Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “Oh, of course, it was his. No, we never socialized much. It was mainly professional, our contact. And I live far from here, in the sixteenth arrondissement.”

  I took the wrapped packet from him and set it down on the coffee table. Apart from the tape coming unstuck at the corners, it looked exactly as it had when I had last seen it. I had no idea what I would do with it, but for the moment my attention was on him. I wanted to say, I can’t believe you haven’t played around with your likeness to my father, that it wasn’t something you both may have used in some way. But, of course, I couldn’t say it.

  “Did you meet my mother?” I could, at least, ask him that.

  “Oh, yes. A couple of times, at private views, that kind of thing.”

  I wondered what my mother would have thought, if she had felt the same shock. Or do you, when you love somebody and live with him for years, become immune to thinking anyone else resembles him? Does intimacy insist on the particular? In Françoise’s case, the likeness between the two of them seemed to be erotic, a draw. In my mother’s, I knew it would not have been. If my father were present today, there would be no question for me; I would know, of course, which one he was. But in his absence, there was that uncertainty—was he like this, or like that, how was he different? The idea of cloning human beings is ultimately repugnant because singularity is the essential human quality. We are, because we are unique. I found it hard to look at Fabrice Corte, and hard not to; he smiled at me quite frankly and opened his empty hands as if to say, I can’t help it, it’s just the way things are.

  “Well, thank you.” I didn’t know if I could call him Fabrice.

  “Do you know what you will do with it?”

  My turn to open my empty hands. “Keep it here, I suppose.”

  “As long as you do not try to take it back to America. Then, there could be complications.”

  “Oh, well, I’m here for now,” I told him, wanting to sound as vague as possible. I also wanted him to leave, so that I could examine it at my leisure. “Thank you for your opinion.”

  “I will be in touch, soon. I will find out what I can. Au revoir, Mademoiselle Greenwood.”

  “Gaby, please. Au revoir.”

  Just as the appearance of Fabrice Corte, alive now, did not wipe out the reality of my father’s life, Dad’s long affair with Françoise could not alter the reality of his life with my mother. Or so I hoped. The next question was, what was the reality of my own life? Was I no more than the child of my parents, the inheritor of the situation here in Paris, the passive recipient of a possibly stolen painting? Was I a fake, or could I be authentic? Who would vouch for my originality, when all I had done in my life was escape, react, refuse?

  I poured my glass of wine and sat down with the omelette I had made—only eggs and limp parsley left in the fridge again—and watched the swallows as I ate my solitary meal. Yves was spending tonight at his mother’s, as she wasn’t well and so had summoned him. What was it that our generation found so hard to learn? Our parents had loved passionately and often wrongly and had had babies by mistake and affairs and messy houses and bills that could not be paid, and had somehow been forgiven; they had survived all this and were not blamed. Yet the world they had hoped for had not come about, and we were the inheritors of that failure. For us, it seemed that there was little leeway. We dared not stray, or refuse to conform. We had to be careful, or we would come to grief. This was the message of these days, and it was the one I’d instinctively fought against when I was younger with my rebellions, my fugues. Sex was dangerous, we heard, money was always short, you had to earn, work late, pay your taxes. We had been told: Be serious, life is difficult, time is short. The world is in entropy. But now, thinking of my parents—the extraordinary generosity she must have had to keep him and go on loving him, his own fidelity both to the other woman and to her—I was struck by a graceful ability to live life that these days seemed almost out of reach. What would we become, without this possibility? How would we grow beyond our limits, become the people we were supposed to be?

  It was nearly dark outside when I went into the bedroom and looked at the wrapped parcel that lay on my bed where I had left it. My gift from my father. It lay there as you might place a sleeping baby, right in the middle of a bed where it could not roll off. I fetched scissors and began to undo it. I would simply hang it on the wall and live with it, and see what happened. Fabrice could investigate its real owner or find out where it had come from. I would simply accept that here it was. I found a nail and a hammer that someone had left in a cupboard in the kitchen—my father in unusually practical mode?—and I drove the nail into the wall and hung my piece of the seventeenth century, its loving certainties, its perpetual dangers, its appreciation of the everyday, right where I could see it. It struck me as the first change I had made in this apartment, the first action I had taken to install something of my own. My painting. My walnuts, whatever they symbolized. There.

  Fabrice telephoned the following day. His voice made me feel nervous; why was he getting back to me so soon?

  “There is a list which exists, you know, of all the paintings worth a certain amount, and who the owners are, throughout the world.”

  “And?”

  “The painting that was in the Guggenheim is in the private collection of a certain Anton Freiborn, a foundation now, which lent it for the show in New York. It was probably sold to him in about 1906, or at least to the person in the US who sold it to him. Your painting, as far as I can discover, is the property of a woman in Holland, a Marth ten Bruggencate. So where do we go from here?”

  “You think my father got it from her?”

  “I think he may have been asked to sell it for her, and was not able to find a good enough buyer, and thought that if he left it in Paris and came back later, he would have the time and the contacts to sell it.”

  “So it can’t really be mine.”

  “Well, I think we already knew that, Gaby.” It was the opposite of what he’d said to me at Françoise’s the other day.

  I thought then, my father wanted that painting, he had no intention of finding a buyer, he wanted it for me, just as he had wanted the Chinese horse for me, all those years ago. Thinking this, I felt that I knew him better than ever, in the way we know the hopes and desires, even irrational, of those we truly love.

  A quick memory: My father showing a drawing of mine to a colleague who came to lunch. In those days, far-off now, I drew. I was ten or eleven, and I drew horses. I knew their bodies and their flying manes, their hooves and their eyes, by heart. I was in love with horses; I wrote stories about them but also drew them obsessively and from the clarity of my passion. A painter came to lunch, someone my father was representing, and he looked at my horse drawings because my father had shown them to him. “Gaby is the artist of the family, see. She’s the one who draws and writes all these stories. I’m sure we are going to have to be proud of her one day.”

  The artist, who was famous, looked at my drawings and appreciated them. Maybe he was being kind to a little girl, one of the millions who draw horses and love what they draw. But that my father showed him my work, in all seriousness—that was what mattered.

  My painting, my walnuts, the one he had chosen for me. No, I was not about to give it up, for all the rich women in the Netherlands who might think it belonged to them.

  I held my phone and heard Fabrice waiting at the other end. “Well, if she wants it back, you’ll just have to let me know. I’ll hang on to it here for the moment. It will be quite safe.”

  Quite safe, I thought, as long as I don’t return to the United States. Quite safe as long as I stay here, both myself and the painting in hiding.

  “Bon. So, we will wait to see what happens?”

  “I think that would be logical.”

  “So, goodbye for the moment, Gaby. You will get in touch with me if you should change your mind?”

  I stood opposite it and looked and looked. The surface like the leather of a
finely creased glove; the high varnish of the time, more yellowed than the one in New York, for this one had certainly not been cleaned. The gleam on the silver of the nutcrackers, duller, the edges of the nuts themselves less clearly tinged with light. But as I looked at my painting, the memory of the other one faded. You can’t keep two images of the same thing, slightly different, in your mind at the same time. One, the one you can see and touch, has to cancel out the other. That thought again. I stood with my glass of wine and, at my shoulder, in the Guggenheim museum, my father murmuring about symbols and the transcendence beneath ordinary life and the way the early alchemists had sought the philosopher’s stone, the true metal, and the way artists had always, over the centuries, sought the eternal in the temporary, and that that was why we were drawn, over and again, into the contemplation of what they had done. The search, restless and eternal, for the eternal in life, the transcendent. The failure, repeated, to lay hands on it for long. Glimpses made across centuries. The fascination of the clues, hunted up with an almost erotic intensity. Why he did what he did, why he spent his life with other men’s paintings, why he loved them so.

  What did we do afterward, that time in New York? Did we walk down Fifth Avenue? Did we stroll through the Park, talking about art; was he finally able to unburden himself to me, explain himself, show me what drove him? And was I listening? Did I pay attention? Or was I worrying about my flight and whether Matt was waiting for me at home, and whether I would make my check-in time at LaGuardia? So many things crowd in, always, to fill the crucial moments of our lives with ephemera. We never know which moments will turn out to be the vital ones. I do remember going into Bloomingdale’s and pretending to want to buy something, because I wanted to use the restroom. I remember coming down the escalator and seeing him in the men’s department turning over a pair of leather gloves but not buying them because as soon as he saw me coming he was ready to go. There was a sarcastic remark or two about my returning to Florida, a conspicuous lack of interest in my husband, a sudden firm but nearly lingering pressure on my cheeks as he kissed me goodbye. I think I walked down to the subway station without looking back.

  13.

  When Yves came to my apartment the following evening—it was July already, a Tuesday, and he had been to an evening class in computing—he was in a strange mood. I poured him a glass of cold wine from the refrigerator while he showered, and he sat slumped on my sofa under the picture in its new place, in his T-shirt and underpants. “You don’t mind? It’s so hot.”

  “Of course I don’t mind. You can sit there nude if you want to.”

  “This is the famous picture, then?” He jerked his thumb backward; he had not really even looked at it properly.

  “Yes. Yves, what is the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m a bit tired, that’s all.”

  Un peu crevé. Like a tire with all the air blown out of it.

  “Yves. You can tell me.”

  “Ouf, I don’t know. You’re going to leave, so why should I bother?”

  “What do you mean? I’m not at all sure that I’m going to leave.”

  “You have a return ticket, don’t you? You will go back, to your husband. We won’t see each other again.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll go back. Either to my husband or the States. If, or when. Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters! You should know! You should know which man you want to be with. It isn’t like—I don’t know—choosing between two desserts, after all.”

  “No, it isn’t. And if it were just a matter of desserts, I could have both.” I felt annoyed that he should accuse me of such frivolity.

  “But you can’t, can you? One is in the United States, one is here.”

  “It hasn’t mattered up until now, Yves. You said so yourself. It was for cheering us up, you said.”

  “Well, that was then. I don’t feel at all cheered up now. I feel you will go back to the United States, and that will be that.”

  “Maybe I will, just to see what’s what, clear things up. But it needn’t be final.”

  “Gaby, there is one thing I don’t think you realize, it is about me, whether I sit here waiting for you to show up one day, putting my life on hold, being treated like a, I don’t know, a gigolo or something. I’m a man, Gaby, I have some pride, I don’t want to be just someone else’s leftovers, a dessert at the end of the meal, you know what I mean?”

  “What brought this on? Did I get something wrong, is there something I haven’t understood? You said you might be getting a job anywhere, after the exams. You said we were together in order to discover things, not to be a couple forever.”

  “Well.” He swirled the wine in his glass, took a big swallow, and leaned back, his arms behind his head, the black hair of his armpits just showing beneath the white of his T-shirt. He smelled of my soap and shampoo and something else, a metallic tang I had never picked up before. The scent of fear?

  I said gently, like walking up to a frightened horse, “Yves, tell me. Really, I want to know. I have made no decisions. I want to hear from you. If something has changed, tell me.”

  “You really think you can have this double life you dream of? Like your father?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. My husband would certainly be horrified by the idea, and now it seems you would too.” I thought of my parents and Françoise, the delicate distinctions and the hard decisions, the pain that must have been there for each of them, if not all at the same time.

  “Would you stay with me, Gaby? Would you leave him, leave your life in America, stay with me? No.” It was less a proposal than an assertion of the difference between us. He was not looking at me as he spoke, but down at his knees, bony and boyish under their sheen of black hair. “I don’t think so. You with your apartment, your valuable painting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just, you don’t know exactly who I am, I think. I wanted to teach philosophy, I told you, but of course I can’t do that, and anyway, what’s the use of it when the whole world, France, at least, is going downhill fast. I want to teach kids, now, because someone has to. Someone has to show them something that isn’t computer games and drugs and supermarkets. There’s going to be a whole generation of people who simply have nothing, the way things are going, and if I can reach just a few of them, even, before they give up and go and work stacking shelves in the nearest supermarket, I want to do that. Even if their lives are shit, afterward, I want that chance.”

  “Well, I want it for you too.”

  “Ah, but you wouldn’t want to be sent to some crappy suburb with me, would you?”

  “No, probably not. But, Yves, this wasn’t meant to be a long-term thing. Was it?”

  “No, no. But I have come to like being with you. And you said, the other night, that you loved me.”

  I had said it with the gratitude that comes with being well loved, physically; it had come from me like an exclamation, not a commitment. “In a way, I do. Yes, it’s true. But not for marriage, not for staying together. I said it because I felt happy, because you had made me happy.” I looked at him where he sat with his head bent and felt appalled. Was he saying that he was in love with me?

  Then Yves said it: “I like you a lot, Gaby.” Je t’aime beaucoup, not the same as je t’aime.

  He said it seriously, not as a plea. I felt intense relief. “Oh, Yves. I like you a lot too. You know I do.” I remembered him saying, almost impatiently, that time I said I loved him: “I know, I know.”

  “But.”

  “Yes, but. I’m just not sure what I want, you see. I can’t be that certain. I married Matt in a hurry, years ago, I told you, and I don’t want to make any more decisions in a hurry. Do you understand, I can’t, not just like that?”

  “I think so. So, you need more time?”

  “Yes, I need more time.” I said it, but what I felt inside was a panic like being in a room without an open door. Why do men always want to close the doors, whatever th
ey may say about freedom and choice? I need more space. I need all the space there is. I need you to hold me lightly, so lightly, and to trust life for the outcome. I need you to do what probably nobody can do: love me and make no demands.

  We went to bed together quite soberly that night and held each other under the white tent of the single sheet, an embrace that seemed to me valedictory. High in the sky beyond the unshuttered window, the swallows swooped and circled. On the wall in the salon, my little painting hung on the pale-gray wall, strangely small all on its own. The change had moved in with us, the shift had happened. I kissed him with all the tenderness I could find, on his neck, on his shoulders, while he curled against me like a boy finding refuge. We lay like that into the small hours, a gray light filling the room, nothing shut out, nothing held in. I could not tell how the morning would find us. I was weak inside with my feelings for him, for his vulnerability, for his confession of it, yes; but on the outside, where it mattered, I knew now that I was strong.

  Fabrice called when Yves was in the shower, to invite me to lunch. I stood at the window watching light spread down the façade of the building opposite and heard his slightly southern voice with its rolled r’s. He asked me if I had ever been to Le Train Bleu restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, and I said no.

  “Then we should go there. Your father would have wanted you to go there, I am sure.”

  “But we’re not going anywhere. Isn’t it just a restaurant for travelers?”

  I knew of its existence, had imagined it was something to do with the grand days of travel, when the blue train actually took people to the Riviera. I’d thought it might even have been closed down by now.

  “No, not at all. It is a national monument, and the food there is still very good. Will you meet me there, say, at one?”

  I agreed. Why not? People were inviting me to lunches and meetings these days; it was as if a crowd of well-wishers had emerged from this city to help me on my way. We could talk about art; we could talk about my father. With Fabrice sitting opposite me, I thought, I might well get nearer to discovering exactly who it had been, on the rue Mouffetard, outside the Closerie, on that quai beside the Seine. The known face of my dead father—the dead ringer; the doppelganger; the ghost; or simply Fabrice Corte in his old jacket from the seventies, doing his shopping, going about his life, even venturing onto the Left Bank.