“I like your intern,” Nora said. “Your boss, I’m not so crazy about.”
“I’m your advocate in all this,” Yale said, and he was gearing up to say more, but Nora spoke again.
“I’m going to tell you about Ranko. I know you have your own agenda, but you can find out about Soutine at the library. The art historians can tell you more than I can about most of those pieces. You’re not going to find much of anything about Ranko, though, and I need to do it while I have the chance.” And then, as an afterthought, “Sergey Mukhankin too.”
Yale said, “We can go through the works chronologically, and when we get to Ranko’s you could give us those details. I have some catalogs in the car that—”
“No.” She shook her head like an obstreperous little girl. One who happened to be in charge. “I’m going to tell you the most important stories first, and then the next, and so on. And the first is about the time before the war, when Ranko was locked away for the Prix de Rome.”
“Locked away?”
“Don’t move any furniture,” she said to Roman, “but if you aim it under the couch that should do.”
Yale lifted his feet while Roman did so.
“He was a Serb,” she said. “But born in Paris, raised there.” Roman was supposed to be the one taking notes, but since he was busy, Yale grabbed the notebook. The air smelled like peppermint now, pleasantly antiseptic.
“We were at different schools. Now, my father was French,” she said, “and when I decided to study art he took it seriously, and he thought there was no point to studying in Philadelphia.” She spoke quickly but paused between sentences for breath—a swimmer coming up for air. “The big school in Paris, as I’m sure you know, was the École des Beaux Arts, but they didn’t admit women, and even if they had, they were fusty. I wrote to two schools, and one was the Académie Colarossi. And”—she laughed—“I’ll tell you what impressed me most: They were going to let me draw from nude male models. This was the excuse for keeping women out of most schools, you know. We can’t have women here, there are nude men! So it was set for me to go to Colarossi”—she spelled it for Yale, who’d seen the name before but was still two sentences behind—“and my father took me over. It was 1912, and I was seventeen.”
Roman crouched to spray the threshold to the dining room, the back of his black T-shirt riding up.
“I was meant to stay with my father’s aunt, Tante Alice. She was senile and never left her bed. The idea was her nurse would keep me in line, but the poor nurse had no idea how. She’d make me toast in the morning, and that was the extent of her supervision. That fall there was an anatomy class at Colarossi that was open to the public. You know, the interior workings of the knee and so on. Beaux-Arts had similar courses, but this was a special deal, someone was visiting to teach it, so a few of those students came.”
Roman was back, like a relay runner, to grab the pen. Yale returned to his own list, the hopeful empty spaces for dates beside each piece, but he found he had nothing to add to the timeline but 1912—arrival in Paris.
“And next to me was a man with dark, curly hair—quite like yours, Yale, although his face was longer—and as he sat there, he made himself a crown of paper clips. Linked them in a circle and put it on his head. He sat there like it wasn’t the least bit unusual, the sun glinting off him. I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I’d never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don’t know if that makes sense, but there it was.”
Yale tried to say something, but didn’t know how to begin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lincoln Park lagoon, the two of them sharing Richard’s Leica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting