Paris, He Said (29 page)

Susan Kraut, Chantal Schmidt, and I, along with Vie Bohème’s owners, Laurent Moller and André Séguy, were relieved that so many people—around two hundred, by Laurent’s estimate—passed through Vie Bohème on the night of the spring equinox, March 21, which was unseasonably cold. Maybe it was the promise of free wine? Whatever their reasons, people emerged from their homes and delivered themselves to rue du Louvre at the appointed hour, and we were grateful. We smiled, we shook hands, we looked into each other’s eyes, my own eyes—I’m sure—hopeful, but nervous too.

The night was a difficult one, even with the high spirits and all the hands reaching for other hands; it was filled with specters, suppressed but roaring expectation, people from our pasts and futures. We had spent so long preparing for it, thinking about it, worrying, doubting, wanting. I was showing my work with my adored painting instructor but did not believe that I deserved to. My paintings looked fine, even good, I think, but I had spent so much time staring at them that I could no longer really see them, like the view from the window you have looked out of for half your life. It is like the face in the mirror: the known latitudes, the no longer suspenseful flaws and strengths.

In college, one of my painting instructors said during a critique, “Each completed painting asks: who was the artist when she started? Who is she now?”

When I arrived an hour before the opening officially began, Susan was already there, standing several feet back from her paintings, each mounted perfectly plumb. Susan was an emissary from my past, from my bubbly, foolish earliest twenties. She looked so pretty, petite and smiling in turquoise beads and a black tunic dress embroidered with small blue, green, and red flowers, her light blue eyes taking everything in. We had seen each other twice in the three days that she had so far been in Paris; I was shy in her presence, but talked too much. I felt something like rapture too, bewitched again as I had been years earlier by her gentleness, her sincerity, her steady hand on the brush, her sympathy, her eye for the whole, intricate picture, no detail neglected. I looked at her the night of our opening and felt winded. It was how I’d felt during the first several weeks that I was seeing Laurent.

I think this might be the exalted state, a celestial plane, its air dizzying, the heady altitudes that are visible from our earthbound stations but are mostly unreachable.

That she felt as happy to be there as I did was immediately apparent, and also, I have to say, humbling. Here we were, looking upon concrete proof that it was possible to make it through the grinding sameness of most days, the self-doubt, the exhaustion, the worries that no one would ever be interested in your work again—all the feelings I had been living with on and off for the last twelve years, three or so years shy of half my life. Yes, we were in Paris, where I have been living for the past nine months—but call me an ingrate, I had gotten used to many aspects of my life here, and this ability to adapt both saves us and does us in—if everything felt new all the time, there would be much less restlessness, fewer crimes (of the heart or otherwise), but would we ever get anything done? I could only guess at Susan’s feelings about her life as an artist, but I wondered if they weren’t much different from my own, even with her huge talent and record of previous successes and exhibitions.

On the early fall afternoon when Laurent told me that Susan would be one of the other two featured artists in
Intérieurs intimes
, I remember staring at his right ear. How oddly pale it is, I thought, compared to his sun-brown face. “Susan Kraut, my teacher?” I asked stupidly. He nodded, and I said, “Would she really want to be in a show with me? Shouldn’t it just be her work?”

“Maybe next time,” he said. “We will see how it goes.”

We will see how her work sells
, he was saying, not,
We will see how we like her.
I knew he and André didn’t like all the artists they represented. Some were almost absurdly demanding: the opening must be on a Sunday, not a Friday night, and go from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., with purple lightbulbs instead of white ones in the gallery fixtures, and a hip-hop deejay, and Cristal served by the case. Some were querulous and ungrateful, blaming their inability to sell every single canvas or sculpture on Laurent and André rather than on the whims of art collectors and the faltering economy.

Later, I thought about the student-teacher relationship, how it is said that the best teachers want their students to surpass their own mastery of painting or sculpture or pastry-making. From my own minimal experience teaching art at community centers and retirement homes, I know what it’s like to feel that jolt of recognition, the almost corporeal thrill when you meet someone whose work shows irrefutable promise. Susan had acted as if she felt this about me, and for a few years I got by on the memory of her praise and kindness. This is the kind of thing that sends a student off to make a life as an artist rather than as a bookkeeper or a dog walker or a librarian.

But even with Susan’s early encouragement, I had given up on trying to make a career as a painter until Laurent appeared in New York and offered a hand up and scolded me for not trying harder, for feeling sorry for myself. There is also this fact: I have been enormously lucky. Few artists have been given what he has given to me.

Susan said a number of things when I was her student that I recorded in the journal I kept during those summer weeks in Chicago, when the air felt like heavy, damp cotton you had to scissor through with your arms and legs.

–    
You have to love this because there are far easier ways to earn a living.

–    
Not so much orange, Jayne. Save some for the construction cones!

–    
Composition in a painting is usually instinctive, but if you keep working, if you study how other painters handle it, you’ll get better. Like you would if you were baking bread or building a house—one day you’ll realize that you’ve gotten the hang of it.

–    
This can be lonely work, but it connects you to other people in ways that many of the things we could do with our lives do not.

–    
Vuillard is the artist I find my thoughts turning toward most often. At least ten times a day, probably more.

–    
Remember to soak your brushes!

The night of the show, she said, “You and Laurent … goodness, Jayne. I’m still speechless. Do I look tired? Because I haven’t slept more than five hours a night in the last week, I was so thrilled about being here. My husband thought I was drinking too much coffee, and didn’t believe me when I told him that I wasn’t. You think you know what’s ahead, and it’s certainly not someone calling from Paris with an offer to put you in a show.”

“When I was still living in New York, I felt like nothing was ever going to happen with my work,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” she cried, putting her hands on my shoulders to give me a good shake. “You’re too young to feel that way.”

I laughed. “I wasn’t painting very much there—that was the problem. I felt intimidated, but here I don’t feel that way as much. Maybe because I’m not French?”

She nodded. “Yes, probably so. It’s important from time to time to remove yourself from a place you’re familiar with.”

Whenever I caught sight of her that night, I’m sure I started smiling like an imbecile. Several times we looked at each other from across the gallery and started laughing, confusing the people who were standing with us, trying to talk to us, to flatter and flirt or express their suspicions about whether we knew what we were saying with our brushes and tubes of paint. “What’s so funny?” they’d ask, but we didn’t know. “I’ll try to paint it for you sometime,” I said to one man who reminded me of my father. “Because I can’t describe it in words.”

“Really,” he said, miffed. “Is that so.” The furrow between his emphatic black eyebrows deepened, but he ended up buying my Joanie painting, the first I’d completed in Paris.

Where would he put her? I wondered. What would he do in front of her, she looking on with her mournful eyes?

These were the pages that I gave to Laurent, but he wanted more; he was certain I had more to say. Over the next several weeks, I went ahead and wrote more pages, many more, but I only gave some of what follows to him.

What about Chantal Schmidt, the third artist to round out our
trio intime
? I liked her paintings, even if I wasn’t sure I liked her—she didn’t look me in the eye when we met to do our walk-through, a couple of days before the opening. She seemed always to be smirking or twisting her mouth into something between a grimace and a pout, an affectation or tic I hadn’t noticed in other Frenchwomen. Maybe she was nervous, or high? Did she possibly have some kind of nerve damage? I wasn’t going to ask, and I started wondering if she thought I was a hack, even though I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with my work, and two nights later, at the opening, no one seemed to be sneering at it.

I could see why Laurent was all riled up about her work, though. Her paintings were overtly sexual—the women’s breasts so idealized and voluptuous, their skin and hair infused with a mellow, dusky light, their drowsy eyes half-closed and long-lashed. Her male models had daunting muscles, but their faces were languid and sated-looking. Each of her couples seemed to be resting after an energetic but affectionate rendezvous, their cheeks flushed, their bodies curving protectively into each other. I thought of Gustav Klimt and the lavishness of his palette—all that gold! and his forest greens and rich reds and browns—but most of all his sensuous models, their ethereal faces and long hair and bared breasts, their intricate patchwork gowns.

Klimt, like Marval before him, has become in the last year or so my Vuillard. He was only fifty-five when he died, a victim of a stroke and the flu epidemic of 1918, and I remember being moved when I first read about the tragic facts of his premature and probably painful death, as commonplace as it might have been in an age before vaccinations and penicillin, all the medical advances of the last hundred years that have allowed us so quickly to overpopulate the planet (not that I want to return to the age of death by tetanus and abscessed tooth). As a student during the spring term that I spent in Strasbourg, I took the train to Vienna with two friends, and we went to the Belvedere Palace, which houses
The Kiss
, and stared at it as if we might brand the two lovers onto our eyes.

Chantal studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, where Laurent had tried to enroll, and where François and Nathalie are currently enrolled. Among the people milling about at the opening, I saw the boy from the art supply store off rue Bonaparte, the one with the stoplight tattooed on his hand. He made an attempt to remember me and listed some of the items he thought that I’d purchased, but they weren’t accurate. He was friends with Chantal, and also knew the two men who were one of the couples in the paintings Laurent and André had chosen for the show. This couple looked like brothers—they were about the same height, with close-cropped dark hair, and the same powerful chests and shoulders beneath their wool sweaters, one in black, the other in charcoal gray. They loved my paintings, they said, and stood before them with solemnity. They seemed truly to be seeing them. Looking at my paintings with them, I felt such a wave of self-consciousness and maudlin emotion that after a few seconds at their sides, I went off in search of a glass of water.

There were several other people at the opening whose presence I want to record, along with Susan’s and the boy from the art supply store (whose name is Nicolas, something I learned when Chantal introduced us. “Mon petit frère,” she said, her lip and eyebrow rings catching the light as she leaned over to kiss his cheek, her tar-black hair swinging forward, a liquid curtain that, contrary to the photos I had seen of her online, now reached past her shoulders. “I’m not really her brother,” he said, his smile placid. “No,” she said, “But I wish you were instead of the one I have. You’re here, and he’s not.” “Maybe he’s sick?” asked Nicolas. Chantal made a face and shook her head. “Maybe he’s
drunk
.”) Chantal’s brother might not have shown up, but Colin did, having managed to arrange a business trip to coincide with the show, though he was embarrassed to admit this. I would never have thought poorly of him for not paying for the trip out of his own pocket; it wasn’t as if I could spend much time with him, and airfare was so expensive. I hadn’t encouraged him to come to the opening; the thought of him there had made me nervous. I didn’t want to have to introduce him to Laurent either, who I was sure would sense my skittishness. Colin also knew that I’d painted his portrait—I’d told him one afternoon when we were lying in his bed at the hotel where he usually stayed, hoping this would make him happy. Now I realized that he would see that this painting wasn’t in the show, but I knew he wasn’t likely to say anything about its absence.

I wasn’t looking forward to introducing Colin to André either, whom I had kissed a second time, and it was as unasked-for and unsettling as the first time. It happened on his birthday, January 25, which I remember as a blustery but sunny day that had also made world headlines because some teenage pranksters from Prague climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and dumped a large sack of miniature chocolate bars onto passing cars and the heads of the oblivious tourists below. No one was injured, but the police roped off the area for a couple of hours, snarling traffic for many blocks.

We’d had birthday cake at the gallery in the afternoon, and champagne, and despite my protests, Laurent went out to buy a third bottle after we drank the first two. André knew that I’d had too much to drink when he asked me to kiss him. I shook my head, but was a little unsteady on my feet, which were tired from wearing heels all day, and I stumbled toward him, only slightly, but he took this as a yes. Nathalie had left a few minutes before Laurent did, and André and I were alone again in the gallery, but in the front this time, with all the windows and curious passers-by. I think, like the first time, we only kissed for a few seconds, but I remember his body’s humid heat, his short, muscular legs and chest pressing into me before I pulled away. Just as Laurent had predicted, I had not been faithful to him in Paris (by saying this, I wonder, had he foreordained my behavior?), and I volleyed between feelings of self-loathing and self-righteousness.