Allan Stein (8 page)

Stéphane showed me the house in his poor English, pointing at things, oblivious to my clumsy attention. He tried out all the doors and switches and ignored my questions about showers and soap. Dinner was much too late, a midnight snack really, and I was too
tired to join them for it. I went to bed and passed that first night at the Dupaignes' without eating.

In my room (two duvets, pillows from the nineteenth century, thick-walled silence of this nether district of Paris, plus the metal-shuttered darkness) I drifted toward sleep, and space collapsed so that home, everything, drew near again: Herbert's voice soft and clear, telling me to pick up my newspapers from the hall; the view of the city from my window; Louise, located like pins in a map, still, in every house we ever had there; my school, the one where I had taught; and the sense, always with me, that the mountains hid our city and beyond them the earth curved over oceans until finally it turned in on itself, moved past the mountains again, and entered back into the city.

♦5  
♦

T
he next morning I had no plans and no urgency. The house was empty when I got up, and a set of keys - plus a bicycle - had been left for me. there was no sense being idle on my first real day. herbert had made it clear he really didn't care about the drawings (and in any case I had no money with wich to buy them), but I thought it would be a great triumph and a terrific gift for poor wronged Herbert if I at least came back with the news of their location. If finding that out involved little more than a leisurely pursuit of the Stein family and some archival research (for background), then I was ready for the task.

The air was cold nd fresh as a pail of water when I set out after a pleasant breakfast, which I ate alone in the Dupaignes' kitchen. Bread and marmalade were on the counter, and the heat of the stove where someone had baked eggs a little earlier kept the chill away. Mirian had left hot chocolate on a tin warming plate with a candle burning beneath it. Outside, the day was bright and blue and the metal of the bike was cold to the touch. I took my map of Paris and rode to the
Musée Picasso
. The bike was simple to maneuver, so I was at ease even when I got lost. Paris felt otherworldly still, a sequence of pretty pictures, but I was beginning to enjoy the effect. While the city's grid of boulevards kept ribbons of cars coursing across it, the streets where I rode were a lost country beneath the
grid. Traffic bled onto them but slowed or disappeared before reaching me.

Everything was interesting, even the trash on the street was exotic to me. It took two hours to get to the museum. An unusual hill where the rue Jeanne d'Arc dropped from the B
oulevard de l'Hôpital
gave me a jolt at the bottom. I drifted into one-way traffic past an old slaughterhouse, now a historical site of interest (interesting because they slaughtered horses here for longer than my city has existed), which smelled like almond pastry, and then cigars and diesel fumes. Overgrown trees spilled up the stone wall of the Jardin des Plantes, cluttering the sky, and the wind shook them. I waited for a light and watched the trees. The wall stretched uphill, away from me, and the sun got blocked by a flat gathering haze so that it became a bruise of light above the feathering trees, like an eye bearing down. It was warm in the saddle of this shallow valley where I relaxed on my bike seat. A silvery bus discharged tourists, pasty and dazed, white-haired, and they shuffled through the gates into the garden. The light turned and I went on through this picture book.

The museum took up a whole c
hâteau
, and the library was hidden in the eaves. My poor French was a problem. Kind Madame Gogny smiled and asked me to write out my request. I wanted pictures of Allan, anything of Allan, and details about the
Boy Leading a Horse
. She brought books to my table, which made me feel childish. The other scholars had files filled with original papers, letters in a tight concealing hand, yellowed bills of lading, the postcards friends sent to Picasso. I had three fat textbooks. But there was Allan, featured on several pages of the American volume.The boy was stubborn. His impatience with the photographer had been frozen so that, staring at me now, he was still impatient, still waiting, and would be until the photo was put away. His face pleased me, and I took my book to the copy machine and enlarged his picture.

He resembled me, his firm mouth and soft chin, and I packed him in my satchel and returned to the Dupaignes'.

The clock had been shattered by my travel so the afternoon felt like midnight to me, the hazy, glorious day lost behind my shuttered windows in this shadowed canyon of unlikely high-rise apartments. Herbert was awake now—6 A.M., 7 A.M.? —bellowing his fragmented songs, washing in a tub of ankle-deep cold water—a ritual I discovered when we were made to share a hotel room in Philadelphia on some little junket of his. Neither of us was very comfortable with the arrangement, and Herbert dealt with it by simply pretending I wasn't there. We lay side by side in the gargantuan beds, reading, and then he turned the light off and began to snore. I lay half asleep, pleased with the clean cotton sheets (Paris now), until the boy knocked on my door and called me to dinner.

D
inner was served in an alcove which hung from the third-floor kitchen like an oversized flower box, seeming to hover in the air above the small courtyard. Beneath this alcove's sloped roof, built-in benches surrounded a low table. Windows on all three sides let the light in, and candles made multiple reflections in the uneven glass. Cushions lined the benches and we slid into our places. "Like dining in the prow of a ship," Per said.

"I sit by the house," the boy pointed out. He slipped onto the near bench, hair toweled and combed behind his big ears, in a fresh white T-shirt and khaki shorts. I sat down beside him. Serge—compact and handsome in a white cotton shirt tucked neatly into belted wool slacks with leather loafers and no socks (and with a great shock of white hair)—looked well beyond sixty. The family mathematics did not add up, but I put the equation out of mind for the time being, smiling at the pleasure of their company.

"English is our
lingua franca
whenever there are guests," Miriam announced. "Even when there are no guests Per doesn't really like French at all, and naturally Serge doesn't know a word of Danish."

"If you prefer French we can speak it," Per allowed. "Some guests of the university are disappointed to find the meals aren't in French." In fact it was a relief. I dismissed his offer with a generous shrug.

"No, the English is excellent, everyone's English."

Together with two musty bottles of brackish red wine from Normandy and a winter stew, Serge served a basket of warm baguettes and yogurt in a cool earthen crock. Stéphane , who seemed to have warmed up to me, now that we were at the dinner table, leaned close and unfurled his napkin.

"I am the devil," the boy offered, apropos of nothing.

Miriam apologized. "Sometimes the level of conversation here is very low."

"It is a lyric from Metallica," Stéphane explained, flush from the effort. With a delicate gesture he pointed at its source. "Per played it for me."

The boy's shoulder brushed mine. The stew and its fine perfume, the great piggish grunt of a wine, plus the good company, blurred a little beside the demanding clarity of this point of contact. I shifted against the boy as we maneuvered through dinner. Pleasantries fluttered from my lips like butterflies, alighting here on Serge, there on Miriam, while my mind retreated into exile, camped out in the monastery of my upper thigh where his hip now touched me. Pinioned to him throughout the conversation, I missed a great deal of what was said.

"Were you also in Paris during the manifestations?" I asked Per, trying to keep up. Stéphane reached for the stew and Miriam swatted his hand from it, then pushed the crock of yogurt toward him.

"I was at sea."

"For many years," Serge put in. "Per was a pilot of a masted ship the Danish navy used to train its sailors." The boy squished yogurt through his teeth, making a sound, then stopped, mocking boredom with a great yawn. "
Fils
, if you are bored by us you can leave and do your work in your room," Serge reminded him. "Such impertinence." He showed off this unusual word.

"Eat more yogurt,
mon petit
, or you know what the night is going to be like." Stéphane stuck his tongue out at Miriam's suggestion.

"
Merde
, Stéphane . That's too much, go now to your work."

The boy withdrew from the table like a fever that, at last, breaks.

"Here we've talked so long about ourselves and asked nothing about your work," Miriam observed.

"Oh, it's nothing." Really, it was. What could they know of Herbert? "I'm researching the American writer Gertrude Stein." Serge smiled benignly while Miriam and Per took some dishes from the table. "And a nephew of hers, though you've probably never heard of him."

"Didn't you know Stein?" Per asked Serge, shouting above the clatter of his chores. "She gave you a tinned ham, didn't she, Serge, after the war?" I'm sure my jaw dropped. In any case, I stopped chewing. A sort of immaculate, disembodied double, a dybbuk of Serge, floated before me, a perfect, unreachable Serge, bleeding irretrievably into the gray photos of Gertrude and family in Herbert's STEIN folder. A kind of tug-of-war was set off in my head, with the silent, flat Stein dragging Serge into the sealed vault of history, while my host dragged Gertrude back into life.

"No," Serge corrected. "No, I never knew Stein."

"Oh." Per sighed, disappointed. "I thought your father fixed her car."

"Your father fixed Gertrude Stein's car?" I asked, a little slow to keep up.

"No. No, he never did."

Serge lit another cigarette and offered more wine, which I took. His smoke drifted out the open window.

"You realize," Per interrupted over the noise of coffee, "that a mechanic was a real artist then, especially a car mechanic."

"Like a great chef," Serge said.

"Yes, like a chef. Monsieur Dupaigne was a famous car mechanic. He worked on the car of my parents when we traveled into France. That is how I met Serge."

"Was the bicycle all right?" Miriam put in. I supposed she had heard this story often enough. "The car reminded me."

"Herbert has my bicycle," Serge pointed out. "Of course it's all right."

"You'd heard of him in Denmark?"

"No, it was coincidence. Our car broke down near the Jardin du Luxembourg. That was before the war."

"The Second War," Miriam added.

"Yes, of course, the Second War."

Miriam smiled at me. Her face was like a fresh-drawn bath, or a bed I could sleep very well in.

"I'm sorry if this is impertinent, Per"—I used Serge's word— "but when were you born?"

"Nineteen-twenty, as was Serge." Now the mathematics tumbled through my head and I couldn't keep from staring at Miriam, who was certainly no older than forty, mother of a fifteen-year-old boy who was almost a decade closer to her, in age, than her husband. The boy was downstairs just then, pinned by duty to
his desk and chair, his head full of Metallica (good for concentration), while he struggled with algebra.

"Mmm."

"The year of diamonds, isn't it?" Miriam remarked.

"In May, and it will be grand."

"Who is the nephew?" Serge asked, leaning to get sugar from Per.

"Allan Stein; he was born in 1895."

"He lived in Paris?"

"For most of his life. His family moved here when he was eight. I think he died in Neuilly, in the American Hospital, in 1951."

"A nephew is . . . ?" Serge.

"Neveu."
Miriam.

"Was he an artist?"

I glanced at my watch intently, as if it and not Serge had spoken to me. "No, no. Allan was painted by Picasso, when he was a boy. He is the boy in the
Boy Leading a Horse
, I don't know its French title."

"Meneurde Chevaux Nu"
Miriam said, leaning forward. "It's a very important piece." Another cigarette took shape in her hand. "The end of the
période rose
, just before
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

"That's right." News to me. "Picasso also painted a smaller, less important portrait of Allan, at the same time." I sipped a little wine onto my tongue and simply breathed it, letting the aroma billow in my throat. "I'm interested in his adolescence, from the Picasso paintings to the First War."

"Did he fight in the war?"

"He was here in Paris, as an army supply manager. The family lived on the rue Madame in a great loft above a church, where his parents had their collection of Matisse paintings. They were the first great patrons of Matisse." I rambled through my dossier of facts. "In the summers they went to Agay, on the
Côte d'Azur
."

"Why this part of his life?"

"Mmm?"

"Why his adolescence?"

"Oh, it's my specialty." The truth at last. "I used to be a schoolteacher, and—well, the boy makes the man, and all of that."

"But was he an important man?" Serge wondered. "I don't understand what makes this man's boyhood interesting."

I was silent and fiddled with my glass. I wasn't stumped so much as baffled. What did it matter if Allan was or wasn't important?

"All boys are important." Miriam. "But so few men are." Sainted Miriam.

"Yes, exactly."

"This is one of the features of the Picasso Herbert speaks of, the most erotic and moving aspect of it—that it is a boy. He has a tremendous power because he is nothing yet, no one, and so he has the power in him to be a god, like all children do, you see? If Picasso had painted a man leading the horse, just imagine it. This man would be someone, some man who will never be a god at all, just a man, without the limitless power this boy has." Oh, God bless her. A mother knows so much most men will never know. It didn't matter if Allan was or wasn't important, he was a boy, and that was sufficient. Per and Serge looked at each other and laughed, not maliciously, not really at what Miriam had said but around it, with it; their laughter was easy and meaningless, the way children hold hands. This pair intrigued me, and so did Miriam, who drifted in and out of their orbit. Serge poured more coffee from the scorched chrome pot. I had drained my wine and he offered to get more.

It was 2:30 P.M., according to my warm new watch, when I went down the stairs to bed. Two-thirty at home, that is, and eleven-thirty in Paris. I'd gone past exhaustion into a second day, and now that too seemed to be ending. The stairway was dark, and
descending rickrack shelves of books spiraled along the wall. Off the second-floor landing Stéphane's door was open, and it led into a nest of rooms, with a small bathroom where the door was open. I knocked timidly and peeked in. No boy. Full bathtub, plastic morphing men afloat face down in the water, a mirror obscured by steam, interesting toiletries, muppet shampoo, deodorant stick, floating boats and ducks, plus a superfluous razor and shaving cream. The room stank of sneakers. Garish strings of beads filled a second doorway, clattering. Thin music drifted from the speakers, and I pushed through the beads. "Stéphane?" Still no answer. A worse smell, mixed with futile incense, which I saw now, still burning on the homework desk. A body bumped me, slipping through the beads.