The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  “No matter,” he said quickly.

  We walked out through the veils of smoke into the street.

  As we moved down the Rue des Archives, Fleury took out a small handkerchief, folded it up and pressed it once against his forehead. This was the only sign that he had exerted himself physically. “How did you like the show?” he asked.

  I admitted that I never felt comfortable at openings.

  “It’s just as well,” he said. “Do you know what happens when I go from one gallery party to another, one café to the next, parading up and down the street to all the different openings and making sure I get in all the hellos that need to be said? What happens is that everybody starts to look the same. Everybody is afraid of the same things. Me included. It all just starts to merge together. If I focus on people or things, they just blur. It’s as if things exist only in fast motion. Everything rushing around. Everything new. And loud. And quite drunk most of the time.”

  “That’s a different world from the one I’m used to,” I told him.

  “You might think you’re not a part of the same world, but you are. You do the work that keeps it in motion. Without the work, the doing, all this just disappears. Am I right?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “No guessing. That’s a fact.” Then a look came over his face as if he had said more than he wanted to. “What did you think of the paintings?” he asked, to change the subject.

  I shrugged awkwardly. “I didn’t really get the chance, to be honest.” I was afraid he would turn us around and make us go back to the gallery.

  Fleury shook his head wearily. “They were awful. The artist is the stepson of a gallery owner across town. A man to whom I owe some favors. He was the one who persuaded Madame Pontier to come. She is a big fish in these waters. That’s why I got the crowd. That and the fact that I was serving proper champagne, for a change. The work won’t sell, you know. None of it.” Fleury spoke as if he were making a decree. “Except perhaps to his relatives.”

  I felt a pinch in my side when Fleury said this. Before my own work had started to sell, I had refused to let any of my relatives buy it. This, of course, made no sense to them and they took it to mean that I didn’t think they had any taste. They got annoyed about it and said their money was as good as anybody else’s, so I was made to explain that I couldn’t stand the thought of them subsidizing me. Even when they complained that subsidizing had nothing to do with it, I didn’t believe them and still wouldn’t sell them the work. Instead, I just gave it away.

  It had started to rain in mist so fine that I could barely feel it. The grayness that swirled through this watery air was like a failing of my sight, as if cataracts were gathering like smoke behind my eyes. I turned up the collar of my jacket and hugged it to my throat.

  Fleury brought us to a restaurant called the Polidor on a street named Monsieur-le-Prince. Inside, the place was warm and crowded, with tables set together in rows and heavy pale green pillars holding up the roof.

  Fleury waved at the waitress, who nodded hello. She was a large woman with long blond hair and a red velvet dress. Her face was soft and friendly and very pink. She was big all over, with the kind of body that Rubens might have painted.

  Fleury and I squashed ourselves into a table by the wall. Fleury whispered to the waitress. She bowed down next to him to hear, her thick blond hair falling over his shoulders and her chest close to his face. When Fleury had finished whispering, the waitress laughed loudly and raked her nails gently down the back of his neck.

  I didn’t ask what he had said to her.

  A pitcher of red wine was brought. Its clay sides were cold and beaded with moisture. The tendons strained in Fleury’s wrists as he lifted the pitcher and filled our glasses.

  “This is kind of you,” I said, but I made sure that he understood from the tone of my voice that I needed some kind of explanation about what he wanted.

  Fleury set down the pitcher and gave me a smile, to show he didn’t mind my curiosity. “Pankratov speaks very highly of you,” he explained. “And I expect you know by now that he doesn’t speak highly of many people. Any man who is of interest to Pankratov is of interest to me.”

  It occurred to me that one person Pankratov did not seem to be interested in was Fleury himself. “But Pankratov doesn’t know me,” I said.

  Fleury shook his head. “He seems to know your work, at any rate.”

  I explained to him about the Levasseur scholarship. I told him how much I had always wanted to come here.

  He nodded slowly while I talked, at one point taking off his glasses and polishing them on his tie.

  “And I don’t even know who these Levasseur people are,” I told him when I had finished the story.

  “Nor I.” Fleury shook his head. “But who cares, as long as they’re paying, eh?”

  “What should we order?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Whatever’s the special,” Fleury told me. He drained his glass and let his head fall back. I saw the wine pulse down his throat. He sighed noisily. Slowly, almost mechanically, he lowered his head until he was facing me again. “Now you must admit,” he said, “that this is more fun than working at home.”

  “I admit it,” I said. “But I didn’t come to Paris just to have fun.”

  “And let me guess. You feel shitty about enjoying it now.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. I drank some wine. It was sharp in the corners of my mouth.

  “So,” said Fleury, laying his hands flat on the table, “did you bring any work with you?”

  I shook my head. “I wanted to start out fresh when I got here.”

  The smile slipped lopsidedly from his face, like a fried egg sliding off a plate. “And do you have a dealer here in Paris?”

  “Not yet,” I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows, smile returning. “Well, that’s easily remedied.”

  “I’d better get some work done first,” I said. I had planned out a series of a dozen paintings, to be based on my memories of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, where I’d lived all my life. I would give them the unreliability which memories take on. Objects would be painted deliberately out of scale—waves too big, houses too small, the colors strong and glaring, with some things left only as outlines. I didn’t want to tell Fleury any of this yet. “How long have you had your own gallery?” I asked him.

  “Less than a year,” he replied. “Before that, I worked for the Galerie St. Edouard over on the Avenue Matignon. I had in mind that I would work as an apprentice for a few years, just to learn the ropes, then start up a gallery on my own. What I learned instead was that it would take a lot longer than my patience would endure.” He rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a wooden match which he struck against the heel of his shoe. He jammed the still-flaring match head against the end of his cigarette and puffed. “I was accused of being ambitious, although God knows why that should count against me. I remember the owner of the St. Edouard saying to me that I was a young man with ‘ideas above my station.’ Do you know, that’s the worst thing anybody ever said to me. But I tell you, they were doing me a favor.”

  He spoke quickly, his words almost running together. “So I said to hell with it, and opened up my own gallery anyway. Borrowed from every friend and relative I could find. Found a place. Haven’t had a day off in months.” He sucked in a lungful of smoke, his lips popping quietly together as he pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “Don’t regret it. Not for a minute. Even if I have to listen to those people tell me they were right that I had ‘ideas above my station.’ At least I gave it a try.”

  I knew those words must have kept him up nights, fuming at the insult. It reminded me of the time I overheard one of my old college friends joking that I could come and live in his basement any time I wanted to, to save me from freezing to death as a penniless artist. But from then on, I would have frozen to death rather than go live in that man’s basement. So I knew what Fleury was talking about.
I didn’t doubt he would succeed. You can tell this about some people, that they will get what they want and are not just fooling themselves or anybody else. They have an instinctive sense of the balance of luck and skill and specificity of purpose that’s required. I hadn’t expected to like Fleury, and was surprised to find that I did. I was equally surprised that he seemed to like me as well.

  “When you get some art together,” he told me, “you let me know. Maybe we’ll work together some day soon.”

  “If Pankratov gives me any time to paint,” I said.

  At the mention of Pankratov’s name, Fleury sighed and patted his hand against the back of his neck, as if the joints of his spine had come loose and he was tapping them back into place.

  “What do you know about him?” I asked.

  Fleury shrugged. “Not enough.” He stubbed out his cigarette, jabbing the butt into the ashtray until it crumbled apart. “Everybody in Paris has heard of the man. People are always talking about him at gallery functions precisely because he never comes to them. They’ve all got Pankratov stories of their own, most of them completely untrue, I suspect, but it gives us something to talk about. Look,” he said, “I don’t know what he said about me after I left the atelier today, but I rather doubt it was flattering. You make your own judgment. Will you do that? If we’re going to work together some day, and I hope we will, I’d rather you based your opinion on what you see than on what you hear. It is a question of trust, and should not be left up to strangers.”

  As he spoke, I felt that never-trusting part of me peer out cautiously from behind its barricade of ribs and the tangled barbed wire of veins.

  “You know,” said Fleury, “I have a hunch that now you’re here, you might decide to stay.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “I can tell from the way you talk about Paris. You loved this city before you ever saw it. We all have dreams of how a place will be before we get there, and usually the dreams are much more lavish than the reality. You can’t help but end up disappointed. But Paris is the only place on earth where the reality is even more beautiful than the dream.” He nodded to show he was serious.

  “I might fall in love with it if I had the time,” I told him, “but after the grant runs out, I can’t afford to stay here. I don’t have work papers, so the only kind of job I could get wouldn’t pay me enough to live off and get any painting done at the same time.”

  “You might find a way,” he said. “You never know.”

  Before Fleury mentioned the idea of staying, going home had seemed inevitable to me. Now the image of remaining here began to burn itself into my thoughts.

  “Welcome to Paris,” said Fleury, pouring out more wine. “I think you have finally arrived.”

  * * *

  HEAVEN ON EARTH. THAT was how my father had described Paris in his letters home. He had come here as a soldier in 1918 and was killed at Belleau Wood. He died when I was only a few months old. My acquaintance with him began and ended with those letters, and the occasional anecdote told by my mother, when some sound or smell might catapult her back into the past.

  I also had an Uncle Charlie, who had come to France before America entered the war and was a pilot for the French air corps. My uncle Charlie never came home after the armistice. He disappeared in 1926, in an attempt to fly the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. I had pictures of my father and my uncle in their wool coats and puttee-wrapped legs, side by side in the city of heaven on earth. Ever since I was a child, their sepia-tinted ghosts had drawn me to this place.

  For me, Paris became the only tangible link between my father and myself. It was not enough to hold on to the flimsy blades of paper which were his letters and to think that he had once held them in his own hands. And the blurred and fading picture was not enough. But if I could only get to Paris, I used to think, and be in the place where he had been, and fall in love with it the way he had fallen in love with it, then I might understand who he had been. Might know him in myself.

  When people would say to me, “You look like your father,” or, “Your father used to do that,” or, “Your father would have liked that,” it was like being haunted. What troubled me wasn’t so much the physical resemblance. It was the traits of character, which I could not call my own because they had been his before me, even if I had never learned them from him. Instead, they had reached me like some echo of his voice inside my blood.

  I looked to Paris for the answers. It would be my bridge between the present and the past. It would give me peace of mind, just as the painting did when it was going well. Sometimes I think I started painting precisely because I knew that my father had not been a painter. So I could call it my own.

  That may have been what got me started, but what kept me at it was beyond me. It wasn’t until I had given up trying to figure it out that I realized I wasn’t supposed to know. If the answer had been clear, I would never had needed to paint. And if I ever did figure it out, I might never need to paint again. I decided it was not my job to know. It was only my job to do the painting.

  During my first days in the city, I found myself wondering again and again if my father and my uncle Charlie had seen what I was seeing now. Not the great monuments or famous buildings but the small anonymous things. A crack in the sidewalk which was shaped like a crescent moon on the Rue de Rivoli. A certain dapple-trunked tree growing in the Tuileries Gardens. A chip in the blue enamel of a street sign on the Rue Solferino. It chased away the loneliness, as I grew used to my new surroundings.

  I learned the precise stab of the key into the lock of my apartment, the setting of my shoe against the door and the flick of the brass knob to open it. The musty smell of the place that rushed into my lungs soon became familiar. The noises of people living on my floor—pots clunking in sinks, the swish of flushing toilets, softly played gramophone music—all merged into a different kind of silence. I put away the metronome.

  There was something hypnotic about the idea of working at the atelier. Never far from my thoughts was the knowledge that outside Pankratov’s studio, we were regarded with suspicion and sarcasm by those who saw no future in painting. It was a relief to find myself in the company of people who shared the same necessary stubbornness of vision. Even if painting was the only thing we had in common, that was enough.

  By the end of the first week, I had become not only a student of the atelier but a student of Balard and Marie-Claire as well. I watched the way they worked.

  Balard never sat on his stool while he drew. Instead, he stood back from his easel, drawing with his arm outstretched. He used thick wedges of compressed charcoal, pressing hard against the paper and drawing quickly, with great flourishes of his free hand and strange whistling and grunting sounds. Over the course of the day, he would get charcoal smudges halfway up his arms and all over his face, so that he looked like a man who had been in a fire.

  Marie-Claire used delicate strands of vine charcoal. In contrast to Balard, she moved slowly and carefully around the paper, often closing one eye and measuring distances with her thumb, rather than trusting her instincts. She tilted back and forth on her stool, looking at her work from different angles. Sometimes she just sat there, staring at it, hands resting in her lap, as if overcome by daydreams. I liked her drawings. They were deceptively simple, as much about what she left out as what she put on the page. She worked so close to her easel that she seemed to be trying to hide her drawing from anyone who might be looking on. Pankratov often scolded her for overemphasizing the faces in her sketching. She would listen patiently to Pankratov, and then go right back to working on the face, as if she couldn’t help herself. She stuck to the middle of the page, leaving huge white borders, and drew dozens of lines where one would have been enough. The lines were all of equal pressure, fuzzy like the contrails of high-flying aeroplanes.

  I could tell I’d had more formal training than Balard or Marie-Claire, but this didn’t mean that Pankratov was any easier on me. I worked hard to
gain his approval, which he gave in such small and obscure doses that it took me a while before I could tell when he was pleased and when he wasn’t. When he gave his critiques, he would speak for a long time, often in raging monologues, using strange imagery, which he apparently translated directly out of Russian. It was as if he were trying to read words that scrolled before his eyes too quickly for him to decipher or to understand what he was saying. It had been a long time since I had let anyone rule my days the way this man did now.

  So far, I’d seen nothing to convince me of his genius. I found none of his paintings at the galleries or museums. I’d even rummaged through old auction catalogues at the bouquinistes, the dealers who run the little green bookstands bolted to the stone walls bordering the Seine. There was no trace of the art of Alexander Pankratov.

  Pankratov required us to be at the atelier by 7:30 A.M., but as that time came and went Pankratov himself would be sitting across the street in a café called the Dimitri. It was like a thousand other cafés in Paris, each one chosen as a regular haunt by a group that never amounted to more than fifty or sixty. The café was too small to hold even half this number, so they came at different times, some to talk and some with the need to stay silent and apart but not alone. The Dimitri had a small blue awning that ran the length of its front. Unlike most others, which were announced as Café this-or-that, this awning just said, Dimitri. Four frosted panes of glass made up the front window. The menu of the day was written in soap on the window nearest the door. Out on the sidewalk, there was room for only one table. Pedestrians had to step into the gutter to pass by. The sidewalk was on an angle, so the owner had built a large wooden wedge on which to set the table and make it level. The chairs were flimsy metal with slatted wooden seats and backs.

  I quickly learned that you couldn’t underestimate the importance of a neighborhood café in the lives of the people who used it. The choosing of the café was a delicate and personal affair, and it was very important for the café not to appear to be trying too hard to attract its customers. This was not like back in America, where the more lights and flashy signs you put out, the more likely it was that people would stop to see what all the fuss was about. There was a big diner that opened up near where I used to live. It was called the Liberty Diner. It had a sign out front with an eagle on it and the eagle was carrying a menu in its claws. Under the eagle was a big clock with the numbers done in the popular chunky style, the fake shadow of each letter painted just behind it. The owners put a slogan under the clock which lit up at night. It said: TIME TO DINE. Local kids were always shooting out the letter N with slingshots, so it usually read, TIME TO DIE. I got superstitious about it and wouldn’t go in there.