French Girl with Mother

by Norman Ollestad

  Running, one leg dragging behind, I swerved to her side of the car, grabbed her, and shoved her into the backseat. Reaching with my free hand, I dug out a clump of hundred-euro notes and dropped them on the taxi driver’s lap.

  “Allez!” I called over Anaïs’s kicking and screaming. “You don’t want those guys to catch us, I promise you!”

  His mouth puckered up under his nose and he shook his head. I lunged between the seats, pulled the door handle, and rammed him out of the car. In the side mirror, I saw Bernard close the gate, a rifle in one hand, while the sedan’s passenger door flung open.

  In the backseat, Anaïs had stopped kicking and screaming—she was looking out the back window, watching Bernard point at us as he got into the sedan.

  I jammed the taxi into gear and we skidded forward, fishtailing along the track, further behind the château, affording us a few seconds of cover.

  “Where does this road go?” I yelled.

  Her face hardly moved when she spoke. “To the highway on the other side of Grez.”

  I accelerated, wishing we had more than a mini courier van to outrun the German sedan.

  “The Holz Hausen!” Anaïs hollered, pointing at the woodpile as it came parallel with my window. “Kick away the sticks! Block the road!”

  Hitting the brakes, I flew out of the car, rushing in a kind of crab-walk for the woodpile behind us, and kicked, with my good leg, the base of all five sticks. Cords of wood spilled across the track, two feet high, piling up against some old chicken coops on the other side of the track. The road was choked off—for as long as it would take them to clear it away.

  I heard the sedan burning up clay as I hunkered back into the taxi. I hit the gas and we climbed with a gradual curve. I glanced into the mirror again. The sedan was breaking, skidding, before it hit the wood. I heard its undercarriage bang, chunks splintering, snapping, hopefully damaging the car. Then the forest cut them off, the road had bent far enough around, and we were out of the line of fire.

  eighty-two

  The deep ruts in the road were threatening to bounce us into the trees. We had a little breathing room now. I eased off the pedal.

  “How long till we reach the highway?” I called to Anaïs in the backseat.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Where is the closest airport?”

  “Back through Grez.”

  That’s no good. “What about in the other direction?”

  “Orleans.”

  “How far?”

  “An hour.”

  “Did you get my message about your passport?”

  “Yes. I have it.”

  “Good.”

  She stared between the front seats, out the windshield, a wreck of confusion and pain, but I had to focus on the road, keep my thoughts in order.

  The path curved the other way, shedding the forest, and soon we were edging along the riverbank. The setting sun had dipped below the clouds, glimmering across the water.

  “Why did you come for me?” she seemed to be talking to the river. “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes slashed at me. “Henri sent the video. He showed me.”

  She had believed that the video was enough to sabotage us. That I’d never come for her. And I thought of Schiele’s model for Reclining Nude, Left Leg Raised, asking for my desire without sacrificing any of her dignity, much like what Anaïs had been asking of Henri, looking for a way to heal, longing for compassion. And I took pleasure in the notion that I would understand her, accept her, where Henri could not.

  When I glanced in the rearview, she was still watching me out of the corner of her eyes. Before I could speak, a ditch threw us into the air. We landed with a crunch and suddenly there was a fork in the road.

  “Left or right?” I said.

  “Left takes us back toward Grez,” she said, and I veered right.

  The tires kicked up spindles of dust, curling skyward. I watched the spindles in the side mirror and hoped they wouldn’t rise above the tree line and give us away. I felt Anaïs’s lips on my cheek, warm pillows against my skin, and she whispered in my ear.

  “You chose me.”

  My double portrait was gone.

  eighty-three

  It was seventy-six degrees in Los Angeles when we landed.

  My phone was missing, likely lost in the tussle at the château, and I didn’t want to use Anaïs’s, so I found a pay phone in the terminal. I called Janet and told her I was back in L.A. with my girlfriend, that her father just passed away, and we needed some privacy, but I didn’t mention the drawings. Could we crash at her pad for a few days?

  “No problem. I’ll stay at Gary’s,” she said, and she asked about the double portrait.

  “It’s on the way,” I lied. “Thanks for giving us some space.”

  An hour later, I picked up a key from the gallery receptionist, and Anaïs and I walked next door to Janet’s apartment building. Art Deco moldings, an apple-red fire escape zigzagging from the fourth floor to the second. Understandably, Anaïs was devastated; she’d wavered between crying and staring listlessly into space during the entire flight, and now the dark shadows under her eyes made her look ten years older and sickly. I took her hand, helping her up to the second floor, which was arduous with my bum knee. Once we were inside, she drank three tall cups of water, found the bed, and crawled under the covers. I sat beside her and rubbed her back. What else was there to do?

  We stayed inside the following day and I mulled over our options—How would we make money? Where would we live?—while the cacophony of questions about Sophie and Bernard, the mess we’d left behind, tried to pry their way in. Was I a fugitive? It was hard to know. Most importantly, I was home and with Anaïs. We could make more great paintings. We could make a life together.

  That night, she insisted on calling her mother. Although the FBI and a group of criminals were looking for us—at least for me—because they wanted those Schieles, I understood the necessity to make sure her mother was okay.

  I walked Anaïs down the street to a pay phone, and standing beside her with my hand on the cradle hook, listened, ready to hang up if I sensed she was about to give away our location. After hearing that Sophie was not in jail or feeling threatened, and after Anaïs convinced her that she was somewhere safe with me, I interrupted.

  “Tell her you’ll call back in a week or so,” I said quietly.

  Anaïs shook her head, whispering, “Maman is all alone. She said Bernard is gone.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Your mom’s smart and tough. She’ll pull through. Now say good-bye.”

  She told Sophie she’d call back soon and reluctantly hung up.

  The next morning, I persuaded her to walk to the beach and go for a dip in the ocean. She refused to wear a bra or underwear. Nearby sunbathers and a couple joggers made a stink, forcing the lifeguards, clearly against their will, to ask her to get out of the ocean and put her clothes back on. She stomped away, toward the apartment, naked. As I tried to catch up with her, it was apparent that the saltwater, washing around my knee, had freed up the ligament and muscle, and it was no longer excessively painful.

  I poached two eggs and fried some bacon and she ate in front of the TV. It would be a long wait, I knew, before she would climb out of her mourning.

  On the fourth day, after I returned from the market, Janet called.

  “The show’s in two days,” she said. “Where is the double portrait?”

  “It’ll be here by tomorrow,” I assured her.

  “It better be, Nathan. I used the photo you sent for the catalogue and the promotions.”

  “No problem, it’ll be here,” I said. “Hey, do you have any paper and pencils lying around? I’d like to work.”

  “You have to ask Cindy,” she said. “Her office is behind reception. She might have something back there.”

  When I returned with a pile of paper and a box of good charcoal pencils, Anaïs was in the bath. I started dr
awing her. She shook her head and turned away with disdain.

  “Anaïs,” I appealed. “We have to do something. We can’t just sit here and be depressed. We’re almost out of money. Janet’s going to kick us out soon. Our only chance is to make something for the show.”

  She remained despondent but I kept working because it seemed like our only chance of survival. I made two fairly good drawings and went to Blick to get some watercolors. After paying, we had a hundred and thirty-five dollars left.

  I worked all night and Anaïs just watched TV and smoked cigarettes. With her vitality and spirit in shambles, she was a different person, and it broke my heart. I feared we’d soon reach the end of our capacity to thrive. With nothing left to connect us, to keep the passion going, we were dead.

  eighty-four

  Anaï’s was on the couch, watching TV, and I was trying to spruce up the drawings when Janet opened the door. Her face was strained.

  “Sorry to intrude, but we’re putting up the final pieces now. I need the double portrait.”

  “The shipping company says it’s missing,” I told her, glancing at Anaïs to see if she was listening. Her eyes were glued to a soap opera. I lifted up the drawings I’d been working on. “But I have these for you.”

  Janet walked past the couch, glancing at Anaïs, who ignored her, and I handed her the two new pieces, hoping she’d just take them out of necessity. She laid them on the bench by the window.

  “These look rushed. They’re nowhere close to the double.” She turned around and faced me. “I’m going to have to use John Selters’s drawings in place of yours.”

  “Wait, I can polish these out right now,” I insisted.

  “It’s too late. You blew it.”

  “The shipping people screwed me.”

  “I called the gallery in Paris, Nathan. You never gave them anything to ship.”

  “I had to use a different place. Long story.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Her heels clacked as she moved to the door. “Please be out by tomorrow,” she said, glancing at Anaïs, catatonic on the couch. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  eighty-five

  In the morning, I headed for the boardwalk with some paper and pencils. Staying in my work was the only way to contend with the terrible disappointment and the bleakness I felt.

  The morning fog was lifting and as I got closer to the kiosks, the thinning veil revealed a carnival of disco-dancing roller skaters, scrappy artists selling their wares, beefy body builders, surfers, skateboarders, and homeless encampments, interwoven with the hordes that came to look at it all.

  The young homeless kids, huddled in groups as large as twenty or thirty on the grassy knoll in the middle of the hubbub, were the most interesting. A lot of them had pit bulls or Rottweilers, and musical instruments, and a few had high-end backpacks. They all seemed inured to a daily routine of begging, hanging out, scoring drugs, and partying late into the night.

  I might be joining their ranks soon, I told myself, as I drew a teenage boy, dirt smudges on his face, staring into his iPhone. The girl sitting beside him, covered by an oversized hoodie, had been tapping his shoulder trying to get his attention. Fed up now, she shoved him with both hands and stood, lifting her skateboard with her.

  “This is bullshit,” she sniped. “All you do is play that crap all day. I’m going to skate the pool . . .”

  Ripping back the hood, she pivoted and was marching right at me. She had grey-green eyes and a mane of strawberry blonde hair that fell past her cut-off jeans. Sweeping by me, her hair was like a cape, a strawberry sea, with the palm fronds bursting out above her in the sky.

  I got to my feet and followed her toward the skate park. Capturing her airing out of a pool with that crazy hair would be a very contemporary, romantic image. I watched her bum a cigarette off a black kid and then she leaned against the skate park railing and shot the shit with the other onlookers. After ten minutes, I realized she didn’t actually skateboard; she just carried one around as an accessory.

  On my way back to the apartment, someone called out my name.

  “Long time no dance,” Hal said, rolling up on a beach-cruiser bicycle, a fresh sunburn splotching his pale skin.

  “I was wondering when I’d hear from you.”

  “Things ain’t going so well, huh?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “You kinda screwed me.”

  “How’s that? By putting my life on the line for you?”

  “You didn’t help yourself with your little stunt.”

  I shrugged indignantly.

  “You know,” he said, “we almost moved in on the Swiss dude. Only at the last second did we realize he didn’t have the Schieles. Could’ve been a real embarrassment for us.”

  “But now you know who he is,” I asserted.

  “Yep. That’s the good part. Would’ve saved a lot of time and resources to bust him then and there.”

  I nodded and he nodded.

  “What about Bernard?” I said.

  “No Schieles, no smoking gun. But the fellas he works with are after his scalp.” He laughed. “That’s far worse than us.”

  “Shit.” I hadn’t thought that part through.

  “Where are they, Nathan?”

  I pulled one of the pencils from my pocket and tore off a corner from one of my drawing sheets, writing down Artur Dorfmein.

  “He lives in Feldkirch, Austria,” I said. “Drives the train between Feldkirch and Innsbruck. Easy to find.”

  Hal stuffed the piece of paper in his windbreaker.

  “My colleagues were convinced that you’d sold them,” he said. “But I knew you just wanted to protect the Schieles. Old Nathan has tucked them away somewhere safe, I told them. And I was right.”

  “Yep, Hal, you were right.”

  He rolled onto the balls of his feet, mouth and cheeks forming a glowering expression.

  I stepped across the boardwalk.

  eighty-six

  Anaï’s was asleep on the couch. A pall of dejection infused the apartment, deepened by the fact that we were about to get booted. With her thoroughly down and out, it was my role to keep fighting. I knew what I was capable of and I needed to go make it happen. Wolfing down a meager sandwich, I went back out to look for a spark of inspiration.

  A swim, like I used to do at the château, would do me good. The ocean was cold but the air was warm. I swam under the rolling surf and thought about my grandfather, what he might say to me right now. Like all things it’s part of a cycle; stay with it and you’ll come around. A big swell lifted me and when it passed the wide fan of ocean stretched all the way under the horizon line into some twilight beyond, and I thought about taking Anaïs up to Portland for the holidays; we’d stay with my parents; maybe Alice would be in town with her family. But in the time it took to bodysurf a wave and wash onto the beach, the idea had crumbled.

  I walked to the Santa Monica Pier and watched the Ferris wheel twirling in the sky. I lay facedown in the sand and replayed that moment at the château when I’d turned my back on the double portrait, my golden ticket, for the promise of making more art with Anaïs, making a life with her, flourishing in love. Now it all felt like the sand falling through my fingers.

  By five, the sun was about to set. It was low tide and I walked in the wet sand, meandering back to Venice.

  Around six o’clock, I crossed the boardwalk onto where Venice Boulevard began its stretch from the Pacific toward the city. The gallery and apartment were just up the street. Throngs of people were stepping out of Ubers and expensive cars, well dressed, crowding into the gallery. I couldn’t bear to go inside and see what I should have been a part of. I felt like an interloper crashing someone else’s show. I turned around and took the back alley to the apartment building, entering from there.

  The TV was off. It was quiet. Moving into the bedroom, I saw that the bed was made. Her scent, distilled to a tobacco stench, hung in the air. She was gone. Maybe I could catch her at LAX.
Had her mother wired money? Somehow arranged a plane ticket back to France?

  The room felt clogged, stale, dusty. I needed to sit down. The floor seemed best. Then I lay all the way down, resting my cheek on the checkered linoleum, and I thought of Wes ending the pain.

  The front door creaked open. It couldn’t be Anaïs, and I hoped that whoever it was would go away. I heard the person pad into the bedroom.

  “Nathan, are you all right?”

  Janet appeared beside me, crouching.

  “Just resting,” I mumbled.

  “Well get up.” She shook me. “Do you have a nice shirt at least?”

  “No.”

  She pulled a clean shirt off a hanger in the closet, presumably one of Gary’s. “Put this on,” she said.

  “No.”

  “But you can’t look like that.”

  “Who gives a shit how I look?”

  “Michael Dolson does.”

  “Let me rest. Please.”

  “Get off the floor.”

  I sighed. “Why?”

  “Because the double portrait is downstairs. The note said it’s called French Girl with Mother.”

  I studied her face to make sure I wasn’t having a weird dream. Her features were in shadow and I squinted.

  Janet continued talking. “It arrived with three other drawings of Anaïs, very erotic, clearly your homage to Schiele, about an hour ago. The note was from someone named Hal.”

  I took a deep breath. Blinked a few times.

  “Anyway, Dolson is head over heels about the double portrait. I came up here to get you but you were gone, so Anaïs came down.”

  It must be a dream.

  eighty-seven

  I pushed through the crowd, head down, and when I finally looked up it was really there. Sophie and Anaïs, spider and prey, mother and daughter, that magnetic confrontation.

  Someone was talking to me, and an orgy of bodies oscillated around me, gawking, asking questions. I touched one person’s face to make sure it was real. When I looked at the painting again, I saw myself in the two figures, my torment and longing, darkness and light, wanting love while fighting for recognition. Life, like art, is ultimately a struggle with yourself, I thought. Something drew me to the stairs on the other side of the room.