A Nearly Perfect Copy (21 page)

“Madame?” the man asked into the silent phone.

“I don’t know if I can come to Paris, fly three thousand miles to meet—”

“With all due respect, Madame, the process is not inexpensive. Consider the trip a holiday, a deposit on the ultimate benefit.”

Elm supposed he was right. The process must be tens of thousands of dollars. In comparison, a long weekend to the City of Light was pocket change.

“Perhaps it could be coupled with a business venture?” he asked. “I see you travel to the Continent not infrequently.”

Elm nodded, alone in the bedroom, until she realized that he was
obviously looking at a record of her transatlantic travels, which made her shiver.

“Shall we say in two weeks?” he asked. “We can arrange flights and a nearby hotel, transportation from the airport to our facility.”

“I’d feel better if I could be on my own,” Elm said, imagining an international kidnapping scandal.

“As you wish,” the man said graciously. “You may e-mail to let us know when you’ll be arriving, and we will send a car for you. Our location is within an hour of Paris.”

Elm hung up the phone, and tried to stop imagining herself getting off the plane, being whisked away in a limousine to some estate with voluptuous nurses and sterile Swiss hospital beds. Maybe she should look at it the way she used to encourage herself to look at dating: as a social experiment, with an anthropologist’s permanent interest and detachment. Then she could laugh about it, about going to a secret medical facility in France. She wandered back out into the living room. Colin was sipping from a scotch.

“I have to go to Paris,” she said. “For work,” she added, realizing the detail was more suspicious than its omission. Tell him, her conscience urged. Tell him you went to the doctor and you have poor follicle reserve and then there was this website … Don’t, it said. Check it out first. If it’s real, then you can discuss it. She made a bargain with herself. If he remembered her doctor’s appointment, if he asked her about it, about her day, about anything at all, she would tell him. She waited anxiously for him to respond.

“Hmmm,” he said. The light from the television fell unflatteringly across the stubble on his chin, giving him a pallor that puttied his soft features.

Gabriel’s roommates, curiously, were all out. He lived with a gaggle of Scandinavian students who were completing degrees, or avoiding the completion of degrees, in various subjects. Two in particular were studious, often sitting at their communal desk until early in the morning. The walls were so thin in the flat that he could hear the computer keys clacking at night.

The apartment had once been a garment factory, and the landlord got a tax incentive for renting to students. It was one room cordoned off by makeshift walls. The kitchen/living room was furnished with found furniture; when sat on the sofa gave a sigh and belched dust.

Gabriel took out the paper to examine it. It was dotted with wormholes, as all old paper was. The holes would soak up his ink and betray the fact that though the paper was of the proper age, the drawing was not.

Gabriel silently thanked his first-year drawing instructor at the École. He had insisted the students prepare their rag paper à la the old masters. Gabriel had learned to make ink, to size paper evenly.

He mixed gelatin and hot water. While it dissolved, he emptied the boxes that were stacked on his floor. Here they were: his notes from those sessions with the professor. He continued to paw through the boxes. Gabriel had spent hours in the rain visiting various Chinese herbalists until he found the jet-black ink he was looking for. He over-watered it, so he mixed it with gum arabic. It had been labor-intensive; Gabriel had cursed him. At four a.m., stoned nearly unconscious, he was shaking a mustard jar of turpentine and walnut oil. Now, leaking into
the box below it, but still useable, the old mustard jar was full of ink. He was in business.

He took a wide brush and spent more time cleaning it than usual, meticulously paring each bristle, trimming the ones that seemed to point in errant directions. He was ready.

The sizing would determine how authentic the drawing looked. He knew he could draw like his ancestor, but if the sizing was uneven, darker in patches or streaked, then the forgery would be obvious. He took a deep breath, steadied his hand, and bathed the paper in glue. The professor had explained that artists should relax their wrists when sizing paper.

“It is like you are on a swing,” the professor had said. “No, it is like you are pushing your lover on a swing, back and forth, with care and force equally.” Gabriel found that the French compared most things to sex. Spanish analogies mostly had to do with food or body functions.

The sizing complete, Gabriel took the page into his room; it would take a few hours to dry. He went back into the kitchen and cleaned the brush again. Then he dumped the rest of the sizing out into the garbage and scrubbed the bowl. He was probably being too clean. His roommates would be suspicious of the washed dishes and the wiped counters. So he made himself a coffee, making sure to let some grounds linger.

Sitting in his kitchen, listening to the sound of the coffee bubbling and waiting for the paper to dry, he remembered being a first-year student. His first few months in Paris were simultaneously exciting and disorienting, tinged with worry for his mother—justified, as it turned out, as she was diagnosed just a few months later. She didn’t tell him, didn’t want to worry him, until the very end, and he went to see her, taking the bus twenty-six straight hours until he was at her bedside holding her hand.

They’d brought her home from the hospital, and the neighbors, who were as much an extended family as any he knew, had arranged for a hospital bed to be placed in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. As it was, she never left the bed again. He sat with her and petted her hand, smoothed the hair off her dry, shrunken forehead. She had always been plump, but in her last days she was as thin as a paintbrush, brittle and desiccated. He gave her sips of water through a straw, fed her ice.

She stopped eating two days after he got there and lived for three
more. He sold all of her possessions and earned just enough to bury her and pay his rent for a year. The copied Connois he gave to neighbors before he returned to France. He wasn’t sorry to have left it there; it would have been a constant reminder of his duplicity.

Would the
pueblo
feel different to him now? Look different? Smell different? It felt strange to think of a Spain without his mother in it. The world would never again taste her
croquetas
or the bread she baked and sold at market. He had not gone back since then because he had no money, nor anyone to visit. If he didn’t return, then his mother was still alive, still in her kitchen. Spain was like a photograph, perpetually frozen in his memory.

He missed his mother. He sighed, finally able to put a name to the knot of anxiety in his stomach. He was lonely and scared that he might disappear from this life and no one would remember him. An image came to him unbidden of Lise’s child burying his face in Gabriel’s neck. The fantasy was so strong he could even feel the moist heat, smell his baby odor. And then it was Lise in his arms, her body pressed close to his, her heartbeat sounding on his chest. She was telling him she was there, would always be there. His eyes suddenly welled with tears, and he lay back on his bed and stared at the juncture where the plasterboard wall met the old tin ceiling until the urge to sob had passed.

He drew in his studio with his headphones on. There was nothing suspicious about his actions. He just had to make sure that no one from the studio would later recognize the drawing as his. But artists deserved the stereotype of being notoriously self-centered; he doubted anyone would even see his drawing, so involved were they in their own work.

It was a disaster. His lines were hesitant, as if the value of the page weighed his hand down, made it sluggish, scared. And it didn’t feel like modern paper. It was unexpectedly rough and yet pillowy, like drawing on a piece of toilet paper. The ink was blotchy, alternately thick and reed-thin where he was unable to adequately control the nib. Gabriel wished he’d thought to bring alcohol to the studio. He wondered if Marie-Laure had any. He hadn’t heard her complain, so she was most likely not working tonight. He could just sneak into her space, grab a nip, replace it the following day. Or maybe he just needed to clear his head.

Outside, it was raining, but he didn’t go back in. How would he explain his failure to Klinman, who would be angry with him for ruining the paper? He was furious with himself, as usual. He’d fucked up again.

He snuck out of Édouard’s early the following day, complaining of a stomachache. He did have one; his innards were tied in knots with the knowledge that Klinman might murder him. He had to go back to his studio to retrieve the failed drawing. Then he had a five p.m. appointment with Lise for a tour of Ambrosine’s. His earlier fear that she was embarrassed to have him come to the gallery proved to be unwarranted. Gabriel found that was often the case; he imagined that people were embarrassed by him, disliked him, designed elaborate schemes to get rid of him. Only afterward did he realize that not only did people not think of him in that way, but most often, no one was thinking about him at all. He was glad he had been wrong about Lise’s intentions, if not about her bourgeois life. He was glad to have her as a friend.

Few were the artists who had their own studios that doubled as storefronts. Among these elite, even fewer had the staying power of Ambrosine. He had capitalized on his real estate and fame to serve as a high-end market for contemporary art. But not the avant-garde post-postmodern installations that interested Gabriel. Rather, he was a purveyor of big names, little talent, like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emins. Gabriel felt simultaneously envious and dismissive of these sellouts. He knew, even as he looked down on them, that he would trade places with them in a heartbeat. It had become his habit recently to check biographies for birth dates. More often than not, those written about in art magazines or shown in the windows of Marais galleries were younger than he.

At Ambrosine, the ubiquitous Cy Twombly was showing. In the window hung a colossal canvas. It was several shades of pale blue, from cyan to titanium to cadet, each seamlessly integrated with white swirls descending the canvas like streaming tears. Something looked strange to Gabriel—the light reflecting off the window?—but then he realized the painting was done in acrylics. He nearly laughed out loud. Acrylics were the fingerpaints of the art world, the medium of Sunday river
painters and rich American art vacationers. Of course, when someone as great as Twombly used them, they were ironic, but to everyone else they were cheap, easily manipulated, and somehow too shiny and artificial. They looked ephemeral compared to the aristocratic authority of oils, with their distinct linseed smell and blunted peaks. You had to really layer on acrylics to get them to have the texture of oils. Of course, Gabriel did not fail to notice the discreet red dot in the lower-right-hand corner of the description. Someone had bought this shit.

Inside the gallery an improbably androgynous assistant sat behind a long glass desk bereft of anything other than a keyboard. He/she was peering down into the table, and it took a minute for Gabriel to realize the monitor was embedded in the glass. He cleared his throat.

The androgyne made no sign of acknowledgment. Gabriel cleared his throat again, louder.

“May I help you,
monsieur
?” There was a long pause between
you
and
monsieur
, emphasizing that the asker was not sure if he deserved the honorific.

“I’m looking for Lise Girard.”

The man—Gabriel now saw an Adam’s apple—waved his hand in a gesture of incomprehension or dismissal.

“We are not a missing persons bureau,” the man said. He swept his hair out of his eyes with one hand.

“I’m not looking for her,” Gabriel said. He had chosen the wrong word. “I have … an appointment.” He wondered how much jail time he would do for slashing a Twombly canvas. Or slashing a supercilious Ambrosine intern.