A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,11

his work to permanently quit the asinine job he’d been holding.

That night, Gabriel met Hans outside the métro. Wordlessly the two artists began to walk toward the gallery, shuffling, Gabriel thought, like condemned men on the way to the gallows. He should be happy for his classmate. He knew that Didier’s success should suggest to him that his own was still possible.

Hans tripped over a lose stone. “Christ, I’m drunk.”

“Already?” Gabriel asked.

“I told Brigitte that it started at five. I don’t get to go out at night that often.”

The gallery was as crowded as Gabriel had feared it would be. The title of the show was painted on the window: “Aching Thighs.” The small over-the-door air conditioner chugged futilely, blowing like wisps of breath on the sweaty faces of Paris’s art community.

Didier was dressed in what Gabriel considered to be a simulacrum of artist-wear, a tuxedo jacket paired with a James Dean white T-shirt, jeans, and gaudy orange sneakers. He was surrounded by a gaggle of admirers, de Treu himself (the Salvador Dalí mustache was unmistakable) guarding against the crush of intelligentsia. No one could have seen the art even if they wanted to, but all eyes were trained on the crowd, not the walls.

Rather than fight to greet Didier, Hans and Gabriel made their way to the bar. Unusual for an opening, this bar was fully stocked. Hans ordered a whiskey. Gabriel held up a finger, indicating he wanted one too. Hans made a big show of removing a twenty-euro bill from his wallet and dropping it into the tip jar. The bartender, in recognition, poured them doubles and winked. It would never have occurred to Gabriel to tip so grandly at an open bar. But of course that was what got you the biggest drinks the quickest.

Gabriel lost Hans in a crush of people, and decided to try to see the paintings.

Since their days at the École, Didier had been painting a series of women from the point of view of their vaginas. Curly hair, fleshy legs, painted toes. Sometimes a penis coming toward the viewer, intent on entering the viewer’s space. Then he began to experiment with the legs, the color, the background. It wasn’t bad, in Gabriel’s opinion. Technically a little facile, but Didier had been the workhorse, doggedly continuing with his oeuvre while everyone declared painting over. And now that painting had come back, here was Didier, ready. Gabriel understood why it would sell—the male artist painting from the woman’s perspective. And, hung here against the backdrop of the tall white walls, it looked, well, it looked like real art. He stood back to try to create some distance between himself and the painting in front of him, to see it as a whole, when he felt a foot beneath his own.

“Excuse me.” He turned to find a woman standing behind him. Her blond hair framed a face slightly older than his, skin taut across its prominent cheekbones. It took him a minute to place her. Lise. He had been so in love with her at school, consumed by thoughts of her. He loved her Frenchness, the unthinking way she was able to summon a check or ask if someone was using a chair without drawing stares or questions, when it felt to him that clearing his throat was announcing his foreignness.

Last he’d heard she was working as an assistant to Mikhail Ambrosine, a popular painter-turned-gallerist. And had she married? Yes, he’d heard that. Someone not French.

“It’s okay, I have another foot.” Lise smiled. “How are you, Gabi?”

Only his mother had ever called him that. When other people used the diminutive it usually annoyed him, but he was happy to hear the familiarity.

“Fine. Good.” He kissed her on each cheek. Remembering his love for Lise amused him. It had to have been, what, six, seven years since he’d last seen her? Where did people go when they left your mind? When you no longer thought about them daily, weekly, yearly, at all? They ceased to exist for you, but yet their lives went on.

“How is it possible that in a city as small as Paris we don’t run into each other?” Lise asked.

Gabriel shrugged. They moved in different circles, that was obvious by her expensive clothing: a black silk sheath that covered one shoulder. The exposed one was freckled and tiny. The dress hung down, skimming her breasts and hips and stopping just above the floor.

“Have you ever met my husband, Giancarlo? Gio, my old