Pictures at an Exhibition (3 page)

Rose leaned toward me. “Do you like to dance?” she asked. I tried to say yes but did not succeed in touching wooden tongue to cottony palate. “You look like you would be a fine dancer. Fox-trot, Charleston, the dances they're doing at Bal de la Musette?”

“I haven't been there in a long time,” I lied. On my last visit there, my companion and I spent the whole evening kissing in the corner, not dancing. She was of Czech extraction, and I had done my best to help her forget the sorrows of her homeland.

“You seem like you would be a good dancer. Lanky, not a string bean but not a muscleman, either.”

“Thank you—I think,” I said.

“No, it's a compliment,” Rose said. “I love to dance, but men are always afraid to ask me because chances are I'm taller than they are. And a girl's legs look nicer in high heels, so what am I to do?”

We walked west onto the Champs-Élysées, toward the Métro at Georges V.

“Would you like to have some lunch?” I asked. “There's an excellent place around the corner. Fast, first-rate pepper steak, and a dozen times better than anything they're serving on white tablecloths around here.”

“Sorry,” Rose said, and she did sound as if she meant it. “I'm helping Ivan review for an exam on the skull.”

“So he's in my Anatomy class as well,” I said.

“Then you should get to work, too.” She had a small birthmark above her mouth that moved when she smiled. “Though the word
steak
does make me hungry. Good-bye, Max.”

She raised her hand to her ear, touched it to make sure the earring was in place, then smoothed her hair behind it. I wasn't sure whether to kiss her cheeks or shake her hand. I felt my head and torso jerk in separate directions from each other. She leaned toward me, and I didn't so much kiss her as press my cheek against hers.

I watched the men on the street watch Rose descend into the
Métro, shaking their heads at the way her hips swung as she shifted down each step in her black-heeled shoes. I felt an undeserved pride—they must have thought she was with me.

By the time I returned home, the rain had stopped and the old women of the neighborhood had reappeared, walking their dogs. The old women wore winter coats, though the day was not cold, and muttered to their pets. A terrier scratched helplessly at the pavement.

From behind his desk, my father called out, “So?” I sat down across from him.

“She's unusual,” I said. “Strident. An eccentric. Intent on the job. As am I.” Father pretended not to hear me. “Lovely to look at,” I added.

“I didn't notice,” Father said. He finished addressing an envelope—its second line read Élysée Palace—and pushed the bill away from him. “Max, the Berenzon Gallery needs to be ahead of the times, not with them.” He gestured with his pen in the air. “Women will have the vote any day now. Miss Clément is part of a new breed, the hungry, independent, middle-class, educated elite. You and I will be out of touch and stale without the likes of her. I'm canceling the rest of the interviews.” He punctuated this with a single clap. The crooked eyes of a Picasso nude stared at me piteously “She knows her Goya, by God! Now there is only a single but significant obstacle in our path, Max.”

Mother streamed across the gallery floor in her kimono, her face porcelain white without its paints, her eyes flashing and ready for one of her cherished fights with my father. Mother dressed only when she was satisfied with her practicing. It was then two o'clock in the afternoon. She played piano from eleven to two, and again from three to six, though some days she sat at the piano bench for barely an hour. She was fond of saying, “I practiced enough even as a child to last a lifetime.”

“Auguste has told me all about your plan, Daniel,” Mother began. Our chauffeur was her special confidant. “A woman does not go to shul without a hat.” Father rolled his eyes at her Yiddish. “She does not go to the theater without a companion. She does not engage in commerce without her gloves. And she certainly does not move into
the house of a strange art dealer if she is a decent lady. She's unchap-eroned. No proper parents would send their unmarried daughter into such a situation. If they cannot save her from disgrace, I will.”

“Ma puce,”
Father said. “For a woman to enter this field, she'd have to be plainer than a librarian. This is a curator, Eva, not a cancan dancer.” He poured a scotch and swirled it in his glass.

“This business of yours, it does not have a kosher reputation. And what would people say about my son?” I cracked my knuckles and she slapped at my hands. “Not good for fingers,” she said. “Or my husband! Nikhil was perfection. Why not another young man like Nikhil?”

“Of all the assistants, your mother only likes royals from the subcontinent,” Father said, and dabbed at my mother's mouth with his napkin.

“Or why not Max, for goodness’ sake, Daniel? You choose a
girl
over your own son.”

Father gripped his glass as if he might throw it. Instead, he drained the liquor in a swallow. “You know why, Eva,” he said. From outside, the two-pitched whine of an ambulance covered his words.

“Why?” I cried, standing up.

“This is not the business for you, Max, any more than you are prepared to fly an airplane or perform surgery with your left hand.” The edge in his voice sounded like a knife touching its grindstone. “You're a rich man's son—”

“Your son,” Mother said.

“—and though it's no fault of your own, you lack the hunger, the desire to hunt and chase.” I tried to protest, but Father drowned out my stammering. “Your morose face would depress the clients, make them feel all the sadness they've come here to escape.”

My mother reached for my hand, but I snatched it away and walked up the stairs while my parents fought in whispers.

LATER THAT EVENING, I RANG BERTRAND REINACH, WHO
said he could meet me in Pigalle, though not until ten o'clock. I looked at my watch, which told me I would have to wait three hours.
I wandered around the city, eating a stale egg sandwich by the quay until it was time to walk to the Eighteenth. Bertrand never appeared at our meeting place. Later he explained that he had been experimenting with the sexual pleasures of self-strangulation and had fainted. As usual, I was neither sure what to believe nor what was stranger, his extravagant stories or the joy he took in telling them.

I went into a brasserie and began talking to two nurses in white uniforms. I said I worked in a munitions factory. They had been raised in adjacent homes in Toulon and were hurt when I said I had never been there. “But I would love to visit,” I added. “Please tell me all about Toulon. What should I see when I go there?” While they reminisced about the miners’ museum, the maritime museum, the prison that Hugo described in
Les Misérables
, and the cafés along the waterfront, I procured them each several more drinks.

When the bartender wiped down the counter and announced he was closing, I bought a bottle of wine and paid him what he asked. I tried to convince the two nurses to hurdle the wall of Père Lachaise with me, though only the less pretty one agreed. I figured out that she was Annette when her friend said, “Don't make me say ‘I told you so,’ Annette.” However, Annette scraped her leg and tore her uniform on her descent from the wall and began to cry and insisted I take her home. It was much harder to get out of the cemetery than to get in it, we discovered, and the girl was sullen and weeping quietly and we were both sober and unhappy.

I felt bad because of the ruined uniform. As we walked, I fished some money out of my wallet and offered to pay for a new one. Annette held the crumpled notes in her hand and shook the small stack twice. I could tell she wanted to take it, but since a monetary exchange with a man would have smacked of something else, she gave it back. We felt more kindly toward each other after that.

Eventually, we found a ladder leaning against a crypt and used it to climb over a low point in the cemetery's wall. It was four in the morning, and I hailed a taxicab and bought her daffodils from a merchant setting up his stand in Les Halles, near Annette's apartment. This seemed to cheer the girl and she gave me a kiss at her doorstep and said she would invite me upstairs if her roommate didn't snore so
loudly. I said I wouldn't pay any attention to it, but Annette said no so vigorously that her curls bobbed against her cheeks. She shut the door and locked it quickly behind her. I knocked twice but she had, I supposed, already trotted upstairs.

I walked toward home, crossed the Seine and back for good measure because the morning light was beautiful, smoked a cigarette with the policeman who patrolled our neighborhood, and drank a coffee in the café by our house. I arrived at school in time to stare briefly at my exam on the bones of the skull before falling asleep.

Chapter Three

I
SAW LITTLE OF ROSE CLéMENT, EVEN AFTER SHE
moved her two upholstered valises into the Nurse's Room on Valentine's Day of 1939. She did not allow Auguste to drive her to and from the Louvre. She did not pause to converse with me when I lingered in the gallery wearing a new shirt. Nor did she take her meals with our family as my father's other assistants had done.

Sometimes, this was for the best. At the dinner table, my parents argued. Father had been unsuccessful in keeping the newspapers from Mother. She practiced less and less but sat at the piano bench with the instrument's keys covered, listening to the wireless.

“Germany isn't Poland,” my father said when she panicked about the news. “There are no Cossacks in Berlin.”

“Hitler is a crazy man. When I hear him on the radio,” Mother said, pressing her temples, “I can barely understand this German he is speaking, his mouth is so full with spittle. And he is an Austrian? But his accent is fake, Bavarian. That Goebbels, he speaks beautifully. Like Satan, but his articulation is perfection. He must be the envy of singers everywhere.”

My father reached across his dinner plate and laid a hand on hers. She snatched it away.

“You know nothing,” she hissed. “You've lived in such comfort here. Now you've got butter on your sleeve.” The pitch of her voice
dropped. “I heard them arrive, on horseback.” Father met my gaze, looking for a conspirator.

We mentioned neither our absent guest nor the empty chair awaiting her, except on one occasion. Father reported that Mademoiselle Clément had inadvertently insulted the Princess Noailles by calling a certain Gauguin a “good deal.” The princess never spoke of money herself and bought paintings without inquiring about their price; she left those details to her lawyer. “Snobby old cow” was what my father liked to call the princess. Still, I felt sorry for Rose. With Father, it was so easy to make a mistake and not know it. You could sense his punishment later but could not identify the crime.

After the second week of Rose's apprenticeship, the empty fourth chair disappeared and we returned to our regular table configuration.

“Thank God you've stopped wearing that wretched cologne,” Mother said to me before dinner. “All my food tasted like musk.”

“Pity the Poles,” Father said to her, turning on the radio. “They lost you, their national treasure.”

On the radio, the announcer speculated about German territorial demands, rendering my father's joke inappropriate.

“Pity the Poles,” my mother said, somber now.

We ate in silence.

THAT WINTER, I GATHERED THAT MADEMOISELLE
Clément took long hot showers because I often heard water rushing in the pipes and, when I turned on my own spigot, found the water cold. After dark, the lamp in her room made a yellow square in the courtyard until well into the night. I watched it for a shadow or a shape. My most prurient attempts to rig up an old motorcycle mirror on a string and dangle it like a fishing lure failed. I could never get the mirror to lie flat or reflect from the right angle. Rose's private quarters remained so. I took to skulking in the hallway between the gallery and the street, hoping to catch her there. But I only frightened my father, who struck out at the shadowy figure in his corridor.

“Verboten!”
he shouted, when he realized it was me. We had begun to speak German to each other as a nervous joke. I went back to tinkering with the motorcycle mirror. I started lifting barbells.

For a month, Mother talked only of the German refugee question and whether it was better for Jews to go to the Philippines or the Dominican Republic. Mrs. Roosevelt backed a move to accept twenty thousand exiles and then christened the Yankee Air Clipper America's first Queen of the Skies, baptized with water from the seven seas. The Italians issued a call to arms to three hundred thousand men, all war babies and those previously deemed physically infirm. In France, I joined the lines of other young men seeking to enlist. The prospect of war seemed to offer a more exciting alternative to school, and the constant reminders of my own failures at home. I was aware, too, I am sure, that my father had never had the chance to serve.

When I visited the draft board, the flatness of my feet was the cause of much attention. I noticed that my card was filed with a crease at its corner. I visited a doctor who recommended a series of painful exercises and sold me a pair of “reshaping shoes.” When I told my father, I could not tell if his laughter was out of relief or at the humor of the situation. He had his own preoccupations. Some clients who decided to buy had their paintings shipped directly to houses in the country. Lucie hid bags of sugar in the closet where I kept my tennis racket. To Mother, Father repeated, “Don't worry.” She replied, “I do.” I wondered if they remembered that they had had a son at all.

The heat clanked at the same pace it had my entire life, and yet that month seemed to pass more slowly than others. Rose's presence was fleeting. On one occasion, I passed by Father's office as she sat at the typewriter, in a green sweater with a hole at its elbow. Notes in a looping hand were torn in two in the garbage. I found her in the hallway bathroom once, with a black tongue, as a pen had burst when she licked its nib. I handed her a white towel and said, “Ruin the cloth,” and she looked grateful and closed the door on me as I stood there, staring stupidly at her stained mouth. To the light in the courtyard, I sang along with my new American record,
There's an
oh-such-a-hungry yearning burning inside of me
, and I felt every word in the marrow of my bones. Eventually, Auguste said, “I hate this Cole Porter,” so I only played the album at a low volume and closed the window when doing so.