“You have something to say,” Lise said. “Say it.”
When he spoke, it came out harsh, like a stage whisper. “I can’t tell you,” he said.
“Why not?” Lise demanded.
Gabriel paused for a while, gathering his words, his composure. “Because I’m ashamed.”
Lise grimaced and stubbed out her latest cigarette. She leaned closely in to Gabriel. For a second he thought she might try to kiss him, but when she spoke it was clearly not out of affection. “I don’t know what you got yourself into. But you dragged me into it. If the police come after me, so help me God, I will kill you.”
Gabriel nodded mutely.
“And I never want to see you again. Never. Understand?”
Lise spoke with such vitriol that little bubbles of spittle landed on Gabriel’s chin. He didn’t wipe them away. He’d never seen her so angry, never seen anyone so angry. It served him right. He had dragged her into it, even if it had been unknowingly. Never seeing her again was a suitable, terrible punishment. He watched her grab her purse and storm out of the café, praying, if he hadn’t used up his celestial currency, that this whole mess would spare her.
He threw money on the table and took the paper with him to Tinsley’s. He ran all the way from the métro stop, and was out of breath when he got to the building. He had to ring the bell twice before they buzzed him inside the building. After looking at the old, rickety lift in the center of the winding staircase, he charged up the stairs instead, and breathlessly asked the receptionist for Colette.
“She’s not in at the moment. Do you have an appointment?”
“I don’t need an appointment. I’m her boyfriend. Where is she?”
The receptionist recoiled a bit, now suspicious of him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. She stepped out. I don’t know where she is or when she’ll be back.”
“Dammit,” Gabriel swore. Other employees stopped their work to stare at him. He was struck by how shabby the office was, its paper peeling from the walls, the desks yellow with age. “If she comes back tell her to phone Gabriel. It’s an emergency.”
He ran into Colette as he left the building. “You owe me some explaining.”
“I’m sorry?” Colette was carrying three oversized bags. She extended her hand to give him one, but he took a step back in refusal.
“What does this mean?” He pulled Le Monde from his back pocket.
Colette looked at it. “Fuck. Well, it took them long enough. Augustus was arrested last week.”
“What is this bullshit?” Gabriel rarely swore in French. It didn’t feel authentic.
“Kindly keep your voice down.” Colette looked around, smiling too widely. “We can talk about this later.”
“We can talk about it now,” Gabriel said. “Or I can talk about it with the police.”
Colette put her bags down wearily. “My little bear,” she said, with a lilt of condescension. “All right, we’ll talk about it now. Let’s take a taxi.”
Colette put the bags in the trunk of the cab. During the ride she narrated what they were passing as though he were a tourist.
“I do love Paris.” Gabriel thought her voice sounded false, like she was doing an imitation of Audrey Hepburn or Jean Seberg. “Baudelaire has this great quote about Paris changing so much, but there’s a lot that never changes.”
He had calmed down by the time they reached her flat. Once inside, she began to make coffee. “Now, what would you like to discuss?”
“Please,” he said. “I’m not an idiot.”
“He’ll be proven innocent. This will all blow over,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that Augustus takes the fall when that asshole Schnell goes free. But really, it’s not your problem.”
“It is my problem. What, I’m just supposed to believe you the way I was supposed to believe your uncle?”
“Believe whatever you want.” Colette came over and sat next to him on the bed. She pulled his head into her lap and began to stroke his hair.
“I want to know. How much are you involved?”
“You don’t want to know, little bear, actually.” She stopped stroking suddenly.
Gabriel grunted. “And what if they found out I drew the art you sold?”
“First of all, as you well know, I don’t ‘sell art.’ I facilitate its auction. And, not to mince words, it is not your work at all. Your work has netted you a piddling little show way out in the provinces.”
Gabriel sat up, offended at her condescension but unable to defend himself. “It is my work. I drew it.”
Colette nodded. “You have a very cunning hand, it’s true.” She held up his fingers, gripping hard when he tried to snatch them away. “What is it that you want, exactly? I wonder,” she said.
Gabriel opened his mouth to answer, but she was still speaking. “I don’t mean right now. I mean, what do you want out of life? Maybe you want fame. That’s a good goal. You want people to admire you for your work and remember your name. Maybe you want money. That’s a worthier goal still—and a hell of a lot more bankable than fame. Do you want to make great art? That’s separate from fame and fortune, you know that. Art is a commodity. Maybe it used to be something else, but now, all it is is tradable currency that looks nice on a wall.”
“I don’t believe that,” Gabriel said, standing.
“I thought you said you weren’t an idiot.”
“And me?” Gabriel said. His ire was returning. “Am I a commodity? Fuck me so I’ll keep making your little drawings?”
“Don’t be insulting,” Colette said. Her voice was rising. She was offended. Good, Gabriel thought. I’ve finally hit the mark.
Colette continued, “I like you. I liked you. You’re not untalented either. Like I said, a cunning hand. But we probably shouldn’t be seen together for a while.” She was crying a little, the way she did at sad movies, in a way that made her look no less attractive.
“I’m moving to New York.”
Gabriel said nothing. She had never told him she was thinking about moving, and the idea that she had not even discussed it with him felt like a betrayal on par with discovering an infidelity.
“Someone’s having a baby and they’ll probably want me to replace her.”
Gabriel said, “When were you going to tell me?” He wanted to sound angry but his voice came out a raspy whisper.
Colette shrugged. She found her cigarettes and lit one. Gabriel noticed that her hand was shaking.
“Take me with you,” he begged. He hadn’t planned on saying that, hadn’t realized he felt so desperate until that moment, when the idea of a Paris without Colette was like sugarless coffee, all bite and no taste. He had changed since being with her. She had changed him, changed his life. Now he was going to have to go back to his previous self, a self he no longer recognized.
Colette shook her head slowly, breathing out smoke. “No,” she said softly.
She walked over to her front door and opened it into the hallway. “You should go,” she said. “Adiós,” she added in Spanish.
Gabriel stood and walked toward her. She stopped him by grabbing his arm and kissing him, her tongue searching out his closed lips. When she pulled back, Gabriel wanted to slap her. She seemed to read his urge, raising her eyebrows as if to say, I’d like to see you try it. Instead he took the stairs two at a time, almost falling out her front door.
Gabriel spent two weeks moping around his apartment. Then he took to the streets of Paris, spending whole days wandering around Clignancourt or out to the Périphérique and back. After a month, he sold the Piranesi sketch that Édouard had given him and lived off that. Two months later he took a job as an art instructor for seniors at the local community center. It paid poorly, but the seniors didn’t seem to mind his accent, or the way he often lost his train of thought, staring out the window. They even politely ignored it (or maybe their eyesight was too bad to see) when he teared up.
When Klinman was released on bail, Gabriel attempted to confront him. But
when he went to his apartment no one answered the bell. He called, but it went straight to voice mail. He even lurked outside for hours to see if Klinman would come in or out, but he never did, and Gabriel realized, as he shifted from foot to foot in boredom, that there would be nothing to say to him if he saw the man.
As he waited, his anger drained from him. Before, his rage was a circulating fountain, falling then returning in an endless loop. But now he felt empty. After so much animosity, he was exhausted, and he slept like he hadn’t slept in years.
As far as Gabriel could tell, his connection to Klinman was never discovered. At any rate, no one ever knocked on Gabriel’s door to discuss the forgeries with him. As the weeks went on, Gabriel’s relief grew. The case against Klinman was dropped—there was some sort of procedural error. He thought he saw Colette once, across the street near the Bastille, but he couldn’t be sure and she was gone before he could look again.
He didn’t visit the studio for months, knowing that his materials would be either pilfered or ruined when he returned. If he returned. Late at night, he made wild plans, to move back to Spain, to travel through China, to go back to school to learn a new profession, to become a garbage collector or a toll booth operator, which required no thought and had no possible promotion. Work thirty-five hours a week and retire.
He had imaginary conversations with Lise in which he begged her to forgive him and she did, embracing him, not erotically, but the way she embraced her children, unconditionally. He told her he was quitting art, and she begged him to reconsider.
But in the morning the hope of those fantasies would ebb, and Gabriel would awake as stuck in his life as ever. Colette’s voice ran like a sound track in his mind, reminding him that art was just a game, and that he needed to learn to play it. In one dream she laughed at him in a restaurant and ordered a twelve-centimeter man whom she immediately ate as Gabriel pleaded with her not to.
The Scandinavian students in his apartment were replaced with other Scandinavian students, who assumed their new roommate had always been that morose and misanthropic. Hans called him three times, but then stopped.
He went for long walks in the Bois de Boulogne, throwing pebbles in the pond. He admired their arcs, their long trajectories to the water, where they landed with a satisfying splash that rippled back to the edge where he stood. Once, a little boy near him picked up some pebbles and copied him, laughing. Gabriel had always been so angry. But now he felt pity. For whom? he wondered.
No one had forced him to be an artist. No one had forced him to fake the drawings. Being angry at the art world was like shaking your fist at the Obélisque in the Place de la Concorde. It was a structure too big to topple. He should stop railing at it. This realization brought him a sense of peace he hadn’t felt in a while. He smiled at the little boy, who seemed not to be afraid of him, and they took turns throwing rocks in the water until his mother told him it was time to leave.
Just after class at the senior citizens’ center, where Gabriel had given up trying to teach perspective and let the old codgers scribble over their paper like they wanted to, his phone rang. It had rung so seldom recently that he was surprised. The number was foreign.
“Hello?” an English voice said when he answered. “Is this Gabriel Connois?”
He responded automatically in French. “Oui.”
She switched to French as well. “My name is Madelyn Hunter.” Her accent was so thick that Gabriel could barely understand her, but she spoke fluently. “I represent the Academy of Arts in London. Have you heard of us?”
Gabriel’s heart began to race. “Maybe.”
“Then you know we sponsor an annual fellowship for a Mediterranean artist. It pays a stipend of fifty thousand pounds to live in the Academy in London and paint for two years.” The woman might have been speaking from a script.
Gabriel had never heard of it, but was the fellowship about to be offered to him?
“Well, you are one of five finalists. You were nominated by someone on our board.”
Gabriel felt the familiar relief of disappointment wash over him. A finalist. He knew he wouldn’t win. So the phone call was a waste. Except that he might win.
“Do you understand?” the woman asked.
“Hmm,” Gabriel said, too stunned for speech.
“We tell you this not to torture you but because we have to know if you’re able to come to London for two years. Sometimes jobs and families don’t allow—”
“I’m allowed,” Gabriel said. That wasn’t what he meant, but the word presented itself as available.
“Good,” the woman said. “Can I verify your address so that we can send you the letter in two weeks? Regardless, now that you’re a finalist, you’re considered a member of the Academy.”
“What does that mean?” Gabriel asked.
“It means you’re part of the AOA,” the woman repeated, as if Gabriel simply hadn’t understood her French.
When the phone call ended, Gabriel stood in the street watching his students hobble glacially onto a bus. Was this a prank? he wondered. It couldn’t have been. No one would bother to prank him. Especially not in French.
He returned to the studio and spent a few hours looking at his work. The stored canvases were rejects from the show. The drawings in his sketchbook were studies for pieces he did for Klinman. He ripped the canvases and tore the paper from the sketchbook, making several trips to the Dumpster. Then he examined his brushes. Gummy, gooey, frayed. He took the whole can outside and tossed it. His pencils were stubby, his turpentine cloudy. He threw them all away. He spent the day cleaning out his work space, getting rid of every vestige of his previous work, all the sketches in others’ hands, all the half-begun paintings in his own style, the jar of ink. Then he decided to throw everything away, all his paints and pencils and brushes and palettes and solvents. As he tossed it all into the Dumpster out back, he felt wonderfully light, like a pebble winging its way to the pond.
Marie-Laure came outside. “If you were going to throw things away, I wish you would have asked if anyone else wanted them. Or at least recycled them.”
“Fuck you,” Gabriel said, the words sweet like a whistle in his mouth.
Marie-Laure spun and ran back to the studio.
He took the remainder of his Klinman money and went to Rougier & Plé, spending every last euro, buying more gum erasers than he would ever need just to get rid of all the cash. He had to hire a taxi to take him back to the studio, an expense he hadn’t counted on, but with his purchases spread out before him he felt like he could begin again.
The following two weeks Gabriel walked around filled with anxiety. Now that leaving Paris was a possibility, he gazed at lintels, examined railings, went for long walks to breathe in the air. Sometimes he found himself smiling at odd moments. Maybe he would win. He was already a finalist. He considered, then rejected, buying an English dictionary.
“Good to have you back, man,” Hans said. “I thought you were angry with me about the show still or something.” Gabriel had accepted his invitation to have a beer. He told Hans about the possible fellowship.
“What are your chances, do you think?” Hans asked him.
“One in five.”
“Ha.”
“I don’t know. I probably won’t get it.”
“Probably not.” Hans paused. Gabriel hit him playfully. “But you might. I mean, no one made me a finalist.”
“You’re not a Mediterranean painter.”
“True. It’s harder competition for real countries. With actual economies, I mean.”
Gabriel ignored the jibe. “I don’t think I’ll get it.” But what if he did? It would jump-start his career, end his money problems. Two years in London at the Academy would mean he was really an artist. It was so difficult to hold these two contrary hopes in his head. On the one hand, not getting it would be a comfort. It would confirm what he’d always suspected. But getting it would place him firmly in the artistic elite—he wanted desperately wh
at he had dismissed all his life as false and hollow. He would be the person he’d always hated, the one patronized by Big Art.
He waited around his apartment for the mail, ran several calculations of how long it would take for a letter to get there. They probably met on a Friday, he reasoned. So they’d mail the letters on Monday and it would get there on a Thursday. Unless they met over the weekend. Or if someone on the committee were out of town and they were waiting to meet until the following week. His speculations were pointless, which didn’t dissuade him at all.
Finally, nearly three weeks after the phone call, Gabriel returned home from a lengthy walk during which he’d succeeded in forgetting about the prize for almost thirty minutes as he contemplated what pigeon genitalia might look like to find a letter in his mailbox with an English postmark. It was thin, and someone had taken care to line the stamp up perfectly with the edges of the envelope. The handwriting was formal, and it gave each part of his address its own line: the number, the street, the apartment, the city, the postal code, the unnecessary région, and the country.
He ripped it open so quickly that he tore the letter but still was able to read the first line: “Félicitations/Felicidades/Congratulations.” It was embossed at the bottom. Gabriel let out a yelp that would make his neighbors check to see who was being assaulted in the lobby. And he would not notice until three days had passed, and he was trying to tape the letter back together, that it listed the board members of the Academy, among whose names was that of Augustus Klinman.
Elm
She thought surely he would be back by that evening, but at midnight she gave up waiting and went to bed. He’d be back by the next day. Moira seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation. She went right to bed when asked, and didn’t even angle for a story.
He was right. How did she know that Michel hadn’t simply implanted a random embryo? She certainly couldn’t sue him if the baby wasn’t Ronan. She had just trusted him blindly, the way she trusted Indira. She had confided in the wrong people, and pushed away the right ones, the ones who would have stopped her from this folly.
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