A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

  Gabriel wanted to sell Febrer when his father’s arthritis had set in and playing the guitar became nearly impossible. Gabriel’s father was a proud man with a face that gravity had claimed. His eyes had sunken into the flesh of their sockets, jowls swollen like wet laundry. He continued to give music lessons, but by then they’d moved to the pueblo, abandoning their apartment in the city. They were poor, their neighbors poorer. Gabriel made some money selling his drawings to wealthy weekenders at the markets, and his mother began making pastries for special occasions, but still money was tight.

  Gabriel must have suggested it a thousand times. Each time his father said it belonged to his mother and she said it was out of the question. After his father’s fatal heart attack, Gabriel and his mother often went hungry. He found her crying one day in the kitchen, an empty bag of flour at her elbow. “We’ll sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell it and this can be over.”

  His mother wiped her eyes. “This painting is a part of our family. Selling it would be like selling a child, or trading a grandparent.”

  “We know it so well,” Gabriel said. “If we want to see it, we can remember it, exactly like it was.”

  “It’s not the same.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you. You are an artist. You have all the talent of your ancestor, and yet you don’t see the value.”

  “It’s because I’m an artist that I do see the value,” Gabriel said. “It’s a piece of cloth with some decorative oil. We need to eat. You should see the doctor. I need material to paint with. It’s not like we’d destroy it. It’ll just be on a different wall.”

  “There is sustenance more important than food.” She crossed herself. Gabriel was rendered speechless by the illogic of faith.

  When the scholarship letter arrived, Gabriel debated whether to tell his mother. He knew she would insist he go to France. It had been her dream to visit Paris, to see her great-grandfather’s work hanging in the musée.

  As he predicted, she was overjoyed. He had to stop her from packing his suitcase that very moment, and she insisted they open the bottle of French wine that she’d been saving since her wedding day. It was vinegar, but Gabriel drank it down. The alcohol moistened her eyes. “I know you have his talent,” she said. “I hope that they will recognize it.

  “My grandfather gave us the painting for our wedding. He had inherited it from his father. He was old then, and nearly sightless, but he came in a chair pushed by his young wife and he gave us Febrer and kissed my forehead. It was a love match, your father and me.”

  “I’ve heard this story,” Gabriel said softly. The kitchen was lit low, one bare bulb. The cabinets he’d known for most of his life, the rustic chairs, the icon of baby Jesus that hung over the large farm sink, the chipping floor tile, were as familiar as the curve of his knee, the jut of his hip bone.

  “And then we waited fourteen years for you. We had given up hope, though not faith.” Gabriel rolled his eyes in anticipation of yet another retelling of the story. Each year on his birthday she forced him to go pray at the altar of the Virgin to celebrate the miracle of his birth.

  She stood and untied her apron, framed by the light. She was lumpy and formless in her widow’s dress, her ankles swelling over the tops of her shoes like overly leavened bread. Her hair in its braid had gone mostly white, and one eyelid drooped a bit. And yet he thought her beautiful, and hugged her from behind while she washed the plates, feeling the rolls of her stomach, and decided that his plan to deceive her was genius, not knavery.

  He spent the summer in the converted woodshed, painting. Every morning he drank coffee in the kitchen, looking at Febrer while his mother kneaded dough for the pastries she would sell at the market. So many coffees that he thought he would begin to convulse with caffeinated anxiety. When she left for the market, he took the painting into the shed to study it closer, careful always to return it before she arrived to make supper. Each evening it hung in the fading daylight, its varnish reflecting back the staticky black and white of the television, tuned to an American sitcom, his mother’s laugh drowning in the dubbed laugh track.

  Then one day he took Febrer to his woodshed studio and turned it over. He removed the nails from the frame and exposed the canvas. Connois had painted two centimeters above what was visible through the frame. He must have known the edges would be lost, and yet this part of the painting was as worked as the rest. This was not an expression of meticulousness or perfectionism. It was simply a part of the painting, regardless of whether or not anyone would see it, and deserved the same level of care.

  Gabriel pried the staples from the stretcher and the canvas sagged with relief. He rolled it carefully, trying not to crack the paint, and placed it in a tube he had stolen from the stationery store. Then he turned to his painting, the one he had been working on all summer. It wasn’t quite dry; August’s humidity stalled the oil, but it would work. He stretched the canvas over the supports and hammered the staples back in. Then he reframed the painting, careful to mimic the small space where the frame’s right angles didn’t quite meet.

  He was in the kitchen when his mother came home. “Gabriel,” she called. “Oh, there you are. Are you very hungry tonight?”

  Gabriel shook his head. His insides were as agitated as though he were traveling on the waves of the painting. Would she notice?

  She set about the business of dinner, peeling potatoes and cutting tomatoes to spread their innards on thick pieces of bread. Gabriel heard the click of the salt container’s top snapping open and closed, but his gaze was fixated on the painting. He stared at it so long and intently that the landscape ceased to resemble any recognizable vista and became a jumble of intermingling colors and shapes. It was like a tangle of thread; if he tried to follow one brushstroke or one color, he confused it with another layer of pigment and texture.

  “What’s wrong with you?” his mother asked. “I think the woodshed is not a good place for a studio. Too hot. And too much coffee; you’re dehydrated.”

  He turned his head to smile absently at her.

  “Febrer changes for me as well.” She served him potatoes. “Depending on my mood, I project onto it, almost like I am the painter. Today it looks shinier, more alive.”

  “I cleaned it,” Gabriel said impulsively. “As a present to you before I leave. I cleaned the surface so it’s like a new painting. Don’t let anything touch it for a couple of weeks until the new varnish has a chance to dry.”

  Tears rimmed his mother’s eyes. She said nothing. Not “Oh, thank you!” as he thought she would, nor “You shouldn’t have bothered,” nor “I’ll miss you so much.” He wondered if she knew, if she suspected. Impossible. It was a nearly perfect copy, and she would have noticed right off if it weren’t exact. If he could fool her, she who knew the painting better than anyone in the world, then he was indeed as talented as she claimed he was, as the school in France thought he might be. He might even be as talented as his great-great-grandfather.

  When he got to Paris, he approached Sotheby’s with the canvas. He told the story truthfully, and was lucky enough to have arrived just as the art market was hitting its peak. Houses couldn’t afford to be too thorough in checking provenances. The house verified the painting’s age through forensic testing and Febrer was put up for auction in a group of minor Impressionists, under “École des Hiverains, artist unknown.” It still sold for more money than Gabriel had expected. He sent his mother all of it, telling her he’d sold one of his paintings. In a sense, he had. The more he thought about it, the more he believed it himself, until it became as much a fundamental truth as the bitterness of coffee or the hot stink of the Parisian métro. He had sold his first Connois.

  Elm

  Mrs. Schmidt’s drawings returned authenticated. Several times, minor copies (or forgeries, it was impossible to know) crossed Elm’s desk. She could always tell—the lines lacked the natural progression, the logic of the artistic mind. Where an artist’s charcoal would fly across the paper, gathering
speed in the weave and bumps of the pulp, the copyist’s was hesitant, looking back to check on its progress. The artist’s work was freer; those who followed in his footsteps were always a step behind.

  Even though clear forgeries were often obvious, people still tried to sneak them into auctions. Their provenances were sketchy—they were discovered in an attic or behind an old painting or in a flea market—or even nonexistent. The perspective was off, or the material was wrong, or it contained other anachronisms. Elm once saw smoke rising from an industrial chimney in the background of a Blavoin, even though the artist worked before the industrial revolution and lived, famously, secluded in the provinces. Terrified of horses, he traveled only on foot, and therefore never left his township, nestled in the foothills of the Alps, far from any such smoke. This willful disregard for scholarship offended Elm, even as she laughed at it. It was insulting that someone would think her that stupid, though she knew specialists and departmental directors often were. She had seen obvious misattributions (the euphemism for fakes) fool good eyes and wind up in private collections.

  Elm was not supposed to voice her suspicions. First of all, it was bad for business. Too many items pulled from auctions because of suspect authenticity gave houses a reputation they didn’t want. Second, it was bad to be the whistle-blower. Also, unless Elm had the opportunity to examine the drawing under the loupe, she really couldn’t be sure. And, of course, if the purchaser enjoyed his “Brueghel” or his “Delacroix,” who was she to rain on his parade? Still, pangs tugged at her heart when she saw small museums blow their acquisition budgets on inferior drawings. It was like watching the government build a bridge that she knew would fail.

  Elm did a quick search in the Art Loss Registry. The database of stolen art was part of her due diligence, a hedge against liability if the pieces had been stolen. Nothing surfaced.

  Elm wanted to meet the great Indira Schmidt, so she joined Ian and his croissants in a company car up to Columbia. Ian had described both the building and the woman perfectly. Mrs. Schmidt looked Elm up and down skeptically with rheumy eyes and let her into the apartment. Ian she kissed on the cheek, and as he straightened he winked at Elm.

  The apartment was dark. The rays of sun that escaped from the velvet curtains blinded like spotlights instead of illuminating. The hallway carpet gave at each footstep. Elm noticed, as she walked slowly behind the old woman, that instead of family portraits, the pictures lining the entryway were all professional: Stieglitz, Leibovitz, Mann, Sherman. Not their controversial or iconic images, but recognizable nonetheless. In fact, Elm realized, there were no photos of family anywhere in the apartment.

  Elm sat on a couch so low her knees were above her chin. She wondered if she’d be able to get out of it.

  “That one’s broken,” Ian whispered at her, extending his hand to help her up. “Sit there.” He pointed to a thronelike carved wood chair.

  “Mrs. Schmidt,” Elm began, “I’m a huge fan of your work. You know, I’m on the board of the New Jewish Institute, though I’m not myself Jewish. Your genius has—”

  Mrs. Schmidt held up her hand in a “spare me” gesture. “This is not a case where the one I’m most fond of will get to sell my art, Mrs. Howells. When I am ready to part with it, the one who can offer me the most favorable terms will be my proxy, even if they are a one-armed ax murderer. You are here because I enjoy meeting new people. What can you tell me?”

  “Beg your pardon?” Elm asked.

  “I spent World War II in a hayloft in France,” Mrs. Schmidt said. “I walked into Texas from Mexico. I once met Elvis Presley.”

  Elm began to say “Wow,” then realized these were examples, not actual experiences. The sound that emerged was “Whoa.”

  “My family has land on this island off the coast of Connecticut,” Elm began. She very rarely parted with this information. She was never invited to the island now that her mother was dead, and she felt it gave people the wrong impression of her. They imagined a silver spoon. But all the silver had long since been hocked. “We used to go there in the summers when I was a child. Dinners were formal for the adults, but the children were served in a separate dining room, Tater Tots and miniature hamburgers. Paradise. The summer I turned twelve I was dying to be let into the adults’ room. The official age was thirteen, but I begged and begged, reminded them my birthday was coming up in October. Finally, on the last night, they let me. Mother gave me one of her old dresses to wear. It fit like a gunnysack. She put the necklace her mother had given her around my neck, an add-a-pearl necklace that no one ever added pearls to. She did my hair in a high bun and stuck a small sunflower into it, and I was convinced I was a grown-up.

  “At dinner, we were served steak medallions and potatoes au gratin. I concentrated on not spilling. I had half a glass of wine. Then a nice man came around to shake hands and when he got to me I gave him the handshake my father had taught me, firm but not rough, look the person in the eyes. He had nice blue eyes, very bright, or maybe it was just the light in the lodge. He said to me, ‘Lovely to meet you. What grade are you in?’ I told him, ‘Sixth grade.’ Then I responded how my father always did. ‘And what do you do?’

  “The man laughed and my father laughed, and my mother turned bright red and clutched me to her. The man said, ‘A little of this, a little of that. Nothing of any great importance.’ And then he walked away. Later I learned he was President Reagan.”

  Mrs. Schmidt smiled, but Elm was unable to tell what the smile meant. Had she passed the test? Ian, who had heard the story many times before, nodded encouragingly. Without turning to him, Mrs. Schmidt said, “Young man, would you please run out and get some half-and-half? This milk that the woman brings me is too watery.”

  “I think I saw some in the refrigerator,” Ian said. “I’ll check the expiration.”

  “Young man,” Mrs. Schmidt sighed, “I’m trying to get rid of you. Be a dear and run to the deli and get us some half-and-half. And go to the Korean one, not the Pakistani one.”

  Elm thought she saw Mrs. Schmidt wink at her. The woman was a web of tics; no wonder she was so thin. Ian shrugged and stood up. Elm could hear him as he banged into the piles of paper and bric-a-brac, beating his way to the front door.

  Mrs. Schmidt lifted her teacup to her lips. It shook, but she managed a loud slurp before it spilled. The teacup banged loudly as it hit the saucer, and, before she knew what she was saying, Elm sputtered, “My son died.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Schmidt said.

  “Do you remember the tsunami two years ago? We were on vacation in Thailand. He was next to me, and then he was gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Schmidt said. A different old lady might have petted her arm and called her “dear,” but Mrs. Schmidt just reached for a sugar cube and dropped it shakily into her tea.

  Elm didn’t know why she told Mrs. Schmidt about Ronan. There was comfort, somehow, in meeting people who didn’t know about him. Elm was allowed to explain the story to them. She was allowed to say Ronan’s name. It was a taboo word elsewhere where she had used up people’s willingness to sit still for the story. Sometimes she felt like even Colin wanted to sweep him under the rug. Though he patiently reminisced with her, she could see the slight knit in his brow that meant he was annoyed. He missed Ronan as much as she did, but it brought him no relief to say Ronan’s name. It didn’t fester inside him the way it did in Elm.

  But what if she had told Mrs. Schmidt merely to shock her? Had she said it to get the woman to like her? Elm was horrified that she’d used her son in this way. His death wasn’t like the Ronald Reagan story; it was a sacred subject, and she had sullied it. She felt ashamed and put her head down, blinking back tears. What kind of mother was she? Elm knew the answer: she was the kind of mother who let her child die.

  Intellectually, Elm knew that what happened wasn’t her fault, that it was an act of God, whatever that meant. The phrase suggested a divine malevolence Elm wasn’t sure she was comfortable with. She wished she r
emembered better her last few moments with Ronan. She was lying on the beach, half reading a magazine, half watching Colin play catch with Ronan, and keepaway from Moira. Ronan still threw like a child, all jerky elbows and stiff hips. Moira ran back and forth between Colin and Ronan, screaming with frustration that the ball was above her head. Colin was laughing, but Elm could tell a tantrum was imminent.

  Finally Ronan turned to her. “Mom, can you make her stop?” He knew that Elm was the disciplinarian in the family, and any grievances must be expressed to her. Elm remembered thinking that she just wanted to read the damn magazine. Couldn’t the three of them play together for fifteen minutes without her?

  She shaded her eyes. Moira’s suit was riding up her bottom, while the top was completely askew. It had looked so cute on the rack, but now, with Moira wearing it, the bikini looked like an attempt to age her, even, possibly, to sexualize her. Tomorrow she would wear the one-piece.

  “Moira!” she called. “Come fix your swimsuit.” Moira reluctantly trotted toward her.

  “Thank God,” Ronan said. “Hey, Da!” and then Elm stopped paying attention. Why hadn’t she paused there, cementing the scene in her memory. Why hadn’t she called both her children to her? She fixed Moira’s suit and took her up the beach behind the dune to pee, the sand so blindingly white that everything was filtered, hazy. Elm recalled being surprised when the beach abruptly ended in a row of palm trees; what stretched behind was dirt, reminding her of the empty scenery of a movie studio backlot. That’s what had saved the two of them, the higher ground. Elm remembered screaming, covering her eyes as if watching a horror movie. Then, as the wall of water moved closer, she grabbed Moira.

  She wasn’t sure if she had passed out or if she had blocked the memory. The next thing she could piece together was that Moira was crying, screaming, the cut on her leg angry and bleeding. The water that had carried them into the trees that lined the shore receded just as quickly. All around her people were yelling, in pain, in search of loved ones … And she registered the fact that Colin was not with her. She prayed that he had grabbed Ronan the way that she had grabbed Moira. Or, rather, she hoped he had. She forgot to think about God. The moment she most needed to believe in all her life, and she didn’t think about Him. And Ronan’s death was proof, she believed, that God didn’t exist. No God would take a child, just snatch him away with the claw of a wave.