A Nearly Perfect Copy

by Allison Amend

  “Ow, wait, there’s a rock in my shoe.” Karen pulled on Gabriel’s arm, and he stopped to support her as she fished something from her platforms. “All right then, that’s better.”

  As they continued toward the auction house, Gabriel could feel Karen’s steps begin to slow. Or was it his reluctance that was slowing them down? “We should have take a taxi,” he said.

  “Taken. No, it’s all right.”

  In contrast to the crowd he feared, the pavement outside the auction house was nearly empty. There was only a woman and her kids, the oldest a teenage hippie, the youngest not more than a toddler. How old were they? He should know these things, start paying attention. The woman was hugging and kissing each one in turn as if she were going on a long trip.

  He sighed. “Why do I say yes to this thing?”

  “Shhh,” Karen said. “They’ll hear you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Of course you do,” Karen put her hand on her stomach, a signal to Gabriel that he should practice his “worldly selflessness,” one of the personal tenets he’d adopted during the course at the Spirit Lotus London Meditation Center.

  Appearing at this auction was part of the elaborately complicated deal he’d worked out with his gallery. Someone owed someone a favor, and thus Gabriel would show up, do some interviews, perhaps create a little buzz around an otherwise lackluster auction in a sluggish economy. In return, the gallery owner would place a painting of Gabriel’s in the collection of a well-known connoisseur. That would drive up the price of his work, especially when the gallerist created an artificial scarcity of work, storing Gabriel’s canvases in a warehouse in Slough and allowing only a select few to purchase them.

  Favors. This was how the art world worked. How the world worked, in fact. Since he met Karen, he felt like he’d grown taller, able to view the world from a higher perch. He could see the way mutual interdependence created intimacy, not vulnerability. He could accept a favor knowing that the bestower was acting out of self-interest. That was only natural. He could return the favor with his own motives securely considered. The Ngagpa had shown him this. His motives, for the first time, were clear: in three months Karen would have his baby, and he felt like the owner of a special secret.

  What had not changed was the fact that he did not enjoy being paraded about like an accordion monkey.

  They looked at the program posted in the window. “They bollixed your age again,” Karen said. “You’re fifty-five here.”

  “Motherfuckers.”

  “Shh. Don’t worry. At least they’ll say you look ten years younger.”

  Gabriel laughed and they went inside.

  Elm took her place with the rest of the press corps, who were few at this low-level auction. She didn’t recognize the other woman there, but nodded to the slouchy, overweight visual arts lackey of the Guardian. It must be a slow news day for him to appear here. The lights flickered once, twice, silencing the polite English crowd.

  This auction was a sad simulacrum of what had been only a few years ago. Not only were fewer pieces making their reserves, but fewer pieces were even going on the market, when investors knew they wouldn’t get top dollar selling them. There had been some fire sales (Lehman Brothers divested itself of an amazing collection, and some bankrupt investment bankers liquidated trophy pieces), but other than that, writing about the art market took all of Elm’s imagination, and not a little bit of invention.

  The auction began with the crack of a gavel. Elm watched dispassionately as the sparse crowd bid on a Sir John Tenniel cartoon satirizing the overtaxation of the middle class. A real snoozer, Elm thought, though it was better than the punning woodcuts that often came from Punch magazine’s coffers. She scanned the crowd and found Marcel Connois’s descendant. He seemed uncomfortable, shifting in his chair. There wasn’t enough room between rows for him to cross his legs. His girlfriend, blandly pretty, a little round, was stroking his forearm. Elm thought of a few questions she could ask him. He was a recipient of the AOA prize, so he must be a decent artist in his own right. She looked at his bio, included with the auction materials. It said he was fifty-five. He certainly looked much younger; men were so fortunate that way. He had had a solo show in France, and one in London. His paintings had been acquired by regional museums. Not bad. Elm decided she could talk to him about escaping the shadow of a famous ancestor. Elm knew a bit about that herself.

  How had she sunk so low? she wondered, making cryptic notes on the sale price as the next lot came up. This was a rhetorical question. She had prostrated herself with a series of events that she alone had set in motion. Even after selling the apartment in New York, she would be paying off the debts she incurred to have Aiden for years.

  She was lucky, she reminded herself, to have a job in art at all. She was lucky not to be in jail. Indira had died just as the investigation turned its eyes on her. She did have some other valuable art pieces lurking in her Havisham-like lair, but they were left to the United Jewish Appeal, which decided to sell the artwork through Christie’s. Elm had resigned from Tinsley’s by then, Colette ensconced in her place. Questions still bothered Elm—the extent of Colette’s involvement, what and how much Indira knew—but she shoved her curiosity away, not wanting to stir trouble.

  She hadn’t spoken to Ian since Aiden was born. But she was living in the UK, and he was still in New York. He opened up an art gallery with Relay; Elm was on their Christmas card list, receiving annual postcards with a list of their upcoming shows. Sometimes she looked at his Facebook updates, invariably upbeat and funny. She felt a horrible sense of loss whenever she thought of him. He was yet another casualty of her machinations.

  Elm forgot to pay attention to the next lot and had to look over the shoulder of the journalist next to her for the outcome. The woman retreated, shielding her steno pad. Elm couldn’t imagine what she’d written that was too much of a scoop for a rival’s eyes.

  The next lot came up. Elm gasped. This pastel was Indira’s—the scene of the market with the woman’s uneven eyes. Mercat. On the block again? Elm quickly flipped through her catalog. There it was, listed, with no mention of Indira Schmidt. The title was given as In the Square. “Marcel Connois, 1825–1889. Signed by the artist. Pastel on paper. Provenance: Galerie Christopher Fuhr, Dusseldorf, 1938. Tinsley’s, 2007. Literature: Connois’s Flights of Fancy, 1901, illustrated. Exhibited: ‘The Spanish Manner,’ Frick Gallery, New York, 2010.”

  Elm stifled a noise. Incredible. In the three years since she’d seen the piece, it had acquired a gallery from before the war. It made it into Connois’s catalogue raisonné with an illustration, and apparently the piece had conjured a museum exhibition. Someone within the art world (Tinsley’s? The woman in blue who’d bought the piece? Someone else?) had decided it was authentic, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite its tainted status. But Elm could say nothing. She had given up all her ability to criticize when she cloned her son. Having Aiden meant that she was no longer an art expert.

  There was a rustle in the audience. She looked over. Connois was gritting his teeth, clenching and unclenching his fists. He must have sensed her looking at him, and he turned toward her. His eyes were slits, burning. They met hers, and both looked away in modesty and surprise. Still, in that split second, she felt that he knew.

  Gabriel matched his breathing to Karen’s, imagined that the fetus was breathing in time too. He tapped his foot and Karen put a calming hand on his knee. She didn’t know why he was anxious. And he would never be able to tell her.

  The bidding started. Gabriel’s heart beat in his throat, roaring faster than Karen’s now. He had no reason to be nervous; the pastel had been through two other owners since it left his hands, and along the way picked up a history that made it even more commercially attractive. There was no way anyone would tie it to him.

  They had lit it poorly; the glass reflected the light back into the audience, and Gabriel joined in the polite applause that greeted its appearance
. He saw his mother’s face, her lopsided eyes staring at him. He had captured her, enshrined her forever. And that fucking dog whose proportions were off. No one had ever noticed. The signature was perfect. Gabriel squeezed Karen’s hand and she obediently squeezed back. A brief cramp of shame gripped him, and he tried to employ the positive visual imagery he’d learned at the center. His Ngagpa’s voice entered his head: Every experience leads you to now. Accept the past and the future as your inevitable path, extending behind you and in front of you. He let the shame flow out of him with his next breath, and took a fresh look at his work. He had created a thing of beauty; he had contributed to the world.

  He felt himself being watched and looked over at the press pit. There was the woman who had said the overwrought good-byes to her children in front of the auction house. She was looking at him openly, and as his eyes met hers he could feel anxiety radiate from her pursed mouth, her flared nostrils. For a moment, Gabriel was unable to breathe, and he grew dizzy. Then he broke the gaze, forced his breathing to slow.

  Elm felt a frisson; Connois looked away. She stared at the catalog for the rest of the auction, and left without seeking Connois out. She was unnerved. She wanted to see her children, have the comfort of them within her gaze. She hailed a taxi to go meet them, wondering what Connois’s look meant. She put it out of her mind. It was impossible that he understood her constant awareness—when she laughed with her children, when she dealt with Colin, when she wrote about or looked at art, when she stared into the sleeping face of her youngest child, the features that were both Ronan’s and yet not—that she was both the artist and the forger of her own life.

  About the Author

  Allison Amend, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award–winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. She lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College.

  Visit: www.AllisonAmend.com

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  For more information on Nan A. Talese Books:

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  Also by Allison Amend

  Things That Pass for Love

  Stations West

  Author’s Note

  The world’s most notorious art forger was Han van Meegeren, an alcoholic Dutchman who painted in the style of Johannes Vermeer. Though his original work was damned with faint praise by the art establishment, his fake Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus was authenticated by expert Dr. Abraham Bredius, sold for millions, and became the top attraction at Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam. In 1943, he exchanged his Christ and the Adulteress with Nazi second-in-command Field-Marshal Hermann Goering in return for 137 Dutch paintings that the Nazis had plundered during the occupation of Holland.

  The painting was discovered by American servicemen in 1945 as part of a cache destined for the planned Führermuseum. Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration, an offense punishable by death. During the trial in 1947, van Meegeren admitted he had forged the paintings, but claimed to be a hero, having saved the Netherlands’ masterpieces from Nazi clutches and fooled Hitler’s henchman. The court ordered him to paint another fake in a guarded and sealed room as part of his defense. The fake was convincingly authentic-looking; the collaboration charges were dropped, and van Meegeren was sentenced to one year in prison for forgery and fraud. At his trial he supposedly said, “My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as [a] creative artist.” He died of a heart attack before he could serve his term, a national hero.

  Some art historians still claim, despite a multitude of scientific evidence, that van Meegeren’s works are authentic Vermeers. His forgeries have become collector’s items as well, and some forgeries of his forgeries have surfaced, van Meegeren’s spiritual descendants trying to cash in on a hostile and capricious art market.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the following organizations and individuals:

  Fundación Valparaiso, the Corporation of Yaddo, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Jewish Book Council.

  Sheila and Jim Amend; Nicole Hynson, Anthony Amend, and Corbin Kanoa; cousins David, Joan, Sam, Vivian, and William Adelman; Terra Chalberg; Ronit Feldman; Nan A. Talese; Carolyn Hessel; Margot Grover; Mark Baillie; Amie Siegel; Thisbe Nissen; Irina Reyn; Gina Frangello; Amy Brill; Leigh Newman; Lauren Creamer; Lynn McPhee; Jeremy Sisto; Addie Lane; Duncan Smith; Katherine Lee; Anna Helgeson; and the Delta Schmelta sorority: Sheri Joseph, Dika Lam, Margo Robb, Lara JK Wilson, and Andrew Beierle.

  Valuable information was obtained from Eric Hebborn’s books The Art Forger’s Handbook and Drawn to Trouble and from Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

  In memory of Michael, whom the water took.