“Un sosie?” she suggested.
“Really? What a strange word. I didn’t tell you, because I knew you loved him, and it would have hurt.”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that hurts me anymore. I know I have to live without him, but then I did that part of the time anyway. There were six months at least of every year when I never saw him at all. It’s qualitatively different, of course. But you can train yourself to accept, you know. Even to accept a death. Then the sightings, or appearances, tend to stop.”
“But what about Fabrice? Is it possible that he faked his death?”
“Look,” she said, “we’re never going to know. He is a peculiar person, Fabrice Corte. Or was. I’m sorry I ever got you involved with him. It seems to have made everything more complicated. I just think there was a whole other side to him and his activities, and I was naïve not to see it before. In Corsica, it could have been something entirely to do with his family, you never know. Probably nothing to do with his activities in Paris.”
“Did you like him because he looked like my father?”
She looked at me, perhaps wondering if it was a criticism. “Initially, I didn’t see it, because I loved your father, and when you are in love, the person you love looks like nobody else. Then, of course, I realized. And, lately, the resemblance seems even to have increased.”
“He took me for lunch at Le Train Bleu, did I tell you? It could have been incredibly romantic.”
“Knowing him, I’m surprised it wasn’t. But perhaps it wasn’t, because you are your father’s daughter, and he had to respect that.”
“It was business,” I said. “He wanted the painting. I expect he put lunch on an expense account, anyway.”
There was a silence between us for a moment, perhaps as each of us decided that there were certain things which had to be let go. “But, Françoise, I’ve got the painting. You must come and look at it after lunch. It looks incredible now, it’s been cleaned, they did a lovely job.”
The young waiter came, we ordered a pichet of Brouilly and the coquelet with fried potatoes, as we were both hungry.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Keep it. Tell nobody. Never let anyone in the art world into where I live. Oh, and carry it around in a shopping bag if necessary. Have it with me always, to remind me of what matters.”
“And what does?”
“Art,” I said, raising my glass to her in the mellow sunlight of a new season. “Life. Seeing things a certain way. Valuing the small, transient, precious things and knowing how to make them eternal.”
“Dis donc,” said Francoise, and raised her glass in return. “You sound just like Peter. He produced a clone.” Our glasses clinked. “Gaby, this has to be a toast to the living!”
“The living!”
“And the future. Enough of the past!”
I knew, as we grinned at each other in the sunlight and raised our glasses, that something else had begun. It was as clear as a letter in a mailbox. I could hear the words that would begin a new poem, that were beginning to shift and move themselves inside my head. In my brain, where perhaps the two sides connected, in that membrane, thin as the skin that divides the kernel in a walnut, something had at last begun to form that was not misery, that was not loss.
The plates were set before us, crisp potatoes and little roasted birds. We drank our wine and ate our lunch, the traffic circling around us, the water in the fountain juggling light, the September blue of the sky, a different blue, coming down between the crooked houses of medieval Paris. We were very small and temporary sitting there, but we were together, my father’s lover and I, and we were friends. After lunch, we would go and look at my painting, and she might ask me what I was going to do next, and I might even tell her, because I knew that the rest of my life was waiting for me, uncertain and yet full of possibility, only just out of sight. But for now, the pigeons were flying down into the square and people were crossing the street, wearing their scarves tied in a certain way, and the church bell struck the half hour and the fountain water played. The light was changed, yet everything was very bright and still at the center, as if it had all been cleaned while we were asleep.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following:
Dendy Easton, for sharing his knowledge about paintings and forgeries.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, for a timely exhibit on dating and authenticating paintings.
Kimberley Cameron, for the insights, persistence, optimism, and constant availability that make her such a wonderful agent.
The writers of Key West, especially Kathryn Kilgore for my room at the Artists’ and Writers’ House and Alison Lurie for her thoughts on ghosts.
Allen Meece, my husband, for his support of me, even when it means I spend months away in France.
Miranda Brackenbury, my daughter, for her careful reading of the manuscript.
The team at Lake Union, especially Miriam Juskowicz, who first loved this book, and Danielle Marshall, its editor.
Christina Henry de Tessan, who worked tirelessly to help me pull it into its final shape.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2014 Nancy Spiewak
Poet and novelist Rosalind Brackenbury is the author of Becoming George Sand. A former writer-in-residence at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, she has also served as poet laureate of Key West, teaching poetry workshops. She has attended the yearly Key West Literary Seminar as both panelist and moderator. Born in London, Rosalind lived in Scotland and France before moving to the United States. Her hobbies include swimming, reading, walking, and talking with friends. For more on the author and her work, visit www.rosalindbrackenbury.com.
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