French Girl with Mother

by Norman Ollestad

  Jean Luc slid his chair back and Bernard twisted out of his. But Sophie remained seated, a glass of water and a brick of lasagna landing in her lap.

  “Yes, Maman,” Anaïs shouted, standing with the tablecloth still in her hands, “you are more sophisticated and you have more to teach him. Even your breasts are more impressive. We get it!”

  Sophie flicked the debris off her lap, took a napkin and dabbed her stained crotch, and asked Jean Luc if he’d like dessert now.

  “Touché,” Anaïs said dryly, and she pulled the cloth all the way off, breaking whatever hadn’t been broken before. She stormed across the kitchen, shedding her jeans and top as she went down the stairs and out the door.

  fifty-three

  My plan was to take refuge in my room, avoid Bernard and Jean Luc as much as possible, and use every spare moment to work on the double portrait and prepare my departure. Instead of going up to my room, though, I changed my mind, realizing I still needed money to ship the portraits and buy myself a plane ticket.

  I helped clean up the mess, hoping for a moment alone with Bernard. When Sophie and Jean Luc went up to their room, I suddenly got squeamish and had a hard time looking Bernard in the eye.

  “How long till you have the money?” I asked.

  “A week. Maybe two,” he said. “Did you find a big-enough surface?”

  I nodded and felt my hand quivering.

  “Can I get an advance now?”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “The show is in less than two weeks.”

  “So you have time.”

  “Not really. It’ll take a week for the pieces to get to L.A.”

  “You can’t wait to leave?”

  “No. I’m just anxious about the show.”

  His jowls went slack, eyes hardening, and he touched my hair. “It’s greasy. Have you been sweating?”

  “Yeah, I took a long walk . . .”

  “You look strung out. Has something happened?”

  “Just feeling the time pressure.”

  He studied me, sniffing me out like a big fucking bear. I was cracking, fear and panic leaking from my pores.

  “I better check on Anaïs,” I mumbled, and I darted away.

  She was sitting on the edge of the deck, legs in the water, and instinctively I knew I needed to touch her. Carefully, I rested my hands on her shoulders and began to gently massage her muscles. She let out a long exhale. I rubbed her neck and scalp, and it gradually calmed us both down.

  “You always know how to ground me . . .” she said, swiveling around and kissing me in that last-night-on-earth way, and in spite of everything, I was able to get lost with her for a few minutes, a testament to the passion we still shared for each other.

  But she could be in on the whole scheme, I warned myself. You have to find a way to let go and care only about finishing the double portrait.

  “Bernard won’t pay me for another week or two,” I told her, “and he doesn’t seem willing to give me an advance, so I won’t have the money to ship the portraits, much less get a ticket to L.A.”

  “Are you finished with the last one yet?”

  “Soon . . .”

  “Why are you keeping it such a secret?”

  “That’s just the nature of it, I guess. It’s between me and the image.”

  “When I watched you draw me yesterday, doing the Schieles, it scared me.”

  “It was that bad?” I smiled.

  “No, no. It was like you’d moved beyond anything I could give you. The way you drew, with such vengeance, something violent and brutal in your face, your hands, like you’d kill whoever got in your way. And the intense beauty of the images, it was on another level.”

  The flame in her eyes and the tone of her voice seemed so heartfelt, and I wondered what would happen to her—her studies, her career—if her uncle and father went to jail.

  “When are you doing your presentation?” I asked.

  “There’s an opening in three days that I might take.”

  “I should be done by then. Maybe I’ll come with you to Paris, see if I can ship off the pieces on credit or something.”

  “If not, I might have enough to cover it. I can try to borrow some money from Papa too.”

  “Thank you, Anaïs.”

  fifty-four

  In the middle of the night I woke up with wild, racing thoughts. With Hal hovering around, everything could change in seconds, and there was no way to know how much time I had to finish the double portrait. I slipped out of bed, put on a jacket and jeans, and climbed barefoot to the fourth floor. Opening the trunk, I lifted out the spider drawing with Anaïs’s lines roughed in, and also the drawings of Anaïs where I’d captured her expression just right. I went outside and put on my boots. Then I had to take them off and creep back to the kitchen to retrieve the flashlight.

  The stall gate squeaked loudly and I cursed it. Ducking inside, I left the gate ajar and watched for any lights turning on inside the château. The recessed windows, raked with light from below, looked sinister. I shut the gate and trained the flashlight on the blank canvas.

  Transposing the spider drawing onto the canvas was tricky in the stark spot of illumination. I miscalculated one of Sophie’s arms and it fell off the canvas just past the elbow. I kept hearing noises and would rush to the gate and peek through the crack to see if someone was approaching. After two hours of this, a barrier of aggravation had built up between me and the image, and I was never able to delve in and get lost.

  By dawn, I was completely drained and the double portrait was a mess of lines on the canvas. I can’t work like this. What the hell am I going to do?

  I peeked out the gate. Sunlight was tinting the sky. The entrance door was closed and no one stood in or passed by the windows. It was time to get back into bed with Anaïs and try to sleep.

  fifty-five

  When I entered the kitchen, Jean Luc was standing at the window.

  He turned and set his eyes on me.

  “What were you doing in the stall?”

  “Finishing the portrait you wanted me to do,” I managed to say. “If Anaïs gets wind of it she’ll go ballistic.”

  “Sophie didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “We decided against it.”

  “Well, you don’t care if I do it anyway, do you? I have a show coming up and they need a third piece.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t expect me to pay you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  In the cool morning gloaming, his body looked wide and stout like a file cabinet, and I remembered his meaty palm and thick fingers stopping me in the upstairs studio.

  “Where were you yesterday?” he asked me.

  Don’t swallow. Keep breathing.

  “I went to the art-supply store in the morning,” I said as casually as I could. “Um, then I took a walk. That’s why I was late for lunch . . .”

  “You act paranoid. Even Bernard asked me if something had happened between you and Anaïs. Like you’re, I don’t know, hiding something . . .”

  I turned the panic into a yawn. “I have to get back to bed,” I said, and I stepped away from him, got to the stairs, and didn’t look back.

  fifty-six

  Lying in bed next to Anaïs, I stared at the ceiling. Cold shivers and hot flashes traded blows. I needed to get away from them for a day or two. Once I gathered myself, I could come back and finish the double portrait.

  Breakfast. I forced myself to eat. Didn’t avoid Jean Luc’s eye. Held it together with an iron will. No mention of Anaïs’s outburst. A new tablecloth, plates, and glasses. Sophie fussed over the croissants. Jean Luc announced he was taking the day off from tennis and planned to fix some things around the château. Was he keeping an eye on me? It felt like a hive of bees in my stomach, nerves tingling, and as soon as Anaïs finished her coffee, I took her outside.

  “I think I need a day off,” I confided. “Just to spend with you somewhere. Can we go to you
r place in Paris?”

  “Sure. I have to go back for my presentation anyway. We could even leave today.”

  “Parfait,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  fifty-seven

  Anaïs’s apartment was in Le Marais and I recalled walking these same streets weeks ago with my skis on my shoulder, invisible to some, offensive to others, and very much resigned to my failure as an artist. We climbed a circular stairway to the fifth floor. The door was sticky and difficult to open. Anaïs went in first and I followed her through a tiny living space with scratched parquet floors and only a few pieces of furniture, all antiques in near ruin. There was a nook on the far side with a four-burner stove and a compact waist-high fridge. Parting strings of black beads hanging in a threshold, I stepped with her into a small room with a futon bed, a stack of textbooks, and another stack of novels. There was a huge oak armoire in the corner, a chest of drawers next to it, and a tiny table that held a computer. The one picture up on the wall was a framed Lucian Freud lithograph of a naked man on a metal frame bed with a greyhound dog beside him. The window in the bedroom looked out at other apartment windows and down into a brick courtyard.

  “As you can see, I don’t spend much time here,” she said, dropping her bag. “Would you like some tea?”

  I nodded, followed her out of the bedroom.

  “Would it be possible for you to do renderings of the love nest for me?” she said. “It would really help my presentation.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like to do it tomorrow. The professor has an opening.”

  After rummaging some colored pencils from a drawer, I used the examples she’d sketched out on her iPad to make detailed drawings of the structure. Two hours later, I finished the last love-nest drawing and showed them to her when she stepped from the shower. She jumped up and down and kissed me all over.

  Anaïs took me to a restaurant atop the Pompidou museum with spectacular views of Paris: an undulating landscape of rooftops, the Eiffel Tower jutting into the sky, the ivory dome of Montmartre glowing in the night. She was friends with the maître d’ and he gave us a seat next to one of the big windows. She unwrapped her scarf with Paris like a halo behind her and for a moment I escaped everything that was threatening to tear us apart.

  Then my curiosity, a sense of self-preservation, resumed its poking and nagging, and I couldn’t push away the need to know any longer.

  “Does Bernard sell a lot of fakes?” I asked while unbuttoning my jacket.

  “Not that I know of,” she said nonchalantly. “Are you regretting doing them?”

  I shrugged, watching her reaction very closely. “What about stolen stuff?”

  “Stolen? Where did you get that idea?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not that different, is it?”

  “Of course it is,” she insisted.

  I gave her as vague a doubtful look as I could.

  “You see,” her voice rose, filling with ardor, “passing off fakes is a kind of poetic justice, a way to get even with all the pompous dealers and critics he’s been at the losing end of. Think about it. Once your Schieles hit the market, the same critics and buyers that discounted you will be drooling over them.”

  Hearing her articulate it like that filled me with a kind of music, the music of sweet redemption. I recalled drawing the fakes, the lines coming from somewhere beyond what we could see or comprehend, out of thin air, like I was tapped into a pure source of creativity and it was running through my veins. It was so beautiful and fulfilling that I hadn’t needed food or sex, nothing, nothing but the visceral charge of making a sublime image. And to envision my work fetching the respect of big collectors, not to mention their big money, washed me with a kind of high that felt healing.

  “You understand,” she said, beaming.

  “Oh yeah, I totally get it.”

  She gave me one of her intoxicating smiles and I told myself that it made sense, fit her personality, to simply enjoy fooling the gatekeepers, as I did, and by producing fake Schieles, not selling stolen ones, she wanted us to make enough money so we could chase our dreams, the very dreams those gatekeepers were blocking.

  After dinner we went to her friend’s apartment and borrowed two bikes. As we peddled through the back streets of the city, Anaïs introduced, what was for me, a secret Paris: a series of canals and waterways, tributaries of the Seine, that jigsawed through the city. My favorite part was waving to the quirky people who lived in their boats, lanterns hanging off a mast, something from a bygone Paris whose mere existence enchanted me.

  We ended up on the back side of La République, along Canal Saint-Martin. It was quaint and narrow, lined with trees growing from the wide flagstone walkways that hemmed in the water, cross-hatched with bridges, some steel, industrial-looking like an Erector Set. Anaïs sang Serge Gainsbourg songs while we dangled our feet over one of the bridges.

  fifty-eight

  In the morning, I walked with her to the Sorbonne and wished her luck and then went to Café de Flore, where we’d gone the day we met. The headlines of the International New York Times were all about a terrorist attack in Switzerland and the tightening of the border, but I noted a short related article about a man being caught in the terrorist dragnet trying to smuggle a stolen Picasso across the border.

  Wonder if Hal had anything to do with that?

  I ate eggs with bacon and waited for the gallery that Janet had a relationship with to open. In a few days, I anticipated, I’ll be finished with the double portrait, ship them all off, and then once Bernard pays me I can get on an airplane, hopefully with Anaïs, and go to L.A.

  “Mind if I join your table?” came a voice as Hal appeared at my side.

  It startled me and after the initial jolt, I just stared at my newspaper.

  He sat down. “Anything to report?” He pointed at something in the paper that was facing him.

  “No. We had to come back for her school presentation,” I said, hiding behind the paper.

  “Hand me a section so it looks like that’s what we’re talking about.”

  I handed him the business section.

  “Well, Nathan, you’re either with us or you’re against us. What is it?”

  “I haven’t seen any Schieles.”

  The waiter came and Hal ordered a coffee. He looked over the paper and didn’t say anything to me, which was an effective way to apply pressure. When the coffee came Hal started counting his money on the table, the confused tourist. Then he slid a five-euro note to the middle of the table.

  “There’s a phone card under the note,” he said. “Once it’s in your phone, and your phone is on, it will allow us to listen to any nearby conversations. Just in case.”

  I lowered the paper. “Just in case what?”

  “In case you talk to Bernard or Jean Luc about the Schieles.”

  I shook my head and used his annoying relentlessness to help me project insolence.

  “Hey,” he said. “Maybe you like Bernard. Maybe you don’t want to hurt Anaïs. I get it. But the one they work for, the mastermind, he’s a very bad man.”

  I opened my hands.

  Hal continued. “Last year, he sold a Picasso and a Degas—seminal works that had been looted by the Nazis—to a Saudi prince. Before he does any more damage, we want to find him. We know he’s a Swiss citizen but that’s all we’ve got on him.”

  Hal put his hand on my shoulder and I scowled at him and he removed it.

  “The Jewish families who had their art stolen want to find him. As an artist, as a decent human being, you should want those paintings in museums for all the world to enjoy, not locked away in some Saudi prince’s lair. It’s immoral.”

  “I agree,” I told him. “But what does that have to do with the Schieles you’re after?”

  “Whoever has the Schieles will most likely fence them through the Swiss guy. There are four other people we suspect might have them, all of whom work with this guy, but I don’t have enough resourc
es to tail everyone.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out and let you know.”

  He watched me for a moment. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said, and then he took his time finishing his coffee before dropping the newspaper on the table and leaving.

  fifty-nine

  I had no choice; I would have to tell Hal the truth. Where before I’d noodled with the idea of taking the path of least resistance—finish the double portrait; borrow enough money from Anaïs to at least ship the portraits, or finagle a way to ship them on credit; and then worry about my plane ticket, letting Bernard and Hal fend for themselves—now I had a larger moral obligation to help nail the Swiss scoundrel and the Saudi prince. Abruptly the clock was ticking, accelerating time, and it galvanized the urgency to finish the double portrait.

  But waiting a few days to call him wouldn’t matter. That’s all I needed in order to get it done. The problem was I had to get back to the château, the canvas, and find a way to work on it without Anaïs knowing.

  “Shit,” I said aloud, causing the nearby patrons to turn and glare at me.

  I walked out of the Flore and found the gallery a few blocks away. I introduced myself and inquired about shipping the pieces on credit. “Impossible,” was the manager’s response. It would cost around eight hundred euros. I had thirty-five in my pocket. I hoped Anaïs would come through.

  She had given me the key to her place. Around noon, I returned to her apartment and waited for her. I was on edge, pacing around the small living room, and then the question of what would happen to Anaïs if her uncle and father were arrested crashed my thoughts again. Would she be arrested too? Tried as an accomplice?

  Her landline rang. It was near the front door.

  “How’d it go, baby?” I said into the phone.

  “It’s me.”

  I held the phone away from my ear.

  “You’re alone, no?” Sophie said. “I just spoke with Anaïs.”