Paris, He Said

by Christine Sneed

  “Were you seeing his ex-wife?” she asked.

  The brief rogue glint appeared again in his brown eyes. “Not really,” he said.

  “Were you?”

  “We were never a couple,” he said.

  Who else should I know that you slept with! she almost snapped. Instead, she said, “What about Sofia? Is she your mistress?” She tried to laugh, wanting to make a joke of her doubt, but the sound came out choked.

  “No,” he said. He looked again at his newspaper, one hand on the crease, ready to return to its oily, ink-shedding pages. “She is my friend.”

  “Is she pretty?” She knew the answer, having already studied the half dozen photos she had found of Sofia online, but wanted to know what he would say.

  His expression didn’t change. “Yes.”

  “Prettier than me?”

  “Jayne, please.”

  She said nothing and stared into the sink, at the drain basket with its bloated bread crumbs.

  “You are different,” he said. “I do not compare you to each other.”

  “I’d like you to introduce us.”

  “I am sure you will meet her if you stay here long enough.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

  He pursed his lips. “No, of course not. Do not do that, Jayne.”

  “Do what?”

  He sighed. “Jump so quickly to suspicion of me.”

  She looked at him, his furrowed dark brow, his gaze now turned away. She was disgusted with herself, but her jealousy of Sofia in that moment was almost unbearable.

  “I’m sorry about André,” she said softly.

  Laurent shook his head. “I know that you were his victim.” He paused. “Am I correct in thinking this?”

  “Yes, of course you are.”

  He regarded her dispassionately. “Good. Then that is that.”

  She nodded but said nothing.

  PART TWO

  Laurent, Fall and Winter

  CHAPTER 1

  The Frames

  Unattributed, anonymous … The people mentioned here will no doubt know who I am if they take the time to read what I have written, but any person who does not know me, I am thinking, will probably not regret this fact. These pages are an attempt to explain how I have so far chosen to live. It is similar to what I intend to ask my artists to compose for me after their work has been exhibited at Vie Bohème. Long after their paintings or sculptures have been sold or packed away into storage, long after the closing date of their shows, there should be something left—just as a diary remains after someone dies, whether the dead like this or not.

  Not having been able to make a career as a painter, and later, in a sense, having failed as a husband (though that failure was a joint effort), I realized a number of years ago that I needn’t also fail at retaining some claim on the past, of making sense of what has happened to me and what I have caused to happen.

  For example, I am no longer young, and in recent months I have been thinking that there are few men and even fewer women whose lives and legacies have continued to be remembered in our modern age, to be celebrated or cursed: Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, Catherine the Great, Attila the Hun. Men and women who oversaw violent upheaval, who were responsible to a significant degree for millions of deaths and millions of liters of blood shed on their soil and the soil of countries they conquered or tried to conquer.

  We have also Beethoven, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Manet, Picasso. Jonas Salk, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur. Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Gregor Mendel. Marie Curie too, yes, but our history has been dominated by men and their ways of seeing, unfair as this might be. I am, after all, the father of a daughter and a lifelong admirer of women.

  What is the point of any life? This is what Jayne—not my daughter, but my girlfriend and protégée—has asked me more than once. She asked me this question not long after we met, when I was already smitten with her, more than I expected to be, and more than she expected too.

  There is the old philosopher’s answer: The point is to be.

  There is the pacifist’s: To live and let live.

  There is the hippie’s: To love.

  There is the Zen Buddhist’s: To be present.

  There is Jayne’s answer, as it was at the time: To be someone.

  There is another answer, maybe the best one: To be kind.

  And another: To regret nothing (but that is impossible, no? Unless you have no conscience or else have been endowed with such a charmed life that no trouble ever enters through your front or back doors).

  For years I have held on to love letters and old photographs. I have held on to receipts and IOUs and the occasional regret, but not too many. I have made lengthy notes, kept track, kept things straight, in my mind at least, if not always in body and deed. It might sound cold, but these pages are not meant to be read by my son or daughter. They would not be happy, I suspect, with what they would discover here, although no honest accounting of any mature life is without its shadows, its trapdoors and dirty cellar floors, its attic rooms with all the cobwebs and blind, floundering bats.

  There is the chance, however, that I will decide to throw all these pages away and no one will ever read them, unless I die suddenly, but I don’t believe that I will. It might seem foolish to declare this here, but I have never been superstitious; ordinary life is not without its mysteries, of course, but to assume there are malevolent forces at work—something other than human beings in angry, destructive collectives, or dictators, or pillaging captains of industry—that, I have to believe, is a waste of time and energy.

  Jayne has had many questions for me in the time we have been together—more than a year now, six months in New York, eight months in Paris. We have weathered changes of season—summer to fall, fall to winter. We have weathered visits from her younger sister and parents, from her friends Liesel and Melissa, with their floppy summer hats and bright red toenails and newly blond-streaked hair (both of them, and Jayne’s sister, Stephanie, too! It was comical, though comedy was not their intention, I do not think). During Liesel and Melissa’s visit in particular I had a headache more nights than not, the two of them, with Jayne, laughing and squealing so often, as my daughter Jeanne-Lucie had done at fourteen when she carried a torch for the actor Olivier Martinez and met him one afternoon when he appeared at Vie Bohème to look at everything with what seemed a discerning eye but then, to my dismay, he bought nothing.

  We have also withstood visits from Jayne’s friend Colin, though she does not know how much I know of her outings with him. She left her phone at home one afternoon when she went out for a long walk, and I read the text messages he’d sent to her, at first inadvertently, the iPhone chiming on the table next to where I sat looking at e-mail on my phone, no code to lock her own against intrusive eyes, I discovered then (though this has since changed). Colin had written to confirm an assignation later in the week, and when I opened the text window, a long thread unspooled before me, many exchanges over several months, numerous unequivocal facts about their ongoing liaison. This man from her life in New York has been coming to my city for business, and for pleasure. I will admit that you should not come to Paris if you have no talent for pleasure. That his pleasures are taken with Jayne at his side, I am not so thrilled about this, but it is to me she returns every night, and she only sees him every couple of months. How much, realistically, can I expect from her? If you look at this state of affairs in a harsh, truthful light, she has been with him six, maybe seven afternoons out of the last year.

  If you are practical in this manner, even about perceived betrayals, maybe they are not so hard to live with.

  This was one way my ex-wife and I tried to justify ourselves when we did something that upset the other. An hour or two with someone else, here and there. Why should this matter as much as it always ends up mattering? Why is the body such a faithless, straining b
east? But that second question belies a bias—that it is wrong to please the body, and also, that what pleases the body, in my experience, sometimes ends up hurting some other body.

  If you look at your life, you see that it is filled with routine tasks and obligations—with phone calls and dishwashing and cooking, with tooth brushing, showering, driving, dental appointments, food shopping, standing in line, typing, walking, waiting at stoplights, opening umbrellas when it has just begun to rain. How not at times to submit to temptation, to an occasion to veer off from the rote and responsible?

  I for one do not want to die thinking about the beautiful women I had a chance to be close to but turned away from. No one who loves women would want to die that way. Because surely that is a miserable fate, perhaps the most miserable.

  This is not to say that I am leaping every hour from one bed to the next. Nonetheless, if an attractive opportunity presents itself, I think you are indeed a fool to turn it away. I do not mean every opportunity. Only the best ones. I see the libidinous glint in my son’s eyes too. He should understand me better, being in possession of his own blunt instrument of passion and occasional dishonor. He thinks I am the one who deserves the blame for his mother’s and my divorce. Not true. Anne-Claire, like many beautiful women, had more admirers when she was younger than she knew what to do with.

  Some of Jayne’s questions for me, ones she has asked sometimes with a catch in her voice:

  What were you doing in Paris during the six days that I was waiting to fly here from New York?

  What is between you and Sofia?

  Who are the other women in your life that I haven’t met, besides your daughter and ex-wife?

  Who was the woman who went with you to the nudist beach in Italy?

  Why do you not go home more often to see your sister and the vineyard where you grew up?

  What do you get from the artists you support, other than a pledge to continue making work?

  What took you so long to get home tonight?

  What happened between you and André’s wife?

  How many other women have lived here with you before me?

  What do you really think of my paintings? My future as an artist?

  What are the real reasons you asked me to move to Paris with you?

  And again, always: What is the point of any one life?

  Those are the frames and the following are the pictures that fill them.

  CHAPTER 2

  Young Artists

  If you have money or uncommon good looks, if you are healthy and good company, if you attract the kind of attention that other people alternately envy and admire, you possess the sort of advantages that may permit you to enjoy a happy life. Even so, permission is not the same as a guarantee. Money and a handsome face make things easier, but this does not mean that easier is always better or enough. I am not claiming to have lived through terrible hardship or to have failed at finding love and friendship. But I have enjoyed some of the advantages noted above, and have lived contentedly for most of my adult life in Paris, first alone in a two-room apartment in the attic of a bookstore on rue Gay-Lussac, and later with Anne-Claire in a five-room apartment on rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève when she was still at the Sorbonne and I was painting the canvases I succeeded in hanging on few people’s walls but our own. Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie were born on this sloped street, with its disheveled students streaming in and out of the universities and lycées on the adjacent avenues and boulevards and narrow, crowded passageways.

  We lived in the fifth arrondissement for several years before moving to a larger and sunnier apartment in the sixth near place Saint-Sulpice, a building with a concierge who stood for hours most afternoons in the courtyard doorway, waiting for her husband to return from the antique postcards and stationery stall they ran with their grown son at the marché aux puces near the Porte de Clignancourt. She was also there to watch the tourists and delivery boys and residents coming and going, her greying hair combed and curled against her pink-rouged cheeks, her fingers stained from many daily cigarettes. This was Madame Latour, whose real surname was Lasky, which I learned after a year or so of living above her and her family, when a letter meant for her was mistakenly placed by the postman in Anne-Claire’s and my mailbox.

  When I gave it to her that evening, asking if she knew whose it was, she nodded. “Mine,” she murmured with a small, embarrassed laugh. She didn’t meet my eyes. But what did I care if she and her husband, having emigrated from Poland forty years earlier, as I eventually learned, had chosen a more French-sounding name? Isn’t everyone, to some extent, trying to leave behind their past, their former selves, with all the ancillary pain and doubts? Madame Latour could have asked me to call her Madame Mitterand for all it mattered to me. She was kind to my children, to Anne-Claire and me. Kindness is not so common, you realize, as you leave behind childhood and move farther into adulthood, with its treacherous landscapes, its ambushes from enemies known and unknown. There is also the aging body and the sense at times that you will be crowded out, or worse, trampled, by the sheer mass of other people alive at any one time. Of a hundred people, two hundred, a thousand, how many names, how many faces, will you remember a day later, a month later, a year?

  Among the two or three hundred faces that passed before my eyes in New York on the November evening when André and I were expecting rainstorms and poor attendance for our new gallery’s vernissage, Jayne’s face was the one that stood out among all the others. “I would like to paint you,” I might have said if I were still a painter. How many men have used that line to lure a beautiful woman into bed? It is not a bad line, as these things go. There are certainly worse: You remind me of my daughter. Or, May I buy that zucchini for you? And afterward buy you a drink?

  She had an alert but soft look, her eyes a little tired, as if she had spent some time that day being scolded by a boss (or a therapist?). She was unsure of herself and her beauty. Whatever it says about me, I like that. I admire confidence but am more impressed by modesty, or maybe it is humility. In any case, the awareness that one has limitations, while at the same time believing they might be overcome—this is a quality that I find both rare and good. Her hair had been cut recently, I also remember thinking. Its satiny ends gleamed a rich dark brown. She stood very straight, her posture a dancer’s, though she told me later that the only dancing she had done as a girl had been in her room to pop music, alone or with her little sister, and later with her girlfriends, the door now locked against annoying younger siblings. I could sense too that she did not sleep soundly every night—her mind seemed to be clicking away with unsolved or unsolvable problems. It was clear to me that she did not have a lot of money, despite how well-groomed she was, how carefully her blouse and skirt had been chosen, how well they fit her young, lithe figure. Having money yourself, you often learn to spot its absence, and the gestures toward it, in others.

  Perhaps the most interesting detail about the way she circulated through the gallery: when she looked at the paintings, she knew something about how they had been made. The fingers of one hand tapped her thigh, a nervous, impatient motion she might not have realized she was making. In profile, I could see that her breasts were not large, but they were high and round, and I could imagine their weight in my hands, their softness too. These thoughts and impressions form so fast in a man’s mind—much faster than it takes to write them all down. Her face reminded me of some of Renoir’s young models, her cheeks flushed, her skin soft and clear. I wondered for a moment if she was already married but could not see a ring.

  Then, unexpectedly, twice I turned to find her looking at me too. The first time you exchange a meaningful glance with a beautiful woman, well, I suspect it is obvious—this is the sort of thrill it is difficult to imagine yourself ever tiring of. I was in that gallery to sell art, and I was certain that she wasn’t there to buy any of it, only to judge it, but I didn’t care. Other people would buy it, and that night, several did.

  I also f
elt sure that if I asked her to dinner she would say yes. She would say yes to most everything I asked, once she trusted me. Or rather, once she trusted me enough.

  Something that is not often discussed: when a person falls in love, this does not mean he (or she) will no longer be in love with someone else. Love is an expansive element, and like helium and other gases, when fire is applied, it becomes volatile. But these concerns were all far away on that evening. When you meet an exciting new woman, you think about her, not the other woman or women you love, wherever they are. I sound guilty of something, I’m guessing, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t married anymore. The woman I was last close to, Sofia, was across the Atlantic, traveling through Italy and Spain with a friend, a man who was more than a friend, though Sofia claimed she did not take him seriously. He was a banker, not an artist, not a gallery owner, not an actor, or a director, or a fashion designer. “How can I take a banker seriously?” she asked me, laughing at my jealousy.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “But you do take his money seriously, I am sure.”

  “Oh, Laurent,” she said. “Always thinking the worst of me!”

  Did her banker know how talented she was? Did he know that if she did not allow herself to get pregnant and distracted, she would have an important, maybe even a tremendous, career?

  One of the reasons I have allowed myself to become close to Jayne is because she is not interested, at least not at this juncture in her life, in having a child. We had a minor argument about my view that artists, especially female artists, should put off childrearing for as long as possible, or at least until they and their work are firmly established, although that often takes many years, and there is of course the risk that an older woman will not be able to conceive when she makes up her mind to do so. Last July, Jayne and I went to see Sidonie Clément, one of the three artists to whom I give a couple of thousand euros every month. She lives in an apartment off the boulevard Vincent-Auriol and paints in a closet-size second bedroom, its graying white walls fissured with cracks.