A Nearly Perfect Copy

Gabriel




Gabriel’s roommates, curiously, were all out. He lived with a gaggle of Scandinavian students who were completing degrees, or avoiding the completion of degrees, in various subjects. Two in particular were studious, often sitting at their communal desk until early in the morning. The walls were so thin in the flat that he could hear the computer keys clacking at night.

The apartment had once been a garment factory, and the landlord got a tax incentive for renting to students. It was one room cordoned off by makeshift walls. The kitchen/living room was furnished with found furniture; when sat on the sofa gave a sigh and belched dust.

Gabriel took out the paper to examine it. It was dotted with wormholes, as all old paper was. The holes would soak up his ink and betray the fact that though the paper was of the proper age, the drawing was not.

Gabriel silently thanked his first-year drawing instructor at the École. He had insisted the students prepare their rag paper à la the old masters. Gabriel had learned to make ink, to size paper evenly.

He mixed gelatin and hot water. While it dissolved, he emptied the boxes that were stacked on his floor. Here they were: his notes from those sessions with the professor. He continued to paw through the boxes. Gabriel had spent hours in the rain visiting various Chinese herbalists until he found the jet-black ink he was looking for. He over-watered it, so he mixed it with gum arabic. It had been labor-intensive; Gabriel had cursed him. At four a.m., stoned nearly unconscious, he was shaking a mustard jar of turpentine and walnut oil. Now, leaking into the box below it, but still useable, the old mustard jar was full of ink. He was in business.

He took a wide brush and spent more time cleaning it than usual, meticulously paring each bristle, trimming the ones that seemed to point in errant directions. He was ready.

The sizing would determine how authentic the drawing looked. He knew he could draw like his ancestor, but if the sizing was uneven, darker in patches or streaked, then the forgery would be obvious. He took a deep breath, steadied his hand, and bathed the paper in glue. The professor had explained that artists should relax their wrists when sizing paper.

“It is like you are on a swing,” the professor had said. “No, it is like you are pushing your lover on a swing, back and forth, with care and force equally.” Gabriel found that the French compared most things to sex. Spanish analogies mostly had to do with food or body functions.

The sizing complete, Gabriel took the page into his room; it would take a few hours to dry. He went back into the kitchen and cleaned the brush again. Then he dumped the rest of the sizing out into the garbage and scrubbed the bowl. He was probably being too clean. His roommates would be suspicious of the washed dishes and the wiped counters. So he made himself a coffee, making sure to let some grounds linger.

Sitting in his kitchen, listening to the sound of the coffee bubbling and waiting for the paper to dry, he remembered being a first-year student. His first few months in Paris were simultaneously exciting and disorienting, tinged with worry for his mother—justified, as it turned out, as she was diagnosed just a few months later. She didn’t tell him, didn’t want to worry him, until the very end, and he went to see her, taking the bus twenty-six straight hours until he was at her bedside holding her hand.

They’d brought her home from the hospital, and the neighbors, who were as much an extended family as any he knew, had arranged for a hospital bed to be placed in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. As it was, she never left the bed again. He sat with her and petted her hand, smoothed the hair off her dry, shrunken forehead. She had always been plump, but in her last days she was as thin as a paintbrush, brittle and desiccated. He gave her sips of water through a straw, fed her ice.

She stopped eating two days after he got there and lived for three more. He sold all of her possessions and earned just enough to bury her and pay his rent for a year. The copied Connois he gave to neighbors before he returned to France. He wasn’t sorry to have left it there; it would have been a constant reminder of his duplicity.

Would the pueblo feel different to him now? Look different? Smell different? It felt strange to think of a Spain without his mother in it. The world would never again taste her croquetas or the bread she baked and sold at market. He had not gone back since then because he had no money, nor anyone to visit. If he didn’t return, then his mother was still alive, still in her kitchen. Spain was like a photograph, perpetually frozen in his memory.

He missed his mother. He sighed, finally able to put a name to the knot of anxiety in his stomach. He was lonely and scared that he might disappear from this life and no one would remember him. An image came to him unbidden of Lise’s child burying his face in Gabriel’s neck. The fantasy was so strong he could even feel the moist heat, smell his baby odor. And then it was Lise in his arms, her body pressed close to his, her heartbeat sounding on his chest. She was telling him she was there, would always be there. His eyes suddenly welled with tears, and he lay back on his bed and stared at the juncture where the plasterboard wall met the old tin ceiling until the urge to sob had passed.



He drew in his studio with his headphones on. There was nothing suspicious about his actions. He just had to make sure that no one from the studio would later recognize the drawing as his. But artists deserved the stereotype of being notoriously self-centered; he doubted anyone would even see his drawing, so involved were they in their own work.

It was a disaster. His lines were hesitant, as if the value of the page weighed his hand down, made it sluggish, scared. And it didn’t feel like modern paper. It was unexpectedly rough and yet pillowy, like drawing on a piece of toilet paper. The ink was blotchy, alternately thick and reed-thin where he was unable to adequately control the nib. Gabriel wished he’d thought to bring alcohol to the studio. He wondered if Marie-Laure had any. He hadn’t heard her complain, so she was most likely not working tonight. He could just sneak into her space, grab a nip, replace it the following day. Or maybe he just needed to clear his head.

Outside, it was raining, but he didn’t go back in. How would he explain his failure to Klinman, who would be angry with him for ruining the paper? He was furious with himself, as usual. He’d f*cked up again.



He snuck out of Édouard’s early the following day, complaining of a stomachache. He did have one; his innards were tied in knots with the knowledge that Klinman might murder him. He had to go back to his studio to retrieve the failed drawing. Then he had a five p.m. appointment with Lise for a tour of Ambrosine’s. His earlier fear that she was embarrassed to have him come to the gallery proved to be unwarranted. Gabriel found that was often the case; he imagined that people were embarrassed by him, disliked him, designed elaborate schemes to get rid of him. Only afterward did he realize that not only did people not think of him in that way, but most often, no one was thinking about him at all. He was glad he had been wrong about Lise’s intentions, if not about her bourgeois life. He was glad to have her as a friend.

Few were the artists who had their own studios that doubled as storefronts. Among these elite, even fewer had the staying power of Ambrosine. He had capitalized on his real estate and fame to serve as a high-end market for contemporary art. But not the avant-garde post-postmodern installations that interested Gabriel. Rather, he was a purveyor of big names, little talent, like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emins. Gabriel felt simultaneously envious and dismissive of these sellouts. He knew, even as he looked down on them, that he would trade places with them in a heartbeat. It had become his habit recently to check biographies for birth dates. More often than not, those written about in art magazines or shown in the windows of Marais galleries were younger than he.

At Ambrosine, the ubiquitous Cy Twombly was showing. In the window hung a colossal canvas. It was several shades of pale blue, from cyan to titanium to cadet, each seamlessly integrated with white swirls descending the canvas like streaming tears. Something looked strange to Gabriel—the light reflecting off the window?—but then he realized the painting was done in acrylics. He nearly laughed out loud. Acrylics were the fingerpaints of the art world, the medium of Sunday river painters and rich American art vacationers. Of course, when someone as great as Twombly used them, they were ironic, but to everyone else they were cheap, easily manipulated, and somehow too shiny and artificial. They looked ephemeral compared to the aristocratic authority of oils, with their distinct linseed smell and blunted peaks. You had to really layer on acrylics to get them to have the texture of oils. Of course, Gabriel did not fail to notice the discreet red dot in the lower-right-hand corner of the description. Someone had bought this shit.

Inside the gallery an improbably androgynous assistant sat behind a long glass desk bereft of anything other than a keyboard. He/she was peering down into the table, and it took a minute for Gabriel to realize the monitor was embedded in the glass. He cleared his throat.

The androgyne made no sign of acknowledgment. Gabriel cleared his throat again, louder.

“May I help you, monsieur?” There was a long pause between you and monsieur, emphasizing that the asker was not sure if he deserved the honorific.

“I’m looking for Lise Girard.”

The man—Gabriel now saw an Adam’s apple—waved his hand in a gesture of incomprehension or dismissal.

“We are not a missing persons bureau,” the man said. He swept his hair out of his eyes with one hand.

“I’m not looking for her,” Gabriel said. He had chosen the wrong word. “I have … an appointment.” He wondered how much jail time he would do for slashing a Twombly canvas. Or slashing a supercilious Ambrosine intern.

Without altering his scowl, the intern picked up a thin silver phone from under the desk. He could hear it ring in the bowels of the gallery. Lise came out, clicking fast in her high heels. She wore a pencil skirt, and he could see, even though she was thin, the traces of her three pregnancies in her belly.

“Thanks, Claude,” she said, motioning Gabriel to follow her into a small, windowless office. It was crowded with catalogs, all up the walls and stacked on the floor.

“What’s in there?” She pointed to his makeshift portfolio.

“Nothing,” Gabriel said. “Something I’m delivering.”

“For Rosenzweig? Can I see? What is it?”

“I don’t want to unpack it.”

“Come on,” Lise said. She reached around him to grab the briefcase from his hand. “Show me. I’ll have one of the peons wrap it back up better than this Naugahyde folder.”

Before he could protest, she had the briefcase in her hands and, gloves on, was unzipping it. She placed the disastrous drawing on a flat table in her office, the only noncovered surface, and inhaled. She tilted a lamp to shine the light directly on the drawing and leaned so that her face was inches away from the page, examining the ink.

Gabriel sucked in his breath. He was sure she was debating how best to put the delicate question. It was obviously drawn in his own hand, inexpertly at that. He let himself smile a bit as he enjoyed her obvious discomfort, imagining her mind spinning through the possibilities: Édouard had been duped; Gabriel had been duped, had tried to fake a drawing.

When she straightened up, she was not smiling. “Amazing,” she said. “It’s fascinating to see the changes from sketch to painting, isn’t it? I mean, I recognize the theme, the composition, certain elements, from … what’s that one Connois called? With the market?”

Lise paused. Gabriel did not answer her. He was shocked. Did she really not see that the sketch was a fake? Was she so gullible or superficial that she didn’t see the hesitation in the lines, the disproportion in the figures? Or did people really expect so little of sketches that they were willing to assume any mistakes would be smoothed over in oil paint? Maybe she was teasing him, trying to see if he would correct her. “Víspera de Fiesta,” he said, finally.

“The other one,” she said. “With the old woman.”

“La Vieja? There’s no old woman in this one.”

“Yes, but”—Lise grabbed a pencil and pointed the nonsharpened end at the paper—“see the triangular composition, with the kiosk pole as the top. And then the inverted triangle just below it with the barrels and the hay bales? Classic Connois, isn’t it?”

Gabriel nodded. Now that she made the point he could see how other Connois paintings must have influenced him. And even a little Canaletto in the exaggerated pleats. Lise didn’t see his hodgepodge of styles?

“It’s so great to deal in older drawings. Sometimes I get so fed up with contemporary posing, you know?” She picked up the phone and pressed the intercom. “Hi, can you send someone to my office to wrap something?” To Gabriel she said, “Are you insured for this sort of thing?”

He shook his head, as much in wonder as in answer. She really believed this was a Connois sketch? He had always respected Lise, her eye. She babbled, yes, but in between volleys of nothingness she often had insightful opinions about work. If he had her fooled, maybe he hadn’t done such a bad job after all. Or maybe a bad job was good enough.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the goods.”

They began in the showroom of the all-white gallery. The paintings were so large that only one fit per wall. In a small room off the main hall was a second show, a cartoonist who collaged pieces of glossy magazines. The characters depicted life in French slums, with old women calling out obscene swears and young men smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They stared in silence. Finally, Lise spoke.

“It’s funny,” she continued, “working for Ambrosine, I thought I would get really jaded, you know, like I wouldn’t care anymore about art.”

“But …” he provided.

“But, I kind of enjoy it more, spending time with it. Like, take Damien Hirst. I get him. Finally. I see what all the fuss is about.”

Gabriel fought the urge to cackle. Of all the contemporary posers who seemed to have charmed the establishment, Damien Hirst seemed the most vile, mercenary, talentless of the bunch. His vivisections, rotting inartistically; the pomp with which he unveiled each readymade was laughable. And the aestheticism of the influence of mortality? Really, were people still painting ideas? Inserting themselves into their artwork? Gabriel abhorred the cult of personality surrounding contemporary art. But he couldn’t say this. Not to Lise. Not in French. He was slightly amazed that he had never seen her willingness to be a part of the masses before, her desire for acceptance into the canon.

His package came back wrapped expertly and nondescriptly, separate from the briefcase, which now looked even cheaper in comparison.

As if to confirm his condemnation of her bobo ways, she ended their awkward silence by saying, “Shit. I have to go pick up the little one from the crèche. Walk with me? It’s just over the Seine.”

Gabriel had a quick flash of reverie of being in Lise’s all-white apartment, children hanging off him like rats in some horror movie. What if that had been his life? He would have f*cking committed suicide.

“I can’t,” Gabriel said. “The client is waiting.”

Lise kissed him on both cheeks and headed off toward the Île St.-Louis. Gabriel was actually traveling that way as well, but he set off in the opposite direction. He’d had enough of the art establishment, with its poor taste and gullibility, for one day.



When Gabriel rang Klinman’s bell, the portière eyed him suspiciously. Gabriel held up the package, signifying official business, trying to exude more confidence than he felt. Why did it matter what the building’s caretaker thought? It reminded him of the failure he was carrying. He did not look forward to having to explain to Klinman what happened.

Inside the apartment, Klinman was sharing a coffee with a man Gabriel didn’t know. When he came in, Klinman rose, but the man remained seated. Beneath his pants, which had a large, purposefully tailored cuff, Gabriel could see the outlines of sock garters. The man, though obviously in his early fifties, had a full head of chestnut hair cut and styled in the manner more suitable for the 1940s than for today. In fact, his whole demeanor, the gentle manner with which he held his coffee cup, his wide-legged yet demure seated position, suggested another era.

The air in the room was charged. Klinman was tense; Gabriel could tell by the tight pull of his shoulders, the creases around his smile. “Gabriel, hello. Mr. Schnell”—he turned to the seated man, pulling Gabriel to him—“this is the young man I was telling you about.” He introduced them in German: “Gabriel, Mr. Tobias Schnell.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Gabriel said in French.

The man nodded. He scratched his small chin and Gabriel spotted his large, jeweled watch. “Gabriel, you’ve fetched the sketch from my apartment, have you?” Klinman asked.

“Monsieur speaks French?” Gabriel asked.

“I understand,” Schnell said.

Gabriel pursed his lips. He had no idea who this man was, but he needed to tell Klinman that the Connois sketch was an utter failure that should never see the light of day. “Mr. Klinman,” Gabriel started. “May I see you alone for a minute before I show the sketch?”

“I think Mr. Schnell is in a hurry,” Klinman said, looking nervously over at the man, who seemed to have settled deeper into his chair. He did not look like a man with pressing obligations.

“There’s a small problem,” Gabriel said. “With the sketch.”

“Not a serious one, I hope,” Klinman said, smiling.

“It doesn’t really look like a Connois,” Gabriel said. “Not exactly.”

Klinman laughed. “I think that’s for the expert to decide, don’t you?” He turned to Schnell and said something rapidly in German. The man laughed also, at Gabriel’s expense, he suspected.

Fine. F*ck it. He had tried to warn Klinman. He unwrapped the adeptly packaged drawing and arranged it on the easel that had been set up for this purpose.

Now Schnell rose. He put down his coffee cup and took a plastic capsule out of his breast pocket. He removed a folded pair of reading glasses and stepped toward the drawing, moving his head in circles around the drawing as if stretching his neck. In a couple of places, a shoulder that Gabriel hadn’t gotten quite right, a chicken whose neck seemed too long for its body, he paused and stared, his eyeballs flashing back and forth. Then he focused on the signature.

Gabriel had started out by signing the drawing because it was the part he felt most confident with. He had practiced Connois’s signature so many times that it was almost as natural as his own signature, and nearly indistinguishable from the master’s. Signing got him in the mood to paint as someone else. Like a method actor, he found he was a better mimic when he inhabited the character of the artist he was imitating. To draw like Connois he had to be Connois, and the physical statement of that was signing a drawing that hadn’t yet been started, but was somehow, in a trick of time, looping itself, already complete.

Klinman gripped Gabriel by the shoulder, his fingers digging into the bones. Gabriel didn’t dare ask him to stop.

“He is right,” Schnell said finally in French, breaking the silence. “This is not Connois.”

Gabriel didn’t dare look at Klinman; instead he stared at his shoes, tried to line up the toes even with the edge of the wooden floor slats.

The man continued in German, and Gabriel lost the thread, hearing only the French cognates: “signature … École … paper …” Klinman’s grip on his shoulder relaxed, and when Gabriel dared to look up, he was smiling genuinely.

“Did you understand that?” he asked.

“No,” Gabriel admitted.

“Mr. Schnell said—”

“Tobias,” said the man, who was now all courtesy and warmth.

Klinman bowed his head in thanks. He gestured to Schnell, clearly not comfortable referring to him by his first name: “—said that the drawing was indeed not by Connois’s hand, but that the style is very like his, the period is appropriate, and the signature undoubtedly the master’s. He concludes, then, that the drawing is by one of the school of the Hiverains, and attributes it to a disciple, signed by the teacher Connois himself. Herr Schnell—Tobias”—he emphasized the first name—“is the foremost German authority on nineteenth-century French schools.”

Gabriel was shocked. This hesitant piece of shit was going to be accepted into the pantheon of drawings? He felt he should really say something, admit that the work was by his own hand and not one of the master’s pupils. But what should he say? That Klinman was a liar? That the so-called expert was an idiot? That some scrawny starving artist with a chip on his shoulder knew the real score? Don’t be an idiot, he told himself. It’s not like Klinman and he were fooling some unsuspecting neophyte. This man, who was supposed to be an authority, couldn’t even recognize a terrible fake. Gabriel had no obligation to divulge the truth, he decided.

The men conversed in German while Gabriel studied his drawing again. He supposed, in the strong but diffuse lighting, the lines seemed more graceful. The men concluded their conversation, which ended with a discussion of dates, or times. Tobias Schnell ignored him; he shook Klinman’s hand in that stiff Germanic way before Klinman walked him to the door.

When he returned, Klinman was grinning. “Well, that went well!”

“What was that?” Gabriel asked.

“We have placed your work in an auction.”

“I don’t understand.” Gabriel sat down.

“There’s nothing to understand. That man is an authority.”

“And he’s putting it in an auction as authentic?”

“It is authentic, Gabriel,” Klinman said patiently. “It’s an original work in the style of Connois. That’s exactly what the expert determined it to be. The picture doesn’t lie. What he sees in it is his business.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t suppose, be sure.” Klinman began to pace in front of the drawing. “Think about it, Gabriel. What is the real value of this piece? Some pulped rags, a little ink. Its value is subjective, as all aesthetics are. Why should it be valueless if one person drew it and worth millions if another did? The picture didn’t change.”

“I did a terrible job,” Gabriel said softly.

“There’s room for improvement, yes. Don’t be so glum. You’ll make us a lot of money with your talents.”

“How much money?”

“Ah, now we get down to business,” Klinman said. “How does five thousand euros sound?”

“I want thirty-five percent,” Gabriel said.

“It might not sell for years. It may never sell at all. No, you should be recompensed now. And please don’t give me that look. I found the paper and the expert. How about seventy-five hundred? It will be in cash.”

“I want ten thousand.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Klinman said, extending his hand for Gabriel to shake. “Shall we go to dinner?”

Gabriel nodded glumly. He still felt irrationally guilty. Everything Klinman had said made sense. Hadn’t people overlooked him just because he was Spanish? Because he didn’t know how to manipulate the right people? Art should be judged on its own merits, but that wasn’t the world they lived in. Hadn’t being on the planet for forty-two years taught him anything? But he had just earned ten thousand euros, more than he’d ever made on all his art put together. Ten thousand euros was several months of salary at Rosenzweig’s gallery.

He followed Klinman out the door, past the still-disapproving eye of the portière, who scowled equally at Klinman. Maybe that was just her default expression.

He called Colette to see if she wanted to join them, but there was no answer. In the restaurant, a nice bistro on the Rue des Ecouffes, Klinman ordered them a bottle of wine, and the menu fixe. When their salads came—frisée with lardons for Gabriel, a pâté terrine for Klinman—Gabriel finally asked him: “Where will you say you got the drawing from?”

“That,” he said, wiping his mouth, “requires a story, which I will tell you over coffee.”

After their main course, Klinman sat back and pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. “My story …” He paused to drop a sugar cube into his cappuccino. Then he lit his cigarette, puffing occasionally as he spoke. “I’m German. And Jewish. My family escaped just before the war was starting, through Switzerland to Italy, then on a boat to China. I was born in China and we lived there for four years. When the visa came for England we settled in Leeds. That’s where I grew up. Did Colette tell you all this? No?

“My parents’ passion was art. Their apartment had paintings and drawings hung so closely together they said it looked like a frame store rather than a living room. When the war started they hid their art with friends, they buried it in vaults or tried to trade it for favors. Others had their art seized by the Nazis.

“Some of it was kept by the local families, impossible to claim after the war ended. Some of it was taken by looters. Some the Nazis hung in regional offices. At one point, they even found canvases that Goering tried to hide in a cave. Barbarians.”

Klinman paused for a long inhalation. He held the smoke inside his cheeks, savoring it. Gabriel was not sure if he was referring to the Nazis’ callous disregard for human life or to their ignorant neglect of art. He thought he could see where this line of argument would take them.

“In short, there is a lot of art out there that is still floating about, waiting to be reclaimed.”

Gabriel said, “So you fake the provenances.”

“I do not like the word fake. Fake makes it sound as though there were something real that the fake is imitating. This is not the case.”

Klinman leaned forward so close to Gabriel’s face that he could smell the thick coffee and the deep tobacco on his breath. “It was ours. It was ours and they stole it. This is just squaring the deal.”

“Well,” Gabriel said. “Wouldn’t returning the real paintings to their true owners or descendants really … square the deal?”

Klinman chuckled condescendingly. “Say you borrow twenty euros from someone. Then you pay them back. Does it have to be the same twenty euros? Of course not. You spent that twenty euros. It’s a different bill that serves the same purpose.”

Gabriel nodded. This reasoning did make sense, in a certain way. Of course, it wasn’t a perfect analogy: money, after all, just stood for something. There was no value inherent in the particular piece of paper, so they were interchangeable. Art, however, was not a substitute for something else. It was itself.

Gabriel felt light-headed, the blood gone to his stomach digesting his large meal. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems a little bit … unethical? Illegal? Deceiving people like this?”

Klinman put out his cigarette. “I deal with some of the most important curators and dealers in the world. They have everything to lose by dealing with me and nothing to gain. Except exceptional art. Gabriel, I like you for the same reason all older men like younger men. I see myself in you. Your heritage has been taken from you. You have the goods, obviously.” Klinman waved his hand, palm up, stating the obvious. “Why won’t they let you use them? Why do you spend all day pushing papers for that poof Édouard? What works of Michelangelo might we lack now if he had to, I don’t know, tote water instead of being patronized by the Medicis? If they are going to try to keep you down, then you employ any means necessary to pick yourself back up, yes?”

Klinman’s voice was rising. People in the emptying restaurant were staring. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Gabriel said.

“Of course you didn’t,” Klinman said. “I know. I shouldn’t get so worked up. But when I see bogus bourgeois morality, invented precisely to restrain people, prohibiting creativity and progress, I get upset.”

Klinman paid for lunch and they stepped outside. While they were eating, it had grown overcast. Rain looked imminent. A cold breeze had picked up. Klinman turned the collar of his suit jacket up to cradle his neck. He handed Gabriel a thousand-euro bill. Gabriel had never seen one before. “We’ll work out the rest of the payments later. I’m off.” He shook Gabriel’s hand, and before Gabriel could reply, Klinman had turned his back and was walking away briskly.

Gabriel was certain he’d offended Klinman. He hadn’t meant to. He liked the man, respected him, and needed the money the man would provide. He just didn’t like making money off others’ ignorance.

He called Colette; again, no answer. She was probably out for lunch. She liked her independence, appointments he didn’t know about, “girls’ nights” where she and her friends dressed up and went dancing. Gabriel was racked with jealousy on those nights, managing to convince himself that she was picking up men. Sometimes he found the thought erotic, even as he lay awake thinking about how much he wanted to be with her.

Suddenly, he was getting what he wanted—money, respect. So why did he feel rather like he’d been rejected yet again, from a fellowship or grant. Don’t be stupid, he thought, and went to spend his newfound wealth, but he discovered that a thousand-euro bill is not money that can be spent. He had to go to a bank to get change to buy an umbrella for the rain that was starting to fall.



When Gabriel emerged from the métro near his studio the rain was steady, thick gooey drops that seemed to hang in the air and then explode upon contact with the ground. Outside the front door, under the awning, sat Didier and Hans, a half-empty bottle of rum at their feet. In the gray light, Hans looked older; the lines around his eyes had increased. Did that mean Gabriel looked older too?

“Hey,” Didier said. “We’re celebrating. Join us.”

“What’s the occasion?” Gabriel pulled up a crate and sat down with them. He accepted the bottle offered to him and took a swig. The liquor made him feel like it was raining inside his gut as well as outside.

“It’s Friday,” Hans said. “We made it to Friday.”

“Thursday, I think, actually,” Gabriel said.

“Reason enough for me. Happy Thursday,” said Didier, and took a large swig, wiping his mouth on his paint-splattered sleeve. “But actually, we are celebrating that Brigitte’s pregnant.”

Gabriel received the news just as he tilted the bottle back. He lowered it while gulping. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, wild, right?” Hans nodded emphatically.

Didier said, “I asked him if he knew who the father was.”

Hans ignored him. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“Of course, sorry. No one … I didn’t think … Did you mean …? Congratulations,” he finally said. He handed the bottle back.

“They’re not even married and the old lady wants his art out of the house,” Didier said, laughing.

“The fumes.” Hans shrugged. “So I took a space here.”

“Wow, a kid.”

Hans said, “You look like you’re smelling shit. It’s not a bad thing. We’re really excited.”

“Sorry,” Gabriel said.

Didier pulled a joint out of his cigarette carton. “This requires a little hash.”

Gabriel felt the liquor spreading its warmth. He hadn’t realized how much he missed this camaraderie, how good it felt to be talking, drinking, laughing.

Didier sparked his lighter and breathed in deeply. “So you’ll have to quit this shit once the baby’s born, huh?”

“Don’t see why I should.” Hans took his turn.

Before Gabriel could stop himself, he giggled, clapping a hand to his mouth to stanch it too late. The two men looked at each other and laughed, and then paused and laughed again. Gabriel took the joint and breathed deeply. The smoke traveled through him, a gritty hurt.

“I don’t know, man,” Hans said, breaking a silence. “It’s going to be weird, being a father.”

“Hmmm,” Gabriel said. Didier examined the end of his shoelace.

“My father was such an a*shole, you know? I barely knew the guy. Bavarian and cold, like … like …”

“Yesterday’s weiner schnitzel,” Didier provided. Hans glared at him.

“I only went to his funeral for my mom’s sake.”

“Hmmm,” Gabriel said again. He thought about his own father’s funeral. His mother, weeping copiously, leaning on the employees of the funeral home for support. And Gabriel in a suit too short for his long legs, embarrassed for a thousand different reasons, wanting to feel sadder than he did, but mostly angry.

Without thinking, Gabriel asked, “If you guys could f*ck over the art establishment, would you?”

“Yes,” they both answered at once.

“What if it was kind of illegal?”

“Are you thinking of something in particular?” Didier upturned the bottle and shook it over his mouth to get the last few drops.

“No, it was just, like, a question.”

Hans looked at him curiously.

“Not that shit we did for the hotel guy?” asked Didier.

“No, it’s just … forget it,” Gabriel said, shaking his head violently, as if clearing water from his ears.

“No, what?” Didier said.

“You brought it up,” Hans said.

“Fine.” Gabriel paused. “I was reading about this guy who forged old master paintings.”

“The Italian guy?” Didier asked.

“I think he was English,” Gabriel said.

“I heard about him,” Hans said. “Hepburn or Stubborn, or something. Didn’t he go to jail?”

“He forged paintings and made them look old and then sold them. They’re all over museum collections.”

Didier said, “Did he claim they were Rembrandts or whatever?”

“I don’t think so,” said Gabriel. “I think he just brought them into auction houses.”

Hans said, “They decide who painted it.”

“He just copied a painting and everyone thought it was a real Rembrandt?” Didier still didn’t get it.

“No,” Gabriel said. “He didn’t copy anything. It was an original painting, but in the style of the master.”

“Wasn’t that the guy who snuck into the Tate and planted a false catalog, or doctored the records with an X-Acto knife and some school glue?” Hans asked.

Didier brushed ash off his lap. “If those f*cking bastards are too stupid to tell a Rembrandt from their a*sholes, then I think they deserve to get taken.”

“Very fancy, coming from someone who’s showing at de Treu.”

“Exactly my point,” Didier said. “They have shit for brains.”

Hans shook his head. His hair flopped into his eye, and he brushed it back, using his fingers as a comb. “Intent to deceive is deception.”

Gabriel and Didier looked at him. Didier said, “The whole art world is completely f*cked up. It rewards youth because it’s novel; it rewards simple art because it’s palatable and it discriminates against innovation. It’s almost our duty to infiltrate and expose the hypocrisies.”

“That’s a really juvenile justification,” Hans said. “That’s like pulling the fire alarm at school.”

“How is that like pulling the fire alarm?” Didier’s voice rose. He was getting angry.

“Lashing out at authority figures because you’re frustrated with the establishment.” The stubble from Hans’s beard showed in relief in the light cast by the entryway as he leaned forward.

Gabriel remained silent, watching the two men. This was how he thought he’d feel in art school. Slightly stymied by the language, more stymied by the sheer education and intellectualism of his peers. But as it turned out, art school was actively anti-intellectual. Emotions were privileged. If you overthought your art, you weren’t naturally talented. But then you were supposed to come up with some sort of artist statement that, through the gobbledygook of art-speak, would shed light on the intellectual process behind the art that you were supposed to create without intellectual process. No one’s French was that good, not even Flaubert’s.

But here he was, eavesdropping on a conversation he’d started about ethics and creation of art, and he felt like it was pretentious and a waste of time. Maybe the hash was making him feel impatient, but the theoretical argument seemed more like posturing to him. Hans was justifying his conventional, moral life, and Didier was trying to attack him for it. It was the same old shit, with art as the weapon.

“Who said anything about lashing out? It’s like a war. No one has any moral high ground.” The conversation was getting increasingly heated.

Gabriel stood up, brushing his pants down his thighs. “I’m going in. Congratulations again.”

“Thanks.” Hans waved absently. He turned back to Didier. Then Gabriel realized they weren’t angry with each other. This was a debate, friendly and substance-fueled. Nothing was at stake. As he entered his studio and the voices receded behind him, he was struck again by his ability to feel shut out, even from a conversation he himself instigated.



There are decisions, Gabriel mused, that can change your life. And often those decisions are both spontaneous and ill considered. He had made a joke at a dinner party. And he had done a favor for his girlfriend’s uncle. Several favors, actually. And, from the nadir to which his life had descended—artistic slavery, intense professional jealousy, wasted potential—he rose suddenly to exultant heights.

Klinman had given him a dozen more sheets of period paper, and Gabriel had filled them with Piranesis, Canalettos, and Connoises in exchange for several thousand euros. He had gotten good at being almost nonchalant with the paper, not worrying he would smudge a line, or betray too much Connois the younger and not enough Connois the elder. He drew market scenes, Italian squares, his childhood kitchen, the buildings on the Île St.-Louis. His bedroom had turned into a veritable sizing factory—rare was the evening when there was not a piece of paper drying.

When Colette made one of her frequent trips to New York, he missed her with an intensity that worried him, one that he was not sure was reciprocal. He examined his ardency like a lump found suddenly under his armpit, with concern. He usually found women irritating, but that might have been because he tended to date the young École students and graduates, who found his experience alluring. Ultimately, the relationships ended in tears when the women realized Gabriel had no interest in deepening the commitment. These young bohemians, who professed to enjoy having someone to go see openings with, to walk in the Tuileries on Sunday afternoons, to f*ck every few days to mutual satisfaction, were really just biding their time until marriage. He simply wasn’t built for relationships. He met people, spent time with them, gradually there was a mutual loss of interest and he moved on. Some took longer to try his patience. Some he couldn’t get away from fast enough. But to live with someone, on purpose, to start sharing toothpaste and finances and friends, seemed boring at best.

Gabriel knew his avoidance of deep relationships probably revealed something dysfunctional about him. But what if it wasn’t pathological? What if this was just the way he was wired? He didn’t feel unhappy. He didn’t feel lonely—not often—even when he celebrated his fortieth birthday by himself at the studio. He was poor, but that was a choice he’d made a long time ago. Shouldn’t there be people in the world who shunned convention, congenitally, to balance out those who wanted monogamy and offspring? What if he was a loner by DNA? The irony, he did not fail to recognize, was that he voiced these thoughts to no one, and so there was no one to provide the counterargument, if such a thing existed.

He went reluctantly back to his shared apartment, which was where he was when Patrice Piclut phoned him. It took him a minute to place the name, and then he remembered: the gallery owner at Klinman’s dinner party. Patrice wanted to pay a studio visit. Would Gabriel be around tomorrow?

Gabriel got to the studio earlier than he ever had, rearranging canvases to look like he’d been hard at work, like he’d always been hard at work, on his own paintings. He used his elbow to sweep the pencil shavings off the work table onto the floor, then shooed them to the corner with his foot. He took all the crusted cans of dried-out paint, some with preserved bugs, some with science-worthy dust and mold specimens, to the communal sink, where he let them clatter and left them.

Sure enough, like clockwork, Marie-Laure stuck her head into his studio minutes later. “Um, about the sink?”

Gabriel fought the urge to tell her to go f*ck herself. It sounded so great in French: Aller se faire foutre. Instead he said, “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m waiting for a studio visit from the Picluts.”

Marie-Laure stuck her chin out in disbelief. “The Picluts?”

“Yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I met them at dinner a couple of months ago. They want to come see my work.”

“Would they want to come next door?” Marie-Laure pointed with her brush to her studio space.

Gabriel shrugged, and Marie-Laure scurried back into her studio, where he heard her similarly straightening.

He adjusted his lights. He leaned on his table. He stood by the large wall. He paced. He went to the front door to look. He went back inside. Finally he realized he couldn’t just stand there, and busied himself with a modern miniature, which kept him sharpening his pencil every thirty to forty seconds. He decided to draw the Louvre, in imitation of the thousands of small frontispieces of the palais. But his drawing depicted the shimmering glass of the new, horrific entrance that obscured the original square. Mitterrand had already committed architectural murder by the time Gabriel moved to Paris.

There was a polite knock on the door. Patrice stepped into the studio, followed by Paulette, who was carrying an enormous purse. She was on the phone and she smiled before turning her back to Gabriel.

Patrice stood for a long time in front of each of Gabriel’s eight pieces. His face betrayed no emotion, but he seemed utterly enthralled, scratching at the small goatee under his lip as if in parody of thinking. Finally Paulette got off the phone and stood beside him in silence. They moved together from piece to piece, shifting as if by wordless signal.

Patrice turned to him. “I love most of all the incongruity of your images.”

“Absolutely,” Paulette echoed. “The juxtaposition of unlikely elements is echoed by your choice of color. Were you consciously commenting on the state of French immigration?”

“Um,” Gabriel said. Had he been? Had he been painting his own carte de séjour visa status?

“It’s really fantastic,” Patrice said. “How many of you work out here?”

“About ten,” Gabriel said. “It’s really cheap.”

“And hard to find. Like a geode,” Paulette said.

“I’d offer you a coffee, but …” Gabriel let the thought trail off.

Patrice began to speak but Paulette cut him off. “No, we’re on a really tight schedule. Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure.”

“A pleasure,” Patrice echoed.

And they were gone. Almost immediately, Marie-Laure appeared in the doorway. “They seemed to really like it.”

“It was all art-language bullshit,” Gabriel said. He couldn’t look at her face.

“Yes, but it was convincing art-language bullshit,” Marie-Laure said.



The phone call came a few days later, while Gabriel was walking home from the métro. Patrice, on speakerphone with Paulette, offering him a solo show. Would September work? They were going to have a series of shows on immigrant artists. Gabriel was so excited he forgot to be angry that yet again he was exoticized for his nationality.

Patrice said, “We especially liked the market scenes.”

“What market scenes?”

“The ones that are reminiscent of Connois’s scenes, but with a contemporary irony that modern life cannot escape.”

Gabriel wondered if his French was failing him.

“We didn’t see many of them,” Paulette continued. “Maybe one, or two. But we think that’s your strongest work. They need a little finishing.”

“Finish them while thinking of your relative, freezing up there in the Low Countries, missing his homeland the way you surely miss yours,” Patrice said.

Realization came over Gabriel slowly, like the delay of warm air as it blows out a subway grate. “You want Connois.”

“We want your originals, yes, but ones which echo your ancestor. I’m so glad you understand me. I don’t speak the language of artists, only the language of art appreciators. It is a tremendous failing, I know.” Patrice sounded actually pained. Paulette tittered in the background.

“Why don’t you come by the space next week?” Paulette asked. “You can see the current show and we can talk over the plans.”

“Sure,” Gabriel said. “Thanks. Of course. Thanks so much.”

Gabriel sat on a bench built in a circle around a plane tree. On the other side, an old woman was feeding the pigeons that swarmed her feet out of a Monoprix bag. Whenever they got too close, she kicked them away.

A show. At a real gallery. Not famous like Ambrosine or de Treu, but maybe even better because it was a gallery that was cooler, that showcased up-and-comers. Could you be an up-and-comer at forty-two? He hoped so, because he was certainly not an already-there, and the only other option was a has-been.

But they didn’t want him. They wanted Connois. F*ck Connois, Gabriel thought. It was possible that his ancestor had ruined his life. Had made him want to be a painter, had made him forge Febrer, had set him on the path that led him to Klinman.

He should tell the Picluts to aller se faire foutre. If they didn’t want him, his art, then they could find someone else. Let someone else take their direction, be their little bitch.

The woman behind him kicked her legs and pigeons fluttered over to Gabriel. He stamped his foot to make them scatter.

On the other hand, a show was a show. This could really launch him. Maybe what Patrice and Paulette were doing was curating, shaping his work, editing it. Maybe it didn’t matter that it wasn’t his original vision.

The woman shooed the pigeons over toward Gabriel. He shooed them back.



Gabriel went directly to Colette’s, stopping only to buy the cheapest champagne he could find.

“Well, hello!” Colette said, glimpsing the bottle.

“I got a call from the Picluts today. They want to give me a show there.”

“I know!” said Colette. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

“You know? How do you know?”

“My uncle said they were going to call you. Apparently, he really likes you, to set you up with them that way.”

“To set me up?”

“I mean, to put you in contact.”

Gabriel hid inside his champagne flute. Had Klinman put them up to this? Why?

His thoughts must have shown on his face, because Colette put an arm on his. “They love your work. They’d have to. Every show figures in a gallery’s reputation. They wouldn’t risk that. Not for anyone.”

“Do you know how long the gallery has been open?”

“Three years, I think.”

“And how long have they been married?” Gabriel asked.

“Who?”

“The Picluts.”

“They’re siblings.”

“They are?” Gabriel was sure they were married. “I thought they were together.”

“That’s gross. No, they’re siblings.” Gabriel thought about how they shared telepathic communication, how Patrice put his hand lovingly on Paulette’s back. How had he confused that with romantic love? “Silly,” Colette said. She yawned. “I’m jet-lagged.”

“Oh, right, how was your trip?”

“Good. I saw the most beautiful Delacroix.” Colette drained her glass and refilled it, sipping quickly before it fizzed over the side. “It’s upsetting. These people in New York, these Americans, they don’t appreciate what they have.”

“I appreciate what I have,” Gabriel said, taking Colette’s free hand.

Colette patted his cheek and said in English, “So cute.”



The gallery space was exactly how he had imagined it would be. In fact, he thought he’d been in the space in another incarnation. Was it possible that it had been a punk club in the nineties? It was the perfect location for an up-and-coming gallery. Not so trendy that the rents were high, but trendy enough that centre-ville Parisians would feel safe sojourning there, and receive a taste of adventure while doing so. Though small and low-ceilinged, the gallery had a nice flow to it, with plenty of interior walls and new track lighting. Colette came with him, standing so close to him as he paced the room, he could smell her strawberry shampoo.

She asked Paulette and Patrice a number of practical questions, and they had an animated discussion conducted so rapidly, with so many numbers, that Gabriel couldn’t follow it. It seemed almost like an argument.

But Gabriel trusted Colette. It had been so long since someone had been his advocate. It felt odd, improbable, yet Gabriel and Colette seemed to share a certain practicality that made Gabriel feel that as long as his and Colette’s interests were aligned—or at least, not competing—he could count on her.

He smiled as Paulette opened a bottle of champagne, and signed the contract willingly. When they clinked glasses, Colette’s bubbled up and over the rim and she brought it quickly to her mouth to save it. “Now, that’s talent,” Patrice said.



After work, still nursing one of the more vicious and perseverant hangovers he’d ever experienced (he swore never to drink champagne again), Gabriel shuffled home and got into bed, contemplating his luck. Could it be that it had finally changed? He permitted himself a fantasy in which he was the toast of Paris. He wore a tuxedo, a satin pocket square, shirt partway unbuttoned. Around him was a cast of characters like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Women in beehive hairdos with long cigarette filters and men with highball glasses. The setting, though, was modern: a view of the Parisian skyline (from in Paris? his common sense asked him. Yes, a view of Paris from Paris). The lighting was perfect for his art and for people watching. Still fantasizing, he looked at the walls. His drawings were professionally mounted and framed. It took him a minute to realize that what he was admiring in the fantasy as his own were the forgeries he’d drawn for Klinman.

He sat up in bed and turned on the light, embarrassed. Could he really have thought that he achieved this show on his own merit? For all his posturing about his supposed talent and the art world’s prejudice, it was entirely possible that his work was inferior. Plus, he had to reflect that the happiest and most fulfilled he’d felt in years was when he worked for Klinman. To produce so exactingly the work of a master created a greater sense of satisfaction than when he finished his own work. Was that because the drawings were accepted so enthusiastically? Obviously, praise was powerful motivation. And money. Maybe this show was what he needed to get the same commendations for himself. After all, being an art world darling was about opportunity, exposure.

A thought: Klinman set up the show. But, again, why? So that Gabriel would stay happy and continue to forge his pictures like a good little boy? Should he accept this charity? Should he feel offended? It was hardly life-changing, a small gallery in the Fourteenth on a low-rent block with two-euro wine and stale crackers at the vernissage.

Or maybe Colette had arranged for the show. Or Édouard. Or even, for all he knew, Didier. The possibilities were endless, and all pointed to the fact that regardless of who prodded the gallery to offer him a show, and regardless of the fact that a solo show was the first step to a career of any kind, Gabriel could only see the offer as further proof that he would never amount to anything. He turned off the light, rolled over, and pulled the covers up over his head, willing himself to sleep.



Gabriel took great pride in announcing to Édouard that he would no longer be working at the Rosenzweig Gallery in order to prepare for his solo show. Édouard didn’t look impressed, nor did he seem upset to hear that his employee would be leaving him. There were a dozen recent grads who would be glad to take his place. Édouard insisted that he stay two weeks to train a new hire, but Gabriel refused. Only then did Édouard show emotion. They fought, and it escalated to the point where Gabriel told Édouard exactly what he thought of him and his gallery. Édouard responded in kind, hurtling insults that sounded just like the characteristics about himself that Gabriel already knew and hated: his attitude, his intractability, the suspicion that if he hadn’t made it in the art world by now he never would.

But going to the studio at ten the next morning, Gabriel was elated. This was what an artist did, got up, drank oodles of coffee, and hit the studio early. He practically sauntered from the métro. He was not the first one there; Marie-Laure was an early riser. Still, Gabriel felt virtuous, pumped from caffeine.

Over the weekend, Gabriel had cleaned out his area in the studio, considering canvases and putting aside those he could re-gesso and paint over. He made a list of possible titles for his show. But after stretching two canvases and priming them, he was at a loss as to what to paint. It might help if he had a theme for his show. But he couldn’t really develop a theme until he’d painted something. A vicious circle. He paced; he ran out of batteries in his tape player and switched their places to eke out a bit more power. Then he went outside.

Didier was having a cigarette. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know,” Gabriel said.

“Christ, when I first found out about my show,” Didier continued, “I couldn’t do anything. It’s like all my ideas had been sucked out of my head. Do you feel like that?”

“No,” Gabriel lied. “I’m painting like they will cut my arms off tomorrow.”

“Nice image,” Didier said. “Lucky. It took me like a month to settle down and produce. You got a title yet?”

“Still thinking,” Gabriel said.

“Don’t think too hard,” Didier warned. “Thinking makes for bad art.”



Lise was impressed by Gabriel’s sudden success. She was full of questions. He did not tell her about having to tailor his paintings to the Picluts’ requests, because he knew she would disapprove. She would wrinkle up her little French nose and scold him like a child. Why was he compromising himself that way? Why had he been true to his art all these years, only to sell out now? What did that make him?

Gabriel was aware of her arguments, because he was making them himself. Why should it matter to him what she thought, this artist-turned-housewife? Except it did.

Sitting in a café near Ambrosine’s, Lise had dedicated her lunch break to brainstorming a title for his show with him. They were talking about Gabriel’s interests, how alienation was always a theme in his works, and they discussed the possibility of the title aliénation, then two words in English, alien nation, and they laughed that they were filming a sci-fi movie. Then it came to Lise. She had to write it down so Gabriel could see the wordplay. “Dé/placement, Dé/plaisir.”

“ ‘Dis/placement, Dis/pleasure.’ I’m happy,” he blurted out. He blushed. He was happy that Lise was his friend, happy to be having a show at last.

Lise laughed. “I’m happy too.”

When he told Colette the title, she scoffed. “It sounds like some sort of Derridean circle jerk.”

“Well, I like it,” Gabriel said.

“You would.”

He was sleeping poorly, partly because he was often at Colette’s and her bed was lumpy. She also generated so much heat when she slept that he awoke sweaty and breathless. Every night he had anxiety nightmares.

One night he dreamed that his painting had made the cover of Art Forum, only to realize, to his horror, that he had copied the Mona Lisa. He awoke panting.

“What is it? Tell me.” Colette stroked his back as Gabriel fought to regain his breath.

“Am I doing the wrong thing?” he asked her.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I feel like … I feel like I’m pretending to be someone else.”

“Because you’re accepting direction?”

“I guess.” He turned to her. “Doesn’t it seem strange that they want to capitalize on my connection to Connois?”

“Why?” Colette lay back down on the bed. Her breasts pointed opposite ways, like contradictory directional arrows. “I mean, you exploit it.”

“Yeah, but. Wait, I do?”

Colette laughed. “You have his name, though it’s not your true name. You like to sketch like him, I’ve noticed.”

Gabriel froze: was it possible she knew about the work he did for her uncle? But Colette continued on. “Just do what they want. Now is not the time for principles. You don’t catch flies with vinegar.”