A Nearly Perfect Copy

Gabriel




As soon as Klinman left the gallery, Gabriel began to think about his new business opportunity. He could get Didier to help him; the man could do a passing Pissarro. Marie-Laure worked for hire too, he knew. Recently she had illustrated a children’s book. Surely she’d be more interested in this work.

A team thus mentally assembled, Gabriel closed the gallery early. After he checked his various pockets for the money (he’d spread it out both to avoid losing it and because the wad was too big to fit into his tight pocket), he locked the door behind him and pulled down the grate. Paris was in the midst of a cold snap, its regular mist hanging heavy like a compress. Gabriel turned up his collar, but it did little to warm him. He arrived at his studio in the banlieue jumping up and down to shake the cold from his limbs. Both Marie-Laure and Didier were there, and he told them about Klinman’s visit. Marie-Laure looked at him with such blatant gratitude that Gabriel was embarrassed.

“Who is this man?” asked Didier. “Our benefactor?”

“He’s English,” Gabriel said. “A dealer or collector or something.”

“Who cares?” said Marie-Laure. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s an angel from God sent to pay my rent.” Marie-Laure’s live-in boyfriend dabbled in heroin; he was always stealing money from her wallet and threatening to hurt her.

“Angels pay your rent?” Didier baited her.

Marie-Laure opened her mouth to answer, but Gabriel cut her off. “We have until next week only. The paper will arrive tomorrow.”

The paper was delivered by messenger to Rosenzweig’s the next day. It did look like nineteenth-century artist’s paper, irregular and obviously not mass-produced. Gabriel took it to the studio, ready to hand it out, feeling a dry-mouthed panic. He was not used to being in charge. He was not a leader. He was an outsider, and this new role of cheerleader/whip cracker was an unfamiliar fit. He didn’t like being responsible, especially for other people’s work. He liked to work alone, rely on no one, and certainly not flaky Didier or weepy Marie-Laure.

Today, Marie-Laure didn’t complain as Gabriel lit incense, and did him the favor of turning her American pop music selections down low. Gabriel sat down at his table. He took out the sketch he had started the day before, planning to transfer it to Klinman’s paper. Some of the elements weren’t working. The perspective was not quite uniform. The clock tower in the background was elongated at the top, the point of view low to the ground. Yet the women’s skirts were viewed from above. This inconsistency bothered Gabriel. He suspected this fussiness was related to the lack of spirit in his art, his preoccupation with structure at the expense of emotion. These kinds of imperfections further falsified the piece of art. Yet there was no time to obsess over details in his current assignment. It was all about production. Line them up, bang them out, pocket the cash.

Gabriel put on the old earphones that led to his Walkman. He was the only one he knew who still listened to cassettes, but that’s how his music was recorded, and it wasn’t like he had money to buy some fancy new digital music player. He pressed play and the familiar Spanish rap music blasted from the headset. Gabriel turned it down. He picked up his pencil. He was more excited about this project than he could remember being in a long while, perhaps since he had copied Febrer. But that hadn’t been excitement; it was more like nervous apprehension.

He was happy that his work would be compensated for once, instead of merely criticized and shunted. He was guaranteed money for his art, even if it wasn’t really his. He felt disappointed in himself; he had fallen into the trap of capitalism, into believing that an object was valuable only if it was monetarily valuable. But he lived within the culture, it was bound to have an effect on him.

Unsellable art was bad art. So according to the cognoscenti, Gabriel was making bad art. And by this same perverse logic, any art that sold was automatically good art, in direct proportion to its sale price. Who were these buffoons who decided what sold and what sat out in the soggy cold of the marché aux puces? Soulless men who, no matter how they tried, saw only Swiss francs and yuan in the brushstrokes of the masters. They would never understand Gabriel. It was futile to try. Rather, give them what they want—eighty-six pieces of art by next week.

He decided to get one of the pastels out of the way. Mediterranean blue was almost impossible to render without oil paints, but he could try. He layered on the pigment, swirling like he remembered the waves in Febrer. Then he completed the scene, a marketplace near the coast.

Almost without realizing it, he drew a large figure in the foreground. A woman, selling bread. It was his mother: the waistless apron, the plaits in her hair, her uneven eyes, one lid heavier than the other, always winking.

No time for nostalgia. An aesthetic assembly line; finish one, on to the next.



On Saturday Marie-Laure and Didier came to his studio. Gabriel, concentrating, didn’t hear them approach until Didier tapped him on the back, startling him.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel rested his old-fashioned earphones around his neck.

Marie-Laure said, “We can’t do it. Figure it takes us at least three hours for each one—”

“That’s if they’re shitty,” Didier interrupted.

“And we can only work like max sixteen hours a day. So that’s five per day, max, which is nearly impossible, and there’s three of us and five days. And I promised my boyfriend that I’d do Sunday lunch with his family. Do the math.”

“I can’t,” said Gabriel.

“I can’t either,” Didier said. “But I’m working my ass off and we’re not going to finish.”

“Yeah.” Gabriel put down his brush. He hated watercolors. Something about them seemed so wishy-washy, so like a Sunday painter. The colors were too muted, the lines inexact. “So who should we get?”

“Hans?” Didier asked. Gabriel nodded. “I’ll text him right now.” Didier busied himself with his phone as he walked out of the room.

Marie-Laure said, “What about Antoine, on the end?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want the whole studio involved, you know?”

“Okay …” Marie-Laure said slowly. She clearly didn’t know. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, Gabriel realized. She didn’t care that they were painting cheap knockoffs for money. But he did, and he didn’t want it spread around. Nor did he want to be the rainmaker for the people in the studio. He didn’t even really want Marie-Laure and Didier involved, to tell the truth.

“What happened to that Russian girl who went to school with us?” he asked.

“Back to Russia.”

“What about Lise?”

“Lise Girard? I just saw her at Didier’s show. Oh, wait, right, you were there. I can find her on the Internet,” Marie-Laure offered.

“I’ll do it,” Gabriel said. Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? “She’s a good idea, right?”

Lise had been the expert draftsman (draftswoman?) in their circle. She had specialized in technical drawing; as a teenager she’d considered becoming an architect. During one of their first conversations, in a smoky bar full of American students near the Sorbonne, she told him that to her lines were clearer than words. She saw the world in charcoal and lead, every person, object, and place an outline, shaded, smeared, or cross-hatched into its third dimension.

“For example”—she picked a piece of tobacco from her lips using her pinkie and her thumb and flicked it away—“right now, in this bar? There are only curves and angles. I could close my eyes and sketch it.”

“All I see is color,” Gabriel said. “I look around and I see sweaters and jackets and hair and surface texture.”

“Together, we would make a great painter.” Lise laughed. Her front tooth was turned slightly inward, an imperfection that made her dearer to him, the way that flaws of unrequited love increase its indelibility.

Lise could render anything, in anyone’s hand, practically effortlessly. Her room had been a shrine to the greats: she had sketches of hunters from the caves at Altamira, Fra Angelico studies, Whistler’s Mother … the lines as sure and exact as if the masters had drawn them. It was part of her final project: a history of the male torso. By copying the style, if not the subject matter, of art history’s most macho protagonists, she subverted their power somewhat, strengthening her own. Gabriel had thought it masterful, though by then he recognized that his judgment concerning Lise was somewhat suspect. Even now, he was motivated by wanting to see what her life was like so many years later.

Gabriel was not well versed in Internet searches; in fact, the entire world of the computer remained opaque to him. In that sense, he had the perfect job—Édouard’s gallery was run as if they were living contemporarily with the old masters. Sales were recorded in double-entry ledgers. Occasionally, Édouard’s bookkeeper would come by and grumble at the lack of Excel spreadsheets. If Gabriel wanted to use a computer, he had to go down the street to the seedy café and time his computer usage to the minute so as to avoid extra charges.

Now, confronted with Google’s French home page, he typed in Lise’s name. It returned more than fifty-five thousand hits. “Lise Girard” was a popular name. He clicked on images, and saw, among an elderly lawyer and a teenager in an inappropriate see-through dress, a tall blonde with a hiking pack on her back, mountains behind her dwarfing her. He clicked on the picture to make it bigger, but Facebook wanted him to join in order to see it. He didn’t like the idea of his personal information being accessible to anyone and everyone. He knew this was silly—he had nothing to steal, and who would want the identity of a f*cked-up Spanish artist who owed France Telecom two hundred euros?

What the hell, he thought, and went back to Google’s home page to create a new e-mail address. Was it a good sign or a bad one that [email protected] wasn’t yet taken? He signed himself up for Facebook, and by the time he was able to navigate back to the picture of what might have been Lise, he had gone over his fifteen minutes and would have to pay an extra five euros.

When he enlarged the picture he saw that it was indeed her. She had several photos up, including some with what Gabriel thought might be four or five children. It was hard to tell which were repeated in the various photos, so alike did they look. In the photos her eyes had gone starry with crow’s-feet and her freckles had taken over a good portion of her nose. He hadn’t noticed these flaws when he saw her at Didier’s show; makeup had done its trick.

Had he gone through the same aging process? He was, granted, a bit lumpier than he had been. Not fat, but shaped differently, his belly developing a slackness that was sure to be a pouch should he ever stop drinking so much coffee and start eating regular meals.

He wrote her a short note saying that it was nice to see her at Didier’s show, thanking her for introducing him to Colette, and letting her know there was money to be made; if she was interested, she should call him. He hated writing in French. He had never taken a formal French class, and the accent marks felt insurmountably arbitrary. Circonflexe, grave, aigu; it was like some strange superlanguage on top of the letters. He felt this way about French in general, and French people. He could understand the basics of conversations, of customs, of conventions, but there was always another level that he failed to grasp, people speaking over his head, looking down on him. But Paris wasn’t really France. Paris was Paris—and it had become his home.

A small box popped up in the corner and there was Lise, virtually, telling him how glad she was to be back in touch, and, in fact, it was a particularly good time for her since her youngest was now in day care full-time. What was the project?

Gabriel looked at his watch. There was one minute until he had to pay for another quarter-hour session. He typed, “Can we just meet?”

“Sure,” Lise responded. “Where?”

Gabriel replied with the first place that came to his head, their old haunt, the Biche Blanche.



The Biche Blanche had the advantage of being across the street from the École. It lacked charm and originality, but was convenient and inexpensive, and the waiters let students linger at tables long after others would have cleared their throats to get the squatters to leave.

The amazing thing about Paris in general, and its cafés in particular, was that they remained outside time. All had identical bistro tables in fake marble, the rounded wooden chairs that were comfortable for no ass. The same large blond Americans, trying to speak French with the pimpled French boys, the insouciant students, too bored even to take a drag from their burning cigarettes.

Lise was already there when he arrived, reading a large book at a window table. As he recognized her she lifted her head, waving vigorously, so that he smiled. She stood and gave him two kisses which were not really kisses but cheek contact. He noticed she didn’t bother making the kissing noises, and he admired that about her. In the brief seconds their heads were touching, he noticed her lemongrass perfume.

At first they made small talk. Lise showed him pictures of her children—three, as it turned out—on a smartphone. She seemed very proud of the fact that she took care of the children with no outside help. Two days a week she worked at Ambrosine’s gallery.

“It’s good. I was actually managing the gallery before the kids. I used to think he was full of shit. He is full of shit, but he’s a genius at recognizing color,” Lise gushed. “You know how everyone always says color in my work is an afterthought? I think I finally get how important it is. Does that make sense?”

Without prompting, Lise began to tell him about other people they had gone to school with. Most of the names did not conjure up faces in Gabriel’s memory, and some were completely unfamiliar. She was friends with them on the computer, she said, whatever she meant by that.

Then there was a silence. Gabriel had noticed, in their brief friendship, and during the briefer-still time they were lovers, Lise’s way of asking few questions. At first he had assumed that she understood if he had anything important to say he would tell her, but he came to realize that she was not actually particularly interested in what he was doing or thinking.

What had he seen in her? he wondered. He mooned for more than a year, despondent when he saw her talking to men at parties, until she cornered him, said she could feel his eyes on her, and would he please stop it? Yes, they had spent one night together, but there was alcohol involved and it was just that once. Gabriel felt hollow inside, his pain so great that he stayed away from school altogether for two weeks. Why? he wondered now. She was just a girl, or rather, now a woman nearing middle age.

Lise smiled, accentuating the lines spreading from her eyes. “Now, what is this business proposition?”

Gabriel explained Klinman’s visit.

“Sounds great!” Lise said.

Gabriel handed her an envelope full of euros and several sheets of Klinman’s paper in a portfolio.

“Fantastic. I’m really excited.” She made a show of opening the envelope and removing a bill to pay for their drinks. “I insist. I’ll bring them to Rosenzweig’s after work on Wednesday?”

“Or I could come by Ambrosine’s.” Gabriel thought it might be a bad idea to have his friends traipsing in to drop off portfolios. Édouard might get suspicious. Her face fell; quickly she recovered her smile. It occurred to Gabriel that she didn’t want him there with his motorcycle boots and ratty secondhand clothing. He felt hot shame curl up into his face.

Lise said, “Could you come by the apartment? That might be easier.”

The waiter took the bill away to make change.

“So I’m, um, painting again,” Gabriel said.

“Painting! Oh, my God, I just told Ambro that everyone was going to return to painting after plastics. It was the only natural progression. Painting! Both Didier and you. I love being right. You know, I really liked your final project,” Lise said. “I know you took a lot of—” She used a slang word that Gabriel didn’t know.

“A lot of what?”

“People criticized it a lot.”

Gabriel didn’t know that was common knowledge. He always assumed that he was invisible to everyone else. If he wasn’t in the room, he ceased to exist. A thousand times something he said came back to him, proving him wrong, but his self-deprecation resisted logic.

Hans had called him repressed. That was what his adviser LeFevre had said about his work too. The same day, as if in chorus. He’d argued with Hans—Gabriel had f*cked both women and men, he said. He’d had sex on boats, on the beach, with strangers, in chicken coops. Hans said that it was perfectly possible to have repressed sex with both sexes at once, with hermaphrodites and dwarves and Amazons. It was emotional unconstraint he was talking about. Any a*shole could do anything with his body if he was high enough. It took true courage to love the person you were sticking it in.

And then Gabriel had gone back to his studio, where he had an appointment with his adviser. LeFevre had stood with his hands on his ample hips and frowned before turning to Gabriel and saying, “The subject matter may be daring, but the line is repressed, censured.” And Gabriel had balled his hands into fists, his too-long nails leaving crescent indents in his palms.

Now Gabriel quoted out loud: “ ‘Gabriel Connois’s work, though technically proficient, is devoid of any recognizable individual style.’ ”

“Well, that was really petty, in my opinion. Your work was beautiful, organic. I don’t know what happened to aesthetics, but I think they count for something.”

“Thanks.” Gabriel was embarrassed. He began to wonder if the waiter had thought the large bill was his to keep. “I liked your project too.”

“You’re sweet.” She touched his arm.

Finally the waiter tossed the silver tray containing the change down on the table. Lise gathered up all the large coins, sliding them into her jacket pocket. She had never removed her gray coat, and when she leaned back, it retained the shape of her hunched shoulders. “I’ll see you next week then,” she said.

Gabriel stood up to follow her out, but she was quicker than he, and was out the door before he wove his way through the tables. As he walked toward the métro, he thought about what Lise had said about his work being beautiful. She meant: beautiful, but not profound. His adviser had offered a similar criticism. “It’s not that you’re not talented,” he’d said. “It’s patently obvious that you are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. There’s just not that spark. There’s no passion in your work. There’s competence, originality even, but no inspiration, no voice. I think you’ll find it—I hope you will. Your talent is too big not to, but so far you haven’t reached that place.”

“And I am supposed to reach this ‘voice’ how?” Gabriel had asked, to his surprise and embarrassment, near tears for the first time in years.

“I don’t know,” LeFevre said. “Think about what moves you. What frightens you. Access the place you don’t want to go.”

“So now you’re a psychiatrist.”

“That’s exactly the kind of defensive attitude that is apparent on your canvases. I’ve taken you as far as I can.”

A*shole, thought Gabriel now. All that French psychobabble. If LeFevre didn’t like the work, why didn’t he just say so? Gabriel had been so proud of his final series of canvases, a pictorial essay on the travels of water. The paintings had turned out rather more conceptual than he would have expected his “research” to produce, but he was commenting on color and reflection, and no one seemed to understand that.

And then video. No one really knew how to judge it, and he gained a foothold in the community without really understanding what he wanted to accomplish, now that he looked back on it. He was still obsessed with color, with the screen as canvas. He loved the graininess of the images—exactly what he was trying to get away from with his glass-smooth canvases now. He also loved the space between the images, found that to be the place where he felt most comfortable. Then he just … lost interest. When everyone moved to solid sculpture (plastic, resin), he moved on to film, making Super 8 reels and blowing up the negatives as stills, drawing on them. A sentence in Paris Match about his work in a group show called it “more interesting than its surrounding pieces.” Not exactly a rave, but it could have been worse, coming from that critic, known as a poison pen.

And now he was back to painting, as though he had returned to the beginning of his career. He was reconvening schoolmates to create the camaraderie that didn’t exist the first time around. It felt like starting over.



Gabriel looked at the address Lise had written down for him. He had never really been to the neighborhood known only by its victory-arch landmark: La Défense. The streets were cleaner here, wider. No clochards begged for change; tourists were absent. The boulevard was filled with midrange prix fixe bistros, punctuated by an authentic-looking Japanese restaurant and an upscale Chinese noodle shop.

He should have brought his Paris de Poche. He wasn’t sure where to find the street, and surely none of the upper-class mothers pushing their prams would answer him, dressed as he was. He went back down into the métro to look up the street on the map.

As he walked, he wondered what Lise’s life must be like. He hadn’t quite guessed she’d be living such a bourgeois existence. How could you go from studying art at France’s most prestigious school to living this far outside the action? She had fallen victim, then, to the vicissitudes and trappings of success. That made sense. The fancy phone, the job at Ambrosine’s. It all fit into a neat little bobo package. Maybe she wasn’t embarrassed by him. Maybe she wanted him to come to her apartment to seduce her, to get a little excitement of the art world that her life now lacked.

There was an elevator attendant. That was rich; someone whose job was to press buttons all day. The cage rose slowly to the seventh floor. The attendant bowed as he held the door open. Gabriel stepped onto the landing and pulled the knocker on Lise’s front door, letting it fall back to its cradle.

A very small person answered the door. He was blond like Lise, with streaks of Nutella on his face. Behind him loud children’s music was playing: synthesizer piano and high-pitched melodies. A small white dog turned circles, yipping excitedly.

“Hello,” Gabriel said.

“Maman!” the child yelled.

Lise came around the corner, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Hey, Gabi, this is … Oh, for … Look at this.” She grabbed the little boy’s face and turned his head toward the door. “There are fingerprints on the door. Geraldine was just here. Go get a towel.”

The little boy ran off. Lise shook her head. “Come in, Gabi. I’m sorry if the place is a mess.” She used the slang word for mess: bordel, the same word that had so confused him when he first arrived in France and couldn’t figure out why everyone claimed to live in a whorehouse. The living room was spacious, a thousand shades of white, and smelled sweetly chemically of new paint. The furniture was modern alto disegno—Noguchi tables, Eames chairs, a Nelson Home desk, a Mies van der Rohe bench, as if she’d received a bulk discount at a modernist design store.

Reading his face, Lise laughed a little. “Giancarlo’s father was a design instructor at Iuav in Venice. He collected pieces.… Don’t make fun.”

“I wasn’t,” Gabriel said. “This is amazing.” He walked toward the window; the apartment looked over the Boulevard Maurice Barrès for a full view of the Bois de Boulogne. The white dog panted at his feet, pink tongue hanging too long out of its mouth. Gabriel toed it away with his shoe.

“Well?” Lise turned on a lamp next to the sofa. “Would you like coffee? I’ll make some.”

Gabriel nodded and Lise disappeared into the kitchen. He looked around the room. A dining table, flat-screen television with hidden wires, an intricately pocketed coffee table. He opened one of the drawers to find a remarkable remote-control collection. There were photos on the mantel of the vestigial fireplace. Gabriel crept closer to look at them.

Lise’s family at Euro Disney, at Chamonix, at someone’s house in the country. Gaggles of children piled in laps, smiling at the camera. Lise at someone’s wedding: A sister? A cousin? Early teenage years, dressed in a long, flowing pink gauze dress, arms folded, shoulders hunched forward to hide nascent breasts, hair straggly. Lise and Giancarlo at a scenic overlook, maybe somewhere in Italy, Lise’s face tanned, her chest freckly, and her nose beginning to peel, Giancarlo looking off behind the photographer with a surprised and pleased expression, as though he were seeing someone he knew unexpectedly.

Gabriel felt like a detective on an American television show. He was looking for a problem, something off, a Photoshop mistake that would reveal the entire hoax. But he knew he would find nothing. Lise had real photos of her childhood, trips, birthdays, etc. Gabriel had only his memories and one photograph, the low-quality colors fading into oranges and reds, of his parents posed stiffly on their wedding day. That was it. The sum total of his past: one kitschy photo and a gaggle of memories. And his name. Maybe talent, if he had any.

Lise reappeared with a plastic tray that Gabriel recognized as IKEA circa 2001. He could hear the cars outside honking as they entered the intersection, the horns muted through the windows. Lise went over and opened one slightly, hooking the handles together so the panes wouldn’t bang. The horns immediately got louder, drowning out the cloying baby music, and a cold breeze blew in, smelling faintly of fish.

In another room a child began to cry. “Be right back,” Lise said.

There was no sugar, so Gabriel put three small disks of sugar substitute into his coffee and sipped it. It was too sweet, sickening. He debated sneaking into the kitchen to pour it out, but in front of him, staring at him, was the same little person who had opened the door.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Gabi,” he said. “An old friend of your mother’s.”

“You talk funny. Are you foreign?”

Gabriel nodded and tried not to be offended. Now that he had a chance to examine the child, he wasn’t sure it was a boy after all. He’d had so little experience with children that he wasn’t sure how to tell how old they were, or what it was appropriate to talk to them about. Plus, it always felt odd that someone who had lived in France—lived on the planet—fewer years than he should speak the language with much greater fluency.

“Which foreign?”

“I’m Spanish.”

“My father’s Italian.” The child picked at the fringe on a throw blanket.

“I know.”

Gabriel shifted uncomfortably. The conversation appeared to have hit a dead end.

“But you don’t talk as weird as he does.” Gabriel felt a silly flush of pride. Why was he in competition with Giancarlo? To live in this suburban aerie working a soulless job and raising some brats?

Lise came back into the room carrying a parcel wrapped expertly in brown paper. “Here they are,” she said. “Do you want to look at them? Oh, you’re talking to Gabi?” She held another child on her hip. This one’s face was wet with tears, and he/she was making small hiccup noises. Lise balanced the package on a chair.

“He talks funny like Papa.”

“Maybe you talk funny? Did you ever think about that?” She smiled and bent to tickle the child’s ribs. It giggled and ran out of the room.

“My six-year-old,” Lise explained.

Gabriel knew he was supposed to say something like “So cute” or “How precious,” but he wasn’t sure how to do so without revealing that he didn’t know the child’s gender, so he just smiled.

“I’ll look,” he said.

He unwrapped her package. The drawings were good, remarkable likenesses of Ganedis, his soft lines, his domestic subjects. There were the requisite charcoal still lifes, and a gouache of the child he’d just been talking to wearing a yellow dress and holding the small white dog.

“Coffee’s no good?” Lise asked. She slid the child down her leg and it landed on its feet, rubbing its face into the back of her knee.

“I put too many sugars in,” Gabriel said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to warn you. Saccharine. I’ll get you another one.”

“It’s okay,” Gabriel said. “I should get going.”

“Thanks for coming by. I’m sorry it’s so chaotic here. You must think my life is hugely boring. That’s because it is.” She sat down and the baby climbed up her, sitting on her lap and burying its face into her neck. She instinctively hugged it and began to rock. What would it be like, Gabriel wondered suddenly, to have something love you that much? He felt an urge to join them in an embrace.

As he left her apartment, with its overpriced furniture and the small fingerprints on the preposterous white walls, Gabriel felt he should pity Lise for what she had become. And yet she seemed so at home in her world, far more content than he was in his. And while she could dabble in his world, work in an art gallery, create just enough to call herself an artist, he would be as lost in hers as if he’d been asked to join a troupe of circus acrobats. He was completely unsuited for a life of convention, unable to imitate it, let alone desire it.

He’d lost Lise, that was patently obvious. And she was not the only one. A phenomenon he’d noticed on the far side of forty was his growing disdain for all his former friends. So many of them had made such boring conventional choices: marriage, children. Most were no longer making art; one had gone to law school, another worked for some sort of graphic design firm. He remembered the long nights, drinking red wine from a screw-top bottle that stained everyone’s teeth red, being told by neighbors to shut the f*ck up for chrissake, talking about art like characters out of La Bohème. When was the last time he had a real meaningful conversation about art? Or anything more substantive than who was showing where and what vitamins everyone was taking? If this was what it meant to be middle-aged, then Gabriel vowed to forgo it.



On Friday, Klinman met Gabriel at the gallery before it opened. Gabriel spread out the best of the art he and his École had drawn on Édouard’s light table. Édouard never came in before ten, so he and Klinman had an hour or so to go over them. Though Klinman’s expression remained stoic, Gabriel could tell by the way his eyes crinkled in the creases that the drawings, watercolors, and pastels were satisfactory. Gabriel’s shoulders opened up and he stood straighter.

Klinman looked at the drawings carefully. He lingered approvingly over the pastel Gabriel was proud of, but then he turned to the next drawing and saw Gabriel’s mother repeated in a sketch. “This is the same woman, in both drawings.”

“Sometimes Connois drew from the same models.”

Klinman nodded. He also paused over Lise’s gouache of her child with that yippy white dog. He pointed.

“Ganedis,” Gabriel said.

Klinman nodded his approval. At the bottom of the pile, Gabriel had included his take on a Piranesi arch as well as a Canaletto plaza scene.

“What are these?” Klinman asked.

“Oh.” Gabriel was slightly embarrassed. “There were a few extra sheets of paper, and because they were so beautiful, I drew on them. It’s not the style you asked for, but it was so pretty.…” Gabriel was scared. Klinman’s expression was of rapt concentration on the drawings.

“Might you be free on Sunday?” Klinman asked. “I have an idea. I would like you to come for a drink.”

He wrote down an address in the Marais.

“What time should Colette and I be there?”

“Not Colette. Just you,” Klinman said. He took the art, placed it carefully in the portfolio, and left without saying good-bye.



The bar Klinman had chosen was attempting to mimic a living room. It was decorated with low, ornate sofas, purple velvet worn through, and embroidered armchairs. Mirrors and candelabra adorned the walls. Klinman ordered a scotch, so Gabriel ordered one too. He was unused to the taste; he took large, infrequent gulps while Klinman sipped daintily. He was hungry, but didn’t want to order something to eat. It was sure to be expensive and tiny.

Klinman was appraising him, looking him up and down. Gabriel was dressed inappropriately for the occasion, as usual. Though they were in the Marais, ground zero for hipsters and artists (wealthy hipsters, successful artists), everyone else seemed to be wearing couture while Gabriel was sporting thrift-store chic. He was the only one without a jacket in the bar, and certainly the only one wearing shit kickers instead of loafers.

Klinman’s clothes, on the other hand, came straight from the set of a 1940s film, a three-piece pin-striped suit that clung to him like he’d recently outgrown it, his barrel chest swelling beneath the fabric.

“So where in Spain are you from?” Klinman asked in Spanish.

“How many languages do you speak?” Gabriel responded in Spanish, taken aback. The scotch was warming in his stomach and the room had taken on sepia tones, reflecting off the mirrors and ormolu.

Klinman laughed. He reverted to French. “My Spanish is terrible, rusty. But I am good at two things.” He let his head fall back, searching the ceiling for words and then staring again at Gabriel. “No, three. I am good at communicating. Languages, puf, they just make sense to me. I am good at judging character. And I know art. My grandfather was a portrait painter to the aristocracy before they took his life. I inherited his eye, though not his talent. You, it seems, have inherited both.”

Gabriel shook his head. “I hoped that by now I would be better.”

“Paris.” Klinman pronounced the city the English way. “What is Paris? And now they say it’s all about Berlin. Tomorrow it’ll be about somewhere else. At some point it will be someone else’s turn, besides Europe. You, Monsieur Connois, have a choice.”

Klinman stopped speaking. He removed a cigarette from a silver holder and offered it to Gabriel, who shook his head. With affected slowness, he removed a lighter from his breast pocket. It looked heavy, in the shape of a lion whose mouth emitted fire. Its eyes were stones. Emeralds? Topaz? Glass? Klinman took another sip of his drink and then a long drag on the cigarette.

“I have high blood pressure,” he said. “I allow myself two a day. You don’t smoke?”

Gabriel shrugged. Klinman nodded his head. “Hmmm,” he said, as though this revealed something important about Gabriel.

There was a long pause. “Your choice, señor, is the following: make art, or make money. Maybe you will make money with art. Not likely. Maybe you will make art with money. More likely. It’s up to you.”

“I don’t understand.” Gabriel wasn’t sure if he wasn’t following the thread or if the man was not making sense.

“You are dating Colette. She likes fancy restaurants. And maybe you’ll fall in love with her, and will want to make French babies. French babies wear couture, have you not noticed? They eat organic vegetables. Not inexpensive.” Klinman opened his wallet and threw a few euros down on the table. “Come, I have something to show you.”

Gabriel had a brief moment of fear that Klinman was going to take him somewhere and expose himself. That had happened to him once, with a gallery owner, right after he got to Paris. The man actually said, “Would you like to see my etchings?” And Gabriel had followed him into the back room, where the man turned around, fly open, half-erect cock waving. But Klinman’s interest seemed solely artistic and avuncular.

They wove through the Marais, cutting across the Rue Bourgeois. The shops here were chic; their front bay windows abutted the tiny sidewalk, displaying mannequins that suggested figures rather than imitated them. Whimsical children’s furniture, a store devoted only to men’s cravats, heavy modern jewelry. Above the stores were the minuscule apartments of the old quarter, slanted floors and hallway bathrooms. Some were still occupied by elderly Jews who had returned after the war. The smaller side streets sold kosher food, hid yeshivas. From some second-story windows emanated Sephardic music, plaintive Moroccan wailing. Some of the other apartments held squatters: artists more interested in the bohemian lifestyle than in art. If they were real artists, they would live outside the city, as Gabriel did, in a rented room, with a separate studio. And the Marais was also the new place for wealthy Americans (“new money,” Édouard called it, using the English words).

They turned left onto a small side street and were in the garment district. The sidewalks were wider here, but no less crowded. Though the racks of clothing seemed to part for Klinman, they closed back up immediately, so that to follow him Gabriel kept having to dodge mobile wardrobes and cudgels of cloth.

Finally, Klinman ducked into a large courtyard. Flagstones surrounded a fountain in the middle, where the wan light drifted down from the cloudy sky. The fountain had obviously been functional rather than decorative at one time. The spray rose and then dripped down a symmetrical spindle with a wide base.

“This is my office. Paris office,” Klinman said, waving at the portière. He led them straight across the courtyard and pulled a set of antique-looking keys from his pocket. He unlocked the door and stepped inside, hurrying to turn off an alarm on the far wall. When he flipped the lights, they were thrown back in time.

The room looked as if it were transplanted from a nineteenth-century men’s club. The furniture was all burgundy leather, redolent of cigar smoke. A low mahogany table had been remade to double as a lightbox. Heavy brocade curtains suggested windows, but no light was in evidence.

“Have a seat,” Klinman said. “Put on these gloves.”

Gabriel felt a flutter of nervous excitement. Whatever the man was about to show him would be important. The setting demanded some sort of unveiling. When Klinman left the room and all was silent, Gabriel could hear the hum of dehumidifiers.

Klinman returned with a large portfolio. He set it on a desk and unzipped it. As soon as he stepped forward, holding the paper with his gloved fingertips, Gabriel knew what he was looking at.

It was a small square of paper, probably not more than thirty centimeters, and it held three drawings. The first was a barely rendered face. The lines were exact, if they didn’t quite connect. A young man’s face, an aquiline nose, an erect neck, and a sensitive gaze. Here was youth, but a youth that was concerned: Wounded by the past? Worried about the future? Melancholic? Pensive? Beneath this was a more detailed study. A hand gloved in heavy leather. Gabriel was sure it had some sort of name. A falconry glove? But no, then it would extend up the forearm, and this glove ended at the disembodied wrist. It held its mate, which was limp, sagging, though it maintained the memory of the form of the fingers that had just been inside it. The third sketch was a ruffled, high-collared Renaissance shirt, just a neck. It was a play of shadow, the ruffles suggested by shading rather than line.

It was obviously a study for Titian’s Man with a Glove; the final canvas hung in the Louvre and Gabriel had seen it a dozen times. A sketch for a work this important was like looking into the artist’s atelier, or even into his brain. Here was how he worked out his precise lines, the faces that registered age, pain, pleasure. Here was the nascent expressive hand so naturally curved and lifelike—an entire portrait boiled down to the placement of one finger, one empty leather finger.

Carefully, Klinman turned the drawing over. On the back was the ornate mark of its original dealer, which Gabriel didn’t recognize. Also, through the light, Gabriel could see the embossed watermark—the paper had been handmade and signed by its maker. These two marks served to authenticate the drawing. This was a real Titian. The master had drawn this himself.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” Klinman asked. “People think of dealers as tooth pullers, but we are just as moved by beauty as the next person. We unite beauty with others who appreciate it.”

Cold air blew on Gabriel’s neck. He felt feverish, and his back was clammy.

Klinman showed him a succession of significant studies by little-known Renaissance painters, rococo practitioners, and Mannerists. He had an impressive collection. Some came in their original frames. All the while he talked to Gabriel about his profession.

“This drawing I found in a marché aux puces. It does happen sometimes. I was looking for something else entirely when I came across this Piranesi. The seller had no idea what it was. He had dated it correctly, but he missed the classic Piranesi hand, the subject matter that is unmistakably his piazzas.”

The afternoon wore on. Gabriel put his head close to each of the drawings, so close he could smell the peaty mold and the fragrant pulp. The smell reminded him of the woodshed where he had painted the Connois all those summers ago, the same dense, rotting earth. He looked at the lines, the hesitations, the fluidities, the places the master pressed down harder and where the line was fainter, fatter, thinner, darker, grayer.

Then Klinman pulled out a sheet of blank paper. It was old; not quite as old as the others, but meaty, like paper produced with care.

“Care to venture a guess as to who this is?”

Gabriel felt confused, intoxicated, like he’d been breathing in turpentine for days. He looked up at Klinman.

“Come on. You can guess. You’ve gotten every artist right all afternoon, even Chassériau imitating Ingres. You can identify this artist. Try.”

Gabriel motioned for Klinman to put the page on the light table. It was definitely blank. Klinman was playing some kind of joke on him. The paper had some glue on the edges; it had been pasted into a book, but it had never been drawn on. Faintly, in the top left corner, Gabriel saw the traces of a pencil: £50. He looked up. “Fifty pounds? The paper belonged to someone famous?”

Klinman chuckled, though he did it kindly so that it wasn’t exactly at Gabriel’s expense. “No, no,” he said. “That’s how much the paper was worth. Before I discovered it was a Connois sketch.”

Realization dawned on Gabriel like extremities thawing after coming inside from the cold. “A Connois? You want me to draw on this?”

“It is already drawn.” Klinman stared at him, his face close to Gabriel’s. “Do you not see the Spanish marketplace?”

Gabriel nodded, though he didn’t exactly see it. Klinman continued, “It looks perhaps like a sketch for Víspera de Fiesta, but not exactly like it. You can see here—” Klinman gestured at a spot on the page that was no different than any other. “Instead of the gypsy selling the fruit, there is a small boy. And there are touches of his other paintings; the clouds from La Baia, this rooster.”

The paper was beautiful: handmade, pulpy. Gabriel could see how it would absorb the ink and then reject it, making an inimitable smooth line. You couldn’t find paper like this just anywhere. It was a work of art in its own right. Drawing on such a piece would be like opening a five-hundred-euro bottle of wine, or staying at the Ritz—a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Suddenly, Gabriel felt such a strong desire to draw on the paper that he didn’t recognize himself. He felt his hands itching to grab the paper off the light table, to run away with it and make it his. The desire was almost sexual, the raw hunger of it.

Klinman leaned back. “You understand me now?”

Gabriel licked his lips, chapped from the cold air. “I think so, yes.”

“You can restore the drawing, then? Return it to its intended state?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. He was thirsty; he wished Klinman had offered him a drink, though no real art lover would let liquid anywhere near these treasures.

“Well, then, we will make each other very happy, I suppose.” Klinman lifted the paper by its corner. Gabriel’s mind was already spinning ideas. Klinman put the page inside a cardboard portfolio, then put that in turn into a faux-leather briefcase. “Should be safe like that,” he said. “You take your time.”

The métro could not come fast enough. Gabriel gripped the briefcase in both hands, holding it in front of him like a schoolboy. He longed to take the paper out and examine it, even here in the station, but he knew that would invite disaster. He felt like he’d won an award, like he’d been singled out as special. For the past decade nothing—no woman, no grant, no group show—had produced anything other than anemic contentment. But now he felt like he had arriving in France years ago with the Connois tucked in his suitcase, his acceptance letter in his shoulder bag, the same exhilaration, the same sense of optimism, of possibility that had eluded him for the past few years as his work failed to impress his professors, colleagues, and gallerists. He’d let them toss him aside like potato peelings, but no longer. He would show them what he could do, what they all overlooked.