A Nearly Perfect Copy

Gabriel




He walked past the restaurant once before checking the address and doubling back. What he’d heard as “La Tour de L’Oqueau” was actually El Toro Loco, a tapas place that was trying extremely hard to replicate some fantastic ideal of Spain. Tapas came from the north, País Vasco, and yet this place was a Southern Castilla of the previous century: dark wood, taxidermy, rustic tableware, and mustachioed waiters. Of course the featured beverage would be sangria. No one Gabriel knew drank sangria after age fifteen—cheap wine and 7UP guaranteed a headache. He opened the heavy door and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. He imagined sitting at an ornate table for two with an open bottle of wine and an empty chair across from him. She might very well stand him up. She wouldn’t mean to, but something might come up.

He began to plan for this contingency. He would pretend like he always dined alone. He’d drain the bottle of wine, order a few pintxos, and nonchalantly drop the cash on the table before leaving, trying to convince himself that adults did this—they dined alone. It was not pathetic. It was independent.

And then his pupils finally dilated and there she was, at a table near the entrance, head down and hair falling into her lap, bent over her phone.

“Hey,” he said. She looked up and he felt his chest constrict. Her eyes sparkled. She had put on smoky eye makeup, à la Edie Sedgwick, and painted her lashes impossibly long. Had she done this for him?

“Hey,” she said, sounding surprised, as if they’d just bumped into each other instead of arranging to meet here. She put her phone into her large leather bag, slumped at her feet like a cat.

Gabriel leaned forward to kiss her cheek and she politely presented each side to him. He sat and removed his leather jacket, then put it back on when he noticed that the other diners were dressed in button-down shirts.

There was a silence while Colette rearranged her silverware. “Is this place okay?” she asked. “I just thought of it while we were on the phone. My friend brings clients here sometimes and then we hung up and I thought, That’s so stupid, bringing a Spaniard to a Spanish restaurant. It’s bound not to be any good.”

“It’s fine.” Gabriel smiled. “It’s like home!” His voice lilted.

She frowned, not sure if he was being sarcastic. The waiter came by and handed Gabriel an enormous, leather-bound wine list. He chose a bottle at random, a Rioja that was neither the most expensive nor the least expensive.

“Very good, sir.”

“How come you didn’t talk to him in Spanish?” Colette asked.

“I think he’s Albanian.”

She looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue the conversation.

The bottle of wine arrived, interrupting their silence. The waiter showed Gabriel the bottle, and Gabriel bent close to it in the darkened restaurant, pretending the words meant something to him. They both watched the aproned man, neat mustache, biceps divulging a past life as a laborer or an athlete, insert the corkscrew and pull the cork out. It gave way with a satisfying pop. Gabriel saw with satisfaction that Colette jumped, just a little bit. Or flinched.

“To art.” She raised her glass.

He took a sip. She swirled her wine inside the glass, her wrist moving barely perceptibly, but forcing the liquid into undulations against the sides, churning red waves.

He knew that if he tried to copy her effort, he would spill drops onto the white tablecloth that would haunt him for the rest of the meal, like spots behind his eyes after he’d unadvisedly looked at the sun.

Colette was talking now, and Gabriel was nodding, listening but not really hearing. She talked quickly and had a small endearing lisp that made it hard for him to understand the specifics of what she was talking about. Now, for example, he knew she was relating a story that was supposed to be unbelievable, he could tell by the way she paused dramatically to inhale, eyes wide and head bobbing as if to encourage belief. No, really, her eyes said, blinking rapidly.

She blew smoke away with the hand that was holding a cigarette, not clearing the air much at all. The lit butt followed her at all times, a firefly punctuating her sentences. Would she lose her charm when the smoking ban went into effect? Gabriel wondered. Or would it simply transfer to another expressive tic, like buttoning and unbuttoning a sweater, or worrying her clamshell telephone?

Tonight she wore more elaborate makeup—her eyelids had a sheen to them and her mouth was painted a bright red. The story finished in a burst of giggles, which Gabriel mimicked. He had gotten used to only half understanding his surroundings. He liked the remove his foreignness gave him. Sometimes, being outside of a culture was like having a one-way window into other people.

He was free to contemplate her in a way that was completely visual. What did her cheeks do when she inhaled? How did her shoulders react to a touch or a perceived slight? Examining a person became part of a narrative he continually constructed, that he always wanted to put in his paintings but emerged only in his drawings, his derivative drawings, his Connois and Canaletto homages. Someday, he would work that sense of completion into his real work, when the pendulum swung away from abstraction and confession/expression and back toward observation and the notion of the artist as a commentator on modern society.

“Do you want to order for me?” she asked. “I don’t know what any of this is, anyway.”

“Um, okay.” Gabriel felt a quick, airless second of panic, then he settled. “Do you not like anything?” As soon as he said the sentence, he realized he’d said, “Don’t you like anything?”

But Colette graciously or unconsciously ignored the fault and said, “I’m French. I eat whatever doesn’t eat me first.”

“So you trust me?”

“Implicitly,” she said.

When the waiter came by their table Gabriel ordered paella for two, with mariscos, and a beet salad and some sausage and dates to start. The waiter took the menus and Colette sighed with relief; now there was room for her elbows.

He took a gulp of wine, feeling courage well up in him in inverse proportion to the sinking alcohol. He said, “You look beautiful.”

She smiled, pursed her mouth as if to deflect the compliment. Then she sat back in her chair. “Where are you from in Spain?”

“Near Barcelona.”

“Barthelona,” she mimicked his accent. “Hmmm, I liked it there. It was … God, this will sound stupid. It was very Parisian.” She laughed.

Gabriel smiled. “No, I see it,” he said. “Large boulevards, old, parks, cafés …”

“Well, I meant more like, when you study art, you get an idea of a place. My idea of Barthelona—” She paused.

“Very good,” he said.

“—was from Picasso and Dalí and Miró.”

“Picasso was barely from here. There.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is why I should have expected that his Barcelona would look like Paris. But, I didn’t.”

“Have you always lived in Paris?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Can’t you tell by my accent?” Gabriel shook his head. She continued, “You know Parisians, unless you’re born here you might as well be from Mars. I’m from Chalon-sur-Saône. Do you know it?”

He shook his head again, contemplating her assessment of Parisians. So she too understood the continuing alienation of being a foreigner. Apparently her accent, which he couldn’t hear, branded her as an outsider too. He wanted to take her hand, but resisted.

“Nobody does,” she said. “It’s completely without interest. My father owns a smoke shop.” Colette pointed to her cigarette as if it were the natural result. She stubbed it out in the silver ashtray. It was an ingenious contraption that when lifted released the ash and the butt inside. “And what do your parents do?” she asked.

“My mother baked bread for the market, sold things,” he said. “My father played the guitar. He died when I was young.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She shook her arm; a tinkling cascade of bracelets fell to her wrist. “How, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No,” he said. “It was strange. He died of mushroom poisoning.”

“Seriously?” Colette asked.

Gabriel nodded, though his father had died of a heart attack. But he liked this story better. “He was very passionate about mushrooms, and he was never wrong when identifying them. I think someone tried to poison him.”

“You’re lying to me,” Colette said, hitting his forearm.

The waiter deposited the appetizers in front of them. When Gabriel motioned that she should serve herself, Colette reached over and took exactly half of each.

She hummed approval. “This is delicious. Is this really what the food is like?”

“Sort of,” Gabriel said. “I can’t really explain it. It’s all the same ingredients. It just has a taste that is different. Tomatoes taste different in Spain. So do beets.”

“It’s like going to a French restaurant in America,” Colette said. “The food there is totally inedible. Have you spent much time in New York?”

“No,” Gabriel admitted. “I don’t travel much.” In fact, he had never left Europe.

“I go for Tinsley’s quite often,” Colette said.

Before Gabriel could comment, the paella arrived and the waiter presented it to them before scraping the contents of the pan onto two plates, including the burned-crisp bottom layer of rice that Gabriel loved.

They ordered another bottle of wine. Colette’s eyes grew glassy and her lips a tad floppy, stained from her drink. He wondered if she might go home with him, or he with her. A wave of longing overtook him that was so acute he nearly choked, and took a large swallow of wine to hide the frisson. A silence fell while they ate. He wanted to keep her here, at this table, buzzed with liquor, in a sort of suspended animation. He knew the spell would be broken, even as the waiter reappeared to take their plates, and so he ate slowly, excruciatingly slowly, as if he could somehow stall time and extend the moment.

He watched as she put down her fork to light another cigarette. She waved the smoke away from their table. Maybe it was the wine, but now he didn’t find the silence uncomfortable. He wondered if she did. Should he say something? No, he decided. He was not going to make conversation for conversation’s sake. That was what bobos did. Artists didn’t have to conform to those conventions. It was one of the few perks.

She tapped her ash in the clever ashtray.

“I’m done,” she announced, and pushed the half-full plate closer toward Gabriel. “Too much food for me!”

Gabriel finished his plate. Then he ate the rest of hers. No sense in letting it go to waste, and he was hungry. In fact, he felt empty.

When he finally set down his fork, she stubbed out her cigarette and, by lifting her head, summoned the waiter.

She demanded the check in the typical French way, which had the trappings of politesse—the conditional verb, the s’il vous plaît, the honorific monsieur that dripped of condescension. There were parts of French culture that he would never master. Spaniards asked for the check in full recognition that the waiter’s job was to bring it, which implied neither servitude nor gratitude. No class wars were played out in restaurants.

Gabriel counted out the bills slowly, attempting to hide them under the table. It was easily the most expensive meal he’d ever eaten. Colette didn’t offer to split it.

“We’ll have coffee at my place,” she said. “I don’t live far.”

They walked back along the Avenue de New York. When Colette slipped on a stone, tottering on her heels, Gabriel grabbed her arm and felt the give of her flesh. When you touched someone you were attracted to, why was it different from touching a stranger on the street? Was the difference in the touch itself, the pheromones that the other person gave off? Or was the excitement all in the mind—did the brain send signals to the arm hairs to tingle, the webs of the fingers to itch, the toes to curl?

They turned down a street he didn’t know. She unlocked the front door, and without a word, without turning on the stairway light, she walked in front of him up the stairs.

Her apartment was an efficiency, tidy and compact. On her walls she had framed vintage Tinsley’s catalog covers. There was a red velvet love seat and a bed. He sat on the love seat.

Colette turned on the electric kettle. Then she sat down next to him and turned her face to his. When her lips met his, Gabriel let her take the lead, keeping his hands on her hips.

The kettle clicked off and Colette pulled away. She spoke for the first time in minutes. “How do you take it?”

“With sugar.”

As she was making the coffee, her phone rang. She answered it and began to chat, using so much slang and speaking so quickly that Gabriel had trouble understanding what she was saying. She was talking to a good friend, that much he knew, because she called the person pote, an old-fashioned word that meant “mate” or “buddy.”

Still talking, she set a tray with coffee and biscotti down on the love seat and then went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Gabriel sipped at the coffee. Her voice went quiet. What was she talking about in there? Hadn’t they come back to her place to screw? Gabriel felt suddenly confused by the evening. Had he completely misinterpreted her signals? He decided to wait until she came back, and then say a quick good-bye.

He’d finished his coffee by the time she emerged from the bathroom, wearing a black boned corset and high-cut lace panties. Gabriel was surprised at her aggression. Pleasantly surprised, and immediately aroused. He stood up and she steered them toward the bed, undressing him quickly, biting his nipples. Her silence was exciting. Once he was inside her he looked down and smoothed her hair back from her head. The intensity of his feeling surprised him. She didn’t even blink, not for hours, it seemed like, and then he closed his eyes. Because he was embarrassed. Because that’s what you were supposed to do when f*cking. Because he was afraid.

The next day, after Gabriel had gone to work and put in a couple of hours at the studio, he stopped by Colette’s. She was home, and dressed in a business suit that Gabriel thought made her look like a sexily stern airline attendant from the 1950s.

“Oh!” she said when she answered the door.

“I don’t like the telephone,” Gabriel said. “Is it okay?”

“Come in,” Colette said. “Sorry it’s such a mess in here.”

Gabriel thought the words must have been a reflex because they’d both left together that morning. He realized he was still wearing the same clothes. He also realized he should have let a couple of days go by before he contacted Colette again. She made him unnaturally and uncharacteristically nervous. She was so obviously out of his league, intellectually, socially, aesthetically, that he wanted to make sure she had no time to think it over.

“You probably think I’m a strange person to appear on your doorstep.” He leaned in to kiss her and she accepted the kiss on the lips. “I promise I’m not a …” He wasn’t sure of the word and let the sentence trail off.

“I’m not worried,” Colette said. “Let’s go out to dinner.”

Gabriel had to stop at an ATM in order to pay for the evening. In two nights, he spent as much on restaurants as he usually did the entire month for food. Dating was an expensive habit.

A week later, Gabriel, hoping to stem the hemorrhage of money that Colette’s young professional lifestyle was costing him, packed a picnic and took her to the studio. She held his hand on the métro.

In his dark space she examined the paintings by peering at them closely, commenting on shading and color. Though she professed not to know much about contemporary art, she knew what she was talking about. She seemed most interested in his imitative sketches.

“This really looks like Canaletto! How did you do this?”

Gabriel shrugged.

“Do you have any Connois sketches?”

Gabriel dragged out the large sketchbook reluctantly. It was embarrassing, creating sketches in someone else’s style. But she squealed with delight as she turned the pages.

Gabriel unpacked the food, and Colette looked with disgust at the dirty floor, even though she was only wearing jeans. Gabriel was sorry he didn’t think to bring a sheet or a blanket. He borrowed a tarp from Marie-Laure’s studio and they sat on that, the lamp on the table casting long shadows. Colette took small bites at the cheese and sausage he put out, though she drank much of the wine and smoked.

In the morning, the first thing she said when they woke in her apartment was: “I’d like you to meet my uncle.” Gabriel was getting dressed, putting on last night’s clothing, which, he realized, was the previous day’s clothing as well. He had to go home and do some laundry.

“Well, I mean, it’s a figure of speech,” Colette said, lighting a cigarette. “He’s not really my uncle. His and my mother’s families were all refugees from Germany. They lived in the same village, I think. Our family came to France and his went to England, but they reconnected after the war.”

“Refugees?”

Colette said, “If you’re asking if I’m Jewish, not really, though technically, yes, I guess. Poor Maman. She married a destitute Christian and my grandparents disowned her. But they each gave her money secretly every month until they died and left her enough that she could leave my father. She lives in the Canary Islands now.” Colette laughed. “We’ll have dinner with my uncle tonight.”



Gabriel met Colette at a restaurant in the Marais that he was unhappy to see was extremely expensive. There was almost no money left in his bank account, and the end of the month’s payday was still a week away. He would have to deposit the check and deliver the rent to the landlord in cash as it was. And now he was going to be obligated to pay for three more meals. Colette had the habit of ordering fish, always one of the more expensive dishes on the menu, and he could not resist her excitement when she came across some appetizer they had to try. Once the entrées arrived, she merely picked at her food, so Gabriel had learned to order sparsely, counting on being able to eat the rest of her meal.

Inside, the maître d’ led them to a private room in back where Gabriel saw there was a small dinner party.

Colette introduced him to her uncle, Augustus Klinman, an overweight Englishman with thinning hair. He extended his hand for Gabriel to shake, and despite its fleshiness, the grip was solid.

“Sorry we’re late,” Colette said.

“I’m afraid you’ve missed the first course, but I’ll introduce you around,” Klinman said. “Everyone, this is my niece Colette’s boyfriend, Gabriel Connois, relation of Marcel Connois, of the École des Hiverains.”

Everyone nodded, either in recognition of the name or in pretend recognition of it. It was interesting, but not surprising, that Colette had told her uncle about his ancestor. He wished, not for the first time, that he could be introduced on his own merit. But she called me her boyfriend, Gabriel thought.

Klinman continued, “This is an associate, Avram ben Hakim.” A Middle Eastern–looking man in a dark suit nodded at Gabriel. “And the Bairds, and next to them the Schoenbergs. Do you know Patrice and Paulette Piclut? No? I’m surprised. They run a gallery in Canal St. Martin. Very cool,” he added in English.

Colette kissed Patrice and Paulette and sat down. The waiter brought over an amuse bouche, some sort of dumpling in a spoon. Gabriel lifted it to his mouth and a spurt of hot liquid shot down his throat. He reached for his water glass, determined not to cough.

Colette said, “In fact, PP, you might be interested in Gabriel’s work.” She popped the dumpling in her mouth and chewed it naturally, swallowing without incident.

Patrice crossed his legs. He was wearing pale pink pants, exposing a skinny, sockless ankle. “It’s not street art, is it? Because we are so over street art.”

“Painting,” Gabriel said. “I’m a painter.”

Paulette nodded. “Painting is so retro it’s new again.”

Klinman addressed them, “When was painting out? Painting has always been in style.”

“No,” the person to Klinman’s right said. “Have you been to the Biennale? It’s been all conceptual for years.”

“And Miami Basel is even worse. It was like being in Las Vegas. You’ve been to Vegas?” a woman with a strong American accent asked.

“I love Vegas,” said Paulette. “I’ve never been there, but I know I’d love it.”

“It’s like a psychedelic experience,” said ben Hakim. “Like what taking LSD was like.”

“An artist, how nice. We only ever meet dealers, like art grows out of the ground,” said a German woman.

“Better the ground than the ass,” Gabriel said. There was a pause while everyone considered whether to be offended or amused. Gabriel’s face turned bright red. He was so used to the accepted vulgarity of artists; he forgot that civilians had more refined sensibilities. But Colette saved him by giggling and then everyone laughed. He was proud of himself for making a joke. Maybe he fit in better than he thought he did.

Gabriel sat back to let the waiter replace his plate with one that held a piece of meat with a brown-red sauce on top of it. When everyone was served, the waiter announced, “Filet mignon avec foie de volaille.”

Gabriel took a polite bite. The meat melted inside his mouth, and the sauce had a pleasing peaty flavor. “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like this,” he whispered to Colette.

She stopped eating to take a sip of her wine. “So many things to try.”

From the head of the table Klinman asked him, “So Connois was your relative?”

“He was a grandfather,” Gabriel said in French, unsure of the exact word for a distant, yet direct, relative. “Of my mother.”

“Ahhhh,” the man sighed. “And your real name?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Does it matter?” Gabriel asked.

Klinman caught his eye and winked, which so disconcerted Gabriel that his fork slipped and he dropped poultry innards on his lap. He was not at all disappointed to hear Colette’s delighted laugh, and see her napkin winging its way toward his crotch.



Édouard and his boyfriend took advantage of the “bridge” long weekend to fly to Corsica, leaving Gabriel to deal with the unlikely foot traffic or emergency in the gallery. Gabriel spent the day doodling, drawing geometric shapes on graph paper and shading them by shining a light from the left margin.

He heard the whoosh of air created by the opening of the door. There stood Klinman, dressed elegantly in a bespoke suit, carrying a hat and an umbrella, popping by from a previous century.

Gabriel stammered hello, and a thank-you for the dinner the night before. Gabriel had grown increasingly nervous as the meal wore on, partly from Colette’s hand on his thigh and also because he was unsure of how the payment for the meal would take place. As it turned out, the waiter brought no bill, and no one took out a card or cash.

“Who paid?” he’d asked Colette on the way to her apartment.

“Oh, Augustus has an account there,” she’d said.

Mr. Klinman smiled and strolled around the gallery, looking at the art on the walls. He grunted, a noise that betrayed no opinion.

Gabriel reverted to his canned speech. “Our stock is in prints and engravings. Monsieur Rosenzweig has a special fondness for the simple line. Can I show you anything in particular?”

Mr. Klinman looked baldly at Gabriel, while Gabriel tried to look indifferent. “You have a very good eye,” Klinman said.

“Édouard picks out most of our work,” Gabriel said. “Can I get you anything? Water, or a coffee?”

“Coffee,” Klinman said. His French was nearly accentless.

He held out his raincoat and hat, so Gabriel took them and hung them up on a nearby coatrack. Gabriel ground coffee beans, scooped the grounds into the casing of the percolator, and screwed the top back on, placing it on a hotpad. The machine began to hiss and bubble.

They both stood waiting until the coffee was done. “Sugar?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Gabriel added one square with the small spoon. He handed it to Mr. Klinman.

“You are patient and you are precise.” Mr. Klinman set down his cup. “Both are qualities I admire. And Colette tells me you are good. Very good.”

Gabriel smiled. Mr. Klinman smiled back. Gabriel could play this game. He uttered what he called the “French hmmm,” a sound that meant neither yes nor no, not invitation or rejection; rather, it was a volley: your turn. Gabriel waited for the man to continue.

Finally Mr. Klinman did. “As you may know,” he said, “I am responsible for the artwork in many of Europe’s finest luxury hotels.”

Gabriel didn’t know, but nodded.

“We are doing the new Andre Balazs. Eighty-six rooms. All will need art.”

Gabriel nodded again. Was the man going to ask for some kind of bulk discount?

“What we would like,” Mr. Klinman said, “is some Impressionist drawings, pastels, and watercolors. Landscapes, decrepit cathedrals, women by rocky seashores, you understand. Connois.”

“We don’t have inventory like that right now,” Gabriel said. “I’m not sure that in his lifetime he even drew—”

“You misunderstand me,” Mr. Klinman said. “I am not speaking of Connois the elder, but rather Connois the younger. You.” He switched to the familiar pronoun.

“You want me to make you eighty-six drawings?” Gabriel must have misunderstood the number. French numbers were impossible, derived from some Gallic counting system that predated Arabic numerals.

The Englishman laughed, and then there was another awkward silence while Klinman rocked forward onto his toes and back onto his heels. His shoes were worn but well made and polished, the laces new, as if to imply that he had the means to purchase new shoes but loved these old ones, and felt secure enough to indulge that fondness. Gabriel fingered the callus on the inside of his left thumb.

“Let’s say by the end of next week? One-half charcoal sketches, one-third those half-finished watercolors your great-great-grandfather liked so much—the landscapes with the sea, perhaps? A few still lifes, the old markets, a couple of pastels.”

“Connois didn’t paint still lifes,” Gabriel said. “He was interested only in movement and light.”

Klinman waved his hand in front of his face as though encouraging a bad odor to waft away. “People like still lifes, find them soothing …” He let the sentence trail off.

He reached into his breast pocket and removed a long leather wallet. “What shall we say, per drawing? I’ll send over the paper I want you to use, to look like the nineteenth century.”

“Umm, I don’t know.” Gabriel tried to put his hands in his pockets, but his pants were too tight. Instead he crossed his arms in front of his chest. His sweater felt itchy against his neck, little prickles of heat. He shouldn’t have to make art for hire. It made him feel like he was prostituting his talent and training. But he desperately needed the money. Colette was proving to be a very expensive habit, one he wasn’t yet ready to give up. He found himself thinking about her more often than he had about any woman in the past decade, so often that he was worried. “What did you have in mind?”

Klinman shook his head. “No. You name what you think your time is worth. I’ll supply the paper; it’s important that it looks authentic.”

What was Gabriel’s time worth? Figure a couple of hours per water-color, some money for supplies: sketch paper, brushes, paints. Would he want them mounted? Matted? Gabriel’s father, a minor musician who played guitar for weddings and baptisms, always told him to name a sum greater than what he expected to get. It gave the client negotiating room, made him feel like he was getting a bargain. But he should not ask for too much, for that would seem like stealing and the client would be suspicious and miserly.

“Fifty euros per sketch,” he said. “Sixty-five for watercolors.”

Mr. Klinman shook his head, a disappointed expression on his face. Gabriel felt a wave of embarrassment. Had he overvalued himself?

“If you do not think yourself significant, then no one will. Charge high when the client is willing to pay, and then deliver a product that exceeds satisfaction. I will pay you one hundred euros for the drawings and one-fifty for the watercolors, which will be unmistakably authentic Connois Père when viewed from two meters. Here are five thousand euros. I will come back next Friday, is that all right?” Augustus handed him two banded stacks of bills.

Gabriel stared at the money in his hands. He had never held that great a sum at one time. The bills were new. Gabriel wet his lips. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Augustus,” he said. “Use the familiar. We are friends now.” He took his jacket and hat.

“Augustus,” Gabriel said. “Eighty-six drawings by next week is more than I can do. So quickly. If you want Connois.”

Augustus turned, his lips pursed sourly. He sighed, exasperated. “Very well, then ring up your old classmates. Reconvene the École des Hiverains.” As he turned, Gabriel thought he saw the man wink.

The door took the air with it when it closed. The papers thumb-tacked to the cork that served as the backsplash to the desks lurched toward the door as if to follow Augustus Klinman out, then settled back flat again. Gabriel’s desk was messy with yesterday’s croissant crumbs and sticky notes stacked like layers of paint. Gabriel looked at the sketch he’d been doodling when the man had walked in. He took the bills and fanned them out over the paper so that the drawing was obscured. A much better source of light, these euros, than anything he could shade.



The École des Hiverains was an inside joke that had escaped its confinement. Marcel Connois, having immigrated to Paris in 1870 from Cataluña, found himself an unpopular second cousin to the more successful Impressionists and so had fled with his circle, which included Del Rio, Monlin, Ganedis (one of the few successful Greek painters of the time), and Imogeney, to the Lowlands, settling first in Belgium and then in the Netherlands, where their talents were appreciated among the lesser nobility. They continued to paint the sunny, arid landscapes of their homelands and the voluptuous women at fruit-filled feasts that characterized their repertoire. They were always cold in the north, wearing scarves, hats, and fingerless gloves even into summer and so gained the nickname Les Hiverains, or “the Winterers.” The active years of the École were few. Monlin died of tuberculosis, Del Rio followed a carnival troupe to Capri where he lost a duel over a gypsy woman, and Ganedis returned home to his native island, where his mother’s cooking still sat warming on the stove for him. Imogeney married a Flemish girl and worked as a portraitist to support his thirteen children. Only Connois survived the dissolution, installing himself back in Paris. Still he painted the Pyrenees, the orange groves, the fish markets of his home.

Gabriel’s mother had owned one painting by her great-grandfather, a half-meter-square oil of the Costa Brava called Febrer. In it, the Mediterranean was an impossible blue, the color changing on the underside of each white-capped wave so that the effect was a mosaic of fractured sea, melting together as the water tumbled back into the roil. Gabriel had spent countless hours staring at the painting, the stiff points of hardened oil paint that revealed the exact motion of the brush. Connois was a meticulous painter; each dab of blue—almost transparent, stark cobalt, aquamarine, nearly glowing, or a navy so dark as to masquerade as black—intentionally rendered. The brushstrokes were visible, small whisks. Connois must have used only the smallest brushes; the canvas would have taken him months to complete.

Gabriel wanted to sell Febrer when his father’s arthritis had set in and playing the guitar became nearly impossible. Gabriel’s father was a proud man with a face that gravity had claimed. His eyes had sunken into the flesh of their sockets, jowls swollen like wet laundry. He continued to give music lessons, but by then they’d moved to the pueblo, abandoning their apartment in the city. They were poor, their neighbors poorer. Gabriel made some money selling his drawings to wealthy weekenders at the markets, and his mother began making pastries for special occasions, but still money was tight.

Gabriel must have suggested it a thousand times. Each time his father said it belonged to his mother and she said it was out of the question. After his father’s fatal heart attack, Gabriel and his mother often went hungry. He found her crying one day in the kitchen, an empty bag of flour at her elbow. “We’ll sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell it and this can be over.”

His mother wiped her eyes. “This painting is a part of our family. Selling it would be like selling a child, or trading a grandparent.”

“We know it so well,” Gabriel said. “If we want to see it, we can remember it, exactly like it was.”

“It’s not the same.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you. You are an artist. You have all the talent of your ancestor, and yet you don’t see the value.”

“It’s because I’m an artist that I do see the value,” Gabriel said. “It’s a piece of cloth with some decorative oil. We need to eat. You should see the doctor. I need material to paint with. It’s not like we’d destroy it. It’ll just be on a different wall.”

“There is sustenance more important than food.” She crossed herself. Gabriel was rendered speechless by the illogic of faith.

When the scholarship letter arrived, Gabriel debated whether to tell his mother. He knew she would insist he go to France. It had been her dream to visit Paris, to see her great-grandfather’s work hanging in the musée.

As he predicted, she was overjoyed. He had to stop her from packing his suitcase that very moment, and she insisted they open the bottle of French wine that she’d been saving since her wedding day. It was vinegar, but Gabriel drank it down. The alcohol moistened her eyes. “I know you have his talent,” she said. “I hope that they will recognize it.

“My grandfather gave us the painting for our wedding. He had inherited it from his father. He was old then, and nearly sightless, but he came in a chair pushed by his young wife and he gave us Febrer and kissed my forehead. It was a love match, your father and me.”

“I’ve heard this story,” Gabriel said softly. The kitchen was lit low, one bare bulb. The cabinets he’d known for most of his life, the rustic chairs, the icon of baby Jesus that hung over the large farm sink, the chipping floor tile, were as familiar as the curve of his knee, the jut of his hip bone.

“And then we waited fourteen years for you. We had given up hope, though not faith.” Gabriel rolled his eyes in anticipation of yet another retelling of the story. Each year on his birthday she forced him to go pray at the altar of the Virgin to celebrate the miracle of his birth.

She stood and untied her apron, framed by the light. She was lumpy and formless in her widow’s dress, her ankles swelling over the tops of her shoes like overly leavened bread. Her hair in its braid had gone mostly white, and one eyelid drooped a bit. And yet he thought her beautiful, and hugged her from behind while she washed the plates, feeling the rolls of her stomach, and decided that his plan to deceive her was genius, not knavery.

He spent the summer in the converted woodshed, painting. Every morning he drank coffee in the kitchen, looking at Febrer while his mother kneaded dough for the pastries she would sell at the market. So many coffees that he thought he would begin to convulse with caffeinated anxiety. When she left for the market, he took the painting into the shed to study it closer, careful always to return it before she arrived to make supper. Each evening it hung in the fading daylight, its varnish reflecting back the staticky black and white of the television, tuned to an American sitcom, his mother’s laugh drowning in the dubbed laugh track.

Then one day he took Febrer to his woodshed studio and turned it over. He removed the nails from the frame and exposed the canvas. Connois had painted two centimeters above what was visible through the frame. He must have known the edges would be lost, and yet this part of the painting was as worked as the rest. This was not an expression of meticulousness or perfectionism. It was simply a part of the painting, regardless of whether or not anyone would see it, and deserved the same level of care.

Gabriel pried the staples from the stretcher and the canvas sagged with relief. He rolled it carefully, trying not to crack the paint, and placed it in a tube he had stolen from the stationery store. Then he turned to his painting, the one he had been working on all summer. It wasn’t quite dry; August’s humidity stalled the oil, but it would work. He stretched the canvas over the supports and hammered the staples back in. Then he reframed the painting, careful to mimic the small space where the frame’s right angles didn’t quite meet.

He was in the kitchen when his mother came home. “Gabriel,” she called. “Oh, there you are. Are you very hungry tonight?”

Gabriel shook his head. His insides were as agitated as though he were traveling on the waves of the painting. Would she notice?

She set about the business of dinner, peeling potatoes and cutting tomatoes to spread their innards on thick pieces of bread. Gabriel heard the click of the salt container’s top snapping open and closed, but his gaze was fixated on the painting. He stared at it so long and intently that the landscape ceased to resemble any recognizable vista and became a jumble of intermingling colors and shapes. It was like a tangle of thread; if he tried to follow one brushstroke or one color, he confused it with another layer of pigment and texture.

“What’s wrong with you?” his mother asked. “I think the woodshed is not a good place for a studio. Too hot. And too much coffee; you’re dehydrated.”

He turned his head to smile absently at her.

“Febrer changes for me as well.” She served him potatoes. “Depending on my mood, I project onto it, almost like I am the painter. Today it looks shinier, more alive.”

“I cleaned it,” Gabriel said impulsively. “As a present to you before I leave. I cleaned the surface so it’s like a new painting. Don’t let anything touch it for a couple of weeks until the new varnish has a chance to dry.”

Tears rimmed his mother’s eyes. She said nothing. Not “Oh, thank you!” as he thought she would, nor “You shouldn’t have bothered,” nor “I’ll miss you so much.” He wondered if she knew, if she suspected. Impossible. It was a nearly perfect copy, and she would have noticed right off if it weren’t exact. If he could fool her, she who knew the painting better than anyone in the world, then he was indeed as talented as she claimed he was, as the school in France thought he might be. He might even be as talented as his great-great-grandfather.

When he got to Paris, he approached Sotheby’s with the canvas. He told the story truthfully, and was lucky enough to have arrived just as the art market was hitting its peak. Houses couldn’t afford to be too thorough in checking provenances. The house verified the painting’s age through forensic testing and Febrer was put up for auction in a group of minor Impressionists, under “École des Hiverains, artist unknown.” It still sold for more money than Gabriel had expected. He sent his mother all of it, telling her he’d sold one of his paintings. In a sense, he had. The more he thought about it, the more he believed it himself, until it became as much a fundamental truth as the bitterness of coffee or the hot stink of the Parisian métro. He had sold his first Connois.