The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  “You’re not paying me to clean up,” said Valya. She stepped into her shoes, jamming her heels into place.

  “I shouldn’t have to pay you at all,” replied Pankratov.

  “Then don’t,” snapped Valya. After that, there was only the sound of her footsteps fading away down the flights of stairs and at last the thump of the front door closing, which startled us back into motion.

  * * *

  “WHAT IS IT,” I asked Marie-Claire, as we emerged into the Rue Descalzi, “with Pankratov and the girl?”

  We were out in the street, taking our first breaths of air not tinted with the reek of paint and thinners.

  “I’ll tell you,” she replied, “but let’s go to the café.” When I hesitated, thinking that today I might go home and work on my own paintings, she set the flat of her hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me gently toward the café door. “It’s Friday,” she said, “and sometimes it’s as important to stop working as it is to start.”

  I hadn’t been thinking about it like that. “You’re right,” I told her.

  “Of course I am,” she said.

  I thought of letting the hours trail by in a fog of coffee and tobacco and the banana yellow brain-fuzzing licorice of Pastis. The idea was sweet and intoxicating, as if I had already drunk the Pastis and breathed in the nerve-smoothing Caporal smoke.

  The tables at the Dimitri were filling rapidly. Behind the bar, Ivan worked the coffee machine with movements like an orchestra leader. He smacked the coffee grinds from each shot into a garbage can the size of an oil drum. The sound made a dull boom in the crowded space of the café, as if Ivan were conducting his own version of the 1812 Overture.

  Balard was waiting for Marie-Claire at a table in the corner. He did not look particularly pleased to see me.

  “We could make it another time,” I said quietly to Marie-Claire.

  “No,” she replied. “Not another time.”

  I wondered if she had asked me along so that it would not be just the two of them. I knew she was very fond of Balard. Maybe even falling in love with him. But it was clear to me that Balard had fallen much harder and faster. Perhaps she didn’t like things to be going quite so fast. I didn’t much want to be getting in Balard’s way again, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escaping it now.

  “So what is it about Pankratov and Valya?” I asked again, once we had sat down.

  “What you have been witnessing,” said Marie-Claire, “is the torment of a man who makes this woman stand there naked before him and yet who cannot possess her. He is so infatuated that he doesn’t even know how to talk to her, let alone make love.”

  “Valya is the one weak spot in the hide of an otherwise bulletproof man,” announced Balard, then ordered his usual drink. He called it a “French 75,” and said it was named after the French 75mm artillery gun of the Great War.

  Daylight trailed away over the rooftops. Marie-Claire, Balard and I sifted through our theories of Pankratov and life inside the tiny universe of the atelier. I gave myself up to the Great God Pastis, adding water from a white jug into the glasses of sharp, honey-colored liquid, seeing it turn powdery yellow. I felt the soft absinthe explosions in my head, one after the other, until it seemed as if my blood were no longer contained inside the anchor of my body.

  On my way home that night, I decided not to be stingy with my free time. What good was being in Paris, I asked myself, if I didn’t live some of the life I had dreamed so long of living? I had to make a balance between working and not working.

  In the days that followed, I became a regular at the Dimitri, whiling away my afternoons and evenings with Marie-Claire and Balard in the happy thrum of café life. Balard soon grew used to my presence. I always left before they did, and from some of the things they said, I had the feeling they usually went back to his place afterwards. I spent a great deal of time politely ignoring the way they held hands under the table and how their knees touched, in a way that could be mistaken for accidental, except it wasn’t.

  We often talked about how hard it was to make a living as a painter.

  “We’ll have to live in a commune,” said Balard. “All of us together.”

  “Wouldn’t that be fine?” asked Marie-Claire. She put her arms around Balard’s neck and hugged him.

  I wanted to ask what her husband would think of us living in a commune, but Marie-Claire seemed to have forgotten all about her husband in these past few days.

  One night, more than a week later, I came home from the Dimitri and found Madame La Roche sitting on a chair on the sidewalk outside our building. When I stopped to wish her a good evening, she took the pipe from her mouth and looked at it sternly, as if it had just caused her some offense. “Monsieur Halifax,” she said.

  “Good evening, Madame La Roche.”

  “Your Levasseur people paid their rent today. On time. I thought you’d like to know. I see you have chosen your café.” She was still looking at the pipe and not at me.

  “Yes, ma’am. The Dimitri.”

  She nodded. “And how is your painting?”

  “Very fine,” I told her.

  Her eyes flicked up to me and then away. “Ah-ha,” she said. Then she tapped the old tobacco out of her pipe on the heel of her clumpy black shoe.

  It didn’t hit me until I was riding up to my room in the elevator, the gloss-black paint on the bars glimmering with the light of each passing floor. “Oh no,” I said quietly.

  When I reached my apartment, the first thing I saw was my easel in the corner, untouched for many days.

  “Oh no,” I said again.

  I walked in circles around the room. All my promises to work. The twelve paintings I was going to do. I hadn’t made a balance between working and not working. I hadn’t done any damned work at all. Instead of that, I’d grown numb to the passing of time. It had been too easy to follow everyone else into the café. My time at the Dimitri was like being addicted to alcohol or cigarettes. There were moments when I had said to myself that this would be the day I’d start my paintings, but when the time came, the whole idea of starting work would suddenly stop making sense. I told myself I was just too tired to paint. That I’d already done enough work that day, sketching for Pankratov. Told myself I didn’t feel inspired. The excuses lined up so far back in my head it seemed to me I could use a new one every time and still never run out. I understood now that none of these were the real reasons. I was afraid of working here. Better never to have tried to make my way as an artist in this city than to try and fail and have to carry that home with me like some cancer spreading in my guts.

  Now, staring me in the face, was the fact that I did not have a single painting. All I had were the endless sketches from Pankratov’s class and a few attempts at my Narragansett series, and they were worth nothing to a gallery.

  I opened my black metal moneybox and looked inside. Even with the money from the stipend, my cash was already running low. It wasn’t as if I could just cable my bank at home and have money sent over, either. What I had now was all I had. I shut the lid and shoved the box away.

  There was no point making more brave promises. I had already made vows and broken them. The only thing left now was to shut up and work and try to make up for lost time.

  I swept the breadcrumbs of that morning’s breakfast into my cupped hand and threw them out on the window ledge for the pigeons. Then I opened up my supply box and mixed paints. I arranged my materials and started painting. I worked until deep into the night, knowing that I was working too hastily. Knowing I would have to go back over this and correct the mistakes I was making. But what mattered now was to be working.

  I felt an easing of unfamiliar muscles, cramped so long inside me that I’d mistaken them for bones. The feeling of working after a long time of not working was unlike anything else. I knew I would sleep deeply that night. The only times I ever slept well were after I had been painting.

  Deep into the night hours the city seemed to rumble, a
s if thunder were gathering beneath it. The deep-sleep breathing of a hundred thousand people.

  I rubbed my hands across my face, smelling the dust of charcoal and paint powder ground into each swirl of my fingerprints. Then I went over to the sink and splashed water in my eyes. I looked at the time. It was too late to go to bed, but too early to go out and buy breakfast. I was too tired to work any more. I set my chair in front of the window and watched the dawn. The pigeons dozed on the ledge, heads tucked under their smoky-violet wings. I smelled baking bread from the bakery down the street. The whisper-whisper of the street sweepers with their witches’ brooms. Tram cars starting their rounds. The first clip-clop of footsteps. Then the sun exploding on the dewy rooftops. The coo and flutter of the pigeons as they set off in search of food. I felt at home in Paris now, as if each pull of air into my lungs had matched itself against the breathing of those hundred thousand dreamers in the dark.

  * * *

  I WENT TO CLASS as usual the next day, but that afternoon I didn’t go to the Dimitri. Instead, I went home and worked. Marie-Claire and Balard understood. Balard even sounded genuine when he said he hoped I’d come with them tomorrow. They disappeared into the café. The frosted glass door swallowed them up like a mist.

  After that, whenever I was up in my room, the sound of laughter or music from down in the street would tempt me away from my easel. But I was working well now, and the temptations were easier to resist.

  When I painted, I slipped away from Paris and felt again the pull of tides in Narragansett Bay, and streams running to the sea through marshes of Spartina grass. It seemed to me that I could sense the storms coming down from the north, as they would this time of year. Red hurricane warning flags blown to shreds on the splintering flagpoles. Indian summer, which would be coming soon. Chevrons of Canada geese overhead, waking me each morning with their muttered honking. I saw the white birch trees bowed down in sheaths of ice and the winter waves frozen glacier green on the empty beaches and the grim faces of the lobstermen, sweeping the snow from their decks as they moved out into the bay, to haul up their pots until their hands would freeze around the weed-slick ropes. The visions that reached me were astonishing in their clarity. I thought how strange it was that I had to cross an ocean before I could be made to understand that value of the place I’d left behind.

  When I painted, I moved through many stages of sketching and preliminary studies. I worked at the forms until they stopped being drawings of things. The figures in the sketch slowly evolved in relation to each other, separate from the world from which they had come. Only then, when the picture had detached itself from its source, would I begin to paint.

  I usually made a lot of false starts, but eventually the image that appeared among the smoky charcoal trails of sketches tacked to each flat surface around me, walling me in, blocking out the light, would become the image I wanted on the canvas.

  I didn’t use paint generously. I didn’t slap it on the canvas and paint over it if I didn’t like what I saw. I scraped it back down to the undercoat and started again. I liked the undercoat to be thin, so you could see the fabric of the canvas, and so that even when the painting was done, you could still make out the texture, but only if you brought your eyes very close. I liked the way it drew the eye toward the picture, made you look at the minutest detail, so that it would stop being the whole picture and would break down into its individual parts, which were different from what the parts had been in reality. Now they were the fragments of a different thing, a thing all by itself. But the ghost of the canvas underneath, the reminder of it, would always bring you back into the world from which the painting had emerged, many incarnations ago.

  * * *

  AS THE DAYS WENT by, I grew more and more frustrated with the endless sketching at Pankratov’s. Once, as he checked my work and breathed a gloomy sigh over my shoulder, I turned to face him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Pankratov looked confused, as if I could not possibly have spoken to him in that way and he must have misunderstood.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked again.

  “Did I say there was something wrong?” asked Pankratov. Then he looked over my head, taking in the whole class with his gaze. “No more sketching today!” he shouted. He strode back to his chair and sat down heavily into its canvas seat. “This weekend, you three will do studies for me. You will go to the Musée Duarte and choose sixteen of the works there and I expect you to have studies of these works by the time I walk into the classroom on Monday morning. Good!” He clapped his hands. “You are dismissed!”

  For a moment, I thought I saw relief drift like a scattering of dust across his face. I wondered if this was part of his teaching. That he would make us sketch and sketch until we rebelled against it and only then would we be ready to move on. Is that it? I wanted to ask him. How in God’s name does your mind work?

  A silence followed his announcement. Balard and Marie-Claire glanced at each other, looking for reassurance that their weekends were not shot to bits.

  But I knew exactly what would be left of our free time. Absolutely nothing. I’d had assignments like this before. In my head, I drew a neat line through Saturday, when I had planned to go to the open-air markets at Clignancourt and buy some cheap art supplies, since I’d run out of everything I’d brought with me and couldn’t afford high-quality materials from the shops on the Rue de Charonne. I had to force myself to calm down. I couldn’t get out of doing the assignment. I would just have to get it over with and then there would be time for my own work.

  I was too annoyed to paint, so I took a walk down Avenue Matignon in Faubourg St. Honoré. Most of the galleries were here. I scouted out the neat little shops, with all manner of paintings set on easels in the front window. They looked so clean and well lit and so unlike the chaos of Pankratov’s atelier that I found it hard to imagine that the paintings on display had come from any paint-splattered artist’s studio. These words seemed to have been transported into a different dimension, where I could neither purchase them nor bring my own work to be sold. I walked home along the Quai du Louvre. I stopped to look at the bronze statue of a lion fighting a wild boar. The bronze was pale green with age. In the fading light, the metal seemed to glow from inside. It was as if the bronze were only a shell, under which the beasts were waiting for the moment when they could cast off their cocoons, thin and shattering upon the road. Then they would roam snarling through the streets, forgetting their centuries of patience.

  At ten o’clock Saturday morning, I showed up at the Musée Duarte. It was an intimidating yellow stone building on the Rue Louis Blanc. In the courtyard was a fountain made of the same yellow stone but streaked arsenic green from decades of water trickling over the side. The fountain was turned off and empty. The main entrance was barred with iron railings. The tip of each rail was formed into a spike. The gates had been locked and the main doors were shut.

  I walked across the road to a bench and sat down, waiting for the place to open. I set my portfolio on the bench beside me. One hour later, I was still sitting there. I walked down the road and bought a crêpe filled with hazelnut paste from a street vendor. Then I went back to the bench and was there another half hour before an old woman sat down beside me with her shopping in a little basket with wheels on the bottom.

  We both stared straight ahead for a minute or two.

  Out of her wheely basket, baguettes jutted up like clumsy replicas of the museum gates. “Are you an artist?” she asked.

  “I’m working at it,” I replied.

  “Oh, you’re Canadian,” she said, having noticed my accent.

  “American. My mother was Canadian.”

  “American,” she corrected herself. “You aren’t waiting for the museum to open, are you?”

  “Actually, yes, I am.”

  “Well, you will have to wait a long time. On the weekend, it is only open on Sundays.”

  I stood up suddenly. “What?” I marched out into the street. �
�Well, why the hell don’t they have a sign posted?” I shouted at the gloomy building. The locked doors and shuttered windows made it look pug-faced and asleep.

  “I don’t think they’ve ever had a sign,” said the old woman. “It is just a thing one is expected to know.”

  I spun around. “This whole city is making me crazy!” I shouted. I marched back to pick up my portfolio and tried to calm myself. “Thank you,” I said to the old woman. “I apologize for shouting.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “One expects this sort of thing from foreigners.”

  I rode the streetcar out to Clignancourt. I was thinking I might get those art supplies after all and still salvage something of the day. I knew this was some joke of Pankratov’s to send us to the Musée Duarte when he knew it would be closed. Some test that had nothing to do with how well we could draw or paint. And only I had failed it.

  I jumped off the streetcar at Porte de Clignancourt and disappeared into the swirl of alleyways that made up the Clignancourt fleamarket. Tables were laid out on the uneven cobblestones, piled with old clothes, shoes, china, boxes of spoons, camera parts. Vendors cooked peanuts in sugar, stirring them in steel bowls with wooden spoons. Arabs carved huge roasts of lamb on vertical spits over charcoal fires. The smell of roasting meat salted the air.

  I sat on the curb and drank wine from an earthenware mug at a café whose tables were already full. I buried my face in the mug and felt the wine splash down inside me. All right, I thought. So I wasted a morning sitting on a bench. So maybe I’ll learn to be more careful next time. That’s what Pankratov was teaching me. I’ll do the sketches tomorrow, when the museum opens up. I eased myself up off the pavement, set my empty mug on a table and went looking for art supplies.