A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,73
Klinman’s stock was the perfect excuse to take a trip to Paris. Ordinarily, it was the dealer who came to the auction house, but Elm agreed with the man’s assessment that he didn’t want the works traveling unnecessarily; each minute they spent out of prime archival conditions was a year off their lives. It would be dangerous to ship them to New York. Easier to ship Elm to Paris. No one would ever have to know her real impetus.
But here she was finally, unencumbered. She made it uneventfully through customs, dragging her overnight bag with a few clothes and a couple of reference books. The taxi driver seemed surprised that she was staying on the Left Bank instead of the Champs-Élysées. Klinman too had been surprised, as had the mystery man at the clinic; apparently only backpackers tried to recapture the dirty glamour of the 1960s. She checked into her room; the hotel had no elevator so she climbed the two sets of carpeted stairs with a baggage porter in tow. She tipped him one euro, which he received silently so that she had no clue if she’d tipped him appropriately.
The small room was decorated in a faux Louis XIV style, lots of ormolu and brocade, but the window, when she pulled the curtain, looked out onto the back side of the Luxembourg Gardens. Across the patchy green she could see the busy Boulevard Saint-Michel.
She hadn’t visited Paris since Ronan died. But though he’d never been to Paris, the city reminded her of him; it was the site of Elm’s first solo trip after becoming a mother. He was a little over fourteen months, and she’d insisted that Colin put him on the phone every evening though he didn’t understand that the voice coming through the receiver was hers. “Yes, he misses you,” Colin said. “No, I haven’t fed him refined sugar. Wait—is Guinness refined sugar?”
Paris bustled beneath her, the snarl of traffic heading up the boulevard haphazardly like a group of beetles, the high-pitched claxons of hooting taxis. Here was a city where she knew no one, where no one knew she’d been Ronan’s mother. This feeling was simultaneously thrilling and devastating. She could be free. She was not under examination as a woman who had lost a child. The flipside of being where no one knew about Ronan was the feeling that all traces of him had been erased from the collective unconscious. She wanted to tell people on the street, “I had a son,” just so there would be some recognition of him. She tried to insert him into her memories of Paris: the smoky cabaret where the fat Frenchman stroked the older lady’s hair, some of which fell out in clumps between his thick fingers; the brushed-clean streets and the whir of the machines as they sprayed water into the gutters. Ronan would have delighted as the fountain went off in front of the Centre Pompidou, or at least, a young version would have. An older version would have enjoyed the Bateaux Mouches, or a tour of the sewers and catacombs. But all these fake memories were like a reel of movie pastiches. She would have to live without Ronan for the weekend, except for the DNA samples she’d brought: the hairbrush she’d kept from Thailand, and a baby tooth retrieved from a plastic box that Ronan had insisted they keep his teeth in once he realized that the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist.
She stood at the window in her room until night fell and it was a decent hour to venture out for dinner. She had with her Pedrocco’s book on Canaletto; with a decent Bordeaux she could try to make the evening pleasant. But even as she thought this she knew she was only going through the motions of a person visiting Paris. She was playing the role of “Elm” and simply waiting until she could shed her cover and visit the clinic. The knowledge simmered underneath her skin. She felt elated; the strange lack of jet lag was like a turbo boost of energy. She remembered a bistro not too far from the hotel. It had changed names, but the decor and the menu remained the same (did bistro menus ever change?), and they sat her at a table by the window so she could watch the people go by. The waiter patiently suffered through her nervous babbling in inferior French, her debate about whether to order steak tartare, and her eventual decision to