The Forger (3 page)

With this apartment, the noises were mostly from the warehouse across the road. I spent a few minutes observing the nearly constant line of trucks that pulled up outside the front gate. They were loaded with crates of wine, the bottles packed in straw. The bottles clinked as they slid onto the flatbed of the truck. Each shipment was checked by a man with a long mustache and hobnailed boots. The sound of his footsteps echoed up and down the street. After inspecting each truck, he banged the flat of his hand against its side, to signal that it could drive off. I found myself waiting for the next thump of the foreman’s hand, or wondering why the hobnails had momentarily stopped crashing on the cobblestones. And later, at closing time, I was startled by the thundery rumble of large rolling metal doors with
Défense de Stationner
painted on them as they were pulled down and locked in front of the Postillon warehouse. There were indoor sounds as well. Water dripping. Muffled conversation in the room across the hall. Someone sloshing in a bath downstairs. The metronome helped to clear these distractions from my head.

It was dark outside now. From down in the street came sounds of laughter. Breaths of music reached me high up in my dingy apartment, which smelled of old cooked meat and coal tar soap and the faint sourness of milk. In my newness here, I could pick out each individual odor of the place. I wondered how long it would be before they merged together in my senses and I would find them comforting. I brushed aside the red velvet curtains. The way they partitioned the space gave me the impression that I was living in the chambers of a heart. I lay down on the bed, too exhausted even to take off my clothes or roll back the sheets or care that the bed was too short.

I thought about the people I had left behind, my mother and my brother. I wondered what they would be doing now. After my father was killed in the Great War, my mother used her widow’s pension from the army to buy a small boardinghouse in Narragansett. Her days were caught up in the flow of visitors from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They came to walk the beaches and maybe catch a glimpse of Newport high society, like children staring through the window of a pastry shop. My brother was a trawlerman, a job for which I alternately admired him because of the risks he took, and pitied him, because of those same risks. The hurricane season was approaching fast, and soon there would be news of boats going down, as they always did under the graybeard rollers off Cape Cod. I remembered being disappointed at how easily they took the news that I’d be leaving for France. It wasn’t that I wanted them to talk me out of it. If I was honest with myself, it was more that I had wanted them to try, the same way they once tried to talk me out of my career as an artist. I realized that, for them, Paris was so far away it was as if I’d slipped into a world of dreams and was unreachable. In their minds, I had become as distant as my father.

The days spent on the ship on my way here had left the faintest rocking in my skull, the slow pendulum swing of the Atlantic’s deep sea swells. I dropped away into sleep with the vertigo rush of falling off a cliff.

Chapter Two

O
NE HOUR LATER
, I woke with a start when a car backfired down in the street. I raised one hand to rub the sleep-creases from my face and realized I was still holding the ticket to Fleury’s gallery show.

I decided I would go. I had to get something to eat, anyway, and I didn’t feel like spending my first evening stuck by myself in the apartment.

The gallery was on the Rue des Archives. I asked directions from Madame La Roche, who was sitting on a collapsible metal chair in front of the apartment building, smoking a little pipe.

The streets were busy. I passed dozens of restaurants whose awnings sheltered the pavement. Hand-holding couples stopped to check menus. They leaned toward the chalkboards on which the specials were written. Soft light pooled on their faces. Diners were jammed elbow to elbow at small tables. Waiters with long white aprons and slicked-back hair navigated through them, trays raised above their heads. Smells of garlic and wine wafted into the street. Some places had beds of ice on which oysters and sea urchins and shrimp were laid out. I could smell the faint salty sweetness of fresh seafood. My stomach cramped with hunger. But I didn’t want to sit at a restaurant by myself. Not tonight, anyway. I figured I would wait until after I’d gone to the gallery show, then buy some bread and cheese and maybe some wine and head back to the Rue Descalzi.

The brightness of restaurant lights and streetlamps and the dark emptiness of shops that had closed down gave me the sensation of everything drifting about, unattached, rushing by in a flickering hallucination. Hunger and my tiredness and, it seemed, the boom of Pankratov’s voice still an echo someplace in my head all piled together to make my walking in the streets like walking in a dream. I’m finally here, I thought, and at the same time I expected to wake up at any minute and find myself back home, in the summer heat, my old dust-greasy table fan creaking around on the windowsill and blowing a feeble breeze over the block of ice I went out and bought each August night. I brought the ice back to my apartment wrapped in brown paper and set it in a large spaghetti bowl. I put the fan behind the bowl and turned it on. In the mornings, I would wash my face in the cold water from the melted ice. I used to wait for the sound of the fan to work its way into my sleep. I listened past the rumble of the city for that faint persistent sound, which would be proof this was a dream. When it didn’t happen, I breathed out a sigh from the bottom of my lungs.

The closer I got to the gallery, the more nervous I became. Fleury was right about these openings being work. I never did well at them, even though I knew they were a necessary part of the business. I felt a sickening sharpness in my guts, as if I had swallowed broken glass, whenever I thought about the fancy-dress slaughterhouse of art openings. At the last show of my own work, I arrived late, walked once around the room and then ducked out the back door. I was halfway to the train station before the gallery owner caught up with me and convinced me to come back.

Ten minutes, I thought to myself. Give it ten minutes and then leave, even if Fleury asks you to stay. Or five, even. Five minutes. I was locked in a reverse bidding war with an auctioneer inside my head.

I saw where the gallery was half a block before I came to it. People spilled out into the little side street, hugging glasses of champagne in one hand and cigarettes in the other. I listened to the hum of party talk. Everyone was smoking. A blue-gray cloud of tobacco hung in the still air of the street.

Five minutes, I thought. Two minutes. One minute.

Inside, the place was so dense with people and smoke that the paintings were almost impossible to see. The artist stood against the far wall, wedged in by two women and a man. They were talking with their faces so close to his that he could not raise his glass to his lips to take a drink. They waved their cigarettes dangerously close to him and his nervous smile twitched as he flinched back from the burning tips.

I saw Fleury. He dodged from group to group like a hummingbird gathering pollen. People who clearly did not know him were grasped by the hand or shoulder or sleeve and made to feel, somewhere in the barrage of niceties, that they ought to know to whom they were talking. He caught my eye and waved me over as if he were hailing a cab.

Grimly, I made my way toward him.

“I want you to meet someone very important,” said Fleury, in a voice too loud to go unnoticed by everyone who stood nearby. “This is Madame Pontier. Of the Musée Duarte.”

Madame Pontier was wearing a loden coat with big buttons down the front, as big as silver dollars. She was thin and distinguished-looking. The age lines in her face were scowling lines, cut deep into the angles of her cheeks.

Judging from the small crowd that had gathered around her, she was obviously a person of some importance, and Fleury was making the most of her presence at his gallery. She had a look on her face as if she had already been introduced to too many people this evening and could not stand it any more. Fleury kept her strategically placed in the center of the room, at the foot of three small steps that separated the front half of the gallery from the rear. Everyone who came to see the exhibit would either have to shake her hand or ignore her and she did not look like the kind of person who got ignored very often.

I offered her the same Egyptian mummy grin that she gave me.

“Madame Pontier,” said Fleury, “is what is called
un expert auprès du tribunal.
This means she can authenticate any painting, and if she puts her stamp on it, her word is law. Show him the stamp.”

“Do you really think this is necessary?” Madame Pontier’s voice made her seem at the point of total exhaustion.

“Make me happy!” said Fleury.

Madame Pontier reached into her pocket. Her hand was clenched into a fist when she pulled it out. Then she uncurled her fingers, revealing a small gold stamp with a base of jadelike stone. It was carved with some kind of seal and attached by a fine gold chain to a buttonhole of her jacket.

“Oh, is that really it?” asked a man in the group. He was tall and gaunt, with wavy hair plastered flat on his head with pomade. Sweat dappled the chest of his starched white shirt.

“It is.” Madame Pontier’s fist closed again around the seal.

“This is Monsieur Lebel,” Fleury introduced the man to me. “A connoisseur of important works of art, and owner of the Metropole Cabaret.”

“Yes. Oh.” Lebel grabbed my hand and stared right through me and immediately went back to ogling Madame Pontier.

The group of people seemed to close even more tightly around her, and I took the opportunity to step back. I was turning to leave when I found Fleury standing right beside me.

“Taking off?” he asked.

“Well, I think so. Yes.” I looked at my wrist, as if to check the time, but I realized I had left my watch back at the apartment.

“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked.

“No, actually,” I replied

“Come,” said Fleury. “Let me buy us dinner.”

“What about the show?” I asked.

He waved his head dismissively. “It’s winding down. I have an assistant who’ll take care of it. I always hate to be the last one to leave a party, even when it is my own.”

I was too tired and hungry to refuse.

“You didn’t happen to see Valya on your way over here, did you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. No.”

“No matter,” he said quickly.

We walked out through the veils of smoke into the street.

As we moved down the Rue des Archives, Fleury took out a small handkerchief, folded it up and pressed it once against his forehead. This was the only sign that he had exerted himself physically. “How did you like the show?” he asked.

I admitted that I never felt comfortable at openings.

“It’s just as well,” he said. “Do you know what happens when I go from one gallery party to another, one café to the next, parading up and down the street to all the different openings and making sure I get in all the hellos that need to be said? What happens is that everybody starts to look the same. Everybody is afraid of the same things. Me included. It all just starts to merge together. If I focus on people or things, they just blur. It’s as if things exist only in fast motion. Everything rushing around. Everything new. And loud. And quite drunk most of the time.”

“That’s a different world from the one I’m used to,” I told him.

“You might think you’re not a part of the same world, but you are. You do the work that keeps it in motion. Without the work, the
doing,
all this just disappears. Am I right?”

“I guess,” I said.

“No guessing. That’s a fact.” Then a look came over his face as if he had said more than he wanted to. “What did you think of the paintings?” he asked, to change the subject.

I shrugged awkwardly. “I didn’t really get the chance, to be honest.” I was afraid he would turn us around and make us go back to the gallery.

Fleury shook his head wearily. “They were
awful.
The artist is the stepson of a gallery owner across town. A man to whom I owe some favors. He was the one who persuaded Madame Pontier to come. She is a big fish in these waters. That’s why I got the crowd. That and the fact that I was serving proper champagne, for a change. The work won’t sell, you know. None of it.” Fleury spoke as if he were making a decree. “Except perhaps to his relatives.”

I felt a pinch in my side when Fleury said this. Before my own work had started to sell, I had refused to let any of my relatives buy it. This, of course, made no sense to them and they took it to mean that I didn’t think they had any taste. They got annoyed about it and said their money was as good as anybody else’s, so I was made to explain that I couldn’t stand the thought of them subsidizing me. Even when they complained that subsidizing had nothing to do with it, I didn’t believe them and still wouldn’t sell them the work. Instead, I just gave it away.

It had started to rain in mist so fine that I could barely feel it. The grayness that swirled through this watery air was like a failing of my sight, as if cataracts were gathering like smoke behind my eyes. I turned up the collar of my jacket and hugged it to my throat.

Fleury brought us to a restaurant called the Polidor on a street named Monsieur-le-Prince. Inside, the place was warm and crowded, with tables set together in rows and heavy pale green pillars holding up the roof.

Fleury waved at the waitress, who nodded hello. She was a large woman with long blond hair and a red velvet dress. Her face was soft and friendly and very pink. She was big all over, with the kind of body that Rubens might have painted.

Fleury and I squashed ourselves into a table by the wall. Fleury whispered to the waitress. She bowed down next to him to hear, her thick blond hair falling over his shoulders and her chest close to his face. When Fleury had finished whispering, the waitress laughed loudly and raked her nails gently down the back of his neck.