A Nearly Perfect Copy (10 page)

“Édouard picks out most of our work,” Gabriel said. “Can I get you anything? Water, or a coffee?”

“Coffee,” Klinman said. His French was nearly accentless.

He held out his raincoat and hat, so Gabriel took them and hung them up on a nearby coatrack. Gabriel ground coffee beans, scooped the grounds into the casing of the percolator, and screwed the top back on, placing it on a hotpad. The machine began to hiss and bubble.

They both stood waiting until the coffee was done. “Sugar?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Gabriel added one square with the small spoon. He handed it to Mr. Klinman.

“You are patient and you are precise.” Mr. Klinman set down his cup. “Both are qualities I admire. And Colette tells me you are good. Very good.”

Gabriel smiled. Mr. Klinman smiled back. Gabriel could play this game. He uttered what he called the “French hmmm,” a sound that meant neither yes nor no, not invitation or rejection; rather, it was a volley: your turn. Gabriel waited for the man to continue.

Finally Mr. Klinman did. “As you may know,” he said, “I am responsible for the artwork in many of Europe’s finest luxury hotels.”

Gabriel didn’t know, but nodded.

“We are doing the new Andre Balazs. Eighty-six rooms. All will need art.”

Gabriel nodded again. Was the man going to ask for some kind of bulk discount?

“What we would like,” Mr. Klinman said, “is some Impressionist drawings, pastels, and watercolors. Landscapes, decrepit cathedrals, women by rocky seashores, you understand. Connois.”

“We don’t have inventory like that right now,” Gabriel said. “I’m not sure that in his lifetime he even drew—”

“You misunderstand me,” Mr. Klinman said. “I am not speaking of Connois the elder, but rather Connois the younger. You.” He switched to the familiar pronoun.

“You want me to make you eighty-six drawings?” Gabriel must have misunderstood the number. French numbers were impossible, derived from some Gallic counting system that predated Arabic numerals.

The Englishman laughed, and then there was another awkward silence while Klinman rocked forward onto his toes and back onto his heels. His shoes were worn but well made and polished, the laces new, as if to imply that he had the means to purchase new shoes but loved these old ones, and felt secure enough to indulge that fondness. Gabriel fingered the callus on the inside of his left thumb.

“Let’s say by the end of next week? One-half charcoal sketches, one-third those half-finished watercolors your great-great-grandfather liked so much—the landscapes with the sea, perhaps? A few still lifes, the old markets, a couple of pastels.”

“Connois didn’t paint still lifes,” Gabriel said. “He was interested only in movement and light.”

Klinman waved his hand in front of his face as though encouraging a bad odor to waft away. “People like still lifes, find them soothing …” He let the sentence trail off.

He reached into his breast pocket and removed a long leather wallet. “What shall we say, per drawing? I’ll send over the paper I want you to use, to look like the nineteenth century.”

“Umm, I don’t know.” Gabriel tried to put his hands in his pockets, but his pants were too tight. Instead he crossed his arms in front of his chest. His sweater felt itchy against his neck, little prickles of heat. He shouldn’t have to make art for hire. It made him feel like he was prostituting his talent and training. But he desperately needed the money. Colette was proving to be a very expensive habit, one he wasn’t yet ready to give up. He found himself thinking about her more often than he had about any woman in the past decade, so often that he was worried. “What did you have in mind?”

Klinman shook his head. “No. You name what you think your time is worth. I’ll supply the paper; it’s important that it looks authentic.”

What was Gabriel’s time worth? Figure a couple of hours per water-color, some money for supplies: sketch paper, brushes, paints. Would he want them mounted? Matted? Gabriel’s father, a minor musician who played guitar for weddings and baptisms, always told him to name a sum greater than what he expected to get. It gave the client negotiating room, made him feel like he was getting a bargain. But he should not ask for too much, for that would seem like stealing and the client would be suspicious and miserly.

“Fifty euros per sketch,” he said. “Sixty-five for watercolors.”

Mr. Klinman shook his head, a disappointed expression on his face. Gabriel felt a wave of embarrassment. Had he overvalued himself?

“If you do not think yourself significant, then no one will. Charge high when the client is willing to pay, and then deliver a product that exceeds satisfaction. I will pay you one hundred euros for the drawings and one-fifty for the watercolors, which will be unmistakably authentic
Connois
Père
when viewed from two meters. Here are five thousand euros. I will come back next Friday, is that all right?” Augustus handed him two banded stacks of bills.

Gabriel stared at the money in his hands. He had never held that great a sum at one time. The bills were new. Gabriel wet his lips. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Augustus,” he said. “Use the familiar. We are friends now.” He took his jacket and hat.

“Augustus,” Gabriel said. “Eighty-six drawings by next week is more than I can do. So quickly. If you want Connois.”

Augustus turned, his lips pursed sourly. He sighed, exasperated. “Very well, then ring up your old classmates. Reconvene the École des Hiverains.” As he turned, Gabriel thought he saw the man wink.

The door took the air with it when it closed. The papers thumb-tacked to the cork that served as the backsplash to the desks lurched toward the door as if to follow Augustus Klinman out, then settled back flat again. Gabriel’s desk was messy with yesterday’s croissant crumbs and sticky notes stacked like layers of paint. Gabriel looked at the sketch he’d been doodling when the man had walked in. He took the bills and fanned them out over the paper so that the drawing was obscured. A much better source of light, these euros, than anything he could shade.

The École des Hiverains was an inside joke that had escaped its confinement. Marcel Connois, having immigrated to Paris in 1870 from Cataluña, found himself an unpopular second cousin to the more successful Impressionists and so had fled with his circle, which included Del Rio, Monlin, Ganedis (one of the few successful Greek painters of the time), and Imogeney, to the Lowlands, settling first in Belgium and then in the Netherlands, where their talents were appreciated among the lesser nobility. They continued to paint the sunny, arid landscapes of their homelands and the voluptuous women at fruit-filled feasts that characterized their repertoire. They were always cold in the north, wearing scarves, hats, and fingerless gloves even into summer and so gained the nickname Les Hiverains, or “the Winterers.” The active years of the École were few. Monlin died of tuberculosis, Del Rio followed a carnival troupe to Capri where he lost a duel over a gypsy woman, and Ganedis returned home to his native island, where his mother’s cooking still sat
warming on the stove for him. Imogeney married a Flemish girl and worked as a portraitist to support his thirteen children. Only Connois survived the dissolution, installing himself back in Paris. Still he painted the Pyrenees, the orange groves, the fish markets of his home.

Gabriel’s mother had owned one painting by her great-grandfather, a half-meter-square oil of the Costa Brava called
Febrer
. In it, the Mediterranean was an impossible blue, the color changing on the underside of each white-capped wave so that the effect was a mosaic of fractured sea, melting together as the water tumbled back into the roil. Gabriel had spent countless hours staring at the painting, the stiff points of hardened oil paint that revealed the exact motion of the brush. Connois was a meticulous painter; each dab of blue—almost transparent, stark cobalt, aquamarine, nearly glowing, or a navy so dark as to masquerade as black—intentionally rendered. The brushstrokes were visible, small whisks. Connois must have used only the smallest brushes; the canvas would have taken him months to complete.

Gabriel wanted to sell
Febrer
when his father’s arthritis had set in and playing the guitar became nearly impossible. Gabriel’s father was a proud man with a face that gravity had claimed. His eyes had sunken into the flesh of their sockets, jowls swollen like wet laundry. He continued to give music lessons, but by then they’d moved to the
pueblo
, abandoning their apartment in the city. They were poor, their neighbors poorer. Gabriel made some money selling his drawings to wealthy weekenders at the markets, and his mother began making pastries for special occasions, but still money was tight.

Gabriel must have suggested it a thousand times. Each time his father said it belonged to his mother and she said it was out of the question. After his father’s fatal heart attack, Gabriel and his mother often went hungry. He found her crying one day in the kitchen, an empty bag of flour at her elbow. “We’ll sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell it and this can be over.”

His mother wiped her eyes. “This painting is a part of our family. Selling it would be like selling a child, or trading a grandparent.”

“We know it so well,” Gabriel said. “If we want to see it, we can remember it, exactly like it was.”

“It’s not the same.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you. You are an artist. You have all the talent of your ancestor, and yet you don’t see the value.”

“It’s because I’m an artist that I do see the value,” Gabriel said. “It’s a piece of cloth with some decorative oil. We need to eat. You should see the doctor. I need material to paint with. It’s not like we’d destroy it. It’ll just be on a different wall.”

“There is sustenance more important than food.” She crossed herself. Gabriel was rendered speechless by the illogic of faith.

When the scholarship letter arrived, Gabriel debated whether to tell his mother. He knew she would insist he go to France. It had been her dream to visit Paris, to see her great-grandfather’s work hanging in the
musée
.

As he predicted, she was overjoyed. He had to stop her from packing his suitcase that very moment, and she insisted they open the bottle of French wine that she’d been saving since her wedding day. It was vinegar, but Gabriel drank it down. The alcohol moistened her eyes. “I know you have his talent,” she said. “I hope that they will recognize it.

“My grandfather gave us the painting for our wedding. He had inherited it from his father. He was old then, and nearly sightless, but he came in a chair pushed by his young wife and he gave us
Febrer
and kissed my forehead. It was a love match, your father and me.”

“I’ve heard this story,” Gabriel said softly. The kitchen was lit low, one bare bulb. The cabinets he’d known for most of his life, the rustic chairs, the icon of baby Jesus that hung over the large farm sink, the chipping floor tile, were as familiar as the curve of his knee, the jut of his hip bone.

“And then we waited fourteen years for you. We had given up hope, though not faith.” Gabriel rolled his eyes in anticipation of yet another retelling of the story. Each year on his birthday she forced him to go pray at the altar of the Virgin to celebrate the miracle of his birth.

She stood and untied her apron, framed by the light. She was lumpy and formless in her widow’s dress, her ankles swelling over the tops of her shoes like overly leavened bread. Her hair in its braid had gone mostly white, and one eyelid drooped a bit. And yet he thought her beautiful, and hugged her from behind while she washed the plates, feeling the rolls of her stomach, and decided that his plan to deceive her was genius, not knavery.

He spent the summer in the converted woodshed, painting. Every morning he drank coffee in the kitchen, looking at
Febrer
while his mother kneaded dough for the pastries she would sell at the market. So
many coffees that he thought he would begin to convulse with caffeinated anxiety. When she left for the market, he took the painting into the shed to study it closer, careful always to return it before she arrived to make supper. Each evening it hung in the fading daylight, its varnish reflecting back the staticky black and white of the television, tuned to an American sitcom, his mother’s laugh drowning in the dubbed laugh track.

Then one day he took
Febrer
to his woodshed studio and turned it over. He removed the nails from the frame and exposed the canvas. Connois had painted two centimeters above what was visible through the frame. He must have known the edges would be lost, and yet this part of the painting was as worked as the rest. This was not an expression of meticulousness or perfectionism. It was simply a part of the painting, regardless of whether or not anyone would see it, and deserved the same level of care.

Gabriel pried the staples from the stretcher and the canvas sagged with relief. He rolled it carefully, trying not to crack the paint, and placed it in a tube he had stolen from the stationery store. Then he turned to his painting, the one he had been working on all summer. It wasn’t quite dry; August’s humidity stalled the oil, but it would work. He stretched the canvas over the supports and hammered the staples back in. Then he reframed the painting, careful to mimic the small space where the frame’s right angles didn’t quite meet.