A Paris Apartment

by Michelle Gable

  “Bonjour,” she said. “So pleased to see you again, Olivier.”

  “Bonjour, Madame Vogt!” said the weaselly Frenchman. “How are things in New York? I’ve been trying to make it back for months.”

  Ah, that’s right, she remembered him now. His name was Marc, and he was the one who nearly tackled her assistant, Birdie. April tried to hold back her sneer, politely kissing both cheeks and mumbling the usual French niceties under her breath, hoping her disdain came across as good old-fashioned Parisian aloofness.

  Beside Olivier and Marc stood a lanky man with floppy black hair and a lavender dress shirt. April’s eyes could not help but follow the elegant seams of the shirt as it tucked precisely, straightly into pinstriped slacks. She gawked a little at his enviable hips and torso, which jutted forward in such a manner as to convey assertiveness or cockiness or something she couldn’t quite name. April was already starting to redden when she noticed the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “You can’t smoke in here!” April screeched. The smallest spark could well incinerate the entire flat, anyone could see that. “Out! Put it out!”

  The man chortled, dropped his cigarette, and pressed it into the floorboards with a buffed and shiny loafer. Before she had time to reconsider, April crouched and plucked it from the ground. She waved it through the air to ensure full extinguishment.

  “You are a dedicated antitobacconist,” the man noted with a smirk as April shuttled the butt into her pocket.

  “She’s with us,” Olivier said by way of explanation, or apology. “This is April Vogt. She is our Continental furniture specialist.”

  “Ah,” the no-longer-smoking interloper said in his heavy French accent. “L’Américaine.”

  “April Vogt.” She extended a hand. He smirked again, nodded, and then pulled her in for a double-kiss salutation. He smelled like expensive cigarettes and even more expensive cologne. April found herself off-kilter from the traditional but unavoidably personal gesture.

  “This is Luc Thébault,” Olivier said. “He’s Madame Quatremer’s solicitor.”

  “Madame Quatremer?”

  “The deceased. This was her apartment.”

  “That is not exactly accurate,” Luc said and rested his arm against a chair. April shuddered as she watched the price depreciate beneath his careless, untrained touch. “Technically I represent not Madame Quatremer but the estate. Generally they don’t allow dead people to hire attorneys. In any case, this was her grandmother’s flat. Madame Quatremer resided in Sarlat and never made it up this way, as you might’ve surmised given the condition of the interior.”

  “And Monsieur Thébault is the one who called us about the items,” Olivier explained. “For which we are quite grateful.”

  “You should be.” Luc turned to April. “You”—he said and scanned her from head to toe— “could almost pass for French. I was not expecting … that.”

  April smiled weakly. Years ago, after she managed to snag the curator position at an eighteenth-century Paris furniture museum (now defunct), she read up on how to look Parisian. Or, rather, how not to look quite so American. Dress in smart, dark, tailored items, the literature told her; things easy to put together, to match, to throw on and look as if you’d hardly done anything at all. And that, April thought, was more or less how she was thrown together. Straight, dark, and tailored, made entirely of clean lines. The hair, the eyes, the nose: all casually assembled; unobjectionable basic pieces. To stand out all she needed was a jaunty scarf and a Bréton top, which was Impersonating-the-French Rule Number Two.

  “No response, Madame Vogt?” Luc said. “Not so garrulous as you should be. I thought these Americans, they jibber-jabber all the time.”

  He moved his hand like a quacking duck.

  “We choose our words more carefully than most, it seems.” April lifted her chin, then turned. “So, Olivier. It looks like we have a bit of work to do.”

  She glanced over his shoulder and spied a Louis-Philippe malachite table butted up against a glorious Louis XVI walnut canapé. Her eyes bugged. The treasures seemed to multiply before her.

  “Some of these pieces—they’re unbelievable.” Her voice came out reverential and yet also sad.

  April thought of the failed furniture museum and frowned. What if it hadn’t gone under? What if she had stayed in Paris one more month? Two months? She met Troy at Charles de Gaulle on her way out of the city. He took a seat across from her in the Air France lounge, a chance meeting, as she’d never been in a business-class lounge before, much less allowed herself to be chatted up by some random guy in one. At the time April figured if you were leaving town in shame you might as well do it in style. Inexplicably, Troy found her appealing and remained undeterred by this dark-haired woman sucking in tears, trying to let go of the first adult dream she ever had.

  “No need to cry over it, Madame Vogt,” Luc said. “It’s only furniture.”

  “I wasn’t crying,” she snapped. “And ‘only furniture’? Please! You could fill an entire museum with only the pieces in this room.”

  “Never mind the settees and bureaus, Madame Vogt,” Olivier said, snapping his fingers and startling April to attention. He pointed to the spot in front of him. “Do you see this? The painting?”

  April made a wide arc around Luc and walked toward Olivier. Before him, against a wall, rested a portrait of a woman. The painting was almost as tall as April, and though the woman herself was in profile she was unquestionably stunning.

  Leaning on a mauve daybed, the subject stared away from the portraitist. Her hair was brown, mussed, pulled back so loosely it was really more out than up. Her dress was pink, frothy, and magnificent, whipping around her bottom half like a mermaid’s tail. Despite the grandeur of her gown, the woman’s jewelry was spartan, spare, and her face the very clearest sort of beauty.

  “She is gorgeous,” April said, mind still picking through the furniture but eyes fixed on this. “Simply gorgeous.”

  “Gorgeous. Yes. But do you see it? Do you see what this is?”

  April moved closer and straight into a bath of sunlight.

  “Please close the shutters,” she said and futilely held her tote up to the light bursting through the glass. “We need to be careful with the items in here.”

  “The lady,” Olivier urged. “Madame Vogt. The painting.”

  April stopped. She looked, harder this time, again noticing the woman’s minimal jewelry (a small strand of pearls, one ring for each hand) and also her downright aggressive décolletage. If the painting were a modern-day photograph someone would enlarge it to catch a glimpse of nipple.

  Then she saw it. The color. The brushstrokes. The unmistakable swish.

  “Oh my god,” April said and tucked both hands under her armpits. She wanted to touch the painting. She wanted to touch it badly. It was half the reason she had been drawn to the industry in the first place. There were things she got to put her hands on that the general public did not.

  “What do you think of her?” Olivier asked. It was a challenge, not a question. He wanted specifics. He wanted to compare notes.

  “Boldini,” she whispered. “I think it’s a Boldini. But that can’t be. Is it?”

  “Yes!” Olivier clapped his hands together, nearly singing with satisfaction. He’d found both the portrait and the right person to do the job. He turned to Marc. “See? This is what I told you. You said to me, ‘Non, c’est impossible!’ But Madame Vogt sees it too.”

  “I thought she did furniture,” Marc pointed out.

  Luc snorted. April shot him an unintentional scowl.

  “Yes, well, I know a few other things too,” she said.

  Indeed, one did not spend years chasing multiple Art History degrees, or living in Paris for that matter, without the ability to recognize a little Giovanni Boldini. The “Master of Swish” was once the most famous portrait artist in the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries you weren’t anyone unless Boldini painted y
ou. This woman was someone.

  “I don’t remember this one,” April said. “Portrait of Madame Juilliard, Lady Colin Campbell, the Duchess of Marlborough, several of Donna Franca Florio. But not her.”

  April’s heart was racing now. She liked Boldini. She liked him fine. One could not dispute his mastery of portraiture. But although she’d seen a dozen or more of his paintings in person, April had never felt like this. The woman was beautiful, yes. But she was more than that. She was a presence.

  “I cannot believe this,” April whispered.

  “As far as I know, this is not in his repertoire,” Olivier said. “Could it be a fake?”

  No. Not a fake. April understood this already.

  “A damn good one if that’s the case,” she said. “On the other hand—” April paused for a moment and pretended to contemplate the possibility. “Who’d lock a Boldini up all these years? He didn’t have to die to become famous. He was already known. Who would do this? Why?”

  “Who’s Boldini?” Luc asked as he lit another cigarette.

  “Can you put that out?” April snapped. “I don’t want the odor attached to everything in the place.”

  Luc cackled something to Olivier. April opened her mouth to remind them she was fluent enough to understand the French equivalent of “uptight.” That’s when she noticed, pushed up against the wall, the mauve daybed from the picture. April’s breath caught. All at once she could see this woman sitting on that piece of furniture. She could see her at the dressing table, writing letters on the bureau plat, gazing at herself in any one of a hundred looking glasses. A room that was dead ten minutes ago suddenly felt very much alive.

  Chapitre IV

  April had overseen hundreds of auctions in her career. The spoils usually came from different versions of the same place: grandmother’s manse or father’s country house or a penthouse having just gone on the market. Unlike the contemporary-art world, where pieces now traded like stocks, for sport and for gain, April still procured her assets from three D’s: debt, divorce, or death. The pieces before her were from a dead woman’s apartment, yes, but more than that, they were from the past. Countless museum-quality objects, untouched, curated only by spiders and ghosts.

  April slipped on her gloves and approached the daybed.

  “Madame Vogt?” Olivier said. “Madame Vogt, are you listening?”

  “Oh, what? Sorry, I was just…”

  She’d nearly forgotten her colleagues were still present.

  “We’re going to step outside for chat and a smoke. For your benefit, bien sûr.”

  “Merci.”

  “I’d invite you along but presume you’re disinterested in such an arrangement.”

  “Please, go ahead. I’ll stay behind and begin a plan for the sorting and inventorying of the items. So much to do!”

  April tried to contain her glee. Yes, bons messieurs, please leave. She wanted to be alone with this woman and her things.

  “Ah. The famous American work ethic on full display,” Luc said. “Très bien!”

  “Well, I’m here to do a job.”

  Together the men, inexplicably, laughed.

  “Don’t start calculating the premiums without us!” Olivier called before the three slipped out of the flat.

  April nodded and forced a smile. The door clicked. She shot across the room to the bookcase near the doorway.

  It was the bookcase she had almost knocked over on her way in. She did not care for the piece. Though old, it felt more late-century college-dorm room than upscale bordello, and would not fetch much at auction. But its shelves were crammed with papers, which she’d spied during her labyrinthine walk over. On every conceivable surface sat a stack, on every stack, five more stacks. The resident of the apartment was either a prolific writer or the nemesis of every bill collector in Paris.

  It was not snooping, April told herself. Not really. It was provenance. The documents would aid with provenance. Maybe they’d mention the painting. Unlikely, but a good-enough excuse.

  April picked up one stack, and then another, and then a third, releasing each from its seventy-year slumber. The documents were bound with faded ribbons: green and pink and light blue. The papers themselves were yellowed, worn down to the weight of the cobwebs around her. The writing was faint, at times illegible, but as April leafed through the pages, the words seemed to brighten, the sentences perked up.

  Papers in hand, April crept toward the window. She looked down to the street, where Olivier, Marc, and Luc were yukking it up on the curb, the lead glass no match for their voices. She had some time. April knew from experience that once Olivier got going he was difficult to shut up.

  She sat down on the very chair she’d previously shooed Luc away from. With the first stack on her lap, April cautiously untied the celery-colored ribbon. As she separated each sheet from its neighbor, April flipped through the documents. Bills. Letters. Diary entries. Her heart galloped.

  The numbers did not seem right. Madame Quatremer sealed the apartment in 1940. Boldini, if the painting was a Boldini, died in 1931. But these dates? They could not be correct.

  Then again, if they were—if on the off chance these dates were valid and not falsified by Madame Quatremer or her shifty solicitor, Luc—then the story was not an amazing 1940 plus seventy years. The tale was older than that.

  The page April held read in tight, neat script: “2 July 1898.” It was not from the last century but the one before it. She glanced at the bookcase. How far back did this go?

  April scanned the letters, biting back a smile. This woman, the writer, she was brave, unfettered, and damn funny. Her penmanship was impeccable, even when writing words like “flatulist,” “manhood,” and “nipples.” If these letters were real—and of course April knew they were—if these entries were real, the author had guts. She was unafraid. Then again, she was also unaware. Never could she have envisioned an American pawing through her belongings a century in arrears.

  Guilt creeping in, April retied the stacks. The documents weren’t part of the Quatremer estate, at least not as it related to the auction house. Exposed skin and gastrointestinal problems would not establish provenance no matter how much April wished it so.

  As she looped the ribbon around itself, a single sentence caught April’s eye. Her first thought was, thank god, I’m not completely invading someone’s privacy.

  Her second was: holy crap. We were right. That painting is a Boldini.

  Chapitre V

  Paris, 20 July 1898

  I sat for Boldini today. Again.

  Only a few more sketches and all will be right, he promises. A few more sketches? That man and his incessant scribbling will drive me straight into an idiot’s asylum! Truth be told, it would prove welcome relief. At last I would finally be done with this godforsaken portrait. A veritable fool’s errand it is. He has yet to pick up a brush! Let this be a warning to all women: A celebrated, handsome artist intent on re-creating your likeness is not so romantic a scenario.

  Turn this way, turn that way, he says. Frowns, furrowed brows, salty language, and much crumpled paper. Then we start the whole thing over. Did I mention it is hot? Murderously hot? Between the heat and the fumes I expected to keel over at any second. I would be offended if the rigmarole was not so very Giovanni. He has done this before.

  “You are meant to be a painter,” I said to him. “Not a cartoonist!”

  He did not appreciate the inference, but, truly, there is perfectionism and there is dementia, and he is teetering dangerously close to the latter. “Master of Swish,” indeed. It would behoove him to swish a little less.

  Marguérite came with me the last time. She told me I do not make it easy on him, at which I had to laugh. Has she ever known me to make it easy on any man? No, in fact mostly I aim to do the opposite. Either way M. Boldini absolutely deserves it. I do tease him. I do warn him against repeating his forebear’s succès de scandale. God help me if a strap falls off my shoulder and I become the next
Madame Gautreau.

  But it is all in good fun. He knows this and, further, would never repeat Sargent’s artistic miscalculations no matter how many (many, many) times I say he is in danger of doing exactly that. Unlike Sargent, Giovanni will take caution. He values commerce as much as art and has no desire for la vie de bohème. In that way we are quite the same.

  I suppose I could let up a little, but what I did not tell Marguérite—nay, what I did not tell Giovanni himself—is that it is not merely my impatience driving me to niggle. There is a certain deadline we are working against. If Madame Gautreau’s errant strap threatened to destroy multiple reputations, I cannot fathom what would happen at next year’s salon if Boldini displayed a painting of a woman ripe with pregnancy. An unmarried woman, no less! Mon Dieu!

  It is easy enough to hide, but a time will come when I must confess to Giovanni, to Marguérite, to all of Paris! For now, I will delay the inevitable as long as possible. I have not yet decided what to tell Boldini. Will I say the baby is his? Will I say it is someone else’s? Lying to this man does not sit well with me, especially with all the lies and secrets kept about my own lineage. However, a woman cannot live on good intentions alone. Sometimes you have to tell a lie to live the truth.

  Chapitre VI

  Paris, 1 August 1898

  Boldini, the bastard! His latest sketch is beyond unacceptable. And he intends to use it! The situation is disastrous. He is such a merde!

  The sketch was only practice, he said. I should have known better, and in fact the minute he picked up a pencil I objected. I was in no form for immortalization, having just been très horizontale with him on my purple lounging chair.

  “You look sublime,” he said, when in fact I did not. I had only just sat up. My eyes were slits, my hair tousled and out of its form. I had lost a bracelet in the sheets, and my whitening powder was almost completely rubbed off.