Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  No. If he wanted to find out more, it would have to be through Jacob Jardine. She had given him the cue. He could talk to him about Michel St Loup. But Dr. Jardine was clever. Too clever for any easy ploys. That much he had realised all too clearly in that abortive interview he had had with him two days ago, when he had pretended to be in search of an analyst. Perhaps Katherine could ease his entry, make it seem less contrived. After all, it was possible to be looking for an analyst and also to be interested in a French painter of the 1930s. The two things did not necessarily make an equation in which the missing factor was duplicity.

  The taxi bumped to a stop. They had arrived. Alexei helped Katherine out. That touch. He dropped her hand quickly.

  ‘I hope you’ll come to Boston,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll have an invitation sent round to your hotel.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Alexei felt like an awkward school boy. ‘Thank you. Thank you for keeping me company.’

  He was gone. Katherine leaned on the door, surprised at the way her heart was racing. He hadn’t kissed her. Hadn’t even tried. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had taken her home and she had felt even the ghost of that desire. And now… She laughed at herself. Laughed at her own disappointment. He was probably married. Attached. The thought suddenly presented itself to her. Of course. What a fool she was. Some men were faithful. Her disappointment deepened. Yet he hadn’t felt married. Hadn’t said anything to suggest it.

  She tried to put him out of her mind, but as she slipped her clothes off, his presence came back to her with a little tremor. Perhaps, she forced herself to confront it, it was all to do with Carlo. The fact that Alexei was from Rome, Italian. It charged his atmosphere. And there had been too much of Carlo’s ghost recently, what with her father and Natalie emphasizing his existence, or rather its lack. She tried to look at it coldly. No, she refused the thought. Alexei was nothing like Carlo. The shape of his intelligence, his sensitivity, the way he had listened. No.

  Early the next afternoon, he rang her at the Gallery.

  ‘Alexei Gismondi,’ Amelia put her hand over the receiver, ‘Will you take it?’

  Katherine nodded, stilled herself.

  ‘Might you be free for a drink after work?’ his voice was distant, punctilious.

  ‘I’ll just check my appointments book,’ Katherine went through the charade, knowing that she would cancel anything, even a date with Natalie. ‘About seven.’

  ‘Fine,’ he paused, chuckled, sounding suddenly very close, ‘I thought I might have another try at persuading you to part with the St Loup.’

  ‘You can try. But I don’t think you’ll get anywhere,’ Katherine said tartly, a little miffed at the direction of his intentions.

  ‘I’m a determined man, Katherine.’ He laughed.

  ‘And I’m a stubborn woman. Until seven then.’ she hung up.

  ‘Who’s not going to get anywhere?’ her friend Nora Harper looked at her curiously. ‘Got a new admirer?’

  ‘It’s not what you think, Nora,’ Katherine put her off. ‘It’s about a canvas.’

  ‘Oh yes? Don’t believe a word of it. You have a secretive look to you today, Katherine Jardine.’

  Katherine shrugged. ‘And you have too fertile an imagination. Now let’s get back to work, shall we?’

  Nora sighed and picked up the telephone at her desk.

  Katherine watched her settle into another chatty conversation with yet another member of the Press about the launch of the the Thomas Sachs Collection. She had known Nora ever since her days at MOMA, when Nora had been married to one of the Museum Trustees whom she had now divorced. A tall, curvacious blonde with a taste for extravagant clothes and men, Nora was a friend without quite being an intimate. She knew everyone who was anyone in that world where art and high finance meet, and when she had offered to do the occasional PR job for Katherine, Katherine had accepted with alacrity. There could be no one better than Nora.

  They had another kind of unspoken arrangement. If Katherine wanted to get rid of a man whose attentions were becoming a nuisance, but whom she couldn’t afford to alienate, she called in Nora. A vivacious foil to Katherine’s coolness, she would deflect the man’s desires and assuage his ego. Katherine sometimes wondered what she did to these men. She suspected Nora had them for breakfast. But she seemed to need that breakfast, and there was always another man on the horizon.

  Nora Harper was still there when Alexei arrived. And for once, as she introduced them, Katherine wished that her friend were slightly less seductive. It was a new feeling this. It made her uncomfortable. As did seeing Alexei, now that he had occupied a space in her imagination. No other man had lodged himself there in quite that way since Carlo’s death.

  She avoided his eyes. Took in, instead, the dark open-necked shirt, the casual cut of the pale linen suit. Her voice sounded odd as she said his name.

  ‘Alexei Gismondi?’ Nora repeated it, smiled sweetly, looked up at him admiringly. ‘The director?’

  Alexei nodded hesitantly.

  ‘I am pleased to meet you. There’s a film of yours playing on the West Side, isn’t there? I saw it last week. Wonderful,’ Nora breathed. She moved closer to him.

  Alexei bowed slightly, signalling his thanks.

  Katherine kicked herself. Why hadn’t she known that? Nora was always in touch with everything. ‘Shall we go, Alexei?’ she heard herself saying. ‘I mustn’t be too late tonight. I fly to Boston early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He murmured goodbye to Nora. And as he did so, Katherine suddenly felt ashamed. Perhaps he would prefer to carry on talking to her friend. She was behaving ridiculously.

  ‘Would you like to join us for a drink, Nora?’ she asked halfheartedly.

  ‘Mmm,’ Nora responded with alacrity.

  Alexei flashed her a strange look. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Harper,’ he said distinctly, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but I think Katherine and I need to talk over some things alone.’

  Nora glanced questioningly at Katherine.

  ‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten. Of course,’ Katherine smiled tremulously. ‘You’ll lock up Nora? I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

  Nora nodded. ‘But we’ll see you in Boston, won’t we, Mr Gismondi,’ she put an invitation into his hands.

  Alexei smiled. Polite, formal. ‘Perhaps,’ he ushered Katherine out.

  When they were in the street, he put his hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘For a moment there, I had just the tiniest suspicion that you might be avoiding me.’

  Katherine smiled, ‘Well, I don’t want to be talked out of one of my pictures. I know how persuasive you Romans can be.’ The words as they tripped out of her staggered her. Was it really she who was referring to Carlo so lightly. She stiffened a little.

  He looked at her oddly. ‘Don’t worry. I know the difference between persuasion and coercion. I’ve had my lessons in female freedom.’

  She was intrigued. ‘Tell me. What kind of lessons?’

  He didn’t answer straight away. His face was taut, etched with melancholy.

  They walked, their steps in tune, oblivious to the Manhattan bustle. Each caught up in private thoughts, yet intensely aware of the other’s presence. Katherine pointed out a wine bar. ‘Shall we go in here? It’s not too noisy.’

  He laughed suddenly, ‘So you can hear me persuade you.’

  ‘Perhaps that too,’ she met him on it. ‘But first you’ll have to tell me about those lessons.’

  He looked at her seriously as they sat down at a corner table of the mezzanine, away from the crowd. ‘It was an attempted joke. It’s nothing.’

  She felt she wanted to touch his face, wipe away the sadness. ‘Tell me anyway,’ she said softly.

  Alexei shrugged, sipped his wine reflectively. ‘I was thinking of a woman friend who once pointed out to me in no uncertain terms how a man’s persuasion can take on the oppressiveness of tyranny for a woman.’

  ‘I see,’ Katherine thought about it, hesitated
. ‘Is she a good friend, this woman?’

  ‘She was more than a friend.’

  Katherine searched his face. ‘Was?’ she asked a little urgently. She suddenly needed to know.

  ‘She’s dead now,’ he said flatly. ‘She committed suicide. In prison.’

  There. It was said now. He had said it aloud to another human being. Alexei studied her. Watched the grey eyes grow wide, the tremor at the corner of her lips. ‘Like your mother. She killed herself.’

  ‘I didn’t love my mother.’ The words spilled out of her. ‘It’s not the same,’ she didn’t know why she said it to this stranger. ‘I didn’t care. I had left home by then.’

  Alexei gazed at her. All at once, he saw the little girl in her. The hurt. The determination. He kept himself from taking her hand.

  ‘Why did your mother do it?’ he asked after a long moment.

  Katherine shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t really know her. She wasn’t well. She suffered from breakdowns.’

  Alexei tried to put together the picture Katherine’s words conjured up with the face he had seen in the painting, in photographs. But Katherine’s features blocked out Sylvie’s. He was making her miserable. ‘I guess we never really know other people,’ he said. ‘Only fragments of them. The fragments which collide with us.’

  ‘I would like to know you,’ Katherine murmured, without a trace of coyness.

  His eyes lit up. ‘You might not like what you found.’ He laughed.

  She joined him, suddenly merry, ‘I’d have to take my chances.’ Her words astonished her. They were so out of character. But she felt light-headed. She giggled.

  ‘Would you take me, could we go and see your film? Together? I haven’t seen that one yet.’ As soon as she said it, she realised that it was what she wanted more than anything else, to sit with him in the dark, watching his imagination take shape on the screen.

  Alexei demurred, ‘It’s my first film. Old now. And I thought you had to get back.’

  Her face fell, ‘I could ring home,’ she said tentatively. ‘But only if you…’

  ‘Of course, we can go,’ he interrupted her.

  They took a cab cross town, arrived at the Studio a few moments late and sat towards the back. Katherine watched the screen avidly. Southern Italy. Dark, brooding. An atmosphere of claustrophobia. Heavy. Oppressive. A young woman, her face sensitive, closed and then flickering into openness. Life. The images carefully framed in a wealth of sensuous detail.

  She was riveted by the film’s unfolding. Alexei had made this. Alexei, the man beside her. He had told this woman’s story. He understood. Without thinking, she reached for his hand, and then aware of her gesture withdrew. He wrapped his arm round her. So warm. Katherine cried. Cried for the woman and herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to him when they were outside. ‘Thank you.’ It was all she could think of.

  When the taxi pulled up at her door, she asked him, ‘Would you like to come in and look at the St. Loup again?’

  He stopped her at the threshold, took her hand. ‘Katherine,’ his voice was urgent, ‘I’m not reliable. You must understand that. I’m not reliable.’ Rosa had said that to him, he remembered. Rosa, so different from the woman who now smiled at him, returned the pressure of his fingers.

  ‘My venerable father has led me to believe that no one is altogether reliable. Least of all oneself,’ Katherine had hoped for wryness, achieved only a huskiness.

  He came in, watched her mutely as she put Doreen into a taxi, checked on a sleeping Natalie.

  ‘And now, while I rustle up a snack, you can go and feast your eyes on Sylvie Kowalska,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t bundle her under your arm and disappear though. I won’t allow that.’

  Alexei in Katherine’s study reflected that he must be mad. He looked at the portrait cursorily and then sat down in Katherine’s reading chair. He would tell her. Go and tell her now. She was stronger than he had thought yesterday. He would tell her the story, his suspicions. Perhaps they were all nonsense. After all, he had so little to go on.

  Sylvie’s eyes called him back. He stared at the portrait. Glanced in a small ornate corner mirror. His eyes. Her eyes. Both trapped. He felt the picture was laughing at him as he walked down the stairs.

  He could hear Katherine’s footsteps in the living room. He paused at the door, watched her as if in slow motion. With his filmmaker’s eye, he saw her bend gracefully to deposit a tray on the low coffee table. Saw the length of her legs, the curve of her back, a pallor of bared nape as her hair tumbled forward. He could have stopped himself, but he didn’t want to. Once, just once, to hold her in his arms. He reached her as she turned.

  A kiss. A fleeting eternity. Body moulded to body. Lips to lips. A hunger. A fragrance. Nothing else.

  And then, in the distance, a cry, insistent. ‘Mommie.’

  Alexei released her. Their eyes met. A moment of recognition. Long, slender fingers traced the line of his cheek. Wonder. He felt hers, returned it. Beautiful. She was so beautiful.

  Melancholy hovered over him. ‘I’ll let myself out,’ he said. He thought, perhaps he hoped, she might restrain him, but Natalie’s call sounded again louder. Her lips curled. ‘Boston. Yes?’

  Alexei nodded. ‘And perhaps you might arrange for me to see some of the pictures in your father’s collection? If it’s no trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all.’ She gave him a lingering smile.

  Jacob Jardine put a glass into Alexei’s hand and looked at him quizzically. ‘And so we meet again, Mr. Gismondi?’

  ‘Yes, I hope I’m not putting you out,’ Alexei leaned back in the armchair and let his eyes peruse the walls of Jacob’s living room. ‘I had no idea when we first met that you were a friend of Michel St Loup’s and that Sylvie Kowalska was your wife.’ There, he had said it. And now he could look the man in the face. ‘I happened on his portrait of your wife, the one in Katherine’s possession, at an exhibition in Rome. It’s a superb painting. It made me want to see more.’

  ‘Ah yes, a fine picture,’ a shadow flickered over Jacob’s face and then his features settled into their more habitual irony. ‘Yes, and like all fine pictures, perhaps, it’s origins were not altogether untroubled.’

  Alexei waited for him to continue, had to prod him. ‘I noticed a tear, perhaps a cut in the canvas, when I looked at it more closely the other day.’

  ‘You are very observant, Mr. Gismondi,’ Jacob glanced at him curiously, ‘My wife, you see, though she was not then quite my wife, was not altogether enamoured of the portrait and made a little stab at destroying it.’ Jacob paused. The scene at Roussillon he had not thought of for so many years suddenly played itself before him with all its force. Sylvie’s pain. The poignancy of it. His own anger. His confusion.

  The young man’s voice brought him back.

  ‘If it’s not indiscreet of me to ask, was St Loup having an affair with Sylvie Kowalska at the time?’

  Jacob shrugged, ‘I don’t think so, no. But what is an affair? And how is one ever to know these things? Particularly with a woman like Sylvie. She was a very special being, the young Sylvie Kowalska,’ Jacob smiled, ‘as all these images of her testify,’ he waved his hand round the room. ‘I can only tell you that St Loup denied the success of any affair with her,’ he chuckled. ‘But the portraits he did of her at that time were some of his best and certainly they drew on some of the more troubled bonds artists sometimes have with their models. Look around, Mr. Gismondi, please. Feel free.’

  Alexei strolled. ‘Yes, a beautiful woman, a very special woman.’ He turned back to Jacob. ‘I think I might have met her once,’ he said casually, ‘I’m not certain. I was very young. But I think it was her. She came to interview me for a book she was writing. Under a pen name.’ He tried to hide the eagerness with which he awaited Jacob’s response.

  Jacob rose, paced for a moment. ‘It’s possible. She was working on a book when she died. I was never allowed to see any of it and she must have torn up
what there was. Nothing was ever found amidst her papers.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alexei sensed Jacob’s distress, ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  A short sharp laugh came from Jacob, ‘No, no. Don’t worry, Mr. Gismondi. That’s the way of things. What is art history for some is life for others. Come, let me show you. There are other paintings in my study.

  ‘There,’ he switched on a light, then another. ‘Look your fill. It’s one of the few pleasures of old age, you know. One becomes a repository of the century’s history. The young come to see one. Ask innocent questions,’ he chuckled. ‘I even have some of my wife’s own work here, though she was better at destroying it than courting recognition,’ he rummaged amidst some folders, placed one on the desk. ‘Do look. Who knows? You might find inspiration in them. I like them very much myself, though they are not to my daughter’s taste.’

  Alexei strolled round the room examining paintings. He did not allow himself to approach the folder which beckoned to him too quickly. His pulse felt erratic. So many questions pressed on him. At last, just before he dipped into the folder, he tried another, keeping his tone as even as he could, ‘Your wife was Polish. I was born there too. It was one of the reasons, I believe, that she came to see me.’

  ‘Yes, yes that could very well be,’ Jacob mused, leaned into his desk chair. ‘She spent very little time in Poland, left when she was still a child and only returned once for a matter of months just after the war,’ he cleared his throat. ‘But childhood is such a crucial time, as my profession has been at pains to note, that she was always preoccupied with things Polish,’ he paused, followed Alexei’s gaze, ‘Her drawings have a certain something, don’t you think?’

  Alexei nodded. He couldn’t trust his voice. Amongst Sylvie’s fantastic bestiary, he had just stumbled on a sketch which he knew must be of himself, a boy, a boy in a room which could only be his, a room with a screen and projector. There was another drawing of this boy, and then amidst scorpions and unicorns and phoenixes and mermaids, an unusual sketch of a room with beds, a man in uniform, his face indistinguishable, but at the corner of the drawing, two words, Makarov and Lublin.