A Masterpiece of Revenge Page 4

  I also asked him — in an offhand manner — if any of his friends were addicted to drugs, or if they even took drugs recreationally. Or whether he had tried any. He answered in the negative, though a little quizzically.

  “Dad, don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course, of course. What is there about life in America that you least like?”

  I knew that my questions must have seemed a little out of character. But I felt sure that his replies would provide me with some information, a clue perhaps, anything to give me a context for those photos.

  All I learned was what I’d already known — that my son was a careful young man who measured the risks before running headlong into some action. And he was no Lothario. Yes, he broke hearts, but he never broke promises. In that way, we were alike, and the realization did not hurt my vanity.

  We said good night in the lobby of the Durant Hotel, a comfortable place located near the university.

  “You know, Dad,” Jean-Louis teased, “there have been at least fifteen small earthquakes since your arrival. Have you at least stopped worrying about that?”

  I burst out laughing. It was true that when we talked on the phone I fretted endlessly about earthquakes.

  I hugged him and watched him pull away from the curb in his yellow Mustang convertible. He was a long way from motorcycles now. We had agreed that tomorrow we would spend the day together.

  California (Northern California, at least) possesses the appearance of paradise. I forced myself not be taken in by appearances. I needed to be watchful and observant. Danger could be lurking almost anywhere.

  For two days I kept my eyes open, scrutinizing every face we passed, observing gestures. I put my powers of observation onto full alert, particularly when he introduced me to his friends.

  Max, a Nigerian Jean-Louis often spoke to me about, was a courtly and kind man. He was incredibly tall.

  Shirley, a pretty young woman with blond hair and a slightly affected squint, seemed obsessed with her appearance. She and Jean-Louis played tennis. It was clear their relationship went no deeper.

  Audrey, a plump young woman with a very sweet disposition, informed me within a minute of our acquaintance that she was in love with a guitarist in a jazz fusion band. From what I could tell, Jean-Louis was a sort of brother to her, a soul willing to listen to her tales of infatuation.

  Amanda was a different matter. I knew that she had slept with my son the minute I saw them exchange a conspiratorial look. She was beautiful, with Sharon Stone-like looks, but I found her lacking mystique — the case for so many American women. She was too tanned, too blond, too — how can I put it? — self-assured. I had a hard time imagining her cooking up a plot against us.

  The only person who seemed even mildly suspicious was Gregory, who lived on the same floor as my son. He was gay and sported a long beard. He had a faraway look, and indeed was very involved in spiritual matters — a channel for voices, he said, a medium for souls from the Other Side. “I’m a kind of phone line between the living and the dead,” he confided to me (nearly making me burst out laughing). “Yesterday I put an old woman in touch with a man who lived four thousand years ago. The man used my mouth to say that his spirit would come to her and help her leave her mortal coil, so that she might join with eternals.’’

  Good heavens, I thought.

  “See, the key to it,” he added in hushed tones, “is that they had once been lovers in the lost city of Atlantis.”

  Gregory’s sole purpose in life was to help people find their Disembodied Superior Self, to better enable them to make the astral journey. He added with dismay that he couldn’t convince Jean-Louis of this, though it was clear that my son was an ancient soul.

  The more I listened to him, the more I realized that Gregory was more a figure of pity than an object for suspicion. I was quickly persuaded that his plans for “holistic global consciousness” didn’t conceal some Machiavellian scheme.

  Despite all the can't about the spirits of enlightenment, all these leafy ideologies, all the talk about the rejuvenating powers of certain kinds of water, all the otherworldly premonitions about the coming of the Age of Spiritual Enlightenment, and all sorts of other neosixties hogwash, I found Berkeley quite a healthy place on the whole. All this self-indulgence took place in a pleasant climate, where vigorous exercise and clean living were the strongest cults of all. Jean-Louis seemed to be living a life that was both healthy and sane. He jogged every morning, played tennis twice a week, and he studied hard.

  Indeed, the strongest impression I got about my son from this trip was how much more mature he seemed. How absurd was the idea that he was caught up in some shady business. I decided to relax and enjoy our last day together. We had a picnic beneath the sequoias, California’s most venerable treasures.

  And so it was with a light heart that I went to the Young Museum in San Francisco to examine the Le Nain painting.

  The central question, of course, was which Le Nain were we talking about here? There are three — Mathieu, Antoine, and Louis, all brothers — just as there are three furies, three graces, three kings, three witches in Macbeth, three little pigs, three cardinal virtues, and three fates. Their lives are a complete mystery. We don’t even know the year of their births. Le Nain (which means “the dwarf”) is, metaphorically, a three-headed, six-handed creature. The question was, which of the three painted which painting? Often when they signed their works they used a first name, but followed by a question mark, because they collaborated. Deciding which was whose was a dicey affair, even for experts like myself.

  Who indeed is responsible for all those magnificent portraits of country folk, immortalized in their misery and despair? Those pictures were thorns in the side of Louis XIII and his cronies at the court of the Louvre. Somber indictments of aristocratic excess. The three dwarves painted to express their identification with the poor, to demand bread for them. Some dared to call the paintings vulgar and ridiculous. I find they possess a poignant majesty.

  The Le Nain I was to look at was part of the country folk series, though the size of the canvas was smaller than usual — somewhat along the lines of Visiting Grandmothers. It had the same dark shades of browns and spots of color, the same stiffness and self-consciousness.

  The tests done on the work appeared to confirm its authenticity. Microscopic and spectrometric analyses provided further proof. But some lingering doubt remained; to put it to rest the Young’s curators wanted an outside opinion.

  Despite the test results thus far, the painting was on the borderline between being a true work and a fake. A large number of paintings in the world today exist in such a state of limbo.

  Experts such as myself are called in to provide some transcendental truth that either will save them or damn them. When we cannot provide this service, we become the objects of scorn. The pressure to decide matters definitively is enormous.

  The truth is that sometimes certainty is simply not possible. What mistakes have been committed in the name of “gut reaction”! Innocent people have been put into prisons, and “masterpieces” hung on the walls of the Louvre or the Met. So many errors of attribution! Think of the now legendary Hurdy-Gurdy Player, which has been attributed, respectively, to Murillo, Zurbarán, Velazquez, Rizzi, Strozzi, Herrera the Elder, and Mayno. These days it is considered the work of either Georges Dumesnil de La Tour or “Unknown.”

  A relative matter, this business of attribution. Determining whether the painting in question was a true Le Nain would complicate matters enough, given that there are three possible fathers.

  I was shown the painting and went to work: I gazed at it, sniffed it, tasted it, and scrutinized the contrasts in the planes of color. I felt a curious sensation of detachment. The painting looked perfect, but it didn’t breathe. True masterpieces transport you inside their world. Not this one. There were, moreover, some suspicious-looking cracks.

  The instant I can tell something is a copy I am repelled, forced by a deep feeling of
revulsion to turn away from the work. I detest fakery in all of its forms. If I am sure of my opinion, I will not withhold it. I am one of the few in my field to be so blunt, I believe. It is a matter of integrity. I find it extraordinary that others can be so casual about the truth.

  I remember a conversation I had with a historian, a renowned academic, who, among other things, was extremely tolerant.

  “Really, Charles,” he said to me once. “Think about it for a moment. Where does creation start? Picasso himself said that the light of a painting always gives rise to another painting. And Pascal teased Montaigne years after Montaigne’s death about how much he borrowed from Plutarch. Aren’t we all plagiarists in some sense?”

  I asked him if all those wonderful turns of phrase I’d read in his last book were really his, or if he had “borrowed” them from some other source.

  The curator at the Young Museum was nearly in tears by the time I had finished rendering my judgment. I spent a good deal of time consoling him, then left for the airport. I was flying to Los Angeles to visit the celebrated Griffith Institute, which works closely with the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Rey and the Getty Museum in Malibu. Griffith was one of the few laboratories I was not familiar with that was devoted to pictorial study.

  The visit was very edifying. What remarkable progress has been made in the study of painting since Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen first X-rayed a canvas in 1895! Like all art historians, I am deeply appreciative of the gifts scientific analysis has given us. Machines see things the human eye cannot. By bringing invisible images to the surface, and revealing the stages of artistic creation — sketches, paint-overs, second thinking — photographic techniques, radiography, and microchemical analysis, to name a few, have been of indispensable help. I am the first to pay them homage.

  The Griffith was at the cutting edge of this kind of technology. The director, bursting with pride, showed me all his marvelous equipment. I told him how impressed I was by everything, which elated him.

  My words inspired him to take me into his confidence.

  “I have something remarkable to tell you. We are at this very moment in the process of analyzing a large work attributed to Claude Lorrain. You of all people must realize what this means. An unknown masterpiece!”

  This was stunning news indeed.

  “Where is the painting from?” I managed.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say. All that I can tell you is that the first results were very, very positive. They came from the Oxford Institute.”

  Ah, yes. The Oxford Institute. I remembered meeting Jane Caldwell at a symposium a year earlier. A striking woman, though very emotional. The fame of her laboratory was growing. One of these days, I thought, I am going to have to go and pay it a visit.

  I told the Griffith director I was intrigued by the news, and would await further developments.

  3

  My trip to California had set the world to rights. On the plane taking me home to Paris, I relived each moment with Jean-Louis, who — to my delight — had told me he would be coming back to France at Christmas. That was a mere three months off. I would find the tree ornaments, I would shop for gifts. And I would work in peace — and with peace of mind.

  I took advantage of everything Air France’s first class had to offer — champagne, caviar, foie gras, Bordeaux. I had refound my taste for life, and the appetite followed.

  Relief reconnected me to my surroundings. Before, everything had left me feeling distracted or bored. Daily news seemed irrelevant. Now I could read the newspaper with gusto. It was all so compelling — the latest elections in France, developments in the Middle East, the stock market. Most compelling of all was the possibility that a lost Lorrain painting had been found.

  I found myself looking with interest at the woman sitting across the aisle from me. There was, I found, something very appealing about her. Her head was leaning to one side, affording a view of what looked like an extremely comely earlobe.

  I have always found ears sensual parts of the female body, whether chaste ears, white and fine, or voluptuous ears with fleshy lobes, such as the ones you find in a Toulouse-Lautrec portrait.

  The pearl-like specimens belonging to my neighbor on the plane made me want to nuzzle them. Ever since the death of Sophie, I have had no real love life, though now and again the dull roots will stir, set off by something small usually — a smell, a freckle, an ear. Desire is bittersweet, for I am always reminded by these twinges that I can never again share them with Sophie.

  Before Sophie, love was to me what it is to so many men: a form of exchange. These dalliances poison the soul, I am sure of it. Worse, they instill boredom.

  Sophie had tumbled into my life on the eve of my fortieth birthday, by the purest of chance and the most unlikely of places: a museum devoted exclusively to Chinese puzzles, located in a suburb of Paris.

  What first drew my attention to her was her laugh — the quality of it, the true joy it seemed to express. I turned my head to find its source and found myself looking at dimpled cheeks and eyes the color of pine pitch, eyes alive with mischief.

  She was with another young woman, and the two of them were giggling uncontrollably before an ivory bague-naudier, one of those games of dexterity designed to drive one crazy.

  Our eyes met. From that moment onward my one overriding fear in the world was losing her. I followed the two women out. Luck was with me. When we got to the museum’s exit, it was pouring rain. I was standing with them in the entryway. They were debating how to get to the train station without getting soaked. I offered to share my umbrella and then, throwing caution to the winds, invited them to join me at the café across the way. That way, I said, we could wait out the rain.

  Before we had even finished our coffee I knew I wanted her. I wanted to live with her, I wanted her to have my children. My love was immediate and authentic. I had found the real thing.

  By the time we parted company that day, I knew everything I needed to about her: that she was single, lived alone, and composed music. I even found out where she lived.

  The next day I hurried over to the corner where her building was located. I had no particular plan in mind. I suppose I simply hoped that “by accident” we would meet. A fierce thunderstorm was brewing. Walking beneath the windows, I heard someone making beautiful sounds, sounds that seemed to come from some other universe. A piano. I found the spot where I could hear it best and stood there, transfixed.

  In my mind now the music I heard merged with that late-summer thunderstorm, expressing the eternal combat between light and dark, between power and grace. Whoever had created that sound was not one of those poor scribblers who crowd contemporary music with atonal, passionless sounds. It was her music. It was she. She was becoming a work of art to me, a painting broken free, gloriously free, of its frame.

  I would have waited a week in that summer storm, there on that corner. But the heavens smiled. The rain stopped, the music stopped, and Sophie emerged from her apartment. I ran around the corner, turned around, buried my nose in a book, and rounded the corner again — two steps ahead of her. Oops!

  “Well, well,” I said, sounding as casual as I could, “isn’t this a surprise!”

  She burst out laughing. “Sorry I’m late. I was practicing scales. So, shall we be off?”

  I looked at her, confused, but nodded.

  An hour later, we were listening to a student of Benjamin Britten’s playing a very cosmic version of The Clocks of Lakmé on a Moog synthesizer. Our fingers met.

  Afterward, she invited me to her apartment. She had already prepared a lunch for two.

  Sophie never admitted that she’d seen me from the window, nor that she had planned the whole thing. I never asked her.

  Three months later, she said “I do” at the Hotel de Ville. Nine months after that I was holding her hand in a dismal birthing room. At 10:29 in the morning one Sunday in September, we had Jean-Louis.

  Over the months our lives blossomed. What
had I done to deserve this happiness? She composed sonatas, Jean-Louis grew, and I worked on my projects. Our life was a priceless work of art, a magic circle. I had nothing left to wish for.

  “Such happiness cannot last,” my grandmother would have said.

  It didn’t. Faces, portraits, tell everything. We pretended, Sophie and I, that she was not that ill: it was just mastitis. The test her doctor wanted to run was a routine mammography, the sort that women take regularly. I nonetheless decided to go with her.

  While the technician was developing the X rays, the doctor showed us an echograph and a scintilloscope, diagnostic equipment that was, as I remarked, not so different from the machines that analyze works of art. I remember having drawn parallels between the ways of detecting anomalies of the breast and those used to find a composition hidden beneath the surface of Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Man — in that case a woman leaning over a cradle.

  Suddenly the technician ended the conversation and said in a perceptibly different tone, “OK, fine. The X rays are very clear. Dr. Bernard will get these results the day after tomorrow, at the very latest.”

  The following morning Dr. Bernard called. He wanted to examine Sophie and to run some more tests. A simple biopsy, that’s all. A week later, when the results had arrived, we went to see him.

  Sophie would need an operation, he told us, and as soon as possible. Behind the carefully chosen words and couched phrases I could make out the words “cancer,” “chemo,” and “radiology.”

  The operation was set for three days hence. We spent two days shuttling between fear and hope.

  After the operation, it was all too clear that Sophie had breast cancer. It had metastasized into her liver. Small-cell cancer. The swiftest and most terrible of all.

  Watching her fade away was like watching a great work disintegrate. Soon all that was left was a sketch from which all color had seeped away. Then even it was gone from view.