by Ted Mooney
His self-certainty, his aversion to small talk, this retreat into physical activity: all of it was deeply familiar to her. Opening the refrigerator, she found a bag of coffee beans, a quart of milk, some leeks, and three eggs. This, too, was familiar, and she decided to take the car into town for groceries.
The church bells struck four. Thin white clouds scudded overhead as she drove.
One summer afternoon when Odile was thirteen, she was with her best friend, an imaginative girl almost a year her senior, window-shopping amid the clothing boutiques, parfumeries, and leather-goods stores of downtown Nantes. At the time, Odile’s parents were professors at the university, and though their income met their expenses, not much money was left over for nonessentials, and compared with her contemporaries she felt poorly turned out, lacking even the smallest tokens of adolescent chic. Her friend was sympathetic, and together they set out to remedy the situation. They began with easily pocketable items—lipsticks, tortoiseshell combs, sunglasses—but as the summer wore on and they became more confident, their shoplifting grew more ambitious. On the afternoon in question, they hesitated outside a designer boutique, inspecting a red silk dress that Odile particularly coveted. When her friend judged the moment to be right, they entered the shop. The friend’s role was to distract the shopkeeper, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with glasses, while Odile looked casually through the racks. When, with four or five scarves laid out on the counter before her, the friend asked to see yet another, Odile quickly turned her back and stuffed the dress under her shirt. The friend chose a scarf and paid for it, and the two girls left the shop together. They’d gone scarcely half a block when the shopkeeper caught up with them, grabbed each girl by an ear, and dragged them back to the store. The police were called, then the girls’ parents. Sebastien arrived. After paying for the dress, he put the girls in his car and drove the friend home, all without uttering a word. When he and Odile were finally alone in the car, she in the backseat, he asked her why she stole. Odile shrugged. She didn’t know. Was it the thrill? he suggested. No, not that. Maybe she had some kind of grudge against the world and its injustices? Not that, either. No grudge. Was it the clothes? he persisted. It was the clothes, wasn’t it? Yes, she answered wretchedly, it was the clothes. Sebastien lit a cigarette and drove for awhile in silence. “Then,” he said at last, “you will learn to sew.” His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “Your mother will teach you,” he added. And Odile burst into tears.
Nobody, least of all herself, could have imagined that at that moment she had found her future vocation. It proved to be a turning point, and she wondered how many such moments a single life might afford.
Parking the car in front of the post office, Odile extracted a string bag from her purse and went shopping for dinner. She was by now a familiar figure in the local business establishments, and at each stop—the baker’s, the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, the wine merchant’s—she lingered to exchange a few words with the proprietor. Sebastien was well liked in Vertou, and everyone with whom Odile spoke inquired after him respectfully. Before his first African sojourn, a year ago, there had even been talk of his running for mayor. He hadn’t discouraged the idea, but neither had he troubled himself over it, and in the end the incumbent had been reelected.
Odile got back to the house around half past six. The oak’s damaged limb had been cut up for firewood, now stacked neatly against the tool shed. When she took the groceries into the kitchen, Sebastien appeared. “And now,” he announced, grinning his satyr’s grin, “one will have an aperitif.”
They took their drinks in the living room, sitting side by side on a sofa facing the fireplace.
“You look very well,” he said once he’d studied her.
“So do you,” she answered.
He dismissed her words with a wave. “In Mali everyone is sick. It’s normal. I have a little bit of what they have, and as you can see I’ve lost some weight. But that’s all. It is not yet necessary to flatter me about my health.”
“Good,” she said, and sipped her pastis. “I’m happy to hear that.”
“What about Orson Welles? Going from one success to another, I suppose?”
“Max is fine. He sends his best.”
“Yes? Is he working?”
“Always. He’s like you in that respect, remember?”
Sebastien sniffed dismissively, as if at the very idea of such a comparison. “Your husband doesn’t know what work is. One thing I will say, though. I’d trade him a month of Mali for a day of filming Isabelle H. An extraordinary woman, truly. Tell me, what’s she like?”
“Actually,” Odile said, “Max put that project on hold for the time being. He wants to work out some new lighting ideas. He’s shooting video.”
“Ah yes, of course. Lighting ideas.” Sebastien took a swallow of port and grimaced. “I should have known.”
“What is it with you?” Odile demanded. “Max is everything you believe in: independent, idealistic, driven. He never does the easy thing or follows the conventional wisdom. Money means nothing to him except what he needs to make his films. He thinks for himself, and he’s uncompromising. Why can’t you accept that?”
Sebastien shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s irrational, isn’t it?”
“You don’t like him because he’s American.”
“But I do like him. I just don’t respect him.”
“Well, believe me,” she said, getting up to check on dinner, “sooner or later you’ll learn to.”
By the time they sat down to eat, they were laughing over a bit of village gossip she’d picked up at the wine merchant’s, and it was as if a crisis had passed.
Her father went to bed at ten. Later, she put on one of his sweaters and sat out back beneath the stars, letting her mind run free. Flashes of herself as a little girl were interspersed with other, less familiar images that at times seemed to have nothing to do with her. Two men playing chess, one of them laying his king on its side in wordless defeat. Some Italians and a German model named Nico in an American car, a white convertible, deliberately crashing it into the gate of a villa to get to a party that was all but over. Another woman, much older, contemplating a painting on an easel until the painting burst into flames.
Whatever had led Odile to lie to the Russians about Thierry—and she knew so little about him or his motives, hardly enough to conceal—the firebombing of the Nachtvlinder had rendered moot. Now she would be obliged to confront what she had unleashed, determine its nature, and, with little but her native stubbornness to go on, extract from it what vindication she could. The prospect made her uneasy. Yet mixed with this anxiety was a deeper response that she couldn’t quite put out of her mind. She felt as though she had been given an opportunity, as inexplicable as it was rare, to help break the impasse at which Max found himself, both as a filmmaker and as a man. He thrived on adversity, his occupation required no less, and as long as she’d known him he had done what was necessary, whether for her or his work. Viewed from this perspective, the troubles she’d brought upon herself in Moscow, however tawdry and destructive in themselves, might yet be turned to advantage, if one kept an open mind. The prospect filled her with dark surmise.
Max was the only man she’d ever come across who seemed to know, instinctively and without deliberation, how to anticipate her needs, needs she often didn’t recognize herself and would have disavowed on principle even if she had. From the very outset—that night in SoHo when she’d sought his help and he’d provided it, no questions asked, then or later—he’d seen and understood her whole. A trust had been established, fierce, wordless, almost arrogant in its certainty. Now, in her love for him, Odile wanted a chance to reveal to Max a part of his character that he himself might have overlooked, an untended capacity that might offer him—and them—something new in their life together, another level of existence. That an element of pride underlay this desire could not be doubted. And while she knew her pride to be a dangerous thing, perverse and not fully
under her control, there were times when she had no choice but to trust it. This, too, had to be lived with.
She grew drowsy, allowing her thoughts to scatter until they were no longer thoughts but mere traces, then not even that.
A shooting star passed across the sky. She waited for another, and when it came she went gratefully back into the house, up the stairs to bed and sleep.
WITH ODILE STILL at her father’s, Max took his Sunday-afternoon meal in the company of Eddie Bouvier and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Dominique, at their apartment in the Marais. The building, an eighteenth-century stone town house, stood on a narrow, twisting street that channeled the sounds of foot traffic and conversation up to where they sat. A shaft of pale sunlight crept across the dining table. Dominique held out her hand for Max’s inspection.
“It’s a bluebird,” she said. “Papa hates it.” Neatly positioned between her thumb and forefinger was a small tattoo of a bird taking flight. Max thought it surprisingly well rendered.
“Cool,” he said, spearing the last of his veal cutlet. “Did it hurt?”
She shook her head serenely.
“In point of fact,” Eddie explained, “this is a prison tattoo, recognized wherever there are convicts. It signifies that the bearer is a thief.”
“Maybe a hundred years ago it did,” Dominique confided to Max, “but now it has no meaning. It means I have a tattoo.”
“You see what I’m up against,” said Eddie.
After salad and dessert, Dominique, who had tickets to a death-metal concert at La Villette, asked to be excused. Kissing Max goodbye, she told him to say hello to Allegra for her, and he was obliged to notice yet again how nearly adult she had become. He recalled with guilt that he hadn’t yet responded to his daughter’s e-mail.
“In the end,” said Eddie, when he and Max were alone, “you have to allow them their concerts, their revolting boys …” He shrugged. “One suffers, of course.”
The two men retired to the living room for cigars and Armagnac.
In the thirty-six hours since the gasoline bomb had smashed against the Nachtvlinder’s wheelhouse, Max had tried to imagine a scenario that would explain the attack, or at least make it less improbable in the light of day. And he had gone further, seeking to link the event with the break-in at the apartment. He’d put his speculations to Odile before she left for Vertou, inviting her response. But though she agreed that it was possible to see a connection between the two incidents and didn’t contradict him when he spoke of intimidation and harassment, systematic or otherwise, she added nothing useful to his imaginings and he let the subject drop.
Eddie said, “Are you working?”
“I’m shooting video. Nothing scripted.” Max swirled his drink and inhaled the fumes. “Maybe it’s a documentary, I don’t know.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nah. Too soon. I’m still trying to get a handle on it.”
“Of course. No problem. But when you are ready, Max, I’m eager to have a look. As always.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” A short silence ensued while Max relit his cigar. Then, when a cloud of blue smoke again billowed around him, he added, “One thing, though.”
“Yes?”
“I’m shooting in natural light only—outdoors, beside windows, wherever I can get an image. Maybe I’ll include ambient electric too. I’m not sure yet. But the point is, no staged lighting, nothing cosmetic.”
Eddie nodded. “More reality.”
“There’s a look to it, yes. I start there.” At the thought of reality, Max grew abruptly restless. Getting to his feet, he strode across the room to the french windows, which opened onto a small masonwork balcony. In the street below, two Hasids were arguing in Yiddish. He watched as they lunged forward, knocking each other’s hats off, yanking each other’s temple locks.
He returned to his seat, his impatience only exacerbated by what he’d seen. “By the way, Eddie, did I tell you that there was a screening of Fireflies at Studio des Ursulines? Part of their first-film series.”
“But this is good, Max, very good. They run an exceptional program. Useful people pay attention. Everything went well, I assume?”
“People seemed to like it,” Max told him. “Anyway, I met a girl there, a film student. She said she had seen another version of Fireflies, one with a different ending. She said it was in rental distribution on video.” He stubbed out his cigar. “That’s not possible, is it?”
Eddie seemed genuinely shocked. “How could it be? It’s out of the question. You didn’t shoot a different ending, did you?”
“No, but these days, with digital this and that …”
“I’ll call the distributors first thing tomorrow morning,” Eddie assured him. “I promise you, it’s nothing.”
“Thanks, Eddie. I know I’m being stupid, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Forget about it. Besides, you must realize it’s a kind of compliment when rumors like that start circulating. People are impatient for more of your work, Max. In the absence of product, they fantasize.”
“Don’t we all,” Max replied.
They had a laugh together.
After taking his leave, Max walked three blocks south to the Place des Vosges, found a bench, and sat for awhile in the dying amber light. Some young black men—Malian, by accent—were playing pickup soccer beside the equestrian statue of Louis XIII, his famous smirk frozen forever in stone. Two elderly ladies sat together knitting. Toddlers, pursued by their mothers, ran stubby legged across the lawn. And, cruising right by Max, three skinny white boys in their teens recited rap lyrics in unison: Anutha day, anutha niggaz name in da newz.
When it occurred to Max that he was putting off going home, he consulted his watch. Odile was due back on the eight-o’clock train from Nantes. Suddenly he longed for her company, wanted her to be at the apartment when he arrived. After a moment’s thought, he abandoned his bench and the little park and headed east to the métro stop at Bastille. The music-and-electronics megastore on the Champs-Élysées stayed open till midnight, he recalled, and, at least in principle, carried cassettes or DVDs of all his films.
CHAPTER 9
GABRIELLA SAT in Turner’s office with an advance copy of next month’s ARTnews in her lap. On the cover was a detail of one of the May Day flags, reproduced in a super-saturated red, with the appliquéd images of Marx, Lenin, and Andropov gazing stolidly heavenward. Yellow display type running across the lower right quadrant read: The Return of the Unique Object? 20 Artists and Critics Respond.
“Incredible!” Gabriella said. “How did you do it?”
“I didn’t,” Turner told her. “That’s the beauty of the art world, so responsive when money’s involved. And it almost always is.”
She flipped through the magazine, chose an article at random, and began to read aloud. “‘After almost two decades in which contemporary art has been dominated by video, photography, film, computer code, and other infinitely reproducible mediums, the unique art object has been given a much-needed boost from a most unlikely quarter.’”
“Not at all bad,” Turner observed, settling back in his chair. “Very old school and respectful, don’t you agree? Now read the next one.”
Gabriella ran her finger down the page. “‘Call it a neo-Duchampian coup or just another episode of cynical showmanship, but the exhibition ‘Ten Untitled Objects,’ currently on view at the Balakian Gallery in Chelsea, is anything but what it appears to be.’” She frowned and skipped ahead. “‘Indeed,’” she went on, “‘the secret was out almost before the show opened. These large fabric works, meant to resemble antique flags of the Soviet Union, are widely thought to be the collaborative effort of two of the gallery’s star artists, who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen not to lend their names to the exhibition.’” Gabriella looked up in annoyance. “But this is caca, no?”
“Maybe Ron’s working a sideline,” Turner conceded. “I’m not sure. But
I do like it. And the other texts are all just as good. Major writers, blue-chip artists, the works.”
“So what will happen next?”
“We’ll see. I need to think about the larger scheme of things.” He looked at his watch. “In the meantime, shall I take you to lunch?”
“Ah, no, I cannot. I have to meet this person.” Gabriella rolled her eyes to suggest entanglements too exasperating for comment. “Tomorrow, though”—she brightened—“you may take me to that new place on La Boétie.”
Turner spent the next hour returning phone calls. An inconveniently large part of his job involved currying favor with elderly men and women who owned desirable objects but for one reason or another lacked suitable heirs. Such people tended to be solitary, whether by design or circumstance, and they enjoyed pretending that Turner’s attention was social, even personal, in nature. Their pride could be easily hurt if they felt they were being neglected, and they competed unabashedly for his time, yet it was always understood that in some fundamental sense he was their fool. Such were the rules of the game.
He was considering closing up for the afternoon when Odile appeared in the doorway, a little out of breath. She wore dark sunglasses and an orange-and-gray floral-patterned dress cut close at the hips.
“Hello,” she said. “Am I interrupting?” Without waiting for an answer, she swept into the cluttered room, taking it in with a series of darting glances.
Turner rose to greet her. “What a surprise. How did you get up here?”
She shrugged. “Was someone supposed to stop me?”
A Benin bronze head that Gabriella had unpacked earlier caught her eye, and he watched as she went over to inspect it. Dark, cruel, and commanding, the African artifact had been set atop its shipping crate, polystyrene pellets strewn before it as though in offering, and Turner thought he saw Odile shudder as she contemplated this tableau.
