A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,37

about production. Line them up, bang them out, pocket the cash.

Gabriel put on the old earphones that led to his Walkman. He was the only one he knew who still listened to cassettes, but that’s how his music was recorded, and it wasn’t like he had money to buy some fancy new digital music player. He pressed play and the familiar Spanish rap music blasted from the headset. Gabriel turned it down. He picked up his pencil. He was more excited about this project than he could remember being in a long while, perhaps since he had copied Febrer. But that hadn’t been excitement; it was more like nervous apprehension.

He was happy that his work would be compensated for once, instead of merely criticized and shunted. He was guaranteed money for his art, even if it wasn’t really his. He felt disappointed in himself; he had fallen into the trap of capitalism, into believing that an object was valuable only if it was monetarily valuable. But he lived within the culture, it was bound to have an effect on him.

Unsellable art was bad art. So according to the cognoscenti, Gabriel was making bad art. And by this same perverse logic, any art that sold was automatically good art, in direct proportion to its sale price. Who were these buffoons who decided what sold and what sat out in the soggy cold of the marché aux puces? Soulless men who, no matter how they tried, saw only Swiss francs and yuan in the brushstrokes of the masters. They would never understand Gabriel. It was futile to try. Rather, give them what they want—eighty-six pieces of art by next week.

He decided to get one of the pastels out of the way. Mediterranean blue was almost impossible to render without oil paints, but he could try. He layered on the pigment, swirling like he remembered the waves in Febrer. Then he completed the scene, a marketplace near the coast.

Almost without realizing it, he drew a large figure in the foreground. A woman, selling bread. It was his mother: the waistless apron, the plaits in her hair, her uneven eyes, one lid heavier than the other, always winking.

No time for nostalgia. An aesthetic assembly line; finish one, on to the next.

On Saturday Marie-Laure and Didier came to his studio. Gabriel, concentrating, didn’t hear them approach until Didier tapped him on the back, startling him.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel rested his old-fashioned earphones around his neck.

Marie-Laure said, “We can’t do it. Figure it takes us at least three hours for each one—”

“That’s if they’re shitty,” Didier interrupted.

“And we can only work like max sixteen hours a day. So that’s five per day, max, which is nearly impossible, and there’s three of us and five days. And I promised my boyfriend that I’d do Sunday lunch with his family. Do the math.”

“I can’t,” said Gabriel.

“I can’t either,” Didier said. “But I’m working my ass off and we’re not going to finish.”

“Yeah.” Gabriel put down his brush. He hated watercolors. Something about them seemed so wishy-washy, so like a Sunday painter. The colors were too muted, the lines inexact. “So who should we get?”

“Hans?” Didier asked. Gabriel nodded. “I’ll text him right now.” Didier busied himself with his phone as he walked out of the room.

Marie-Laure said, “What about Antoine, on the end?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want the whole studio involved, you know?”

“Okay …” Marie-Laure said slowly. She clearly didn’t know. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, Gabriel realized. She didn’t care that they were painting cheap knockoffs for money. But he did, and he didn’t want it spread around. Nor did he want to be the rainmaker for the people in the studio. He didn’t even really want Marie-Laure and Didier involved, to tell the truth.

“What happened to that Russian girl who went to school with us?” he asked.

“Back to Russia.”

“What about Lise?”

“Lise Girard? I just saw her at Didier’s show. Oh, wait, right, you were there. I can find her on the Internet,” Marie-Laure offered.

“I’ll do it,” Gabriel said. Why hadn’t he thought of her in the first place? “She’s a good idea, right?”

Lise had been the expert draftsman (draftswoman?) in their circle. She had specialized in technical drawing; as a teenager she’d considered becoming an architect. During one of their first conversations, in a smoky bar full of American students near the Sorbonne, she told him that to her lines were clearer than words. She saw the world in