Pictures at an Exhibition (4 page)

STILL, AS ABSURD AS THIS MAY SEEM IN RETROSPECT
, I thought mostly of Rose. When my curiosity about her overwhelmed my common sense, I decided to investigate her living quarters. I would find her diary and learn the secrets of her heart. Anything important in the house not on a canvas was hidden in the kitchen. Searching in the spice cabinet, behind the teapot Lucie kept filled with whisky, I found a key attached to a paper disk on which was written
Nurse's Room
in my mother's hand. I planned my invasion for that afternoon, when Rose was at the Louvre, as she was most days when I returned from my medical classes.

A few hours later, I crept down the three stairs that led to the hallway off of Rose's suite. I could not recall the last time I had been in the Nurse's Room. I imagined it had housed my own caretaker at some point, though I never recollected having anyone look after me aside from Lucie and Auguste. The hallway had two doors. I passed the first, which held a shuddering, rusting furnace. The second door opened, with a jangle of bells, into Rose's room.

I had expected a jewelry box, and I stumbled into a riot. A stack of comics—Belphegor, Tintin, and Spirou and Fantasio—spilled to the floor and would not be coaxed into a pile. In the process, I knocked a pair of muddy roller skates off their pedestal (the Paris telephone directory) and into the dinner plate Rose had used as an ashtray. I cursed aloud.

On her desk sat a typewriter with a single jammed key pointing accusingly. Beside the typewriter was the secret to her solitary meals: a portable burner and a can of beans with a punctured lid.

I considered examining the contents of her dresser drawers (that haunting flash of white lace, once, at the waist of her skirt) but heard a tread in the hall and ran out, past the furnace and directly into Rose.

“Snooping about?”

“No,” I denied. “The hot water—Father said I—”

She raised her eyebrows. “I should have left the door open for you. Saved you the trouble of picking that lock. I tried it myself once, just to make sure it could be done.”

“I had a key,” I said.

“Finger my underthings, did you? Did you find my diary? No? Well, that's because I don't keep one. For exactly this reason.”

She swept past me into her room. The door remained open.

“What a mess you've made,” she said, and examined me, hand on hip. “Enough already! We have business to discuss.”

Rose pushed aside the clothes and the damp towel on her desk chair and threw the things in a heap on the floor. She perched at the foot of her bed, rolling an unopened can of beans on the carpet back and forth with her stockinged foot.

“How are your studies?” she asked.

“Fine,” I replied, my throat dry.

“You should assert yourself more,” she said. “I think you have a fine mind.”

“Thank you,” I said. She took out a cigarette and waited for me to light it, which I did.

“Tell me, what did I do wrong?” She picked a flake of tobacco from her tongue. “I know from that Swede that your father takes his assistants to visit the artists in their studios. I bought a new dress the week he had the appointment with Braque.” She blinked forcefully and looked out the window. “I was planning to wear it and return it with the pockets sewn. But I'm never invited. I've waited four weeks, and I know he's visited at least that many studios. It's past Easter; soon the high season will be over. I need to know what the artists are working on to stay current and useful.”

“I don't know what you did wrong,” I said, both wanting and not wanting to leave.

“Then find out,” she said, “or I cry about you sneaking around my room and getting your grubby fingers into my things.”

“I didn't do that.”

“But you thought about it. Tell me what you know.”

I inhaled. “You talked about money,” I said. “That was your mistake. You told the Princess Noailles the Gauguin was a good deal.”

“That woman is a princess?” Rose stabbed her cigarette onto the dinner plate. “Why does she dress like that, with her horrid lipstick smeared on her teeth? She kept spitting in my eyes while she talked. What an awful woman!” Rose put her hands over her face.

“Don't take offense,” I said, “because I think you will.”

“I promise. Give me something to swear on.” The can of beans rolled under the bed.
“Zut,”
she said. I stretched out my leg to find it and our knees touched. My foot located the can, and I sent it back in her direction.

“It's a custom. The princess, on the one hand, expects everyone to know she's filthy rich. How rich, and how she spends her money, on the other hand, is a private matter. So she can dress in a fur that's been dead fifty years and have her chauffeur drive her around town in a rusty old box. ‘To live happy, live hidden.’ She never
ever
talks about money. I doubt she knows how much she pays for anything. Her solicitor handles it and makes a heap for himself.”

“I was just making conversation. What can one say to those people?”

I shook my head. “Don't ever mention a price unless someone asks you. Pretend you hadn't even considered that money was involved. Turn to my father, as if you're saying, Mr. Berenzon, you handle this mystery.”

Rose chewed her lip. “How long until I can visit a studio?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. You know Father won't speak with me about his business.”

“You had heard about the princess.”

“That was said in passing to my mother, who also despises her.”

“Why?”

“She's an anti-Semite. She makes a show of leaving the orchestra early when they play Mendelssohn or Offenbach.”

“Yet she still buys paintings from your father.”

“True, but he is not the artist, nor is he her dinner guest.”

I waited for Rose to comment on the injustice of it, but she only looked pleased with understanding the puzzle and its pieces.

FATHER HAD BEEN TO VISIT MATISSE IN HIS MEDITER-
ranean sanctuary on Cimiez Hill, with its cages of doves, Moroccan tapestries, and views of the Roman ruins. Father loved the South in the winter, without its hordes. He was childlike and gay after a few hours spent in the presence of his artists, and this was both infectious and infuriating to me.

Tanned, sitting at our dinner table, he said, “Last time, I chose one set of paintings and when I had a leg over the threshold, the old Buddha said, ‘Wait, Daniel, those ones I have decided to keep!’ He's got a right to sell them on his own, of course. He suffers for them, says painting his delectable models and vases is more like slitting an abscess with a penknife or kicking down a door. Today Henri told me he begins to paint when he has the urge to strangle a man! I just nod. The paintings are so lovely. What a batty old Buddha! This time I chose all the ugly paintings and he switched his dotty mind and would only give me these marvelous still lifes and pink nudes. You could squeeze the lemons on the canvas, they're so bright. We're lucky we live across from Pablo and not Henri.”

“Henri has fewer legal problems,” Mother said.

“Only because he's too old to chase skirts. Now they all just work for him. And divorce suits Picasso.”

“Does it?” Mother asked. Her right hand played sixteenth notes against the tablecloth.

Father had helped Picasso negotiate the separation from his ballerina wife. (Before Rose, the thought that the world possessed a woman more beautiful than Olga Khokhlova had been inconceivable.) Picasso had worried that his beleaguered former bride would wrest half his paintings from him in the settlement. For three days, Father had sat over Monsieur Picasso's bankbooks, unwilling to trust anyone else to the task, and the two men drew up long lists of his assets. Somehow, Father had convinced Olga to part from Picasso without either money or art.

“Now that he has the Russian off his mind, he has five new paintings ready for me. I'll see them this afternoon. I've been dreaming of these, painting my own Picassos in my mind.” Father snatched up my mother's hand and kissed the curled fingers. “Can you feel it, the current running through us? We've grasped the cord that ties Manet's generation of French painting to ours.”

“Picasso is not French,” I said.

“He's French now,” Father replied.

“As French as Mother,” I said, and she laughed.

MATISSE'S AND PICASSO'S NEWEST PAINTINGS MUST
have pleased Father indeed, as the next morning he announced that he had set aside ten thousand francs—roughly the price of a new automobile—for me to invest in a painting. I took his blank check with a whoop and without a question ran for my coat and hat. It was eleven o'clock: auction hour. Mother went to her piano smiling. Father spoke to me tenderly, as if I were a young child. “This will be a grand occasion for you, Max. Take it all in at first. Don't act rashly.” I laughed and told him not to worry. I flew from the house, eager to spend the bounty I had earned but not deserved.

Drouot's appeared as a mirage amid the soot-stained facades of the city's apartment buildings. Though I had passed by the old mansion many times before, leaving my father here to buy treasures for his gallery, I did not enter it until that Monday, March 20, 1939.

I joined the crowd streaming inside and inhaled the smell of damp wool, face powder, and Macassar mustache oil. A woman with a nimbus of white hair led her spaniel amid a trio of Italians, holding their lit cigarettes above the crowd. The Italians debated which way to go and split in three different directions. The crowd slowed, swerved, and merged. It was thrilling to be there instead of in the lecture hall of the medical faculty, watching my surgery professor slice the skin of some jaundiced cadaver.

The rooms at Drouot's were not numbered in any discernible order. From Room Three by the entrance, at a sale of mid-eighteenth-century medical equipment, as if to remind me of my
dereliction of duty, an auctioneer bellowed, “A perfectly preserved scalpel!” Room Five, next door, was a sea of Oriental carpets. I could not locate Room Six, where the auction of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European painting would be held. I finally found it upstairs, next to Room Twelve, where a sale of fur coats attended solely by women already wearing fur coats was under way.

Room Six was the largest at Drouot's, with red velvet walls and carpeting and its white number six dangling loosely above the door. At the front of the long room was a platform, not unlike the ones I saw photographed at the Olympic ceremonies in Berlin, with two level tiers divided by a raised third plank; the auctioneer stood on this center plank, tapping a gavel into his palm. He resembled a painting of a cherub, with wide-spaced eyes and a pink mouth. He took a breath, touched his blond hair, and began the auction.

The auctioneer sold five paintings in less than five minutes. Five times he had cried,
“C'est vous? Adjugé!”
and yet, as much as I craned my neck and twisted in my seat, I could not fathom who had bought the painting. There was almost no detectable movement in the sea of overcoats. Everyone's nose was buried in the Sajan Auction Company catalog with a Sisley winter scene on its cover. I leaned over a few shoulders and saw that the auction goers marked down the starting price over the final bid for each painting like a fraction.

“Psst.”
A man leaning against the wall hissed at me and beckoned with a fat finger. He had a leonine head and a sailor's complexion. “You're in the wrong section, young man,” he said, in a rolling Greek accent. “Sit up front only if you can remember Waterloo. Any man who can still chew his own food stands in the back or on the sides. That way you see who else is bidding. Understood?”

“No one seems to be bidding at all,” I whispered.

“Yes, they are. Stand here with me.” He yawned. “Not that you should buy anything. It's strictly professionals today. They have their own tricks.” I craned my neck but recognized only my father's friend René Huyghe, paintings and sculpture curator at the Louvre, looking mole-eyed and funereal in his gray suit.

Lots 31 through 42 sped by in a blur of Dufy watercolors as
Drouot's employees in bellboy jackets barely had time to lift the paintings to the podium before they were whisked away

By Lot 45, I had begun to recognize familiar faces. There were four young curators who had once come to our gallery to authenticate a Tiepolo; there was Madame Bernheim in the back, reading Proust; Alain de Leonardis had one arm in a sling and the other round the shoulders of a blond American model; the Wildensteins’ oldest son was present, in need of a shave. To my surprise, I saw Rose, who nodded but did not smile before turning back to her catalog. Auguste winked at me from his seat at the end of the row. Ludovic Delanoë, my father's former secretary, was there also, back from his two-year tour of South America and biting his nails.

The auctioneer described Lot 50 in fantastic words that did not match his flat voice: “A classic example of Sisley's finest winter scenes, almost a symphony in white, ladies and gentlemen. Similar examples are in the Jeu de Paume. Bidding will begin at five thousand. Do I hear five thousand three, Monsieur Berenzon?” Upon hearing my name, I looked up with a start, but no, the auctioneer addressed my father, who now stood in the doorway, barely in the room at all. Father's eyes skimmed over me and his mustache twitched. A lily pinned to his breast had dusted his lapel with gold pollen, which shimmered in the light as if Father himself were gilt.

After ten thousand francs, my father indicated he would raise the bidding by five hundred, holding up five fingers. The gesture was so cool and knowing that my hand automatically tried it. “Eleven thousand from the young man to my left,” the auctioneer crowed. Father did not glance my way, and raised to eleven thousand five. The auctioneer fixed me with his electric stare and asked for another five hundred. “No,” I whispered, shaking my head, and an old woman with a yellow hat and veil took my place to do battle with my expressionless father.

Father stood with his arms folded. The hands that flashed in and out of the crook of his jacket were so pale he could have been wearing white gloves. At forty thousand francs, he was victorious.