A Nearly Perfect Copy (5 page)

Despite his best efforts to ignore the hype, it was clear to Gabriel that Didier’s show at Galerie de Treu was eagerly anticipated by art critics and collectors. There were actual advertisements in
L’Officiel des Spectacles
, which Didier showed him proudly at the studio, and a short article in
Paris Match
. Gabriel had debated whether to go to the
vernissage
at all, but Didier had come to his studio, his smile making him look like the kid he had been when they had met more than twenty years ago, telling Gabriel how much this show meant to him and how it was a triumph for everyone who didn’t sell out or quit. At de Treu’s gallery, Didier’s career seemed suddenly assured. Gabriel assumed that Didier could look forward to enough income from sales of his work to permanently quit the asinine job he’d been holding.

That night, Gabriel met Hans outside the
métro
. Wordlessly the two artists began to walk toward the gallery, shuffling, Gabriel thought, like condemned men on the way to the gallows. He should be happy for his classmate. He knew that Didier’s success should suggest to him that his own was still possible.

Hans tripped over a lose stone. “Christ, I’m drunk.”

“Already?” Gabriel asked.

“I told Brigitte that it started at five. I don’t get to go out at night that often.”

The gallery was as crowded as Gabriel had feared it would be. The title of the show was painted on the window: “Aching Thighs.” The small over-the-door air conditioner chugged futilely, blowing like wisps of breath on the sweaty faces of Paris’s art community.

Didier was dressed in what Gabriel considered to be a simulacrum of artist-wear, a tuxedo jacket paired with a James Dean white T-shirt, jeans, and gaudy orange sneakers. He was surrounded by a gaggle of admirers, de Treu himself (the Salvador Dalí mustache was unmistakable) guarding against the crush of intelligentsia. No one could have seen the art even if they wanted to, but all eyes were trained on the crowd, not the walls.

Rather than fight to greet Didier, Hans and Gabriel made their way to the bar. Unusual for an opening, this bar was fully stocked. Hans
ordered a whiskey. Gabriel held up a finger, indicating he wanted one too. Hans made a big show of removing a twenty-euro bill from his wallet and dropping it into the tip jar. The bartender, in recognition, poured them doubles and winked. It would never have occurred to Gabriel to tip so grandly at an open bar. But of course that was what got you the biggest drinks the quickest.

Gabriel lost Hans in a crush of people, and decided to try to see the paintings.

Since their days at the École, Didier had been painting a series of women from the point of view of their vaginas. Curly hair, fleshy legs, painted toes. Sometimes a penis coming toward the viewer, intent on entering the viewer’s space. Then he began to experiment with the legs, the color, the background. It wasn’t bad, in Gabriel’s opinion. Technically a little facile, but Didier had been the workhorse, doggedly continuing with his oeuvre while everyone declared painting over. And now that painting had come back, here was Didier, ready. Gabriel understood why it would sell—the male artist painting from the woman’s perspective. And, hung here against the backdrop of the tall white walls, it looked, well, it looked like real art. He stood back to try to create some distance between himself and the painting in front of him, to see it as a whole, when he felt a foot beneath his own.

“Excuse me.” He turned to find a woman standing behind him. Her blond hair framed a face slightly older than his, skin taut across its prominent cheekbones. It took him a minute to place her. Lise. He had been so in love with her at school, consumed by thoughts of her. He loved her Frenchness, the unthinking way she was able to summon a check or ask if someone was using a chair without drawing stares or questions, when it felt to him that clearing his throat was announcing his foreignness.

Last he’d heard she was working as an assistant to Mikhail Ambrosine, a popular painter-turned-gallerist. And had she married? Yes, he’d heard that. Someone not French.

“It’s okay, I have another foot.” Lise smiled. “How are you, Gabi?”

Only his mother had ever called him that. When other people used the diminutive it usually annoyed him, but he was happy to hear the familiarity.

“Fine. Good.” He kissed her on each cheek. Remembering his love for Lise amused him. It had to have been, what, six, seven years since
he’d last seen her? Where did people go when they left your mind? When you no longer thought about them daily, weekly, yearly, at all? They ceased to exist for you, but yet their lives went on.

“How is it possible that in a city as small as Paris we don’t run into each other?” Lise asked.

Gabriel shrugged. They moved in different circles, that was obvious by her expensive clothing: a black silk sheath that covered one shoulder. The exposed one was freckled and tiny. The dress hung down, skimming her breasts and hips and stopping just above the floor.

“Have you ever met my husband, Giancarlo? Gio, my old friend from school, Gabi.” The man, who was in his early fifties, looked distracted and slightly bewildered. They shook hands and Gabriel saw that the man wore a diamond ring. Gio’s eyes alit on the bar.

“What do you want? I’ll go,” Gabriel offered.

“Thanks,” Gio said, with the gruff trace of an accent. “She’ll have champagne. I’ll have a bourbon.”

Gabriel fought his way to the bar and found his bartender friend, who quickly filled three drinks. Hans was truly brilliant. Gabriel squeezed through the crowd to find Lise and her husband laughing with a dark-haired woman in a print wrap-around dress.

He handed the couple their drinks. “What would you like?” he asked the woman. Her features were sharp but attractive; she wore the kind of makeup that looked as though she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all, an unseasonal glow.

“Are you the waiter?” she asked.

Gabriel blushed, and Lise introduced them. “This is Colette; she’s at Tinsley’s, you know, the famous auction house. Gabi was one of the best in our class.”

It was interesting how living for so long in a foreign country had changed Gabriel. If they were conversing in his own language, he might have made a joke or asked a question about her job. But in French, while he could come up with the words, he would probably mangle the grammar. Anything he said would invite a question about his origins, or at least a confused smile while the person parsed his accent. So he said only, “Hello,” kissing her on both cheeks.

Colette smiled, which made her nose crinkle upward fetchingly. She was darker than a typical Frenchwoman, with curly brown hair she’d pinned back into an unruly chignon.

Marie-Laure, another classmate with whom Gabriel shared studio space, approached Lise and gave her a hug. The women squealed in excitement to see each other, which left Gabriel and Colette standing awkwardly together. Gio was typing rapidly on his phone.

“So,” Colette said. “You know Lise from the École?”

Gabriel nodded.

The woman stood as if she were smoking, her left hand across her body, her right hand held up in a peace sign, an imaginary cigarette between her fingers.

Gabriel struggled to think of something to say. “You work at Tinsley’s,” he finally sputtered. “What is your job?”

“Oh, it’s mostly clerical, though, you know, I went to school in conservation and connoisseurship. We are merely an outpost of the New York house, arranging for European transportation and acquisition.”

“Old art?” Gabriel said. It was a question, though he didn’t phrase it with the long French interrogative.

“Mostly. Some contemporary, if it’s well-known, though, you know most of the interesting stuff is coming out of developing countries, or America, not Europe so much. And so much is undisplayable junk, video, or ephemera.”

Gabriel nodded. He had been a video artist, once upon a time. Colette looked bored. He could see her eyes darting around the crowd.

Lise and Marie-Laure rescued him. “It’s like an École reunion!” Lise exclaimed.

“Because we’re all hoping to meet de Treu,” Marie-Laure said. She was dressed like a little girl, in knee socks and a pleated skirt.

“Or Cosimo de’ Medici,” Gabriel interjected. It came out more glumly than he’d planned, and as he said it he realized he was looking at Giancarlo.

Lise narrowed her eyes and took her husband’s arm. “Well, I say, good for Didi.” She raised her glass.

“To Didi,” Marie-Laure echoed. Gabriel drained his glass. He was on his way to being very drunk.

“Colette, did Gabi tell you that he is a descendant of Connois?”

“No.” Colette turned to him with renewed interest.

“Yes,” Lise said. “He does fantastic imitations. Colette is a specialist in Impressionist painting. You’ve handled some Connoises, right?”

Colette nodded. “How fascinating.”

Didier came upon the group and kissed everyone on both cheeks. “Thank you so much for coming,” he said earnestly. He was sweating in his tuxedo jacket. “I really—it means so much to me.” Gabriel wasn’t sure if it was the lights or if Didier’s eyes were moist. For some reason, perhaps because of nervousness, this tearing struck Gabriel as irresistibly funny. Involuntarily, he giggled, and an embarrassed silence descended on the group, graver for the noise around them.

“Well,” Lise said. “We have to pay the babysitter, so …”

Everyone repeated the kisses to say good-bye, and congratulated Didier again. As Lise leaned into Gabriel, she whispered sternly, “Behave,” like she was scolding a naughty child. He felt his face flush.

Colette placed a hand on his forearm. “Do you have a card?” she asked.

Gabriel shook his head.

“Here,” she said, presenting him with the postcard of the show, “write down your number. I’d like to talk to you about Connois, if you don’t mind.” A strawberry-scented curl of hair fell in her face as she opened her small pocketbook.

He wrote down his cell number and she put the postcard in her purse, snapping it tightly and patting it to confirm it held something valuable. “I’ll be in touch,” she said.

Hans appeared. “Who was that?” he asked. “Pretty, for a Frenchwoman. And was that Lise?” Hans was drunk, slurring his words slightly. “She looks good,” he said. Gabriel couldn’t tell if he was smiling behind his beard. “Are we really in our fucking forties?”

Gabriel turned to him: “I would like to get blind, stinking drunk.”

The next day, after slogging, dehydrated and irritated, through work, Gabriel made the trek to his studio. The space was cheap and illegal, so far out beyond the Périphérique that it almost didn’t deserve the title “suburb.” A friend from school had jury-rigged the place, pirating electricity and erecting crude walls of corrugated cardboard.

Gabriel nodded at Didier, who sat on a supermarket crate near the front door, smoking. Didier had been a part of his life since he arrived in France twenty-one years ago. They weren’t friends exactly, but years of proximity had cultivated a mutual fondness. When Gabriel slipped on the ice outside Galeries Lafayette last winter and hit his head, they
wouldn’t let him leave the hospital unless someone came to get him. He called Didier, thanking him by taking him out for a beer.

If Gabriel hadn’t seen Didier’s finished canvases, he wouldn’t have believed that Didier got anything done, so often did cigarettes interrupt his day. In fact, Gabriel thought that it would be fairer to say that painting interrupted his smoking. But it seemed to work for him. Gabriel wished, not for the first time, that he was a smoker too, so he’d have something ostensibly productive to do while avoiding painting.

The air had grown cold now that the sun had set, and Gabriel hugged his arms to his torso and shifted from foot to foot. Didier emerged from the darkness, pushing himself upright from his smoking squat.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Gabriel replied. He hadn’t expected to see Didier in the studio. If it had been the day after his solo show, Gabriel would be lying in bed, or getting a massage. “Your show was really great.”

“Thanks,” Didier said hollowly.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” Gabriel said. “I thought you would move out of the studio, you know, after the show.”

“Not everything sold. What did sell, you know, the commission, materials. I mean, I’m not dirt poor anymore, but it’s not like I’m buying a mansion on Avenue Foch or anything.”

Gabriel was surprised that he and Didier were still peers. He had expected that Didier’s show would enable real studio space, shows in other countries, attention for his previous work. But it seemed that Didier’s brush with greatness was just that, a slight catch of the wrist, a fleeting touch. Gabriel should have known better than to be surprised, should have known that the art world never simply anoints royalty.

Didier pinched the end of his cigarette and threw it on the ground. “You look terrible.”

“I have a hangover.” Gabriel hugged himself tighter. “My work’s going badly.”

“Sorry, man. That sucks. I’ve been there. But, I mean, work through it. You’ll have a show soon. It’ll be your turn.”

Gabriel frowned.