A Nearly Perfect Copy (36 page)

Gabriel quickened his step. He held an imaginary conversation with Klinman where the man laughed at him for showing up, in jeans and sneakers, no less, with an unauthenticated drawing at one of France’s most important auction houses and attempting, on the spot, to have one of its experts declare it sellable.

And now the drawing was tainted. Tombale wouldn’t soon forget it. Gabriel wasn’t going to be able to sell it without a provenance, and if it came up for auction with a fabricated story Tombale would be suspicious. The drawing was now not even worth the paper it was drawn on. Gabriel could have sold it blank for more money.

He felt like crumpling it up and tossing it into the Seine, but he had affection for the drawing. He passed a bar and went in to order a panaché. A girl’s drink, but one he still enjoyed. He didn’t want to get drunk. He wanted to think.

Above the bar, instead of the polished mirror typical of a neighborhood café, there was a boar’s head.
Sanglier
. He remembered the word, the way some bizarre French words—
huissier
(bailiff),
etalon
(studhorse)—seemed to glue themselves to his memory while more common ones—like the ones for “broom” and “great-great-grandfather”—remained forever out of reach. The bar was an odd sight, slightly foreboding. And then, looking around, he saw many other taxidermied game animals presiding over the few tables.

The bartender noted his interest. “I like to hunt, at my house in the country. Do you hunt?”

Gabriel shook his head.

“And my wife’s uncle stuffs the animals. He does an excellent job. If you ever have something you need preserved, let us know. All these specimens are for sale.”

“Who wants a dead animal in their house?” Gabriel asked, before he could stop himself.

“Not my wife,” the man answered. “That’s why they’re here. But lots of people like the look. It reminds them of grand old hunting lodges.” The man wiped the already pristine bar with a rag. A couple walked in and sat at a table. The woman held up two fingers—they wanted coffee. The bartender nodded, but before he turned to the espresso maker, he said to Gabriel, “People want to pretend they have nice things, that their family name is more important than it really is.”

Gabriel reflected that his case was just the opposite. His name was illustrious; he himself was not. His name connoted great art; he did not. But perhaps the drawing wasn’t a total loss. Maybe he’d gone to the wrong expert. An antiques dealer might like the drawing simply because of its age, and might appreciate it for its aesthetics, as opposed to where it came from. In a way, this could be a purer form of art appreciation. Then the drawing would no longer be pretending to be what it was not, but rather proclaiming proudly what it was.

Gabriel paid for his drink and took the
métro
up to the
marché aux puces
at Clignancourt. He haggled for and purchased the gaudiest nineteenth-century frame he could find, and then took his purchase home, where he mounted his drawing on matte paper and renailed the frame shut. He then lined the back with butcher paper, and the next day went to the Left Bank dressed in a pair of wool pants and a button-down shirt borrowed from one of the Scandinavians. The first store he went into offered him 150 euros for the framed drawing. The entire transaction was completed in less than ten minutes.

When Gabriel added up his hours of work and the cost of the materials, he was better off sorting paper clips at Édouard’s. He couldn’t help but feel angry, at himself, at Klinman, at Paris, at the art world that conspired to keep him out. He was destined to be exploited, and he returned to his studio out in the suburbs to sit cross-legged on the floor examining splats of paint that had hardened into small shiny pieces, impenetrable as a Pollock splatter, and nowhere near as valuable.

Part Four
Winter 2008

It was the strangest feeling. She would be fine. Hungry, tired, but fine. And then the world would turn upside down and that horrible feeling of her insides revolting, the organs contracting violently to expel the poison within, would take hold. She rarely made it to the bathroom, just looked for the nearest receptacle, sometimes missing even that.

Tired didn’t even begin to describe it. She’d heard people say they’d overdone it, but she had never really understood the feeling. However, with this pregnancy exhaustion would overwhelm her. Even her elbows felt bushed. She actually sat down on the floor of the crosstown bus (she wasn’t showing so no one offered her a seat) and rested her head on her bent knees until an elderly woman put a cool hand on her shoulder, asking, “Are you all right, dear?”

At home, watching her retch from the safety of the bathroom door, Moira asked, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“I think I have the flu,” she answered.

“Poor Mommy.” Moira rubbed Elm’s forehead the way Colin did when Moira was sick. Her hands were sticky with something—what had she snuck from the kitchen?

Elm and Colin had never spoken about what was happening with his job. It seemed like in the past weeks they had been living in shifts—they were never awake and without Moira. Elm was avoiding him, and wondered if he was avoiding her. What scared her was not that she didn’t know what was going on but that she had forgotten to be worried about it.

She longed to confide her secret to someone—Ian would be ideal,
but she knew she couldn’t tell anyone. Her fantasies now involved pretzels and confession—sodium and some lessening of the burden.

It was after eleven as Elm turned the key in the front door and tiptoed gratuitously into the living room. After years of New York living, her family could sleep through fire drills, earthquakes, alien invasions. She set her purse down on the kitchen table and took off her shoes.

Thirsty, she took a container of orange juice out of the refrigerator and stood there drinking it from the carton. Then she became aware of movement behind her. She spun around guiltily, spilling some orange juice down the front of her shirt.

“Hey,” Colin said. His hair was comically disheveled. “How’d it go?”

“Fine. I hate those things.” Part of Elm’s duties as a board member of the New Jewish Institute consisted of glad-handing donors at galas that often ended late. She reached in for a piece of cold pizza. It had gone pale and slack, and Elm wondered what it was that made mozzarella look like dead flesh after refrigeration. How often did they eat pizza? Would it stunt Moira’s growth, being raised only on breaded chicken and tomato sauce? Would it hurt the fetus? She put it back down. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

Colin turned obediently and sleepwalked back to the room. When Elm went into the bedroom, though, she could feel that Colin was awake, more so than he’d been a couple of minutes ago.

Elm pretended not to notice and took off her suit, hanging it carefully in the closet and then putting on her nightgown. She climbed into bed backward, trying not to wake him, but he rolled over toward her, not touching her. “How’d it go?”

“You asked me that already.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was good.”

“Brilliant.”

There was a pause.

“Elm?” Colin asked. He pitched his voice high. It contained concern and seriousness.

“Hmmm,” Elm said, answering but not encouraging. She was tired. She wanted to sleep.

“Are we all right, then?”

“Of course.” Even to herself Elm sounded disingenuous. She tried to change the subject. “Moira go to bed without fuss?”

“I mean …” Colin ignored her. “I just feel …” he trailed off.

Elm felt a sense of panic invade her again, welling up like an undulation of nausea. Without thinking, she said, “I’m pregnant.”

Colin sat up quickly. “Really?” He put a hand on her upper arm. She rolled over to face him.

“Yup,” she said. She watched his face break into a wide smile. Even in the dark she could see that his excitement was unfeigned.

“God, Elm, that’s … great, fantastic, stupendous! When? How do you …? Which?” He was unable to spit out an entire question.

“I think about four weeks,” she said. “I took two at-home tests.”

“Elm, I’m so happy. This is what we wanted. Wait, is it?”

“Of course,” she said. “How can you ask that?” She sat up then too, genuinely injured. Had she really been so hostile these past weeks?

“I’m just … I hope the timing is all right. When do you think? I mean, with my work …” He began to babble, a sign that he was nervous. Now she laid a hand on his thigh.

“June, I think.” She didn’t think. She knew. “I’ll go to the doctor in a couple of weeks. What do you mean, the timing?”

“I’m just worried about work, is all. Don’t mind me. I’m so excited. Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” He put a hand on the small bulge of Elm’s stomach where the skin was slack and a roll of fat had accumulated.

“Who knows?” Elm said.

There are holes in a marriage, Elm thought, periods of time for which if you were drawing a graph of marital compatibility there would be an absence of data. These dispersals are gradual, like not noticing that someone you see every day is getting fat until you are apart from them and return to find a different person from the one you left. It finally dawned on Elm that she and Colin had been gradually wandering in different directions. When she got married, Elm thought, as all brides do, that it was Colin and Elm against the world. She had assumed there’d be secrets, but from others, not between them, or if there were they would be minor: hiding chocolate in a stash, not necessarily telling him that someone had tried to pick her up at the gym. She had never
imagined the need to keep a secret from him and found it incredibly difficult.

The urge was upon her nearly constantly to tell him, not only because she wanted to unburden herself but because it felt like an itch, a continuous low-level irritation, a desire to blurt out what she was thinking. She began to censor herself, and the effort was so great that she cut down on what she was saying to Colin, and then eliminated all but the most essential conversations: What do you want for dinner? Can you take Moira to ballet on Saturday?

From there, she imagined, it would be but a short leap until she found herself emotionally estranged from her husband. And then he would crave intimacy and find it elsewhere. Cheating now seemed inevitable, the end of the divergent paths she and Colin were taking.

It might have helped if Colin had put a stop to the estrangement that wasn’t really an estrangement, but he was worried about his job (they had extended the merger period another three months, and whatever investigation was ongoing was moving glacially, but it felt like a stay of execution, not a pardon). She could see him searching for words with which to engage her. Recently, she had ceased to cede him any emotion. No matter what he said she would reply vacantly as though humoring a pestering child. A couple of times he said things that would have pissed her off just a couple of months before, but she had barely acknowledged that he spoke, let alone risen to the bait.

Elm had seen this in her own parents. Fighting, they’d at least declared their commitment to hating each other. When they quieted, finally, toward the end of Elm’s adolescence, she knew the marriage was over. They remained together, inhabiting two separate sections of the same house. Elm saw the same vacant cohabitation looming in her own marriage. She vowed to herself that she would break this pattern, clenching her fists to seal the promise.