Paris, He Said (2 page)

And probably she had had an advantage: a week after the initial phone interview, the hiring committee paid for her to take the train down from New York and put her up in a room in the campus hotel. She was told by the smiling director, who claimed to remember Jayne from eight years earlier, that she was one of two finalists. The interview lasted an entire day, and with little ceremony, she was handed off from one group of encouraging or distracted university bureaucrats to the next. It had seemed to go well, despite her embarrassment after she bumped her coffee cup with a gesturing hand while talking to the second wave of interviewers, spilling the flavorless, lukewarm liquid onto the table and her skirt.

She had returned to New York thinking that professionally, at last, things might be aligning: she would soon have the chance to move back to Washington and start over, with optimism and good health insurance. She’d have more time to draw and paint, and to prepare food that hadn’t come from a can or a frost-furred box because she was too tired on the nights she wasn’t with Laurent to make any real effort to feed herself. The cookbooks she had held on to since college, picture-filled hardcovers that she had studied closely before her first uncertain attempts to bake bread, to roast a pork loin to the point of perfect tenderness, and to make a pan of spinach lasagna that didn’t emerge from the oven a watery morass, would be opened more than a couple of times a year. She would have to leave Laurent behind in New York, but he was returning soon to Paris and had not yet asked her to move across the Atlantic with him. They had been dating for a little more than four months when she interviewed for the job in Washington, and although he’d said he admired the work she’d shown him, a series of small oil paintings she’d made of old photographs found at a flea market near Liesel’s apartment on the Upper West Side—some of unoccupied rooms, others of strangers’ unsmiling faces—he had not mentioned anything about putting her work in a show and launching her career as a New York artist, something Liesel thought he should already have offered to do. Jayne dismissed her friend’s complaint. “It doesn’t work that way. Laurent is running a business, not a charity.”

“Your work is as good as just about anything we’ve seen at Vie Bohème,” said Liesel.

Jayne felt the sororal warmth of her friend’s indignation, but she doubted she was as talented as Liesel insisted. Her friend had long been prone to exaggeration: if they were held up in traffic for more than a few minutes, Liesel would later say that the delay had been interminable; or if she’d seen a movie she liked, she’d proclaim that she had just been to the funniest/most brilliant/best movie ever—something that seemed to happen every other month.

“I’m not going to ask him to put me in a show,” said Jayne. “He gets that all the time and doesn’t need it from me too. If he wants to represent me, he’ll suggest it.”

Liesel was undeterred. “You’re dating a guy who owns two galleries. Good galleries too, not some bullshit place that’s hardly better than a poster shop. If you don’t make an effort now, you never will.”

“That’s not true.”

Liesel opened her mouth but closed it again.

“What,” said Jayne.

“I just think you’re cheating yourself. He has to know that you want his help.”

“He probably does, but there’s no rush, is there?”

“I don’t know, is there?” asked Liesel. “How many years have you been saying that to yourself?”

On the night she met Laurent, Jayne had plans with Colin, who she’d been seeing for three and a half months by that time, but earlier in the afternoon he’d had to cancel their dinner date in order to stay late to finish a job for a demanding client. His boss was working overtime too, and Colin knew that he couldn’t leave at six as he’d been planning to do. He offered to take Jayne to a late dinner instead, but she was sure that by nine or ten o’clock she’d be too tired to fix her hair and makeup again and step out into the chilly night to meet him.

While Colin was eating carryout Thai at his desk and staring at his computer screen, she intended to stay in to finish an overdue library book and call her parents. Her mother’s tone in her last message had been more aggressive than usual: “I won’t take up much of your time, Jayne. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. Can you spare that for your mother?” Jayne’s sister, Stephanie, two years younger and her only sibling, had told Jayne that their parents were having trouble—Mrs. Marks was sleeping in the guest room, and she had stopped cooking for their father, saying that he could eat frozen dinners and peanut butter sandwiches until he started doing more of the dishes and picking up after himself. Yet when Jayne had last called home, her attempts to get her mother to talk about any of this had been sidestepped. Mrs. Marks would only say that she and Mr. Marks were fine, tired but fine.

“You and Stephanie don’t need to worry about us,” her mother said. “Everything’s the same, I suppose, except that he wants to get a new dog, and I don’t.”

“Why don’t you want to?” asked Jayne. “It’s been six years since Clemmie died.”

“I know, Jayne. As if I could ever forget. Your father reminds me almost every day.”

Jayne’s sister lived in Los Angeles, down the bottlenecked 405 freeway from their parents in Pasadena, but Stephanie saw them infrequently—only a few times more than the two visits Jayne tried to make each year. Stephanie called home a little more often than Jayne did, and also kept closer track of their parents’ health, schedules, and grievances. The year after Stephanie started college, their mother had left their father, though she only stayed away for five days, and neither Jayne nor her sister heard anything about this rift until a couple of years later, when their father let it slip over the Christmas holiday. It was only the four of them at home, no gossipy relatives to worry about, but her mother had not wanted to discuss her short-lived defection. Jayne and Stephanie looked on with apprehension, feeling wronged to have been told nothing of the situation until their father saw fit to spoil that year’s Christmas, as their mother accused him, fuming.

Before Jayne had returned her mother’s call on the evening of the Vie Bohème opening, Liesel texted and begged Jayne to go with her. She had a crush on one of the three featured artists and was desperate to attend.

Jayne had read about the opening, but there were dozens of artists, playwrights, and musicians debuting their work in New York every week. Within a year after moving north from D.C. she had stopped going to galleries most weekends, feeling herself excluded from Manhattan’s art world in a way that seemed impossible to breach. The desire for recognition, the fear of being ignored, the barely suppressed competitive urges—all these undercurrents in almost every gallery crowd—now enervated her more often than not. Liesel had never been an artist and so did not feel the same way.

The eight or nine group shows Jayne had been a part of before meeting Laurent, most of them taking place while she was still an undergraduate, had attracted few people other than the artists’ parents and roommates and the people the artists were having sex with. At twenty-two, then at twenty-three and twenty-four, her college diploma still in its envelope and buried in a desk drawer, how she spent the bulk of her days had less and less to do with boar’s-hair brushes or charcoal pencils or tubes of acrylic or the more precious, eternal oils. Her bedroom was hardly bigger than a hall closet; there was no space for her easel, and she had to resort to taping unstretched canvases to the wall. Or else she painted on heavy butcher paper, also taping it to the wall next to her room’s one drafty window.

Since college, she had winnowed down the contents of her heavy, paint-encrusted metal chest of art supplies, everything inside once as important and intimate to her as the contents of her wallet. Some of her brushes and cheaper paints, the acrylics and watercolors, she sent to her parents’ house in southern California or sold to former classmates, but she held on to the best brushes, her charcoals and oil paints, and a few of her smaller sketchbooks, keeping them in a tiered red plastic case beneath her desk. During the weeks when she did less work than she expected to, she could still hear the smug voice of a star classmate, a guy nicknamed Pepper who had gotten into Yale’s M.F.A. program in painting on his first try: “If you have time to make excuses, you have time to do your work.”

She had not applied to M.F.A. programs, doubting that she was ready to compete with applicants as good as Pepper, and if she had gotten in, she’d have had to take on more student loans. Instead, she found what turned out to be an exhausting job as a paralegal near the same campus where she had so recently been a student greedy for the pleasures of adulthood. Some of her classmates had to take temping jobs after graduation, but those positions seemed almost enviable after the paralegal position took over her life. She worked overtime nearly every week, and one of the lawyers thought nothing of calling her after hours and bombarding her with requests and complaints.

After two years of sixty-hour weeks, she moved to New York to try to find a job as a gallery assistant and to live with Liesel, who had begun her third year of law school. By then Jayne had trouble imagining her work hanging on the walls of some acquisitive stranger’s home, or in the galleries all over Manhattan where for a year she’d fruitlessly applied for jobs. Imagining her work on someone else’s walls had once been almost as effortless as putting on her shoes. Her one real commitment after college was to getting by, to sending out, even in the leanest months, the payment due on her student loans; this made her feel respectable when other facts of her life did not: the wretched frustration over a lost subway card recently reloaded; the muffins and fresh fruit stolen from hotel conference rooms where she was meeting an out-of-town friend; the neighbor’s Halloween card with ten dollars inside, sent by an Aunt Ginny in Salt Lake City and mistakenly put in Jayne’s mailbox, which she had kept.

An hour after Liesel’s call, Jayne dutifully appeared at Vie Bohème, her friend already there, looking very pretty but anxious in a black-and-white sleeveless dress she had bought especially for the opening. If Liesel’s new crush, Bernard Ferriss, a painter from Boston who had moved to Brooklyn a year earlier, ignored her, Jayne would be surprised, though he might tease her too—the gallery’s binary decor matched her dress exactly, something he couldn’t fail to notice. Jayne could see this ruining the night for Liesel, who was very sensitive, especially around men she was attracted to. The walls were white, the cement floors lacquered to a hard, bright sheen, and black ceramic vases of stark, velvety calla lilies had been arranged on tables stationed throughout the long, narrow space. Light fixtures that wouldn’t have been out of place in an oil-spattered garage dangled from the ceiling. Also on display was the compulsory crop of unfriendly red-lipsticked women and skinny men with nicotine-stained teeth, their laughter erupting every minute or two in jittery gales.

Some of the paintings were so good that Jayne wondered, as she almost never did, whether she would have bought one if she’d had the money. The four paintings she liked most were photorealist oils of handsome college-age boys, each canvas three by three feet. The portraits turned out to be Bernard’s, a new series she hadn’t seen when she’d searched online for his work after Liesel mentioned meeting him through Bernard’s cousin, who was one of her law school friends. But it was Laurent who ended up being the most memorable sight in the gallery. She knew as soon as she saw him that he had to be one of the owners. He looked relaxed and calm among the people who stood near him, a few glancing at the paintings mounted at even intervals before them. His face did not shine; his shoes didn’t pinch; his soft gray suit and loose cotton shirt, its mint green the same color as the ice cream Jayne had liked most as a girl, had likely been tailored precisely to his measurements. It seemed as if he believed he had nothing to prove to anyone, though of course he did—it was his taste, after all, that he was selling, his idea of what good, possibly great, art was.

She kept an eye on him, tracking his movements across the half-filled room; after her third or fourth furtive glance, she found him staring back at her. It was November and rainy, but his skin glowed as if he had recently returned from a beach vacation. He was beautiful to her shy, starved gaze. She glanced behind her to see if he was looking at someone else, but his eyes were still on her when she turned around again.

A week later, after their first night together, he spoke the words
coup de foudre
, his breath warm against her ear.

She couldn’t meet his eyes. Love at first sight was a fantasy she had tried to stop believing in during college, when the boys she thought might like her too were as likely as not to be more interested in her roommates or each other or their professors. “You’re being silly,” she said softly.

She felt guilty too; she had not yet told Colin that they were through. On the surface, she knew he seemed a better match for her; Colin was only a year older than she, American, a Manhattan resident. He was a CPA and liked his job most of the time, although some of his firm’s wealthy private clients did get on his nerves, and Jayne’s too, when they interfered with her and Colin’s plans to see each other. He played basketball two nights a week and tennis every other Saturday morning with a college friend who lived off a trust fund, which Colin did not appear to envy. Sometimes she admired this; at other times his broadmindedness about his rich friends irritated her, as did his uncritical love for New York, which seemed at times to verge on idolatry. (“The traffic, the noise, all the crowds,” she’d grumble. “Well, it’s New York,” he’d say. “You have to pay to live here. But everything you need is only a block or two away. How could you not love that?”)

Still, his optimism was also one of the things she found most endearing about him, along with his sweet tooth, bigger than her own, which was a first for a boyfriend; also, the fact that he took stand-up classes at a comedy club near his apartment. He was always trying jokes on her, some of them so awful (
Did you hear about the blind horticulturalist? She got arrested at a funeral for trying to deadhead all the bouquets!
) she found herself laughing harder at the whoppers than at the good ones. She admired too his habit of visiting used bookstores, where he looked for the scruffy old biographies and novels that he kept in a bookcase in the dusty living room of his apartment on East Twelfth Street, which he shared with another friend from college, this one without a trust fund. A first edition of
Catch-22
was the book he valued most, one he kept intending to reread, but it was Jayne who did, on the sly at the shoe boutique when her boss wasn’t there.