A Nearly Perfect Copy (17 page)

“Now you have to find a horse,” she said, and he resumed his scrutiny. Elm stood in front of Cossiers’s portrait of his son Guiliellemus. The nose was too large for the small head, but Cossiers had exactly captured the child as his attention was drawn to something else, that moment between focus and excitement that she loved to watch in her own child. Moira kicked inside her and Elm rubbed the spot.

“Babies, babies, everywhere,” Ronan said next to her, reciting a children’s book. “There”—he pointed to the drawing—“and there”—pointing to her belly.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Girls,” he observed.

“Actually,” Elm said, “that’s a picture of a boy with long hair.”

One of his pant legs was tucked into his sock, and it was time for a haircut. Knowing it was likely the last time they’d spend real time together before the new baby was born, and knowing that everything would change, she held him to her and clung, perhaps a bit too tightly.

“Ow, Mom, she kicked me,” he said, pulling away.

“You two are fighting already?” She had felt it too, a little foot wedged between them.

“I just hope she likes trains,” he said, sighing.

“Me too,” Elm said.

She was staring at what would have been a window if she’d had a decent office; she answered the phone only half-paying attention. “Young lady,” the voice on the line said, “I am Indira Schmidt.”

The name triggered a memory of her afternoon sobbing in the woman’s living room.

“Young lady,” the woman said. “I would like you to come over.”

“Now?” Elm asked.

“Whenever it is convenient for you. I have something to show you.”

“It’s difficult right now,” Elm said. “Maybe Ian, the young man that was with me before, can come take a look?”

“It is for your eyes only,” Indira said. “Is that dramatic enough? I want your opinion. If I had wanted that young man’s, I would have called him.”

Elm sighed. “How about I come by after work tonight?” She considered. She would have to get across town and then up to Columbia. She was committing herself to at least an hour commute each way, though it wasn’t more than a couple of miles.

“That would be fine,” Indira said. “I’ll expect you then.”

As Elm waited for Indira to answer the door, she noticed a dead cockroach. She wondered why cockroaches always died feet up, and how they managed to do so. The welcome mat was frayed on the edges. She rang the bell again, heard it loudly on the other side. Was it possible that Indira wasn’t home? That she had forgotten? That she couldn’t hear the bell? Dead? Elm considered what to do if Indira didn’t answer the door. Ring the next-door neighbor’s bell, she decided, and ask them to call the super. Elm was imagining the conversation with the super when the door’s chain began to rattle.

Indira seemed more resigned to see her than happy. She drew back the door slowly and grimaced. Elm was immediately infused with anger. She had come all the way across town for this woman. The least Indira could do was acknowledge her effort.

Indira’s apartment looked even darker than it had before, if that were possible. The heavy curtains were still shut tight.

“I’m sorry,” Indira said, as she limped down the hallway. “Some days are not so good, and this is one of those days.” She collapsed into an armchair, out of breath.

Elm’s anger melted into pity and guilt. “Can I get you something?” she asked.

Indira waved her off, her hand crooked like a skeleton in the air. Elm sat down in the armchair opposite her. Between them stood a footed table, a dingy lace runner just slightly larger than the tabletop’s circumference
resting on top. There sat an ashtray, its sole contents a dead fly, curled into itself. “Do you know about my family?” Indira asked.

“The Holocaust, isn’t that right?” Elm said. She placed her hands in her lap, sat up straight.

“Yes. I was married. They do not know that.” Elm wasn’t sure who “they” were. “He was taken almost immediately: Jew, Communist, student.”

Elm wasn’t sure what to say. She took advantage of the brief pause to say she was sorry.

Again, the skeletal hand. “I am telling you this for a reason. You’ll have to trust me. This is not just the ramblings of an old woman. No, it
is
the ramblings of an old woman, but one who is coming to a point. Young lady, can you please bring me that box there by the lamp?”

Elm stood and picked up a small curio box. It was plain, the top held by a latch. Elm wondered what was inside it. A broach of some kind that she wanted to show Elm? A portrait on a napkin by Picasso? Indira took the box and opened it. Elm couldn’t see inside it as Indira moved her hands. Then she brought out a small cigarette and a lighter.

She placed the cigarette in her mouth and handed Elm the lighter. It was antique, and it took Elm two or three tries before she got it to light. When the cigarette caught, Elm realized Indira was smoking pot, and she had to fight to stifle a laugh.

“Laugh, laugh,” Indira said. “It’s funny to see an old lady get high. I will join you in laughing in a minute.” She took a drag and held it in. Then she flicked it into the ashtray. Indira held out the joint to Elm. “Do you smoke?”

Elm shook her head. “I have other bad habits.”

“I know it’s silly, but I turned ninety and thought, what the hell, might as well, and now I keep Columbia’s pot dealers in business.”

Indira stubbed out the joint in the ashtray on the side table. Elm now saw that what she had thought was a fly was actually a piece of ash.

“I have been criticized,” she said, “because my work is not political. It doesn’t reference the Holocaust. Why should it? Art is about beauty and balance, nature, and by nature I mean God. If I want to make a statement I use my mouth. We leave politics for the politicians and historians to make up whatever they want.”

Elm stared at Indira’s profile. Her face was turned toward the painting
above the sofa, an abstract that Elm didn’t recognize. But Elm could see that her gaze was soft; she was looking elsewhere.

“I lived the politics. I don’t have to be reminded.” Indira paused, but Elm sensed she wasn’t supposed to speak. “I had friends in France, and when the Nazis took Jacob my friends insisted I come. When it looked like France would be occupied, they arranged for a U.S. visa, impossible to get at that point, but my friends were … important. I say this because it explains why it happened. I met him when I attended a state dinner at the White House. He talked to me in German, and he understood. And he wasn’t like the others. His guilt was quiet, like mine. He emigrated. He didn’t have to walk across the Alps or hide in chicken feed or get smuggled out like contraband. He was smart, and he hated himself for it. That was the connection. I’ve never told anyone, but now he’s dead.”

Elm wasn’t sure who Indira meant. She wondered if the woman wasn’t a little off. “Who?” she asked softly.

Indira looked at her as though she had just asked her own name. “Blatzenger, of course.”

“Nixon’s guy?” Elm knew Blitz-Blatz, as everyone called him, had had many affairs, but she hadn’t known that Indira was one of his conquests.

“I attended a state dinner at the White House. That’s where I met him. We were together for twenty years, until his death.”

“I didn’t know,” Elm said.

“No one does,” Indira said. “We were very careful. Toward the end it was an affair without the physical, but we believed in the same God, passionately.”

“Wow,” Elm said, realizing as she said it how ugly and inadequate the word sounded. How American.

“There is one more piece that I haven’t shown you. One more. I was supposed to meet him in the Netherlands, but there was a crisis. During the cold war there was always a crisis, and his trip was cut short. Still, he bought this for me, a Connois pastel.”

“I would love to see it,” Elm said.

“It’s there.” Indira pointed but her fingers were so crooked it was impossible to tell which way.

Elm noticed that behind the dining table, leaning against the dark, stained wallpaper, was a large square, undoubtedly a frame, covered by
a dropcloth that had the same stained dark green color as the wallpaper, camouflaging it.

“I had it brought up from the storage unit.”

Elm walked to the other side of the room. She felt like a magician’s assistant; when she pulled off the cloth, what would be underneath? She was dizzy, not like she was going to be sick or fall over, but as if the room had become untethered and she was floating above it, looking down on the scene from on high. She wondered if the secondhand pot smoke was going to her head.

She put her hands on the dropcloth and it felt damp, or cold. She felt a stab of worry—if it had been stored like this there would be little of it left. Carefully she pulled the cloth off.

It took her eyes a second to adjust. The lighting conditions were far from ideal, dull gray diluted further by the heavy curtains and the dust, but quickly the bright colors resolved into a market scene, the swirling texture became stalls, baskets, a dog. The background was a dull blue, the flat light off the dusty ground as it fell away to the sea. Elm remembered light like this from her backpacking days in Europe, when she still thought she was going to be a painter, how drastically the light shifted once you went inland enough that the ocean fell away from view, that the sparkling off the water was absorbed into the dirt and no longer shimmered, but rather made the vista murky, like looking through unwashed windows.

It was amazing, that Connois could do this with mere pastels. Here was that same blue, almost gray in places, aqua in others. There were the typical market stalls, an oddly shaped dog. This pastel featured an older woman, face lined, one eye slightly lazy or palsied, a strange detail that she registered.

“It’s
Mercat
,” Indira said.

“Excuse me?” Elm asked.

“
Mercat
, ‘market’ in Catalan. The title.”

Elm remembered vaguely, from art history class, that there were several inventories of group shows of the Hiverains, advertisements and handbills, for paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings that had since been lost. Some of these, as described in newspaper accounts of the time, had been masterworks. Elm remembered this because of the sense of loss she had felt when she read about it. Like the library at Alexandria, burned, and all the knowledge it contained destroyed. She had
just been dumped by a sophomore-year love (sophomore year, for some reason, had been full of heartbreak), and the idea of these paintings, spoken about so admiringly in the newspaper, and even in a letter written by Édouard Vuillard to his Parisian gallery, felt unbearably tragic.

Could this be one of those lost pieces? Possibly, she supposed. She pulled it away from the wall. The frame was new, but that didn’t mean anything. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “He must have cared about you very much.”

Indira made a grunting noise that may have been agreement, derision, or just clearing her throat.

“Do you have the bill of sale? A certificate of authentication?”

Indira shook her head. “It was for me,” she said, “not for resale. But sentimentality will only feed you so long, yes? Before you get too old. So sell it with the rest. I have no children; that way I can live to be one hundred and afford to have young male nurses wave palm fronds to cool me.”

Elm felt a quick stab of pity. She didn’t usually consider herself lucky compared to other people. Indira’s loneliness, though, made her suddenly grateful, for Colin, for Moira, and even for getting to live with Ronan for the short time he was here. It felt strange, like the first sting of lust in a newly pubescent teenager, foreign but not bad necessarily.

“Why not display it?” Elm set the frame carefully back up against the wall and sat down across from Indira.

“It hurt, to look at it, especially after he died,” she said. “I put it away and didn’t think about it until the other drawings …”

“Do you know where he got it?” Elm asked. She didn’t want to seem pushy, but unless the provenance was solid, it would be hard to get its maximum value.

“He bought it in a gallery, he said.”

“Any more surprises lurking in your storage unit?” Elm asked.

Indira smiled. “I don’t think so. But, then, an old lady’s memory is not what it used to be, so you never know what will turn up, do you?”

Elm wasn’t sure if she was teasing or not. She felt like there was a joke being played on her, like the time she was sure that Colin had planned her a surprise party for her fortieth birthday a couple of months before Ronan died, and she spent hours getting ready each morning for the two weeks surrounding her birthday, just in case (it was her pet peeve that everyone knew about surprise parties except the guest of
honor, who then appeared in every photo in what was potentially the worst outfit in her closet on a terrible hair day). But when on the big day Colin presented her with a pair of earrings, a babysitter, and a nice dinner not too far from their apartment, she finally relaxed. How had she thought him capable of deceit, even for her own benefit? A full week later when they went for their regular date-night dinner, all her nice clothes were at the dry cleaner’s, so she threw on a pair of slacks from the previous decade (pleats, a little snug in the hips), and put her hair up in a ponytail. Sure enough, when she walked into their local pizza joint, forty people yelled
“Surprise”
and the flashes lit.