by A. R. Taylor
She stopped her car and went into the local coffee bar where she often had an espresso. Steamy, smelling of cigarette smoke, it typified everything foreign about her new home but also its potential warmth, if only she could choose that, or choose some sort of life here. Maybe get a job? What a strange thought, and as she sat alone at her tiny table, looking out at the villagers mushing about shopping, she paused again to reflect on the oddity of what she had seen in the private office of Vincent Macklin Hull. Nothing about it made any sense, and yet all those authoritative New Yorkers had explained and explained. They counted on her, they had entrusted her with a stunning secret, and she held their future within her hands, sort of, but if she told the “true” story, what would they do? Had they done something to Vincent? “Something’s wrong that isn’t right,” her granny whispered from the grave.
As she walked into the hotel out of the cold and heard her boot heels click and clack on the marble hotel floor, the perpetually worried concierge motioned her over to him. “I have a small package for you.” He handed her a box with an elaborate French crest on the outside. Champagne, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Maison Fondée en 1772, à Reims France.
“Thank you.” She carried the heavy box up to her rooms, secretive, wondering who on earth would send her such a gift.
THREE
Two days later, in the early twilight, she set out for the Veuve Clicquot cellars with a firm purpose, to find out how this lovely bottle of bubbly might have made its way to her. Even if she learned nothing, drunkenness seemed pretty appealing, and Champagne had always made her tiddly after only one glass, but as she drove, she became more and more wary. Such investigation seemed too weighted with the unknown. Someone had found her or knew about her or wanted to tell her something, or maybe it was a handsome local, wooing with a bottle. If only. Jorge Garza would have loved its golden yellow label.
Thinking better of this quest, instead of toward Reims, she headed south toward Épernay, the landscape still unvarying, field after field covered in snow, not a house in sight, until at last she spotted a farmhouse with a dangling sign that read Galerie Legard. She pulled her car over to the side of the road and made her way to the front door. Inside was a French version of a curio shop, small paintings resting on even smaller wooden easels as a way to display them. The artwork, though, was lovely, and Jenna bent down to look at one particularly charming still life, just a bowl filled with lemons and a rose in a small brass vase next to it. It reminded her, for a moment, of all the paintings she had seen at Vincent Hull’s house, with just that sort of immediacy and force.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.” An elderly man came out of a small, side office. Dressed in paint-spattered blue jeans and a Cleveland Indians sweatshirt, he wiped his hand on a piece of cloth. He was tall, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail and bushy eyebrows, but handsome, even with his deeply tan, wrinkled face. “Are you looking for a painting?”
“I am, as a matter of fact.” She could buy things, though she hadn’t done any of that until now. “I like the one with the lemons. How much is it?” His dark eyes surveyed her closely, squinting. The man named a price in francs, and though not too good at computing back and forth into dollars, suddenly she didn’t care how much it cost. She had to have it. “Yes, that will be fine.” She handed him a wad of French money, acquiring the first thing all her own that she had bought with what she thought of as the Hull legacy.
The man smiled at her in a knowing, almost flirtatious manner and threaded through the bills, taking up a number of them. She imagined that the painting cost about two hundred dollars, but wasn’t sure. “Are you an artist, by any chance?”
“No, no, far from it, but I do know a little bit about art.”
“What does anyone know, young lady, a little bit? That’s all. I have a studio in the back. Would you like to see it?” Hesitant a moment, because in some respects, though older, he was still a man, but finally Jenna followed him as they wound through shelves and shelves of cups and plates and platters. He had an enormous kiln, and she could see the work of his hands in vivid blue and green pots in playful shapes, and into each one he had traced the name, M. Legard. On the far side of the studio, oil paintings rested upright against more wooden shelves, and about the room stood several more easels that displayed works in progress. Jenna stood close to each one, trying to see what he was up to. “Did you do these?”
“Yes, but don’t look. They’re not at all ready.”
“Don’t worry. I just want to see how you work the colors.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to paint yourself?”
“Absolutely not, but I’m interested in the process. I have no vision.”
“But you have an eye,” he said, all the while pulling more canvases out of the racks. “Here, I have one that’s not mine. I’m restoring it, a different kind of work altogether, like taking something back to what it once was. A bit of plastic surgery.” He laughed. “Or chemistry.” The painting was of a large field populated by scattered cows, a furious, threatening black sky above the tranquil scene below. Dwarf beech trees lined the upper right-hand corner, and they twisted peculiarly around themselves.
“I studied art history in college.”
“So you know about all this.”
“I couldn’t find a job, nothing decent. I went to New York and became,” but she stopped, remembering the words of her contract, “a caterer,” she said, thinking that mixing up a few boxties might make this vaguely true.
“Then you know food. Please, come and eat a bit. I’m tired of eating alone.” She searched his face for signs of lust behind the invitation, but saw none; besides he was way too old, and so she agreed. Like two country neighbors, they sat at a small table sharing wine, which the old man poured out of one of his ceramic pitchers, and cheese and bread. He told her of his art, his dead wife, and his two sons, who never came to visit. “They live in Paris and think I’m a hermit in a shack. The artistic life is not for them. Where are your parents?”
“Long dead, I’m afraid. I was raised by my grandmother, Margaret Grace McCann.”
“An Irishwoman?”
“Through and through, though she never had anything good to say about the Irish.”
“They never do, a self-hating race, I’m afraid, like the Americans. Not that you are, my dear.” The old man and the young woman drank the evening away until at last he gave her two cups of strong French coffee to prepare her for the road. As they walked out to her car, Legard stopped and then leaned against the trunk, studying her carefully. “Why don’t you come and watch me begin to restore the painting? I’ll teach you about it, as you know something of art already. Not a good painting, I’m afraid, but the rich man who owns the chateau down the way, he likes it. Unfortunately the painting is cracked. Done by some Italian, and you know how they are.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Cracked,” he opened the car door for her. “I’m Matthieu, and please call me that.”
“Matthieu,” she said loudly, pleased at how much better her pronunciation had become. “Je suis Cate. When could I come?”
“Why not tomorrow?” And just like that it was arranged.
At last Jenna had a purpose, and so the next morning, after yet another paralyzing hour-long breakfast with the high flyers at the hotel, she arrived at Monsieur Legard’s studio prepared simply to watch. He worked at cleaning the cow picture, in particular the beech trees, the stream, and several dogs leaping up in the background. Over the next three hours, she sat quietly as he removed dirt and grime from the outermost layer of the painting, the varnish layer, using small brushes dipped in several watery-looking substances. Her neck began to hurt, and she moved closer to follow his exact movements. He stood in front of her, but finally he let her stand right beside him. This close to the painting, it took on an entirely different look, more precious, deeper, despite the mundane subject matter. After all, it was no longer a cow but a chipped slab of brown and white paint irregularly ag
ing, like the record of some forgotten past.
“Look here. Someone has retouched the painting, from a long time ago, in oil and imitation resins.”
She could see small marks and scratches but nothing very big. Such painstaking work, it made her eyes glaze over. However could he have the concentration? “I’m amazed that you can do this.”
“The owner pays me big money, and that helps in a hard time. He loves it, merde, thinks it has historical value.”
“When was it painted?”
“In the early twentieth century, but he pretends it’s older.”
Matthieu leaned away from the painting, sitting on a stool, and grasped onto his coffee cup. “It gives me nerves to work on it for so long. You know, you might help. I could pay you a little, and then do my own painting. It would be worth it to me.”
“But I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“I’ll teach you, you’ll be here beside me.” For one ridiculous moment Jenna thought this man was actually infatuated with her and just wanted her around, making up a silly reason, but no, this couldn’t be. He was old, seventy-five at least. He must be quite sincere, but given the levels of duplicity she had seen before, she had lost faith in what she knew or thought she knew. Nevertheless, she agreed.
These frigid days found Jenna in the Legard studio, and under Matthiu’s tutelage she had restored the losses in the paint and ground layers of The Summer Storm, filling them and texturing them to match the surrounding original paint layers. She felt like a painter herself, working with the tiny brushes to inpaint any of the remaining cracks or discolorations. Inching over the canvas focused her mind, made her forget her loneliness, and made her wish that she had looked much more carefully at the Hull works she inventoried. All the while, she and her maître had become fast friends, laughing and gossiping about the locals, none of whom, of course, she knew. Who was sleeping with his neighbor’s wife, which one dodged taxes, who had shot a stag illegally small or out of season—it was grist for her mental wanderings and made her feel somewhat more at home. After a month the painting had been fully restored, its cows and dogs and trees glowing with brilliant color, and her new employer wanted her to go with him to the chateau of the owner to present the work in a formal setting. “I don’t want to, Matthieu. You do it. He hired you, after all.”
“But he’ll love the beautiful assistant, and perhaps he has more such paintings, and we could continue to work.”
Startled at the word “beautiful,” she wanted to please the man who had uttered it and allowed herself to be persuaded, in part out of loneliness, in part out of curiosity. Her status in life had changed so dramatically that she hardly knew where she fit in the social world, the problem more acute because her bank balance seemed to belong to somebody else. “You’re rich, a millionaire many times over, so act like it,” she said to herself. But act like what? She didn’t like what she’d seen of the rich acting rich. Guests at the hotel, for instance, were curt, clannish, overdressed, overly demanding, whatever the nationality. Only occasionally did she spot an act of kindness or courtesy to the staff, hence she went out of her way to behave so. Her best friends had become a bellboy and a maid.
Jenna insisted on driving the two of them, because, considering all the wine Matthieu drank on any given day, she didn’t imagine him too steady at the wheel. Over the vast countryside they rolled, the painting carefully tied in the trunk. “What’s the owner like?” She suddenly worried that she would be encountering someone who resembled Vince, maybe even someone who knew him, since he had traveled to France all the time.
“He’s a nice man, yes, with a big family and lots of very bad art. He gets his money from Champagne, and it flows and flows all over the world. Maybe it will flow toward you and me?” The old man patted her on the arm.
They wound up a cobblestone driveway and found themselves before an enormous, crenellated chateau made of gray limestone. Flanking the heavy wooden doors stood a row of structured shrubs, almost like bonsai plants but large, sporting rounded tops with skirt-like growths at the bottom. Matthieu guided the painting out of the trunk and carried it proudly, as they ascended the steps. “Oh dear,” Jenna whispered. “Designer shrubs?”
“Yes, a magic castle,” Matthieu whispered back.
Once inside, though, they found little magic and much domesticity. The count’s children, all four of them, were running about in various states of excitement. A nanny or some such, followed a toddler, cooing and begging in French at his naked behind, trying to get the little one into some pants, while the boy rushed forward pushing a plastic toy with wheels in front of him. Two older boys tossed a Frisbee to a Weimaraner dog in an ornate formal dining room nearby, and a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, danced her way through the front hall with a Walkman on her head, singing in English. She barely looked up when Matthieu and Jenna entered, toting the painting. The girl pointed them toward another room down a long hallway.
The count, a short, trim man in his forties with dark hair, wearing a sweatshirt and blue jeans, talked loudly into his cell phone, waving airily as they entered the room. Bookshelves lined the walls, with ladders running up to them, and here and there marble busts in the Roman or Greek mode glowered down at them from above. Another dog, a black-and-white spaniel, raised its head as they entered and wagged his way over to Jenna, while Matthieu unwrapped the painting and placed it on the floor next to the couch. The count gestured toward them again happily but kept on talking into his phone. Jenna noticed a number of other paintings that hung about the room, mostly involving hunting or horses or dogs.
“Ma peinture,” the count cried, shoving his phone into his pocket. He rushed toward them with open arms. “Magnifique,” he cried again and sought to embrace the two of them in his arms. Then he stood back, assessing their work and finally bent down to examine the details, even touching the surface several times.
“Maintenant, Monsieur le Comte, my assistant is American, so we should speak in English. Please, don’t touch the painting yet.”
“I know, Matthieu,” the man said in unaccented English. “I mustn’t but I love it so.” The toddler, still without pants, rushed back into the room, and the count swept him up in his arms. “Hello, my boy, you should learn English too so you can be a man of the world or maybe an airline pilot.” The count laughed at his joke and motioned them to sit. “We’ll have Champagne and drink to my cows.”
The word “Champagne” caught Jenna off guard, and she had the mad thought that the count himself had sent her the bottle, but then realized this was nuts since she hadn’t even met him when she got the thing. Anyway, he had his own cave or label or something like that, his own business, and wouldn’t have sent the Clicquot brand. Normally she would have refused a drink at what she now called “work,” but today seemed like the first festive time she had had since Vincent Hull died, and she was so eager to have some friends, or at least acquaintances with whom to share a laugh. They were having such good fun, and the count made so many jokes about Americans that she felt suddenly at home, even though he certainly didn’t think much of her countrymen. “I have another American coming here today,” he seemed to remember and then consulted his watch. “A little journalist. He’s writing about the French aristocracy, whatever that is, and wanted to visit a real chateau. Poor fellow must be desperate if he wants to talk to me. My neighbors are vastly more aristocratic.”
At this Jenna took alarm and wondered how fast she could get Matthieu out of there. She had her instructions, and journalists perched atop the list of people she could not associate with. One of them might recognize her. “Matthieu, shall we go and leave the count to his interview?”
Their host, who was still bouncing his son on his knee, jumped up and surveyed his pictures. “No, no, I need more paintings fixed.” He took down a small portrait of a prancing horse. “Unfortunately everything is falling apart here, it always is. It’s a fight against breakdown and dirt. My house is dead, and the land is alive. Take this one
and make it shine. Oh, but I may have some others.” He proceeded to lead the two of them down a winding stone staircase into an enormous climate-controlled cellar, where hundreds of bottles of Champagne and wine rested neatly in exact order, one upon another. The cave smelled musty, like a grave, and Jenna became more and more anxious as she followed the others deeper into the darkness. At last they reached a storage room filled with paintings, rugs, lamps perched oddly here and there—the count’s treasures, at least that’s what he called them. He pulled at several canvases, surveying them, shaking his head until he finally hauled out a very large piece with a voluptuous redheaded woman and a man in a suit of armor clasping each other—according to the count, Aries and Aphrodite in adulterous love. To Jenna it looked pretty awful, but in her self-deprecating way, she immediately assumed her own ignorance, although she managed to say, “I’m an Aries.” The two men stared at her. “You know, my astrological sign.”
“Oh.” Matthieu laughed, and the count patted him on the arm in some sort of agreement or understanding.
“Here is one you might fix, brighten it up. It would fit nicely in the grand salon.”
Her maître stopped talking now, taking in the unwieldy canvas, possibly an important work to his eyes, and he nodded toward her as the two men carried it and its heavy frame upstairs. “We will see,” Matthieu said as even the count pitched in to help them load it into the car. Just as they were trying to figure out how to close the hatchback without damaging the painting, another Renault swung into the driveway. Jenna assumed this was the journalist come for his interview, and she tried to hurry Matthieu into his side of the car. She turned around and saw the retreating figure of a young man with a backpack, wearing a puffy down jacket. Thank goodness they had missed him.