by Paul Watkins
She was watching us. She looked old and sad.
It occurred to me that maybe she had wanted Fleury to invite her along, too, but I doubted it had ever crossed his mind.
The Polidor was crowded, warm with the heat of elbow-to-elbow people, each group locked in their own conversations. Outside, the light had faded from the streets. The air that blew in through the open windows carried with it the smell of rain about to fall.
We ate cassoulet and started out with heavy Dordogne wine, an almost blood-thick Château Pineraie. Then we switched to the house red, which tasted acidic and papery in comparison.
I had been waiting for the right moment to let him know about Valya and Pankratov. Now my patience gave way and I told him.
As Fleury listened, he took off his glasses and stared at me across the table. Then he put his glasses back on and stared some more. He gritted his teeth and scratched at his neck as if he had some kind of skin condition. “Good God,” he said. “I must admit I did not see this coming.” He squinted at me. “Are you sure you’re not joking?”
“No joke,” I assured him.
“And to think all this time…” His voice trailed off. He sat his elbow on the table and rubbed his fingers hard across his forehead, leaving red marks.
“But you know, Fleury, Valya…” I narrowed my eyes. “She’s a hard case.”
“She certainly is.” Fleury sat back, crossing one leg over the other.
I noticed that, although his brown ankle boots were highly polished, the soles had both worn through and the heels were ground way down. I looked up at his face, in case he saw me staring at those boots.
“Here’s the thing, about Valya and me,” he said. “You know how it is when there are beautiful people all around, but their beauty does nothing to you.”
“I guess,” I said awkwardly.
“You recognize that they are beautiful,” continued Fleury, “and charming and intelligent, men and women both, but when you look at them you feel a certain emptiness. It doesn’t occur to you that you may never see them again, and if it did, you wouldn’t care. It’s as if we each have some kind of coding device inside us. Sometimes our codes partly match with the codes of other people. Mostly they don’t match at all. But”—he pinched the air—“in the rarest moments, the codes will match completely. There is even a feeling of a lock clicking shut. It isn’t love or lust. It’s something entirely different. It’s some unnamed recognition that makes you want to be near them, no matter what the circumstances. It makes you want to tell them secrets. You don’t care what kind of fool you make of yourself. The idea that you might not see this person again sends panic clattering through your head. That’s the way I am about Valya. And I tell you, there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.”
“Poor you,” I said.
“Poor me is right.” His face took on a mixture of deviousness and hope. “But perhaps not as poor as all that, now that I know things are different.” His eyes narrowed as the possibilities took shape in his head.
I felt even more sorry for him than before. Fleury was not a handsome man. Not well built. He seemed to have a certain clumsiness around women, which he hid pretty well behind his sense of humor, but he could hide it for only so long. None of these things should have mattered, and maybe Valya should have loved him from the start because he was kind and intelligent and would have made a good companion—I supposed all that was true—and because of a dozen other reasons which didn’t matter in the end. They didn’t matter because Valya would not be seen walking out with a man like Fleury. That was a fact.
I figured there wasn’t a person in the world who hadn’t, at one time or another, sat down with a friend and listened to them go on about loving someone they would never possess. Rather than tell them the truth about their chances, and save them some grief down the road, you just sit there nodding and smiling and feeling bad about it, because that is a thing they’ll never believe until they find it out for themselves. So, for the rest of the meal, Fleury talked about Valya and I agreed with every damned thing he said, because he didn’t really want to know what I thought. The only thing I could do for Fleury, as a friend, would be not to remind him about all the things he’d said when he got to the point where he wished he’d never said them.
Finally, mercifully, Fleury changed the subject by asking me if I had any paintings for him to sell.
“They’re not finished,” I told him. “They’ll be done soon.”
“What about the sketches?” he asked. “You have some of those, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have some studies I did at the Musée Duarte.”
He tapped at his chin with his index finger, thinking. “Those are the ones Pankratov was raving about.”
“He didn’t rave about them,” I said. “He just said he liked them is all.”
“If Pankratov likes them, that’s good enough for me.” Fleury crumpled his napkin and stood. The napkin stayed wrung in his fists like the neck of a small strangled animal.
I looked up, fork still poised over a piece of apple tart. “What’s the matter?”
“I have some calls to make. I’ll stop by your place tomorrow,” he said. “Pick up those sketches, if you don’t mind. We can make a start with those.” He was looking over my head and out into the street. A fine rain was falling. His thoughts had already moved on. They raced ahead of his footsteps and out into the dark.
After the meal, I went to the Polidor bar. It was connected to the restaurant through a doorway and down a couple of stairs. The wine hummed warmly in my head and I wanted to have a coffee before heading home to work for the rest of the night. A Japanese man in a tuxedo was playing jazz on the piano. His eyes were closed and smiling and his lips moved as if making up words for the songs he was playing. As I stood in the doorway watching people at the bar, I realized that one of them was Valya, in the company of a man I’d never seen before.
She wore a long black dress and an amber necklace, each marmalade stone held by a silver band and joined with silver links one to the other. Her hair was tied up on her head. She looked very beautiful. She was sitting up at the bar with a small thin glass of clear liquid in her hands. Beside her was a bowl of crushed ice with more thin glasses in it, almost like test tubes. She drank the clear liquid in one gulp, her head going back and her neck arching, and the man, momentarily not under her gaze, fixed her with predator’s eyes, which had vanished behind soft-smiling politeness by the time she looked at them again.
I remained almost hidden behind the mounds of coats hanging from the porcelain-tipped brass coat racks that jutted from the wall. Several of them were already broken off from the weight of too many coats. I breathed in the leathery smells of tobacco and strong coffee, mixed with the faint sourness of wine.
“I’ll be right back,” said the man. He headed for the bathroom, stepping past me on his way. The man was about six foot two, with brown hair cropped at the sides and longer on the top, which he combed back. He had a broad forehead and deep-set brown eyes the color of hazelnut shells. His shoes were spit-shined and cross-laced.
Now another man, who was standing at the bar, leaned across to Valya. He was broad-shouldered and round-faced, with his front teeth bunched too close together. “Why do you like Thomas so much?” he asked, teasing, as if to show he really didn’t care.
“I like him,” replied Valya, “because he doesn’t ask stupid questions.”
The man’s head rocked back as he laughed, but then he brought his face close to hers and was no longer laughing. His hands gripped the bar on either side of her. “Why didn’t we meet in another life, you and me?”
She rested the heel of her palm on the man’s head and gave him a gentle shove backwards. “He’d kill you if he heard you talk like that.”
The man shrugged to show he didn’t care.
“He’s coming back,” said Valya.
The man stepped to one side in a quick, fluid movement. All his brave talk was finished,
as if perhaps they’d not been joking about the lethal instincts of the brown-eyed man.
I felt suddenly ashamed to be spying on her like this. It was just what she would be expecting of one of her father’s pupils. I walked the two steps down into the bar.
From the expression on Valya’s face, it was clear she didn’t want to start a conversation.
Obligingly, I pretended not to know who she was.
I found a table to myself and drank my coffee. I started thinking about Fleury again. I wondered if I ought to tell him about Valya being here tonight and hoped there might be some way he could find out on his own. Fleury might thank me for bringing him the news, but he would always remember that I was the one who brought it. For now, I tried to push it from my head. I sat on the plush green chair and felt the music swirl around me as if it were part of the smoky air.
* * *
EARLY THE NEXT DAY, Fleury met me outside my apartment as I was heading to Pankratov’s.
I had dropped off my sketches the night before. I slid them under his apartment door in a manila folder.
He was holding the folder now. His face was serious.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“I think I can sell these,” he said.
“But they’re just sketches,” I told him.
“I may have a buyer.” His glasses made him owlish. He lifted his head back, as if trying to see out from under the heavy lenses. “So you’ll allow me to represent you?” he asked. “Just to make it official?”
“Sure,” I told him. “I’d be glad to.”
“And on your painting series as well, when they’re ready. I’d like to have that be a part of the arrangement.”
I thought about it for a second. “All right,” I said. “And after the paintings, we can see how it’s going.”
“Fair enough,” he said and held out his hand.
I shook it.
Madame La Roche appeared, carrying her chair. She grunted as she stepped by us and out into the sun. The chair’s old hinges creaked as she sat down. She brought out her pipe from her apron and clamped it, unlit, between her teeth. Then she folded her arms and stared into space.
I looked down at the ground, stubbing the toe of my shoe against some imaginary bump in the pavement. “I saw Valya out with some other man last night.”
Fleury was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant, “there was bound to be someone, wasn’t there?”
I glanced up. “Sure, I suppose.”
“Don’t count me out,” he said. “Haven’t even thrown my hat in the ring yet.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Good man,” I said.
He raised the manila envelope. “Let’s get these sold, shall we?”
“Lots of luck,” I told him.
“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” he replied. Then he beamed a smile at Madame La Roche. “’Morning, Madame.”
She creased her porridge face into a smile.
When he had gone, I stood for a while in the sun, eyes closed, feeling the warmth on my face. I thought about how things were in motion now, about how there was nothing for me to do but get on with my work. I tried to prepare myself for the fact that the sketches would most likely be rejected. I knew the precise acidic heaviness in my guts from times it had happened before, and how I would try not to let it show.
Madame La Roche breathed in deeply, which she did whenever she was going to make some pronouncement.
I opened my eyes.
She was watching me. She took the pipe from her mouth and pointed it at me. “Monsieur Fleury is going to sell your paintings?”
“Yes, ma’am. He’s going to try, anyway.”
“It is just as well. We will need some paintings to look at, now that the museums are closing.”
I had been hearing rumors about this for some time. A few days ago, it became official. Due to the threat of war, the museums would close on August 25. I gave a gloomy sigh at the prospect.
“If Monsieur Fleury likes your paintings,” said Madame La Roche, “then everyone will like them.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
Madame La Roche looked down the road after Fleury. “The compliment is not for you,” she said.
* * *
AS MARIE-CLAIRE, BALARD AND I came out into the street at the end of the day’s classes, I declined Balard’s halfhearted offer to join them at the Dimitri. By now, they were hopelessly in love, beyond all practicality and sense. They were like characters in a pointillist dream, fragmented by late summer’s hazy light.
I stepped through the doorway of my apartment building and into the shadows. I was clutching a portfolio to my chest, heading for the elevator at the end of the hall.
There was an explosion.
“Jesus!” I shouted. I dropped to my knees, hard on the tiles of the floor, and then sprawled onto my face. The portfolio flew out of my hands. It slapped onto the floor, spilling paper like a fanned-out deck of cards.
In the silence that followed, I heard laughter.
It was Fleury. He was sitting on one of the benches that stood on either side of the door. No one ever sat on them. It was too gloomy there. He was holding a bottle of champagne and had just fired off the cork, which bounced off the ceiling and came to rest, spinning, right in front of my face. “Did you think someone was shooting at you?”
“What are you doing there?” I asked, as I gathered up my scattered portfolio.
“I am about to drink this,” he said quietly. “And then, perhaps, quite a bit more.”
It took a second for this to sink in. “You sold something?”
He drank some champagne from the bottle, and when he lowered it, the champagne rose up and spilled down over his hand and wrist. From the top pocket of his jacket pocket, he took out a wad of money, neatly folded and held with a brass clip. He tossed it onto the floor in front of me.
I looked at the money but didn’t touch it yet.
“You doubted me, didn’t you?” he said. “Go on. Admit it. You doubted me.”
“It wasn’t you I doubted. It was the work.” I reached over and picked up the bills. I slipped off the paper clip and counted the money. I calculated roughly one month of expenses, including food and rent and painting supplies. This money had come just in time. The Levasseur grant expired in two weeks. “Did you sell all of them?” I asked.
Fleury set down the champagne bottle and pushed it gently across the black and white tiled floor so I could reach it. “Actually, I sold only three of the eight you gave me, to a man who is a private collector.”
“I don’t understand. Three pictures?” I held up the wad of bills. “For all this?”
He sat forward and clasped his hands together. “What you don’t understand is how little work of genuine quality is out there. And you don’t know how much quality artwork actually goes for. If you think you’re worth very little, so will everyone else.”
“Why didn’t you sell all of them?” I asked. “Didn’t he want the others?”
“I didn’t even show him the others. I gave out just enough to make him hungry and to keep him that way. He’ll get the rest when I’m ready.”
“You can’t tell me his name? I mean, I’d like to thank him.”
Fleury ground his heel into the tiles. “You do your job and let me do mine.” Then he smiled, to hide the force behind his words.
I put the money in my pocket.
* * *
YOU ALWAYS WONDER WHAT you’ll do when you get your first break in a new place. The break isn’t always about money. It’s more about the first vote of confidence. You feel as if everything you have done to get to this place has been worthwhile and that all of the miserable days of doubt will have inverted into something glorious. You wonder what momentous thing you will do to mark the event. Maybe you will climb to the edge of some jagged cliff above the clouds, like a character in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, and watch the sun come up on this new universe of yo
urs. Or maybe you will do a painting to mark the event, the one you will never sell or give away.
Here is what I did instead. I bought a pair of socks. I walked around, aimless but contented, and got lost somewhere between Rue St. Dominique and the Avenue Bosquet. I asked an old woman for directions. She had set herself up at a little table, on which she placed handknit sweaters, socks and gloves. She had made them herself and was knitting a new sweater while she sat there in the street, with a pile of old newspapers for a chair. The wool was thick and nubby, and when I pressed it to my face, I smelled the calming fragrance of new wool. She showed me the way to get home.
On the way back, the night cold found its way along my sleeves and down my neck. I strolled down the Rue Racine and the Boulevard St. Germain, peering into shop windows at the wistful-looking mannequins. If I sold some more pieces, I might be able to buy myself a few new shirts, maybe even a suit. I peered in at the restaurants, and made a mental note of the ones that looked inviting. Places I would go when the money started coming in—to the bar at the Hôtel Meurice and La Cremaillière and Le Boeuf sur le Toit.
I went back to thinking about the sketches. I had sold work before. That wasn’t what made this so different. What made it different was that this work had been bought in Paris. I realized just how many of my daydreams had been about this moment.
When I got home, I rolled up the money, tied it with string and stashed the bundle at the bottom of a box of oatmeal.
I set some breadcrumbs out for the pigeons, then put on my pajamas and the new socks. Lying in bed, I wiggled my toes in the socks. This drew a smile across my face. For the first time since I reached France, I wouldn’t wake up with cold feet.
In my dreams that night, it seemed to me that all the great paintings of the world filed past behind my closed eyelids. They seemed to have a kind of life in them that I could not identify. These paintings were not alive by themselves, but when I looked at them, it seemed that part of what was living in me passed through them. If I could only keep this vision in my head, I thought. If I could understand it the way I do now in my dream.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE THE next morning, the city was rumbling with a smooth even thunder like an engine as it reaches its optimum speed, when everything in the machine suddenly seems to settle and all vibrations stop. I went to class and made no mention of selling the sketches, since I didn’t want it to seem like bragging. I didn’t want to hear what Pankratov would say about my work and my friendship with Fleury, either.
