A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,103

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

Elm

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