A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,38

charcoal and lead, every person, object, and place an outline, shaded, smeared, or cross-hatched into its third dimension.

“For example”—she picked a piece of tobacco from her lips using her pinkie and her thumb and flicked it away—“right now, in this bar? There are only curves and angles. I could close my eyes and sketch it.”

“All I see is color,” Gabriel said. “I look around and I see sweaters and jackets and hair and surface texture.”

“Together, we would make a great painter.” Lise laughed. Her front tooth was turned slightly inward, an imperfection that made her dearer to him, the way that flaws of unrequited love increase its indelibility.

Lise could render anything, in anyone’s hand, practically effortlessly. Her room had been a shrine to the greats: she had sketches of hunters from the caves at Altamira, Fra Angelico studies, Whistler’s Mother … the lines as sure and exact as if the masters had drawn them. It was part of her final project: a history of the male torso. By copying the style, if not the subject matter, of art history’s most macho protagonists, she subverted their power somewhat, strengthening her own. Gabriel had thought it masterful, though by then he recognized that his judgment concerning Lise was somewhat suspect. Even now, he was motivated by wanting to see what her life was like so many years later.

Gabriel was not well versed in Internet searches; in fact, the entire world of the computer remained opaque to him. In that sense, he had the perfect job—Édouard’s gallery was run as if they were living contemporarily with the old masters. Sales were recorded in double-entry ledgers. Occasionally, Édouard’s bookkeeper would come by and grumble at the lack of Excel spreadsheets. If Gabriel wanted to use a computer, he had to go down the street to the seedy café and time his computer usage to the minute so as to avoid extra charges.

Now, confronted with Google’s French home page, he typed in Lise’s name. It returned more than fifty-five thousand hits. “Lise Girard” was a popular name. He clicked on images, and saw, among an elderly lawyer and a teenager in an inappropriate see-through dress, a tall blonde with a hiking pack on her back, mountains behind her dwarfing her. He clicked on the picture to make it bigger, but Facebook wanted him to join in order to see it. He didn’t like the idea of his personal information being accessible to anyone and everyone. He knew this was silly—he had nothing to steal, and who would want the identity of a fucked-up Spanish artist who owed France Telecom two hundred euros?

What the hell, he thought, and went back to Google’s home page to create a new e-mail address. Was it a good sign or a bad one that [email protected] wasn’t yet taken? He signed himself up for Facebook, and by the time he was able to navigate back to the picture of what might have been Lise, he had gone over his fifteen minutes and would have to pay an extra five euros.

When he enlarged the picture he saw that it was indeed her. She had several photos up, including some with what Gabriel thought might be four or five children. It was hard to tell which were repeated in the various photos, so alike did they look. In the photos her eyes had gone starry with crow’s-feet and her freckles had taken over a good portion of her nose. He hadn’t noticed these flaws when he saw her at Didier’s show; makeup had done its trick.

Had he gone through the same aging process? He was, granted, a bit lumpier than he had been. Not fat, but shaped differently, his belly developing a slackness that was sure to be a pouch should he ever stop drinking so much coffee and start eating regular meals.

He wrote her a short note saying that it was nice to see her at Didier’s show, thanking her for introducing him to Colette, and letting her know there was money to be made; if she was interested, she should call him. He hated writing in French. He had never taken a formal French class, and the accent marks felt insurmountably arbitrary. Circonflexe, grave, aigu; it was like some strange superlanguage on top of the letters. He felt this way about French in general, and French people. He could understand the basics of conversations, of customs, of conventions, but there was always another level that he failed to grasp, people speaking