Paris, He Said (26 page)

“That’s not what he said when I spoke to him this morning.”

“Well, then, I suppose either he misheard me or he was lying.”

She regarded me. “Why would he do that?”

“I have no idea.” I continued looking at her until she glanced down and reached for her wineglass. One glass of Languedoc Chardonnay was all that she would have. She would be content with it too. I wanted two glasses, three—the entire bottle—but stopped myself after two. There are so many ways of classifying our tendencies, but I think one of the most telling must be this: there are those of us who do not wrestle very often or for very long with our appetites, who can simply say, Enough, and walk away, and those of us who are constantly at odds with how much we desire and what we actually allow ourselves. The gap between desire and restraint: here rages the river of discontent, one that often threatens to overflow its banks.

“You know very well that they prefer to stay with you when they come,” she said. “Your extra room is larger, they say, but I think the real reason is because you let them keep whatever schedule they want. I don’t like Frédéric watching television until two a.m., and he knows this.”

“Yes, I’m aware of all that, but I told him he should still consider staying with you if they really do want to visit this weekend.”

“Tell me what happened with you and Sofia,” she said, refusing to be deterred from her wish to provoke me. “You wouldn’t tell me when I saw you in New York last time.”

“I wouldn’t?” I said. “I don’t remember.”

She shook her head. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“Nothing happened, not really. Why do you ask?”

She smiled. “Just curious, Laurent. What else?” How ready to pounce she looked. I had no idea what was wrong with her that evening and wanted to find a way to end our dinner before the cheese course arrived, and especially before dessert—the
mousse au chocolat
that I would order and Anne-Claire would watch me eat, teasing censure in her eyes.

“We were always friends,” I said. “Sofia and I were under no illusions that there was more between us than friendship.”

My ex-wife laughed. “Oh no, nothing more. Of course not.”

“Anne-Claire,” I said. “Really. I don’t see why you keep asking me about Sofia. Why are you so interested?”

“Women like her always interest me.”

“You met her once,” I said.

“Twice. I saw her again one day last fall when I was at the Cojean near my office, having lunch with Jeanne-Lucie.”

“I see,” I said. No one had told me about this encounter. Not my daughter, nor Sofia, nor Anne-Claire until now. “Did you speak to her?”

She gave me an amused look. “Yes, of course I spoke to her! She came over to me first, in fact. She remembered me from the day I came by the gallery, when you and André had left her there by herself.”

“We often do that with our assistants,” I said. “That’s why we hire them.” I had told her this how many times? And still, for reasons I couldn’t understand, she would not let it go.

There are three main qualities that bother her about Sofia, I suspect:

–    She is not afraid of other women, and Anne-Claire is the type of woman who often inspires fear in her gender (not to mention mine).

–    She is as stylish as my ex-wife, when Sofia decides to make the effort.

–    Sofia is a very talented painter—and because this talent is apparent in every painting she has made in the past several years, it cannot be explained away as a fluke.

A woman such as this—it is the world’s good fortune that she was born. About Jayne, I think I can say the same, but her potential is still being plumbed. Sofia’s is too, though, of course. They are both so young, just a year apart, Sofia born the spring before Jayne was. They could, perhaps, be sisters with their dark eyes, shapely ears, and long hair that is often held back in a band—Jayne’s hair the color of dark chocolate, Sophia’s of anise-flavored licorice. I describe them as if they are edible, which, in a sense, they are.

(Am I like Hemingway in that I might be accused too by Jayne of devouring women? I hope not. I try to give back as much as I might take from them. More, I hope.)

It has been more than twenty-five years since I’ve called myself a painter. Half my life. When friends asked why I wanted to be an artist, I could give them several reasons, but it wasn’t until a while later, several years after I quit painting, that I realized the foremost reason was that I hoped to impress women. I wanted to impress other men too; of course I did. We want our friends to respect us (and envy us a little too) and our rivals to be threatened. I wanted to be able to say that I could produce things with my hands, things of beauty and intelligence that people, women especially, would have trouble tearing their eyes away from.

The idea that you want to master a skill purely for the joy of doing or being—well, I have trouble believing it. Humans are social creatures, we live and move in herds, we fight for attention and affection, even those of us who say we are loners and prefer our own company to other people’s. I know that true hermits exist—men, rarely women—who leave society and have no wish to return, but I am not one of these people. I want to be among other people, to look at and talk to them, to kiss a lover’s lips and touch her smooth, warm skin.

My parents were responsible in some ways for my adolescent desire to be an artist. When we came to Paris at Christmas each year and walked through its crowded, cold, exquisite streets—the storefronts bejeweled with expensive, closely guarded gifts—we also went to museums and churches to look at the stained glass, Sainte-Chapelle the one my father kept making us return to each December, until I started to be grateful for what seemed to be this Catholic shrine’s immutability, how no matter what had happened in the twelve preceding months, it would be there, looking the same as it had the previous year—only the other tourists were different. As a boy, I spent the year between visits drawing from memory what I had seen on those trips. We did not take photographs; my father instructed Camille and me to remember with our mind’s eye instead, and I took him seriously, teaching myself to record in pictures some of the rooms and museum galleries we had entered.

There were the streets too, and the girls who caught my eye. I drew their pink, wind-burned faces, their long legs in thick stockings, feet in buckled shoes and boots with heels. The girls I was most attracted to walked with their backs straight and chests thrust out, arms linked with another girl’s, their expressions alive with laughter. These laughing, glamorous girls seemed agonizingly unattainable, but within a few years, when I was fifteen and at a birthday party for my friend Etienne Rivard, his older sister Fabienne took me into her room, locked the door, and offered herself up in all her womanly, eighteen-year-old splendor. She tasted of wine and garlic and let me press my nose to the soft, fragrant skin behind her ear and breathe in her warm, intoxicating scent until I found the courage to do what she wanted me to do. The elastic of her black silk stockings that reached up to mid-thigh, their tops just visible beneath the hemline of her miniskirt, was so tight that it had scribbled angry pink bands around her strong, smooth legs. She rode horses, and when I’d see her on some afternoons riding her chestnut mare Loulou on the road near my house, I thought that she was the sexiest girl in all of France.

In bed with her that first time—her parents, oblivious to our disappearance, were drinking the new vintages that night—my fingertips kept returning to the imprinted flesh of Fabienne’s thighs, these temporary scars irresistible. I had the sense there in her bedroom, the Rolling Stones playing on the turntable, of finally waking fully to my life and its possibilities. I knew that women were going to be an important part of the story, maybe the most important part. That is still being decided, I suppose, but I’ll risk saying that more likely than not, it’s true.

Fabienne had a slim, limber body that she was already comfortable with, more so than I was with my own, with its occasional embarrassing eruptions and pimples and recent, coarser hairs. She showed me where to put my hands; she whispered and coaxed and told me gently how to use my mouth on her, one of her hands pulling hard at my hair whether I was making her sigh or moan or cry out, “Non, là … oui, oui, très, très bien, Laurent, oui …” I worried that someone might hear us, hear her especially. She seemed to hold nothing of herself back; I still remember my shock and pleasure in her cries and convulsions. I’d had no idea that girls were really like this—the movies, even the little bit of pornography I had seen, often showed women in submissive positions and attitudes, or else in cartoonish dominatrix roles. She didn’t want to talk very much, not until afterward, and then she expressed surprise when I admitted that she was my first. “But you’re so handsome,” she said. “I’m sure other girls have offered themselves to you?”

Yes, I admitted, but not as boldly as she had, not without fear, not with so much feline confidence. I had kissed other girls; there had been some groping and a botched attempt at fellatio, but not what Fabienne had offered and also taken for herself.

I probably fell in love with her that night. Maybe I have always fallen fast. For three days I walked around in a haze of remembered carnality. I could not control my body, the impromptu erections after I sat down at the dinner table, or when I was at the lycée supposedly learning algebra or reading about the resolution of the War of 1812, or even worse, changing after school for a soccer match with my friends. At eighteen, Fabienne might as well have been living in another country. In the land of fifteen-year-old boys, there are curfews, no driving privileges, many locked doors real and virtual, and the unnerving sense that everything is meaningful and momentous. It took me a while to figure out that everything is not momentous, and a little more time to understand the fact that this relative lack of gravity is a gift handed down from above.

On the fourth day Fabienne appeared at my school, waiting for me with a heart-stopping smile by the gate. Every cell within me leaped toward her, but I stopped and stared at her sly, vivid face, making sure that she really was there because I had had her almost ceaselessly in my thoughts since being invited into her bed. She had borrowed her mother’s car, and she drove me to her house, asking on the way how I felt, laughing when I stuttered an indistinct reply. Who at the school had watched us leave? I wondered. Her brother would surely know before long what we were up to.

We walked in through the back door into the kitchen, which smelled of stewed tomatoes and roasting lamb, and went straight upstairs to her room. Her parents were in Dijon doing household errands, and Etienne was with his girlfriend at her own house, Fabienne reported, smiling at me as if he were a coconspirator and would have approved of our new relationship, but I was certain that he would feel betrayed. I knew that he adored and admired her, though he wouldn’t have said as much to me or any of our other friends.

She was not wearing stockings this time; she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all. I could not believe how fearless she was, how daring and hungry. Within three, maybe four, minutes it was over, but Fabienne did not laugh or get angry with me. At that age, an amorous boy belongs to the same cadre of marvels as a circus sideshow character, and she knew that it was only a matter of minutes before I’d be ready again. I remember that it was early November, warm outside her bedroom windows; she had left them open, and I could look down at Simon, the family dog, a hairy, aging German shepherd mix. He was sleeping peacefully on the lawn, oblivious to the fact that my life had changed, that Fabienne was teaching me how to be a thoughtful lover, something I remain deeply grateful to her for. If I had had the same passion for painting that I do for women’s bodies, I would have been a success.

As a painter, I was merely able to copy what I saw—faithfully but without, I finally had to admit to myself, finding the soul of my subject and capturing or imaginatively reinterpreting it. I might have made a good illustrator, but I knew that I would never approach anything like John Waterhouse’s genius with his perfect
Ophelia
and the
Lady of Shalott
paintings, or
My Sweet Rose
, his female subjects so flawless and idealized that I could imagine lovestruck men losing their wits if they stared at these images for too long. When I first saw Waterhouse’s paintings in a book my father’s older sister, Aunt Cécile, gave me for my thirteenth birthday, hoping to encourage what she considered to be my artistic promise, I had trouble believing that women such as these walked the earth, but if they did, how to find where they lived and convince them to let you kiss them and touch their luxurious hair? How to inspire them to love you too?

I was mocked by artist friends who were firm in their belief that art was something more than a reflection of an artist’s sexual desire, which I hadn’t realized was the view I was embracing, not until they made this clear for me, though I don’t think this is true for everything I painted—only, perhaps, the most elemental motive behind my wish to be an artist. I had moved to Paris at nineteen and began to lurk around the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, to which, a few years later, I did not succeed in gaining admission. Twice, a year between each attempt, I took the entrance exams and presented my portfolio to the admissions jury, and twice I was turned away. You are only allowed two chances, and so, that was that.

It was crushing—probably the worst pain I had ever felt, my self-doubt a savage, clawing force that left me wrung out and bleeding internally. By my second attempt, I had met and was close to marrying Anne-Claire, our parents disapproving of such an early leap into marriage from their homes far from Paris, far from the city that is the self-appointed arbiter of all that is beautiful in the world.

Maybe our marriage was doomed from the beginning; maybe Anne-Claire could not help but see me as a failure too, even though I came from a wealthy family and we and our children-to-be would never starve. And before long the idea also arrived that I might be able to sell the work of my artist friends, who had succeeded in gaining admission to ENSBA, but had no clear idea how to make a living from their talents. I conducted self-directed studies for a couple of years, reading the business plans of companies of various sizes and missions, talking to a number of gallery owners who were willing to share with me a few of their mistakes and successes. I put away the canvases and brushes and paints. With time, I learned how to make money from art rather than how to make art itself.