by Ann Charney
“Something like that. It’s a long story.”
Edward jumps up at this point and starts to bark — a sure sign he’s ready to get going.
“That’s a greatlooking dog,” Christophe says, bending down to stroke Edward’s chest. “What’s his name?”
“Edward. He belongs to Meredith Covington, the artist. I work as her assistant.”
Christophe looks impressed. “Wow, that must be interesting. Listen, do you have time for a coffee? It’s not every day you run into someone you thought you’d never see again.”
The shoes can wait, Nerina decides, and she leads the way to a nearby restaurant with a few outside tables.
“Looks like they know you here,” Christophe remarks when the waiter arrives with a bowl of water for Edward.
“We’ve come here a couple of times,” she says, bending down to remove the dog’s leash. “Edward makes friends easily.”
When she looks up, she finds Christophe watching her attentively. “What?” she snaps. The scrutiny makes her uncomfortable.
“I just can’t get over how different you are. In Venice, you looked Italian. Now, you could easily pass for an American.”
“It’s a refugee thing. We’re good at blending in. Like chameleons.”
“I can see that. Tell me, do you live in this neighbourhood?”
It’s a simple, innocent question, but Nerina has to force herself to reply. It’s been a long time since a man has shown interest in her; Marco and Leo don’t really count. “Do you know the framing store on 3rd Avenue, just a couple of blocks from here? I work as a receptionist there. The owner, Leo Samuels, lets me stay in a spare room at the back. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but I haven’t had time to look for another place.”
“I’ve heard of Samuels,” Christophe nods. “He has a great reputation among artists. How did you end up working for two such interesting people?”
She’s beginning to get the hang of it — the back and forth that pushes the door a little more ajar with each exchange. “I owe it all to Helena. She got me the job at Leo’s and he introduced me to Meredith. She used to drop in at his place all the time, but since she started preparing for her new show she doesn’t go anywhere anymore.”
“That’s understandable,” Christophe says, leaning forward in his chair as if the conversation had suddenly become more private. “There’s a lot riding on the success of her show. Money, prestige, reputation. It comes with the territory. Not that I’m anywhere in her league. At the moment I’m just barely getting by, but give me time and who knows? I’m already starting to make inroads with a few galleries. My luck could turn around at any moment.”
Nerina recognizes the mixture of cockiness and insecurity she hears in Christophe’s voice. A lot of the artists who come into Leo’s shop are like him — eyeing each other with wariness and waiting for their big break. According to Leo, the attrition rate is high: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”
“Is that why you moved to New York?” she asks, watching him fold his napkin into accordion pleats. His hands are big, thickfingered, but still graceful.
Christophe gives her a rueful smile. “In a way. I was accepted for a sixmonth residency program for artists run by the Canadian government. Helena recommended me. I guess we’re both indebted to her. When it was over, a Canadian artist I met here, Sam Frith, helped me find a sublet. He also hooked me up with a couple of guys in Brooklyn who let me share their workspace. Sam knew everyone in the art scene. Unfortunately, he’s gone now.”
“What happened to him? Did he die?” she asks, seeing Christophe’s mournful expression.
“Almost as bad. He was forced out of his building when it went condo. A woman banker bought his loft and Sam moved to a small town in upstate New York. The last time I visited him there he showed me a copy of Architectural Digest featuring the conversion of his old loft. Sam’s studio has been turned into a giant walkin closet; the clothes inside are spaced out like trees along a walkway, no two ever touching. We had a laugh about it at the time, but I haven’t had the heart to go back.”
“It can get pretty lonely up there,” Nerina says, realizing she’s just opened the door a little wider.
Christophe gives her a curious look. She can tell he’s winding up to ask her something — something personal — and she has a sudden urge to set the record straight.
“Walter, the guy I married, is gay. He offered to marry me so that I could come to the States. I was in a difficult situation and he was kind enough to want to help me. And while we’re clearing things up, the story about me being an exchange student? That was just my cover for the party. The truth is I was an illegal alien when we met, working as a maid for the Ohstroms.”
He seems silenced by her confession, but she has no time to wait for him to sort out his feelings. “I have to go,” she says, reattaching Edward’s leash. “Meredith is waiting for her lunch and I’m late as it is.”
“Wait. When can I see you again? Can we fix a time now?”
Nerina hesitates. She wants to see him as well, but how? She’ll have to come up with a pretty convincing reason to persuade Meredith to do without her for a few hours.
“Let me see what I can work out.”
Christophe hands her the napkin he’s been playing with. When she unfolds it, she sees that he’s written his number in one of the crevices between the pleats. She folds it back again so that the writing disappears and slips it into her purse.
XVII
Hybrids
NERINA finds it easier to speak to Leo about taking time off. Unlike Meredith, Leo is not in the midst of an allconsuming project and is bound to be more sympathetic.
He is. “I’ve been wondering how long you could keep up this pace,” he says, when she asks if she can leave earlier than usual. “How about tomorrow afternoon? The boys and I will manage without you.”
When Leo fails to turn up after lunch the next day, Nerina is surprised by the intensity of her disappointment. All this distress about a missed date with a man she barely knows — and a struggling artist at that. Working at Leo’s place, she’s had many occasions to corroborate Helena’s view of artists: driven, narcissistic, always dissatisfied. Yet here she is, anxiously watching the clock and wondering how long Christophe will wait for her.
It’s nearly four in the afternoon when Leo reappears. His meeting went longer than expected, he starts to explain, but she’s not listening.
“You look really nice,” he calls after her as she runs out the door.
It’s hard to stay mad at Leo, but Nerina hangs on to the feeling for as long as she can. The anger helps to distract her from the nervous excitement she feels as she rushes to Christophe’s place.
His sublet turns out to be a small, stuffy semibasement on 24th Street. She’s about to explain that she can’t stay very long, but Christophe seems to understand they don’t have much time. Without knowing exactly how she got there, she finds herself flat on her back on an air mattress, with Christophe beside her, his hot breath fanning her ear as his lips trace a path along her neck.
The swiftness of his approach takes her by surprise, but not unpleasantly so. To have matters taken out of her hands is strangely restful.
“I knew you were sensuous the first time I saw you,” he says when she finally pulls away from him. The heat in the room makes it feel as if their skin has been stuck together with glue. The broken air conditioner in the window prevents any passing breeze from cooling the air, and the plastic covering of the air mattress maintains their body heat as effectively as an incubator. “I don’t know if you remember. You were in a great hurry that day, running across the campo, but I could tell.”
His satisfaction at being proven right makes her laugh. “I don’t know about sensuous. Deprived is closer to the truth. I haven’t been with anyone for a long time. Anyway, you only saw me for a few seconds that day.”
“It’s your mouth. I noticed it right off. You can tell an awful lot abo
ut a woman from the shape of her lips.”
“What are you, some kind of lip fetishist?” she asks, laughing.
“Absolutely,” he says, with a hint of pride. “It’s the first thing I check out in a woman.”
She purses her lips out to resemble a caricature of a fish’s mouth. “How do you like this? Does it turn you on?”
His answer is to pull her on top of him and swallow her mouth in his. The burning sensation of his skin is overwhelming and she feels as if her body were melting, dissolving, right down to her bones. Tears well up in her eyes and run down her face, mingling with sweat. She hopes Christophe won’t notice the difference.
It’s dusk when they emerge, but the air is still stifling. Christophe suggests a diner at the corner of his street. “Best souvlaki in town, with a powerful air conditioner to boot.”
The place is just what he promised. Even the plasticseated booth feels cool as she slides into it. She eats quickly, messily, liquid and bits of lettuce squishing between her fingers. When she comes back from washing her hands, Christophe is starting on his second souvlaki. She watches him fold back just enough of the aluminium foil to reveal one bitesized portion at a time. When he’s finished, he wipes the paper clean with his napkin and begins to fold it into a square that resembles a star. She has no idea why he does this. She knows nothing about him.
“I’ve been folding paper since I was a kid,” he says, looking up. “My own crazy version of origami, I guess.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” Nerina says, only half mockingly. “Now for something even more important: do you realize I don’t even know your last name?”
“Yeah, I guess we skipped that part,” he says, with a teasing grin. “It’s Dubé. JeanChristophe Dubé, that’s my full name. When I was in art school, I became aware how many artists in the past were known only by a single name — Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio. I decided to follow their example. ‘Aim high’ was my motto.”
“Dubé sounds French,” she says, wanting more.
Christophe obliges. “On my dad’s side,” he explains. “But I’m really a hybrid. My dad is FrenchCanadian, Québécois, and my mother’s people were Scots who settled in Toronto. I was born in Montreal, but we moved around a lot because of my dad’s work for the Department of Foreign Affairs.”
“Hybrid. That’s an interesting way of putting it. I guess it applies to me as well. I’m half Serbian, half Bosnian.” She watches his face to see his reaction; he doesn’t look surprised.
“I know; Helena told me. That must have been a lethal mixture during the war.”
“I don’t really remember much. I was a child at the time.” This is her usual response when she’s asked about the war. Christophe, does not accept it as easily as others have.
“All right. We don’t have to talk about it now, if you don’t want to. But I can be very persistent, I warn you. I want to know everything about you.”
His curiosity is making her uncomfortable. Christophe is moving too fast for her. She doesn’t know yet if she’s ready to trust him. In an attempt to steer the conversation towards neutral ground, she asks him about Montreal. “Isn’t that where you were living when we met in Venice?”
“I returned to Montreal to go to art school. I was curious about the place. My father’s family had lived there for generations. I arrived just before the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence, and found myself thrust into a crash course on history and politics. It was very easy to get swept up in the excitement of the moment.”
“We had a referendum in Bosnia in 1992 and it didn’t end so well,” she says, breaking her resolve to divert his attention from herself. There must be something contagious about Christophe’s easy, open manner.
“I know,” he replies. “That’s what makes Quebec so unusual. The independence side lost by less than one percent, but the night the results were announced there was only sadness on the losing side, no violence. I think that’s when I decided to stay. There aren’t too many places in the world today where people resolve their differences in such a peaceable way.”
“It sounds too good to be true,” she says, unconvinced.
“We’ll go there together one day, and then you’ll see for yourself,” he says, unfazed. “I would love to show you around my native city.”
“I’d like that,” Nerina says cautiously. She doesn’t know if the offer is sincere or a casual remark inspired by the moment. Marco is right. North Americans are hard to read. Learning the language is easy; its subtleties of meaning, however, remain stubbornly foreign.
XVIII
Heart attack
IT’S past midnight when Nerina returns from Meredith’s place. The phone starts to ring as soon as she steps through the door. She rushes to answer, hoping it’s Christophe. He hasn’t been out of her thoughts since she left him in front of the Greek diner hours ago. Even Meredith, who usually pays no attention to Nerina except to give her orders, zeroed in on Nerina’s distracted state.
“You have the concentration of a mosquito tonight,” she complained when Nerina failed to catch something she’d said. “I don’t care what you do on your own time, but while you’re here I expect your mind to be entirely at my disposal.”
The call is from Leo, not Christophe. “You’re back. Good. I’ve been trying to reach you.” He sounds anxious and tired and there is a strange beeping noise in the background.
“What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“I’m at Mount Sinai Hospital with my mother,” he explains. “She collapsed in the subway this afternoon and they brought her here. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with her. I’m going to stick around until I can find out. I just wanted to warn you I won’t be in tomorrow morning.”
Nerina has met Leo’s mother, Miriam, on a couple of occasions when she’s come by the shop to take Leo to lunch. A small, energetic woman, she had been a kindergarten teacher for many years, and she still had the sweet but firm manner of someone who has worked with small children. Miriam’s sweetness extended to Nerina as well; she would inquire about how she was getting on, telling her to look after herself.
Leo is an only child and very close to his mother. Nerina has never heard him sound so distressed. She can’t help thinking that Leo’s bad news came while she was enjoying herself with Christophe. There’s no real connection, but Leo’s troubles dampen her pleasure in a way that Meredith’s scolding failed to do.
“Don’t worry about things here. I can cancel Meredith if you need me. I really hope your mother will be all right.”
“Thanks, but it doesn’t look good.”
Despite the late hour Nerina calls Christophe, feeling the need to hear his voice. She tells him about Leo and his mother — but all the time she’s really trying to find her way back to his room, where, for a little while earlier in the day, she had felt invulnerable to the damages of life.
Unfortunately, time has not stood still for Christophe either. In the hours they’ve been apart, an idea for a new work has captivated his attention, and he’s eager to tell her about it. The idea, as far as she can gather, has something to do with their conversation about cultural hybrids.
“I’ve been looking for a way to use perceptual discrepancies and the fallibilities of memory to examine the way we construct what is real to us. The concept of hybridization struck me as a useful paradigm for the exploration of consciousness and the self.”
Nerina has heard Leo mock this kind of highminded talk used by some of the younger artists — gobbledegook, he calls it — and it makes her feel better about not understanding it. To hear Christophe describe his work in such opaque terms discourages her. Yet another language she must learn, if they are going to spend much time together.
“Stop. This is way too profound for me. Especially at this late hour.”
“Sorry. I do my best work at night,” he says, unfazed by her sarcasm. “I’ll explain it all to you when you’re not so tired.”
“Can’t wait.”
Christophe has become aware that she’s not happy with the way their conversation is going. “Come on Nerina, don’t be cranky. You know I’m crazy about you.”
The words melt her resistance. Before the conversation ends, she promises Christophe she’ll find a way to see him tomorrow. She has no idea how she will keep her promise, given Leo’s emergency, but she’ll think of something.
Next morning, just to be on the safe side, she leaves a message for Meredith warning her that she’ll be late. Even though she knows Meredith rarely listens to her messages, Nerina feels she’s covered her tracks.
When Leo finally appears, he immediately flops into the chair across from her. It’s clear that he’s spent the last twenty-four hours at the hospital, and she doesn’t have the heart to run out on him.
“The boys have just made a pot of their strong coffee. Shall I get you some?”
“I’ve had too much coffee as it is in the last twenty-four hours. What I need is to go home and take a shower. I just stopped by to see how things were going in the shop.”
“Nothing for you to worry about,” she assures him. “We’re managing fine. How is your mother doing?”
“She’s pretty banged up from her fall,” he says, pausing for a moment as if trying first to sort out the story in his own mind. “It was caused by a heart attack according to her doctors. They say she’s going to need bypass surgery, but first she has to recover from the fall before they can operate. To make matters worse, she won’t hear of the operation. She says she’s lived long enough and prefers to let nature take its course.”
“She’s probably in shock,” Nerina says, trying to comfort him. “I bet she’ll change her mind, once she gets used to the idea.”
“Who knows? She’s always been a stubborn woman, now more so than ever. The strange thing is she wants me to call Helena and ask her to come.”
Leo is looking at her with an air of expectation. Maybe he thinks that as Helena’s friend she can offer some insight. But she doesn’t have a clue. Helena, she recalls, has little patience for her own or other people’s illnesses.