The Restoration Artist (14 page)

I
WALKED BACK ALONG THE CHEMIN DES
S
IRÈNES
feeling used. And foolish for letting myself be used. For feeling anything. Was it all a game to her? A little fling that she’d instantly regretted?

The leaves around me were dripping but the rain had stopped, although the sky was dark with sullen clouds. At the junction with the route des Matelots I paused. I wanted a drink. I wanted several. But I didn’t want to talk to anyone, or see anyone, which meant the hotel was out. There was an almost full bottle of Étienne’s Calvados in my cottage. That would do. Then I remembered the bottle of wine I had taken to the chapel after Lorca’s last visit. She’d wanted a drink and I hadn’t had anything to offer her, so I’d stowed away a Beaujolais with my painting gear. I headed for the chapel; it was closer than my cottage.

A thin sheen of water covered the sand of the causeway. The tide was coming in. The sandpipers were gone. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up the bottoms of my trousers, my feet throwing up splashes as I crossed.

Inside, I tossed my sketchbook and paintbox onto the table and lit the oil lamp. It hissed into life. I sat down on one of the pews to dry my feet before crossing over to the canvas tacked on the east wall. I stood for a moment looking at it, then with the damp cloth I’d used to dry my feet, scrubbed out most of the charcoal drawing of the woman. In the bright light of the lamp my shadow fluttered across the walls. Who was I kidding, thinking I could make a painting for this place?

I turned and looked at the little portrait of Lorca, which I’d left on the table propped against a jar. What I saw made me gasp. There was a slash of red paint right across the face and a coarse grimace had been drawn over the mouth.

I stared, dumbfounded. The smear was like a gash, a bleeding wound. For a second I had the absurd idea that Lorca herself had done this. But it was as if my own anger had manifested itself in this crude disfigurement. As if one of my long-ago caricatures had come back to haunt me.

A round object whipped past my head and rebounded off the wall with a thud. I jerked around. A second apple came flying across the room, narrowly missing my head.

A figure was framed in the window—a figure with a scowling face.

“Tobias!” I shouted.

The face dropped out of sight as I rushed to the window. I ran back to the door and flung it open. But in the gloom I saw nothing against the dark shape of the island.

“Tobias!”

Then I heard a strange guttural cry and the sound of splashing, like an animal galloping across the causeway. The boy was
briefly silhouetted on the ridge as he vanished into the dusk. I didn’t call out again.

I looked at the two apples lying on the floor, the portrait with its lurid streak of red paint, and the whole thing in the harsh light from the lamp was like the scene of a crime. I couldn’t bring myself to even try to remove the paint. Why bother now?

I noticed too that the painting of the flowers was gone, the one Tobias had signed and given to me. Had he seen me carrying flowers to Lorca’s door? Had he seen more? The shutters had been open. Is that why he had slashed paint across her portrait? To hurt her? Or me? I had not given him a thought all day. I’d wanted to paint, and I’d wanted Lorca. My promises to teach the boy had been forgotten.

Lorca had said I shouldn’t have any illusions about her. But this whole place was an illusion, and I was the self-deluded fool in the middle of it. What did I think I could accomplish here? This wasn’t a real studio. Lorca and Tobias and Père Caron were strangers to me, and I was using them as actors in some misguided personal drama.

I picked up my paintbrushes and hurled them across the room.

A
T A CERTAIN DISTANCE
from the shore there is a place of emptiness, where neither the island nor the distant mainland is visible. One either goes forward, or turns back. I looked back from the deck of the
Stella Tilda
to where La Mouche had sunk over the horizon. The boat’s engine rumbled and vibrated
beneath my feet and the sharp breeze blew a waft of diesel smoke across the deck.

Simon Grente, steering from the wheelhouse, raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question, indicating that it was still possible to turn around. I shook my head and faced in the other direction. I did not look back again, not even when the mainland appeared, nor when I disembarked in Saint-Alban, nor after I had pressed a handful of franc notes on the protesting Simon and walked up the slope to the town with my bag in my hand.

I
STOOD IN THE HALLWAY OF THE APARTMENT ON
rue du Figuier with the keys bunched in my hand. I inhaled, and all the familiar smells overcame me, a thousand memories flooding my senses so that I seemed to inhabit not only this particular point in time but all the moments that had ever taken place in these rooms.

But was there anything left of that old life? I flicked on the light switch and shut the door. Nothing had changed here, except for the film of dust that had appeared on surfaces. Where did dust come from, I wondered, and how did it penetrate rooms when the doors and windows were shut? A pile of mail had accumulated on the floor and I pushed it aside with my foot, not bothering to even glance at the envelopes.

This was the only real home I had known in Paris, or anywhere else, for that matter. This
quartier
, this street, these rooms, had been my life—the birthdays, the Christmases, the dinners, the happy times.

As I wandered from room to room again, the strangeness of the apartment struck me. Everything appeared unfamiliar, unrecognized, like the belongings of people I had never met. I could not even bring myself to sit down in one of the armchairs.

I wanted a drink.

The kitchen sink was full of empty wine bottles. In the cupboards there was nothing. I’d long ago finished off the Calvados and the brandy, and even a bottle of gin, which I hated. Just behind the sauces I spied the label of a pommeau bottle. Uncorking it and lifting the neck to my mouth, I swallowed. Oh that familiar taste! In a moment I was standing in the garden of the house on rue Pierre des Touches in Montmartin, listing to the cooing of the turtledoves in the pine trees, in my hand a small fine crystal glass containing my first taste of that sweet sherry-like drink made from cider and apple brandy. It was my first visit there. We had known each other less than two months.

Was that the day we’d cycled down to the dunes? Yes, it must have been. We had wheeled the bikes up the gravel driveway to the street. Within two minutes we were at the edges of the small village, past the houses of grey stone and slate roofs, on a flat stretch of road. Claudine rose on her seat and pedalled hard, shooting ahead. I raced to catch her. She was wearing a yellow summer dress cinched at the waist with a white belt, and a pair of espadrilles on her feet. Her dress billowed around the tops of her thighs as I caught up to her, whistling in appreciation. She laughed and made no effort to cover her legs.

As we rounded a curve, the sea appeared, spread below like a carpet of blue light fringed by white sand, immense and wide to the distant horizon. The road twisted and curved down
through the fields, crossed a narrow river and ended at the dunes. The tide was high. Not a soul was in sight on the long beach. To the right, at the mouth of the estuary, stood a green lighthouse on a point of land.

Oystercatchers with long red beaks scurried along the shoreline, heads bobbing up and down as they dug at the wet beach. Claudine dropped her bike on the sand and ran down to the water, her hair streaming behind her like a horse’s mane. The birds took to the air in a wave of flashing black and white. She bent down and picked up something and when I approached she held her hand out to me, fingers closed over her palm.

“For you,” she said.

But first, I said I had something serious to tell her, and I confessed that the story about my parents dying in a car crash was a lie. I told her the truth about my upbringing.

“Why did you lie to me, Leo?” she responded. “You say you love me. I tell you everything that is in my heart. Everything. I don’t hold anything back.”

“It’s a lie I’ve always told. A kid once told me my mother was a prostitute. It hurt me. Maybe it was true. I’m ashamed that I had no parents. I didn’t want anybody to think that my parents gave me up, that they didn’t want me. For whatever reason.”

“I don’t care about your parents, Leo. But if you could tell me this lie, what others? How can I believe anything now?”

I took her hand, the one she had held out, and she opened her fingers. In the centre of her palm lay a small pink shell, worn smooth by time and the ocean into a perfect heart shape. Then she pulled her hand away and was running up into the long grasses on the dunes.

When I crested the slope she was nowhere in sight. It took me five long minutes of searching and calling to find her. She was reclining on her back in a little hollow nestled and sheltered between two higher dunes, one arm flung back above her head, a clasped hand resting lightly across her breasts. Her eyes were shut. Her dress was bunched above her knees, showing her long thighs. I could smell the warmth of the earth.

I lay down next to her and she opened her eyes. When I saw her expression I thought I had lost her. But then she whispered, “I forgive you,” and she pressed the small heart-shaped shell into my hand. “You can have my heart now,” she said.

A half-hour later, under that clear blue sky, with the sun warm on our naked bodies, I asked her to marry me.

Replacing the cork in the bottle of pommeau I set it back on the cupboard shelf. I no longer had the desire or need to obliterate my memories with alcohol. I still had that little shell, treasured in a small velvet-lined box among Claudine’s jewellery. We can never forget, I thought, but perhaps we can learn not to regret.

From the kitchen I walked down the long hallway to my studio at the back of the apartment. I opened the door but did not enter. Bare walls, a blank canvas on the easel, two drawings lying on the worktable. Two faces. A boy and a woman. I closed the door.

In the living room I opened the windows onto the street. Startled by the sudden noise of the neighbourhood intruding in this place of memory, I quickly slammed the window shut.

The coffee table in front of the couch was littered with magazines and books that I had not looked at in over a year. Sitting on top of Zola’s
L’oeuvre
was my paperback copy of Balzac’s
short story
The Unknown Masterpiece
, the one illustrated with etchings by Picasso. I’d bought it my first year here because it was the story of a painter and took place in Paris. Some of it was set on rue des Grands-Augustins, in a building that Picasso had eventually rented and where he had painted
Guernica
. I hadn’t known then that the book was about a painter who works on the same picture for years, unable to finish it, never showing it to anybody, and after his death his friends find a canvas covered in incomprehensible scribbles. For an artist, the story was a chilling one.

I set the book on the shelf and as I did so a sheet of folded paper slipped out from between the pages. It was an article that had been torn from a magazine, and though I knew what it said, I read the words again.

In Leo Millar’s paintings now showing at Galerie Serge Bruneau, we have the sensation that time has ceased, or is suspended. Pastoral is the word that comes to mind. These are landscapes of eternity. We feel these are places we might know, and if not, we want to know them, we want to be there and experience that comforting light, that timeless serenity, that beauty
.

There are no figures in Millar’s landscapes, but rather than making them seem uninhabited, this absence avoids all storytelling. His mysterious terrains are “ideal landscapes.”

But there is a disquiet here too, a certain anguish and longing. For all their calm and tranquility, Millar’s pictures evoke melancholy as well. His ideal pastorals of order and harmony are also precarious, and because they exist only in art, we feel their absence in our own world as tragic
.

Most noticeable in the exhibition is
The Church at Pont de la Roque.
Here, the view of an ancient ruined bridge and a church silhouetted
on a hill in the morning light is elegiac, but it is also an image of hope, and, one might add, of a profoundly expressed love for the beauty of the world
.

I smiled bitterly rereading these words. A review of my first exhibition at Serge’s gallery. Written by someone named Daniel du Courjan in
ArtVue
magazine, which coincidentally was where Claudine worked as an assistant editor. Perhaps that should have made me suspicious, but I was too pleased to give it a second thought when Claudine presented me with a copy. I am good at anagrams and crossword puzzles, so maybe that was why the name suddenly clicked in my mind some hours later, and out of the blue the letters rearranged themselves in my mind as an anagram of Claudine Jourdan. I confronted her and she confessed that the article was her work.

I was extremely angry. I didn’t need my wife puffing up my work under a false name, and if the word got out I would be the laughingstock of my contemporaries. I was humiliated. We argued. Claudine pleaded that she’d meant well, but I wouldn’t even speak to her. I tore the article out of the magazine and locked myself in the studio.

Later, only after reading the review over and over again, did I see that this was a wonderful description of my paintings. I couldn’t have articulated it so well myself no matter how much I had tried. I realized that Claudine understood me, deeply, which meant that she loved me, deeply. My anger evaporated instantly. I apologized, we forgave each other, and I took her that night to Bofinger for oysters and champagne. Was that the night we conceived Piero?

Folding the paper up again I slipped it back between the pages of the Balzac and placed it on the bookshelf. Perhaps one
day I would read the story once more, and find the article again.

Across the hall I could see Piero’s bedroom, and the colourful wooden mobile hanging from the ceiling. I’d made it of balsa wood in the studio, painting the shapes in bright primary colours, then putting it up on the morning the three of us came home from the hospital a few days after Piero’s birth. The first time we were together here as a family. I remember him lying on his back, looking up at the mobile, his chubby little legs making pedalling motions in the air.

For the first days Piero mostly slept. When he opened his eyes they were a luminous dark blue, and their extraordinary beauty, their absolute purity, had made me weep. Life had been serene here, mother and child like gifts to me from heaven. Days and nights of contentment. Was there any better definition of happiness?

Those first months Claudine had been resplendent with an inner light, her skin glowing, a beatific smile on her lips as she sat with Piero at her breast. I’d never painted them like that, mother and child, because by then I was doing landscapes exclusively.

Before Piero, in the months after our marriage, I had done some nude studies of Claudine, but one day while I was drawing her, she had said to me, “Leo, I don’t want to pose any more.”

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed.

“It’s too unnerving,” she said. “The way you stare at me, almost taking me apart piece by piece and reassembling a version of me on your canvas. You look at me as if I am nothing more than a tree or a table. I don’t recognize you when you stare like that. You become someone else.”

“It’s just concentration,” I explained. “I have to look very carefully.”

“You want to capture me. Isn’t that what artists say, that they want to capture a likeness, capture a moment?”

“Well, yes, in a way.” What I wanted was to hold back time, to make permanent what was as transient as the light passing through the air. I wanted to keep us like this, together and happy, forever.

She explained. “When I am naked in front of you I want it to be a special experience between us, one that we share. I don’t want to become a picture. It is the living woman you get, Leo, not a representation. Maybe it is just vanity, but I want to age with the face I have. I want to look at your work, now and in the future, with joy, not with regret. Stick with your landscapes.”

A few months later I was working at my easel when the door of the studio opened. Claudine stepped into the room wearing a white lace robe. She stopped a few feet away and let the robe slip from her shoulders and fall into a soft heap at her feet, revealing her naked body.

“Look at me,” she said.

The early light falling through the windows had a warm rosy tint, touching her breasts, the curve of her stomach and her bare feet with a dusting of gold. The robe at her feet was a creamy foaming wave. A faint blush like the bloom on a peach spread across her cheeks as I stared at her. I was astounded by her beauty. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time. A radiance emanated from her. I felt humbled, in the presence of a beauty no art could match. I was also confused. Had she changed her mind and was she going to pose for me? Or did she want me to make love to her?

She smiled—the first time I’d seen that odd inscrutable smile, filled with a secret inward knowledge that I could not apprehend. Then she said. “I’m pregnant, Leo.”

My eyes blurred now at the memory, the knowledge that her radiance was lost and gone forever. I crossed into our bedroom and flung myself down on the bed, burying my face in the pillows, inhaling deeply, trying to find again some lost essence. But only a slight musty odour came to my nostrils. Would I ever be able to sleep in this bed again? How many times had I made love with Claudine in this room? I pressed myself down on the bed, willing her memory back, wanting her.

But it was Lorca I saw, her long limbs and white skin in the rainy light of her room in La Maison du Paradis, her dark eyes fixed on mine, clouding as she cried out and the rain beat at the window.

I leapt off the bed and grabbed at the cover and sheets, stripping them from the mattress and bundling them up into a ball, which I threw into the corner. Collecting my keys from the kitchen counter I hurried from the apartment and strode down to the little Monoprix supermarket on rue Saint-Antoine. I asked one of the clerks for any empty cardboard cartons and he gave me a stack, which I carried back up rue Charlemagne to the apartment.

I started my packing in the bedroom, with Claudine’s clothes, not bothering to fold, to examine, to check the pockets, or even to allow myself the recollection of her in some dress or coat. Everything went rapidly into the boxes. Only once did I falter, when I came upon a wine-coloured paisley blouse by Mary Quant that I’d bought for Claudine, along with a set of red lucite earrings, at Bazaar on King’s Road when we
had visited London to see the big Pop Art exhibition. Our only holiday abroad other than the last journey to Cyprus. With the cloth pressed to my face, I inhaled deeply, smelling her body, the memory of it. And then I thrust it away.