The Same River Twice (24 page)

Odile glanced at her reflection in the mirror beside the landing. Her upper lip was abraded where she’d been kissed, and she rubbed the spot with a saliva-moistened finger. “Me too,” she called, dabbing at her hair. Then she turned on her heel and stepped into view just as he reached the top of the stairs. “There you are,” she said, smiling at him.

They kissed.

Max set a grocery bag he was carrying on the kitchen floor. “I hope you haven’t already—”

Turner cleared his throat, and Max looked around in surprise.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Odile hastened to interpose herself between them. “Max, this is Turner, from the auction house. He’s here to appraise the Giacometti for us. Turner, my husband, Max Colby.”

They shook hands warily.

“It’s a beautiful drawing,” Turner said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it.” Max turned in bafflement to Odile. “Are we selling it?”

“No, no. I just thought we ought to get an idea of what it’s worth. For insurance purposes.”

“You really should keep it insured at value,” Turner offered. “To be on the safe side, I mean.”

Max looked quizzically from this stranger to Odile and back again. “Okay. Would you like something to drink?”

“Thank you, no,” Turner answered.

“He just needs to see the papers,” Odile added quickly. “Provenance and certificate of authenticity. We were waiting for you.”

“No problem,” Max said. “Just give me two seconds to wash my hands.”

While he was in the bathroom, Odile took the Giacometti from the wall and laid it on the kitchen table. Turner started to say something, but she hushed him at once, refusing to meet his eye. He took a photographer’s loupe from his pants pocket and began examining the drawing.

“You know,” he said when Max returned with the papers, “something like sixty percent of the Giacomettis on the market today are forgeries. I’ve seen dozens, lots of them with very convincing provenances.”

“Is that right,” said Max.

Odile stood slightly apart from them, her arms folded across her chest, her mood contentious.

“But this one’s good,” Turner went on. He straightened up and handed Max the loupe. “See how even the pencil line is? The dark areas are built up by superimposition. Most forgers can’t help increasing the pressure a little when they have to darken the image. That’s because they want to draw like Giacometti without thinking like him. They’re focused on product, not process. It’s a dead giveaway.”

“Right.” Max hunched over the drawing, peering at it through the loupe. “I read somewhere that he never finished anything, just abandoned it.” Max passed the loupe to Odile. “And that he liked to work in fading light, right up to the point of darkness and beyond. True?”

“Quite true.”

Both men watched her examine the drawing. When she looked up and saw them staring at her, she flushed. “So, are we about finished here?” she asked, handing the loupe to Turner.

There remained the business of the papers, which Turner examined closely. The drawing had been a wedding gift from Max’s mother, who’d bought it on a trip to Paris the year before he was born, and she had been assiduous in acquiring the necessary documentation. When Turner was satisfied that everything was in order, he took a business card from his pocket, wrote a figure on it, and gave it to Max, who glanced at it before passing it to Odile.

“That’s my best estimate, if you were to sell it now,” Turner told them. “I’ll have my assistant write up a formal appraisal and send it to you by the end of the week.”

He had priced the drawing at 350,000 francs.

“Thank you for your time,” Odile said, giving him her hand.

“Not at all.” He managed a strained smile. “I hope you don’t sell it, but if you decide to, please call me.”

Once he’d left, Odile hung the drawing on the bedroom wall, then went into the kitchen to start dinner. Max paced in the living room.

“That’s quite a price,” he said, “considering my mother paid a hundred and fifty bucks for it straight out of the gallery.”

“I don’t want us to sell it.” Odile put the asparagus in a colander and ran cold water over it. “I just thought we should have an idea what it’s worth.”

“What about that guy?” Max said. “Turner. You think he’s legitimate?”

“I called the auction house, and that’s who they sent me,” she said with a shrug. “Why, don’t you like him?”

He now came up behind her at the sink. “I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms. But he seems to like you well enough.”

She laughed, shut off the faucet, and, drying her hands on a dish towel, turned to face her husband. “That’s all right,” she said, letting her eyes grow wide and still. “I don’t like him much either.”

HE KEPT THREE PHOTOGRAPHS of Allegra on his dresser. In one she was the radiant child, three years old in a red party dress, standing on a sunstruck bench in Central Park, her face thrust forward in transports of hilarity. The second showed her four years later, at the Caribbean resort where Max and Diana had made their last attempt to salvage their marriage. Here she was standing beside a fountain in the open-air lobby, her right arm extended to accommodate a parakeet that was balanced on her forefinger, her eyes turned uncertainly toward the camera; she’d lost her baby fat, and her hair had darkened to honey blond. The third photograph had been taken a year ago at her mother’s apartment. Here Allegra was seated somewhat formally on the sofa, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, a book in her lap. She looked into the camera defiantly, a half smile on her face, and though she was a pretty child, her eyes, it seemed to Max, had become calculating. From one picture to the next, her physical resemblance to him increased so markedly that it sometimes took his breath away. Not infrequently he wondered if she’d ever forgive him for it.

That weekend, with Odile in Vertou for Sebastien’s sixty-ninth birthday, Max decided it was time to settle the question of Allegra’s summer plans once and for all. He waited until he knew she was at her Saturday-afternoon riding lesson—horses had lately become her presiding obsession—and then called Diana at home. To his surprise, his ex-wife shared his view about Paris.

“It would do her good to get away,” she told him. “The kids she hangs with now have got a bit of a jump on her developmentally, and I think she feels the pressure. You know—to be more mature, quote unquote.”

“Mature?” Max repeated warily. “You mean in the physical sense?”

“No, Max, not in the
physical
sense—surely you’ve noticed that much.” Diana sighed. “It’s this false sophistication kids have at that age, a kind of contempt for what they were the day before yesterday. Allegra’s just not that cynical yet, bless her.”

“They have a saying here,” Max ventured, “that the two worst times in a woman’s life are when she’s thirteen and when her daughter’s thirteen.”

“Thanks for that,” said Diana in a tone he couldn’t interpret.

“Anyway,” he added, “we’re agreed that I’ll take her for June, right? Eddie’s daughter Dominique will be here, so she’ll have a friend. Plus I’m shooting locally, as far as work goes. Allegra and I, we’ll have a mutual growth experience.”

A brief silence ensued. “Okay, Max,” Diana said quietly. “I’ll leave you to tell her about it yourself.” Then, before he could respond, she hung up. It was a little after nine o’clock.

Having made no plans for the evening, he spent the better part of an hour cleaning out the tiny garret room upstairs which served as the guest quarters. It would be necessary, he decided, to put a full-length mirror on the back of the door and get her a telephone. Allegra would certainly bring her own books and laptop, and he could decide later whether to leave the film-still decor intact or replace it with something less personally freighted. A room too eagerly prepared, he recalled from his own adolescence, could be even more off-putting than one not prepared at all.

At ten o’clock, with at least two hours remaining before he could reach Allegra across the six time zones that separated him from New York, Max changed clothes, stopped by the studio to pick up a still camera, and headed for the quai de la Tournelle to look in on Rachel and Groot.

He found them seated on the
Nachtvlinder’s
quarterdeck with Katje, the Dutch photographer. She and Groot were sharing a hash-boosted cigarette while Rachel spliced two lengths of rope. They all three hastened to their feet at his approach.

“You’re just what this group needs,” said Rachel, flinging her arms around him in greeting. “Isn’t he, Groot?”

Groot smiled and shook his hand. “Rachel thinks I’ve become stodgy in my old age,” he explained.

“She didn’t say old,” Katje corrected him. After kissing Max hello, she
took his camera from him, snapped two pictures of Rachel in rapid succession, and gave it back. “She did say stodgy, though,” she added, laughing.

Groot disappeared belowdecks and returned a moment later with a bottle of Armagnac, which he poured out equally among four glasses. All drank.

“Tell him about the engines,” Rachel said.

“Ja
, the engines.” Groot lit another reworked cigarette and passed it to Max, who hesitated—he still intended to call Allegra—before drawing on it thoughtfully. “We have found on the Internet,” Groot continued, “two duplicates of the
Nachtvlinder’s
engines, still in their original taxis. The owner was asking ninety thousand francs each, which of course we cannot pay, but yesterday we find that in fact the owner has died, and his widow is willing to consider other offers. So maybe we will be lucky, who knows? I will go next week to look at them.”

“They’re in Reims,” Rachel added, “so it might actually be doable.” She took the cigarette from Max and, to his surprise, inhaled deeply from it before passing it to Katje. She seemed to be running a little ahead of herself.

“Are you going too?” he asked her.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, smiling brightly. “Maybe.”

Since the flood, Max had been shooting Rachel and Groot together whenever possible in an effort to accustom the Dutchman to the camera. He wasn’t the natural subject that she was, but he had a flair for the dry aside that sorted well with her physical expressiveness, and more than once, replaying the results in his studio, Max thought he discerned a darker undercurrent in their exchanges. Then he would look again and decide he’d imagined it. Such a sublime instrument, the camera: it revealed everything except the secret of its indifference. Maybe he, too, would have to go to Reims.

“So now that everyone’s in a better mood,” said Katje, flipping the cigarette butt over the side, “are we going to do anything fun?”

Rachel was already on her feet. “Let’s go, guys,” she said, extending a hand to Max and Groot. “Redeem yourselves.”

They drove in Katje’s minivan to a nightclub in the tenth, a renovated theater whose lavender-and-black interior was sparsely lit by ice-white sconces of frosted glass and miniature spotlights playing over the half-filled dance floor. On a dais at the far end, enclosed in Plexiglas, a DJ in dreadlocks commanded two turntables, a laptop, a mixing board, and a headset microphone. Running the length of an adjacent wall was a cherrywood bar.
Max ordered champagne all around, and, when it came, the four of them clinked glasses and drank. He was gratifyingly high.

“Dance with me,” said Rachel, taking his glass from him.

Max handed his camera to Groot and let himself be led onto the hardwood floor.

Rachel was a wonderfully fluid dancer, responsive to Max’s lead without ever seeming to wait for it, and again and again her eyes flashed at his in unfeigned delight. The DJ cross-faded a jumped-up reggae vamp into a party mix of “How Insensitive,” bringing up the bass and speaking a few unhurried exhortations through the fuzz-boxed microphone. Rachel spun in and out of Max’s arms like a skater, lending him a grace not normally his own. They kept it up for a good thirty minutes.

Later, having handed her off to Groot, Max sat at the bar chatting with Katje and a startlingly beautiful Ivorian transvestite of her acquaintance. Yvette, as the man styled himself, had two different lives, two different plans. In one he was a film critic of some repute, who knew Max’s work and was writing a screenplay. In the other he was an African queen, hoping to open a beauty school on rue de la Goutte d’Or. At one point, Katje seemed to suggest that Yvette and she were lovers. Max thought it unlikely.

He tried shooting some photographs of Groot and Rachel dancing, but by then the club was packed and he had trouble getting a clear line of sight. Thwarted, he ordered another glass of champagne. At a little after two, his patience exhausted, he excused himself and went outside to call Allegra on his cell.

A line of would-be revelers waited on the sidewalk, trying to engage the doorman’s attention. Max crossed the street and sat down on a bus-stop bench facing the club. Protocol dictated that he try Diana’s number first, but he got the answering machine and left no message. After a moment’s deliberation, he punched in Allegra’s cell-phone number. It rang three times before, amid loud music and voices, someone not his daughter answered.

“House of Babes,” the girl said. “How may we serve you tonight?”

Peals of teenage laughter sounded in the background.

“Allegra, is that you?”

“Um.” A stricken silence replaced the laughter. “Just a minute.” There was a crash as the phone dropped to the floor. “Shit.” Someone turned down the music. “Allie! I think it’s your dad.” More urgent whispering. The phone changed hands.

“Hello?” Allegra said.

“Sounds like you girls are having a party.”

“Oh. Hi, Dad. Yeah. I’m at Camilla’s with some friends. We’re having a sleepover.” Her voice was studiedly casual.

“That’s great. Are Camilla’s parents there?”

“They’re downstairs watching a movie.” She hesitated. “Do you want to talk to them?”

In fact, as Allegra knew full well, Max didn’t want to talk to them, whether they were home or not. “That’s okay,” he said, “but I do need a word with you, if you’ve got a moment.”

“All right,” she said, affecting a tone of utter bafflement. He heard her leave the room and close the door behind her. “What’s up?”