Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I hadn’t asked her about the apartment, the one I lived in. Did she meet him there, or was it only for him and my mother? Did my mother innocently suggest going to the Jeu de Paume or the new Centre Pompidou for an exhibition, or want to browse in the market in the rue Mouffetard, while he dashed across town to a rendezvous in Montmartre, saying he had to go and meet a dealer? Was there for him that breathless rush on the métro between women, for her that bland question, How did it go, your meeting? I imagined him dashing up steps, along concrete corridors, leaping on a train before the doors closed, squashed inside and breathing hard, hoping that the scent of Françoise had been adequately washed off in that brief shower. No wonder he had had heart failure. Hearts failed, perhaps, from too much use as well as too little. My father, that muscle, that pump: again, like Zhivago, staggering, falling, driven by love across distance.

  11.

  I stood in Françoise’s bedroom and stared. It was small, the painting, smaller than I had imagined, and it was a copy or a twin of the one we had seen together in that exhibition in the Guggenheim. It was a tiny still life of walnuts, on a gray-blue cloth folded into ridges. The nuts were scattered as if a squirrel had left them, and what had fascinated the painter, I could see, was the way the whorls and ridges on them could be translated by paint. There was a silver nutcracker like a pair of bandy legs. The cloth was a real, rucked-up tablecloth, and the walnuts were knobbly and looked hard to crack. The light that fell on them came in from the left, as if they had been abandoned after a meal in an adjacent room. There was one nut that had been split open. I came in close, examined the slightly crazed surface of the paint. The kernel that had fallen from the open nut lay in two pieces only just joined together, like the human brain. I remembered how my father had peered at the little painting on the wall at the Guggenheim, one still life among others, pots, jugs, apples, kitchen implements, even leeks and carrots, all the ordinary things of life made to glow in the light the painters had seen. Still life, a celebration of the ordinary. Las Bodigones, the exhibition was called. It had been organized by topic, rather than in historical sequence, so the artists were all jumbled together as if what they had painted mattered more in the end than who they were. A Cézanne study of apples next to a Dutch seventeenth-century pot, a Cubist fruit bowl beside an Italian Renaissance heap of root vegetables. I had been brought up to respect the order of art history, to recognize painters by their connection with each other—Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Pieter de Hooch all knowing each other, the Impressionists lending each other money to buy paint as they lived together in Montmartre, Picasso and Braque bound together by their era and their friends and what was going on around them. Both my father and the Courtauld had taught me that historical period mattered, made art coherent. Shocked, I saw a new way of presenting things, and I remember commenting on it to my father. He’d said, “This is how they have organized the Tate Modern, you know. It’s the new fad. I’m not sure I approve. But it does allow you to concentrate on the paintings themselves.”

  I saw him move from painting to painting with the absorbed attention of his profession. He was pretending not to care about provenance, influence, all the things I knew were at the heart of his work. You had to know these things, to know whether a painting was real or a fake. The brushstrokes, the signature were visible on the surface, but what lay underneath, the history beneath the paint and varnish, that was where the clues lay. Each painting was a palimpsest, more than itself alone, because painters used and reused canvases, and sometimes, with cleaning, details appeared that had been invisible before. The painting in the Guggenheim had looked newly cleaned; I remembered him pointing it out.

  She came and stood behind me. I turned back from my examination of the painting and glimpsed a look on her face that was like a grimace of pain.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, don’t worry. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Very nice.” I wondered whether to tell her now, or leave it.

  It was dark and highly varnished, its surface crazed like the bottom of a fine bowl. Craquelure. I knew the word. I tried hard to remember the one in the Guggenheim exhibition, and thought that the nuts were perhaps more scattered, the cloth smoother. It was not the same painting. But had the painter made several studies of the walnuts, even on the same day? This one could be the other’s near twin. Or one of them could be a fake. I thought that this one was darker, probably simply because it had not been cleaned as the other had. Clues might be here that I couldn’t see at present.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “He brought it here a few months before his death. Last June, maybe? He just asked me if I could look after it for a while, and that he would collect it and get it back to its owner. That made me think that he had not bought it. But since I don’t know who the owner is, and your father isn’t here to tell me, it’s really yours more than it is mine.”

  In the museum, I had loved the smallness and intensity of these still lifes, and the way the painter had chosen subjects—walnuts, leeks, potatoes—that were at once so solid and so temporary. A seventeenth-century vegetable or nut wouldn’t have a hope of still existing today; it was a particular product of its time. Everything rotted and went back to the earth, but this series of marvelous little paintings told us all we needed to know about eternity.

  “But I can’t take it. What would I do with it? You have no idea where it came from, none at all?”

  “I know he found it here in Paris. That must have been why he couldn’t take it abroad. We’re very exacting here about art staying within the country, even if it isn’t by a French artist.”

  I tell her, because here we are, two women who loved him. “I was with him when we saw it, or one exactly like it, in the Guggenheim museum in New York.”

  “Really? Do you know where the New York exhibit came from?”

  “It was in someone’s private collection. I can’t remember what the name was. But I don’t think it was American.”

  “The painting could have been borrowed for the exhibition.”

  “Yes, or there could have been two of them. Or even more. Or one of them could have been a fake. A forgery.”

  “I don’t think the Guggenheim hangs fakes, somehow. They have a mass of experts. They would know.”

  “Could this one be a fake, then?”

  Françoise frowned and stared closely at it as if for the first time, or as if she had never considered this. “I don’t know. How do you tell? I should know, but I don’t.”

  “You run a series of X-rays and see what’s underneath. You examine the signature. You look to see if it’s the original stretcher, and they can test the canvas for age, and look at even minute amounts of paint through a microscope. Even the rust marks from nails. But sometimes it’s very, very hard to tell. I don’t somehow think he’d have hidden it here if he’d thought it was a fake; he could have just taken it home and hung it on the wall and said, It’s a copy of one I saw in America, isn’t it good?”

  I thought, I wouldn’t care if it was a fake if I managed not to care about the painter. Once you had imagined a person in seventeenth-century Delft or Amsterdam scattering his walnuts on a gray-blue cloth, with the light coming in from the left just as in a Vermeer—conscious or unconscious influence?—then you wanted it to be real. If all you cared about was the surface, then a good forgery would do. I thought of billionaires who famously hid their real paintings in vaults, under lock and key, while the ones they hung on their walls were copies. When was a copy a fake? When it pretended to be the original. If you had the original locked up in your cellar like a prisoner whose cries you tried not to hear, you would still know your hung painting was a copy. Faking involves the imagination, a sleight of hand, while a copy is simply a copy, isn’t it, no malice or legerdemain involved? A forgery demands a signature, surely; yet even a signature can be faked.

  Françoise said, “Well, it can stay here while you make up your mind. But I wouldn’t feel all right a
bout keeping it, long term.”

  “He didn’t say he’d given it to you, did he? You’re sure?”

  “No, he said, keep it for me, I’m going to get it back to the owner. I’m sure that’s what he said.”

  “As if he thought it had been stolen, maybe?”

  “Who knows?”

  She made coffee, and we went to sit at her kitchen table to drink it. Small cubes of sugar stirred into little cups, and she lighting a little cigar. Already we had become allies in a need to discover truth. We were on a trail set by my father, the pieces of his life scattered before us as if we were on a treasure hunt. Had all this been deliberate? No, nobody could know exactly when they were going to die. My father, the magician, the one who had done conjuring tricks at my birthday parties and laughed when a sharp child found him out and shouted, “I saw you! Mr. Greenwood! It was you!” and simply went on to the next trick. Handkerchiefs fluttering out of hats and sleeves, eggs appearing from behind ears. All that was easy enough to perform. But Dutch paintings? Sudden appearances of mistresses? Himself, even, as revenant, echo, copy, fake?

  “We could take it to the Louvre, I suppose.”

  “But if it does belong to someone else, the person your father mentioned? We might be accused of stealing it. We have no papers for it.”

  “We could just tell the truth, that someone left it here.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think the experts at the Louvre would swallow that,” she said.

  “Françoise?”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wondered—you saw him last summer, when he brought you the painting. How was he? Did he seem ill?”

  “No, not really. He got tired easily, had to walk more slowly than he used to. But no, he seemed all right. Were you worried?”

  “I’ve been thinking I should have been.”

  “Gaby, it was sudden. I had no idea it was going to happen like that. You have nothing to reproach yourself about, if that’s what you are thinking.”

  “My sister told me he was living in a mess, seemed depressed.”

  “Oh, your sister. Hmm. His heart wasn’t strong, I knew that, but he seemed fairly well. We had a good time. Don’t worry about it. So, see you soon? You’ll think about what you want to do about the painting?”

  We kissed on both cheeks, and I left her flat and walked down the hill to the métro station, the bulk of Sacré-Coeur a looming presence at my back. We were in something together now, she and I. Was that what my father had wanted to achieve? I ran down the steps, my ticket in my hand, and went underground to come up like a mole on the other side of the city, on the Left Bank. Two sides of everything, even Paris. This is what he’d done, over and over, crossed the city, under the great river, to come up on the other side. I was following the way he had gone. Of course I was. I was his daughter, after all: not a copy, not even a reproduction, but with his genes in me mysteriously making me in his image.

  What I knew of the business of testing paintings for their source and authenticity, I had mostly from him, picked up from idle conversations, questions, the sort of thing a parent hands on to a child without even knowing. It was not the sort of practical thing you learned at the high-minded Courtauld Institute where he had sent me. He had not been training me to follow him in his career but providing me with an education, a safe alternative to hanging out in a squat in the East End and stealing from department stores. Yet it had always been me, not any of my siblings, who was invited to art openings, private views, who was told about deals and offers made and the secret language of dealers, of how auctions worked, and when new techniques were found to baffle thieves, discover forgeries. How chrome yellow was not used in painting after the nineteenth century, for example, until the end of the twentieth, because it blackened quickly from pollution. How electron microscopes were used these days to scan paintings, as well as ultraviolet light, and infrared. How radiography can see through layers of paint, discovering hidden paintings underneath the surface ones: the true meaning of palimpsest.

  Once he had said to me, “Every good dealer is at heart a thief.” I was shocked, but I knew what he meant. The urgent desire to have and handle a painting, to contemplate that painter’s vision in private; you would have to be a billionaire or a thief to indulge it. Or a dealer. He chose the middle way, meaning that he could hold on to things he loved for a certain time but was dependent on letting them go. He had the knowledge that gave him power. He could make a client want a painting and then not want it. He could, by simply raising his eyebrows, create sudden interest. His way of clearing his throat could send the price of a painting up by thousands; a downward glance of his could bring it down again. I had seen this, but more, I had guessed at it. He lived in the place between people’s desires and the actual exchange of money, with a foot in both camps, understanding the longing to own, manipulating it, able to gratify it at will. A Gemini by birth, and by occupation: two of everything, a way of being he could hardly help, I began to understand it now.

  At the root of it was the love of the thing itself, which he could never have afforded—unless he had become a thief. The passion for the way paint had been laid on, for the human touch that showed through the brushstrokes, the light of a particular morning in a man’s studio hundreds of years ago, or yesterday. He had showed me, in galleries, the mark and the limits of a painter’s skill; more, he had showed me something about himself. I had hardly paid attention, or so I thought, when I was young and easily bored, going around London galleries with him, being taken to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, looking at Nicholsons and Alfred Wallaces and the sudden shock of a small Braque. I had complained when being dragged, as I’d felt it, around the endless galleries of the Louvre. But now I knew that the information had gone in; I had learned and absorbed what he had wanted me to learn. I could love what he had loved. That morning in the Guggenheim, he must have seen it as we both moved toward the same small canvases with the addict’s light in our eyes. Had he hidden the painting of walnuts here in Paris for me to find? Had he used himself as a series of clues—his appearances a trail, leading to a treasure? Françoise and me as his acolytes? The painting, my inheritance that had been waiting for me all along—and the way to it, tortuous, complicated, like himself?

  Yves said to me out of a long silence, that evening, “You will go back to America, won’t you? To your husband?”

  We were lying sprawled across my bed, swallows dipping and diving at the window and sometimes nearly coming in. The other day, one had flown in and circled the room twice and then flown out again through another window while I held my breath, hoping it would fly free. A failure of sonar, a sudden missed flight adjustment? Swallows can change direction on the wing, avoid obstacles, swoop back out and up into the air.

  “Why do you ask? We already talked about that.”

  “I feel it. I feel you thinking about him.”

  “Not when I’m with you.”

  “Yes, when you are with me. You aren’t entirely here. Part of you is elsewhere.”

  “No, Yves, I am entirely here.” I came close to him again and began to show him the completeness of my presence: this, here, my hands and body, my mouth, my skin. He had been right. I had been thinking of Matt, but not sexually, not at all. Is anybody ever completely in one place these days, with just one person, when our minds are full of e-mails to be read, voice mails, text messages, memories, plans, demands from far away made even without our consent upon our consciousness? We exist, each of us, at the heart of a complex web. The swallow through the open window: a thought, circling twice and then gone.

  Matt had been sending me more e-mails: I miss you, when are you coming back to your senses, my life is better when you are here, for God’s sake, Gaby, please. So I was in his mind; perhaps he dreamed of me too. I tried sometimes to remember him in his particularity and failed to do more than conjure his face in a photograph, and the parts of him: hands, buttocks, toes. The whole of him was unknown to me now. Change had taken place in both of
us, and I no longer knew him in the intimate daily way I once had. I felt sad, recognizing this. This must be how people parted, not so much by announcement or decision but simply by allowing time and distance to do their work. The man with me on the bed was present in his entirety as well as his parts, erasing, or at least blurring, memory. A body in a smooth skin, marked with patches of dark hair that I knew as his particular geography, a movement toward me, an urge to scratch an itch suddenly, a penis that rose slightly and turned as we talked as if it wanted its own way into the conversation. The conversation itself, his accent, his slang, his questioning turns of phrase, his hands gesturing in the air. Soon the conversation would stop, because the penis had insisted, and we would be inside and outside each other again, feeling our way to the center of life where pulses and streams of feeling defined us, not words.

  I said, “I’m here with you completely. This is real. You, me, today, here on this bed. If I think about Matt, he’s on the outside of this. This is the present, you and me.”

  I remembered a time with Matt, when he had said to me, “Gaby, you aren’t really here. What’s up?” I had said, “No, no, nothing. I’m here, don’t worry.” At what point in our life together had I begun to leave? Had it been when my mother died, or long before?