by Paul Watkins
We sat down on a bench to have a smoke. Fleury liked English tobacco, which he bought from a tobacconist in the foyer of the Hôtel Continental on the Rue de Rivoli. He smoked a brand called Craven A, which came in flat red tins with a black cat on the front. I had brought a few packs of Chesterfields with me from the States, but I didn’t often smoke and the tobacco went stale before I finished it. So now I was trying the French stuff, Caporals, which took some getting used to.
I opened my mouth to ask Fleury what he had thought about the movie, but never had the chance to speak, because a voice called to us from behind.
We both turned and looked past the dappled bark of the trees.
A man stood behind some tall black railings that separated the street from the park. He was waving to us. He was tall and wore a big hat.
It seemed to me I had seen him someplace before, but I couldn’t recall where and his face was in the shadows.
“Monsieur Fleury,” the man called down. “I have been meaning to speak with you.”
“Yes,” said Fleury, his voice strained. “Call me tomorrow.”
The man laughed. “No. I mean now. I will only be a minute.” He was already on his way.
Fleury smiled and waved and then slumped back on the bench. The smile had been sliced off his face.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Fleury cleared his throat. “Lebel. A collector. You met him once. At that opening I took you to.”
I had some vague memory of his grizzled gray hair, sweat coming through his starched shirt and being told that he owned a cabaret. “Why don’t you want to see him?” I asked.
It was too late for Fleury to reply, because Lebel had already arrived. He had a dog on a braided leather leash, which was wrapped around his hand like knuckle straps on a boxer. The dog was a tough-looking little schnauzer with bushy eyebrows and gray fur.
Lebel and Fleury shook hands.
“This is David Halifax,” said Fleury, rising to his feet.
“Excellent,” said Lebel and stared right through me, just as he’d done the time before. He let the leash fall to the ground. The dog sniffed at my shoes with busy jerking motions of his nose.
Lebel turned back to Fleury. “It’s working out so well,” he said. “You remind me that there is still quality work to be found. Work by the great masters that hasn’t yet been gobbled up by museums or millionaires. It is out there!” He waved his hand expansively over the pond. “Monsieur Fleury, you have given me hope. I see in you a partner of many years.”
“Yes, well,” said Fleury, hands in pockets, looking down at his shoes. “I’m glad it’s all working out.”
I wasn’t paying much attention. I stayed sitting on the bench. I bent down and scratched the dog’s ears. The leash trailed behind him. The leather braid reminded me of the pattern on the back of a copperhead rattlesnake.
“Those Gauguin sketches. Such a trove,” said Lebel, wrapping his lips around the word.
For a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Looking up, I saw a sudden grayness in Fleury’s cheeks as the blood left his face. Then I knew that I hadn’t misunderstood. Fleury had been selling my sketches as originals. I felt suddenly nauseous.
Lebel grasped Fleury’s hand and shook it violently. “Thank you,” he exhaled. Then he turned to his dog and snapped, “Bertillon!”
The dog gave my feet one last sniff and scuttled off, the leash slithering behind.
I didn’t wait for Lebel to meet my eyes in some blind gesture of farewell. I was staring at the ground.
Fleury sat down beside me. “That’s what I love about Lebel,” he said. His voice was falsely jovial. “When he is happy, he just can’t stand the thought of keeping it to himself.”
I watched Lebel disappear across the park, his footsteps crossed by the wandering paths of others. His shape blurred amongst the rippling shadows of the fountain and the trees, like a cat-lick figure in the background of an Impressionist painting.
“You son of a bitch,” I said very softly. “You lied to me.”
It was quiet for a long time.
Fleury sighed. “Yes, I did.”
At that moment, I was too stunned to feel anger. Instead, I sensed a rushing static all around me, sealing me off, so that Fleury’s voice reached me as if down a long cardboard tube.
Fleury had his hands in front of him now, as if weighing in his palms the air that came out of his lungs. The cigarette was wedged between the first two fingers of his right hand, smoldering patiently. “The moment I saw those sketches,” he said, “I knew I could pass them off as originals to someone who wasn’t an expert. Lebel was the first person I thought of. He lives on our street, you know. That’s how I met him. Lebel may know how to run that cabaret of his, but he’s not the art expert he believes himself to be. The more I praise his intelligence, the less intelligent he becomes. I knew he would buy them. At a glance, and even at a second or third glance, it would be assumed that the sketches were original Gauguins. The paper was old, and you were probably using old pencils, too, and your sketches were very good. Very fluid.” He was touching his lips with the tips of his fingers as he spoke, as if trying to stop the words from coming out.
“Where did you tell him they came from?” I asked.
He sipped at the smoke from his cigarette and stared straight ahead. “I made up a story about how the sketches came out of the private collection of a family friend who had passed away and that the other family members were letting me buy the work rather than putting it out on the open market themselves.”
“And everything you told me about them being sold as decorative pieces…” As the numbness of shock wore off, anger was taking its place.
“You should take it as a compliment.” Fleury tried to find his way around the lie. “I knew you’d never agree to it.”
“You’re damned right I wouldn’t,” I snapped. I was suddenly conscious of his physical frailty, in a way I never had been before. Rage glanced off my bones in coppery sparks.
“Look,” he said. “I know I had no right…”
“You had no damned right at all!” I shouted. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Fleury got up slowly and walked over to the edge of the water. He stood for a moment, hunched over like a man grown suddenly old. “Do you want to stay in Paris?” he asked. He spoke so quietly that it was as if he were talking to his own reflection in the water.
“Of course I do,” I said.
Fleury straightened up. He spun on his heel and walked back to me. His face had lost its grayness. “Then you ought to thank me!” he said. “I did you a favor. You said yourself that if I hadn’t sold those sketches, you’d be on the boat home by now. And if I sold them for what they’re really worth, I could have bought you a week or two. A month at the most. But I knew I could get more for them, so I did. And that’s the only reason you’re here now.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “But what about the risk you took with my career?”
He slapped his hand against his chest, bouncing his palm off the thick, rough tweed. “Mine, too! I took the risk just the same as you did.”
“Yes, but you knew you were taking it! My part of that risk wasn’t yours to take and you can’t deny that!”
“What would you have done if I’d told you the truth?” he asked. “Would you have let me sell those sketches as original Gauguins?”
“Of course not!”
Fleury paced in front of me, stirring the gravel with his shoes, yellow dust coating the spit-shined toecaps. “Exactly. You’re too high and mighty. You have no idea how things work. What to do when an opportunity comes along. How to balance it against the risks. And you can’t just not take risks. I know what you want more than anything else in the world. I know, because I want the same thing. To be here. To be making a go of it and doing well for yourself. And did you honestly think you could get what you wanted without paying some kind of price?”
I didn’t answer. I stood an
d walked past Fleury, heading for the street.
Fleury stopped pacing. His anger seemed to leave him. His hands found their way into his pockets. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
I walked right by him and still gave no reply.
He made no move to stop me. “You have what you want,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”
I shuffled through the fallen leaves, my mouth and eyes dried out, noticing nothing around me.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke as usual to the sound of the men lining up outside the Postillon warehouse. They were mostly older men now, the younger ones having been called up for military service.
For the rest of that week, I worked on my paintings. All my confidence had gone now. I worked only out of a grim stubbornness to get the job done.
Fleury kept his distance, which took some doing, considering we both lived in the same building. I tried not to think about what had happened, but of course this didn’t work. If the word got out that Fleury was selling forgeries, and that I was the one who had made them, we would both be finished in Paris. And wherever the story spread—New York, London, Rome—we’d be finished there, too. I realized that even if we seemed to have gotten away with it, I couldn’t forgive Fleury for taking the risk.
When I thought about it that way, it all seemed clear. I would have nothing to do with Fleury from now on. If I happened to run into him, which seemed inevitable if we were both to work in Paris, I would fend him off with a freeze of politeness.
Other times, it didn’t seem clear at all. The other half of my brain was telling me to shut up and face the fact that the only reason I was still here was because Fleury had sold those sketches. He had been right when he said I wanted to stay here more than anything else in the world. I asked myself what I’d have done if Fleury had come to me first and asked me what I wanted him to do. Would I really have told him not to sell the sketches, and then just packed up and left Paris? I would have run out of money by now if it weren’t for the sketches. I could only have taken on a job illegally, since I had no papers, but any job like that would have paid me so little and worked me so long that I would never have gotten any more painting done. I honestly didn’t know what I would have said to Fleury. I didn’t have the right to dismiss so easily the wrong that he had done.
These separate voices clashed so furiously inside me, warring back and forth across the tundra of my brain, that it seemed to me my sanity was fracturing in hairline cracks across my skull. I couldn’t sleep, hearing the volcanic rumble of the city. The wind blew in off the rooftops, carrying the smell of baking bread and the distant clank of trains. I wondered how many others out there were like me, among the hundred thousand sleepers, hounded through their dreams by such confusions.
* * *
LATE FRIDAY EVENING, I finished the last of the paintings.
All Saturday, I sat with the canvases set up around me, trying to decide what to do.
Before it all happened, I’d never have thought I could stay friends with someone who pulled a stunt like this. Now it didn’t seem so black and white. You start out with some image of how things will need to be, clear-cut and defined, and it all seems reasonable to you at the time. But when the image gets dented and scarred, as it always does, you remember the promises you made yourself about what you would do and what you wouldn’t. Maybe you never do find out what is in another person’s heart, or in your own. It boils down to whether you can live with the uncertainty, and in some ways want it even as you fear it, just as you want and fear the few things that are certain in a life.
By the end of the day, I had made up my mind.
That evening, I wrapped up each of the paintings in brown paper and string and brought them downstairs to Fleury’s apartment. I had to make several trips in the elevator, and found myself hoping he didn’t hear the racket I was making in his hallway.
He answered the door wearing a smoking jacket made of lurid red and black velvet. “Ah,” he said, tilting back his head the way he always did.
I waited for him to say something else, but that was all he said. A breeze blew in the window of his apartment and past him and into my face. I smelled soap and aftershave. I looked into his apartment and saw how small and clean it was. I had stopped by a few times to pick him up before we headed out to the Polidor, but mostly he liked to meet in the hallway downstairs. I thought he might be a little ashamed of his place, since he liked to give the impression of living more grandly than he did. The windowsills were busy with flowers in tiny white pots with designs painted on them in orange and blue. An empty red glass bowl stood on the kitchen table. His polished shoes were lined up just inside the door—one pair of black and one pair of brown—and he wore a pair of fancy slippers on his feet.
“You’ve brought your paintings with you,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
His eyebrows bobbed. “I thought you’d had enough of me.”
“I kind of thought that, too,” I said.
“I wondered if perhaps you were coming down to rough me up a bit. For my crimes and misdemeanors.”
“I didn’t come here to rough you up. Look,” I told him, “if you still want to work together, there’ll be no more going behind my back.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”
I helped him carry the paintings into his apartment. We opened them up and I told him what they were about.
“Do you think you can sell them?” I asked.
He breathed in sharply. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
I was very tired now. As I said good-bye to him, he insisted we shake hands. I walked down the corridor and pressed the elevator button. When I turned to look back, he was still standing in the hallway. “Where the hell did you get that jacket?” I asked.
He looked down at his chest, then back up at me. “This is my armor,” he said.
“Armor?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “It’s a different kind of armor. But it is armor, all the same. And it never fails me.”
* * *
MY PAINTINGS WERE SHOWN at Fleury’s gallery the following month. I sold eight of them during the time they hung in the show, and all but one sold soon after that. They didn’t go for a great deal of money, and it made me realize that even if I was successful here, survival in this place would not come easily.
I had, by now, taken over the rent payments on my apartment. Madame La Roche seemed impressed. “You’ve given up painting?” she asked me. “You have taken up employment?”
“Painting is my employment,” I replied.
She blinked in slow astonishment, unable or unwilling to make the connection.
In the weeks that followed, she treated me with grudging respect, even introducing me to one of her landlady’s friends as “a painter of things.” This other woman, Madame Coty, was a near duplicate of Madame La Roche, in her flower-patterned housecoat and thick, fleshy stockings. The two of them used to sit outside the front door in the sun, perched on rickety chairs, smoking their pipes. Their expressions reminded me of two old jack-o’-lanterns that had been left out on a doorstep after Halloween. Their once savage faces had sagged like the slowly rotting pumpkins. Now they just looked drawn and ornery, with only rudeness to chase demons and children away.
It was only after months of living here that I began to find myself on friendly terms with the people who lived on my floor. I rarely saw them. We seemed to live in completely different schedules, like employees of some nonstop factory, all working different shifts. On those rare moments when we did pass in the cramped hall, or rode the elevator down to the street, our greetings were so filled with awkward flinching that it seemed easier, even more humane, to pretend the other person wasn’t there at all. I hated the silence in the black cage of that elevator, as it seemed to close in around me like some complicated torture device, while the other person seemed to be expanding until there
was no place for me to look. Eventually, I took it upon myself to start conversations. To my surprise, it worked. An old man with the watery eyes introduced himself as Laurent Finel. He had been invalided out of a job in a coal mine ten years earlier and had come to live in Paris with his sister. The sister died and Finel continued to live in the apartment. He was one of the men who stood outside the Postillon warehouse every morning, more I think because he wanted something to do than because he needed the money, as he had a disability pension. From then on, I recognized him when I looked out the window at the line each morning, the stoop of his back and the type of floppy cap he wore.
There was a young family, the Charbonniers, who had a six-month-old son named Hubert. At first, when I knew there was a baby on the floor, I had worried that the child would keep me up at night with his crying. But the little boy was so quiet that I started hoping he would make some noise, because I had begun to worry that there might be something wrong with him. It turned out that there wasn’t. He was just fat and cheerful and quiet. And there was a woman who worked as a dance instructor. She was originally from Norway, a little place called Krossbu that I never could find on the map. She had flaming red hair, lots of it, and huge bright eyes which made her look, depending on whether her eyebrows were raised or lowered, as if she were either in a state of realizing something very important or having just forgotten what it was. Her name was Madame Lindgren. She never did let me know her first name, which I took to be a signal that she didn’t want to get involved. One day, in the elevator, she showed me a couple of dance steps. “It’s jazz,” she said, pronouncing it “tchazz.”
“Not when I’m doing it,” I told her.
From then on, whenever we bumped into each other, she would teach me new steps and I would mangle them and we would laugh about it.
