Authors: Christine Sneed
For now, the gallery and its staff and the foot traffic from the busy street, the polite, curious people drifting in and out all day, kept her occupied. She had Laurent and the unexpected promise of Jeanne-Lucie’s companionship—but of that possibility, she had no idea what to think.
When Laurent returned from the
tabac
thirty minutes later,
Le Figaro
folded under his arm, she was already out of bed but had left a drawing on his pillow, a human heart she had hastily inked, copied from an anatomy guide in the study, the word
amour
printed under its lower ventricles. She listened for his step from her seat at the desk, her own heart pounding in her ears. Along with the drawing of Colin, she was working on sketches of the study where she worked and of the salon, with its tall windows and comfortable sofa. She had also begun a painting, her first in the apartment, of a faded color photograph her sister had found at a yard sale in L.A. and sent to her with several others the previous year, its back marked
Joanie and Jim, 10/67, Salinas
. In the foreground was a young couple, newlyweds, Jayne thought, but there was no confirmation of this. The pair stood by the front bumper of a powder-blue Cadillac, the smiling man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders, her smile more tentative, her red hair in an expert updo. Laurent stopped in the doorway, watching in silence as she worked. She raised her eyes and smiled at him.
“I love to see you drawing. I’ve meant to ask if you’ve been writing in a journal too, Jayne. Isn’t this what Americans in Paris are supposed to do? Because then, like Mr. Hemingway, you can publish your memoirs and become famous.”
“Or like Martha Gellhorn, one of his wives, did.”
“I haven’t heard of her.”
She smudged a line that was too dark. “I’m not surprised. Hemingway ate women for lunch, but he couldn’t digest Gellhorn. He spit her back out, mostly intact. I’ve only read a little of her work, but I think she was a better writer than he was.”
He had come up behind her chair and slipped a hand inside her robe. “You are naked, Jayne? Under your dress?”
She squealed at his hand’s coldness. “Yes, I am. But it’s a robe.”
“In French
robe
means dress.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Will you spend all day like this?” He put his mouth to her ear and nibbled the lobe, his breath warm and smelling of cigarette smoke. “In your robe, working on your drawing of this handsome couple in the desert?”
She laughed, wriggling away. “That tickles,” she said. “Maybe I will. Do you think I should?”
“Yes. How nice it would be, don’t you think?”
“Why don’t you spend all day naked with me?” she said. “That would be more fun than me being here all day by myself without any clothes on.”
“I would if I didn’t have to go to work.”
“You’re the boss,” she said. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. Have you ever spent an entire day naked?” As soon she asked this, she realized that she didn’t really want to know the answer.
Without a moment’s pause, he said, “Yes, of course.”
“Of course?” She could hear a note of censure in her voice.
“I have been to nude beaches, Jayne. Many Europeans have. My favorite one is in Italy. When I was there, I didn’t bother to wear clothes for most of the trip.”
“Didn’t you go to any restaurants?” Her gaze fixed on his left eyebrow, on a long silver hair that jutted upward.
“No, we had our meals at the hotel.”
She wondered who the woman had been, if she was an artist too and younger than Laurent. Where was she now? “Did everyone walk around naked there? Even the waiters and the concierge?”
“No, only the guests, but the waiters did not wear very much either.”
“Well, that’s interesting.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“We could go there too if you would like to. It is a very pretty beach near Portofino.”
“Who did you go with?”
He bent down to kiss her cheek. She smelled the Gitane again. “A friend. It was a while ago,
chérie
. Not long after my divorce.”
She peered down at her sketchbook. The drawing was not working. She would need to start over.
“I lived a lot of years before I met you,” he said. “I was never a monk. You know that.”
“I know,” she said.
“You don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not.”
He looked at her, a half smile on his lips. “No, of course you’re not.”
She pushed her chair back and stood, one hand holding her robe closed. “I’d better get dressed and go out for some groceries. I was thinking of cooking tonight. I found a recipe for shrimp linguine that looks good.”
“I’ll be out with André and a new client tonight. Maybe tomorrow for the shrimp? I probably won’t be home until after ten. You should eat whatever you would like. Take yourself out to dinner. Treat yourself to something good, like a very big steak.”
“Ha-ha,” she said. He knew that she did not eat beef anymore, something she had decided to stop doing over the winter when she finally read
Fast Food Nation
, a book her sister had recommended.
His client was probably a woman, a new buyer, or maybe an artist, but Jayne didn’t ask. She had realized in New York that if Laurent was meeting a man, he would say so: “I will see Yves-Alain Nagy, the landscape painter, tonight” or “Olivier Denis, the sculptor of our marble dancers, the artist you think has borrowed too much from Degas.” A woman’s name was rarely offered. Was he, as his daughter alleged, a truly secretive man? But it seemed to her a gesture more circumspect than secretive.
“I’ll need to put clothes on if I take myself out to dinner,” she said.
He smiled. “Go out in your dress. No, your robe, I mean. But don’t forget to put on your shoes first.”
She laughed. “No, that’s okay. Maybe you could invite me out with your clients sometime.”
“We will see,” he said. “It is a possibility, Jayne.”
“I’d like it.”
“You want to be included,” he said. “I understand. That is only natural. You’re not bored, I hope.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not.”
“You will hear from Jeanne-Lucie soon, I think. But I do not want you to ask her to tell you all my secrets if you do become friends.”
She turned to look up at him. “I’m sure your conscience is clear,” she said, nonchalant.
His laughter sounded forced to her ears. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that.”
Are you taking care of yourself?
Melissa wanted to know, her newly maternal tendencies as clear across thirty-five hundred miles of fiber optics as if she were voicing her concerns directly into Jayne’s ears.
Jayne’s sister Stephanie also had questions, less tactful than Melissa’s.
What if Jayne got pregnant? And what if Laurent cast her out, forcing her to return to New York, a baby on the way or else an appointment scheduled at Planned Parenthood? Who knew how she’d be able to handle all that.
Pregnancy was unlikely, unless it was some other man’s child, because Laurent had had a vasectomy a few years after Jeanne-Lucie’s birth. “I saw no reason to risk having another child when the world is already very crowded,” he said. “My wife was not happy with this choice, but she understood why I made it.”
“You didn’t ask her before you did it?” asked Jayne.
“Yes, of course I did. She went with me to the hospital, and afterward she drove me home. She also made sure that I didn’t go in to work for a few days, as the doctor had recommended.”
“From what I’ve heard, most men don’t want to have it done.”
“No, they do not, but this surgery made sense. It should not cause as much controversy as it does, especially with so many people on the planet, twice as many now as when I was a child.”
“He could still give you an STD,” Liesel and Stephanie both had said later.
“You should use condoms anyway, Jayne,” Liesel added. “You never know if some of his soldiers will leap into the breach and make it across. I’ve heard about that happening.”
Jayne pretended to agree. Liesel was hardly a model of scrupulous birth control use anyway; she had taken plenty of risks during their long friendship, the most recent, from what Jayne gathered, with Bernard, but Jayne did not point this out.
Almost everyone Jayne knew from home had ideas about how she should spend her time in Paris. Write a blog about the city’s best pâtisseries! The best swimming pools and health clubs (“As if I even swim,” she’d told her friend Daphne, who drove her two border collies from Williamsburg to a beach on Long Island as often as she could, but Daphne insisted, “It’s probably one of the few things there aren’t already five dozen guides for.”). The best dog parks, knitting circles, emo clubs (“What are those?” Jayne asked her sister, who then mocked her ignorance over Skype), organic bakeries, gluten-free bakeries (“In France?” asked Jayne. “Yes, of course in France,” said Melissa. “Just do a Google search, and you’ll see.” “No offense, but I didn’t come to France to go gluten-free,” said Jayne. “Or to write a guide about how to do it here either.”), Japanese noodle shops, Vietnamese noodle shops, pizza parlors, yarn shops, bicycle shops, bicycle tours, helmet shops, soccer gear shops, soccer pubs, lamp boutiques, bead boutiques, flower shops, soap stores, all-night pharmacies, all-night wine shops. She could illustrate the blog too and land a huge book deal, like the one the cartoonist who blogged about her suicidal thoughts had gotten.
“If you’re not going to keep a blog, which wouldn’t even taken that much of your time,” said Stephanie, “why not invent something? Like sunglasses for dogs.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jayne. “Sunglasses for dogs?”
“Aren’t people in Paris completely wacked over their dogs? I read that some of them spend two grand on fancy leashes at Chanel. You should invent little dog Ray-Bans and make a billion dollars. You just have to give me half because it was my idea.”
“You can invent them and keep the billions all for yourself.”
“Maybe I will. That way I can get away from my boss, who told me the other day that his wife used to make him use coconut oil as mouthwash and as a sex lubricant.”
“Is he on drugs? Why would he tell you that?”
Stephanie made a noise of contempt. “Of course he’s on drugs.”
“You can use coconut oil as mouthwash? That’s so strange.”
“Look it up. It’s true.”
“That’s all right. I believe you.”
Jayne did not need advice from friends or her sister on how to spend her time in Paris. She had her job at Vie Bohème. She spent hours every day painting, she read, she went for walks and ran a few days each week. She had the weekends and most evenings with Laurent.
A few days before Colin’s e-mail arrived, Liesel had announced that she wanted to visit in mid- to late August. By then Jayne planned to have at least two or three new paintings completed and another underway. She was working mostly with her collection of junk-shop and flea-market photographs, the ones in color, though she thought she might start a series of paintings in black, white, and gray in the next few months. Laurent was letting her use his study as a studio and had moved some of his files and his laptop into the salon, where he kept a small writing desk. She’d bought an easel at the art store off rue Bonaparte and set it up next to the bigger desk in Laurent’s study, where she did her sketches before moving to the canvas, her paints and brushes spread out across the desk’s newspaper-covered surface when she was painting. Her laptop she tucked into one of the desk drawers or else kept on the kitchen counter, where the Wi-Fi signal was the strongest.
Before she was able to set up her work area, Laurent had asked François from the gallery to come over to help him move a filing cabinet and a bookcase out of the study to make space for Jayne’s easel. François had not asked if Laurent was grooming her for a show; his work hadn’t yet been displayed, nor had Nathalie’s, but other art students who had worked at Vie Bohème as assistants, such as the mysterious Sofia B., had been given shows, though only after they were no longer working for Laurent and André. Laurent had told Jayne that one criterion for how he and André chose gallery assistants was whether they liked the assistants’ own artwork. “They must fit with our aesthetic interests,” he said. “That way they can better understand what we sell.”
When she told Melissa what Laurent had said on her second night in France, that he intended at some point to put her work in his gallery, her friend had screamed into the computer’s electronic eye, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shit,” she whispered, wincing. “I just put Josh down for a nap. But Jayne, oh my God, I’m so happy for you. I knew it!”
“I really didn’t know it,” Jayne whispered back. “Not at all.”
“No, of course you didn’t, which is probably one reason Laurent is so willing to help you.”
• • •
About an hour after Laurent had left for Vie Bohème, Jayne was working on the drawing of Colin, his e-mail still unanswered, when the doorbell’s stately
bong-bong
interrupted her. She ignored it, but when it rang again, she got up from her desk, annoyed, and went into the hall. It was a little before noon, and Laurent was often home at midday, but Thursday was his early day at the gallery. He opened and manned it alone until Nathalie or François arrived an hour or two later. She wondered if he had lost his keys and was returning to pick up a spare set, but this seemed unlikely; he would probably have called and asked her to bring them down instead of coming all the way up to the apartment again.
She squinted through the peephole, the face of the man on the other side slowly assembling itself through the tiny distorting glass: Philippe, the music student from upstairs, the one who discarded the care packages his parents sent. She wasn’t sure if she should let him in, especially because she was still as naked beneath her robe as she’d been when Laurent had left for the day, but Philippe had probably heard her approaching footsteps. She tied the sash of her robe tighter and opened the door halfway.
“Désolé de vous déranger, madame,” he said, blushing pink from the neck up. He wore jeans and a red polo shirt; he was lean and pale, probably at most twenty-three, with a bony, equine handsomeness. His face was unlined and clean-shaven, the hands at his side large and bony too, more fit for kneading bread or maybe for sawing wood than for playing the cello.