Paris, He Said (27 page)

I did not undertake this change with a light heart, however. It took me years to accept that I was more skilled at imitation than at creation and interpretation.

As for Fabienne, she and I continued to meet for a few more months, into the new year, but after that she left Bourgogne and went abroad, married a man from New Mexico, divorced him several years later, and eventually resurfaced in France. She was the woman who took me to Italy, to the nudist resort that worries Jayne. Fabienne and I have kept up with each other, and meet from time to time when she is passing through Paris or I am traveling somewhere she also happens to be, and one or both of us is free. The friendship between her brother and me faded away after he learned that I was his older sister’s lover; we had a fierce argument, one that ended with him driving his fist into my hotly blushing, defiant face. In any case, his and my paths have not crossed for years.

Perhaps he has forgiven me by now, but it isn’t important anymore—these things happened almost forty years ago, which in itself seems to me the bigger injustice: how hastily our lives pass. Fabienne is still my friend, and her brother is not. I am sorry to have caused him distress, but at the time I wasn’t sorry. I regretted nothing. She was one of the great joys of my life up to that point, possibly the greatest. A boy’s carnal education, those earliest lessons especially, I believe most of us will remember far into our lives, the suspense and urgency we experienced, the mute awe. And what gratitude I felt toward Fabienne, her willingness to take what she wanted, to let me know that other girls may have felt about me as she did. There are people who live chastely, who think they can get by without wanting or needing sex, who say that it causes too much trouble, that it is dangerous and shameful, and that, like the value of one’s bank account, this aspect of our lives should never be discussed. I do not believe them; I have to think that they have not been with the right person, or that something awful has happened to spoil it for them, whether it was abuse or shame over their appearance or too much religious dogma.

I can see ahead to a time when it will not be so easy for me to find a willing partner, beautiful and youthful (Anne-Claire can make as many snide remarks as she’d like to). This question should be considered too: would it be better to die than to live without this most instinctive and elemental of pleasures?

No, nothing that extreme, but I suspect that it would be like losing your ability to see color, to taste your favorite foods, to hear the nocturne that sometimes lulls you to sleep. I am not some kind of sex maniac or slavering addict—what I am mostly saying is that there are limits to what a person should learn to live without, that deprivation is yet another kind of sadness, possibly the worst kind.

Living with Jayne is different from living with the women I have shared my home with in the past. Most days she is so quiet, never stomping from one room to the next or leaving her dirty clothes on the floor or talking loudly on the phone or watching the television at an unpleasant volume; she watches so little television at all. She would rather read and paint and draw or take naps in the quiet hours of the afternoon when the motorbike messengers are more scarce, when the boisterous students are locked up inside the lycée with which we share our street. Some days I have come upon her lying on the
canapé
, the curtains drawn on the tall northeast windows, a book facedown on her chest. She sleeps with head tilted toward her left shoulder, her face and brow pale. She is so lovely in these moments, sweetly childlike, as she is when she tells me a joke from when she was a girl, one that she must patiently explain to me, her expression growing tart, her eyes turning fiery with disbelief that yet again I do not understand! Her drawings—of human hearts with muscular aortas, of cats with owlish faces (or owls with feline faces), of dachshunds in little blue shoes—convey her sense of humor, these mementos she leaves for me on my pillow, a line or two written beneath each picture:

For you, mon amour, because we all need an owl in our lives!

You have my heart now (please take good care of it).

She must understand somewhere in this young heart of hers that our situation will not last, that her life with me will come to an end before long; other men here will catch her eye, or it will be Colin with his broad shoulders who succeeds in seducing her back to New York. Even then, I can see ahead to what she will experience: eventually she will find someone else, even if she marries Colin, has his child. Her essential restlessness is something that she is only beginning to admit to herself. We have many things in common, whether she believes this or not.

Hand-to-mouth circumstances in Manhattan kept her marching in place for a while, along with fear of losing the little she did have—her independence, such as it was, her place in a New York apartment with its interchangeable roommates. There are so many young women, from what I have observed, who live this way, waiting for the right person—lover, boss, dying relative—to come along and rescue them from the indignities of budget meals and inconsiderate neighbors and oppressive crowds, the near-ceaseless noise from the street and inside the claustrophobic buildings where millions of city dwellers are trying to live meaningful, mostly peaceful lives.

If it is nothing else, money is the escape hatch from the constant tyranny of other people’s bad behavior. This is part of what I have offered her by taking her away from East Second Street in New York—the space and leisure to make art. It is what I offer the other artists I help support, something I started doing without Anne-Claire’s knowledge near the gasping, exhausted end of our long marriage. Those ENSBA friends led to other artist friends, ones whose work I wanted for the gallery, and sometimes succeeded in acquiring and selling.

Over the last twenty-five years or so, there have been a few men and more women to whom I have given money for art supplies and food. My parents were stingy while I was growing up, paying the bare minimum to the housekeepers and handymen we employed over the years, and I felt deep shame over this. I told myself that I would never be so stingy, that when I had money of my own, I would worry less about it running out, which I believe was the main problem for my parents, even though neither of them had ever gone hungry. They feared another world war, having lived through the horrors of the second. I think they believed that they had to squirrel away as much money as possible and buy property on other continents, in case they were ever forced to flee their land and start over somewhere else.

Although I have profited from the free market and complain at times about the money I earn that must be sent to the government’s tax treasury, it doesn’t seem right to me that there has never been a functioning collective, whether state-run or otherwise, that has truly embraced economic and social equality. The poor continue to remain poor, and the rich remain rich. Jayne wonders why, if I feel as I do, André and I do not show overtly political art. I suppose it is like this: you might admire the people who bake bread for a living but do not want to bake it yourself. Similarly, I admire the people who speak loudly against injustice, but I prefer to conduct my protests in private, giving to artists who are not supported by their families or an arts council, or by employers who permit them enough time and energy to devote to their studios.

What I ask of the artists I support is nothing sordid or extortionary, only that they keep working. Some of the women I have lived with have also been artists, but from them I also expect friendship and ardor, respect and loyalty.

Anne-Claire was the first woman I lived with, for a little over two decades. I think of that now and wonder how we did it without one of us ending up in an asylum. It must have been because we had two children to raise and had to keep the household in order for their sake, and because we had careers we enjoyed and friendships outside of the marriage. We each also had the confidence that we were always right. Our occasional flare-ups and entrenched resentments kept us more or less sane too—anger is more clarifying and motivating by far than depression or melancholy—even if these resentments rotted the marriage from the inside out.

Agnieska was the second woman who lived with me. She stayed for seven months, a few years after the divorce. She eventually became a Vie Bohème artist, and is a painter of both male and female nudes. She is also the firstborn child of a French father and Polish mother and was a friend of my son’s, older than him by three years; her younger brother was Frédéric’s friend.

I think that my son was briefly interested in blond, impulsive Agnieska a year or two before she moved in with me, but she has told me that she has always preferred older men, and my son never spoke of his feelings for her to me—it was his sister who did, and angrily too, as if I had stolen Agnieska from him, which was not at all the case. I don’t believe that Frédéric would have made her happy, and I don’t know if he makes his wife happy either. (They have been married for four years; he was only twenty-six, Léa twenty-five, when they married. Your child’s marriage is something you regard with both curiosity and a little doubt—you know this child’s flaws, his tendency to find fault where there is none, to forget to say thank you, to believe the worst, to get angry when he does not get his way.) Agnieska moved to Montpelier to help her sister, who had had twin girls; it was supposed to be a temporary situation, but Agnieska stayed on, after discovering how much she liked warm weather and sun. She teaches painting classes down there and continues to paint and exhibit at Vie Bohème from time to time.

My third domestic companion was Brigitte, for about year, two and a half years ago. She is a friend of Fabienne’s too, but we are the same age—she is not an older woman like Fabienne is. Brigitte and I met on a day in late April so perfect, the air so light on our skin, it seemed as if nothing in our lives had ever been or ever would be dull or frustrating or tiresome.

One night toward the beginning of my relationship with Brigitte, she, Fabienne, and I had quite a good time together in my home. This is not the sort of event that has occurred often in my life—one attractive and willing woman is plenty to keep me happy—but Fabienne is hard to deter once she sets her mind on something, and Brigitte wasn’t afraid or skeptical, nor was I. We had some wine and good food, and soon there was some laughter and teasing, and Brigitte, who is an obstetrician, twice divorced and sexually adventurous, was as fearless as Fabienne.

After several months of living together, Brigitte began to speak of marriage, noticing that I had not, and when I gently made it clear that I did not intend to marry her, a few more months passed before she was able to remove the renters from her apartment in Montmartre and reinstall herself inside its sunny top-floor rooms. We still talk from time to time and meet for lunch or a glass of wine if she stops by the gallery near closing. She has since married for a third time, this husband also a doctor, but a psychiatrist rather than a deliverer of newborns.

Sofia lived with me too, for three weeks, when she was between apartments, just before I left for New York. I should not count her as a cohabitant, because, in part, she regarded my place as she would a hotel—temporary lodging with certain useful amenities. A good place for sex, for indulging one’s appetites for fattening foods and throwaway movies. She loves to eat and walk around naked and laugh at silly films and television shows. She is, I suppose, a true Bohemian, and although she preferred me to André and his sweaty, grasping style (he is a man who will swallow nearly whole something that should instead be savored), she bestowed a few of her favors on him too. I was jealous, one of the few times in my life where I strongly felt this airless, ugly urgency. But having had such affectionate relations with his ex-wife some years earlier, I tried to convince myself that a little time with Sofia was his due.

And presently I live with Jayne. It is a month now before her March show at Vie Bohème. When she flew home to Los Angeles to see her sister and their truce-observing parents over Christmas and New Year’s week, I stayed here and felt my home’s sudden stillness settle around me during the hours when my son and his family were visiting with Anne-Claire and Jeanne-Lucie, and I knew then that I would not want to live alone anymore. I have wondered often if Jayne will be ready to leave my home after her show goes up at Vie Bohème because that is my hunch.

Why have I not already shown her the door, knowing that she has met her old boyfriend on a few isolated afternoons and returned home to rue du Général-Foy with the vague, dreamy look of a teenage girl who has just been kissed by the golden boy of her fantasies? And knowing as I also do that she has been painting this boy’s portrait in the studio that I have made available to her, a portrait she readily admitted was of him when questioned, her honesty something I admired in spite of myself? And why, if I would prefer that Jayne forget Colin, have I not sworn off my own occasional meetings with other women?

What I know is that we cannot always do the things that our better judgment dictates we do, not all the time, and certainly not with joy.

I worry that Jayne has become an addiction for me: her soft skin; her ascending, girlish laughter; her powdery, clean scent; her shyness; how the tender flesh between her legs sometimes tastes slightly of brandy; her awakening belief in her talent as an artist. She is more grateful than Sofia was for what I have done for her, and more generous in her opinions of other people. If not for the threat of another man reclaiming her heart, I would be content—or as content as it is possible for me to be.

Jayne will have five new paintings in the March show, which André and I decided to name
Intérieurs intimes
. She wasn’t sure at first if she liked our choice of a name, but eventually she agreed that it seemed fitting because Susan, her mentor, is showing six canvases that are all part of a series of paintings based on photographs of a maternal aunt’s Manhattan apartment, and Jayne is showing two interiors—one of her childhood bedroom, the other of her maternal grandparents’ kitchen—as well as one painting with a window view onto a verdant yard and two portraits of people whose expressions I’d describe as contemplative, as if each subject has recently received disappointing or worrisome news. Chantal Schmidt will show five paintings of three different couples—Chantal and her girlfriend, two young men, and a heterosexual couple—lying in their beds, nude or partially clothed, the sheet or blankets kicked to the end of the mattress or missing entirely.