Authors: Christine Sneed
“You can’t expect to be able to tell her when she can or can’t have a baby,” said Jayne. “It’s just not something you can do, whether you’re giving her money or not.”
“I really do not understand why people are in such a rush to have children when life is so much easier without them. And frankly, better.”
She laughed. She was angry, but instead of raising her voice, she poked me in the side, hard. “You wouldn’t say that in front of your own kids, I hope,” she said.
“No, I wouldn’t, and while they were growing up, I didn’t think it, but now, looking back, I see that this is the truth. Everything is easier if you do not have to worry about a child.” I glanced at her. She was listening, and to my surprise, without condemnation in her eyes. “You must know this too. You have told me that you do not think you will ever have a child.”
“Obviously not everyone feels the way you do about parenthood,” she said. “My friends with babies are nuts about them.”
“You can love the child, but not the fact you are a parent. Those are two different matters.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“They are. That is the truth. I know this, but you cannot, never having raised a child yourself.”
“Maybe someday I will,” she said, annoyed.
“Yes, maybe you will.” It won’t be mine, though, I thought but didn’t say.
• • •
One other exchange from our visit with Sidonie remains in my mind’s eye and ear. My behavior was rather foolish, which I didn’t really grasp at the time.
As we stood at the door of Sidonie’s apartment, ready to make our way down to the street and leave behind her wooden animals and her tired boyfriend, who seemed to want nothing more than for us to go and not come back—my presence implied, I suppose, that he could not take adequate care of her on his own—Sidonie announced that they were getting married, most likely before the birth of their child. Jayne was happy for her and congratulated her with enthusiasm, before looking at me to do the same. I did wish her well, but I wanted to say aloud that she must not let her changing domestic situation keep her out of her studio for months at a time. Cold as it must sound, if she expected the checks to keep arriving without new work being produced in that sawdust-filled cell, I would need to let her know this would not be the case. I said nothing of it, though. As much as I wanted to, I held back the warning, knowing it would sound more like a threat. It was better to wait to see what she would do after she gave birth.
“We will call the baby Joie, boy or girl,” said Sidonie.
“Joie,” Jayne repeated. “That’s very pretty.”
“It means joy,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” Jayne said, her voice tight.
Sidonie laughed, though not out of spite; instead, I suspect she was trying to diffuse the awkwardness between us. I was sure Jayne would not forget that I had embarrassed her, but I was so disappointed by the visit and therefore unable to keep myself from forcing her to feel some of my displeasure too.
• • •
Why do I give money to artists I barely know, ones who might, as has been suggested by more than one friend, somehow be conning me?
I think of it in this way: if you have the means to make someone else’s life easier, someone who is doing something you admire and want to encourage, why shouldn’t you share some of your good fortune? I am not without self-interest either, obviously. I own a gallery and profit from the work of the artists I represent. Half of those whom I have helped financially over the last several years have ended up with their work in Vie Bohème. Some of my investment in their talents has paid dividends. But there is no guarantee that the artists I am currently helping will earn me anything in return, and although I admit that it would be nice if they did, I know that I won’t spend years feeling angry about it if they don’t.
You give to other people if you can, and you might end up making their lives better. They in turn might also go on to make someone else’s life better. I have inherited money from my parents, who along with running a successful vineyard also invested in real estate in Italian, Caribbean, and South African resort towns. My sister and her husband run the vineyard, which is part of a Gevrey-Chambertin collective that produces one of the Bourgogne region’s celebrated grands crus and a number of other good, less distinctive vintages. Camille and Michel are happy that I do not interfere with the family business, but admittedly, this has caused tension between us. Long ago, when I was nineteen and very arrogant and self-assured, I told my parents that I intended to make art, not table wine, and this did not go over so well, but there was never any threat that they would disown me. Camille stepped into my shoes at home, and she has never deviated from her devotion to Maison Moller. Any interest that I have expressed over the years in the vineyard’s day-to-day operations, any request for information about the vines or the weather conditions or the state of the oak barrels in which the wine is aged, or about the harvest, which I know I am not truly a welcome participant in, even though I would gladly come down to help them each year—any question I might ask is construed as criticism, or worse, a desire to usurp her place as the loyal lifelong servant to and CEO of the family business.
When I sold off the several vacation properties our parents had left to me, the sum was significant enough, in addition to my share of the annual profits from the vineyard, that I would not have had to work another day if I chose not to. My sister has held on to the properties willed expressly to her, and she rents them out to vacationing Americans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and Brits with a management company she hired to help her and Michel with the particulars. They do well with them, but I preferred to have my money in a lump sum. I started Vie Bohème with some of it, and met André shortly thereafter; his wife Caroline—now ex-wife—was friends with a number of good artists, some in need of representation.
Before long André and I set up shop on rue du Louvre (not my ideal location—that would be in the sixth arrondissement on rue Bonaparte, but through a school friend, André found our space for much less than what a smaller storefront in the sixth would cost). We had signed on artists whose work was more skillful and interesting than the imitation Monets and Renoirs that I had been painting and futilely trying to sell—romanticized landscapes of the people and countryside where I grew up. I was also painting Van Gogh–inspired interiors of hospitals and fromageries and garages. (Garages! What could I have been thinking when I tried to paint these greasy, light-deprived interiors in the style of the mad Dutch genius? I have no idea what was wrong with me. Or with Anne-Claire for not telling me to stop immediately. It wasn’t until we were in our final ugly year together, insults flying aggressively and as often as the starlings outside our windows, that she told me how untalented a painter I’d been. If I had just continued faithfully copying the faces and objects from sales ads or photographs—which I had done when I first was learning how to draw and paint—she thought that I might instead have become a competent enough illustrator. Our daughter, ironically, went on to become one and is very good, but she does not have the work ethic she should have, and her husband also makes too much money, probably, for her to be hungry or ambitious enough. And for that matter, my own wealth did not, early on, encourage hunger in her either.)
The ego is good for some things, but in financial matters not always so much. I was able to add to the money from my inheritance because I stepped back and did not go into a self- pitying depression (not for long, in any case), over the fact that other artists were making work that people wanted in their homes, and I was not.
Jayne is gifted. Without question I knew this when I first saw the delicate, precise oils of the strangers she had painted from scavenged photographs, and the street and hillside scenes framed by the windows of her parents’ home in southern California. Some of these paintings were hanging in the dismal apartment in lower Manhattan that she had shared for years with a series of other destitute girls, and I thought, “I did not expect this,” but I kept my surprise to myself.
Every other person I meet tells me with a smile somewhere between self-mockery and defiance that he or she is an artist or has always wanted to be an artist. I know that it’s the same for writers, according to my oldest friend, Paul Ligault, who is a novelist of some repute in France, though it has been several years since his last book. How many fans or family members or former students have told him they’re going to write a book one day, or they are in the midst of trying to write a book, or they have an excellent idea and would love some help writing a book and maybe he has some time, some suggestions, knows an editor, knows a filmmaker in Paris or Rome or Hollywood …?? When Jayne first told me that she had studied painting in college and still drew and painted a little in her scarce free time, honestly, I didn’t think much of it.
Another surprise: she never asked me for a show—out of fear or a species of calculated, mercenary patience, or perhaps a failure of confidence? Nonetheless, I felt the gentle, constant pressure of her hopefulness. I tried baiting her a little, seeing what she would do when I praised other artists without also praising her. I was not cruel, but I wanted to see if she might say some unguarded thing, reveal the depth and intensity of her ambition. On the whole, however, she kept it reined in, and so I believed that she cared for me, for my confidence and kindness to her, for my foreignness, and for how I made her feel in bed. That I have money, that I am co-owner of just the kind of elite commercial and artistic enterprise she hopes some day to be an integral part of, well, that is mostly happenstance.
But even if it is not, I don’t really mind very much. I think it’s true that the people we open ourselves up to, whether as friends or as lovers—we choose these people with some calculation, conscious or not. Maybe they dress well and seem delighted by life all the time, things we wish we did too; maybe they are wealthy and will be generous materially with us because we are poorer; maybe they are beautiful and make us look closer to beautiful when we are with them, smiling and laughing too. Though sometimes these hopes do not work out so well; their wealth and beauty might underscore our relative poverty and plainness. We end up resenting them for not making us happier, for not making us look better, but this seems such a cynical way to view the world and how we interact with each other.
I asked Jayne to move with me to Paris because I was attached to her, but also because I knew that she would not fulfill her promise in New York. She could not afford to live there; few people can, despite the irony that it is the most densely populated city in America. Working those two miserable jobs she was wasting her life on, maybe earning thirty or thirty-five thousand between them, her share of the rent a thousand dollars per month, not a good rent-to-salary ratio—how was she ever going to find the time and energy to get her work ready and in the hands of someone like me, who could change these circumstances for her? Because again, if you can make someone’s life better—without, I suppose, doing harm to your own—shouldn’t you?
This, after all, is the ethos that bolsters a million different charities. If we think of charity on a more personal scale, we could do as much individually for a few specific people as any big organization like PETA or Médècins sans Frontières or UNICEF does for larger groups.
It is a rather extraordinary thing, though, I know—I opened my home and invited into my life in Paris a young woman I had only known for four and a half months. I gave her food and employment and leisure to make her remarkable paintings. Most important, perhaps, I eventually offered her a show in my gallery. I also introduced her to my daughter, who became her friend, and before long to my son, and to some of my own friends. I trusted her with my business partner, who in short order proved himself untrustworthy where she was concerned, though in fairness to André, I did not behave as nobly as I could have while he and his wife Caroline were deciding whether to get a divorce, a couple of years before we opened Vie Bohème–New York. But André was hardly the most loyal husband in the world, let alone on the little street near the Bastille where he and Caroline lived. She had real cause to leave him: the second e-mail address used for correspondence with his lovers, the gifts paid for from their shared account, the forgotten anniversaries and airport pickups and other minor but ultimately catastrophic disappointments he visited on his lovely wife, who is also quite a bit smarter than he is. He should have chosen a woman who is less watchful, less skilled at adding up discrepancies and detecting the reasons behind them.
The fact that I helped her come to a final decision about their marriage by making myself available to her in ways that perhaps I should not have is not a point of pride, but she and André were separated during the few weeks that Caroline and I were meeting at my apartment for late dinners and sex, and sometimes, rather than going back to her friend Clothilde’s apartment, she would stay the night. The next morning we often took our time getting out of bed and having breakfast. And after I had cleared the table of our crumbs and dishes, she let me wash her long red-gold hair, closing her blue eyes in pleasure, her thin, strong, pianist’s fingers gripping the side of the porcelain tub as the warm water coursed over her head and back.
Not until months had passed did André learn of our evenings and mornings together. Caroline had promised not to tell him, but he discovered our liaison from an old e-mail exchange he found on my computer in the gallery office when he was checking to see if I had paid the same bill twice. As it turned out, I had left for the day in absentminded haste to meet another woman, the caustic and brilliant Sofia. He had always suspected that his wife found me attractive, that I found her attractive too, and it was true, but until that time, on the eve of their divorce, we’d indulged in nothing more than light flirtation.