A Nearly Perfect Copy (47 page)

Gabriel matched his breathing to Karen’s, imagined that the fetus was breathing in time too. He tapped his foot and Karen put a calming hand on his knee. She didn’t know why he was anxious. And he would never be able to tell her.

The bidding started. Gabriel’s heart beat in his throat, roaring faster than Karen’s now. He had no reason to be nervous; the pastel had been through two other owners since it left his hands, and along the way picked up a history that made it even more commercially attractive. There was no way anyone would tie it to him.

They had lit it poorly; the glass reflected the light back into the audience, and Gabriel joined in the polite applause that greeted its appearance. He saw his mother’s face, her lopsided eyes staring at him. He had captured her, enshrined her forever. And that fucking dog whose proportions were off. No one had ever noticed. The signature was perfect. Gabriel squeezed Karen’s hand and she obediently squeezed back. A brief cramp of shame gripped him, and he tried to employ the positive visual imagery he’d learned at the center. His Ngagpa’s voice entered his head:
Every experience leads you to now. Accept the past and the future as your inevitable path, extending behind you and in front of you
. He let the shame flow out of him with his next breath, and took a fresh look at his work. He had created a thing of beauty; he had contributed to the world.

He felt himself being watched and looked over at the press pit. There was the woman who had said the overwrought good-byes to her children in front of the auction house. She was looking at him openly, and as his eyes met hers he could feel anxiety radiate from her pursed mouth, her flared nostrils. For a moment, Gabriel was unable to breathe, and he grew dizzy. Then he broke the gaze, forced his breathing to slow.

Elm felt a frisson; Connois looked away. She stared at the catalog for the rest of the auction, and left without seeking Connois out. She was unnerved. She wanted to see her children, have the comfort of them within her gaze. She hailed a taxi to go meet them, wondering what Connois’s look meant. She put it out of her mind. It was impossible that he understood her constant awareness—when she laughed with her children, when she dealt with Colin, when she wrote about or looked at art, when she stared into the sleeping face of her youngest child, the features that were both Ronan’s and yet not—that she was both the artist and the forger of her own life.

Allison Amend, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award–winning short story collection
Things That Pass for Love
and the novel
Stations West
, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. She lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College.

The world’s most notorious art forger was Han van Meegeren, an alcoholic Dutchman who painted in the style of Johannes Vermeer. Though his original work was damned with faint praise by the art establishment, his fake
Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus
was authenticated by expert Dr. Abraham Bredius, sold for millions, and became the top attraction at Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam. In 1943, he exchanged his
Christ and the Adulteress
with Nazi second-in-command Field-Marshal Hermann Goering in return for 137 Dutch paintings that the Nazis had plundered during the occupation of Holland.

The painting was discovered by American servicemen in 1945 as part of a cache destined for the planned
Führermuseum
. Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration, an offense punishable by death. During the trial in 1947, van Meegeren admitted he had forged the paintings, but claimed to be a hero, having saved the Netherlands’ masterpieces from Nazi clutches and fooled Hitler’s henchman. The court ordered him to paint another fake in a guarded and sealed room as part of his defense. The fake was convincingly authentic-looking; the collaboration charges were dropped, and van Meegeren was sentenced to one year in prison for forgery and fraud. At his trial he supposedly said, “My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as [a] creative artist.” He died of a heart attack before he could serve his term, a national hero.

Some art historians still claim, despite a multitude of scientific evidence, that van Meegeren’s works are authentic Vermeers. His forgeries have become collector’s items as well, and some forgeries of his forgeries have surfaced, van Meegeren’s spiritual descendants trying to cash in on a hostile and capricious art market.

The author wishes to thank the following organizations and individuals:

Fundación Valparaiso, the Corporation of Yaddo, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Jewish Book Council.

Sheila and Jim Amend; Nicole Hynson, Anthony Amend, and Corbin Kanoa; cousins David, Joan, Sam, Vivian, and William Adelman; Terra Chalberg; Ronit Feldman; Nan A. Talese; Carolyn Hessel; Margot Grover; Mark Baillie; Amie Siegel; Thisbe Nissen; Irina Reyn; Gina Frangello; Amy Brill; Leigh Newman; Lauren Creamer; Lynn McPhee; Jeremy Sisto; Addie Lane; Duncan Smith; Katherine Lee; Anna Helgeson; and the Delta Schmelta sorority: Sheri Joseph, Dika Lam, Margo Robb, Lara JK Wilson, and Andrew Beierle.

Valuable information was obtained from Eric Hebborn’s books
The Art Forger’s Handbook
and
Drawn to Trouble
and from Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

In memory of Michael, whom the water took.