When we arrived at her door, she threw it open before we had finished knocking, startling Jayne and me both. Sidonie greeted us with a nervous smile, dressed in blue jeans, a paint-streaked black blouse, red flip-flops. I could see as soon as I set eyes on her that she was pregnant. Almost five months along, she confirmed, her thin laughter an apology of a sort as we followed her down the gloomy hall to her studio with its low ceiling and one dusty window that faced the neighboring building’s eastern wall. Her boyfriend was living with her now, an Austrian boy named Stefan who works in the kitchen of a restaurant near place Pigalle—Chez Patric or Pascal; I haven’t had dinner there yet, and can’t ever seem to remember its name. He is training as a chef, and is responsible for the soups and broths, an important role in any kitchen, needless to say, and I was impressed when Sidonie told me this but have learned to keep my enthusiasms about my artists’ personal lives to myself. If I portray myself to be a friend more than a patron (I am thinking of the French meaning of the word, “boss,” more than the English meaning, “benefactor,” though I am that too), my artists tend to expect more leniency when I express displeasure with their productivity or the directions in which they are taking their work.
Sidonie was not making the lush, deeply personal paintings she’d been working on when I began giving her money a year or so earlier. She was wasting her time and talents on foolish-looking wood carvings and thematically related paintings. In her studio, scattered on two rectangular worktables, one gouged by the chisels and carving knives she was learning to use, were wooden animals about ten to fifteen centimeters high, in various states of evolution—a leopard, an elephant, something that resembled a llama, a horse with a foreleg cast onto which ROBERT + CAROLE had been carved. The llama-like creature had one large bulging eye, the other eye a question mark. The elephant had an open umbrella for a trunk.
The new paintings in progress were other breeds of strange animals—one creature half tiger, half jackrabbit; another a black cat wearing the frilly neck ruff of an old-fashioned clown, its tail a pig’s. The series was called La loi naturelle—“Natural law,” she said, glancing from Jayne to me. “Our environment has many problems, and people have no sense of the sacred anymore. We are changing all our genes with chemicals and the scientists in the labs who want to clone everything. Pretty soon there will be no authentic creatures.”
“And of course we’re told that it’s all in the name of making the world a better place,” said Jayne. “These are so good.”
“Thank you,” said Sidonie, smiling and relieved, it seemed to me.
I said nothing.
“Money is an exciting word, but a dirty one too,” she added.
I made a small coughing sound. I couldn’t help it.
“The more money, the fewer moral questions asked,” said Jayne, ridiculously agreeable.
“Exactly,” said Sidonie, still smiling at Jayne, before glancing over at me. Her large, pretty brown eyes were so anxious that I made myself say something.
“Your new paintings are okay,” I said. “But your landscapes and the portraits are better.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” said Sidonie, crestfallen. Her hands fluttered over the horse with the cast, over the llama with the goggle eye, brushing off flecks of sawdust. “I am still working with those paintings too. I have not abandoned them.”
“I hope not,” I said.
She looked at Jayne, as if for support. Jayne met her eyes and smiled again. I didn’t think that I was being too severe, but I was not going to encourage Sidonie either. Was she wondering if I would withdraw support if I didn’t approve of her new interests? With time, if she kept on this trajectory, I very likely would.
“I like working with the wood right now. It’s a risk, I know, but—”
“That’s fine, Sidonie. We’ll see how it goes,” I said, looking down at her disintegrating flip-flops. Her toenails were unpainted and badly in need of attention, but I suppose I could be grateful that she had not made an appointment at the salon, as this would not be the best way, in my view, for her to use the money she received from me twice a month. But we did not have a contract; our agreement was only that she keep producing thoughtful work. If she stopped working, I stopped sending money. Tacit in our unofficial agreement was also the fact that I had to continue to like her work too.
With each of the dozen or so artists I have helped over the past eleven years, it is usually apparent within a year and a half that they have a real future as an artist or else are better suited for something else. One painter became a graphic designer and has done well designing logos and other corporate materials. Another, a sculptor of beautiful and alien female bodies made from small household objects, decided that she would be better off spending her life designing haute couture hats for the atelier of Yves Saint Laurent when the opportunity was offered to her. Another stopped making art altogether and moved to Saint Lucia to open a café with her mother, who had recently been remembered fondly in a long-ago lover’s will.
But most of the artists I have helped have continued to make fine art, even after my patronage ended. Some teach in art academies to supplement their earnings from the sale of their work; one is a guide for part of the year for a company that sells vacation tours in Morocco and Tunisia. Another creates and oversees large-scale mural projects for different municipalities and arts organizations.
As we were leaving Sidonie’s apartment, her boyfriend came out of the kitchen to look us over. He was not tall and had a bulldog’s neck and shoulders. He shook my hand with his ruddy kitchen worker’s hand, one that he had probably burned many times while learning his art of boiling broths and simmering potages. We stared at each other for a few seconds. In his dark green eyes I could see his fear of the future, his need for reassurance, but I knew that I was not the right person to offer it to him. He smiled and turned to look at Jayne, who had dressed up for the visit, unnecessarily, in a a black miniskirt and a tight black-and-white-striped top, worrying, I suppose, that Sidonie would be more glamorous than she turned out to be. Not every pretty woman is the enemy that other women, pretty or not, old or young, assume she will be. But I am aware of these rivalries; I am aware of the jealousy and willingness to perceive slights and the outright hostile obstructions that pit women against each other. They should not blame men for all their troubles, however—we who are said to make every rule for how a woman is supposed to look and act. If this is true, why don’t more women protest these circumstances?
In the taxi back to rue du Général-Foy, Jayne and I had a disagreement over Sidonie’s condition.
“Did you know before today that she was pregnant?” she asked.
“No, I did not.”
“I thought you seemed surprised,” she said, regarding me with suspicion.
Did she think that I had something to do with Sidonie’s pregnancy? Because I certainly did not. “I was surprised,” I said.
After a moment she said, “I like her work. She seems very nice too.”
“I am not very happy about the wood,” I said. “I think it is a waste of time.”
Jayne did not agree. “I thought that what she’s done with it so far is interesting. I doubt you have to worry about her crossing over to a kind of craft-fair art. Knickknacks, that kind of thing.”
“We will see,” I said.
“You were a little grouchy up there with her.”
I looked down at Jayne’s legs, her miniskirt riding far up her thighs. She had gooseflesh from the taxi’s air conditioning. Outside it was a hot day, 33 centigrade, maybe even a little hotter. “Sidonie should not be having a baby,” I said. “She and Stefan cannot afford it.”
“I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Their parents will probably help them if they can.”
“I do not want my money to be used for baby clothes and diapers,” I said, irate. “And those wooden circus animals. Is she planning to make art for children now?”
“I thought they were good,” she said flatly.
“Yes, for a nursery,” I cried. A song was playing on the radio loudly, one by a band my son was crazy about in his adolescence; the musicians were all screaming American males and barely talented. I asked the driver to turn it down, and he did without a word.
“You can’t expect to be able to tell her when she can or can’t have a baby,” said Jayne. “It’s just not something you can do, whether you’re giving her money or not.”
“I really do not understand why people are in such a rush to have children when life is so much easier without them. And frankly, better.”
She laughed. She was angry, but instead of raising her voice, she poked me in the side, hard. “You wouldn’t say that in front of your own kids, I hope,” she said.
“No, I wouldn’t, and while they were growing up, I didn’t think it, but now, looking back, I see that this is the truth. Everything is easier if you do not have to worry about a child.” I glanced at her. She was listening, and to my surprise, without condemnation in her eyes. “You must know this too. You have told me that you do not think you will ever have a child.”
“Obviously not everyone feels the way you do about parenthood,” she said. “My friends with babies are nuts about them.”
“You can love the child, but not the fact you are a parent. Those are two different matters.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“They are. That is the truth. I know this, but you cannot, never having raised a child yourself.”
“Maybe someday I will,” she said, annoyed.
“Yes, maybe you will.” It won’t be mine, though, I thought but didn’t say.
• • •
One other exchange from our visit with Sidonie remains in my mind’s eye and ear. My behavior was rather foolish, which I didn’t really grasp at the time.
As we stood at the door of Sidonie’s apartment, ready to make our way down to the street and leave behind her wooden animals and her tired boyfriend, who seemed to want nothing more than for us to go and not come back—my presence implied, I suppose, that he could not take adequate care of her on his own—Sidonie announced that they were getting married, most likely before the birth of their child. Jayne was happy for her and congratulated her with enthusiasm, before looking at me to do the same. I did wish her well, but I wanted to say aloud that she must not let her changing domestic situation keep her out of her studio for months at a time. Cold as it must sound, if she expected the checks to keep arriving without new work being produced in that sawdust-filled cell, I would need to let her know this would not be the case. I said nothing of it, though. As much as I wanted to, I held back the warning, knowing it would sound more like a threat. It was better to wait to see what she would do after she gave birth.
“We will call the baby Joie, boy or girl,” said Sidonie.
“Joie,” Jayne repeated. “That’s very pretty.”
“It means joy,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” Jayne said, her voice tight.
Sidonie laughed, though not out of spite; instead, I suspect she was trying to diffuse the awkwardness between us. I was sure Jayne would not forget that I had embarrassed her, but I was so disappointed by the visit and therefore unable to keep myself from forcing her to feel some of my displeasure too.
• • •
Why do I give money to artists I barely know, ones who might, as has been suggested by more than one friend, somehow be conning me?
I think of it in this way: if you have the means to make someone else’s life easier, someone who is doing something you admire and want to encourage, why shouldn’t you share some of your good fortune? I am not without self-interest either, obviously. I own a gallery and profit from the work of the artists I represent. Half of those whom I have helped financially over the last several years have ended up with their work in Vie Bohème. Some of my investment in their talents has paid dividends. But there is no guarantee that the artists I am currently helping will earn me anything in return, and although I admit that it would be nice if they did, I know that I won’t spend years feeling angry about it if they don’t.
You give to other people if you can, and you might end up making their lives better. They in turn might also go on to make someone else’s life better. I have inherited money from my parents, who along with running a successful vineyard also invested in real estate in Italian, Caribbean, and South African resort towns. My sister and her husband run the vineyard, which is part of a Gevrey-Chambertin collective that produces one of the Bourgogne region’s celebrated grands crus and a number of other good, less distinctive vintages. Camille and Michel are happy that I do not interfere with the family business, but admittedly, this has caused tension between us. Long ago, when I was nineteen and very arrogant and self-assured, I told my parents that I intended to make art, not table wine, and this did not go over so well, but there was never any threat that they would disown me. Camille stepped into my shoes at home, and she has never deviated from her devotion to Maison Moller. Any interest that I have expressed over the years in the vineyard’s day-to-day operations, any request for information about the vines or the weather conditions or the state of the oak barrels in which the wine is aged, or about the harvest, which I know I am not truly a welcome participant in, even though I would gladly come down to help them each year—any question I might ask is construed as criticism, or worse, a desire to usurp her place as the loyal lifelong servant to and CEO of the family business.
When I sold off the several vacation properties our parents had left to me, the sum was significant enough, in addition to my share of the annual profits from the vineyard, that I would not have had to work another day if I chose not to. My sister has held on to the properties willed expressly to her, and she rents them out to vacationing Americans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and Brits with a management company she hired to help her and Michel with the particulars. They do well with them, but I preferred to have my money in a lump sum. I started Vie Bohème with some of it, and met André shortly thereafter; his wife Caroline—now ex-wife—was friends with a number of good artists, some in need of representation.
Before long André and I set up shop on rue du Louvre (not my ideal location—that would be in the sixth arrondissement on rue Bonaparte, but through a school friend, André found our space for much less than what a smaller storefront in the sixth would cost). We had signed on artists whose work was more skillful and interesting than the imitation Monets and Renoirs that I had been painting and futilely trying to sell—romanticized landscapes of the people and countryside where I grew up. I was also painting Van Gogh–inspired interiors of hospitals and fromageries and garages. (Garages! What could I have been thinking when I tried to paint these greasy, light-deprived interiors in the style of the mad Dutch genius? I have no idea what was wrong with me. Or with Anne-Claire for not telling me to stop immediately. It wasn’t until we were in our final ugly year together, insults flying aggressively and as often as the starlings outside our windows, that she told me how untalented a painter I’d been. If I had just continued faithfully copying the faces and objects from sales ads or photographs—which I had done when I first was learning how to draw and paint—she thought that I might instead have become a competent enough illustrator. Our daughter, ironically, went on to become one and is very good, but she does not have the work ethic she should have, and her husband also makes too much money, probably, for her to be hungry or ambitious enough. And for that matter, my own wealth did not, early on, encourage hunger in her either.)
The ego is good for some things, but in financial matters not always so much. I was able to add to the money from my inheritance because I stepped back and did not go into a self- pitying depression (not for long, in any case), over the fact that other artists were making work that people wanted in their homes, and I was not.
CHAPTER 3
Charity and Profit
Jayne is gifted. Without question I knew this when I first saw the delicate, precise oils of t
he strangers she had painted from scavenged photographs, and the street and hillside scenes framed by the windows of her parents’ home in southern California. Some of these paintings were hanging in the dismal apartment in lower Manhattan that she had shared for years with a series of other destitute girls, and I thought, “I did not expect this,” but I kept my surprise to myself.
Every other person I meet tells me with a smile somewhere between self-mockery and defiance that he or she is an artist or has always wanted to be an artist. I know that it’s the same for writers, according to my oldest friend, Paul Ligault, who is a novelist of some repute in France, though it has been several years since his last book. How many fans or family members or former students have told him they’re going to write a book one day, or they are in the midst of trying to write a book, or they have an excellent idea and would love some help writing a book and maybe he has some time, some suggestions, knows an editor, knows a filmmaker in Paris or Rome or Hollywood …?? When Jayne first told me that she had studied painting in college and still drew and painted a little in her scarce free time, honestly, I didn’t think much of it.
Another surprise: she never asked me for a show—out of fear or a species of calculated, mercenary patience, or perhaps a failure of confidence? Nonetheless, I felt the gentle, constant pressure of her hopefulness. I tried baiting her a little, seeing what she would do when I praised other artists without also praising her. I was not cruel, but I wanted to see if she might say some unguarded thing, reveal the depth and intensity of her ambition. On the whole, however, she kept it reined in, and so I believed that she cared for me, for my confidence and kindness to her, for my foreignness, and for how I made her feel in bed. That I have money, that I am co-owner of just the kind of elite commercial and artistic enterprise she hopes some day to be an integral part of, well, that is mostly happenstance.
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