediately backtracked. “I mean, not that you’re moping, or, I mean, you have something you can mope about. I didn’t mean you at all, I meant me. I’m going to shut up now. Do you understand what I meant?”

  “Yes.” Elm nodded. She did understand. They needed to focus. Maybe that’s what she needed, to concentrate on her work, and maybe then she could move into the next stage of grief, whatever that was. Each new wave felt like he died all over again. She suspected that it would always feel like this, that each year would bring merely innovation instead of diffusion.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said. This was her solution to everything; she volunteered to be in charge. She knew, of course, that not allowing anyone else to help was a pathology that only deepened her disconnect from the world. It entrenched her in a battle with the day; it alienated even her husband. She knew this, and yet she didn’t know how not to feel this way, how to break the pattern.

  Ian, however, was not going to let her. “We’ll fix it, both of us.” She wondered if he was pulling her back into the fold of humanity for her own good, or if he didn’t trust her.

  “How?” Suddenly, there were tears in her eyes. Frustrated tears, she thought. She’d never known how many different kinds of tears there were until Ronan died. Like a parody of the old saw about all the Eskimo words for snow—tears of frustration, of hurt, pain, anger, angst. And there were new tears to discover all the time, vast galaxies of hidden stars and satellites of pain that orbited into view.

  Ian turned up his palms. “We’ll think of something, sweetie. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t,” Elm said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. He hadn’t, really. Tears like these didn’t count.

  Elm rubbed her eyes. “Do you think it’s seemly for me to go home now?” she said. “I’m having … I’m really tired.”

  “Wait for me, we’ll walk out together.”

  Elm turned off her computer and gathered the papers she was going to pretend to look over during the weekend. She spent the week dreading the weekend’s aimlessness, and then she spent the weekend dreading work. She looked at her watch. She could pick up Moira from school instead of letting Wania do it. She could go shopping. She could crawl into bed and read a magazine. None of the options sounded appealing.

  There was soft music playing in the elevator, the same Beethoven symphony that recycled constantly. Elm had written e-mails to the office manager on more than one occasion, begging him to put some Sibelius or Handel into the mix. She did get Handel: the “Hallelujah Chorus” at Christmastime on repeat. She sighed heavily. Ian put his arm around her.

  They stepped into the elevator. “Do you have exciting weekend plans?” he asked.

  Elm shook her head. “You? Hot date?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t gone online yet.”

  Elm laughed obediently. Ian paused. He was lonely, she knew, in a many-friends-no-partner way. She remembered that feeling of swinging trapezelike through her twenties. There was the net if you fell, but no one to link arms with midair. She should invite him over for dinner, or out for a drink, but she didn’t feel like it. Didn’t feel like coming up with witty jibes to match his zingers, to laugh at the jokes he inevitably made at his own expense. She would make it up to him another night.

  He kissed Elm’s cheek. She felt his breath, warm on her neck. His tenderness was so sweet, it was another unexpected thing that brought tears to her eyes. She didn’t bother to wipe them; they wouldn’t spill.

  Gabriel

  He walked past the restaurant once before checking the address and doubling back. What he’d heard as “La Tour de L’Oqueau” was actually El Toro Loco, a tapas place that was trying extremely hard to replicate some fantastic ideal of Spain. Tapas came from the north, País Vasco, and yet this place was a Southern Castilla of the previous century: dark wood, taxidermy, rustic tableware, and mustachioed waiters. Of course the featured beverage would be sangria. No one Gabriel knew drank sangria after age fifteen—cheap wine and 7UP guaranteed a headache. He opened the heavy door and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. He imagined sitting at an ornate table for two with an open bottle of wine and an empty chair across from him. She might very well stand him up. She wouldn’t mean to, but something might come up.

  He began to plan for this contingency. He would pretend like he always dined alone. He’d drain the bottle of wine, order a few pintxos, and nonchalantly drop the cash on the table before leaving, trying to convince himself that adults did this—they dined alone. It was not pathetic. It was independent.

  And then his pupils finally dilated and there she was, at a table near the entrance, head down and hair falling into her lap, bent over her phone.

  “Hey,” he said. She looked up and he felt his chest constrict. Her eyes sparkled. She had put on smoky eye makeup, à la Edie Sedgwick, and painted her lashes impossibly long. Had she done this for him?

  “Hey,” she said, sounding surprised, as if they’d just bumped into each other instead of arranging to meet here. She put her phone into her large leather bag, slumped at her feet like a cat.

  Gabriel leaned forward to kiss her cheek and she politely presented each side to him. He sat and removed his leather jacket, then put it back on when he noticed that the other diners were dressed in button-down shirts.

  There was a silence while Colette rearranged her silverware. “Is this place okay?” she asked. “I just thought of it while we were on the phone. My friend brings clients here sometimes and then we hung up and I thought, That’s so stupid, bringing a Spaniard to a Spanish restaurant. It’s bound not to be any good.”

  “It’s fine.” Gabriel smiled. “It’s like home!” His voice lilted.

  She frowned, not sure if he was being sarcastic. The waiter came by and handed Gabriel an enormous, leather-bound wine list. He chose a bottle at random, a Rioja that was neither the most expensive nor the least expensive.

  “Very good, sir.”

  “How come you didn’t talk to him in Spanish?” Colette asked.

  “I think he’s Albanian.”

  She looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue the conversation.

  The bottle of wine arrived, interrupting their silence. The waiter showed Gabriel the bottle, and Gabriel bent close to it in the darkened restaurant, pretending the words meant something to him. They both watched the aproned man, neat mustache, biceps divulging a past life as a laborer or an athlete, insert the corkscrew and pull the cork out. It gave way with a satisfying pop. Gabriel saw with satisfaction that Colette jumped, just a little bit. Or flinched.

  “To art.” She raised her glass.

  He took a sip. She swirled her wine inside the glass, her wrist moving barely perceptibly, but forcing the liquid into undulations against the sides, churning red waves.

  He knew that if he tried to copy her effort, he would spill drops onto t
he white tablecloth that would haunt him for the rest of the meal, like spots behind his eyes after he’d unadvisedly looked at the sun.

  Colette was talking now, and Gabriel was nodding, listening but not really hearing. She talked quickly and had a small endearing lisp that made it hard for him to understand the specifics of what she was talking about. Now, for example, he knew she was relating a story that was supposed to be unbelievable, he could tell by the way she paused dramatically to inhale, eyes wide and head bobbing as if to encourage belief. No, really, her eyes said, blinking rapidly.

  She blew smoke away with the hand that was holding a cigarette, not clearing the air much at all. The lit butt followed her at all times, a firefly punctuating her sentences. Would she lose her charm when the smoking ban went into effect? Gabriel wondered. Or would it simply transfer to another expressive tic, like buttoning and unbuttoning a sweater, or worrying her clamshell telephone?

  Tonight she wore more elaborate makeup—her eyelids had a sheen to them and her mouth was painted a bright red. The story finished in a burst of giggles, which Gabriel mimicked. He had gotten used to only half understanding his surroundings. He liked the remove his foreignness gave him. Sometimes, being outside of a culture was like having a one-way window into other people.

  He was free to contemplate her in a way that was completely visual. What did her cheeks do when she inhaled? How did her shoulders react to a touch or a perceived slight? Examining a person became part of a narrative he continually constructed, that he always wanted to put in his paintings but emerged only in his drawings, his derivative drawings, his Connois and Canaletto homages. Someday, he would work that sense of completion into his real work, when the pendulum swung away from abstraction and confession/expression and back toward observation and the notion of the artist as a commentator on modern society.

  “Do you want to order for me?” she asked. “I don’t know what any of this is, anyway.”

  “Um, okay.” Gabriel felt a quick, airless second of panic, then he settled. “Do you not like anything?” As soon as he said the sentence, he realized he’d said, “Don’t you like anything?”

  But Colette graciously or unconsciously ignored the fault and said, “I’m French. I eat whatever doesn’t eat me first.”

  “So you trust me?”

  “Implicitly,” she said.

  When the waiter came by their table Gabriel ordered paella for two, with mariscos, and a beet salad and some sausage and dates to start. The waiter took the menus and Colette sighed with relief; now there was room for her elbows.

  He took a gulp of wine, feeling courage well up in him in inverse proportion to the sinking alcohol. He said, “You look beautiful.”

  She smiled, pursed her mouth as if to deflect the compliment. Then she sat back in her chair. “Where are you from in Spain?”

  “Near Barcelona.”

  “Barthelona,” she mimicked his accent. “Hmmm, I liked it there. It was … God, this will sound stupid. It was very Parisian.” She laughed.

  Gabriel smiled. “No, I see it,” he said. “Large boulevards, old, parks, cafés …”

  “Well, I meant more like, when you study art, you get an idea of a place. My idea of Barthelona—” She paused.

  “Very good,” he said.

  “—was from Picasso and Dalí and Miró.”

  “Picasso was barely from here. There.”

  “I know,” she said. “Which is why I should have expected that his Barcelona would look like Paris. But, I didn’t.”

  “Have you always lived in Paris?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Can’t you tell by my accent?” Gabriel shook his head. She continued, “You know Parisians, unless you’re born here you might as well be from Mars. I’m from Chalon-sur-Saône. Do you know it?”

  He shook his head again, contemplating her assessment of Parisians. So she too understood the continuing alienation of being a foreigner. Apparently her accent, which he couldn’t hear, branded her as an outsider too. He wanted to take her hand, but resisted.

  “Nobody does,” she said. “It’s completely without interest. My father owns a smoke shop.” Colette pointed to her cigarette as if it were the natural result. She stubbed it out in the silver ashtray. It was an ingenious contraption that when lifted released the ash and the butt inside. “And what do your parents do?” she asked.

  “My mother baked bread for the market, sold things,” he said. “My father played the guitar. He died when I was young.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She shook her arm; a tinkling cascade of bracelets fell to her wrist. “How, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “No,” he said. “It was strange. He died of mushroom poisoning.”

  “Seriously?” Colette asked.

  Gabriel nodded, though his father had died of a heart attack. But he liked this story better. “He was very passionate about mushrooms, and he was never wrong when identifying them. I think someone tried to poison him.”

  “You’re lying to me,” Colette said, hitting his forearm.

  The waiter deposited the appetizers in front of them. When Gabriel motioned that she should serve herself, Colette reached over and took exactly half of each.

  She hummed approval. “This is delicious. Is this really what the food is like?”

  “Sort of,” Gabriel said. “I can’t really explain it. It’s all the same ingredients. It just has a taste that is different. Tomatoes taste different in Spain. So do beets.”

  “It’s like going to a French restaurant in America,” Colette said. “The food there is totally inedible. Have you spent much time in New York?”

  “No,” Gabriel admitted. “I don’t travel much.” In fact, he had never left Europe.

  “I go for Tinsley’s quite often,” Colette said.

  Before Gabriel could comment, the paella arrived and the waiter presented it to them before scraping the contents of the pan onto two plates, including the burned-crisp bottom layer of rice that Gabriel loved.

  They ordered another bottle of wine. Colette’s eyes grew glassy and her lips a tad floppy, stained from her drink. He wondered if she might go home with him, or he with her. A wave of longing overtook him that was so acute he nearly choked, and took a large swallow of wine to hide the frisson. A silence fell while they ate. He wanted to keep her here, at this table, buzzed with liquor, in a sort of suspended animation. He knew the spell would be broken, even as the waiter reappeared to take their plates, and so he ate slowly, excruciatingly slowly, as if he could somehow stall time and extend the moment.

  He watched as she put down her fork to light another cigarette. She waved the smoke away from their table. Maybe it was the wine, but now he didn’t find the silence uncomfortable. He wondered if she did. Should he say something? No, he decided. He was not going to make conversation for conversation’s sake. That was what bobos did. Artists didn’t have to conform to those conventions. It was one of the few perks.

  She tapped her ash in the clever ashtray.

  “I’m done,” she announced, and pushed the half-full plate closer toward Gabriel. “Too much food for me!”

  Gabriel finished his plate. Then he ate the rest of hers. No sense in letting it go to waste, and he was hungry. In fact, he felt empty.

  When he finally set down his fork, she stubbed out her cigarette and, by lifting her head, summoned the waiter.

  She demanded the check in the typical French way, which had the trappings of politesse—the conditional verb, the s’il vous plaît, the honorific monsieur that dripped of condescension. There were parts of French culture that he would never master. Spaniards asked for the check in full recognition that the waiter’s job was to bring it, which implied neither servitude nor gratitude. No class wars were played out in restaurants.

  Gabriel counted out the bills slowly, attempting to hide them under the table. It was easily the most expensive meal he’d ever eaten. Colette didn’t offer to split it.

  “We’ll have coffee a
t my place,” she said. “I don’t live far.”

  They walked back along the Avenue de New York. When Colette slipped on a stone, tottering on her heels, Gabriel grabbed her arm and felt the give of her flesh. When you touched someone you were attracted to, why was it different from touching a stranger on the street? Was the difference in the touch itself, the pheromones that the other person gave off? Or was the excitement all in the mind—did the brain send signals to the arm hairs to tingle, the webs of the fingers to itch, the toes to curl?

  They turned down a street he didn’t know. She unlocked the front door, and without a word, without turning on the stairway light, she walked in front of him up the stairs.

  Her apartment was an efficiency, tidy and compact. On her walls she had framed vintage Tinsley’s catalog covers. There was a red velvet love seat and a bed. He sat on the love seat.

  Colette turned on the electric kettle. Then she sat down next to him and turned her face to his. When her lips met his, Gabriel let her take the lead, keeping his hands on her hips.

  The kettle clicked off and Colette pulled away. She spoke for the first time in minutes. “How do you take it?”

  “With sugar.”

  As she was making the coffee, her phone rang. She answered it and began to chat, using so much slang and speaking so quickly that Gabriel had trouble understanding what she was saying. She was talking to a good friend, that much he knew, because she called the person pote, an old-fashioned word that meant “mate” or “buddy.”

  Still talking, she set a tray with coffee and biscotti down on the love seat and then went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Gabriel sipped at the coffee. Her voice went quiet. What was she talking about in there? Hadn’t they come back to her place to screw? Gabriel felt suddenly confused by the evening. Had he completely misinterpreted her signals? He decided to wait until she came back, and then say a quick good-bye.