by Ted Mooney
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “1550 AD, give or take. Excellent condition.”
“So it’s real, then?” She removed her sunglasses and turned to look at him.
“Very.” He whisked the copy of ARTnews from the chair Gabriella had vacated. “Please, have a seat.”
Instead she went to the window, parted the curtains, and peered down at the courtyard. “I thought we had an understanding.”
“So we did. And I’m happy to report that your problem has been taken care of.”
“Really? You think so?” She wandered over to the lightbox and switched it on. Turner had been sorting through color transparencies of the unsold flags, and their glow now gave Odile’s features a ruddy cast. “Then you overestimate your influence.”
“Oh, I’d hate to think that. Was there an incident?”
“Last Friday night someone threw a Molotov cocktail at me and my friends. It was dramatic and quite intimidating. The police came.”
“I see. And what did you tell them?”
“Nothing.” She sat down on a Shaker bench, next to a pile of old auction catalogs. “But this cannot continue. These people are crazy. I want my life back.”
Resting his chin on his fist, he contemplated his visitor. She was agreeable to look at, more so than he’d thought, full at the hips but slim overall, with upturned breasts, a wide-set mouth, and large, cognac-colored eyes. She carried herself well. She projected sullen confidence and a willingness to engage. Yet it seemed to him that there was also something ascetic about her, an unplumbed capacity to do without, to withdraw, to reduce and simplify, to exist among essences or endure their absence. It was like a glimpse of another woman, one quite capable of indifference, even cruelty, and Turner quickened at the recognition.
“Maybe now would be a good time to tell me what these Russians really want from you,” he said.
“They want to know where they can find Thierry Colin.”
“Thank you. And do you have any idea where he is?”
“No.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“No but what?”
“I saw him last at the station in Brest. We’d split up for customs—his suggestion. I took the bags through—my choice. Then he disappeared.” She made a face. “He was very hungover.”
“So as far as you know he never crossed into Poland.”
She assented European style, with a quick intake of breath.
“What could have happened to him, then?” said Turner.
“I don’t know. There was some kind of trouble at the station, a big crowd of people trying to get out, military police. Also, he had his wallet stolen right before we left Moscow, so I don’t think he had much money.”
“Passport?”
“He still had his passport, yes, I’m certain.”
“Anything else you want to tell me?”
“No. Well, yes. He’d been talking on the train about whether it’s possible to start a new life. He seemed to be speaking theoretically, but also with a kind of irony that I found very annoying. I was meant to find it annoying. He wanted to throw me off track.”
Turner nodded sympathetically. “So he maneuvered you into taking charge of the flags and went his own way, probably with something that didn’t belong to him. It’s not unknown.”
“Those guys want him very badly,” she said.
“But here’s what I wonder, Odile. Why haven’t you told the Russians what you just told me? If that’s all they want?”
She appeared genuinely taken aback by the question. Turner watched her swallow, open her mouth to speak, then abruptly shut it again. Following her gaze, he saw Gabriella standing in the doorway.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were busy.”
“No, it’s okay,” Turner answered. “Odile, this is my assistant, Gabriella Gabriella, Odile.”
As the two women considered each other, an idea came to him. He supposed it was the opportunity for which he’d been waiting. “I’ll tell you what, Gabriella. Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? We can deal with the bronze tomorrow.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“All right, if you say so.” She looked at him dubiously. “See you in the morning.” She said goodbye to Odile and left.
“Look,” Turner said, “I understand about the Russians. Guys like that, you don’t want to give them anything. All I’m suggesting, Odile, is that next time, in the interest of your peace of mind …”
She nodded.
“Besides, as I mentioned, I think you’ll find that you’ve seen the last of them. Sometimes it takes a little while for word to filter down, but the person I talked to is highly regarded. People don’t often cross him.”
“Thank you,” Odile managed to say. She didn’t look at all convinced.
“My pleasure.” He glanced at his watch. “Now. When was the last time you had your portrait painted?”
“My portrait?”
“Yes. An artist friend is painting my portrait, and I’m due at her studio for a sitting. She’s an exceptional woman—in her seventies, but she sees everything—and I’d very much like you to meet her. In fact, I’d consider it a personal favor.”
“Oh, but this would be difficult. I …”
She would object, pleading prior commitments, making excuses, stalling, but Turner knew she would come along to Céleste’s apartment. Such moments had their own logic, a kind of internal necessity. It was as if, he thought, they were meant to be.
UPSTAIRS AT HIS STUDIO, in the screening room, Max was watching Fireflies for the fifth time that afternoon. He had bought all seven copies that the megastore had had in stock, two on videocassette, five on DVD, and was playing them at six times the normal speed, one after another, watching for anomalies. It was oppressive and fruitless work that left him feeling distinctly humiliated.
When the phone rang, he paused the film and took the call. It was Eddie Bouvier, who’d spoken with the video distributors of Max’s films and been assured that all was as it should be. Sales since the release of White Room/Black Room had risen substantially, and there was even talk of rereleasing the four earlier titles if the uptick continued. Max thanked him, bookmarked the DVD he’d been watching, and went downstairs.
“So?” asked Jacques. “Did you find any improvements?” He sat behind the editing console, wearing a backward-turned baseball hat and a T-shirt that had Mal Vu, Mal Dit—Badly Seen, Badly Said—printed across the chest.
“Nothing,” said Max. “There’s nothing to find. I’m crazy to look.”
“To look is never crazy. Someone told me that.”
“Right.” It irritated Max unreasonably to hear his own words tossed back at him. “Listen, stick around, okay? I may need you later.”
At the apartment, he washed his face and flushed his eyes with saline droplets. He felt sullied by the afternoon’s pursuits, with their overtones of spite and retrospection, and he cast about for how to redeem what was left of the day. Then, remembering Allegra’s e-mail, he booted up the computer, launched the telecom software, and, after sitting a few moments blankly before the screen, began to type.
Dear Allegra, he wrote. Thanks for your message, which I really appreciated. You’ve got your mother’s wit and preemptive good sense. Lucky girl.
I was sorry to hear about your friend Alison’s troubles. You’re right, I really did like her: she’s smart and seemed to be a real friend to you. I won’t embarrass us both by giving you the standard-issue drug lecture at this point. Let’s just say that she showed bad judgment in letting that guy stash his pills in her locker. Legally that makes her an accomplice, and juvenile court is no place anyone wants to be. Enough said. I hope things work out for her.
About the summer. Here Max hesitated, choosing his words carefully. I understand your wanting to be with your friends, especially when you’re about to make the move to upper school. You’ve got big changes coming up and exciti
ng times. But family is important too. Again he paused. Just by using that word he was laying himself open to the whole arsenal of sighs, sulks, and ironic silences that Allegra deployed to remind him of his perfidy and to chastise herself, a girl so catastrophically wanting, as he knew she sometimes suspected, that she didn’t even deserve a father. But Max persisted.
Your mother and I love you very much, and you will always be our daughter. Nothing can change that, sweetness. So I’m thinking about you, and I’d like to find a plan for us to be together this summer. Maybe you could spend half of it in New York, half of it here. I’ll call later and we can talk about it, okay? He added a paragraph of small news, a word of love from Odile, then signed the note and hit the send button.
CÉLESTE PULLED TWO PORTRAITS of Turner from the storage rack and propped them up against the adjacent wall. The strains of a Shostakovich string quartet wafted in from the front room, and the scent of linseed oil hung in the air like ripe fruit.
Lighting a cigarette, Céleste contemplated her work. “You know, he’s not so easy to paint,” she told Odile. “The features are strong, and the hands. But one senses right away that this man—”
“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Turner called from the kitchen, where he was attempting to replace an electrical switch on the water heater.
“—that he isn’t comfortable in his skin. He has several methods of hiding this, all of them convincing enough to anyone but himself. The problem becomes, how to capture this richness? Because to be fallible to oneself is a kind of richness, no? It is human.”
Odile approached one of the portraits. Turner was depicted standing nude against a whitewashed brick wall, his arms folded across his chest, his brown-black eyes glistening with a mix of bravado and something that Odile didn’t rush to identify. “You must know him well,” she said.
Céleste gave her a sideways glance. “To me it’s like traveling. For the first twenty-four hours in an unfamiliar city, one can see and understand its entirety. Afterward, one may live for many years in that same city before understanding it again.” She blew smoke toward the ceiling. “With people it is the same. I painted that one when Turner first arrived in Paris. I’m satisfied with it.”
Shifting her attention to the other portrait, Odile saw that it had been done some time after the first. Turner, again nude, was seated beside a green metal café table, against a cream-colored backdrop. He held a glass of pastis in one hand and was unshaven, studiously casual. About the eyes, a smudge of fatigue. He appeared disconsolate.
“That was two years later,” said Céleste, “right before he began working for the auction house.”
“I’m not sure I would have recognized him,” Odile said.
From the kitchen came the sound of metal clattering to the floor. A string of curses followed, then another small crash.
Céleste smoked and studied the portrait. “It is not a success, this painting. Maybe I was distracted by the obvious. I don’t know.”
“But not at all,” said Odile, surprising herself. “Here the obvious is true. You caught him with his guard down. A rare moment.”
“Yes?” Céleste kept her eyes on the portrait. “Then you also must know him well.”
“No,” Odile replied. “We’re only acquaintances.”
Céleste was returning the paintings to the storage rack when Turner appeared, holding the faulty switch in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. “You know, Céleste, I’m really not the ideal electrician.” He paused, as though waiting to be relieved of his chore. “All right,” he said at last. “Fine. Is there a hardware shop nearby?”
“Go right out the gate, then right again,” Céleste told him.
He looked from one woman to the other, shook his head, and left.
“I tease him because he’s spoiled,” Céleste explained. “But also charming, and I enjoy being charmed. Don’t you?”
“Not so much, no. I don’t have the patience for it.”
Céleste’s deeply lined face expanded in a smile of pure delight. “What a pleasure to meet you, Odile.” Her blue eyes glistened. “May I offer you coffee?”
SEATED AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with that afternoon’s Le Monde spread out before him, Max was startled by the repeated dull thump of someone dragging a plastic bin over the cobblestones below. It was Rachel, come to drop off their garbage. He cranked open a window and invited her up.
“Don’t you want some footage of me hauling trash?” she asked when she reached the top of the stairs. “It’s, like, so representative.”
Because the Seine was not legally part of Paris, refuse generated on the river could not be disposed of within city limits, and clandestine dumping was universal. “Maybe later,” Max replied. “What I need now is your company and sweet good nature.”
Miming a curtsy, Rachel smiled at him and crossed the room to install herself on the sofa. She wore white canvas sneakers, faded black jeans cut low on her hips, and a red jersey top that stopped well short of her navel. Her jet-black hair was up, carelessly gathered in a clip but parted at the scalp in a zigzag pattern Max hadn’t seen before. Her heavy black-framed glasses perched lopsidedly on her nose, slowly sliding down until she was obliged to push them back up again. Even sitting down, she looked taller than her actual six feet.
“How’s the Nachtvlinder?” Max asked. “Get her cleaned up?”
“Pretty much. One part of the wheelhouse roof is burned through, but we were really lucky. It could’ve been much worse.”
“Definitely. What if we hadn’t been there to put it out? There’d be nothing left, right?”
Rachel shuddered. “Let’s not visualize.”
“Very strange, though,” Max said, shaking his head. “I wonder who did it.”
“Groot thinks it was someone who wanted our berth,” Rachel replied. “All the legal places to dock in Paris are taken, and there’s a waiting list that goes on forever. Maybe this person got tired of waiting.”
“Maybe. But if somebody really wanted to burn you out, wouldn’t he pick a time when you weren’t there? The hose, the fire extinguisher, all of us sitting there in plain sight—it must have been obvious, even in the dark, that we could put out the fire before it did any serious damage. Whoever was responsible had to have known that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying this was meant to intimidate you and your guests, not burn up your boat.”
She smiled wanly. “Well, whichever, it didn’t work. That’s all I care about.”
“You’re a pragmatist. An outcome-type person.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m an American like you, remember?”
They laughed together. It was an unspoken imperative of expatriate life in Paris not to cluster with fellow countrymen. Doing so suggested a lack of moral resources or, worse, of wit, and Max sometimes felt that flouting this rule lent an extra edge to his interest in Rachel. They were each the only American that the other saw with any regularity.
“At least I’m married to a French girl,” Max said. “What kind of credibility do you get from Groot? People here think the Dutch are all pornographers and pot smokers.”
Rachel laughed. “Poor Groot. But really, to be fair, I’ve never understood why the French have this reputation for rudeness. They’re so nice to me, always offering their help. I sit down in a café, open a menu, and right away somebody’s translating for me and telling me not to order the pig’s feet.”
“You fulfill a national fantasy,” he said. “The American ingénue. Jeanie Seberg in Breathless.”
“Right. I’m so innocent.”
“But you’re not, of course. What people respond to lies much deeper. It’s just that they need an excuse to succumb to their own good intentions.”
“Unlike the average California girl,” Rachel added, “who needs an excuse not to.”
Max went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of mineral water. He could hear the widow from the building immediately
behind the mews remonstrating with the couple next door, a jeweler and a contractor who were raising their roof by half a story. The widow claimed that the heightened chimney would send smoke directly into her kitchen window. The couple argued that the prevailing winds blew in the other direction. Hundreds of bitter words, spread out over days, had been expended on the subject.
Returning with the drinks, Max found Rachel polishing her glasses with a lavender tissue. He sat down opposite her and when she finished, said, “I’ve been trying to think of just how to ask you this. It’s a bit awkward, and I don’t want to overstep.” He looked carefully into her deep blue eyes.
“Go ahead, Max.”
“I guess it boils down to this: if Odile were in some kind of trouble—a tight spot that for one reason or another she didn’t want me to know about—would you tell me if I asked?”
Rachel didn’t blink. “Probably not, no. Not if she didn’t want me to.”
“Right. That’s the only decent answer, isn’t it?”
“Sure, a friend’s a friend.”
“But if the situation got out of hand, and she couldn’t deal with it herself?”
Shifting in her seat, Rachel began to look uncomfortable. “Max, I’m sure that if she were in real trouble, she’d tell you, okay?”
“It’s been on my mind.”
“Just stop worrying. I mean it.”
They drank their water and talked of other things. Someone they both knew had recently been arrested for identity theft—credit card and telecom fraud in three time zones. A sous-chef with a wife and two children, he wasn’t at all the type, but neither Max or Rachel could think of much to do for him.
“IT IS NOT SO OFTEN that I have a visitor who would appreciate these,” Céleste said, “but when you mentioned you were a designer …”
Odile nodded. “They’re beautiful.”
The two stood side by side in Céleste’s bedroom with the closet open and several items of antique couture laid out on the bed. A gown of golden silk, pleated in a twist. Another of black lace, embroidered with hundreds of tiny seed pearls. A scoop neck burgundy dress, a midnight-blue suit, a bustier in brocade, a backless dress in emerald taffeta. Odile studied them all, lingering over the details. Here was a treasure trove of design ideas, and even as she admired these clothes, each item custom-made, she saw how to adapt them, simplify them, take them in different directions. She reached out to touch a dress of jade-green silk, wrapped at the front and secured with a dozen hidden fasteners.