by Paul Watkins
“I was wondering how he would be.”
“Oh, he can be worse. Much worse. He’s so moody.” She waved one hand dismissively. On her ring finger was a large diamond engagement ring flanked by two rubies, and a heavy gold wedding band. “He just has to be endured.”
“Where are the other students?” I asked. “I mean, are there any others?”
She shook her head. “So few people can stand him.”
“What does he have against dealers?” I asked.
“Oh, Pankratov has something against everybody.”
The man with the black curly hair spoke up behind us. “Pankratov is a genius. Even people who hate him agree.”
“How many do you think there are who hate him?” asked Marie-Claire. “Do you suppose it runs into the thousands?”
The black-haired man set his hand upon my shoulder. “My name is Artemis Balard.”
“David Halifax,” I said. We shook hands awkwardly, as he reached down from the step above.
“You mustn’t take it badly,” he said, “if Pankratov comes down hard on you. He’s a good judge of art. You just have to accept that. He criticized me once, back when we first started.” Then he slapped me on the back. “Good to have you along.” Artemis Balard galloped past me down the stairs, pom-pomming some tune of his own invention.
Then it was just Madame de Boinville and me. She smiled faintly. “Artemis is very sweet, but sometimes he doesn’t think before he speaks. He’s right about Pankratov, though. The man may be a genius, but the truth is I don’t know how much more of him I can take. Do you suppose all geniuses are like that? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever met a genius before. Not a real one, anyway. Unless of course, you’re a genius,” she added after a moment. “In which case I’ve met two.”
I shook my head and smiled.
“Well, I’m glad,” she whispered, and rested her hand for a moment on my arm. “One is about all I could stand.”
I didn’t go to the café that first day, despite Balard’s invitation. I had promised myself only work while I was here. No lounging in bars or cafés. For as long as I could take it. Only work. I’d set myself the goal of twelve finished paintings within the first two months. I’d brought no pieces with me. Nor had I arranged to have a gallery represent me. Once I had the paintings, I’d set about finding one. There was something about starting out fresh in this new city that had appealed to me before I left.
My apartment building was number 50 on the Rue Descalzi. I rode to the top floor, three flights up in a cage of an elevator whose suspension cord creaked and grumbled as it hauled its cargo of the old landlady and me. Her name was Madame La Roche. She had tightly curled gray hair, and wore a flower-patterned housedress with clumpy black shoes. The first thing she did after shaking my hand was to point to a large and gaudy coat of arms, carved out of wood and painted, which hung in the main entranceway. “My family,” she said. “Very noble.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And your family?” she asked, her voice rising.
“Not very noble, I guess.”
She nodded severely, to show it was a problem that could neither be helped nor overlooked.
The apartment was a one-room studio divided into kitchen, bathroom and bedroom by three heavy velvet curtains, which hung from brass rings on wooden rails. It had a window at the front and a window at the back. Slowly, I set down my cases. Then I straightened up and clenched and unclenched my hands to get the blood flowing again. I went to the front window. It looked out onto a large advertisement that had been painted on the wall of a building across the road, which was some kind of warehouse. The advertisement was bone white with a wineglass in the middle. The glass was half full of red wine. Below it, in black letters: Buvez les Vins du Postillon.
“Beautiful,” she said, and gestured out the window. “The view.” She didn’t sound very convincing.
“When does the sun come in?” I asked. “For how many hours a day?” I wanted to know if I could get any painting done here.
“It depends,” she said suspiciously. “The clouds. The time of year. Most of the day you will get sun. You don’t want to see the kitchen?”
“That’s all right,” I told her.
Madame La Roche squinted with suspicion. She held out the keys, pinched between her thumb and index finger. “You are an artist,” she said.
“That’s right,” I replied.
“If this committee weren’t paying your rent, and paying for it in advance, I wouldn’t let an artist stay here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said wearily. I’d heard talk like that before.
“The only other exception I have made is to Monsieur Fleury. He lives here, you know, in one of the luxury suites downstairs.” She emphasized the word “luxury,” letting it roll off her tongue in slow motion. “I expect you have met Monsieur Fleury. Everybody has. Everybody here likes Monsieur Fleury. He is a very charming artist.”
“I did meet him,” I told her. “I think he’s a dealer. Not an artist.”
She looked me up and down. “You are an artist at making paintings. He is an artist at selling them.”
“I guess you could see it that way,” I said.
“I see it,” she told me, “just the way it is. And I tell you one other thing I see. I see people who come to Paris because they think that the city will make them into what they want to be. Actors. Painters. Musicians. But it doesn’t, you know. It doesn’t work that way.” Having made this pronouncement, she went out into the hall and pressed the button for the elevator to take her back down.
I walked over to the window and hauled it open, hearing the iron counterbalance weights rattle inside the frame. Warm air coming off the sun-heated slates on the rooftops brushed against my face. I leaned on the lead sheeting that plated the narrow sloping rim of the building, and looked out across what little of Paris I could see. I listened to the noises of the city, squinting in the glare of sun off the Postillon wine advertisement.
Already, I was starting to feel lonely. I looked down and was surprised to see Fleury standing in the middle of the street.
He was looking up at me, his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket. The whites of his teeth showed when he smiled and the sun winked off his glasses. “I see we’re going to be neighbors,” he called out.
Madame La Roche heard his voice. She came clumping in from the hall, pushed me aside and wedged herself half out the window. “Hello, Monsieur Fleury! Have you been working hard?”
“Madame La Roche!” Fleury filled the air with her name. “You look lovely today!”
“Oh,” said Madame La Roche very quietly, then glanced about the street to gauge how many people might have heard him call her lovely. She waved and then stepped back into the room. “You see,” she said to me. “He is so charming. A gentleman of the old days.”
“You should come to the show,” Fleury shouted to me.
“I ought to work,” I told him.
“But it would be work,” he said. “Now that you’re here, you’d better start making connections.”
I held up the ticket, to show I hadn’t thrown it away, and gave him a noncommittal smile.
He gave a short wave and walked toward the café at the far end of the street.
I set up my easel in the corner of the room, and then, from my suitcase, I brought out a little pyramid-shaped box. Inside it was a metronome, the kind that people use when they are learning to play the piano. I started it ticking on the table in the kitchen, very slowly, with the easy swing of a grandfather clock pendulum. Whenever I came to a new place, unfamiliar sounds always got in the way of my concentration.
With this apartment, the noises were mostly from the warehouse across the road. I spent a few minutes observing the nearly constant line of trucks that pulled up outside the front gate. They were loaded with crates of wine, the bottles packed in straw. The bottles clinked as they slid onto the flatbed of the truck. Each shipment was checked by a man with a long mustache
and hobnailed boots. The sound of his footsteps echoed up and down the street. After inspecting each truck, he banged the flat of his hand against its side, to signal that it could drive off. I found myself waiting for the next thump of the foreman’s hand, or wondering why the hobnails had momentarily stopped crashing on the cobblestones. And later, at closing time, I was startled by the thundery rumble of large rolling metal doors with Défense de Stationner painted on them as they were pulled down and locked in front of the Postillon warehouse. There were indoor sounds as well. Water dripping. Muffled conversation in the room across the hall. Someone sloshing in a bath downstairs. The metronome helped to clear these distractions from my head.
It was dark outside now. From down in the street came sounds of laughter. Breaths of music reached me high up in my dingy apartment, which smelled of old cooked meat and coal tar soap and the faint sourness of milk. In my newness here, I could pick out each individual odor of the place. I wondered how long it would be before they merged together in my senses and I would find them comforting. I brushed aside the red velvet curtains. The way they partitioned the space gave me the impression that I was living in the chambers of a heart. I lay down on the bed, too exhausted even to take off my clothes or roll back the sheets or care that the bed was too short.
I thought about the people I had left behind, my mother and my brother. I wondered what they would be doing now. After my father was killed in the Great War, my mother used her widow’s pension from the army to buy a small boardinghouse in Narragansett. Her days were caught up in the flow of visitors from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They came to walk the beaches and maybe catch a glimpse of Newport high society, like children staring through the window of a pastry shop. My brother was a trawlerman, a job for which I alternately admired him because of the risks he took, and pitied him, because of those same risks. The hurricane season was approaching fast, and soon there would be news of boats going down, as they always did under the graybeard rollers off Cape Cod. I remembered being disappointed at how easily they took the news that I’d be leaving for France. It wasn’t that I wanted them to talk me out of it. If I was honest with myself, it was more that I had wanted them to try, the same way they once tried to talk me out of my career as an artist. I realized that, for them, Paris was so far away it was as if I’d slipped into a world of dreams and was unreachable. In their minds, I had become as distant as my father.
The days spent on the ship on my way here had left the faintest rocking in my skull, the slow pendulum swing of the Atlantic’s deep sea swells. I dropped away into sleep with the vertigo rush of falling off a cliff.
Chapter Two
ONE HOUR LATER, I woke with a start when a car backfired down in the street. I raised one hand to rub the sleep-creases from my face and realized I was still holding the ticket to Fleury’s gallery show.
I decided I would go. I had to get something to eat, anyway, and I didn’t feel like spending my first evening stuck by myself in the apartment.
The gallery was on the Rue des Archives. I asked directions from Madame La Roche, who was sitting on a collapsible metal chair in front of the apartment building, smoking a little pipe.
The streets were busy. I passed dozens of restaurants whose awnings sheltered the pavement. Hand-holding couples stopped to check menus. They leaned toward the chalkboards on which the specials were written. Soft light pooled on their faces. Diners were jammed elbow to elbow at small tables. Waiters with long white aprons and slicked-back hair navigated through them, trays raised above their heads. Smells of garlic and wine wafted into the street. Some places had beds of ice on which oysters and sea urchins and shrimp were laid out. I could smell the faint salty sweetness of fresh seafood. My stomach cramped with hunger. But I didn’t want to sit at a restaurant by myself. Not tonight, anyway. I figured I would wait until after I’d gone to the gallery show, then buy some bread and cheese and maybe some wine and head back to the Rue Descalzi.
The brightness of restaurant lights and streetlamps and the dark emptiness of shops that had closed down gave me the sensation of everything drifting about, unattached, rushing by in a flickering hallucination. Hunger and my tiredness and, it seemed, the boom of Pankratov’s voice still an echo someplace in my head all piled together to make my walking in the streets like walking in a dream. I’m finally here, I thought, and at the same time I expected to wake up at any minute and find myself back home, in the summer heat, my old dust-greasy table fan creaking around on the windowsill and blowing a feeble breeze over the block of ice I went out and bought each August night. I brought the ice back to my apartment wrapped in brown paper and set it in a large spaghetti bowl. I put the fan behind the bowl and turned it on. In the mornings, I would wash my face in the cold water from the melted ice. I used to wait for the sound of the fan to work its way into my sleep. I listened past the rumble of the city for that faint persistent sound, which would be proof this was a dream. When it didn’t happen, I breathed out a sigh from the bottom of my lungs.
The closer I got to the gallery, the more nervous I became. Fleury was right about these openings being work. I never did well at them, even though I knew they were a necessary part of the business. I felt a sickening sharpness in my guts, as if I had swallowed broken glass, whenever I thought about the fancy-dress slaughterhouse of art openings. At the last show of my own work, I arrived late, walked once around the room and then ducked out the back door. I was halfway to the train station before the gallery owner caught up with me and convinced me to come back.
Ten minutes, I thought to myself. Give it ten minutes and then leave, even if Fleury asks you to stay. Or five, even. Five minutes. I was locked in a reverse bidding war with an auctioneer inside my head.
I saw where the gallery was half a block before I came to it. People spilled out into the little side street, hugging glasses of champagne in one hand and cigarettes in the other. I listened to the hum of party talk. Everyone was smoking. A blue-gray cloud of tobacco hung in the still air of the street.
Five minutes, I thought. Two minutes. One minute.
Inside, the place was so dense with people and smoke that the paintings were almost impossible to see. The artist stood against the far wall, wedged in by two women and a man. They were talking with their faces so close to his that he could not raise his glass to his lips to take a drink. They waved their cigarettes dangerously close to him and his nervous smile twitched as he flinched back from the burning tips.
I saw Fleury. He dodged from group to group like a hummingbird gathering pollen. People who clearly did not know him were grasped by the hand or shoulder or sleeve and made to feel, somewhere in the barrage of niceties, that they ought to know to whom they were talking. He caught my eye and waved me over as if he were hailing a cab.
Grimly, I made my way toward him.
“I want you to meet someone very important,” said Fleury, in a voice too loud to go unnoticed by everyone who stood nearby. “This is Madame Pontier. Of the Musée Duarte.”
Madame Pontier was wearing a loden coat with big buttons down the front, as big as silver dollars. She was thin and distinguished-looking. The age lines in her face were scowling lines, cut deep into the angles of her cheeks.
Judging from the small crowd that had gathered around her, she was obviously a person of some importance, and Fleury was making the most of her presence at his gallery. She had a look on her face as if she had already been introduced to too many people this evening and could not stand it any more. Fleury kept her strategically placed in the center of the room, at the foot of three small steps that separated the front half of the gallery from the rear. Everyone who came to see the exhibit would either have to shake her hand or ignore her and she did not look like the kind of person who got ignored very often.
I offered her the same Egyptian mummy grin that she gave me.
“Madame Pontier,” said Fleury, “is what is called un expert auprès du tribunal. This means she can authenticate any painting, and
if she puts her stamp on it, her word is law. Show him the stamp.”
“Do you really think this is necessary?” Madame Pontier’s voice made her seem at the point of total exhaustion.
“Make me happy!” said Fleury.
Madame Pontier reached into her pocket. Her hand was clenched into a fist when she pulled it out. Then she uncurled her fingers, revealing a small gold stamp with a base of jadelike stone. It was carved with some kind of seal and attached by a fine gold chain to a buttonhole of her jacket.
“Oh, is that really it?” asked a man in the group. He was tall and gaunt, with wavy hair plastered flat on his head with pomade. Sweat dappled the chest of his starched white shirt.
“It is.” Madame Pontier’s fist closed again around the seal.
“This is Monsieur Lebel,” Fleury introduced the man to me. “A connoisseur of important works of art, and owner of the Metropole Cabaret.”
“Yes. Oh.” Lebel grabbed my hand and stared right through me and immediately went back to ogling Madame Pontier.
The group of people seemed to close even more tightly around her, and I took the opportunity to step back. I was turning to leave when I found Fleury standing right beside me.
“Taking off?” he asked.
“Well, I think so. Yes.” I looked at my wrist, as if to check the time, but I realized I had left my watch back at the apartment.
“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked.
“No, actually,” I replied
“Come,” said Fleury. “Let me buy us dinner.”
“What about the show?” I asked.
He waved his head dismissively. “It’s winding down. I have an assistant who’ll take care of it. I always hate to be the last one to leave a party, even when it is my own.”
I was too tired and hungry to refuse.
“You didn’t happen to see Valya on your way over here, did you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. No.”
