A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,49

During the cold war there was always a crisis, and his trip was cut short. Still, he bought this for me, a Connois pastel.”

“I would love to see it,” Elm said.

“It’s there.” Indira pointed but her fingers were so crooked it was impossible to tell which way.

Elm noticed that behind the dining table, leaning against the dark, stained wallpaper, was a large square, undoubtedly a frame, covered by a dropcloth that had the same stained dark green color as the wallpaper, camouflaging it.

“I had it brought up from the storage unit.”

Elm walked to the other side of the room. She felt like a magician’s assistant; when she pulled off the cloth, what would be underneath? She was dizzy, not like she was going to be sick or fall over, but as if the room had become untethered and she was floating above it, looking down on the scene from on high. She wondered if the secondhand pot smoke was going to her head.

She put her hands on the dropcloth and it felt damp, or cold. She felt a stab of worry—if it had been stored like this there would be little of it left. Carefully she pulled the cloth off.

It took her eyes a second to adjust. The lighting conditions were far from ideal, dull gray diluted further by the heavy curtains and the dust, but quickly the bright colors resolved into a market scene, the swirling texture became stalls, baskets, a dog. The background was a dull blue, the flat light off the dusty ground as it fell away to the sea. Elm remembered light like this from her backpacking days in Europe, when she still thought she was going to be a painter, how drastically the light shifted once you went inland enough that the ocean fell away from view, that the sparkling off the water was absorbed into the dirt and no longer shimmered, but rather made the vista murky, like looking through unwashed windows.

It was amazing, that Connois could do this with mere pastels. Here was that same blue, almost gray in places, aqua in others. There were the typical market stalls, an oddly shaped dog. This pastel featured an older woman, face lined, one eye slightly lazy or palsied, a strange detail that she registered.

“It’s Mercat,” Indira said.

“Excuse me?” Elm asked.

“Mercat, ‘market’ in Catalan. The title.”

Elm remembered vaguely, from art history class, that there were several inventories of group shows of the Hiverains, advertisements and handbills, for paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings that had since been lost. Some of these, as described in newspaper accounts of the time, had been masterworks. Elm remembered this because of the sense of loss she had felt when she read about it. Like the library at Alexandria, burned, and all the knowledge it contained destroyed. She had just been dumped by a sophomore-year love (sophomore year, for some reason, had been full of heartbreak), and the idea of these paintings, spoken about so admiringly in the newspaper, and even in a letter written by Édouard Vuillard to his Parisian gallery, felt unbearably tragic.

Could this be one of those lost pieces? Possibly, she supposed. She pulled it away from the wall. The frame was new, but that didn’t mean anything. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “He must have cared about you very much.”

Indira made a grunting noise that may have been agreement, derision, or just clearing her throat.

“Do you have the bill of sale? A certificate of authentication?”

Indira shook her head. “It was for me,” she said, “not for resale. But sentimentality will only feed you so long, yes? Before you get too old. So sell it with the rest. I have no children; that way I can live to be one hundred and afford to have young male nurses wave palm fronds to cool me.”

Elm felt a quick stab of pity. She didn’t usually consider herself lucky compared to other people. Indira’s loneliness, though, made her suddenly grateful, for Colin, for Moira, and even for getting to live with Ronan for the short time he was here. It felt strange, like the first sting of lust in a newly pubescent teenager, foreign but not bad necessarily.

“Why not display it?” Elm set the frame carefully back up against the wall and sat down across from Indira.

“It hurt, to look at it, especially after he died,” she said. “I put it away and didn’t think about it until the other drawings …”

“Do you know where he got it?” Elm asked. She didn’t