Correspondingly, I intuited that Anaïs was that rare uncensored beauty, who had no qualms about letting down her mask, or peeling back mine, and as rash as it sounded, I felt like she possessed, at least potentially, that partner-in-crime element I’d been looking for over the last nine years.
Thirty-five euros was a lot of money for me but I dropped them on the silver tray. At least you now know she exists; let’s hope you can find another Anaïs. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I balanced my skis on my shoulder, turned left in the direction of the metro, and saw her striding down the sidewalk. I tilted the skis across my face to bury the surge of relief, a heavy groan pouring out. When I lifted them back up, I saw that her hair was now unbraided, a lustrous black flowing over her white cotton shirt open at the neck. The shirt stopped just below her navel, and her low-slung, short-zippered jeans revealed her pelvic bones.
She was walking right into a beam of late-day sun. Her mouth was a splash of pale pink amid the walnut browns of her skin. No makeup, not even on her eyes or lips. A reminder that her coloring would be as important as her lines. But not as important as getting to know her and trying to understand her, I reiterated.
“You’ve changed your mind?” she said, shifting her leather duffle to the other hand.
“No, I thought you’d changed yours.”
She grinned, something triumphant in her expression—my impatience, leaving the café like a spurned lover, was concrete evidence that she’d gotten to me, and she clearly enjoyed that.
“Allons-y,” she said, walking ahead without looking back, and I followed her.
It was dusk outside the glass ceiling of Gare de Lyon. The train was already rolling and we ran for it, jumping aboard. I’d bought an International New York Times, wanting to catch up on the news and prove I had other interests than simply pining over her, and after stowing the backpack and skis, I sat across from her and opened the newspaper. We were on the train to her family’s country house. There was a room for me. A forest. A river. Anaïs would sit for me if I wanted. And the clincher was that her mother would be there—giving me a window into her family life, into things she could easily hide if we were alone, and it would enrich my understanding of her. Imperative if I wanted my work to evolve.
The light changed; we were out of the city, dark green trees and suddenly a provincial chapel framed in the window, then a clearing under a dome of cobalt sky. I peeked over the top of the paper. Anaïs was furiously texting while watching some sort of Jackass-type video, giggling and chomping on gum at the same time, and I thought of Andy Warhol’s inside joke . . . everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes . . . and how it had been taken to heart and now had become an epidemic. How could a portrait, made of pencil and paper, with the occasional dabs of color, ever compete with the media shower of infinite and immediate gratification?
She was enthralled with the looping video of a guy riding his bicycle off various second- and third-story rooftops, and her aura dissipated before my eyes. I realized I’d glommed on to the idea that she possessed something timeless, born of classic archetypes, divorced of reality TV and celebrity pop stars, and ironically, by comparison, would reflect something fresh and exciting when I drew her. I lifted up the newspaper to block it out.
I’d created that fixed distance again. Willing my hands to lower the newspaper, I grabbed my pad and pencil and drew her. She chomped on the gum, immersed in the video, and it was disheartening to reproduce it on paper. After a few minutes, she noticed what I was doing and snatched the pad out of my hands.
Her face fell and then her eyes crept up from the sketchpad and found me.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m just a boring teenage girl.” She tossed the pad back to me. “You still want me to sit for you?”
I nodded, watching her round mouth turn down unnaturally, as she stared out the window, openly affected by what the sketch had revealed. She wore her emotions like an electric wire, so unprotected, and I didn’t want her to feel snubbed, so I shared something private.
“A few months ago,” I said somberly, “on my thirtieth birthday, I made a self-portrait.” She looked over at me cautiously. “After it was done, I saw that I’d made a drawing of an older man with a lot of remorse in his face. It scared the shit out of me.”
“Like it was the face of a man whose chance had passed him by?”
“Something like that . . .”
“A man who believes his critics,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re only thirty,” she asserted.
“I know but . . .”
“Can I see it?”
“I left it in a hut by mistake.”
“By mistake?” she challenged.
I shifted in my seat and shook my head. “Probably not . . .”
She watched me, eyebrows raised, letting me know that I’d have to go deeper, open up more if I wanted to impress her.
I wasn’t ready, just yet, and stared right back at her. She slid low in her seat and wrapped her legs around my shin, dropped her head back, and grinned.
seven
It was pitch black when we stepped off the train forty-five minutes later. There was no station, only a platform. It was cooler than Paris and there were crickets and lots of stars. Anaïs looked at the sky, lost in thought, and then lit a cigarette.
“Is your mother on her way?”
“My uncle’s coming,” she said. “I couldn’t reach Maman.”
Light beams strafed the tops of distant trees then dipped and raked across a rolling field as a car moved along what must have been a dirt road, dust plumes hued red in the taillights.
It was a big Citroën and it skidded to a stop in front of us. Her uncle lumbered out, smoking a cigar, stinking of alcohol. They kissed and then I was introduced to Bernard, her father’s older brother.
“Your reputation precedes you,” he said, shaking my hand.
I glanced at Anaïs.
“She claims you’re as gifted as Beltracchi,” Bernard explained with a beguiling grin.
Wolfgang Beltracchi was widely considered a painter of genius and the forger of the century. He’d produced over three hundred paintings in the styles of the great masters and evidently most of them had not been discovered yet, still hanging as authentic works in museums, galleries, and mansions around the world.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, garnering as much élan as I could in order to conceal my unease.
“As you should,” Bernard said. “She knows her stuff. Besides, Beltracchi is a better painter than 99 percent of the masters he’s forged.”
“True,” I said, “but what makes you one of the crème de la crème is the all-important idea, right?” A hard lesson I’d learned over the last nine years.
Uncle Bernard gazed at me before his eyes dropped and one corner of his mouth twisted up in acquiescence.
“D’accord . . .”
When I glanced at Anaïs, she was going around to the passenger’s side, moving hastily, partially obscured by the roof of the car, and I was pricked with suspicion, an inkling of an ulterior motive. Then Bernard threw open the door and gestured for me to maneuver the skis between the front seats.
As we came through the first turn, the Citroën bounced to the far side of the road and fishtailed in the soft earth along the edge. Unfazed, Anaïs turned to her drunk uncle and asked him something about his daughter, and he rambled back in very rapid French.
Bernard and Anaïs chatted away as we followed a path beside an eighteenth-century wall, and then he abruptly made a right turn through an opening and onto pavement. There was no indication that he saw the hairpin turn ahead. I clutched the headrest and, as if it were an afterthought, his eyes never leaving Anaïs, Bernard cranked the wheel just in time and we squeezed onto a narrow road, zigging and zagging between battered stone buildings in what appeared to be a deserted village.
I uncoiled when I realized we were driving alongside another wall on a relatively strai
ght road.
“What’s the name of that village?”
“Grez-sur-Loing. We just say Grez.” Anaïs pronounced it grey. “It’s close to Fontainebleau, which you’ve probably heard of.”
We crested a small hill. Bernard turned and said something I didn’t catch and they both laughed, joking back and forth. In the light beams, at the bottom of the hill, appeared an enormous wooden gate that I assumed was the entrance to the country house. At the last second, inches away, he screeched to a stop, motioned for Anaïs to stay put, and got out of the car.
She turned around. “You’re carsick?”
“No. Just stoked to be alive.”
“Ah,” she glanced out the windshield at Bernard, “nothing interferes with the French when they want to talk. Especially the man.”
Bernard wrestled with the gate. He was a big barrel of a man whose body was no longer limber. The bottom edge of the gate caught in the crushed clay, the wood twisted, and he grunted.
“Apparently Maman had to go to Bern today to see Papa,” Anaïs said. “So it’s only us.”
I tried to dampen my surprise but she saw it in my face and didn’t like it, abruptly turning and sitting back in her seat.
“What does your father do?”
“He works for the French consul in Switzerland,” she said as the gate flew all the way open.
At the end of a long drive stood a four-story château. It took over the entire horizon, grand and venerable, the likes of which I’d seen only in photographs, usually in black and white. Lit from below, its grey chunks of stone were wreathed in ivy, cut away around windows tall enough to stand in. Bernard got back behind the wheel and we rolled forward. On our left, a single row of vacant stone horse stables followed the drive. On our right, a weeping willow vaulted over a lawn, its outer limbs barely visible in the ambient light, and the lowest branches seemed to be tickling water, presumably the river. As we came to the end of the drive, the river split—the main body was mostly shrouded in darkness while a channel, made of hunks of rock with wooden dykes, diverted some of the water beneath the house. Along the château’s rutted brick walls closer to the river, I noticed a thin layer of lichen, lime green in the strafing well lights, turning sparser and darker as it climbed higher. The old decrepit château was still teeming with life.
“Nice little country house,” I said as we all got out of the car.
“Enchanté,” Bernard cheered, shaking my hand, and I realized he was leaving.
“Enchanté.”
I watched the Citroën drive away, wondering how in the hell I’d ended up here.
eight
“I always take a swim when I first come back,” I heard Anaïs say behind me.
She was standing in a darker area on the grass, slipping out of her boots, one foot on the stone barrier that fended off the river.
“It’s become a ritual of mine,” she added.
My skis were upright, leaning against my chest, and I wrapped a hand around the tips. With the sound of the river going over a fall and the big château illuminated in the night and the forest all around us, she pulled her shirt over her head and shimmied out of her jeans.
“Aren’t you going to come?” she said.
“Sure . . .”
I kicked off my shoes, turned sideways, and stepped out of my pants.
“I already know your ass,” she said in a raspy timber, and I looked over at her.
Her hair fell over her breasts and I saw the pulse of that storm in her eyes.
“You think I can’t handle seeing your penis?”
I was caught standing there like a shy schoolboy.
“I didn’t want to assume anything.”
She searched my face before running her eyes down my body and pausing at my cock, as if to confirm that it was filling with blood.
“You’re not going to ask for permission to fuck me, are you?” she said.
“But I’m not trying to fuck you.”
She started laughing. “I hope not.”
Stark-naked, without a hint of self-consciousness, she stood right in front of me and waited for me to say something.
“Can I do a quick sketch before you go in?”
She frowned. “Don’t be boring,” she said, and stepped onto the barrier. “You missed the best part anyway.”
She leapt into the river, disappearing into the black liquid.
It felt like too much of a capitulation to follow her in and I slipped back into my pants. When I turned to find my shoes, her rumpled jeans on the grass caught my eye—a potent detail that I’d overlooked.
I drew the jeans, hard-edged in the artificial light seeping from the château. They looked like those chalk drawings at a crime scene. A splash against the barrier made me turn. Anaïs pulled herself onto the stones and sat with her feet dangling into the river. Black strands of hair clung to her skin like cords of licorice, shedding silver beads down the groove of her spine. She reached behind her and plucked fall-blooming wildflowers from the grass, and the jeans, lying like a body in the foreground, created an ominous effect—the nude girl plucking flowers appeared immune to the dead body or the ghost of one.
I was working fast to capture the moment when she spun around and dropped off the barrier. She picked up her jeans, shirt, and duffle bag, and without a word, walked past me over the footbridge and through the entrance door.
I tried to keep working but without her there it was no use. I gathered up my gear and then wrestled with the heavy entrance door, wedged between the château’s bricks, where I noticed a worn, rusted placard that read Maison Blanchon, which I assumed was her family name. The stairs to the first floor were off-kilter, cobbled together over decades of repair. Stepping from the landing, I found her in the kitchen.
She was slipping on her shirt. Her damp hair, lying over her breasts, bled through the cotton, clinging to her stiff nipples. I glanced away, taking in the quartzite walls, the modern kitchen appliances, the buckling wood floors, the past and the present side by side. The kitchen was an expanse unto itself, connected to the dining area via an archway.
“Great kitchen,” I said.
As if there’d been no awkwardness between us, she took my hand and led me into the dining room. “A little tour . . .” We passed a table that could seat twenty, antique rugs over the wood planks, and an old chest with fine china and silver. Through another archway, she escorted me to the living room. A hearth the size of a VW Beetle, adjacent to which were a small library and a floor-to-ceiling glass door. It opened to a patio, buttressing the lawn, streaked by an outdoor light, where I saw the river bend around it.
Back through the kitchen, we climbed another flight of stairs to the second floor. Two master bedrooms, another small library, and some children’s rooms. The third floor accommodated a series of larger bedrooms on the back side of the house, with pitted stone walls and windows framing a view of the channel as it came out from under the château and merged back with the river, dark forest encroaching on both sides.
In one of the rooms, Anaïs pointed to the bed. “This is yours.” She stuffed some of the wildflowers in a vase. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” she said, and she walked out.
I heard her pad to the end of the hall; a door creaked and then closed. I put my gear in the corner and sat on the bed.
I was alone with a beautiful young woman in the French countryside. All indications suggested she was an idyllic model, my long-sought partner in crime. Yet I wondered if her aura of confidence and inhibition was just another mask, a game she played to get what she wanted—whatever that might be. A game she probably always won. Was she a gold mine? Or a maze that ends in a cul-de-sac or at a cliff? I didn’t know, of course. The only way to find out was to stay on her carousel and see where it led.
nine
She was searching the refrigerator for something to eat when I came down the stairs. With her head buried, she mentioned that her father or uncle would cook when they were here. “Because in France
the man does the cooking.”
She unearthed several kinds of cheeses and some stale bread. I toasted the bread in the oven to revive it and found a few packets of pasta, a bag of pine nuts, and some olive oil in the pantry.
“With the basil in the fridge,” I told her, “I have enough to make a pesto, if you’d like.”
“Parfait.” She gave me a big smile.
While I prepared the meal—chopping and blending away—she sat on the counter and asked me questions.
“Oregon but I moved to Venice Beach about twelve years ago,” I responded to the first one.
“A lot of artists live there, no?”
“Not any more. Too expensive now.”
“What happened that made you run away?”
“I didn’t run away. I just left.”
“Okay,” she said, gently. “But something must have happened?” She looked at me with those big pools of compassion and I opened right up.
“In a sense, I had it made, living and painting in a studio apartment, a great old brick building one block from the beach, and I paid for it all by working for a graphic designer. On the other hand, I’d just suffered through another bad show, with a bad review by the New York Times to boot.”
Anaïs opened her arms, looking down at me with a faint smirk and those sunken eyelids—c’est la vie. I nodded and continued.
“There was an older gentleman named Wes in the building, he was a writer, and we hung out quite a bit. He’d try out his stories on me and I’d show him my drawings and paintings. One day, there were flowers and candles on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. Taped to the entranceway was a piece of paper with Wes’s handwriting on it and someone had written RIP next to it. It was the last thing he’d written. He’d jumped off the roof. Died right there on the sidewalk.”
Haunted by the recollection, I looked down at the buckled wood.
French Girl with Mother Page 3
