A Nearly Perfect Copy

Part Five


Spring 2011

Elm and Gabriel

“Hurry up,” Moira whined.

“Moira,” Elm said, “your brother has little legs. He can’t walk that fast.”

“Can so,” Aiden said.

Elm looked at Aiden’s gait, worried. He was still walking a little pigeon-toed.

“But what if we miss it?”

“You’re not going to miss it,” Elm said. “Mary is meeting us at the auction house and she’ll take you. The carnival is going on all afternoon.”

“But we’re only in London for a week.”

“Mama?” Aiden asked.

“No, I can’t carry you,” Elm said. “You’re too much of a big boy.”

“More like a big, slow turtle.”

“That’s enough, Moira. Come here and hold my hand while we cross.”

It was a hot day, and Moira’s annoyance was catching. Aiden continued to stare everywhere but in front of his feet, and Elm was dragging him. The back of Moira’s neck was red and irritated. She was getting sunburned, but it hadn’t occurred to Elm that one needed sun protection in rainy London.

“Da coming?” Aiden asked for the umpteenth time.

“Yes, baby, Daddy will meet us at the fair after his meeting.” Probably. Maybe. Nothing was certain with Colin.

“After his meeting,” Aiden parroted.

Aiden was meeting his developmental milestones; Elm waited for each one, sure that at some point his being a clone would manifest itself in a limitation, or a severe deficiency. She treated him carefully, and he was growing up timid and fearful, dependent. But so far they’d been lucky. Sometimes Elm forgot he was Ronan’s clone; he seemed so himself, so Aiden.

Though Aiden looked just like his brother—his twin, really—with the long nose that Elm shared, Colin’s blond hair and gray eyes, there were differences between Ronan and Aiden. Elm wasn’t sure if this was some trick of memory or if Aiden really was taller than Ronan at this age (possible: foods were increasingly fortified; Elm was vigilant with his diet and had breast-fed him past one year). He was interested in music, which Ronan never was. And he was a ham, in the way of second children, forever competing for attention in a way that Ronan never had to.

Occasionally, during a late-night feeding, or for a moment in the bathtub, Aiden stared at her with Ronan’s eyes and his genetics reminded her of her enormous loss, the grief that could only be salved, never cured. Though she would never admit it, those were the times when she regretted what she’d done. They were infrequent, but devastating, and flashes of hatred for this impostor were as strong and as fleeting as the impromptu feelings of recognition and adoration that same gaze could inspire. She would have to live with these contradictions. Always.

But then he’d look up at her in such a way that it felt like Ronan was there, inside him, and when he began to talk it was as though Elm were getting to regain what she had lost. At those moments she didn’t care that she had sacrificed her career, her marriage, perhaps her happiness.

They stopped at the crosswalk near Phillips de Pury, and Elm strained to look for Colin’s niece. She was supposed to meet them at the auction house and take the children for the afternoon, but Mary was notoriously unreliable. Yesterday she was an hour late returning home, bringing the children back full of sugar, having missed Aiden’s nap. Elm couldn’t explain to her how worried even a tardiness of fifteen minutes made her without seeming overprotective, crazy.

“Mary!” Moira squealed. She broke from Elm’s hand and ran to hug her cousin. “Are we going to the carnival?”

“What carnival?” Mary feigned ignorance. “I thought we’d tour Buckingham Palace.”

“No!” Moira giggled.

“Mary!” Aiden said. He knew better than to wriggle from Elm’s grasp, but she could feel his urge to run to Mary. Elm was jealous; her arrival never provoked such fanfare.

“Hi, Mary,” Elm said. “Thanks for taking them.”

“No trouble,” Mary said. She was wearing a long skirt woven with shiny threads that sparkled, her many bracelets providing an accompanying tinkling.

“Why do I say yes to this thing?” asked a nearby man, echoing Elm’s thoughts. He was tall and thin, dark with a couple of days’ stubble that looked purposeful rather than neglectful.

A young woman shushed him. “They’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care.” His accent was foreign. Was this the man she was supposed to be interviewing—Marcel Connois’s great-great-grandson, himself some sort of artist? This was one of the auction house’s gimmicks in the great global market collapse, an added value, an enticement to come to an underattended auction: meet the artist’s descendant! What a change from three years ago, when people threw money at art as though they had it to burn.

Elm could not have cared less about meeting someone’s relative (she of all people knew that blood ties were expendable), but the art rag she wrote for was interested in an interview. She considered approaching him now, but he opened his mouth and swore loudly, “Motherf*ckers.”

“Shhh,” his girlfriend said again.

Moira gasped. “Mummy, who is that man?”

“I don’t know.”

“He said ‘motherf*cker.’ ”

“Don’t, Moira, your brother will repeat it.”

“Muddah-fakkah, muddah-fakkah,” Aiden said.

“Stop it,” said Moira. “It’s a bad word.”

“What is?” Aiden asked.

A representative from the auction house approached the foreign man and his girlfriend. “Mr. Connois? Welcome. We’re very happy to see you. Come this way.”

“Go ahead with Mary,” Elm said. She reached down to kiss and hug her children, a drawn-out ritual that they all respected, one that would seem from the outside to be excessive. By the time she’d hugged them and given Mary some money, Connois and his girlfriend had gone inside.



“Ow, wait, there’s a rock in my shoe.” Karen pulled on Gabriel’s arm, and he stopped to support her as she fished something from her platforms. “All right then, that’s better.”

As they continued toward the auction house, Gabriel could feel Karen’s steps begin to slow. Or was it his reluctance that was slowing them down? “We should have take a taxi,” he said.

“Taken. No, it’s all right.”

In contrast to the crowd he feared, the pavement outside the auction house was nearly empty. There was only a woman and her kids, the oldest a teenage hippie, the youngest not more than a toddler. How old were they? He should know these things, start paying attention. The woman was hugging and kissing each one in turn as if she were going on a long trip.

He sighed. “Why do I say yes to this thing?”

“Shhh,” Karen said. “They’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Of course you do,” Karen put her hand on her stomach, a signal to Gabriel that he should practice his “worldly selflessness,” one of the personal tenets he’d adopted during the course at the Spirit Lotus London Meditation Center.

Appearing at this auction was part of the elaborately complicated deal he’d worked out with his gallery. Someone owed someone a favor, and thus Gabriel would show up, do some interviews, perhaps create a little buzz around an otherwise lackluster auction in a sluggish economy. In return, the gallery owner would place a painting of Gabriel’s in the collection of a well-known connoisseur. That would drive up the price of his work, especially when the gallerist created an artificial scarcity of work, storing Gabriel’s canvases in a warehouse in Slough and allowing only a select few to purchase them.

Favors. This was how the art world worked. How the world worked, in fact. Since he met Karen, he felt like he’d grown taller, able to view the world from a higher perch. He could see the way mutual interdependence created intimacy, not vulnerability. He could accept a favor knowing that the bestower was acting out of self-interest. That was only natural. He could return the favor with his own motives securely considered. The Ngagpa had shown him this. His motives, for the first time, were clear: in three months Karen would have his baby, and he felt like the owner of a special secret.

What had not changed was the fact that he did not enjoy being paraded about like an accordion monkey.

They looked at the program posted in the window. “They bollixed your age again,” Karen said. “You’re fifty-five here.”

“Motherf*ckers.”

“Shh. Don’t worry. At least they’ll say you look ten years younger.”

Gabriel laughed and they went inside.



Elm took her place with the rest of the press corps, who were few at this low-level auction. She didn’t recognize the other woman there, but nodded to the slouchy, overweight visual arts lackey of the Guardian. It must be a slow news day for him to appear here. The lights flickered once, twice, silencing the polite English crowd.

This auction was a sad simulacrum of what had been only a few years ago. Not only were fewer pieces making their reserves, but fewer pieces were even going on the market, when investors knew they wouldn’t get top dollar selling them. There had been some fire sales (Lehman Brothers divested itself of an amazing collection, and some bankrupt investment bankers liquidated trophy pieces), but other than that, writing about the art market took all of Elm’s imagination, and not a little bit of invention.

The auction began with the crack of a gavel. Elm watched dispassionately as the sparse crowd bid on a Sir John Tenniel cartoon satirizing the overtaxation of the middle class. A real snoozer, Elm thought, though it was better than the punning woodcuts that often came from Punch magazine’s coffers. She scanned the crowd and found Marcel Connois’s descendant. He seemed uncomfortable, shifting in his chair. There wasn’t enough room between rows for him to cross his legs. His girlfriend, blandly pretty, a little round, was stroking his forearm. Elm thought of a few questions she could ask him. He was a recipient of the AOA prize, so he must be a decent artist in his own right. She looked at his bio, included with the auction materials. It said he was fifty-five. He certainly looked much younger; men were so fortunate that way. He had had a solo show in France, and one in London. His paintings had been acquired by regional museums. Not bad. Elm decided she could talk to him about escaping the shadow of a famous ancestor. Elm knew a bit about that herself.

How had she sunk so low? she wondered, making cryptic notes on the sale price as the next lot came up. This was a rhetorical question. She had prostrated herself with a series of events that she alone had set in motion. Even after selling the apartment in New York, she would be paying off the debts she incurred to have Aiden for years.

She was lucky, she reminded herself, to have a job in art at all. She was lucky not to be in jail. Indira had died just as the investigation turned its eyes on her. She did have some other valuable art pieces lurking in her Havisham-like lair, but they were left to the United Jewish Appeal, which decided to sell the artwork through Christie’s. Elm had resigned from Tinsley’s by then, Colette ensconced in her place. Questions still bothered Elm—the extent of Colette’s involvement, what and how much Indira knew—but she shoved her curiosity away, not wanting to stir trouble.

She hadn’t spoken to Ian since Aiden was born. But she was living in the UK, and he was still in New York. He opened up an art gallery with Relay; Elm was on their Christmas card list, receiving annual postcards with a list of their upcoming shows. Sometimes she looked at his Facebook updates, invariably upbeat and funny. She felt a horrible sense of loss whenever she thought of him. He was yet another casualty of her machinations.

Elm forgot to pay attention to the next lot and had to look over the shoulder of the journalist next to her for the outcome. The woman retreated, shielding her steno pad. Elm couldn’t imagine what she’d written that was too much of a scoop for a rival’s eyes.

The next lot came up. Elm gasped. This pastel was Indira’s—the scene of the market with the woman’s uneven eyes. Mercat. On the block again? Elm quickly flipped through her catalog. There it was, listed, with no mention of Indira Schmidt. The title was given as In the Square. “Marcel Connois, 1825–1889. Signed by the artist. Pastel on paper. Provenance: Galerie Christopher Fuhr, Dusseldorf, 1938. Tinsley’s, 2007. Literature: Connois’s Flights of Fancy, 1901, illustrated. Exhibited: ‘The Spanish Manner,’ Frick Gallery, New York, 2010.”

Elm stifled a noise. Incredible. In the three years since she’d seen the piece, it had acquired a gallery from before the war. It made it into Connois’s catalogue raisonné with an illustration, and apparently the piece had conjured a museum exhibition. Someone within the art world (Tinsley’s? The woman in blue who’d bought the piece? Someone else?) had decided it was authentic, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite its tainted status. But Elm could say nothing. She had given up all her ability to criticize when she cloned her son. Having Aiden meant that she was no longer an art expert.

There was a rustle in the audience. She looked over. Connois was gritting his teeth, clenching and unclenching his fists. He must have sensed her looking at him, and he turned toward her. His eyes were slits, burning. They met hers, and both looked away in modesty and surprise. Still, in that split second, she felt that he knew.



Gabriel matched his breathing to Karen’s, imagined that the fetus was breathing in time too. He tapped his foot and Karen put a calming hand on his knee. She didn’t know why he was anxious. And he would never be able to tell her.

The bidding started. Gabriel’s heart beat in his throat, roaring faster than Karen’s now. He had no reason to be nervous; the pastel had been through two other owners since it left his hands, and along the way picked up a history that made it even more commercially attractive. There was no way anyone would tie it to him.

They had lit it poorly; the glass reflected the light back into the audience, and Gabriel joined in the polite applause that greeted its appearance. He saw his mother’s face, her lopsided eyes staring at him. He had captured her, enshrined her forever. And that f*cking dog whose proportions were off. No one had ever noticed. The signature was perfect. Gabriel squeezed Karen’s hand and she obediently squeezed back. A brief cramp of shame gripped him, and he tried to employ the positive visual imagery he’d learned at the center. His Ngagpa’s voice entered his head: Every experience leads you to now. Accept the past and the future as your inevitable path, extending behind you and in front of you. He let the shame flow out of him with his next breath, and took a fresh look at his work. He had created a thing of beauty; he had contributed to the world.

He felt himself being watched and looked over at the press pit. There was the woman who had said the overwrought good-byes to her children in front of the auction house. She was looking at him openly, and as his eyes met hers he could feel anxiety radiate from her pursed mouth, her flared nostrils. For a moment, Gabriel was unable to breathe, and he grew dizzy. Then he broke the gaze, forced his breathing to slow.



Elm felt a frisson; Connois looked away. She stared at the catalog for the rest of the auction, and left without seeking Connois out. She was unnerved. She wanted to see her children, have the comfort of them within her gaze. She hailed a taxi to go meet them, wondering what Connois’s look meant. She put it out of her mind. It was impossible that he understood her constant awareness—when she laughed with her children, when she dealt with Colin, when she wrote about or looked at art, when she stared into the sleeping face of her youngest child, the features that were both Ronan’s and yet not—that she was both the artist and the forger of her own life.