A Nearly Perfect Copy (13 page)

When she got back to her desk there was a voice mail from Colin. He was whispering into the phone, speaking in mock code. “Shit is about to hit fan. Repeat, shit is about to hit fan. Ring my cell.”

Elm dialed him. He picked up and said, “George! Grand, and you?”

“You’d make a terrible spy,” Elm said.

“Yes, of course, George,” he said. Elm wanted to let him know he was overplaying it, but let him continue. When he was out of his colleagues’ earshot, he said, “Christ, Elmtree, you can cut it with a knife in there.”

“What’s going on?”

“Fuck if I know,” he said. “Looks like the merger will keep most higher-ups, but provisionally, just until the FDA ruling. Look, Elm,” he said, concerned by her silence. “We’ll be fine, I promise. Don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” Elm said.

“Everything else okay?” he asked.

I don’t know how to answer that, she thought. Nothing’s okay. Nothing will ever be okay again. “Fine,” she said.

“I’ll give you details tonight. I’d best go back in. Love you.”

Elm put her face in her hands. Maybe her cousin Greer was right. She could use some time off. She hadn’t taken more than seven consecutive days since the month Ronan died, when she had started back at work, too soon by most people’s standards. They didn’t understand that home was unbearable, suffocating, each room a cubby of memories. If she was at work, there were eight hours a day she couldn’t be lying in bed, remembering, mourning. Maybe during five minutes of the day
she’d forget to think about him, and then a flood of guilt would overtake her even as she savored the relief of it, the lifting of the iron weight.

She searched her desk and briefcase for Relay’s card to pass on to Ian. She was wearing the same trench coat she wore that night, but the pockets contained only gum wrappers and used tissues. Maybe she had put it in the pocket of the pants she was wearing? She’d sent them to the dry cleaner’s with a stain on the right knee from falling guacamole. She could call the hostess. She supposed she should probably call her anyway, to thank her for the evening.

To her surprise, Ellen picked up the phone after the second ring. “Hello?” she said, breathless. Elm wondered if she was expecting a call. Maybe from her lover. Elm always imagined that people were having clandestine affairs, but usually there was some mundane reason for the erratic behavior, like a stomach virus, or a broken refrigerator. Elm thanked her for the party.

“Oh, of course. We’re glad you could make it. Sorry, I’m waiting for a call from France. From the company that’s cloning Dishoo?”

“That’s really happening, huh?” Elm asked.

“That’s what they say. We’re paying for it anyway.”

“How did it even occur … How did you find them?” Elm asked.

“My holistic health healer heard about it somewhere. They have a website.”

Elm wrote down the URL, thinking that Colin would get a kick out of it. She remembered to ask for Relay’s information before she hung up.

She took the phone number over to Ian’s office before she lost it again. “You know, it occurs to me now, I thought she looked familiar,” Elm said, pausing at the entrance to Ian’s office. “Is it possible she’s been to an auction?”

“I haven’t seen her.” Ian continued to look at his computer screen. Elm couldn’t see what was requiring such rapt attention. “At school she was into modern dance, I think,” Ian said, still not looking at Elm.

Elm stared at him, his profile sharp, his neck tucked neatly into his collar, his hair gelled to obedience. The computer screen threw off light that reflected off his high forehead. Suddenly, such a wave of loneliness overcame Elm that she thought she might faint from despair. He was shutting her out.

This was a recurring paranoia she’d felt since Ronan had died. In
therapy, she had discovered that she felt he had rejected her, as silly as it sounded. That he had somehow chosen to perish in order to get away from her. Her psychiatrist had teased this out of her one day after she related the dream she’d had a million times, so cliché she dismissed it as embarrassingly banal and mainstream: she was returning from a journey to her childhood house and no one recognized her.

Knowing that this fear of abandonment was irrational did nothing to dispel it. So Elm had learned to at least acknowledge that what she was feeling was probably in her head, and to try to assemble evidence to the contrary. One, Ian loved her and was fiercely loyal. Two, she had done nothing to incur his annoyance. Three, he wasn’t one to suffer in silence. When he was angry, you knew it. Ergo, whatever was bugging him was him, and not Elm.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Bye,” he said, waving.

As soon as Klinman left the gallery, Gabriel began to think about his new business opportunity. He could get Didier to help him; the man could do a passing Pissarro. Marie-Laure worked for hire too, he knew. Recently she had illustrated a children’s book. Surely she’d be more interested in this work.

A team thus mentally assembled, Gabriel closed the gallery early. After he checked his various pockets for the money (he’d spread it out both to avoid losing it and because the wad was too big to fit into his tight pocket), he locked the door behind him and pulled down the grate. Paris was in the midst of a cold snap, its regular mist hanging heavy like a compress. Gabriel turned up his collar, but it did little to warm him. He arrived at his studio in the
banlieue
jumping up and down to shake the cold from his limbs. Both Marie-Laure and Didier were there, and he told them about Klinman’s visit. Marie-Laure looked at him with such blatant gratitude that Gabriel was embarrassed.

“Who is this man?” asked Didier. “Our benefactor?”

“He’s English,” Gabriel said. “A dealer or collector or something.”

“Who cares?” said Marie-Laure. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s an angel from God sent to pay my rent.” Marie-Laure’s live-in boyfriend dabbled in heroin; he was always stealing money from her wallet and threatening to hurt her.

“Angels pay your rent?” Didier baited her.

Marie-Laure opened her mouth to answer, but Gabriel cut her off. “We have until next week only. The paper will arrive tomorrow.”

The paper was delivered by messenger to Rosenzweig’s the next day. It did look like nineteenth-century artist’s paper, irregular and obviously
not mass-produced. Gabriel took it to the studio, ready to hand it out, feeling a dry-mouthed panic. He was not used to being in charge. He was not a leader. He was an outsider, and this new role of cheerleader/whip cracker was an unfamiliar fit. He didn’t like being responsible, especially for other people’s work. He liked to work alone, rely on no one, and certainly not flaky Didier or weepy Marie-Laure.

Today, Marie-Laure didn’t complain as Gabriel lit incense, and did him the favor of turning her American pop music selections down low. Gabriel sat down at his table. He took out the sketch he had started the day before, planning to transfer it to Klinman’s paper. Some of the elements weren’t working. The perspective was not quite uniform. The clock tower in the background was elongated at the top, the point of view low to the ground. Yet the women’s skirts were viewed from above. This inconsistency bothered Gabriel. He suspected this fussiness was related to the lack of spirit in his art, his preoccupation with structure at the expense of emotion. These kinds of imperfections further falsified the piece of art. Yet there was no time to obsess over details in his current assignment. It was all about production. Line them up, bang them out, pocket the cash.

Gabriel put on the old earphones that led to his Walkman. He was the only one he knew who still listened to cassettes, but that’s how his music was recorded, and it wasn’t like he had money to buy some fancy new digital music player. He pressed play and the familiar Spanish rap music blasted from the headset. Gabriel turned it down. He picked up his pencil. He was more excited about this project than he could remember being in a long while, perhaps since he had copied
Febrer
. But that hadn’t been excitement; it was more like nervous apprehension.

He was happy that his work would be compensated for once, instead of merely criticized and shunted. He was guaranteed money for his art, even if it wasn’t really his. He felt disappointed in himself; he had fallen into the trap of capitalism, into believing that an object was valuable only if it was monetarily valuable. But he lived within the culture, it was bound to have an effect on him.

Unsellable art was bad art. So according to the cognoscenti, Gabriel was making bad art. And by this same perverse logic, any art that sold was automatically good art, in direct proportion to its sale price. Who were these buffoons who decided what sold and what sat out in the soggy
cold of the
marché aux puces
? Soulless men who, no matter how they tried, saw only Swiss francs and yuan in the brushstrokes of the masters. They would never understand Gabriel. It was futile to try. Rather, give them what they want—eighty-six pieces of art by next week.

He decided to get one of the pastels out of the way. Mediterranean blue was almost impossible to render without oil paints, but he could try. He layered on the pigment, swirling like he remembered the waves in
Febrer
. Then he completed the scene, a marketplace near the coast.

Almost without realizing it, he drew a large figure in the foreground. A woman, selling bread. It was his mother: the waistless apron, the plaits in her hair, her uneven eyes, one lid heavier than the other, always winking.

No time for nostalgia. An aesthetic assembly line; finish one, on to the next.

On Saturday Marie-Laure and Didier came to his studio. Gabriel, concentrating, didn’t hear them approach until Didier tapped him on the back, startling him.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel rested his old-fashioned earphones around his neck.

Marie-Laure said, “We can’t do it. Figure it takes us at least three hours for each one—”

“That’s if they’re shitty,” Didier interrupted.

“And we can only work like max sixteen hours a day. So that’s five per day, max, which is nearly impossible, and there’s three of us and five days. And I promised my boyfriend that I’d do Sunday lunch with his family. Do the math.”

“I can’t,” said Gabriel.

“I can’t either,” Didier said. “But I’m working my ass off and we’re not going to finish.”

“Yeah.” Gabriel put down his brush. He hated watercolors. Something about them seemed so wishy-washy, so like a Sunday painter. The colors were too muted, the lines inexact. “So who should we get?”

“Hans?” Didier asked. Gabriel nodded. “I’ll text him right now.” Didier busied himself with his phone as he walked out of the room.

Marie-Laure said, “What about Antoine, on the end?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want the whole studio involved, you know?”

“Okay …” Marie-Laure said slowly. She clearly didn’t know. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, Gabriel realized. She didn’t care that they were painting cheap knockoffs for money. But he did, and he didn’t want it spread around. Nor did he want to be the rainmaker for the people in the studio. He didn’t even really want Marie-Laure and Didier involved, to tell the truth.

“What happened to that Russian girl who went to school with us?” he asked.

“Back to Russia.”

“What about Lise?”

“Lise Girard? I just saw her at Didier’s show. Oh, wait, right, you were there. I can find her on the Internet,” Marie-Laure offered.

“I’ll do it,” Gabriel said. Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? “She’s a good idea, right?”

Lise had been the expert draftsman (draftswoman?) in their circle. She had specialized in technical drawing; as a teenager she’d considered becoming an architect. During one of their first conversations, in a smoky bar full of American students near the Sorbonne, she told him that to her lines were clearer than words. She saw the world in charcoal and lead, every person, object, and place an outline, shaded, smeared, or cross-hatched into its third dimension.

“For example”—she picked a piece of tobacco from her lips using her pinkie and her thumb and flicked it away—“right now, in this bar? There are only curves and angles. I could close my eyes and sketch it.”

“All I see is color,” Gabriel said. “I look around and I see sweaters and jackets and hair and surface texture.”

“Together, we would make a great painter.” Lise laughed. Her front tooth was turned slightly inward, an imperfection that made her dearer to him, the way that flaws of unrequited love increase its indelibility.

Lise could render anything, in anyone’s hand, practically effortlessly. Her room had been a shrine to the greats: she had sketches of hunters from the caves at Altamira, Fra Angelico studies,
Whistler’s Mother
 … the lines as sure and exact as if the masters had drawn them. It was part of her final project: a history of the male torso. By copying the style, if
not the subject matter, of art history’s most macho protagonists, she subverted their power somewhat, strengthening her own. Gabriel had thought it masterful, though by then he recognized that his judgment concerning Lise was somewhat suspect. Even now, he was motivated by wanting to see what her life was like so many years later.