A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,122

The case against Klinman was dropped—there was some sort of procedural error. He thought he saw Colette once, across the street near the Bastille, but he couldn’t be sure and she was gone before he could look again.

He didn’t visit the studio for months, knowing that his materials would be either pilfered or ruined when he returned. If he returned. Late at night, he made wild plans, to move back to Spain, to travel through China, to go back to school to learn a new profession, to become a garbage collector or a toll booth operator, which required no thought and had no possible promotion. Work thirty-five hours a week and retire.

He had imaginary conversations with Lise in which he begged her to forgive him and she did, embracing him, not erotically, but the way she embraced her children, unconditionally. He told her he was quitting art, and she begged him to reconsider.

But in the morning the hope of those fantasies would ebb, and Gabriel would awake as stuck in his life as ever. Colette’s voice ran like a sound track in his mind, reminding him that art was just a game, and that he needed to learn to play it. In one dream she laughed at him in a restaurant and ordered a twelve-centimeter man whom she immediately ate as Gabriel pleaded with her not to.

The Scandinavian students in his apartment were replaced with other Scandinavian students, who assumed their new roommate had always been that morose and misanthropic. Hans called him three times, but then stopped.

He went for long walks in the Bois de Boulogne, throwing pebbles in the pond. He admired their arcs, their long trajectories to the water, where they landed with a satisfying splash that rippled back to the edge where he stood. Once, a little boy near him picked up some pebbles and copied him, laughing. Gabriel had always been so angry. But now he felt pity. For whom? he wondered.

No one had forced him to be an artist. No one had forced him to fake the drawings. Being angry at the art world was like shaking your fist at the Obélisque in the Place de la Concorde. It was a structure too big to topple. He should stop railing at it. This realization brought him a sense of peace he hadn’t felt in a while. He smiled at the little boy, who seemed not to be afraid of him, and they took turns throwing rocks in the water until his mother told him it was time to leave.

Just after class at the senior citizens’ center, where Gabriel had given up trying to teach perspective and let the old codgers scribble over their paper like they wanted to, his phone rang. It had rung so seldom recently that he was surprised. The number was foreign.

“Hello?” an English voice said when he answered. “Is this Gabriel Connois?”

He responded automatically in French. “Oui.”

She switched to French as well. “My name is Madelyn Hunter.” Her accent was so thick that Gabriel could barely understand her, but she spoke fluently. “I represent the Academy of Arts in London. Have you heard of us?”

Gabriel’s heart began to race. “Maybe.”

“Then you know we sponsor an annual fellowship for a Mediterranean artist. It pays a stipend of fifty thousand pounds to live in the Academy in London and paint for two years.” The woman might have been speaking from a script.

Gabriel had never heard of it, but was the fellowship about to be offered to him?

“Well, you are one of five finalists. You were nominated by someone on our board.”

Gabriel felt the familiar relief of disappointment wash over him. A finalist. He knew he wouldn’t win. So the phone call was a waste. Except that he might win.

“Do you understand?” the woman asked.

“Hmm,” Gabriel said, too stunned for speech.

“We tell you this not to torture you but because we have to know if you’re able to come to London for two years. Sometimes jobs and families don’t allow—”

“I’m allowed,” Gabriel said. That wasn’t what he meant, but the word presented itself as available.

“Good,” the woman said. “Can I verify your address so that we can send you the letter in two weeks? Regardless, now that you’re a finalist, you’re considered a member of the Academy.”

“What does that mean?” Gabriel asked.

“It means you’re part of the AOA,” the woman repeated, as if Gabriel simply hadn’t understood her French.

When the phone call ended, Gabriel stood in the street watching his students hobble glacially