A Nearly Perfect Copy (4 page)

“Not in Europe!” Ellen said brightly. Then her face hardened, and Elm could tell she was just remembering that someone had told her that Elm’s son had died. Elm knew this look on people’s faces, when they caught themselves either alluding to their own inconsequential troubles or reminding Elm of her dead son, as if she had forgotten, even for five minutes, as if she would ever forget. Ellen recovered quickly. “Has Relay shown you everything? The Renoir?” Ellen leaned over toward Relay and stage-whispered, “Elm’s at Tinsley’s, I hear, a specialist.”

“Drawings and prints,” Elm confirmed reluctantly, “seventeenth- to nineteenth-century.”

Relay looked impressed, though not astonished. Perhaps she didn’t have a surprise gene, or had she already known?

“We’ll have you back when Dishoo’s …” Ellen searched for the word. “Reincarnated, so to speak. You can compare the portrait to the real thing.”

Elm laughed, but the other women didn’t join in. She turned the laugh into a smile. “Could I trouble you for a refill?” she asked.

“Certainly!” Ellen replied. “Did you enjoy it? Dick and I love this vineyard and we bought up all the 2001’s.” Relay turned out the light before Elm could get a last glimpse of the silent dog.

In the living room, Colin was holding court, drinking a cocktail glass full of brown liquid. Scotch, most likely. He was on his way to getting drunk, which didn’t upset Elm. He was a hilarious drunk, laughing loudly and telling stories. His personality was amplified with liquor. It was a testament to his fundamental good nature that this temperament was kind and gentle, if a bit boisterous. Elm got quiet and sulky with liquor, so she made sure to limit her intake. Since she’d had the children she’d lost her tolerance, and after a couple of nights celebrating Moira’s weaning, lying in bed with the apartment building spinning around her precariously, a balloon of nausea attempting to climb her esophagus,
she limited herself to a couple of glasses of wine. Thus, she was the designated driver, which, in New York, meant the designated cab finder.

When he saw her he extended his arm and spun her around so she fit against his shoulder. “Where’ve you been?” he asked her.

“Touring the art.”

“Big artsies, these ones.”

“They’re cloning their dog.”

“What?”

“I said, they’re cloning their dog. It died and they had a portrait painted of it, and now they’re going to have the dog cloned. In Europe.”

“Too much money, not enough sense,” Colin whispered. “But the scotch is excellent. Want a taste?” Elm shook her head.

After refilling her glass, Elm went to sit on the sofa. Another woman joined her and Elm discovered that the woman’s sister had also gone to Wesleyan, but she was older than Elm and Elm hadn’t known her. The woman asked how many children Elm had, and she paused before answering that she had just the one. They discussed private schools, then babysitters. A man joined them, the woman’s husband. Elm did her impression of Moira aping some teenage pop star, innocently changing the lyrics from “love me up” to “love me ’nuff” and “wanna crash your party” to “wanna crash your potty,” which always made her giggle.

The woman’s face was open, with wide-set eyes. The left was slightly bigger than the right, though she had tried to disguise this with makeup, painting a wider swatch of eyeliner on the bigger one. Someone had given her lessons, and from far away it worked. The man’s body was half youthful strength and half pot-bellied middle-ager. He had beautiful salt-and-pepper hair. Elm wondered if that’s how people saw her and Colin, a nice couple, well groomed, well suited. Or, she wondered, was their tragedy apparent? Had it aged them or matured them in a way that was perceptible, even to a stranger?

She felt Colin’s hand on her shoulder. She introduced the couple to him, and said that their daughter was born the same year as Moira, and was attending the school they had almost decided to send her to. It was superior to the one they ended up at, but they thought they wouldn’t have the energy to schlep all the way across the park and down fifteen blocks every morning for fourteen years. At least Moira was close to home.

“Almost ready?” Colin asked her. “It’s nearing midnight.”

“No,” Elm gasped in disbelief. Had she been forced to guess the time, she might have said ten p.m. “It was lovely to meet you,” she said to the couple. “We have to relieve the babysitter. She has science club in the morning or something.”

They said their good-byes, and this time both Dick and Ellen kissed Elm’s cheeks. Relay slipped her a card; Elm put it in her jacket pocket without looking at it. “You’ll come back and meet Dishoo, right?” Ellen called as the elevator door closed.

“Wouldn’t miss it!” Elm said.

“Who’s Dishoo?” Colin asked. The elevator gave a lurching start.

“The dog they’re cloning. Rhodesian Ridgeback, maybe?”

“Am I pissed or am I missing something? How are they cloning their dog?”

“I think you’re pissed
and
missing something,” Elm said. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Europe, maybe. I think it’s legal there?”

Colin shook his head. “Crazy as fucking loons, the rich are.”

The letter was florid and embossed. Nothing French was official without raised lettering, which required paper solid enough to withstand the pressure. This letter had a particularly ornate seal, a ring of flowers and a headless crown. “We regret to inform you, despite the excellence of the submitted materials, and with extreme sadness due to the number of deserving candidates who will not have the opportunity to realize the experience doubtlessly anticipated in the solicitation of this prize, that your entry was among countless worthy applications that have not been awarded the 2007 Prix des Artistes Emergents.”

A lot of verbiage to say, “Fuck off.”

He wanted to murder the messenger: to crumple up the page or rip it into indistinguishable pieces. But violence to paper was against his nature. Paper was delicate, precious. Even modern paper, readily available and inexpensive. Even paper delivering bad news.

The sun was shining, a rare occasion in rainy Paris, and Gabriel fingered the letter in his pocket as he walked down the Rue St. Joseph on his way to work, threading his way among the garment racks and bolts of cloth. The men in orange jumpsuits were out in droves at this hour, hosing down the sidewalks and urging the water toward the gutters with plastic fronds. Gabriel stepped around one man wielding a lethal-looking brush, scrubbing particularly stubborn dog shit stains.

Why did Gabriel still bother to apply for these prizes? It was embarrassing to be still looking for emerging artist grants when he was more than fifteen years out of school. Every year’s rejection resulted in a resolution
not to humble himself before the prejudiced committees again, but when each deadline came around his dire financial straits prompted him to send in his work, open himself up to yet another round of disappointment. It was a particularly unfortunate day to receive bad career news; his friend/rival from his days at the École des Beaux-Arts, Didier, was having an opening for his solo show tonight at a well-regarded gallery. Gabriel quickened his step so he wouldn’t be late to work.

Though not the most renowned gallery, Rosenzweig Gallery was nonetheless located in the fashionable Marais district, and dealt mostly in older drawings. Édouard Rosenzweig hired only École graduates to be his assistants. In exchange for horrendous hours and little pay, he offered a crash course in the business side of art. Business was a practical matter untaught and unmentioned in the École—anyone uncouth enough to care about paying rent was either a poseur or a capitalist.

Édouard had originally chosen Gabriel because of his surname. Connois was not his real name—it was the name of his illustrious ancestor Marcel Connois, a major Spanish painter from the French school of Hiverains and a contemporary of Degas. Gabriel’s actual name was Holgado y Rodríguez, hardly evocative and, well, Spanish. Marcel Connois’s work was displayed in all the major museums of the world, and Gabriel’s mother used to swear that two major works had hung in her childhood house, both now owned by the Hermitage:
Adam Leads Eve from the Garden
and
Portrait of a Muse
. His ancestors had come from France at some unknown point in time, bringing with them the French surname (not unusual in Cataluña).

Gabriel had obviously inherited his relative’s talent; he had won a full scholarship to the École, beating out dozens of better-trained artists who were technically superior, at least initially. Gabriel had enjoyed five student years in Paris, living in the garret apartments provided by the school, eating
menus fixes
and drinking cheap plonk that invariably gave him a terrible headache. Then, somehow, fifteen years had passed and he woke up one morning feeling the weight of his age, the absence of accomplishments as heavy as their presence might have been.

Along the way there had been crumbs of success, tantalizing tastes: group shows, purchase of his work by regional museums, a write-up in an avant-garde Barcelona magazine. But he still ate
merguez
waiting for the month’s paycheck to arrive, he still had to beg for supplies, and
recently, disconcertingly, his lower back had been paining him, tight across the top of his buttocks, and no amount of stretching or icing would relieve it. And he was still working a full-time job for The Man, eking out an existence as a gallery slave and desperately searching for time and money to work on his art.

Inside the gallery, the light was muted by the window screens. Gabriel left the grate pulled halfway down, a signal to passersby that someone was in but not ready to receive business. Then he made coffee with an Italian percolator, standing and drumming his hands on the counter while he waited for the gurgling to stop. He spilled sugar on the counter and used his hand to sweep it into his coffee. The staccato grinding of the lifting grate was followed by the unmistakably unhurried footsteps of his boss.

Édouard was dressed uncharacteristically in a suit and tie, the former of a pistachio color popular among panelists on television current events roundtable programs, the latter a muted solid saffron. He wore a Kangol cap with the bill in front and carried a black, seemingly empty briefcase.

“Ahh, café,” he said by way of greeting.

Gabriel handed him the
tasse
without speaking and unscrewed the percolator, retracing his steps. Édouard flipped through the morning mail, leaving it in an untamed pile on the counter.

“So,” he said, acknowledging Gabriel with a flick of his chin. “Today we have an appointment at noon.”

Gabriel leaned against the counter; his tight black jeans didn’t allow him to sit down fully. He had worked for Édouard longer than any other assistant, longer than he should have. On his ten-year anniversary with Édouard, his boss bought him a cake and gave him a miniature drawing, some scrap of a Piranesi sketch. It was easily the most valuable thing Gabriel owned.

“He was recommended to me through Jean-Marie as a dealer of some importance,” Édouard continued.

“You should have told me,” Gabriel said. “I would have dressed.”

“You’re fine the way you are.” Édouard smiled approvingly. The wrinkles around his eyes grew deeper. They sat in bags of skin, like a Shar-Pei puppy, while the rest of his face remained unlined, as though his eyes were older than the rest of him. “If you could prepare some of our pieces for inspection …”

Gabriel nodded, tossed back his coffee. He knew the stock better than Édouard did, better than the inventory list. He walked into the storeroom and put on the white cotton gloves. He should pull out a representative sample of their good work, not their best. Something should be held back. A little reticence could be sensed. It would not do to seem overeager.

The visitor’s appointment would explain Édouard’s outfit. This was someone to impress. But Édouard had dressed flamboyantly; obviously Jean-Marie had told him that the dealer’s taste admitted novelty. From the locked cabinet, Gabriel removed a couple of eighteenth-century drawings from the Italian School, a sketch after Rubens, and two well-preserved seventeenth-century etchings of a Brueghel drawing. He complemented the selection with a lesser-known Corot and a not entirely successful landscape by a young Cézanne.

Nearly every time he performed this task for Édouard he remembered the Rembrandt preparatory sketch for a self-portrait the artist completed the year he died. It was early in Gabriel’s extended apprenticeship, and he had fingered the yellowed paper carefully, holding the watermark up to the light. The paper itself was beautiful, thick and uneven, rough like a winter beach. Worms had eaten through the page in a couple of places, and when Gabriel turned it over, despite the thickness of the paper a faint ink line showed through. Also on the back was Rembrandt’s signature, the pregnant
R
and the perfectly aligned letters, followed by the date: 1667.

And, ah, the drawing itself. The sure, strong lines centered the bulbous face. The background was cross-hatched into a darkness the artist would later imitate in oil, his gray hair curled from underneath his cap. In the sketch, the artist wore a wry smile, which he replaced with a tired grimace in the final portrait. Gabriel had eased off one of his cotton gloves and lightly traced the rounded chin, imagining, for a minute, the complete confidence of the master’s hand. He was not supposed to touch the drawings—the oil from his fingers could compromise the graphite or the paper, but just being that close to such a master draftsman sent a frisson of pleasure that was not unlike a sexual thrill down his back.

In comparison, these sketches were anemic, and Gabriel found the task menial, rote. As he arranged the chosen stock on the light table, he was confident that his choices would please Édouard. He hoped the collector
would be interested in the pieces; someone, at least, should have a good day.