Paris Still Life

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “Who was that?” Yves, naked except for a small white towel, his wet hair on end, coming out of the bathroom.

  “Fabrice Corte. Inviting me to lunch.” I did not say where.

  “Watch out for him, Gaby.” It was what Françoise had said, Françoise who was his friend. I knew what Yves meant, also that my going out to lunch with this man annoyed him, as it would have annoyed Matt. But perhaps there was some possible danger that was not sexual, not to do with a middle-aged man taking a younger woman out to lunch?

  I said, “Don’t worry, I will.”

  I met Fabrice on the station platform as we both headed for the grand winding staircase that leads up to the restaurant. No point in assuming he came here for his lunch normally; nobody would do that. He had wanted to impress me, to give me a treat. I had taken the bus across the Seine and got off in front of the Gare de Lyon with its grand façade, its huge and beautiful clock. Inside, on the platforms, voices boomed about trains to the south, Aix and Marseille, the TGVs in their stalls like gigantic horses about to be kicked into movement.

  He stood aside to let me go in first. Up a level and through the doors, the painted ceilings, the scenes from all the French colonies of the past, Tunis and Algiers, Tangier, Marrakesh, and the paintings of the Thames in London, with Westminster and St. Paul’s, and the boats going out of the port of Marseille. Caryatids clutching their heads held up the ceiling. The weight of conquest upon them, the permanent headache of occupation. The waiter let us in by undoing a small golden rope from a hook. “You are here for lunch, monsieur? This way, please.”

  White tablecloths and napkins, polished glass, silver. The trappings of the colonial past.

  Fabrice ordered smoked salmon and a turbot soufflé, without asking me; I simply nodded when he told the waiter of our choice. He also ordered the wine, a bottle of Saumur. I wondered if he was used to women sitting opposite him simply agreeing with his choices, and presumably being paid for. It felt strangely restful.

  “Now, Gaby, I have asked you here not only to admire the ceiling, or for the décor, as you must have imagined.”

  “Something to do with going somewhere on a train, maybe?”

  “No, no, we aren’t going to le midi, much as I would like to. One day you must go to Corsica, which is where my family comes from. You can take a boat from Marseille. It’s a beautiful country. No, I have something more about the painting. I have something to ask you. I thought we could combine it with a nice lunch, rather than over the telephone.”

  “Sure. I always like a nice lunch. This place is spectacular.”

  The waiter, who was probably Fabrice’s age, came back with the bottle, poured an inch of pale gold for Fabrice to taste, and when he nodded, poured some for me. The naked caryatids with their headaches looked down on me. The boats went out in all directions, assured that the world was still French.

  “Very good. I thought, since you said you had never been here, it would be nice.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s great.” I wondered if he would wait until we were eating for him to tell me.

  The smoked salmon came, with lemons and capers. The butter was in little curls.

  “Gaby, I am going to have to ask you to give up your painting, or there may be trouble.”

  “Why? What sort of trouble?” I’d guessed that this would be coming—some variety of threat.

  “It is being looked for. It is known that it is somewhere in Paris.”

  “The Dutch woman?”

  “She is dead, actually.”

  “Dead? But you said—”

  “I know. I didn’t know she had died. It was fairly recently. It is her heirs who are looking for it. It would be easiest to be able to put it somewhere—somewhere where it may be found. So neither you nor I will be implicated.”

  I took a mouthful of my wine. I said, “Fabrice, if somebody wants it, they have to come and get it from me. I am not just going to give it up. As you said yourself, my father wanted me to have it, and now I do.”

  “But he wouldn’t want you to be accused of stealing it.”

  “Well, I won’t be. Any more than Françoise would have been.”

  “Gaby, let’s have our lunch and then talk. It’s no good talking on an empty stomach. Look, have some salmon. Do you like the wine?”

  “Yes, it’s perfectly lovely, and so is everything, and the waiter makes me think of somebody in a 1940s film, but I am not even going to think about giving you back the painting, sorry, because it was meant for me. So, don’t even ask me again. If Mrs. Ten Whatsit’s heirs want it, they can come and see me. I didn’t steal anything. I have a completely clear conscience. Right?”

  Silence. We cleaned up the smoked salmon, and the little soufflés that arrived next were like chef’s hats puffing out over their rims, and nothing I have eaten was ever so delicious. Fabrice frowned and ate, and avoided my eye. I washed soufflé flavors with delicate wine into my throat and felt at once liberated and elated. Here, in the restaurant of Le Train Bleu, with this man thinking he could buy me and change my mind, I would assert myself at last.

  “You are your father’s daughter,” he said. “Stubborn. But I don’t think you quite realize what is at stake.”

  “Yes, you are right there, about my being his daughter. Including being able to handle it. Thank you for bringing it to me, Fabrice, and thank you for everything, but you do understand, I can’t possibly give it up now.”

  The ships went out in all directions, down the Mediterranean, to Africa. The ceiling was held up by naked slave women, and I was down here, a twenty-first-century woman, staking my claim to property, refusing to give in.

  “Do you want a dessert?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Just coffee, please.”

  “You’re sure? They are very good here.”

  “No, really.” I had seen the desserts being served to some Japanese tourists on the other side of the room, but wanted to give Fabrice the impression that I was not a woman to be bought with sugar and cream. I was sure that Françoise would have refused a dessert.

  “Deux expressos.”

  The waiter went to bring back our tiny gold-rimmed cups, with brown sugar in cubes.

  “I have to ask you something, Fabrice, if you don’t mind.”

  “Go ahead, Gaby. I’ll answer if I can.”

  “You looked to me when I met you very like my father. Now I can see there isn’t so much of a resemblance. But have you ever, at any time, pretended to be him?”

  He looked at me and stirred his coffee with a tiny spoon. I thought of how small, perfect things were always appearing between us: the painting, coffee cups, sugar cubes, the things of everyday life. Las bodegones. “You have asked me that once already, and the answer is the same, no, I haven’t. Why do you ask?”

  But there was no point in continuing. I had refused him the painting; he would refuse me the information. I would never know now if he was there at those times. Check, checkmate. My father again, showing me chess moves. He unfolded the bill for our lunch at Le Train Bleu, just as the early afternoon TGV to Avignon and Marseille was announced down below, and the steam trains of the past blended with the clean efficiency of the trains of the present. The caryatids and the seagoing ships would remain the same, decade after decade, always being renovated now that they were a national monument; and men would invite women to lunch here and give them delicious mouthfuls of soufflés and smoked fish and the best wine; and one would ask, and the other would refuse, and that was simply how it went: the past disappearing into the present, the present the only place where you could say yes, or no. Yes, I will do what you want, I will gracefully fit in with your plan. Or no, and make yourself somehow less a woman, less deserving of that fine lunch.

  “One thing, Fabrice.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why does all this matter so much suddenly, when it has hung on Françoise’s wall for over a year?”

  “Because nobody knew it was there. Because nothing moved, nothing changed.
It was—how can I say it—sleeping. Invisible. Now people know.”

  “Because of you.”

  “Because you asked me, you wanted me to find out. So, I did. And now, it is in the open, it is, well, awake.”

  “But you could lie and say you don’t know where it is.”

  “I could, yes.”

  “So, will you?”

  “You are asking for my silence.”

  “Yes.”

  “Normally, my silence costs something.”

  “Ah. But I don’t have anything. No money. Nothing.”

  “No, Gaby, you do have something. Do I have to tell you what it is?”

  If I hadn’t been trying to be sophisticated here, I would have said to him, I’ve no idea what you are talking about, or, Are you trying to get me into bed? But the whole aura of this place, with its outdated images, its glorious colonial past, and our sitting at this table opposite each other, after such a remarkable lunch—well, it all made me want to appear more worldly than I was. I wondered then if the Dutch woman and her heirs were an invention of Fabrice’s. Nothing was what it seemed to be; I would appear other than I was.

  So I stared at the coffee spoon I was playing with in my left hand, twirled it a little, and said to him, “Well, Fabrice, I will have to think about that.”

  It was a ridiculous thing to say, as I had no idea what I meant. It was a line out of a bad movie, in which two people played manipulative games with each other in a grand restaurant. It wasn’t my style at all; and I suspect he guessed.

  Fabrice paid the bill with the discreet ease of a man used to paying for expensive lunches for women who are not to be allowed to know how much they cost, and smiled at me as soon as that was done. His smile was that of the one with the power. But I could see, it was a habit. I was not intimidated. Then he said something that interested me. “You know, Gaby, that a forger is nearly always a failed artist, and he does it out of a kind of revenge. It’s like saying, look what I can do and get away with it. It’s a calculated insult to the rest of the world. A forger is nearly always ambitious, frustrated, a person whose talents have not been recognized.”

  “But you said my painting is not a fake, that it wasn’t forged.”

  “No, but I wanted you to know this. We tested your painting’s actual paint, comparing the way paint changes color over time, and it’s seventeenth century, no doubt about it. Also, the canvas and the boards. The only thing in doubt is the signature. No, I wanted you to know about forgers just for general information, about life. They are people who didn’t get what they thought they deserved, in some way. You see?”

  Was he referring to my father, who was a dealer, not a forger? Dealers, Fabrice himself had said, are very rarely forgers. My father, who may have forged not a signature on a painting, but his own life? Who had at least attempted to duplicate himself, and was still doing so, in his appearances to me in Paris? And if so, how did Fabrice know?

  The effect of all this food, wine, and convoluted French was enough to make me nearly fall down the elegant staircase that curved down to the station below. I held on to the banister and took my time. I couldn’t wait to get away from Fabrice Corte, go back home, take off my clothes, have a shower, and fall on the bed, alone.

  “You aren’t worried, that you might be accused of stealing it?” Yves wanted to know. I had given him a very brief account of my lunch with Fabrice Corte, leaving out how delicious it all was, and how confusing, and he had grumbled again, “Don’t trust that man.”

  “No, because I haven’t. I feel completely innocent, and I am.”

  “Well, don’t be too innocent. People play games, you know, and especially with valuable paintings, you have to watch out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, it’s about the money, isn’t it?”

  “For me, it’s about the art. As it was for my father. It’s got nothing to do with the money at all. Anyway, it wasn’t so much, if it’s really seventeenth century. Eighty thousand euros, Fabrice said.”

  “It would amaze me if that was all. I think he’s seriously underestimating it, probably on purpose.”

  “Yves, the only point of the painting for me is that my father left it to me because of our last afternoon together and what we both felt for its twin. That is it. I am not in the slightest bit interested in how much it is worth.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You, no. But other people will be, you can be sure. And Fabrice Corte, well, I think he is a man who gets what he wants.”

  “Yves, do you think I’m crazy to think it was him on the film set, and at the Closerie, and on the Right Bank walking down toward the Pont Neuf?”

  “Him?”

  “Fabrice. Not my father, after all.”

  “Hmm, no. What would be more crazy would be to go on thinking it was your father. Did you ask him?”

  “No, partly because I’d refused him something he wanted, partly because he has the right to walk about Paris as much as he wants, without being questioned about it.”

  “If it was Fabrice, you don’t have your ghost. Maybe you want your ghost.”

  “Maybe I do.” Like Hamlet, I thought: Having a ghost makes the whole thing viable. No ghost, and the play would be a story of hasty adultery and a sulky boy’s objections. It needed the ghost, and, perhaps, so did I.

  We did not discuss my going back to America or staying here. It seemed that the night we had slept together curled around each other in the gray light had brought that conversation to a natural end, at least for now. He looked at the painting with more interest, and I thought, he wants to be on a par with Fabrice Corte, he wants to be knowledgeable, powerful, all the things he is not, that I love him for not being. I felt I had reached a state of truce, in which men had laid down their arms and I, who had been battling for my very existence, was the one with the strength and balance to live at the heart of it all. I had not given in—to Yves’s anxiety, to Fabrice’s greed and manipulation. I wanted to tell someone this, someone who would understand.

  Matt called me that evening—midafternoon in Florida, ten o’clock in the evening in Paris. We had not spoken since my four a.m. call. It was July 4, and I had not even remembered the significance of that day in the United States.

  “How are you?” He sounded careful, a little unsteady. I listened with attention to the change in his voice.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s turning out to be a very interesting time, yes.”

  “Well, I can’t say the same for me. Gaby, I miss you.”

  “I miss you too, Matt.” It was not true, but I wanted to be kind to him. I wondered if he missed me more, surrounded as he probably was by barbecues and family parties, if this was what had brought on his call.

  “How would it be if I came over?”

  “To Paris?”

  “Yes. I’m owed some vacation time. I could. Then we could—see.”

  In my mind two worlds collided; space and time eclipsed. I shuddered, hoped he could not hear my intake of breath.

  “I don’t know. Could you leave it a while?”

  “Well, yeah, I can’t come immediately. I can’t just disappear, the way you can.”

  Touché. I said, “Let’s think about it?”

  “I worry about you. What are you doing over there? Aren’t you lonely? How do you live? You know, I just don’t get it. Shit, I decided not to say any of this. You’re free to decide, Gaby. I’m trying to leave you free to decide, and it’s hell, if you want to know, but I’m leaving it up to you. So look, you think about it, and let me know, okay? Because I think we need to talk, and not on the phone.”

  If the two worlds were to collide, then what? I could hardly imagine Matt here in Paris, but people flew from the United States every day to land here, and it was entirely possible, even easy, to do so. And no, I did not want it: not now, not soon, perhaps not ever.

  14.

  July, and summer rain had darkened the leaves of the trees in the
little park outside Saint-Médard. The children were out of school but had not yet left for vacations elsewhere in France, the smallest ones playing on the slides and climbing frames while their parents, who all looked surprisingly young, sat on the benches. A young man with a shaved head and unlaced sneakers and a little knapsack with his daughter’s things in it, a snack, a change of pants. The little girl with hair in tight black bunches sticking out sideways, who shouted to him from the top of the climbing frame. The black woman with the tight black T-shirt and green baggy pants, the mother? An American child stamped through puddles, counting out loud in English, spattering mud. The young woman next to me on the bench frowned and got out her sandwich and said to me how annoying he was. The mother, in Birkenstocks, not saying anything until everyone had frowned and withdrawn their clean shoes away from the splash. The American mother said, “Honey, people are trying to read and eat lunch. Maybe you shouldn’t do that.” The child took no notice.

  Yves came through the gate with bags of groceries, a baguette under one arm, and rolled copies of newspapers, and sat down beside me. We watched children fall over and cry and be picked up, children call out for parents to admire them, children hugged and held and let go again: the whole pantomime of a certain way of life that we had excluded ourselves from. Our generation, reproducing itself without us. Yves unrolled Libération and Le Monde.

  “They have liberated Íngrid Betancourt, did you know? No, of course, you don’t watch TV. We watched for hours last night. I can’t believe it. And she was so amazing, so warm and grateful, so happy to be back in France. Do you know, I cried when she spoke. I don’t know why, it just touched me so much. She is such a beautiful woman. And how can she be like that after being tied up and locked up for years?”

  I reached to look at the photographs: Íngrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian journalist, who had been imprisoned for years by FARC in Colombia, first shackled to a wall, then embracing her daughter in the open air. The caption said that she had never given up. But how did you do that, when every day was simply hours of discomfort or pain, days, weeks, years of imprisonment, being insulted and even tortured, being systematically deprived of hope? I read over Yves’s shoulder. Yes, she had been tempted to despair. Some days, it seemed impossible that life would ever be any different. And yet, in a small corner of her spirit, she had kept hope alive. Her thin face, her long dark hair tied back, her dark eyes. Reaching to embrace her daughter in the sunlight, freed at last, who knew how, would she ever know exactly how it had been done, I wondered? Would she even know what deals had been done, threats made, promises offered?