Authors: Christine Sneed
“Did his mistress die too?” asked Jayne.
“No, nothing so dramatic. She was at home. He had a heart attack when he went out to buy wine for their dinner.”
André’s smile was friendly each time he shook Jayne’s hand or kissed her cheeks in greeting, but his direct, appraising looks unnerved her a little. Despite her desire to turn a neutral eye on him, André’s confidence and his muscular, compact body impressed her.
In New York, after she first met André, Laurent had said, “He is charming, but he is like a dangerous animal. He moves very fast and bites hard when he decides to bite. I will have to keep an eye on him. And you too.” He laughed as he said this, but Jayne could not tell if he was joking.
André dressed much as Laurent did, in fine wools and silks and linens that required dry cleaning, but André had his clothes tailored a little more closely to his body’s contours. He was also more tightly wound than Laurent, not having been mellowed by years of childrearing, of diapers, temper tantrums, teenage anarchy. She wondered too if André used a bronzer or a tanning bed. Laurent’s color was natural; he had a Sicilian grandmother from whom, he’d said more than once, he had inherited his skin tone and sanguine personality.
“Paris and you are getting along well?” asked André now. “You must be speaking more French now.”
“Some, mais pas beaucoup,” she said, her voice cracking. God, she thought. What is wrong with me?
“But you are trying?” he said. “Tu essais?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tu n’as pas le mal du pays, Jayne?”
She looked at him, silently groping for the translation. Was she homesick? “No, I love it here,” she said. “It’s very beautiful.”
“New York is also very beautiful,” he said. “I miss my time there.”
“It is,” she agreed. “But it’ll be waiting for you whenever you want to go back.”
“And you too. Unless you decide not to go back.”
She nodded but said nothing.
“Do you think you will stay here forever?” he asked. “Especially if you can convince Laurent to marry you?”
She hesitated. Was he kidding? It didn’t sound like he was. “I don’t know if I’ll stay forever, and I’m not thinking about marriage either,” she said coolly. “It’s not something that Laurent and I need to decide at this point.”
“No, no, of course not,” he said. He smiled, baring his teeth, the tip of one of his incisors pressing into his lower lip. “Laurent is very generous, yes?”
“He is,” she agreed, wishing that Laurent would get off the phone. He had been talking on it in rapid, animated French for almost an hour. It was possible that André had meant no harm, that he was trying only to gauge whether or not she was a trustworthy employee. After all, she had been welcomed into his and Laurent’s professional lives without, as far as she knew, Laurent having asked for André’s approval. It seemed wise to remain wary of him.
He was sweating, the scent of his cologne rolling off him in a soapy wave. Jayne shifted her weight from one hip to the other; she was uncomfortable but hoped he couldn’t tell. They stood less than a foot apart, close to the gallery’s entrance, a taxi pausing directly in front of them to pick up a man in a beige suit. Passersby glanced in the gallery’s large front windows, an older man and woman in shorts and tennis shoes—tourists, Jayne thought; few Parisians over the age of twenty-two wore shorts or athletic shoes if they weren’t in fact exercising—stopping to study a painting of a teenage girl in a green bikini, supine on a white towel, full summer:
JEUNE FILLE À CANNES, HUILE SUR TOILE
. The price was five thousand euros, but this was not posted on the painting’s placard. André and Laurent kept the price list in a slim black folder on top of a filing cabinet behind the gallery assistant’s desk; it was one of the first things Laurent had shown her when she started working at Vie Bohème.
“I have known him for twenty years. He is like a brother,” André said, an edge to his voice that had not been as noticeable a moment ago. “Maybe more like a father. You might see him this way too.”
She looked at his canny, perspiring face. Laurent had told her not to trust André, but until now, she had found herself wanting to. “I don’t see him that way,” she said. “He’s nothing like my father, and I don’t have a brother.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, the pressure heavy and admonitory. He stepped closer, his soap smell tickling her nose. She stiffened but didn’t back away. “Laurent is my very good friend,” he said. “We have lived through many, ah, many moments together, not all good things, but I care about his well-being.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. I do too. You don’t have to worry that I wish him harm, André.”
“We should have a drink one evening and talk some more away from here,” he said. “Laurent has told me about your paintings. I am guessing that you are here in Paris because you expect us to exhibit your work. I know that Laurent has likely made promises to you already.”
She stared at him, but before she could reply, he spoke again. “I must sound rude,” he said, “but I am only being honest.” He let go of her shoulder and turned away to greet a dark-haired woman in a white hat who was entering the gallery with a bored-looking adolescent girl. Jayne could hear the girl speaking to her mother in a high, whiny voice. André addressed the woman by name and offered his hand. Jayne stared out at the street for a few more seconds before retreating to the back office, where Laurent was still on the phone. He glanced up when she entered and made a comical face, either unaware of or deliberately ignoring the irritation she was sure could be read on her own face.
Of course she wanted a show. What artist wouldn’t? And André’s unvoiced scorn made her want one even more.
What an asshole! He was trying to intimidate her, to make sure she watched each of her still-tentative steps, but later, after she had cooled off, she realized that she had no idea who had preceded her—maybe Laurent had been involved with another young artist and given her opportunities like those he seemed to be offering Jayne, and it had gone badly.
Laurent wasn’t a fool though, nor did she believe that André was wholly innocent. She had access to the gallery’s check register and had noticed a number of bank drafts with his name on them in the last several months, most of the checks in the high-hundred euros. Maybe he was using the money for gallery business, but she had not found any receipts on file with his initials, like the ones Laurent turned in when he made work-related purchases. One of her currents tasks—likely to change, she guessed, if she questioned André’s expenditures too closely—was to pay the bills sent by caterers and the occasional florist for openings or the private-viewing receptions they sometimes hosted for their best clients, and for the cleaning crew that arrived every Wednesday night to buff and wax the floors and remove the densely woven black wool rugs near the front door and in the office, bringing them back the next morning, freshly aired and beaten.
The gallery’s bona fide bookkeeper, a bearded, unsmiling man named Armand, with springy gray hair he parted with limited success down the middle, took care of the other accounts: the utilities, the lease, the business taxes that were disbursed on a strict schedule, the salaries paid to Laurent and André along with her own wages, which were generous, five hundred euros a week for twelve to fifteen hours of work. What the accountant thought of this, she didn’t know.
The gallery also employed two assistants, François and Nathalie, both attractive art students in their early twenties, who split the week’s hours, their schedules rarely overlapping. Nathalie sometimes knitted on the days André wasn’t there to disapprove, her blond curls bobbing lightly as she clicked the needles and pulled more yarn from her skein. They sat on a stool at a desk made from an old door and an iron trestle that looked to Jayne like the undercarriage of an antique sewing machine. From this perch they nodded to the people who trickled in to gaze at the work and ask questions, some of them smart and informed, a few verging on the idiotic, but the assistants never smirked, Laurent having trained them not to—the person who asked the witless question might turn out to be a serious buyer. It had happened before. “You don’t have to be a genius to appreciate a fine painting or sculpture,” he told Jayne. And, “There is no rule that says a person with money must also be intelligent.”
“No, that’s for sure,” she said.
“In France we are more foolish with love than with money,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“Good thing that abortion is legal here then,” she said, giving him a wry look.
“Oh, Jayne,” he said. “So serious all the time.”
“I was kidding,” she cried, laughing.
He was happy with himself, a fact she’d understood from their first meeting. He was a success in the most obvious ways, and even his failure to become an artist, he seemed to have accepted and left behind, adapting himself to another, related career that made him less vulnerable, personally if not financially, to art-related trends and the mercurial tastes of critics and collectors. He was nothing if not easygoing and adventurous, qualities that she found very appealing. “I am an opportunist,” he had declared one night not long before they left New York. “I have a nose for business. That is the American expression?”
“Usually we say head instead of nose, but yes, I think you do,” she said.
“I have both maybe.” He grinned. “And feet? Because I now have galleries in New York and Paris.”
Within a week of the Vie Bohème opening in New York, he and André had sold all but two of the twenty-one paintings mounted on their walls. The remaining two sold by the end of the following week. Bernard and the other two artists were not yet well known, but after their successful show at Vie Bohème, Laurent expected that they were on their way to greater renown and prosperity.
His instincts proved correct, as Jayne learned was often the case: in the weeks after the opening, Bernard was offered the part-time faculty position at Pratt, and not long after Jayne moved to Paris, Liesel told her that RISD had called to ask him to teach two painting classes during the next school year. “He’ll be able to stop working at the frame shop once he starts at RISD next fall, but between the commute and his own painting, I’ll never see him,” Liesel said grimly. “And if I have to go out to his dump in Queens one more time because he won’t make the trip to my place, that’s it.”
“You’ve been saying that for months,” said Jayne.
“I know.” Liesel exhaled dramatically. “I know!”
Bernard lived in a basement apartment and used an adjacent storage room as his studio; his place was in Woodside, not far from LaGuardia, his neighbors with their small, screaming children and domestic unhappiness almost as hard to ignore as the roar of the arriving and departing jets. Liesel had a comfortable and, by New York standards, spacious one-bedroom on West End Avenue near the Seventy-Second Street subway stop, but Bernard claimed to feel out of place there. Jayne suspected the truth was more likely that he didn’t want to spend the time getting to her place from his studio in Queens.
“What does Melissa say?” asked Jayne.
Liesel rolled her eyes. “You know exactly what she says. I should have dumped his ass a long time ago. But she’s married. She doesn’t remember all the BS you have to put up with when you’re single.”
“I think you need to take a break and come visit me.”
“I still have to renew my passport, but I did get my picture taken for it, and I have the form. Are you sure Laurent wouldn’t mind me staying with you?”
“No, he’d be happy to have you. We have a guest bedroom. This place is pretty big. You’ve seen it.”
“Skype tours hardly qualify,” said Liesel. “If I come for a visit, what about setting me up with Laurent’s partner?”
Jayne was sure that such a pairing would be a disaster for her friend, probably for most women. “I think he’s seeing someone,” she said. She looked away from the screen and Liesel’s hopeful face, out the living room window, where she could see down into the courtyard. On some afternoons a small black-haired boy rode a yellow bicycle around its perimeter until his mother called him inside or an elderly neighbor yelled out his window at the boy to be quiet, though he made very little noise. “I’m not sure if he’s still dating the woman he was with in New York when he was there to open the gallery. I can ask Laurent.” She paused. “He’s kind of slippery, Liesel. I don’t recommend pursuing him.”
“Then he’s exactly the kind of guy I’m used to.”
“I’m serious. I don’t trust him.”
“What guy do you trust?” said Liesel. “Do you trust Laurent?”
Jayne nodded. “Yes. I do.”
Her friend glanced away from the screen for a second before turning back to meet Jayne’s eyes. “You don’t look like you mean it.”
“I trust him as much as I’ve trusted anyone I’ve dated,” she said. She didn’t really know if this was true, but it seemed a futile exercise to spend more time considering Liesel’s question. She was here in Paris with Laurent, and on the whole very happy that she was. Unless something terrible happened, she intended to stay, at the very least until after her show at Vie Bohème opened.
At six thirty, a half hour before the end of Jayne’s second Wednesday shift, a ponytailed woman in a sleeveless red dress and beige sandals entered the gallery with a little girl in a stroller. It was a windy day, the occasional crumpled piece of trash pinwheeling by in the street, and the woman smoothed down her dark hair as the front door closed behind her. Jayne had come to the front to slip an updated price list into the binder and glanced over at the door as it opened, past gangly red-haired François on his stool, long legs splayed, preoccupied with something on his laptop. Jayne knew as she called out a greeting, which assistants rarely did—André had instructed them to nod hello and smile at visitors as they arrived but to let them browse in peace—that this slender, well-dressed woman had to be Jeanne-Lucie. She looked so much like her father, even more than she did in the photos of her in the apartment. A few feet past the entrance, she stopped with one manicured hand atop the stroller. She looked over at Jayne but didn’t return her smile; Jayne was reminded of her childhood cat Butternut’s narrowed eyes before she shot out her paw and whacked a passing human on the shin.