The Forger (7 page)

After that, whenever I was up in my room, the sound of laughter or music from down in the street would tempt me away from my easel. But I was working well now, and the temptations were easier to resist.

When I painted, I slipped away from Paris and felt again the pull of tides in Narragansett Bay, and streams running to the sea through marshes of Spartina grass. It seemed to me that I could sense the storms coming down from the north, as they would this time of year. Red hurricane warning flags blown to shreds on the splintering flagpoles. Indian summer, which would be coming soon. Chevrons of Canada geese overhead, waking me each morning with their muttered honking. I saw the white birch trees bowed down in sheaths of ice and the winter waves frozen glacier green on the empty beaches and the grim faces of the lobstermen, sweeping the snow from their decks as they moved out into the bay, to haul up their pots until their hands would freeze around the weed-slick ropes. The visions that reached me were astonishing in their clarity. I thought how strange it was that I had to cross an ocean before I could be made to understand that value of the place I’d left behind.

When I painted, I moved through many stages of sketching and preliminary studies. I worked at the forms until they stopped being drawings of things. The figures in the sketch slowly evolved in relation to each other, separate from the world from which they had come. Only then, when the picture had detached itself from its source, would I begin to paint.

I usually made a lot of false starts, but eventually the image that appeared among the smoky charcoal trails of sketches tacked to each flat surface around me, walling me in, blocking out the light, would become the image I wanted on the canvas.

I didn’t use paint generously. I didn’t slap it on the canvas and paint over it if I didn’t like what I saw. I scraped it back down to the undercoat and started again. I liked the undercoat to be thin, so you could see the fabric of the canvas, and so that even when the painting was done, you could still make out the texture, but only if you brought your eyes very close. I liked the way it drew the eye toward the picture, made you look at the minutest detail, so that it would stop being the whole picture and would break down into its individual parts, which were different from what the parts had been in reality. Now they were the fragments of a different thing, a thing all by itself. But the ghost of the canvas underneath, the reminder of it, would always bring you back into the world from which the painting had emerged, many incarnations ago.

*   *   *

A
S THE DAYS WENT
by, I grew more and more frustrated with the endless sketching at Pankratov’s. Once, as he checked my work and breathed a gloomy sigh over my shoulder, I turned to face him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

Pankratov looked confused, as if I could not possibly have spoken to him in that way and he must have misunderstood.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked again.

“Did I say there was something wrong?” asked Pankratov. Then he looked over my head, taking in the whole class with his gaze. “No more sketching today!” he shouted. He strode back to his chair and sat down heavily into its canvas seat. “This weekend, you three will do studies for me. You will go to the Musée Duarte and choose sixteen of the works there and I expect you to have studies of these works by the time I walk into the classroom on Monday morning. Good!” He clapped his hands. “You are dismissed!”

For a moment, I thought I saw relief drift like a scattering of dust across his face. I wondered if this was part of his teaching. That he would make us sketch and sketch until we rebelled against it and only then would we be ready to move on. Is that it? I wanted to ask him. How in God’s name does your mind work?

A silence followed his announcement. Balard and Marie-Claire glanced at each other, looking for reassurance that their weekends were not shot to bits.

But I knew exactly what would be left of our free time. Absolutely nothing. I’d had assignments like this before. In my head, I drew a neat line through Saturday, when I had planned to go to the open-air markets at Clignancourt and buy some cheap art supplies, since I’d run out of everything I’d brought with me and couldn’t afford high-quality materials from the shops on the Rue de Charonne. I had to force myself to calm down. I couldn’t get out of doing the assignment. I would just have to get it over with and then there would be time for my own work.

I was too annoyed to paint, so I took a walk down Avenue Matignon in Faubourg St. Honoré. Most of the galleries were here. I scouted out the neat little shops, with all manner of paintings set on easels in the front window. They looked so clean and well lit and so unlike the chaos of Pankratov’s atelier that I found it hard to imagine that the paintings on display had come from any paint-splattered artist’s studio. These words seemed to have been transported into a different dimension, where I could neither purchase them nor bring my own work to be sold. I walked home along the Quai du Louvre. I stopped to look at the bronze statue of a lion fighting a wild boar. The bronze was pale green with age. In the fading light, the metal seemed to glow from inside. It was as if the bronze were only a shell, under which the beasts were waiting for the moment when they could cast off their cocoons, thin and shattering upon the road. Then they would roam snarling through the streets, forgetting their centuries of patience.

At ten o’clock Saturday morning, I showed up at the Musée Duarte. It was an intimidating yellow stone building on the Rue Louis Blanc. In the courtyard was a fountain made of the same yellow stone but streaked arsenic green from decades of water trickling over the side. The fountain was turned off and empty. The main entrance was barred with iron railings. The tip of each rail was formed into a spike. The gates had been locked and the main doors were shut.

I walked across the road to a bench and sat down, waiting for the place to open. I set my portfolio on the bench beside me. One hour later, I was still sitting there. I walked down the road and bought a crêpe filled with hazelnut paste from a street vendor. Then I went back to the bench and was there another half hour before an old woman sat down beside me with her shopping in a little basket with wheels on the bottom.

We both stared straight ahead for a minute or two.

Out of her wheely basket, baguettes jutted up like clumsy replicas of the museum gates. “Are you an artist?” she asked.

“I’m working at it,” I replied.

“Oh, you’re Canadian,” she said, having noticed my accent.

“American. My mother was Canadian.”

“American,” she corrected herself. “You aren’t waiting for the museum to open, are you?”

“Actually, yes, I am.”

“Well, you will have to wait a long time. On the weekend, it is only open on Sundays.”

I stood up suddenly. “What?” I marched out into the street. “Well, why the hell don’t they have a sign posted?” I shouted at the gloomy building. The locked doors and shuttered windows made it look pug-faced and asleep.

“I don’t think they’ve ever had a sign,” said the old woman. “It is just a thing one is expected to know.”

I spun around. “This whole city is making me crazy!” I shouted. I marched back to pick up my portfolio and tried to calm myself. “Thank you,” I said to the old woman. “I apologize for shouting.”

“Not at all,” she said. “One expects this sort of thing from foreigners.”

I rode the streetcar out to Clignancourt. I was thinking I might get those art supplies after all and still salvage something of the day. I knew this was some joke of Pankratov’s to send us to the Musée Duarte when he knew it would be closed. Some test that had nothing to do with how well we could draw or paint. And only I had failed it.

I jumped off the streetcar at Porte de Clignancourt and disappeared into the swirl of alleyways that made up the Clignancourt fleamarket. Tables were laid out on the uneven cobblestones, piled with old clothes, shoes, china, boxes of spoons, camera parts. Vendors cooked peanuts in sugar, stirring them in steel bowls with wooden spoons. Arabs carved huge roasts of lamb on vertical spits over charcoal fires. The smell of roasting meat salted the air.

I sat on the curb and drank wine from an earthenware mug at a café whose tables were already full. I buried my face in the mug and felt the wine splash down inside me. All right, I thought. So I wasted a morning sitting on a bench. So maybe I’ll learn to be more careful next time. That’s what Pankratov was teaching me. I’ll do the sketches tomorrow, when the museum opens up. I eased myself up off the pavement, set my empty mug on a table and went looking for art supplies.

I found a shop at the end of a cobblestoned alleyway, somewhere in the labyrinth of market stalls. A sign on the front said:
Fournisseur des Matériaux Artistiques. R. Quatrocci. Prop.
It was done in swirly letters and borders of painted ivy. The sign stuck out about a foot into the alleyways on either side of the shop.

Everything in the shop was coated with dust. The place was crammed with stacks of artists’ paper and jars of pencils and half-used tubes of paint. Old artists’ paintboxes and portable easels hung from the ceiling. The owner, a large man with deep-set, sleepy eyes, had to keep moving things aside whenever he moved about in the shop. He wore a painter’s smock that was dirty from the constant wiping of his hands across his chest. When I walked in, his big hands were in mid-wipe over his chest, like a woman trying to hide her naked breasts.

“I need some paper, please,” I said, “and charcoal pencils, too.”

“Bof,” he said and puffed up his cheeks. “This whole place is made of paper. What type of paper do you want?”

“I need it for sketching,” I said.

Just then, a man stuck his head in and shouted, “Rocco!”

I couldn’t see who it was and neither could the owner. Our view of the entrance was blocked by a large gilded frame that held the shredded remains of a painting. It hung from the ceiling on two old leather belts.

“Rocco Quatrocci!’ said the man, with the voice of a ringmaster introducing his prize act to the crowd. “Quatrocci, the King of the World!”

Rocco waved uncertainly and smiled.

“Rocco!” said the man again, as if the word felt good in his mouth and he could not help saying it again. Then he was gone, whistling, the echo calling back to him from the overhanging rooftops of the alleyway, where dandelions grew in the leaf-clogged gutters.

“I have no idea who that was,” said Rocco. “Paper. Let me see.” He walked his fingertips up and down his lips, which popped against each other with a sound like water dripping. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack that lay beneath a shelf of brushes, divided up by size and stacked in old jam jars. “But it is very old.”

I hauled down one of the sketchbook pads. I could tell by the writing style of the manufacturer’s name on the front that the pads were from the turn of the century or perhaps even before. The paper in them had browned at the edges. It was brittle. In some places the paper had started to come apart like dead leaves crumbling. I asked him how much they were.

“I am thinking,” said Rocco, the King of the World. He flippered his lips again.
Plip plop plip.
“Will you buy all of them?” His voice sounded breathlessly hopeful, as if he carried the weight of all this dusted junk not only in his shop but in his mind.

I didn’t buy all of it, but I bought more than I’d planned to.

I liked it there at Clignancourt, being around all the old books and clothes and china and cigarette cases and wallets picked from pockets years ago and dusted with mold the color of weathered bronze and sold now in heaps on collapsible tables. I liked the way the present and the past collided in the relics that made their way here, whose stories you could read like Braille in each chipped cup and crease of leather.

I rode the streetcar home, feeling the sweat cool on my back from the effort of carrying the heavy paper to the tram stop. My pockets were filled with old charcoal pencils and pastels, mostly broken but still good. I had three sable brushes tucked into my socks because I had no other way to carry them. Their quality had once been good. I didn’t think Pankratov would mind me working on this stuff. I smelled the mustiness of Rocco’s shop in the paper. Rocco, King of the World. I even said it to myself a few times, under my breath, my voice lost in the jangle and clatter of the streetcar.

I made calculations, mumbling the sums, figuring how many more days it would buy me in Paris to work with cheap supplies.

The conductor made his way up and down the car with his metal ticket maker slung across his chest, flipping the red, blue and yellow plastic buttons, then striking a lever that spat out a thin yellow slip with a rapid zipping sound.

There was a warm breeze blowing in from the west. “It’s blowing in from Normandy,” said one old lady. “You can smell the apple blossoms from the trees outside Bayeux.” People smiled and filled their lungs. I didn’t smell any apples. Bayeux was a long way off. It was just a thing to say, but still it made everybody smile with the pleasure of remembering the smell. The breeze filled the space of the streetcar, and people turned their faces to it, closing their eyes. I did the same. I felt the dizziness of clean air deep inside me and knew a part of me belonged here now, in the flow of people and machines.

*   *   *

“S
EE ME AFTERWARDS
,”
SAID
Pankratov. He had collected our Duarte Museum sketches at the end of the previous day. Now he was handing them back.

I stared at the folder, unable to hide my dread. Pankratov’s words reminded me too much of what my old Latin teacher used to say when I had failed a test.

After class, when the others had cleared out, I remained at my stool. I hadn’t touched the sketches.

Pankratov sat down in his chair. “Come over here,” he said.

I slipped off the stool and walked toward him.

“Bring the sketches,” he told me.

I turned around, returned to the easel and fetched the damned sketches.

Pankratov held out his hand for the folder.