Roman turned on the tape recorder he’d brought, and Nora began talking about that summer, the way the modeling led to wild parties and long dinners, inclusion in a circle of real artists that hadn’t been available to her as a female student.
“It had been five years,” she said. “I actually believed he’d survived the fighting, because several friends had seen him right at the end. You never knew about the flu, of course. But in any event I’d written him off for lost. Everyone knew he hadn’t claimed his prize.”
She told them about Paul Alexandre, a name Roman seemed familiar with, a patron who’d rented a crumbling mansion and let artists use the house for parties that lasted days.
“There was a lot of cocaine,” she said, and Fiona burst out laughing. “Well, honey, we’d just survived something horrendous, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Modi was the magnetic center, and he brought me there. Now he was no more than five foot three, and he’d lost a lot of teeth. And he’d fly into rages, which were a product of the TB. And sometimes he’d just cry. He was drawing me one day and he had an absolute temper tantrum about Braque, how Braque was over the horizon, and he was lost in a rowboat. I’m making him sound terrible, but he was tremendously sexy. He’d taken me to Alexandre’s house, and I was quite drunk, and I looked up—and Ranko was standing in the doorway like a ghost.”
Roman gasped aloud, as if the whole story hadn’t pointed to this.
“His right hand was shoved in his pocket, and I didn’t understand that this was because it was ruined, the nerves gone. He hadn’t been shot, so I don’t know what caused the damage, but it might have been psychological. He could move the pinky finger, but not the others.
“I can’t remember the beginning of our conversation—but it ended with the two of us out on the lawn, Ranko yelling that he knew what it meant that I was a model. Now, he was right. He was absolutely right. I never was able to explain to him that modeling was the only way left for me to be an artist. And look, didn’t it work? After all this time, my show is going up!” She laughed and smacked the table.
“But you still could have been an artist,” Fiona said. “Couldn’t you? Just because you weren’t in school anymore?”
“Oh, sweetheart. Name a woman whose work you know from before 1950, besides Mary Cassatt. But it wasn’t just that. I was honestly never that good. Now, I might’ve been, if I’d kept up the training. I was someone who needed the instruction. Ranko was destroyed by the teaching, but I’d have been helped.”
“Berthe Morisot!” Fiona said, but Nora had moved on.
“I was back in love the instant I saw him. It’s the strangest thing, isn’t it, to find someone again after a great deal of time. Your brain resets itself to the last time you saw them.”
She looked at Yale intensely, as if she needed him to agree. He wondered how long he could possibly avoid Charlie, and what might happen if they next met five years on. If Yale moved away, for instance, and came back to town for some funeral. The jolt of seeing Charlie across a crowded room, featherweight and pale. But no—in five years, it would most likely be Charlie’s funeral.
“He was angry enough with me that he went off to Nice for a month. I don’t know what he’d been expecting; he was lucky I wasn’t married with three children. But I’ve always imagined what really rankled him was my being around those successful artists. He came back and we fought terribly, and then we made up. He moved in with us, to the flat I was sharing with my friend Valentina. But I kept modeling, and he’d fly into jealous fits. He tried getting me to paint for him. It was awful; we went to the studio of a friend of his, and he’d sketch out a scene with his left hand, very rough, and try to direct me like a puppet. He’d mix the colors and he’d point, all with his left hand. It was absolute torture, and in the end it looked painted by a child. I’d have done better if he weren’t yelling over my shoulder. The—I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m afraid I’ve already slipped. The painting—”
“The man in the argyle vest,” Yale said. His head was floating away like a balloon. “You said it was from after the war.”
“Now, it’s his! It’s not mine! He wanted a self-portrait, and he’d never done one he liked. Of course I was willing to be his hands. And you can see how similar the style is to the painting of me as a young girl!”
Yale wanted to crawl under the table, curl into a little ball. He’d have to get Roman to delete that part of the tape later. If Bill caught wind of this, he’d be off the Novak pieces forever. If anyone else heard about it—good God, it could throw off all the authentications. It was a—not a forged piece, exactly, but close. He couldn’t think straight.
Roman said, “That’s him? That’s what Ranko looked like?”
“Well, no. It didn’t turn out too terribly like him. I do think I got the eyes right. I pride myself on that. But it’s hard to paint when someone’s yelling in your ear.”
Fiona said, “Why did you put up with it?”
“Guilt, I suppose. He’d been through so much. And I was madly in love, and you’re never reasonable when you’re in love.”
Fiona didn’t look satisfied with the answer. But then she hadn’t understood, either, why Yale had put up with Charlie so long. She’d figure it out herself, sooner or later—the way a person could change, and yet you couldn’t let go of your initial conception. How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger.
Beside Yale, Roman had taken the top off his sandwich and was disassembling it. He took his square of cheese and folded it in half and put it in his mouth. Neither he nor Fiona seemed disturbed by Nora’s admission.
“Now, you know how Modi died. In January, Jeanne got herself to Paris, pregnant. I heard she was in town, so I kept my distance. He lived right around the corner from La Rotonde, and it makes me sick to think I sat there several times while he was dying just a block away. What happened was his neighbor finally checked in, and he and Jeanne were unconscious, half dead of cold. They didn’t even have wood to burn. Jeanne recovered, but he didn’t. It was the TB he died of, but the cold finished him off.”
Yale had read this much at the library.
Nora squinted at the three of them. “Do you have a strong stomach?”
“Sure,” Fiona said. Roman looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“Some friends of Modi’s wanted to make a death mask. One was Kisling, the painter, who’d become a friend of Ranko’s in the war. And Lipchitz the sculptor. They had no idea what they were doing. The third was an astrologer. And they invited Ranko to watch. I was jealous, because I’d wanted to say goodbye to Modi, and Ranko, who’d hated him, got to go instead. The trouble was, Lipchitz used the wrong plaster, something too abrasive, so when they took it off”—she glanced at each of them—“it peeled off his cheek, and his eyelids. The men panicked and dropped the cast right on the floor. In the end, they pieced it back together, and Lipchitz ended up essentially carving the face. It’s in the museum at Harvard now, and I’ve no desire to see it.”
Fiona seemed fine but Roman looked pale. The imagination that had been allowing him to picture Ranko so vividly was probably not his friend right now. Yale felt woozy himself.
“It drove Ranko over the edge,” Nora said. “He’d already been a wreck, but I think seeing someone—someone of great talent, no less—turn into a skeleton before his eyes . . . Well, he managed to tell me the story, but it was about the last thing he ever said to me. I’m sure he’d seen worse in the war, but this was different.
“And meanwhile, Jeanne killed herself over Modi. She leapt out the window of her parents’ house, unborn baby and all. I wonder about that, too, the effect on Ranko. You know, when they call us the Lost Generation—Was it Hemingway who said that, or Fitzgerald?”
Roman said, “It was—sorry—it was something Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. But, I mean, he was the one who wrote it down.”
<
br /> “Good. Well. I can’t see a better way to put it. We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?”
Nora ran her finger along the edge of the shoebox. She said, “The funeral was a circus, just the worst sort of irony. He’d died cold and hungry, and here was this opulent affair at Père Lachaise. Now—Yale, you need to tell me when to stop. You’ve driven so far, and I’m ruining everyone’s day. You should know we had so much joy as well! But when you boil a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don’t they.”
Yale wasn’t actually sure he could take one more mention of death, but he said, “Keep going.”
“You know the basic fact, which is that Ranko killed himself. It was the same day as Modi’s funeral. A group of us went, afterward, to La Rotonde. We were drinking and carrying on, and I wasn’t looking at Ranko. Someone said later they saw him put his hand to his mouth. All we saw was that he started shaking violently, fell off his chair. Everyone thought he was having a seizure. But then he wasn’t breathing, and blisters popped up around his lips. I couldn’t stop screaming. By the time the medics came, he was dead. What they figured later, from the powder on his hand and in his pocket, was he’d swallowed cyanide crystals. Popped them straight in his mouth. Why he chose that particular moment, I’ve spent a lifetime wondering.”
“Cyanide!” Roman said. “So he—he had to have planned it, right? You don’t just carry that stuff around.”
Yale said, “Why do you think he did it?”
“Good lord. People take their reasons with them, don’t they?”
Debra was back with the groceries, and she refused help carrying them, but then she banged through the room four times.
Roman stepped outside to smoke, and when he was gone, Nora said, “I’m sure you think I’m foolish to stay so devoted to someone so difficult.” Neither of them protested. “It’s not as if it kept me from living my life. If he’d lived, we’d have parted ways soon enough. He’d have had a life out there in the world, outside my mind. But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”
“This is what you’re doing with it,” Yale said. “The collection, the show.”
Fiona, he realized, was quietly crying. He reached over and scratched her back.
Before Roman returned, Yale told them both the story of how Nico, waiting tables at La Gondola, once chased after two customers into the rain when they hadn’t paid—pinning a man twice his size against a lamppost until the cook came to provide backup. Yale and Charlie had watched from inside the window. “He was like a kid,” Yale said. “The way he ran and the way he tackled him. Like his limbs were wound up with springs.” Fiona had heard the story before, but she laughed as if she hadn’t.
Yale said, “This might have to be our last trip for a while. But you can call me with anything you think of.” He wrote his new number. “And—I want you to know that as the gallery grows over the next year, there could be changes in my role.”
Nora opened her mouth, and he was worried she’d ask what he meant. But she put her hand, cold and weightless, on his. “This was meant to be,” she said. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
Yale looked at Fiona for help, but she was only waiting for his answer, bemused. “I’d like to, I guess.”
“Well.” She patted his hand. “If we get to do it, let’s all come back at the same time. You two, me, Nico, Ranko, Modi, everyone fun. It’ll be a party, and we won’t let any stupid wars break it up.”
* * *
—
At the B&B, Yale and Fiona watched the evening news out in the TV nook. Roman disappeared into his room.
Yale said, “What have you heard about Charlie?” He wasn’t sure it was healthy to ask. He wanted to know what Teresa was going through, and how the paper was doing, and if Charlie missed him. He wanted to know if Charlie was still skulking around the city. He wanted a full-color diagram of Charlie’s heart and all its failures.
“I don’t know much. Asher’s organizing that thing against Cardinal Bernardin, and I know Charlie’s involved. I haven’t seen him, except—well, so Teddy had a birthday party.”
“Ouch.”
“No, I mean—”
Yale laughed at himself, but it really did hurt. A third-grade hurt, a primal hurt. “Who was there?”
“It was small. You didn’t miss anything. Everyone just talked about Julian the whole time. Asher was there, and Katsu, and Rafael and his new boyfriend, and Richard. And Teddy’s Loyola people, who were honestly dull as hell. And then Charlie brought that big guy he used to date, the one with the beard. Martin.”
“Martin!” This particular fact entered Yale’s mind more as lurid gossip than as a personal affront. He wondered if it was a new development, or if Charlie had kept things going with Martin the whole time.
“Everyone missed you. I mean, I missed you, and your absence was palpable.”
“I guess that should make me happy.”
“Wait, what are we doing for your birthday? May, right? Do you want a party? Or we’ll do a dinner! We’ll go to Yoshi’s!”
Yale found he was incapable of imagining what his life would look like in three months. He smiled and said, “That sounds perfect.”
* * *
—
On the way back to his room, Yale stopped and knocked at Roman’s door.
Roman’s shirt was untucked, his hair a mess.
Yale said, “We should get going early. Is seven okay?”
“Sure. Listen, this trip finishes off my internship hours, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. I think you have more than enough.”
“So I’m sort of done at the gallery. I mean, if it’s okay, I’m not coming in anymore.”
“I’ll barely be going in myself.”
Roman took his glasses off and rubbed the dents on the bridge of his nose. He said, “You’re not my supervisor anymore.”
There was no one else in the hall, but Yale felt he should whisper. “Right.”
“So maybe you could come in.” Roman stepped back, made space for Yale.
The room was dark, and Roman smelled like honey and cigarettes, and Yale walked through the door like he was diving into a sunken ship.
2015
At noon the next day, an email on Serge’s laptop. Fiona didn’t remember writing her address down for Fernand the art critic, but either she’d done that (dizzy with wine and blood loss) or Fernand had asked Richard for it.
“This is what my speedy friend was able to find,” he wrote, “but with minimal searching. He says this is 1911. Ranko Novak is third row, second from left. If it’s something more you want, let me know details! Happy to help Richard’s friend. My regards to your injured hand.”
Fiona clicked the attached scan. A triangular group—ten in front, seven in the next row, and so on—of mustachioed men, gazing at one another rather than at the camera. A skeleton draped across the laps of the front row. On a rug in front of them all, a naked woman, ample backside facing the camera. A spoof photo, the belle epoque version of a goofy group shot.
She moved her finger on the screen to the third row, the second man. Dark curly hair, a long slit of a mouth. Hair slicked and parted down the middle. A skinny, floppy bow tie.
What had been so special about him? Fiona didn’t know what she’d expected, but something more than this. Ranko Novak was worth seventy years of devotion. Ranko Novak was irreplaceable, a hole at the center of Nora’s universe. And this was it? A
face, two eyes, two ears.
Well, try telling that to someone in love.
She zoomed in. He didn’t get any clearer, just larger.
Her affair with Dan had started with a conversation after yoga class, a walk to the juice place around the corner, where he’d asked her thoughts on what the teacher had said that day about letting go of attachments. He said, “Money is one thing. If I wanted to be a monk I could give up my car and it would only hurt for a week. But people. That’s the hard part.”
They’d sat a long time, talking. Fiona said, “I always thought geese were so funny.” Dan had started laughing, and she said, “No, what I mean is, they mate for life, right? But they all look exactly the same. They are exactly the same! How would you ever tell one goose from another? I mean, what, do they all have different taste in music? But a goose could recognize its partner from miles away.”
“And we think we’re so special,” Dan said. He got it, and this was when she started falling for him. “True love and all that. You think we’re as random as the geese?”
“But the tragedy,” she said, “is that knowing it doesn’t change a thing.”
And here, a hundred and some years on, was Ranko Novak. A face among the faces, a goose like all the other geese. He was gone, and Nora was gone, and what had happened to the passion that had consumed them both? If Fiona could convince herself that it was floating around the world—just disembodied, leftover passion—wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to believe?
* * *
—
At two in the afternoon, Cecily called and said she’d changed her mind; she was about to board her connection at O’Hare and would be there late tonight. She didn’t need a hotel. An old college friend lived in the Latin Quarter. “I won’t be in your way,” she said. “I’ll work on Kurt. And then—do you think I should bring presents? For the little girl?”
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