A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,27
greater than what he expected to get. It gave the client negotiating room, made him feel like he was getting a bargain. But he should not ask for too much, for that would seem like stealing and the client would be suspicious and miserly.
“Fifty euros per sketch,” he said. “Sixty-five for watercolors.”
Mr. Klinman shook his head, a disappointed expression on his face. Gabriel felt a wave of embarrassment. Had he overvalued himself?
“If you do not think yourself significant, then no one will. Charge high when the client is willing to pay, and then deliver a product that exceeds satisfaction. I will pay you one hundred euros for the drawings and one-fifty for the watercolors, which will be unmistakably authentic Connois Père when viewed from two meters. Here are five thousand euros. I will come back next Friday, is that all right?” Augustus handed him two banded stacks of bills.
Gabriel stared at the money in his hands. He had never held that great a sum at one time. The bills were new. Gabriel wet his lips. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
“Augustus,” he said. “Use the familiar. We are friends now.” He took his jacket and hat.
“Augustus,” Gabriel said. “Eighty-six drawings by next week is more than I can do. So quickly. If you want Connois.”
Augustus turned, his lips pursed sourly. He sighed, exasperated. “Very well, then ring up your old classmates. Reconvene the École des Hiverains.” As he turned, Gabriel thought he saw the man wink.
The door took the air with it when it closed. The papers thumb-tacked to the cork that served as the backsplash to the desks lurched toward the door as if to follow Augustus Klinman out, then settled back flat again. Gabriel’s desk was messy with yesterday’s croissant crumbs and sticky notes stacked like layers of paint. Gabriel looked at the sketch he’d been doodling when the man had walked in. He took the bills and fanned them out over the paper so that the drawing was obscured. A much better source of light, these euros, than anything he could shade.
The École des Hiverains was an inside joke that had escaped its confinement. Marcel Connois, having immigrated to Paris in 1870 from Cataluña, found himself an unpopular second cousin to the more successful Impressionists and so had fled with his circle, which included Del Rio, Monlin, Ganedis (one of the few successful Greek painters of the time), and Imogeney, to the Lowlands, settling first in Belgium and then in the Netherlands, where their talents were appreciated among the lesser nobility. They continued to paint the sunny, arid landscapes of their homelands and the voluptuous women at fruit-filled feasts that characterized their repertoire. They were always cold in the north, wearing scarves, hats, and fingerless gloves even into summer and so gained the nickname Les Hiverains, or “the Winterers.” The active years of the École were few. Monlin died of tuberculosis, Del Rio followed a carnival troupe to Capri where he lost a duel over a gypsy woman, and Ganedis returned home to his native island, where his mother’s cooking still sat warming on the stove for him. Imogeney married a Flemish girl and worked as a portraitist to support his thirteen children. Only Connois survived the dissolution, installing himself back in Paris. Still he painted the Pyrenees, the orange groves, the fish markets of his home.
Gabriel’s mother had owned one painting by her great-grandfather, a half-meter-square oil of the Costa Brava called Febrer. In it, the Mediterranean was an impossible blue, the color changing on the underside of each white-capped wave so that the effect was a mosaic of fractured sea, melting together as the water tumbled back into the roil. Gabriel had spent countless hours staring at the painting, the stiff points of hardened oil paint that revealed the exact motion of the brush. Connois was a meticulous painter; each dab of blue—almost transparent, stark cobalt, aquamarine, nearly glowing, or a navy so dark as to masquerade as black—intentionally rendered. The brushstrokes were visible, small whisks. Connois must have used only the smallest brushes; the canvas would have taken him months to complete.
Gabriel wanted to sell Febrer when his father’s arthritis had set in and playing the guitar became nearly impossible. Gabriel’s father was a proud man with a face that gravity had claimed. His eyes had sunken into the flesh of their sockets, jowls swollen like wet laundry. He continued to give music lessons, but by then they’d moved to the pueblo, abandoning their apartment