Authors: Christine Sneed
She had seen Colin twice after their breakup. They’d met once for coffee a week before Christmas, and he’d given her a poinsettia plant that she later brought to the office, where it still lived, and a Coach wallet that she had felt uncomfortable accepting. She had only brought him a card and a bar of his favorite dark chocolate, one studded with hazelnuts, not expecting him to arrive with expensive gifts. He was nervous and seemed happy to see her; he had dressed up for their meeting in new jeans that fit him well and the navy lamb’s-wool sweater she had given him for his birthday in late October. This was the first time they had seen each other since the breakup, and he looked good; he’d had a haircut and was clean-shaven, no missed whiskers below his eyes or near his ears. And yet her thoughts kept drifting to Laurent, to what he might want to do that evening, to the fact that he would be returning to Paris over Christmas while she flew to L.A. to see her parents and sister for five days. She wanted Colin to return the wallet but was afraid of hurting his feelings. She ended up keeping it and thanked him but felt resentful of herself and, unfairly, she knew, of him too. Later, when Laurent noticed the wallet and complimented her on this new acquisition, she did not say that Colin had given it to her.
The last time she and Colin had gotten together, for breakfast on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day, when Laurent was in Paris again, this time on gallery business, it had not gone so well. Colin seemed hungover and spoke heatedly for most of the meal about his job and his older brother, who was cheating on his wife. When Jayne tried to pay the check, he looked offended and insisted on paying. When they parted ways a few blocks from her apartment, he had trouble meeting her eyes. “I know we weren’t seeing each other for that long,” he said softly. “But I thought, I thought you were—” He couldn’t finish the sentence, and the sight of his face, red from the cold and his warring feelings, made her throat close over.
“I’m so sorry, Colin,” she said, reaching up to put her arms around him, her nose pressed to his warm neck. He smelled like honey and cold wind. He mumbled good-bye and didn’t look at her again before he turned and walked hastily away. She stayed where she was, watching his retreating back. When her phone began to ring, she knew from the tone that it was Laurent calling from Paris, as if he sensed the sad tension she was feeling on the other side of the ocean. With conflicting pangs of guilt and pleasure, she answered. She looked once more in Colin’s direction, but he had disappeared.
Jayne’s sister wanted to visit later in the summer or in the early fall, as soon as she had saved enough money to buy a plane ticket. Stephanie was desperate for a few days’ escape from L.A. and from her record executive boss, who was in the middle of a contentious divorce and had lately gotten into the habit of sharing with her every detail of this unhappy experience, no matter how personal. Laurent had told Jayne that of course Stephanie could stay with them, her parents too if they wanted to visit, but Jayne wasn’t ready to invite anyone in her family to France. She didn’t yet want them to know the extent to which she depended on Laurent, nor did she feel like fending off the questions she imagined her mother asking, and not for the first time:
What are Laurent’s intentions? What are yours? Which classes are you teaching? What? I thought you told us you planned to teach classes at an art school in Paris!
And whether her parents would be willing to get on a plane together remained to be seen. “You’re in Paris now, Jayne,” said her mother, “living what sounds like a fairy tale. Please stop worrying about us.” At breakfast the next morning, Laurent had said the same thing, adding that she and Stephanie hadn’t lived at home for years anyway, and their parents’ private life really wasn’t any of her or her sister’s business.
“You say that because you’re divorced,” said Jayne. “But I’m sure Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie weren’t very happy when you and Anne-Claire announced that you were separating.”
“No, maybe not, but they knew it was coming. They’d known this for years. I think it was a relief for them, in the end.”
“I wouldn’t be relieved if my mother left my father,” she said. “I doubt they’d know how to live without each other.” If they did separate, it would probably feel as if some appalling truth about herself or the world had suddenly been revealed. (
All marriages are a mirage, Jayne. Didn’t you already know that?
Or,
I didn’t give birth to you, honey. We found you alongside the highway in a cardboard box!
)
“They would know how to live, Jayne. They are adults, yes? And they brought two children into the world and provided a good home for you, if I’m not mistaken. I am sure that they could figure out how to move on.”
“I don’t want them to have to figure it out,” she said, petulant.
“You want to live in the world as if you were a child,” he said. “But you cannot.”
“Is it childish to want my parents to stay together?” she asked, her voice rising.
“No, but expecting them to stay together for your sake is.”
Once she’d been in Paris for a while, she was sure that she would want to show her parents and sister around the city, lead them to the base of the Eiffel Tower, to the Pont Neuf, to Notre Dame—they were the first Parisian monuments that she had ever seen. M. Keller, her junior high French teacher, had taped posters of those landmarks to his classroom walls.
Oui
, he was an American, but a Frenchman at heart, and the owner of a Peugeot, he’d proudly announced. He was also well dressed and handsome, and every girl in the room seemed to have a crush on him. “Paris, c’est ma ville préferée du monde entier,” he’d told her class, Jayne listening with smitten attentiveness to this tall man in the blue pinstripe suit, his silk tie green paisley, dizzyingly elegant. She later repeated his words to her mother and apathetic sister. His favorite city in the entire world! It would become her favorite city too, six years later, when she first stepped off the train from Strasbourg at Gare de l’Est, directly onto Parisian earth.
“Un merveil,” he’d also said, translating it for the students who stared at him dully. “A marvel,
mes élèves.
A marvel!”
Now that Jayne lived in Paris, she could see these monuments every day if she walked southeast from the apartment toward the Seine. Whenever she did, she would pause to watch the river traffic, the sound of the boats and rushing water filling her with an unaccountable surge of hopefulness. From the north end of the Pont Alexandre III, she could look across the swift, murky river to the immense golden cupola of the Hotel des Invalides, Napoleon’s remains interred beneath it.
If she turned to the west, there was the wide, gray traffic-choked expanse of the Champs-Elysées, the unearthly Arc de Triomphe in the near distance, clusters of tourists shuffling over the sidewalks, their heads raised in tired or exclamatory wonder. Sometimes Laurent was with her, his hot, strong hand holding hers, but she preferred to walk by herself, especially in the morning, after the rush-hour traffic had dwindled, when he was either reading the paper on the sage-green sofa or already at the gallery, meeting with a private buyer or with André to discuss the images and queries they had received from hopeful artists.
The air near the Pont Alexandre III smelled of exhaust and dust and sometimes of rain. During her first few weeks, she crossed the bridge several times and twice walked to the Musée Rodin, one sculpture inside the museum luring her through the gates more than the famous ones stationed in the gardens,
The Thinker
with his noble, weather-scarred face and the ornate, imposing
Gates of Hell
. It was
The Kiss
, an embracing couple carved from pale, buttery marble, that she wanted most to look upon. The sculpture was so personal and seemed to Jayne an image smuggled from a young girl’s dream of what ideal love was.
Sometimes she sketched the sculpture, solitary visitors and tour groups shuffling past, a few inquisitive people glancing at her, but only children were bold enough to ask to see her sketches. (One afternoon when her drawings were not turning out well, she wrote a note to Rodin on the back of a botched page:
Were you thinking of Camille Claudel while you worked on
The Kiss?
Why did you not come to her rescue when her mother and brother locked her in that asylum? She died there, so many years later. Were you ever jealous of her talent
?)
A third French artist Jayne admired and had discovered not long after she began studying art was Marie-Joseph Vallet, who changed her name to Jacqueline Marval after her application to exhibit her paintings in the Salon des Indépendants was rejected in 1900. The next year, applying under her new name, she was accepted. She worked closely with Henri Matisse and Kees van Dongen, and was a frequent visitor to Gustave Moreau’s home in Montmartre, and in a coup that Jayne suspected was wholly unanticipated by Marval, she was declared the most interesting painter in the 1911 Salon d’Automne by poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
When she was still in high school, Jayne had found Marval’s paintings in a heavy library book redolent of mold and neglect—so few of her classmates, as far as Jayne could tell, spent time browsing the dusty stacks where the art books languished—during a study hall when she should have been preparing for a trigonometry final. The Frenchwoman used color with an aggressive energy that immediately seduced Jayne. It made no sense to her that Marval was not as well known as the male painters who had been her friends and whose work was frequently exhibited with her own. Was it because she had been a woman, and like the forsaken Claudel, could be dismissed with little more than an unheeded cry of protest?
At the time she found the library book, Jayne had been sketching rooms filled with objects. Her chairs and lamps and sofas were meant to seem on the verge of animation, but they were defeating her. Seeing the interplay of color and light in Marval’s paintings, she realized that she needed more depth in the contours if she hoped to make her objects appear possessed.
Later, during the summer class in Chicago, Susan Kraut also taught her to think more about composition, to place her objects within the rectangle of the page or canvas in ways that generated both stillness and energy. In college, she realized now, most of her favorite instructors had been women, though Susan was the only one with whom she had stayed in touch for more than a couple of years after graduation.
When she told Laurent about Jacqueline Marval, he had had to look her up. “I’m not sure how I missed her,” he said, apologetic and a little embarrassed. “Her work is very striking. We could go to Grenoble to see some of her paintings in the museum there, if you’d like. You’ve seen the ones in Paris, I’m guessing.”
“Yes, but I should go back and look at them again. I’d love to go to Grenoble too. I intended to go during the spring I was in Strasbourg, but I never made it down there.”
“You were busy having love affairs with young Frenchmen instead, I am sure.”
She smiled. “Yes, of course I was.”
When Jayne was alone, she sometimes looked at the framed photographs Laurent kept in the apartment, unable to stop staring at these images of his very handsome past selves. Her favorite photo was on an end table next to the
canapé
in the salon, a picture of him and a school friend, taken in Saint-Tropez, both men smiling and shirtless, deeply tan. Jayne often looked at this photo when she was reading and fighting drowsiness on sunny afternoons.
In photographs or paintings, strangers’ exotic faces inhabited almost every room of the apartment, the six family portraits in the hallway sometimes flitting into her consciousness as she dropped into a nap. When she asked Laurent if he’d ever displayed the artist’s work, he said that he had, but offered little else, except that Sofia had also worked at Vie Bohème as an assistant for a little while.
“Where is she now?” she asked.
“In Italy,” he said casually, but did not meet her curious gaze.
She felt a twinge of jealousy but didn’t feel she could pry. She said again how skillful the portraits were, how full of feeling the faces seemed to her on some days, on others, only passive acceptance.
“Yes, Sofia’s talent is very special,” he said.
“I want to be that good.”
“Yes, of course you do,” he said neutrally.
I will be, she thought, resentful.
Jayne had kept to her plan of sketching and painting for a few hours in the mornings or afternoons, sometimes both, every day since her arrival in Paris. She began working at the gallery a week after she moved into Laurent’s apartment, and it was on her second Wednesday at Vie Bohème that she met Laurent’s daughter and also had a disconcerting encounter with Laurent’s business partner, André. She’d seen him four or five times in New York, but they had never spoken for more than a few minutes at each meeting. André was only ten years her senior, and she almost matched him in height when she wore heels. He looked like some of the soccer players, all coiled energy and grinning cockiness, that she had seen Laurent watching on TV on Saturday afternoons in New York, his mania for the game at first making her laugh, but he was resolutely serious about it. French males of all ages loved soccer, he’d told her, his tone reproving when she gave him a funny look. “It is the same way that many American men feel about baseball and much more barbaric football,” he said.
“But not much happens in soccer other than a bunch of guys chasing a ball around,” she’d said. “It’s worse than watching baseball!”
“No, no. Soccer played well is very beautiful. If you start watching matches with me, you will see.”
“I don’t know, Laurent. I’d probably fall asleep.”
“Oh, Jayne,” he’d said, pained. “You cannot mean that.”
André had always been an art dealer, never an artist, she knew. “He is practical in ways I am not,” Laurent told her. “We are a good pair. It was his ex-wife who brought in some of our best clients. Her father was a painter, and he knew many people who have been helpful to us.” Laurent paused. “I liked him very much. He died four years ago in a car accident in Nîmes while visiting his mistress.”