Authors: Christine Sneed
• • •
Other indignities small and medium stepped out from the consoling camouflage of her daily routines and rituals. Strangers dialed her phone and yelled at her when she told them they had the wrong number. People let doors close in her face as she tried to enter stores, restaurants, and post offices on their heels. If she made a disapproving sound, the offender might turn on her and tell her to get a life, furious to be called out on a thoughtless act. If all she had to worry about was someone forgetting to hold the door for her, she was pretty damn lucky!
“You live in New York,” her father said when she complained to him over the phone. “What do you expect? Rose bouquets and parades in your honor?”
“Common decency would be nice,” she said.
“Common decency,” he repeated. “What exactly is that, Jayne?”
It was in the month before she left for Paris, long after the e-mail to her sister and the breakup with Colin, that she received alarming news more personal than the nuclear meltdown or the drowning island. She had known it would come one day, but nonetheless she wasn’t prepared for it.
Pepper, the college classmate who had gone on to Yale’s M.F.A. program, had been hired to teach painting classes full-time at the San Francisco Art Institute. This fact she supposed she could live with, set it aside, and move on mostly unencumbered, but the next line of his updated biography revealed (he had a Wikipedia page already, another blow) that one of his paintings had just been chosen for the Venice Biennale. Who had plucked him from oblivion? One of his Yale instructors? Someone he had met at an artists’ colony? Or possibly, more distressing still, one of their undergraduate instructors?
“But you’re going to Paris,” said Liesel over drinks the day after Jayne had made these discoveries. They were at KGB, where they had once gone every Thursday night for two beers each—three if it had been a difficult week—when Liesel was finishing law school and Jayne had first moved north from D.C. “Fuck Pepper and that Venice show. Does he really still call himself that? It’s such a stupid nickname.”
“I don’t know,” said Jayne. The bar’s red lights made Liesel look both sexy and a little demonic. “His Wikipedia page lists his real name. Gary Lentz.”
“He has a Wikipedia page?” said Liesel, doubtful. “I want a Wikipedia page.”
“I’ll start one for you if you start one for me.”
Liesel shook her head. “You have to be famous. Or sort of famous. Wikipedia has gatekeepers.”
“We’ll get one,” said Jayne. “If he’s got one, I’m getting one.”
Liesel glanced at a black-haired guy with a fussy goatee on the other side of the bar. She had been gazing at him experimentally for the past hour, and he had started to return her looks. “That’s the spirit,” she said to Jayne, her eyes still on the goateed man. “Nothing like a little old-fashioned jealousy to get you off your ass and into the future.”
Laurent’s apartment on rue du Général-Foy, a few blocks from one of the city’s busiest train stations, Gare Saint-Lazare, took up the entire third floor of his building, which in New York would have been considered the fourth floor. Jayne was struck by his apartment’s spotless opulence when he unlocked the heavy oak door that opened onto the landing and led her inside for the first time. The rooms were bright and startlingly spacious, accustomed as she was to New York’s claustrophobic domesticity; most of the apartments she knew there were so cramped and dim that even her friends’ feline companions looked crowded in their little velour beds, let alone the bigger-than-purse-size dogs that a couple of her friends kept as roommates. Her friends Daphne and Kirstie had two border collies squeezed into their six-hundred-square-foot condo, and also had a baby on the way. Jayne had no idea how they would all survive in the aftermath of the baby’s arrival.
She especially admired the tall French windows in Laurent’s home, which she would soon be in the habit of opening in the mornings to let in the day’s freshest air. He’d bought the area rugs on the hardwood floors in Ankara, he told her with some pride, while on a long-ago vacation with his ex-wife and their children, Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie, who were both around the same age as Jayne and already married. The thick wool was very soft, the pile almost pillowy beneath her feet. On the walls were oil paintings of urban landscapes, several pastoral watercolors, and figurative drawings, along with a half dozen looking glasses in gilded or carved wood frames. Laurent kept houseplants too, African violets and pink and white orchids in porcelain pots—had his daughter Jeanne-Lucie cared for them in his absence? Or some other woman who might one day step toward Jayne from among the strangers on the street to say that she was Laurent’s friend, her emphasis on the word making it clear that she was something else entirely? The sofa and upholstered chocolate brown armchairs in the living room—the
salon
, she had been instructed to call it during her profligate college semester in Strasbourg (her Visa bills so alarming during those months that her father canceled the card)—were large, overstuffed, and modern. The wide sage-green sofa looked as inviting as a bed.
“Do you think you will be comfortable here?” he asked, watching her stare at everything with what she was sure was an awed, covetous gaze.
“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking. “Thank you for asking me to come.”
“Oui, chérie. C’est mon très grand plaisir.” He smiled. The fine bones of his face moved her so deeply that she had to turn away.
Included with the apartment were a
chambre de bonne
, a small room two flights up on the building’s top floor, where a domestic servant had once lived, and a shared bathroom down the hall. Laurent rented these tiny quarters to a student at the École Normale de Musique named Philippe, a dark-haired cellist, pale and tall. His parents lived in Lille and sent care packages every few weeks, filled with sweets and other small gifts their son seemed rarely to want and often left in the hall for the two other students and the retired bachelor postal worker who inhabited the floor’s other three maid’s rooms. Laurent had laughed quietly, and with a trace of sadness, as he told Jayne about the chocolate bars, the pots of raspberry jam, and the lemon-scented hand soaps that Philippe placed in the corridor for his neighbors. “His parents must not know that he does this,” said Laurent. “If they did, they would probably be upset and might stop paying his rent. I’d be hurt by this too if he were my son.”
“If they stopped paying, you’d evict him, wouldn’t you?” she asked.
“It isn’t likely they will find out. I don’t think they visit.”
“Maybe that’s why he throws out their packages.”
“Maybe, but it might also be that he has told them not to come,” he said.
Jayne rarely saw Philippe or the building’s other occupants after she had settled in, her suitcases emptied of the neatly rolled layers of clothes and plastic-bagged shoes. By container ship—its transatlantic passage, Laurent warned her, slow as a sleepless night (
une nuit blanche
, she remembered from a distant French class)—she had sent two trunks from New York, books and more shoes, some scarves and coats, though Laurent had said that they could shop for new clothes when she arrived. He had never stated it directly, but she knew that he had family money.
What he had told her was that his parents were in their late thirties when he was born, and died within seven months of each other when he was thirty-five. They had been the proprietors of a vineyard in the Gevrey-Chambertin collective of winemakers, an enclave not far from Dijon; the business was now in the hands of Laurent’s younger sister Camille and her husband Michel, Laurent having announced at nineteen that he wanted to make art instead of wine. He had not succeeded as an artist though, and had stopped painting with any seriousness at twenty-five. Instead, he had decided to try selling the work of other artists, and at this, he’d been successful.
Much of the art Laurent sold in the Vie Bohème on rue du Louvre consisted of narrative paintings, lithographs, and figurative pastels and charcoals. He and his partner André also sold small-scale sculpture, most of it in marble or bronze, which reminded Jayne of Rodin and Brancusi. It was all very skillful, often arresting and beautiful, though Laurent had hesitated when she compared several of the artists he represented to more famous ones.
“Not everything is derivative,” he insisted. “Some things are original.”
She nodded, but on the whole, the art he sold did seem derivative to her, though she would never say this outright.
“I know what you are thinking,” Laurent said before Jayne could reply. “That it has all been done, but this is not true. Each painting is new because each person will paint in a different way, even if some of the paintings look alike. You might make a sculpture or another work that looks like someone else’s, but it is not someone else’s. It is yours because you do not have the same process as the other artist.”
She couldn’t really say that he was wrong. His was only another way of seeing, albeit a convenient one, considering that he earned a comfortable living selling art that sometimes resembled other, more celebrated art. He had painted this way too; the few canvases of his own that he eventually showed her reminded her of Monet’s, technically sound but stiffer than the most famous impressionist’s as if the master had asked his students to copy one of his cathedral or Giverny paintings while looking at its image in the mirror instead of head-on. Depth, something spiritual? Jayne wasn’t sure, but some vital element was missing.
“Love,” said Laurent. “I did not love what I was painting the way it needed to be loved. I did not have the heart yet. It will sound strange, but this is true. I kept worrying that I would not be good enough, and so,” he said with a self-deprecating look, “I was not. I needed to love the experience of painting more—the way the brush felt in my hand, the scent of the paints. And myself too, maybe, but perhaps you will help me with this.”
“Do you want to start painting again?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, no. I want only to learn to be a better lover.”
She smiled. “I’m serious, Laurent.”
“So am I,” he said.
Two days after he’d met her at Roissy, on the other side of the sliding glass doors that separated orderly, martial customs from the anarchic rest of the world, the weather was so clear and mild that her happiness felt almost unbearable: seventy-five degrees, a few cotton-ball clouds, the sky a deep, luminous blue. Laurent went in to the gallery for a few hours, and Jayne left the apartment and walked the few miles east to Sacré Coeur. She was feeling the pressure exerted by the sketchbooks, two canvases, and tubes of oil paint she’d bought the previous evening at a store on rue Bonaparte, where she’d seen a few students from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts buying their supplies too. She had entered the shop almost dumbstruck with pleasure at being in the city where an art history professor who claimed Picasso as a distant relation had argued that the Western paradigm of beauty had been defined. Jayne remembered taking frantic notes during his lectures on early Impressionism, her hand cramping painfully near the end. The peppery mix of scents in the store, the pigments and gessoed canvases, the oil crayons and paints and drawing tablets—the sight and smell of so many colors and textures and possibilities continued to exhilarate her, no matter how many times she’d stood staring covetously at overflowing rows and racks of art supplies.
The boy at the register had a thin, impassive face but spoke in a friendly mutter. His blue eyes grazed hers as he rang up her purchases, and finally he smiled a little as he took her credit card. His nails were painted metallic silver, and two studded black leather bracelets encircled each wrist. On one hand was a tattoo of a stoplight.
“C’est mignon,” she said, pointing at the tattoo. She was so happy her voice nearly shook. “Très bon, votre feu rouge.”
She sounded like a simpleton.
It’s cute. Very nice, your stoplight.
She winced inwardly.
“Merci,” he said, glancing up at her again. He had something in his mouth that seemed to make it hard for him to speak—a new tongue stud, or maybe a huge wad of gum? Not chewing tobacco. Did the French use that foul stuff? She hoped not.
She wished she had kept her own mouth closed, but she’d wanted so badly for him to know that she was like him, that she was an artist too. She had also tried, she realized now, to look like a student; she’d pulled her dark brown hair into two long pigtails and was wearing a tight black T-shirt and a short olive-green skirt. In the mirror behind the register, she could see that her face was still flushed from the hot, humid walk across the Seine. When she was done with her errand, Laurent planned to take her to dinner a few blocks away at a café that he’d started going to many years earlier, when he was trying to be an artist too.
Now that she no longer had to answer to an alarm clock Monday through Saturday, to the deadening demands of nine-to-five and, on some evenings, six-to-nine, she intended to draw and paint every day for at least three or four hours, no excuses permitted short of a coma or full-body traction. Apart from the hours she spent working at Vie Bohème and exercising her artist’s eye and hands, she could do whatever she wanted—a fact her sister had grumbled over in a recent e-mail:
Why are you so lucky? Why am I the one who’s stuck with the insane boss who bitches every single day that he should never have sold his inventory to iTunes because those bastards are making all the money? “There should be laws … there should be a revolution! Where have all the revolutionaries gone?”
When Jayne told Laurent she felt guilty, he said, “If it were your sister instead of you, do you think she would have turned down an offer to be here so that you would not be upset?”
“No, I know you’re right. But I’m not used to having something that other people are jealous of. It takes a little getting used to.” She paused, smiling. “Not that I won’t get used to it.”
He smiled too. “Oh, I am thinking that you will. It is not so hard.”