A third French artist Jayne admired and had discovered not long after she began studying art was Marie-Joseph Vallet, who changed her name to Jacqueline Marval after her application to exhibit her paintings in the Salon des Indépendants was rejected in 1900. The next year, applying under her new name, she was accepted. She worked closely with Henri Matisse and Kees van Dongen, and was a frequent visitor to Gustave Moreau’s home in Montmartre, and in a coup that Jayne suspected was wholly unanticipated by Marval, she was declared the most interesting painter in the 1911 Salon d’Automne by poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
When she was still in high school, Jayne had found Marval’s paintings in a heavy library book redolent of mold and neglect—so few of her classmates, as far as Jayne could tell, spent time browsing the dusty stacks where the art books languished—during a study hall when she should have been preparing for a trigonometry final. The Frenchwoman used color with an aggressive energy that immediately seduced Jayne. It made no sense to her that Marval was not as well known as the male painters who had been her friends and whose work was frequently exhibited with her own. Was it because she had been a woman, and like the forsaken Claudel, could be dismissed with little more than an unheeded cry of protest?
At the time she found the library book, Jayne had been sketching rooms filled with objects. Her chairs and lamps and sofas were meant to seem on the verge of animation, but they were defeating her. Seeing the interplay of color and light in Marval’s paintings, she realized that she needed more depth in the contours if she hoped to make her objects appear possessed.
Later, during the summer class in Chicago, Susan Kraut also taught her to think more about composition, to place her objects within the rectangle of the page or canvas in ways that generated both stillness and energy. In college, she realized now, most of her favorite instructors had been women, though Susan was the only one with whom she had stayed in touch for more than a couple of years after graduation.
When she told Laurent about Jacqueline Marval, he had had to look her up. “I’m not sure how I missed her,” he said, apologetic and a little embarrassed. “Her work is very striking. We could go to Grenoble to see some of her paintings in the museum there, if you’d like. You’ve seen the ones in Paris, I’m guessing.”
“Yes, but I should go back and look at them again. I’d love to go to Grenoble too. I intended to go during the spring I was in Strasbourg, but I never made it down there.”
“You were busy having love affairs with young Frenchmen instead, I am sure.”
She smiled. “Yes, of course I was.”
When Jayne was alone, she sometimes looked at the framed photographs Laurent kept in the apartment, unable to stop staring at these images of his very handsome past selves. Her favorite photo was on an end table next to the canapé in the salon, a picture of him and a school friend, taken in Saint-Tropez, both men smiling and shirtless, deeply tan. Jayne often looked at this photo when she was reading and fighting drowsiness on sunny afternoons.
In photographs or paintings, strangers’ exotic faces inhabited almost every room of the apartment, the six family portraits in the hallway sometimes flitting into her consciousness as she dropped into a nap. When she asked Laurent if he’d ever displayed the artist’s work, he said that he had, but offered little else, except that Sofia had also worked at Vie Bohème as an assistant for a little while.
“Where is she now?” she asked.
“In Italy,” he said casually, but did not meet her curious gaze.
She felt a twinge of jealousy but didn’t feel she could pry. She said again how skillful the portraits were, how full of feeling the faces seemed to her on some days, on others, only passive acceptance.
“Yes, Sofia’s talent is very special,” he said.
“I want to be that good.”
“Yes, of course you do,” he said neutrally.
I will be, she thought, resentful.
CHAPTER 8
Commerce and Art
Jayne had kept to her plan of sketching and painting for a few hours in the mornings or afternoons, sometimes both, every day since her arrival in Paris. She began working at the gallery a week after she moved into Laurent’s apartment, and it was on her second Wednesday at Vie Bohème that she met Laurent’s daughter and also had a disconcerting encounter with Laurent’s business partner, André. She’d seen him four or five times in New York, but they had never spoken for more than a few minutes at each meeting. André was only ten years her senior, and she almost matched him in height when she wore heels. He looked like some of the soccer players, all coiled energy and grinning cockiness, that she had seen Laurent watching on TV on Saturday afternoons in New York, his mania for the game at first making her laugh, but he was resolutely serious about it. French males of all ages loved soccer, he’d told her, his tone reproving when she gave him a funny look. “It is the same way that many American men feel about baseball and much more barbaric football,” he said.
“But not much happens in soccer other than a bunch of guys chasing a ball around,” she’d said. “It’s worse than watching baseball!”
“No, no. Soccer played well is very beautiful. If you start watching matches with me, you will see.”
“I don’t know, Laurent. I’d probably fall asleep.”
“Oh, Jayne,” he’d said, pained. “You cannot mean that.”
André had always been an art dealer, never an artist, she knew. “He is practical in ways I am not,” Laurent told her. “We are a good pair. It was his ex-wife who brought in some of our best clients. Her father was a painter, and he knew many people who have been helpful to us.” Laurent paused. “I liked him very much. He died four years ago in a car accident in Nîmes while visiting his mistress.”
“Did his mistress die too?” asked Jayne.
“No, nothing so dramatic. She was at home. He had a heart attack when he went out to buy wine for their dinner.”
André’s smile was friendly each time he shook Jayne’s hand or kissed her cheeks in greeting, but his direct, appraising looks unnerved her a little. Despite her desire to turn a neutral eye on him, André’s confidence and his muscular, compact body impressed her.
In New York, after she first met André, Laurent had said, “He is charming, but he is like a dangerous animal. He moves very fast and bites hard when he decides to bite. I will have to keep an eye on him. And you too.” He laughed as he said this, but Jayne could not tell if he was joking.
André dressed much as Laurent did, in fine wools and silks and linens that required dry cleaning, but André had his clothes tailored a little more closely to his body’s contours. He was also more tightly wound than Laurent, not having been mellowed by years of childrearing, of diapers, temper tantrums, teenage anarchy. She wondered too if André used a bronzer or a tanning bed. Laurent’s color was natural; he had a Sicilian grandmother from whom, he’d said more than once, he had inherited his skin tone and sanguine personality.
“Paris and you are getting along well?” asked André now. “You must be speaking more French now.”
“Some, mais pas beaucoup,” she said, her voice cracking. God, she thought. What is wrong with me?
“But you are trying?” he said. “Tu essais?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tu n’as pas le mal du pays, Jayne?”
She looked at him, silently groping for the translation. Was she homesick? “No, I love it here,” she said. “It’s very beautiful.”
“New York is also very beautiful,” he said. “I miss my time there.”
“It is,” she agreed. “But it’ll be waiting for you whenever you want to go back.”
“And you too. Unless you decide not to go back.”
She nodded but said nothing.
“Do you think you will stay here forever?” he asked. “Especially if you can convince Laurent to marry you?”
She hesitated. Was he kidding? It didn’t sound like he was. “I don’t know if I’ll stay
forever, and I’m not thinking about marriage either,” she said coolly. “It’s not something that Laurent and I need to decide at this point.”
“No, no, of course not,” he said. He smiled, baring his teeth, the tip of one of his incisors pressing into his lower lip. “Laurent is very generous, yes?”
“He is,” she agreed, wishing that Laurent would get off the phone. He had been talking on it in rapid, animated French for almost an hour. It was possible that André had meant no harm, that he was trying only to gauge whether or not she was a trustworthy employee. After all, she had been welcomed into his and Laurent’s professional lives without, as far as she knew, Laurent having asked for André’s approval. It seemed wise to remain wary of him.
He was sweating, the scent of his cologne rolling off him in a soapy wave. Jayne shifted her weight from one hip to the other; she was uncomfortable but hoped he couldn’t tell. They stood less than a foot apart, close to the gallery’s entrance, a taxi pausing directly in front of them to pick up a man in a beige suit. Passersby glanced in the gallery’s large front windows, an older man and woman in shorts and tennis shoes—tourists, Jayne thought; few Parisians over the age of twenty-two wore shorts or athletic shoes if they weren’t in fact exercising—stopping to study a painting of a teenage girl in a green bikini, supine on a white towel, full summer: JEUNE FILLE À CANNES, HUILE SUR TOILE. The price was five thousand euros, but this was not posted on the painting’s placard. André and Laurent kept the price list in a slim black folder on top of a filing cabinet behind the gallery assistant’s desk; it was one of the first things Laurent had shown her when she started working at Vie Bohème.
“I have known him for twenty years. He is like a brother,” André said, an edge to his voice that had not been as noticeable a moment ago. “Maybe more like a father. You might see him this way too.”
She looked at his canny, perspiring face. Laurent had told her not to trust André, but until now, she had found herself wanting to. “I don’t see him that way,” she said. “He’s nothing like my father, and I don’t have a brother.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, the pressure heavy and admonitory. He stepped closer, his soap smell tickling her nose. She stiffened but didn’t back away. “Laurent is my very good friend,” he said. “We have lived through many, ah, many moments together, not all good things, but I care about his well-being.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. I do too. You don’t have to worry that I wish him harm, André.”
“We should have a drink one evening and talk some more away from here,” he said. “Laurent has told me about your paintings. I am guessing that you are here in Paris because you expect us to exhibit your work. I know that Laurent has likely made promises to you already.”
She stared at him, but before she could reply, he spoke again. “I must sound rude,” he said, “but I am only being honest.” He let go of her shoulder and turned away to greet a dark-haired woman in a white hat who was entering the gallery with a bored-looking adolescent girl. Jayne could hear the girl speaking to her mother in a high, whiny voice. André addressed the woman by name and offered his hand. Jayne stared out at the street for a few more seconds before retreating to the back office, where Laurent was still on the phone. He glanced up when she entered and made a comical face, either unaware of or deliberately ignoring the irritation she was sure could be read on her own face.
Of course she wanted a show. What artist wouldn’t? And André’s unvoiced scorn made her want one even more.
What an asshole! He was trying to intimidate her, to make sure she watched each of her still-tentative steps, but later, after she had cooled off, she realized that she had no idea who had preceded her—maybe Laurent had been involved with another young artist and given her opportunities like those he seemed to be offering Jayne, and it had gone badly.
Laurent wasn’t a fool though, nor did she believe that André was wholly innocent. She had access to the gallery’s check register and had noticed a number of bank drafts with his name on them in the last several months, most of the checks in the high-hundred euros. Maybe he was using the money for gallery business, but she had not found any receipts on file with his initials, like the ones Laurent turned in when he made work-related purchases. One of her currents tasks—likely to change, she guessed, if she questioned André’s expenditures too closely—was to pay the bills sent by caterers and the occasional florist for openings or the private-viewing receptions they sometimes hosted for their best clients, and for the cleaning crew that arrived every Wednesday night to buff and wax the floors and remove the densely woven black wool rugs near the front door and in the office, bringing them back the next morning, freshly aired and beaten.
The gallery’s bona fide bookkeeper, a bearded, unsmiling man named Armand, with springy gray hair he parted with limited success down the middle, took care of the other accounts: the utilities, the lease, the business taxes that were disbursed on a strict schedule, the salaries paid to Laurent and André along with her own wages, which were generous, five hundred euros a week for twelve to fifteen hours of work. What the accountant thought of this, she didn’t know.
The gallery also employed two assistants, François and Nathalie, both attractive art students in their early twenties, who split the week’s hours, their schedules rarely overlapping. Nathalie sometimes knitted on the days André wasn’t there to disapprove, her blond curls bobbing lightly as she clicked the needles and pulled more yarn from her skein. They sat on a stool at a desk made from an old door and an iron trestle that looked to Jayne like the undercarriage of an antique sewing machine. From this perch they nodded to the people who trickled in to gaze at the work and ask questions, some of them smart and informed, a few verging on the idiotic, but the assistants never smirked, Laurent having trained them not to—the person who asked the witless question might turn out to be a serious buyer. It had happened before. “You don’t have to be a genius to appreciate a fine painting or sculpture,” he told Jayne. And, “There is no rule that says a person with money must also be intelligent.”
“No, that’s for sure,” she said.
“In France we are more foolish with love than with money,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“Good thing that abortion is legal here then,” she said, giving him a wry look.
“Oh, Jayne,” he said. “So serious all the time.”
“I was kidding,” she cried, laughing.
He was happy with himself, a fact she’d understood from their first meeting. He was a success in the most obvious ways, and even his failure to become an artist, he seemed to have accepted and left behind, adapting himself to another, related career that made him less vulnerable, personally if not financially, to art-related trends and the mercurial tastes of critics and collectors. He was nothing if not easygoing and adventurous, qualities that she found very appealing. “I am an opportunist,” he had declared one night not long before they left New York. “I have a nose for business. That is the American expression?”
“Usually we say head instead of nose, but yes, I think you do,” she said.
“I have both maybe.” He grinned. “And feet? Because I now have galleries in New York and Paris.”
Within a week of the Vie Bohème opening in New York, he and André had sold all but two of the twenty-one paintings mounted on their walls. The remaining two sold by the end of the following week. Bernard and the other two artists were not yet well known, but after their successful show at Vie Bohème, Laurent expected that they were on their way to greater renown and prosperity.
His instincts proved correct, as Jayne learned was often the case: in the weeks after the opening, Bernard was offered the part-time faculty position at Pratt, and not long after Jayne moved to Paris, Liesel told her that RISD had called to ask him to teach two painting classes during the next school year. “He’ll be able to stop working at the frame shop once he starts at RISD next fall, but between the commute and his own painting, I’ll never see h
im,” Liesel said grimly. “And if I have to go out to his dump in Queens one more time because he won’t make the trip to my place, that’s it.”
“You’ve been saying that for months,” said Jayne.
“I know.” Liesel exhaled dramatically. “I know!”
Bernard lived in a basement apartment and used an adjacent storage room as his studio; his place was in Woodside, not far from LaGuardia, his neighbors with their small, screaming children and domestic unhappiness almost as hard to ignore as the roar of the arriving and departing jets. Liesel had a comfortable and, by New York standards, spacious one-bedroom on West End Avenue near the Seventy-Second Street subway stop, but Bernard claimed to feel out of place there. Jayne suspected the truth was more likely that he didn’t want to spend the time getting to her place from his studio in Queens.
“What does Melissa say?” asked Jayne.
Liesel rolled her eyes. “You know exactly what she says. I should have dumped his ass a long time ago. But she’s married. She doesn’t remember all the BS you have to put up with when you’re single.”
“I think you need to take a break and come visit me.”
“I still have to renew my passport, but I did get my picture taken for it, and I have the form. Are you sure Laurent wouldn’t mind me staying with you?”
“No, he’d be happy to have you. We have a guest bedroom. This place is pretty big. You’ve seen it.”
“Skype tours hardly qualify,” said Liesel. “If I come for a visit, what about setting me up with Laurent’s partner?”
Paris, He Said Page 7
