A Nearly Perfect Copy (40 page)

“We reconnected at the auction and we’ve had dinner a few times. She’s actually grown into a really nice person. She said you’d given her drawings to sell, which seemed strange to me. First, because you never said anything, at least not to me, which, by the way, I’m hurt about.”

“Sorry,” Elm said. “With everything on my mind I’ve just—”

“Why in the world would you give her drawings to sell instead of putting them up for auction at Tinsley’s? Relay said she didn’t know. And she hadn’t thought to ask. Intelligence, not necessarily one of her most attractive traits.”

Actually, Elm thought, claiming ignorance was a sign of acumen that Elm neglected to demonstrate.

“So I say to myself, ‘Self,’ I say, ‘why is Elm pimping out drawings and not telling me?’ Either she doesn’t think they’re worthy of the auction house, and in that case it’s shitty to be foisting them on Relay, even though she doesn’t know any better. Or she needs the money. Either way, it seems like something Greer would not be thrilled about, or it’s potentially illegal. What are you involved in, Elm, and why didn’t you tell me?”

Elm began to cry but she didn’t avert her glance. “I need the money. Colin’s going to lose his job; he has to testify in court. And yes, Relay’s drawings were probably fakes. But they were convincing, and enjoyable, and, for all I know, possibly real. And it was helping out these Jews whose art was lost in the …” She trailed off. This was Klinman’s line, his bullshit story. Suddenly, she understood Indira’s attitude. Elm didn’t care. She didn’t care who got hurt as long as she could have Ronan. There were so many steps between Relay and Elm and Klinman, and the forger.… It was a gulf that stretched too wide to imagine, a snarling, rough sea. And it had swallowed her up and carried her out.

Her tears dried as she finally put the pieces together. But here was Ian, waiting for her to speak, to explain herself, to save their friendship, her job, and his.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think it would get so huge. Indira’s art looked authentic. We ran it through the paces.”

“Yes, but to prove it was original, not to prove it was fake. It’s different.”

“What the fuck do I do now, Ian?” Elm looked up at him. His gaze was stern, like a father’s. The disappointment radiated out from his forehead, wrinkled in dismay.

“Look, Relay won’t say anything. And I’m not going to say anything. We never even had this conversation. Maybe the media attention will die down.”

“An Englishman using the world’s most famous ceramicist as a shill to sell fake art through one of the world’s most venerated auction houses? Yeah, no one will want to hear about that,” Elm said. She tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was famished. She wanted a grilled cheese sandwich so badly her knuckles ached. “Shit, shit, shit. Why didn’t I just stay out of it?”

“More like, why did you drag me in?” Ian saved her by saying, “Excuse me,” to the passing waitress.

“Grilled cheese, no tomato, please.” Elm looked at Ian, who shook his head.

“How can you eat?”

“I’m not eating. The parasite is. What do you think I should do?”

“Lie low,” Ian said. “Get lots of doctors’ appointments. Can you get put on bed rest?”

“I don’t know,” said Elm. “I think I’m done with deception,” she said, even as she realized that her deception ran so deep she would never be done.

Elm and Colin both took the day off before the long weekend. Moira ran around the living room singing at the top of her lungs, so excited was she to have vacation, and both parents home. Elm knew how little time she and Colin had spent together recently. She was also aware that though she had been living in the apartment, participating in family dinners and arranging pickups and drop-offs, playdates and meals, she had been with her family only in body. In spirit she had been … in a clinic, in France, getting impregnated with her dead child. Or on a beach in Thailand, watching as the wave came in to lay waste to her life.

Elm was making a dinner shopping list, which so far consisted of chicken and ice cream. She rubbed her lower back with her left hand, then felt Colin’s hands on her shoulders, kneading the flesh there.

“We have to talk, Elmtree,” he said.

Something in his voice, his touch, suggested sex. She was not in the mood, but she let herself be led to the bedroom after putting on a television show for Moira.

In the room, he sat her on the bed, and she could see he was no
more interested in sex than she was. He began to pace, chewing on his hangnails as he did when he was nervous, so that she had trouble understanding what he said.

She asked him to repeat himself.

“It’s over, Elm,” he said.

There was a moment when she couldn’t breathe. How had he found out about Ronan? Or had he done something else? Had he fallen in love while she wasn’t looking? He wouldn’t leave her six months pregnant, would he? He was so loyal; only the colossal lie of her pregnancy could make him leave her.

“I’m out,” he said. “Don’t look so scared; you’re fairly pale. Do you need to lie down?”

Elm shook her head.

“I’ll get another job, Elm. It’s not like it’s impossible. And I can stay home with the baby if nothing else pans up.”

Elm deflated. He was leaving his job. Not her.

“Pans out,” she corrected. “What happened?”

“HR scheduled a meeting on Tuesday. I brought home all the interesting files yesterday.”

“And …” Elm still felt out of breath. Her heart was racing; she couldn’t completely fill her lungs.

“They’re not pursuing legal action. They are just going to shove it all under the rug and sweep away any crumbs. I’m a crumb. It’s for the best, really. It’s time to move on.”

Elm nodded.

“It’ll be okay, sweetheart. You’re working. We have savings. It’ll be all right.”

“I, uh—” Elm held up her finger while she swallowed. Colin brought her the glass of water from the nightstand. Elm took a long swallow.

“Things aren’t looking so great at Tinsley’s right now. I have to … I wasn’t—” Elm began to sob, then dry-heave. Colin, concerned, sat next to her on the bed, holding her while she made noises that hadn’t come out of her since the days after Ronan’s death, guttural grunts and wails. Moira knocked at the door.

“Not now, gobeen,” Colin called. “Everything’s grand. Go back to the television.”

“I’m okay, go to her,” Elm said.

“No,” Colin said. “I’m here. Tell me. It can’t be as bad as all that.”

“It can,” Elm said, calming.

“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Moira called from behind the closed door.

“Wait a minute, sweetie,” Elm said.

She took a deep breath. She would tell him. She could tell him and then this would all be over. She would tell him, he’d be angry, then he’d forgive her. He’d see that she had done the best thing for all of them. She put her hand on her belly.

“There was all this pressure. From Greer, and then your job thing, so I—”

“Elm, you’re not making sense.” Colin shook his head.

“Mommy, will you fix me lunch?”

“In a minute,” they both chimed.

“Get a yogurt drink from the fridge,” Elm called. “Okay,” she said to Colin. “The beginning was before the auction, and Greer kept threatening me if I didn’t get some good commissions. And then, suddenly, these two things came up. First, there was Indira Schmidt. Remember the ceramicist I told you about? The one who survived the Holocaust? She was profiled in
The New Yorker
a few years back?”

“All right …” Colin clearly didn’t remember.

“She had this amazing collection of drawings, and this one Connois pastel that she said Blatzenger gave her when he went to France. They were having an affair. For years, apparently.”

“From Nixon’s administration?”

“It was, it is, a beautiful piece, and the story behind it is incredible. The poor lady, she’s nearly blind. So I sent everything off to be authenticated, or rather, Ian did, and it went up for auction, which was a great success, remember?”

“Aye,” Colin said.

“Okay, hold that in your mind while I tell you the rest of the story.”

“I’ll try,” Colin said, his clipped tones betraying his confusion.

“Colette told me to call this Klinman guy in France.”

“The reason you went to Paris, I remember,” Colin said.

Elm felt a poke of guilt behind her ribs. The baby flipped inside her. “That, and … But initially, I didn’t call him, because of Colette, right?”

“Colette the cow.”

Elm smiled weakly at his attempt to cheer her with Irish slang. “You’re not going to like this.”

“I can tell.”

“But his drawings were good, or they looked good. Not good enough for the auction house. But, I mean, decorative, convincing. Do you remember we went to that party in TriBeCa, and I met that art adviser? So I took Klinman’s drawings and gave them to her and she sold them and we split the money.”

“Elm.” Colin’s disappointment was palpable from the bass of his voice.

“Their provenances were—they were all stolen from Jewish families during World War II, and just recently returned. The families didn’t want to come forward.”

“I don’t understand, Elm.” Colin always thought the best of Elm, refused to recognize her faults, even when they were so obvious they might have been tattooed across her forehead. “The drawings were fake?”

“Well, that’s hard to prove. But they weren’t … right.”

“Couldn’t you X-ray them?”

Elm said, “FTIR is expensive, plus it’s better for paintings.” Elm looked at Colin, really looked at him for the first time since she began speaking. So far, she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was angry, but not so much that he would not forgive her. She wished she could stop talking, stop time, or stop her involvement in this story right here, at the part where her actions were merely bad, not despicable. But it was too late. She had to let it all out.

“Sounds like straight shite.”

“Can you please not speak again until I’m done?” Elm said, impatience crowding her words. Stung, Colin stood, facing her.

“The whole thing blew up. Klinman was selling fakes and Indira Schmidt was one of his fences. And I was too dumb to suspect her because she’s this famous artist. I thought someone just copied the authentic pastel. Now I think maybe that was a test, by Klinman, to see how good, or how bad, my eye was, how blind I’d become since …” She held up both her hands to stop him from speaking. “An article came out a few days ago in the paper. Klinman was arrested in some sort of international sting operation. Indira is a person of interest. It’s only a matter of time until they come to talk to me.” Elm paused.

“Are you done?” Colin asked. He said it so nonchalantly, like he was asking her if she was done with the half-and-half so he could put some in his coffee.

“I wish,” Elm said.

“There’s something more? Something worse?”

Elm nodded. She began to breathe faster.

“Wait, what did you do with the money?” Colin spat.

“At that party, in TriBeCa, Relay told me that your friends, the whoosits, from Budokon class, were cloning their pet.”

“They’ve too much money and not enough sense.” Colin sighed. Then his face paled. His arms fell to his sides and his eyes opened wide.

“What? Elm? That’s impossible.”

Elm began to cry again. “It’s not impossible. I did it. This—” She pointed to her stomach. “This is Ronan.”

“Motherfucking hell!” Colin yelled. In response, Elm heard the television volume grow from the living room. Cartoon Dora was screaming now too, slightly louder than Colin. It wouldn’t be long before their grouchy downstairs neighbor came up to complain.

“Elm, you fecking eejit, what the hell have you done?” She had never seen Colin this angry; he spit a bit as he swore at her. His hands were curled now into fists. Elm was worried he might hit her, then hoped he would. She deserved to be hit, but he never would; he was not a violent man.

“Do you know how fucking illegal and experimental that is? How can you even be sure that it’s really his DNA? What if it comes out with five heads, or a tail or something?”

“It won’t,” Elm said. “You’ve been with me to the sonograms.”

“No one knows what happens to these clones.” Colin began to pace. “No one knows what happens when they grow up,
if
they grow up.”

“But—”

“No,” Colin roared. “Now you wait until I’m done. How could you think you could replace him? By getting another body that looked like him? How do you even know that it’s Ronan, that you didn’t get duped by some sawbones? Do you know what happens to all these animals people are cloning now? They die, Elm. How dare you set us up to lose him again? How dare you?”

Elm said, “Human clones aren’t like animal clones.… Something about the brain’s ability to re-myelinate?”

He closed his mouth and looked at her. “Who the fuck are you?” He stood up abruptly and left their room. Elm followed him down the hall in time to see him grab his jacket off the rack in the entryway, and slam the front door.

“Where’d Daddy go?” Moira asked, unfazed, as always, by her mother’s tears.

“Business trip.”

On his way to Colette’s house, Gabriel walked through the Passy Cemetery, a setting befitting his mood. The weather, however, was not cooperating. There was pale, cool sunshine and a light breeze, clouds passing quickly overhead, grouping and regrouping, forming interesting shapes. Maybe he could convince Colette to go to the park instead of somewhere fancy for dinner with her friends who spoke so quickly Gabriel had trouble following the conversation.