said.
“Painting! Oh, my God, I just told Ambro that everyone was going to return to painting after plastics. It was the only natural progression. Painting! Both Didier and you. I love being right. You know, I really liked your final project,” Lise said. “I know you took a lot of—” She used a slang word that Gabriel didn’t know.
“A lot of what?”
“People criticized it a lot.”
Gabriel didn’t know that was common knowledge. He always assumed that he was invisible to everyone else. If he wasn’t in the room, he ceased to exist. A thousand times something he said came back to him, proving him wrong, but his self-deprecation resisted logic.
Hans had called him repressed. That was what his adviser LeFevre had said about his work too. The same day, as if in chorus. He’d argued with Hans—Gabriel had fucked both women and men, he said. He’d had sex on boats, on the beach, with strangers, in chicken coops. Hans said that it was perfectly possible to have repressed sex with both sexes at once, with hermaphrodites and dwarves and Amazons. It was emotional unconstraint he was talking about. Any asshole could do anything with his body if he was high enough. It took true courage to love the person you were sticking it in.
And then Gabriel had gone back to his studio, where he had an appointment with his adviser. LeFevre had stood with his hands on his ample hips and frowned before turning to Gabriel and saying, “The subject matter may be daring, but the line is repressed, censured.” And Gabriel had balled his hands into fists, his too-long nails leaving crescent indents in his palms.
Now Gabriel quoted out loud: “ ‘Gabriel Connois’s work, though technically proficient, is devoid of any recognizable individual style.’ ”
“Well, that was really petty, in my opinion. Your work was beautiful, organic. I don’t know what happened to aesthetics, but I think they count for something.”
“Thanks.” Gabriel was embarrassed. He began to wonder if the waiter had thought the large bill was his to keep. “I liked your project too.”
“You’re sweet.” She touched his arm.
Finally the waiter tossed the silver tray containing the change down on the table. Lise gathered up all the large coins, sliding them into her jacket pocket. She had never removed her gray coat, and when she leaned back, it retained the shape of her hunched shoulders. “I’ll see you next week then,” she said.
Gabriel stood up to follow her out, but she was quicker than he, and was out the door before he wove his way through the tables. As he walked toward the métro, he thought about what Lise had said about his work being beautiful. She meant: beautiful, but not profound. His adviser had offered a similar criticism. “It’s not that you’re not talented,” he’d said. “It’s patently obvious that you are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. There’s just not that spark. There’s no passion in your work. There’s competence, originality even, but no inspiration, no voice. I think you’ll find it—I hope you will. Your talent is too big not to, but so far you haven’t reached that place.”
“And I am supposed to reach this ‘voice’ how?” Gabriel had asked, to his surprise and embarrassment, near tears for the first time in years.
“I don’t know,” LeFevre said. “Think about what moves you. What frightens you. Access the place you don’t want to go.”
“So now you’re a psychiatrist.”
“That’s exactly the kind of defensive attitude that is apparent on your canvases. I’ve taken you as far as I can.”
Asshole, thought Gabriel now. All that French psychobabble. If LeFevre didn’t like the work, why didn’t he just say so? Gabriel had been so proud of his final series of canvases, a pictorial essay on the travels of water. The paintings had turned out rather more conceptual than he would have expected his “research” to produce, but he was commenting on color and reflection, and no one seemed to understand that.
And then video. No one really knew how to judge it, and he gained a foothold in the community without really understanding what he wanted to accomplish, now that he looked back on it. He was still obsessed with color, with the screen as canvas. He loved the graininess of the images—exactly what he was trying to get away from with his glass-smooth canvases now. He also loved the space between the images, found that to be the place where he felt most comfortable. Then he just …