Paris Still Life

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “But nobody knows it’s here, except Françoise and Fabrice Corte and me.”

  He sat down on the nearest chair, straddling it with his arms along the top, his long legs spread, his feet in the kind of suede shoes that you don’t see often these days, with trailing laces. “Ah. And Corte is in Corsica. You’re sure?”

  “Yes, he left yesterday.”

  “Well, in that case, the coast is clear. Have you got any bubble wrap by any chance, and perhaps brown paper? Luckily nobody examines anything much on the wonderful train. But I want to know one thing, Gaby, if you don’t mind. What is your part in all this? What are you doing this for?”

  “I want to take over from where my dad left off, that’s all. I don’t mean, to be a dealer. I mean, to look after this painting. It needs cleaning. And look at the state of the frame. And it should be properly valued. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what we do. Good. Well, let’s wrap up our little beauty, shall we, without more ado?”

  I fetched the bubble wrap and brown paper that had covered the painting when Corte brought it to me, and watched him wrap it. I handed him Scotch tape and string. Simon put it in his canvas holdall and did up the buckles. “Et voilà.” His French accent was terrible. “Now, I’m fearfully sorry, but I shall have to take the next train right back. I’ve a client waiting for me in a house in Sussex simply stuffed with potential goodies, and I swore to be there by six, before the light goes. But I’ll be in touch soon. Thanks for the tea.”

  “Just a minute. I have to ask you. You seemed to think that my father might not really have died. Please don’t rush off. I really have to know why.”

  Simon Jakes sat down again, the bag on his knee, like someone waiting at a bus stop. He placed his hands on top of the bag and folded his fingers together. “Well. Sometimes people do that. They fake their own death. Some people have just done it in England, this summer, in fact. The man was supposed to have died in a boating accident, body never found and so forth. The wife was to collect on his life insurance, then they were both to scarper off to Panama or somewhere and live happily ever after on the dosh. Only it backfired, and she ended up in court. Now, obviously that’s not what happened with your father, and he’d never have done it for the money, but I just had a hunch, especially when you told me you had seen him. He was someone who wanted more out of life. He may have felt he deserved more than what he had. He was once a very fine painter, you know. It’s possible—just faintly possible—that he’d have wanted to disappear and sort of . . . pop up somewhere else. And be someone else.”

  “You make him sound like a rabbit going down a rabbit hole.”

  “Gaby, I can’t know, obviously, so please don’t take what I said for gospel. But why not phone me, if it happens again?”

  I was remembering something. A phrase hung in the back of my mind, recent, in French, a man’s voice, who was it? Fabrice Corte, at lunch, saying that a forger was nearly always a disappointed man. But nobody thought my father could have been a forger of paintings, or even signatures. I had never even known he was, as Simon said, a fine painter. He must have stopped before I was old enough to know. Or had he? All I had seen of his were the sketchy little drawings, almost cartoons, that he had left for me from time to time: a drawing of me tidying my chaotic room, once, and another of me looking absurdly Gothic in black clothes, later on. A scribble that was me taking the current dog for a walk, with sun and clouds, one time when I had sulkily refused to do so. But paintings?

  “I will take it straight up to London with me in the morning,” Simon Jakes said, maybe sensing my apprehension. “And it will be cleaned and valued, and we will get in touch as soon as that has happened, and send you a bill.” As if the sending of the bill would validate the whole transaction. I thought of Corte, carefully pocketing the bill from Le Train Bleu. “Now, don’t worry. It will be safe as houses. Then, we’ll get in touch with those Dutch people; it would be easy to find out if they exist, and tell them the exact worth for probate purposes and ask them for their instructions. And if there aren’t any, we’ll know we have Corte to deal with. All right, Gaby?”

  “But what about me?”

  “You will have done your bit. Very responsible, actually, the best thing you could have done, handing it over to us. And you know, it strikes me that if it were found to be a fake, after all, it would be very much easier for you to keep it.”

  “I don’t follow. Why?”

  “Well, it would simply have, let’s say, less of a footprint. People wouldn’t want it back so much. Have you ever heard of a famous forger called van Meegeren?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He painted some very bad paintings, also some halfway good ones, that he managed to pass off as Vermeers. He bought seventeenth-century canvases, removed the original paint from them, ground his paints exactly the way Vermeer did, and believe it or not, used Bakelite to fix them. He really worked at it. He was obsessed. Amazingly enough, nobody ever challenged him or even did an X-ray, he was so convincing. There was a particularly bad one called Supper at Emmaus that nobody in their right mind now could accept as a Vermeer. He sold one called Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery—terrible painting—to Goering during the war, and the fact that he admitted the paintings were forged actually saved his life. Selling the Dutch patrimony to the Nazis would have been treason, a capital offense, whereas selling forgeries was merely clever. See what I mean?”

  “I don’t see how it connects with me.”

  “No, just that sometimes it is more convenient for something not to be real.”

  “But Fabrice Corte said it was real!”

  “And so I believe it is. But if only you, me, and Corte knew that, it would be more convenient.”

  I let out the long sigh I had been holding in. It was all beyond me, but suddenly I thought, it would not have been beyond my father.

  “Simon, I want it back. On my father’s life, I want it back. Real or fake, I don’t care. If you value your friendship with him at all, you will bring it back to me, or I will come and steal it from you in England.”

  “But, of course, Gaby, you will have it back whenever you want. I’ll get in touch as soon as it’s done. Scout’s honor.”

  “And I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not selling things to the Nazis.”

  “No, no, of course, I just wanted you to be aware of what the possibilities are. True art lovers, Gaby, are people who are prepared to love a painting because of what it is and what they feel about it—sometimes against all the odds. There aren’t many of them. But you know, a very large proportion of paintings in art galleries are forgeries, and then, it’s more convenient to pretend that they are real. I’m just saying that this woman’s heirs probably will love your painting a lot less if they think it’s a copy. That’s all.”

  “So what’s the difference between a copy and a forgery?”

  “A forgery is masquerading as something it is not. But in a way, you see, it’s art’s shadow, its other self. The false has to exist in order for the true to be itself. A copy is anodyne, carries no shadow. We do live, increasingly, in a world of copies. Or am I getting into deep water here? Anyway—look, I’m afraid I must depart. Tempus fugit, you know. The mighty Eurostar waits for no one. Thanks for the tea.”

  He was already sliding away from me with his slightly blundering politeness, glancing at his watch, thinking about his train. An ungainly middle-aged Englishman with floppy hair and a look of Alan Bennett about him, his jacket flapping, a canvas bag hooked over his shoulder with my painting in it, striding off to identify yet more found paintings in somebody’s attic, to pronounce on the false and the real. I closed the door behind him, breathed out, and felt the disappearance of my painting, sharp as loss.

  There was a blank space on my wall beneath the nail where it had hung: absence, visible now, where once there had just been a wall. Yves noticed it immediately. “Gaby, your painting’s gone.”

  “I han
ded it over to a friend of my father’s, who works at Sotheby’s. It’s going to be cleaned. And I think he knows that if I don’t get it back, there’ll be trouble. Now, how was your day?”

  “Not so interesting. I went all over Paris looking for a computer for my mother. She wants to learn how to use one, and every secondhand one I looked at was fucked. I’m going to have to buy it new. There’s a deal now for getting TV, phone, and Internet access all in one, and she wants to go online. My mother, imagine! Still, it’s a good idea. It will link her up to the outside world at last. When even my mother is online, we’re really in a science-fiction world.” He came over and stood behind me, rubbing my shoulders, his hands easing lower, coming around my waist. I leaned back against him, enjoying it, but more as if he were a masseur than a lover. I felt as if we had already said goodbye. Maybe in buying his mother a computer, he had also said goodbye to her, freed himself into becoming a son who could go and live at the other end of France. If I myself were to leave Paris, I would be leaving not only him but my father, who walked these streets but presumably not those of any other city, especially in the United States. Or was it possible that he would wait for me outside the gates of Central Park in New York, or in line outside the Met? That he could pop up, as Simon Jakes had put it, anywhere at all?

  “Come, let’s go into the bedroom.” He pulled me by the hand, and I went with him, and yes, we found each other again among the tangled sheets, our bodies remembering and saluting each other, but our minds, I was almost sure of it, elsewhere.

  “Gaby,” he said at last, “where are you? I can’t find you today.”

  No fooling this man, I thought. “I’m sorry. I’m distracted.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t undistract you. What is it?” He sat up, naked at my side, his fingers moving across the top of my spine.

  “I feel as if I’ve been going around in interlocking circles and as if there’s something at the center that I’m never going to find.”

  “Your father?”

  “Well, myself too. What it all signifies. What I do next with my life.”

  “Gaby, you know, I think you have to stop worrying about it, and something will become clear. Your mind keeps working away at it, you keep on asking other people’s opinions, but, really, you know, I think it might be better to relax and simply be here. Here, in this room, today, with me. This is your life, even if it never happens again. In fact, it won’t ever happen again. It’s a one-off, even if we meet again, even if it’s tomorrow. You told me this yourself. Be here, Gaby, be present. Be happy. Don’t fight me off. You are so well loved, you know; that’s the heart of it.”

  “You love me?”

  “Yes, of course. But not in the way of wanting to keep you, don’t worry. And so does your husband, I imagine, and so did your parents, and so do René and Marie-Christine, and so, I’m sure, do many other people I don’t know. You have to accept it, Gaby. You are such an intellectual, you ask so many questions, and God knows, so do I. I’ve spent my life asking them, the hard ones, and not letting myself off the hook. But we’re here to please each other and also to teach each other, I think. Let yourself feel loved, Gaby, and it won’t matter so much about your father being dead or alive.”

  We sat with the sweat cooling on our joined flesh, and for a long moment I tried to let in what he said. It had the freshness and simplicity of reality. It wasn’t a construct. It wasn’t out of the past, or even connected to a future. It wasn’t about pretending anything, or covering anything up. It was about us, in this room, this evening, now. We lay down again and held hands, while the light beyond the shutters changed and darkened. Outside, the nights were growing just perceptibly longer. I felt an extraordinary peace settle around us, and tears leaked from the corners of my eyelids that he licked up, leaning over me, his tongue washing the saltcellars of my closed eyes.

  15.

  August: Paris was emptying itself of its residents and filling with tourists. Everybody who lived here was about to go on holiday or had already gone, the days were hot and still and the evenings blue with fumes and dust, even with less traffic in the streets. Most of the shops in my neighborhood were closed, with grim metal grilles pulled down over the windows. Some of them had their windows covered with brown paper on the inside, so that the look was blind, where not fortified. Down below in our street, beneath our opened windows, tourists trundled suitcases on wheels as they searched for their hotels. It was another season, one of migration, one of change.

  Françoise went to Brittany to stay with her family and was then going to treat herself to some thalassotherapy on the coast. René and Marie-Christine were staying on in René’s father’s country house in Touraine, and begged me on the phone to join them. Yves was going to Portugal to see his grandmother there and was then going to a windsurfing school near Arcachon. He, too, begged me to go, saying how I would love it. August in Paris seemed to nail a roof of heat above the city, in spite of impromptu beaches along the Seine, and bicycle lanes everywhere with people bicycling on the free bikes that had appeared in ranks everywhere, and picnics on the worn grass in the parks. I refused all invitations and then felt bitter and alone. But there was something to see through, here, and I would not know for sure if I went away. There was still a question, and there was still a chance.

  I heard nothing more from Fabrice Corte, who was presumably in Corsica for the month of August. Nobody sent me a bill from Sotheby’s. No Dutch people arrived on my doorstep to demand their painting. In August in France, everything gets forgotten, let go, postponed. Only at the rentrée, when the schools reopened, would anyone begin to send e-mails, ask questions, send bills, knock on doors, demand answers. I drifted in the heat, breathing in traffic fumes, dawdling like a tourist along the Seine. I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and visited the lovely statue of the Mask Seller, and stood amazed before the huge golden sculpted head of the Prophet that gazed back across the formal gardens into a yet unknown future, out of an inscrutable past. I left my windows and shutters open all night and let the dawn wake me and birds swoop through my dreams. I wrote brief, cryptic poems on old yellow legal pads brought from America for that purpose and then in French notebooks with squared paper. I sat at cafés on narrow pavements in streets where I had never been before and drank pastis as if I were in the south, drowning it with water, or Campari, with orange juice as if I were in Italy. I took cold showers, walked about the flat naked, bought a fan at the local quincaillerie and spent an entire afternoon trying to put it together. I thought of sleeping in the air conditioning of Florida. I thought of going back there—but to what? I felt as if I were in a giant oasis, a mirage, a city that only existed in people’s imaginations, a city abandoned by its inhabitants, created by the fantasies of foreigners. I heard the voices all around me: American, English, German, Japanese. I felt deprived of language, with no one to talk to. Even the cinemas had given up changing their films and were showing the same tired old ones. The market on rue Mouffetard turned into a display for tourists and the one on Port-Royal on Saturday mornings had shrunk, leaving only a few tired sellers of tomatoes and lettuces. I began to forget why I was here, whether I had made a life here, after all, if any of it was real. I longed, in the absence of reality, for the rentrée: for sensible clothes, chill winds, new books, films, newspapers, people going to work. My return date was not until late September. August stretched around me, a desert, a purgatory. Yet it was what I had chosen. There was a reason, even if I had forgotten it, why I was here. I missed Yves. I rolled across my bed in an ache of longing. I flung my hands out to the very edge of the mattress and turned into the pillow to search for a new cool place. I understood why they had all gone, only too well. It was a necessary migration, leading to a necessary return. It was the way life was, had to be. It was like the order of French meals, one thing after another, and coffee at the end. It was the narrative of the French year, as inevitable as spring or winter, a season abandoned, emptied, left to rot. No wonder people died in Paris
in August without anyone noticing.

  In the middle of the month, a call on my cell phone: Simon Jakes’s English voice breaking open the silence. The English don’t vanish entirely for the whole month of August. They have holidays but are quickly back on the job.

  “Gaby, how are you?”

  “Almost nonexistent. Everyone here is away. I should have gone too. But somehow, I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave.”

  “Well, I’ve got the painting for you. It’s been cleaned, it looks wonderful, and it’s been valued. Two hundred thousand pounds, approximate probate price. That means it’s worth far more on the market. But the odd thing is, we’ve not had a squeak out of those Dutch people who were supposed to be so keen to have it back. D’you think they exist? Ten Bruggencate, the name was, not an unusual one, and they were supposed to be at an address in The Hague. What did Fabrice tell you about them?”

  “Nothing much. That they were the heirs of the woman who wanted to sell it, who’d left it with Dad. Marth, her name was.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want them to have it.”

  “Who knows. I can’t get anything out of anyone here. The whole place has ground to a halt until September.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s true of the whole of Europe, is it? Gaby, are you all right? You sound strange.”

  “It’s just that I haven’t spoken to anyone for so long, I suppose.” I leaned against the wall in my underwear, feeling the fan cool my knees as it turned.

  “Well, I’ve got the picture for you, since nobody else seems interested. What do you want me to do?”

  “Can you keep it for me, Simon? I’m coming to England, to see my sister, I’ve decided. In a few weeks. I’ll let you know.”

  “Of course. Just let me know. Keep in touch, tell me if you need anything? Oh, and by the way, forget what I said about suggesting it’s only a copy. We aren’t going to need that now.”

  “Thanks, Simon, I will.”