by Karen Moline
“But I don’t like him,” she told him. “He’s a jerk. I don’t like how he looks at me. He’s so used to taking anything he lays his eyes on that I don’t want to be part of his craziness.”
Olivier was still laughing. “Even more reason,” he said. “He’s already got you complètement folle, my darling, so throw that frustrated energy into your painting. I can just see him now, Monsieur Sex Symbol, trying to seduce you with his charm, and you telling him va t’en faire foûtre.”
She laughed then, relieved. “But I’ve still got a bad feeling about him.”
“Don’t be silly. It will give me intense pleasure to imagine his égoïsme trying to invade your studio. I shall think of you when I’m rehearsing, you my darling, you and the most famous actor in the world, and you will think of me, when you are looking at his face, knowing that I am laughing at the puncturing of his esprit. So do it for me.”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” she said, sighing. “But only because you ask. And if it goes wrong, it will be entirely your fault, and I hold you completely responsible. Then you’ll be sorry.”
“Say it again.”
“What.”
“You’ll be sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because it sounds sexy.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Yes. Crazy without you.”
“Does this mean you miss me?”
“Horribly.”
“Likewise.”
“I must go now.”
“You’re tired.”
“Very.”
“Is it going well?”
“Very.”
She sighs again, she cannot help it. “Well, sleep tight. Je t’embrasse.”
“Darling,” he said, and hung up.
WE ARE at our usual table in the back, and Nick is in a state of unsurpassed impatience, the signs of which—a nick shaving, a tap of his boot on the floor, his hands ruffling his hair, making the ladies lunching sigh with frustrated pleasure, imagining how much they’d like to do that very thing with their glossy polished nails—were remarked upon and registered silently only by me.
I have never seen him made anxious like this by a woman before. It alarms me, this obsession, because it is growing, here a tiny weed, needing only the first few rays of slanting whiter sunshine to sprout and spread, unchecked, soon covering the plots of our nasty bad habits, and choking the garden of our solitude.
I wonder what it is about Olivia.
His greeting of Annette is genuine pleasure, and she flushes with grateful surprise, knowing all eyes are upon her. She really is pretty, her cheeks blooming as Nick pulls his chair closer to hang on her every word as if the teller is far more intoxicating than the tale. Her hair naturally blond, streaked with subtle highlights, her makeup understated, her figure slender, her wedding band glinting pale fire, she is a seductive woman who adores the slither of silk underclothes hidden under the mannish yet provocative cut of her Yohji suit. She would almost be Nick’s type if she weren’t so smart and posh, speaking in the clipped proper cadence of the well-bred, running a gallery on Cork Street, married to a suitable investment banker, driving their silver-blue Range Rover to the country house on weekends, flicking off the attention of unsuitable lovers as if they were no more substantial than annoying marsh midges.
That she has a husband is worthy only of a yawn from Nick. She would almost be his type, if she were not Olivia’s friend.
“Tell me about your business,” he says. “Tell me about how you find your artists.”
Not artists. Olivia.
“It depends. For instance, I’ve known Olivia for ages,” she says. “I was acquainted with her ex-husband when I was working at the Tate, and he went off to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Olivia was a student there, and they fell in love and came over here and it was a huge scandal because he was quite a lot older and married at the time to a certain very proper lady.”
This could be more interesting than I thought.
“Is that why she still lives here?” Nick asks.
“Yes, and why she’s got such a marvelously huge studio. Geoffrey turned into a real bastard, and it’s why Olivier is so—” She flushes a deeper rose. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Olivia will murder me. I’m still not even sure she’ll do the portrait. It’s never up to me, not really, much as I wish it were, although I am her dealer.”
Nick calmly pours her a glass of champagne.
“Still,” he says, “I imagine you’re lucky to represent her. She appears to be very successful.” He doesn’t mention how well thumbed the catalogue from Olivia’s last show has become, the slim volume I picked up from the concierge at the Savoy after he called the gallery, pretending to represent a sheik in town on a shopping spree.
“Yes, quite. She is. Despite her peculiarities, as she calls them.”
Nick suppresses a smile. He likes that.
“Her support was one of the reasons I could open the gallery,” Annette is saying. “She’s a wonderful painter and a wonderful friend.”
“Tell me about her fiancé.”
He has segued so smoothly into the sole topic of interest that Annette barely notices, seeing no farther than the dark blue eyes smiling into her own.
“Olivier.”
“Olivia and Olivier. How cute. Sounds like destiny to me,” Nick says with a saucy grin, “or a bad romance novel.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity. He’s not in town, is he?” he asks. She shakes her head, surprised that he would know. “And hope. Hopefulness, I mean, that it will give me some leverage and persuade her to paint me.”
His candor is unforced, and since he is telling the truth, she believes him, and finds it easy to talk, hypnotized by charisma.
“He’s a pianist, quite famous, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s on tour now, in the Orient. He’s booked for years in advance. I don’t know how she can stand it.”
“The separations, you mean.”
She nods.
“But isn’t that better for you, that he’s away, and so she keeps herself busy with work?”
“I suppose. I know she misses him dreadfully, but they’re both quite independent, and Olivia would never stop painting to follow him around on his tours like a puppy dog. They both seem to thrive on isolation and longing, it becomes part of their work. Strange, isn’t it.” Her eyes are fixed on Nick, who doesn’t think it strange at all. “That’s why Olivier is so perfect for her.”
Nick appears mesmerized, smiling gently, as if he were an unaccustomed audience, thrilling to a slowly rising curtain. He caresses a nonexistent hair off Annette’s forehead, watching her melt, liquid putty in his fingers as she unknowingly tears bits of her bread into crusty shreds of nervous tension, silently thanking her husband, who has no interest in her extracurricular activities, for marrying her, so she has a built-in excuse to either end or prolong Nick’s flirtatiousness, should he wish it.
“Tell me how they met,” he says.
“Olivia had just been in Paris, working, so I suppose she still had a soft spot for Frenchmen when he came into the gallery.”
“Why was she in the gallery?”
“Covering for me.” She giggles. “It really was quite a nasty trick.”
“Go on.”
This story does not really interest me, because I know I will hear it again, from Nick, hear it over and over again as he muses upon endless provocative possibilities.
I prefer to imagine Olivia in Paris, a city I know well after spending months there while Nick was shooting that miniseries, an abysmally ridiculous remake of To Catch a Thief too low-budget to shoot on the Riviera yet inexplicably earning that year’s highest ratings and a Golden Globe for Nick’s performance.
It is easier to imagin
e Olivia in Paris, reading myths, for inspiration, reading of the Five Nations, and the Celts, and the Etruscans, sitting on a green iron bench in the Jardin de Luxembourg, or wandering in a contented daze through the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, sketching. I picture her sitting in a teahouse she stumbles upon one cloudless afternoon, tucked in the Cour de Rohan near the house where Voltaire once lived, it is claimed. They begin to know her there after a while, warming to her shy smile and hesitant French, giving her the table where the light is best, near the window in the corner, upstairs under the low-beamed ceiling, close to the fireplace that illuminates her odd beauty, flickering quietly, rendering her alabaster skin translucent, her eyes pale, and throwing the strange planes of her face into sharp relief as if she were a Caravaggio peasant come to life. Soon she comes to sketch the propriétaire, the waitress, the pastry chef peeling apples for a tarte tatin, she gives them these delicate miniatures, received with grateful delight, and they ask her, beg her, really, to paint a mural on their walls. Persephone, she decides, prancing in the wheat fields of her mother, eating a pomegranate, seeds staining her teeth the same sweet ruby as the tea scented with eaux de fruits she likes so much, deep crimson, scented with cynorrhodon and pétales d’hélianthe.
In the evenings she lies in her small bed in the flat she’d rented in the Fifteenth Arrondissement near the Eiffel Tower, the top floor, deliberately, so she can have the roofs to herself, the city at her feet. She could see the very top of the tower, glowing yellow, a nightly beacon reflected and repeated, golden little flickering dabs like pats of butter on her windowpanes. Sometimes as she scribbled in her notebooks, a glass of wine on the floor, a candle scented with rosemary and lavender lit, flickering, the radio playing odd bits of jazz and blues, she heard the clickety patter of her neighbor’s cat scrabbling up the slate shingles of the roof, or the high chattering voices of the children of the concierge playing games, echoing in the courtyard, laughing, or the quick clatter of high heels on the cobblestones below, or a phone, ringing, or the sudden clap of shutters pulled close, the world shut out, safe for the night.
Paris is a city of secrets. We secret-sharers recognize that in each other, and belong there. Push open the heavy green door, slightly crooked with age, and a courtyard beckons, thick heavy curtains fluttering in the windows, hiding the life inside.
I see her in the market on Thursdays, under the shade of the elevated Métro, admiring the carefully constructed mountains of fruit, piled cerises provençales, glowing white pyramids of mushrooms, curling green snakes of frisé and haricots verts, she gets yelled at when she touches the fat fingers of white asparagus, the jeweled heaps of beets and turnips. She laughs when she sees the table of fish, gleaming, neatly quivering silver, for they remind her of the market she once stumbled upon, years ago in Hong Kong, there where her lover is now, his fingers on keys of ivory, the audience rapt, the sounds silver, silver like the scales of fish there in the night market, an open-air market at a crossroads in Kowloon, the tabletops roiling, a wriggling mass of every imaginable variety of creature that crept and crawled in the sea, gathered up, squirming, by bored impassive cooks, dumped into squat black caldrons of boiling water, scooped out seconds later, and as quickly devoured.
Those tables, writhing, alive with the near-dead of the deep, became the background for the painting that launched her career when she was still in art school, the portrait of Mao and Stalin, cooking together, stirring the boiling morass, the witches’ brew of the Orient.
“I was home with the flu,” Annette is saying, “and I was in a terrible dither because an important buyer had said he might be coming by, but he was in transit and therefore unreachable, and my secretary was on holiday, and I quite didn’t know what to do.”
“So you called Olivia,” Nick says.
“Yes. It was the last week of her show, actually, and she knew the art, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Nick agrees, filling her glass.
“So, after I begged and pleaded and promised her the moon she came round for the keys.”
Nick is calm, listening, his eyes never leaving her. I stare at the bubbles in my champagne, cream-colored effervescence, until my eyes blur, unfocused, and the room dissolves to nothing save Annette’s voice, softly speaking, I can see the gallery she is describing, the calm white interior, I see Olivia behind the desk, reading, the only noise the slap of rain on the window, the smooth moan of the wind. I imagine her lost in a book, her paintings on the walls, the discomforting presence of being surrounded by portraits that had once occupied her so violently yet now have passed on to their owners, and no longer have any hold on her life save a vague disbelief that she created them.
She is sitting there, reading, when she hears the door open and the snap of an umbrella shutting, and she barely looks up when a man says Bonjour because she has completely forgotten he might be an important buyer, and so all she says is Let me know if I can help you.
He wanders around, this stranger, his presence negligible until she hears a great jolt of laughter, the kind of infectious laugh that makes you smile through any tears, and she cannot understand what could have amused him so, because they were her paintings, and she did not think they were funny.
She gets up, annoyed, and moves over to join him. He is tall and thin, with wavy dark hair that needs cutting, staring with eyes the color of her Siberian amber beads at her favorite of all in the show, the naughty one, a portrait of the cello player Antonio del Campo, painted in the setting of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, naked on a blanket in the forest, with a string quartet serenading him in the background, the quartet he often played with. Poor Antonio, she is thinking, such a bastard and yet at this moment so maligned, so naked, hanging on a wall, an object of humorous derision for a man who has walked in out of the rain.
“So this is the famous portrait,” he says, his English heavily accented. “Forgive me for laughing, but I know Antonio, and she’s captured him perfectly, that arrogant smile. Quelle gueule! May I ask, do you know, what did he do when he saw it for the first time?”
“I heard he was stunned into what, I was told, was for him an uncharacteristic silence. The shock of the truth, I guess, when it dents the fragile eggshell of someone’s ego, can be a bit frightening. Seeing yourself exposed like that, I mean.”
“She’s a great talent, don’t you think?”
He turns to her, thinking she is the receptionist, and his eyes are shining, like a tortoiseshell comb catching the light even as it lies hidden in the thick bun of a woman’s hair, and when she sees him full in the face she decides, a surprising quick decision rare in its clarity and strength, that if she could she’d like to paint him, whoever he is, she will somehow contrive to paint him as a cougar, sleek, rain-wet, prowling, an elegant dark shadow, in the corridors of a palace. Versailles, perhaps, or Vaux-le-Vicomte.
“Do you know,” he says, as if reading her thoughts, “but, of course you must know, how does she arrange her commissions? Do you think I might be able to ask her to paint my portrait?” He flushes. “It is not only that I admire her work, but it is a sort of—”
“Sort of what?”
He bites his lip. “Rivalry.” He looks at her quickly, then away, embarrassed. “It is quite silly. We often worked together,” he explains, his gaze back on the portrait. “The first violin used to be my wife.”
“I see,” she says, “but that’s still not a very good reason to sit for a portrait. Rivalry, I mean. It’s an important decision, not to be taken lightly, and Olivia is quite fussy.”
“And that was a very stupid thing to say. Vous avez raison. But, you know, the truth is . . .” He runs his hands through his hair, as she does to her own. “The truth is I live in terror of losing my hands, although that fear is probably quite ridiculous, and I’d like to be painted while I am at this, how do you say . . . this place.” He flushes again. “Excusez-moi,” he says. “All I seem t
o do is apologize for the idiotic things I am saying. Je m’exprime beaucoup mieux en français. But these paintings, they are so open, their caractère, they make you want to drop your guard and be painted as she sees you, not as you see yourself.”
There is a glimmer, only a flick, in his eyes that she suddenly wants desperately to capture, to reanimate in her studio, illuminate on canvas, and in doing so make that illusion be real, immortalized.
He catches her stare. “I’m sorry, but you look familiar,” she says, her turn to blush even though she knows perfectly well who he is.
“Olivier de Chabrol. I am very pleased to meet you.”
“Of course,” she says. “The pianist.” Before he can ask her name she tells him the particular demands of the artist, the capricious selection of her subjects, the lunchtime sittings in the pose of her choosing, the numbing curiosity unsatisfied by her curt refusal to show any work in progress, her penchant for settings and highly stylized backgrounds among the oddities of mythology and folktales, complete payment in advance, unrefundable and irredeemable.
“I understand,” he says. “I am leaving quite soon for a tour in America for several months. Do you think I might meet her before I go?”
“I can put in a word for you, seeing that you liked poor Antonio so much. She was very pleased with that one. Let me have your number, and if she wants to, she’ll call you to arrange a meeting.”
“I’m at Brown’s, only until Sunday. Will you try?”
“I’ll do my best. This is her gallery, after all.”
“Could she meet for tea, or a drink?”
“Lunch. She prefers to meet potential clients at lunch. There’ve been many arguments about this, I must say, but she claims the sittings must take place then because the light is best, even when it’s not, and that’s when she wants to see people, to talk and make her decision.” She smiles, secretly a bit aghast at her audacious description of her own stubborn temperament.
