The Forger (6 page)

I
T WASN’T LONG BEFORE
Balard began to take exception to me.

Even though I had no designs on Marie-Claire, my arrival had thrown off Balard’s monopoly of charm. Now he was trying too hard. He spoke at great length about artists he’d studied and exhibits he had seen. Then he would express concern that we hadn’t been to the exhibits, even though they might have taken place years before any of us had come to Paris. Balard was the only native Parisian among us.

The fact that Marie-Claire knew very little about artists like Elisabetta Sirani, Luca Giordano and Andreas Benedetti didn’t bother Balard. He seemed to find it charming. But my ignorance he would not tolerate.

When I said I wasn’t familiar with Sirani, he sat back on his stool, feet hooked into the rung at the bottom. “Not familiar?” he asked. “You’re not
familiar
with Elisabetta Sirani?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I can’t believe you’re not familiar with her work.”

“Why do you keep using that word?” I asked him.

“What word?”

“Familiar.”

“I’m not
using
it at all!” He gave a forced-out deep-voice laugh. “You said it first. I am just surprised.”

Marie-Claire watched, saying nothing. Perhaps she was even a little flattered that Balard would go to all this trouble over her. If Balard did succeed in making a fool of me, she would like him for it. It was a primitive thing, but it was there nonetheless.

“You are not very educated in the arts, are you?” Balard asked me.

I felt myself sighing. All right, I thought. Let’s get this over with. “I am,” I said, “too busy painting to talk about painting. There’s always the danger,” I told him, “of becoming an artist who doesn’t do any art.”

Balard folded his arms and then unfolded them again. “Are you saying I’m not an artist? Are you saying that you are the only artist here?” He tried to make it seem as if my insulting him was an insult to Marie-Claire as well, but already Marie-Claire was watching him with different eyes. Balard held up his sketch. “I am an artist! What do you call this?”

Both Marie-Claire and I looked at his half-done sketch of Valya and knew exactly what to call it. The room filled chokingly with silence, like a jar filling with milk.

“I
am
an artist,” said Balard, his face gone fiery with blushing.

Marie-Claire reached her hand across and rested it comfortingly on his knee.

He looked at her. His gaze was bright and pleading.

“You’re a very good artist,” she said.

What I didn’t admit, of course, was that Balard had been right. Given the choice between painting and looking at other painters, I would always paint. There was never enough time to do both, so I was always painting.

After the class, Balard came up to me while I was packing away my pencils and paper into the leather portfolio that I brought with me from home. He hovered there for a while, casting his gloomy shadow. “We got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

I looked across at Marie-Claire. She had packed up her kit and was standing by the brass pegs, ready to put on her coat. She glanced alternately at Balard and at me and then fussed with the buttons of her coat.

“It’s just a crazy day,” I said to Balard, as we headed out.

“Crazy!” said Balard loudly. “A crazy day! Oh, yes. Perhaps I can buy you a beer.”

We made our peace and there was no more jousting between Balard and me across the worn-out floorboards of the Atelier Pankratov.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT DAY, AT
the end of our sketching, Valya stood up from her perch, stepped down from the platform and padded barefoot across the dirty floor to where her clothes hung on the brass coat pegs. She began to dress.

I noticed that Pankratov turned away, even though his chair was facing where she stood. Still looking away, as if distracted by something in the dingy rafters of the room, he said, “Valya, I was thinking you could help me tidy up the place once the students are gone.” He reserved for her a softness of voice that he shared with no one else. I knew immediately he was in love with her and that she knew it and despised every measure of his devotion. He seemed humbled by her. She always got her way: whether it was refusing to stand naked up on the stage any more because she said she was cold, in which case we drew her wearing her fur coat and nothing else, or if she wanted to leave an hour early, Pankratov always gave in.

The rest of us were packing away our things, untying the knots that belted our smocks to our bodies, washing out brushes. There was a general clatter of furniture being shifted and the hiss of the tap in the paint-splattered aluminum sink. We gave every appearance of not listening, but we were. Not one word passed between us as we strained our ears to catch each subtlety of breath.

“You’re not paying me to clean up,” said Valya. She stepped into her shoes, jamming her heels into place.

“I shouldn’t have to pay you at all,” replied Pankratov.

“Then don’t,” snapped Valya. After that, there was only the sound of her footsteps fading away down the flights of stairs and at last the thump of the front door closing, which startled us back into motion.

*   *   *

“W
HAT IS IT
,” I asked Marie-Claire, as we emerged into the Rue Descalzi, “with Pankratov and the girl?”

We were out in the street, taking our first breaths of air not tinted with the reek of paint and thinners.

“I’ll tell you,” she replied, “but let’s go to the café.” When I hesitated, thinking that today I might go home and work on my own paintings, she set the flat of her hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me gently toward the café door. “It’s
Friday,
” she said, “and sometimes it’s as important to stop working as it is to start.”

I hadn’t been thinking about it like that. “You’re right,” I told her.

“Of course I am,” she said.

I thought of letting the hours trail by in a fog of coffee and tobacco and the banana yellow brain-fuzzing licorice of Pastis. The idea was sweet and intoxicating, as if I had already drunk the Pastis and breathed in the nerve-smoothing Caporal smoke.

The tables at the Dimitri were filling rapidly. Behind the bar, Ivan worked the coffee machine with movements like an orchestra leader. He smacked the coffee grinds from each shot into a garbage can the size of an oil drum. The sound made a dull boom in the crowded space of the café, as if Ivan were conducting his own version of the 1812 Overture.

Balard was waiting for Marie-Claire at a table in the corner. He did not look particularly pleased to see me.

“We could make it another time,” I said quietly to Marie-Claire.

“No,” she replied. “Not another time.”

I wondered if she had asked me along so that it would not be just the two of them. I knew she was very fond of Balard. Maybe even falling in love with him. But it was clear to me that Balard had fallen much harder and faster. Perhaps she didn’t like things to be going quite so fast. I didn’t much want to be getting in Balard’s way again, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escaping it now.

“So what is it about Pankratov and Valya?” I asked again, once we had sat down.

“What you have been witnessing,” said Marie-Claire, “is the torment of a man who makes this woman stand there naked before him and yet who cannot possess her. He is so infatuated that he doesn’t even know how to talk to her, let alone make love.”

“Valya is the one weak spot in the hide of an otherwise bulletproof man,” announced Balard, then ordered his usual drink. He called it a “French 75,” and said it was named after the French 75mm artillery gun of the Great War.

Daylight trailed away over the rooftops. Marie-Claire, Balard and I sifted through our theories of Pankratov and life inside the tiny universe of the atelier. I gave myself up to the Great God Pastis, adding water from a white jug into the glasses of sharp, honey-colored liquid, seeing it turn powdery yellow. I felt the soft absinthe explosions in my head, one after the other, until it seemed as if my blood were no longer contained inside the anchor of my body.

On my way home that night, I decided not to be stingy with my free time. What good was being in Paris, I asked myself, if I didn’t live some of the life I had dreamed so long of living? I had to make a balance between working and not working.

In the days that followed, I became a regular at the Dimitri, whiling away my afternoons and evenings with Marie-Claire and Balard in the happy thrum of café life. Balard soon grew used to my presence. I always left before they did, and from some of the things they said, I had the feeling they usually went back to his place afterwards. I spent a great deal of time politely ignoring the way they held hands under the table and how their knees touched, in a way that could be mistaken for accidental, except it wasn’t.

We often talked about how hard it was to make a living as a painter.

“We’ll have to live in a commune,” said Balard. “All of us together.”

“Wouldn’t that be fine?” asked Marie-Claire. She put her arms around Balard’s neck and hugged him.

I wanted to ask what her husband would think of us living in a commune, but Marie-Claire seemed to have forgotten all about her husband in these past few days.

One night, more than a week later, I came home from the Dimitri and found Madame La Roche sitting on a chair on the sidewalk outside our building. When I stopped to wish her a good evening, she took the pipe from her mouth and looked at it sternly, as if it had just caused her some offense. “Monsieur Halifax,” she said.

“Good evening, Madame La Roche.”

“Your Levasseur people paid their rent today. On time. I thought you’d like to know. I see you have chosen your café.” She was still looking at the pipe and not at me.

“Yes, ma’am. The Dimitri.”

She nodded. “And how is your painting?”

“Very fine,” I told her.

Her eyes flicked up to me and then away. “Ah-ha,” she said. Then she tapped the old tobacco out of her pipe on the heel of her clumpy black shoe.

It didn’t hit me until I was riding up to my room in the elevator, the gloss-black paint on the bars glimmering with the light of each passing floor. “Oh no,” I said quietly.

When I reached my apartment, the first thing I saw was my easel in the corner, untouched for many days.

“Oh no,” I said again.

I walked in circles around the room. All my promises to work. The twelve paintings I was going to do. I hadn’t made a balance between working and not working. I hadn’t done any damned work at all. Instead of that, I’d grown numb to the passing of time. It had been too easy to follow everyone else into the café. My time at the Dimitri was like being addicted to alcohol or cigarettes. There were moments when I had said to myself that this would be the day I’d start my paintings, but when the time came, the whole idea of starting work would suddenly stop making sense. I told myself I was just too tired to paint. That I’d already done enough work that day, sketching for Pankratov. Told myself I didn’t feel inspired. The excuses lined up so far back in my head it seemed to me I could use a new one every time and still never run out. I understood now that none of these were the real reasons. I was afraid of working here. Better never to have tried to make my way as an artist in this city than to try and fail and have to carry that home with me like some cancer spreading in my guts.

Now, staring me in the face, was the fact that I did not have a single painting. All I had were the endless sketches from Pankratov’s class and a few attempts at my Narragansett series, and they were worth nothing to a gallery.

I opened my black metal moneybox and looked inside. Even with the money from the stipend, my cash was already running low. It wasn’t as if I could just cable my bank at home and have money sent over, either. What I had now was all I had. I shut the lid and shoved the box away.

There was no point making more brave promises. I had already made vows and broken them. The only thing left now was to shut up and work and try to make up for lost time.

I swept the breadcrumbs of that morning’s breakfast into my cupped hand and threw them out on the window ledge for the pigeons. Then I opened up my supply box and mixed paints. I arranged my materials and started painting. I worked until deep into the night, knowing that I was working too hastily. Knowing I would have to go back over this and correct the mistakes I was making. But what mattered now was to be working.

I felt an easing of unfamiliar muscles, cramped so long inside me that I’d mistaken them for bones. The feeling of working after a long time of not working was unlike anything else. I knew I would sleep deeply that night. The only times I ever slept well were after I had been painting.

Deep into the night hours the city seemed to rumble, as if thunder were gathering beneath it. The deep-sleep breathing of a hundred thousand people.

I rubbed my hands across my face, smelling the dust of charcoal and paint powder ground into each swirl of my fingerprints. Then I went over to the sink and splashed water in my eyes. I looked at the time. It was too late to go to bed, but too early to go out and buy breakfast. I was too tired to work any more. I set my chair in front of the window and watched the dawn. The pigeons dozed on the ledge, heads tucked under their smoky-violet wings. I smelled baking bread from the bakery down the street. The
whisper-whisper
of the street sweepers with their witches’ brooms. Tram cars starting their rounds. The first
clip-clop
of footsteps. Then the sun exploding on the dewy rooftops. The coo and flutter of the pigeons as they set off in search of food. I felt at home in Paris now, as if each pull of air into my lungs had matched itself against the breathing of those hundred thousand dreamers in the dark.

*   *   *

I
WENT TO CLASS
as usual the next day, but that afternoon I didn’t go to the Dimitri. Instead, I went home and worked. Marie-Claire and Balard understood. Balard even sounded genuine when he said he hoped I’d come with them tomorrow. They disappeared into the café. The frosted glass door swallowed them up like a mist.