A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,123

onto a bus. Was this a prank? he wondered. It couldn’t have been. No one would bother to prank him. Especially not in French.

He returned to the studio and spent a few hours looking at his work. The stored canvases were rejects from the show. The drawings in his sketchbook were studies for pieces he did for Klinman. He ripped the canvases and tore the paper from the sketchbook, making several trips to the Dumpster. Then he examined his brushes. Gummy, gooey, frayed. He took the whole can outside and tossed it. His pencils were stubby, his turpentine cloudy. He threw them all away. He spent the day cleaning out his work space, getting rid of every vestige of his previous work, all the sketches in others’ hands, all the half-begun paintings in his own style, the jar of ink. Then he decided to throw everything away, all his paints and pencils and brushes and palettes and solvents. As he tossed it all into the Dumpster out back, he felt wonderfully light, like a pebble winging its way to the pond.

Marie-Laure came outside. “If you were going to throw things away, I wish you would have asked if anyone else wanted them. Or at least recycled them.”

“Fuck you,” Gabriel said, the words sweet like a whistle in his mouth.

Marie-Laure spun and ran back to the studio.

He took the remainder of his Klinman money and went to Rougier & Plé, spending every last euro, buying more gum erasers than he would ever need just to get rid of all the cash. He had to hire a taxi to take him back to the studio, an expense he hadn’t counted on, but with his purchases spread out before him he felt like he could begin again.

The following two weeks Gabriel walked around filled with anxiety. Now that leaving Paris was a possibility, he gazed at lintels, examined railings, went for long walks to breathe in the air. Sometimes he found himself smiling at odd moments. Maybe he would win. He was already a finalist. He considered, then rejected, buying an English dictionary.

“Good to have you back, man,” Hans said. “I thought you were angry with me about the show still or something.” Gabriel had accepted his invitation to have a beer. He told Hans about the possible fellowship.

“What are your chances, do you think?” Hans asked him.

“One in five.”

“Ha.”

“I don’t know. I probably won’t get it.”

“Probably not.” Hans paused. Gabriel hit him playfully. “But you might. I mean, no one made me a finalist.”

“You’re not a Mediterranean painter.”

“True. It’s harder competition for real countries. With actual economies, I mean.”

Gabriel ignored the jibe. “I don’t think I’ll get it.” But what if he did? It would jump-start his career, end his money problems. Two years in London at the Academy would mean he was really an artist. It was so difficult to hold these two contrary hopes in his head. On the one hand, not getting it would be a comfort. It would confirm what he’d always suspected. But getting it would place him firmly in the artistic elite—he wanted desperately what he had dismissed all his life as false and hollow. He would be the person he’d always hated, the one patronized by Big Art.

He waited around his apartment for the mail, ran several calculations of how long it would take for a letter to get there. They probably met on a Friday, he reasoned. So they’d mail the letters on Monday and it would get there on a Thursday. Unless they met over the weekend. Or if someone on the committee were out of town and they were waiting to meet until the following week. His speculations were pointless, which didn’t dissuade him at all.

Finally, nearly three weeks after the phone call, Gabriel returned home from a lengthy walk during which he’d succeeded in forgetting about the prize for almost thirty minutes as he contemplated what pigeon genitalia might look like to find a letter in his mailbox with an English postmark. It was thin, and someone had taken care to line the stamp up perfectly with the edges of the envelope. The handwriting was formal, and it gave each part of his address its own line: the number, the street, the apartment, the city, the postal code, the unnecessary région, and the country.

He ripped it open so quickly that he tore the letter but still was able to read the first line: “Félicitations/Felicidades/Congratulations.” It was embossed at the bottom. Gabriel