Paris, He Said
Page 29
“This is the artist, Jayne Marks,” said Laurent, walking over with Serge, who smiled and nodded once, very polite and proper.
I climbed down from the desk’s high stool and offered my hand, conscious of both men’s assessing gazes. I wanted the banker to find me as talented and as attractive as Sofia, but I was embarrassed by this impulse. One of the lessons I’d been learning during the year and a half with Laurent was that I probably wouldn’t ever feel confident that I knew a man’s true thoughts and feelings, not the ones I was attracted to.
“Very nice to meet you,” said Serge. “I am looking forward to seeing more of your work soon.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s so nice of you to say.”
“It is the truth.” He smiled.
“We both thank you for buying Jayne’s painting, as does my business partner, André,” said Laurent.
“It is a gift for my girlfriend,” said Serge. “You know her, of course.”
Laurent’s expression didn’t change. “Yes, I know Sofia.” He sounded so patient. It was costing him, I thought, to be so agreeable with this good-looking younger man who also had the money to spoil his sexy girlfriend as much as he cared to.
“It’s for her?” I said, trying to hide my surprise.
Serge nodded. “She came home after your vernissage and told me how much she liked your paintings.”
“I had no idea if they’d sell,” I said. “And not as quickly as they did, that’s for sure.”
“I knew they would sell,” said Laurent. “But that is part of my job.” He glanced at Serge. “The painting is in the back room, packaged and ready. I can help you take it to your car if you would like.”
“No, no, I think I can manage it on my own,” said Serge.
I could see that Laurent wanted Serge to follow him, but the banker stayed where he was, looking at me inquisitively while Laurent disappeared into the back office. He was gone for no more than a minute, Serge asking me during Laurent’s absence if I minded the rain, which we’d had all week, and who were the artists I’d been most influenced by?
“Gustav Klimt,” I said, “and my coexhibitor, Susan Kraut. Jacqueline Marval too.”
“Klimt, really?” said Serge. “But your work isn’t very much like Klimt’s.”
Laurent reappeared then, carrying my painting, which earlier in the day had been packaged for light travel and handling. “It doesn’t have to be,” he said, answering for me. “An influence is often like a spice in a stew that you do not know you are tasting, but without it, there would be no depth.”
Serge reddened slightly. “Yes, I suppose. You can see that I am not the artist in this room.”
I smiled. “You should be relieved about that.”
“Oh, I am,” he said, his grin foxy. “Bankers have almost no talent. We are only good at counting money.”
“Or losing it in bad investments,” said Laurent.
Serge paused. “Yes, some bankers do,” he said. “That is true.”
After Serge left, carrying off Vicky and Sheldon to their new home with Sofia, a revelation I was still reeling from a bit, Laurent presented me with a check for my percentage of the painting sales. It was more money than I’d ever been given at one time, but I tried not to ogle it. “This should make you happy for a little while,” he said, suppressing a smile.
I laughed. “Yes, for an hour or two at least.”
“What is the expression? Don’t spend it all in one place?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I won’t. Two places, for sure. Maybe three.”
“Good,” he said. “Then you will be just fine.” He put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head.
“Thank you, Laurent. Thank you for everything,” I said.
“C’est mon plaisir, ma chérie. It is what I am here for.”
Within an hour after Serge left, it was time to close the gallery and go home. I had a big check in my handbag, money that I’d already decided to put away for the future. We rode home in a taxi, through the streets of the first and eighth arrondissements, and I stared out the window at the stone buildings already illuminated for the night ahead, at the people in their soft spring coats, some of them hatless and smiling to themselves in the light evening rain. I had tears in my eyes, joy washing over and through me. It was a temporary state of grace, this upwelling of suspense and happiness, but I knew that every feeling I’d ever had was and would be temporary.
POSTSCRIPT
About a week after Serge picked up Vicky and Sheldon at Vie Bohème, the intercom buzzed around nine o’clock. Laurent and I had finished dinner a half hour earlier, and he was now watching some news program while I worked in my studio on a painting I’d started a couple of weeks earlier, one of Jeanne-Lucie and Marcelle from a photo I’d taken at Place des Vosges the previous fall, Marcelle staring into the camera from where she stood a few inches in front of her mother. Jeanne-Lucie was looking to the left, toward what I remember to be a group of Japanese tourists, the men in dark suits, the women in hats and pretty silk dresses, all of them having just laughed in a loud, jubilant burst.
Laurent got up to answer the intercom, and I froze as I heard the cheerful, static-riven voice that charged into our apartment from the street: “C’est moi, Sofia.” Then a very short pause before she added, “Et Serge aussi.”
Laurent buzzed them in without a reply.
Above all else, I remember feeling irritated. I was not dressed to receive visitors, especially ones as beautiful as Sofia and her banker boyfriend. I stuck my brush in the jar of diluted solvent that I kept near the easel and called to Laurent, “Were you expecting them?”
“No,” he said. “I was not.” He did not sound bothered, though. When I went into the hall, I saw him still standing by the intercom, and he seemed only to be distracted, perhaps a little perplexed. He hadn’t yet changed out of his work clothes—a black cotton-and-silk shirt, slate-gray pants. He was in stocking feet and had made no move to put on the shoes he’d left in the hall by the door.
I was in jeans and the ratty blue T-shirt I frequently painted in. I felt resentful of Sofia for dropping by unannounced, and wondered if Laurent was lying, if he’d known they were coming but hadn’t thought to warn me, though I didn’t really think he had. I went into the bedroom and pulled off the T-shirt, flinging it onto the bed, before putting on another blouse. I chose a grape-colored V-neck, thin and close-fitting. I quickly looked in the mirror over the dresser and pulled my hair up higher in the clip I had subdued it with earlier.
Soon Sofia and Serge were ringing the doorbell and Laurent was letting them in, their laughter and greetings carrying down the hall as I came out of the bedroom. Sofia was wearing an emerald-green dress, and as she had on the night of my opening, expensive silver jewelry; she looked like a starlet, her face shining with almost belligerent good health, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the admiration of everyone who saw her. Serge was in jeans and a black sweater; he was also aglow—in his case, in the lone, bright light of Sofia’s regard. “We’re not going to stay,” she announced after I said hello and pretended to be happy to see her. “But I wanted to give this painting to you, Jayne. I made it just for you.” She offered me a small square brown-papered package.
I glanced at Laurent. He was looking at her, his face relaxed with pleasure, and although I tried, I couldn’t catch his eye. It all felt like an ambush, and I was so jealous of her, of the feelings Laurent obviously still had for her. At the same time, I hated myself for reacting this way and knew that I didn’t deserve his fidelity. It bothered me too that she didn’t seem at all threatened by me, even here, in what had become my home.
“You made me a painting?” I asked dimly.
Why? I thought, pulling off the package’s wrapping, all four of us silent. The thick paper was heavy and intractable in my hands.
Sofia’s painting was of a little black-and-auburn dachshund, its eyes deep brown and expressive, almost entreating. It was perfect—adora
ble, really—but how strange that its creator would think I would welcome her gift wholeheartedly, as if I had no idea of her history with Laurent.
“Her name is Madame Tussaud,” said Sofia. “She belonged to my grandmother. Laurent has told me that you like dachshunds. They are my favorite dogs too.”
“She’s beautiful,” I said slowly, not looking at Sofia. “But are you sure? You should sell this painting. Someone would probably pay a lot for it.”
She laughed. “Oh, no, no, no. Sometimes I like to paint for my friends. I love your painting, the one Serge bought for me, and I wanted you to have one of mine.”
There were, of course, six of her paintings in the hallway already, just beyond where we stood, but I didn’t mention that. She knew they were there.
“For your studio,” she said. “Or the bedroom?” She laughed, darting a look at Laurent. “The kind of dog that will not wake you up in the middle of the night.”
He laughed too. I looked at Serge, who was smiling, oblivious, it seemed, to any subtext.
“You will have to come and visit her,” said Laurent. “Maybe you can both come for dinner later this month. Jayne likes to cook.”
“Do you?” said Sofia. “I do too.”
Of course you do, I almost said. “I do like to cook, but I think we’d be better off going to a restaurant. I’m not sure I want to subject you to any of the new recipes I’ve been trying lately.”
Sofia nudged Serge’s side. “He will eat anything,” she said. “And I at least will taste anything.”
They left soon after this, refusing Laurent’s offer of a drink. They were going to see a movie, a new Almodóvar film. “Would you like to come too?” Sofia asked, looking at me before Laurent.
“No, but thank you for asking,” I said. “I should get back to work.”
“Oh, yes, go back to your work so that you can make me another brilliant painting,” said Sofia, her smile unforced.
After they left, I looked at Laurent for a long moment, waiting for him to say something for himself, but he only made a show of admiring Sofia’s painting of her grandmother’s dog. “Very meticulous and honest,” he said. “As always. Very nice of her to give it to you too, don’t you think?”
“I don’t understand why she would,” I said, exhausted by her clever act of one-upmanship, or whatever it was supposed to be.
“Sofia is your fan,” said Laurent, “and naturally, she hopes that you will like her work too.”
“There are six of her paintings here already,” I said.
“Yes, but this one is yours. The others are not.”
For a moment I considered leaving the apartment, going to Jeanne-Lucie’s, but even though I believed that she would have welcomed me, I did nothing but go down the hall and into the study. I thought of Colin in New York and wondered if he was thinking of me too, lying in his own bed—alone or with another woman. I knew that he could very well be seeing someone new—his bedside lamp off, the tiny basketball hoop perched like a bird of prey on the back of his door, his new girlfriend’s head against his shoulder.
I was too tired and distracted to paint, and I didn’t feel like sketching either. I pushed my easel against the wall and lay down on the rug in the center of the room, first pulling off the drop cloth I always covered it with when I was working. For a pillow, I wadded up the old sweatshirt that I’d tossed onto the desk chair earlier and lay down with a bitter lump rising in my throat, the door locked against Laurent, but I knew that he wasn’t likely to come to check on me. Eventually, maybe after twenty minutes of brooding, I fell asleep.
It was very late, the middle of the night, when I awoke with a stiff back and my right arm tingling painfully. I got up and pulled my easel away from the wall to look at what I had so far finished of the painting of Jeanne-Lucie and her daughter. There was no movement on rue du Général-Foy, no sense that there ever had been or would be again. Morning felt as distant and unreachable as the life I had left behind in New York. I stared at the faces I had begun to paint on the canvas and hoped that they would become what I wanted them to—I loved the hint of annoyance in Jeanne-Lucie’s profile and the candor of Marcelle’s stare; in it was her absolute desire to shield her mother from influences she could feel but not yet name.
Down the hall, I imagined Laurent in bed, still as a corpse, but when I went into the bedroom, he wasn’t there. I looked in the other rooms, and he wasn’t in them either. I stood in the dark hallway for a long time, looking at the outline of Sofia’s six portraits, each obscured in shadow. I stayed there until my heartbeat slowed and I knew that I would be okay, that I could stand it all, for now. The bed I had slept in for the last eleven months was comfortable and harbored its familiar scents. I could see that Laurent had been lying in it for a little while before he’d disappeared, and I wanted very badly to be able to go back to sleep; it seemed important that I not be awake when Laurent came home from wherever he had gone, from doing whatever he had done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury deserves at least a year off after all the work she has done with me on this novel, as does Lisa Bankoff at ICM, who helped to shape it from the very beginning. Sheryl Johnston remains a most patient, generous friend and role model.
My parents, Susan Sneed and Terry Webb, and Melanie Brown continue to offer their steadfast love and support.
Thank you to Susan Kraut, who is an extraordinary painter and a giving friend. I feel very fortunate to have been able to write about her work (though the events described in this book are fictional).
Thank you to Francis Noel-Thomas, who read early pages and offered helpful suggestions and details.
I must also thank the kind and supportive people at Bloomsbury, among them George Gibson, Lea Beresford, and Sara Mercurio; Daniel Kirschen, Dolores Walker, Leonard Sneed, Floyd Skloot, Stuart Dybek, Anita Gewurz, Denise Simons, Adam McOmber, Chrissy Kolaya, John Buckvold, Randy Albers, Randy Richardson, Mike Levine, Alison and April Umminger, Bob Bledsoe, Carolyn Kuebler, Noelle Neu, Beth Eck, Dorthe Andersen, Melissa Spoharski, Ruth Hutchison, Greg Fraser, Melissa Fraterrigo, Paulette Livers, Patricia Grace King, Taigen and Naomi Leighton, Patricia McNair, Cindy Martin, Cindi Rupp Rand, Don DeGrazia, Julie Deardorff, Barry Benson, Mary Dixon, Debra Gwartney, Bill Hageman, Bill Weber, Ann and Tom Tennery, Karri Offstein, Angela Pneuman, Jason Klein, Kim Brun, Ross Werland, Dave Wieczorek, Lauren Klopack, Melanie Feerst, Debra Stephens, Peggy Shinner, Gina Frangello, Robin Bluestone-Miller, Mare Swallow, Javier Ramirez, Felice Dublon, Don Evans, Suzanne Clores, Joel Drucker, Mona Oommen, Marlene Garrison, Natalia Nebel, and Alexandra Sheckler.
My students and colleagues at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—thank you too, for your friendship and support.
Thank you to the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and to Marilyn Berling, Ann, Amy, Andy, and Richard Tinkham and their families.
And thank you again, dear Adam T.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Christine Sneed’s story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won the Grace Paley Prize and Ploughshares’ John C. Zacharis Award, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her debut novel, Little Known Facts, won the Society of Midland Authors award for best adult fiction and was named a top ten debut novel of 2013 by Booklist. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New England Review. Sneed was a French major in college, and for several years worked at the School of the Art Institute. She now teaches at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
By the same author
Little Known Facts
Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (stories)
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© Christine Sneed, 2015
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-62040-692-2
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ePub: 978-1-62040-694-6
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sneed, Christine, 1971–
Paris, he said : a novel / Christine Sneed. — First U.S. edition.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-1-62040-692-2 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-62040-693-9 (paperback) –
ISBN 978-1-62040-694-6 (ebook)
I Title.
PS3619.N523P37 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014039546
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