Aaron Elkins - Old Scores

What I needed right then was a little peace to sort out my thoughts, but it was almost as crowded in the reception area as in the gallery. The bar along one wall was open, and by now people had had enough to drink so that the sound level was about where it is a couple of hours into a successful cocktail party. I peeked around a partition to look into the somewhat isolated bay just outside Vachey's study, with the paintings by Duchamp, Villon, et al. To my relief, only one person was in it, a woman in her sixties, who was slumped in one of two armchairs in the center, quietly sipping cognac and contemplating the Duchamp. Near her, on a butler's table, a waiter had set down and forgotten a tray with seven or eight glasses of cognac and a few empties.

By this time I'd decided I could use another glass myself, so I helped myself to one from the tray, offering my companion a perfunctory smile when she glanced at me. I got an uncordial nod in return, but sat in the other chair anyway. If she didn't bother me, I wasn't about to bother her.

The brandy tasted stale and heavy. All the same, I drank most of it down. My mind felt stale and heavy too. Maybe I didn't want to think; maybe I just needed a few minutes of passive contemplation on my own. The far wall of the bay was mostly made up of the glass doors that led into Vachey's antique study, now softly illuminated with indirect amber light, like an interior by Rubens. For a while I let my eyes rest on the furnishings in a mild, pointless, but somehow rewarding bout of covetousness. Then I turned toward the silvery blue Duchamp on the wall a few feet away. I could read the title on the placard: jeune fille qui chante. Singing girl.

"You think he's so wonderful, don't you?" The woman said in French, quite loudly.

"I beg your pardon?" I thought she might be calling to someone out in the reception area.

"I said," she replied, staring at the painting and not at me, "you all think he's so wonderful, don't you?"

"Uh… Duchamp?"

"No, not Duchamp." She jerked her head to the left, toward Vachey's study. "The upstanding, the virtuous, Rene Vachey. You all stand in line to kiss his ass, don't you? The great benefactor of society. Yes? Well, I say shit to that."

I began to see why she had the bay to herself.

I also realized that the tray of cognac had not been accidentally left by an absent-minded waiter. It was hers alone, and until I'd arrived to horn in, she'd been making solitary progress through it.

She turned to look at me, a blowzy woman with an awful coppery-red wig and copper-dyed eyebrows tweezed and teased into painfully thin, scanty arcs in which each separate filament of hair could be seen. Dry-eyed for the moment, her face was blotched and out-of-focus from crying, the mascara smeared, the lurid lipstick blurred and off-center. In her hair, on the left side, was a black velvet bow glittering with rhinestones, girlish and pathetic.

"You like him?" she said.

"Uh… Vachey?"

"Not Vachey, Duchamp."

The conversation was not improving.

"So?" she prompted. "Tell me. You like that painting?"

"Yes, it's fine," I said, putting down my glass and thinking about going. But to leave now would look too much as if I were fleeing (which I would be), and I didn't have the heart to be rude to this forlorn old woman. No doubt Louis would explain to me that it was me I was worried about, not her-that I was reacting to feelings of guilt generalized from the childhood suppression of aggressive impulses toward my mother, etc., etc.-and maybe he'd be right. Anyway, I supposed I could stand it a little longer.

She gave a little snort. "He likes it fine."

She stood up, a little rocky, and a little top-heavy too; one of those boxy, thin-legged women who put on weight above the waist, not below. Once reasonably steady, she went to the painting and stood beside it, lifting both arms, looking upward, her stretchy red lips parted in what I believe she thought was a carefree expression. When she realized she was still holding her glass, she stuck it in my hand and resumed her stance, expression and all.

"You see?" she said out of the corner of her mouth. I didn't see.

Slowly she lowered her arms. "This picture was made in 1929," she said with simple, slurred dignity. "I am the little girl, the model." Briefly, she struck the pose again. "You don't see it? The line of the arm? The tilt of the head? The expression of childish abandon?"

Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the works of Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase? We are talking about the prime mover of Dadaism here, one of the original Cubo-Futurists, the man we all have to thank for Conceptual Art, and this picture was right up there: a swirl of hard-edged overlapping forms like steel plates arranged in a complex spiral. You might be able to find the line of an arm or the tilt of a head if you were willing to be open-minded about it, but an expression? Of childish abandon, no less? Not bloody likely.

When I couldn't think of what to say, she gave a sigh of exasperation. "Naturally, monsieur, one changes with time. I am, ah, sixty-eight years of age, as it happens."

Oddly enough, I believed her-not about the sixty-eight, but about having posed for Duchamp. "You knew him then, madame? You were a model?"

"No, no," she said, gratified by the question. "I had an uncle who was Duchamp's chess partner for a time, and he recommended me to the artist as a sitter. Only that once. No, my life was given to music, not art. I was an opera singer. Somewhat before your time, I'm afraid. My name is-" She drew herself up. One of those hairline eyebrows rose as she peeked at me from under lowered lids. "-Gisele Gremonde."

"Gisele Gremonde," I repeated wonderingly. "Why, of course. You were famous for… wasn't it-"

"My Gilda-yes, that's right," she purred. "And my Violetta."

"Of course!" I exclaimed. No, of course I'd never heard of her, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Madame Gremonde turned into a prima donna before my eyes, taking back her cognac and re-seating herself as if she were on stage, regal and straight-backed. She finished her glass, picked up another, and gestured graciously toward the tray. "Please help yourself, monsieur."

But it didn't last. As she drank from the new glass, looking over its rim at the Duchamp, her eyes overflowed. Tears slid down her cheeks, leaving two oily tracks. Her mascara, her chins, and her body in the chair all slumped at once. She put down the glass and rubbed at her nose with a damp, wadded handkerchief that had been in her hand all along.

"Do you want to know the truth?" she asked, snuffling back the tears. "Would you like to hear the entire, sad, miserable story?"

I may be a pushover, but I knew I definitely didn't want to hear the entire miserable story. I put my glass on the table. "Madame, I've taken up too much of your time already. I've enjoyed-"

"Rene has had that painting for over forty years, did you know that? He bought it in 1951, to please me. It hung in his Paris apartment for many years. We used to look at it from our chairs at breakfast."

"At breakfast?" I was caught in spite of myself. "Are you- were you and Vachey-?"

"We were not married, no. Of course, Rene would have left his wife at a word from me, that was common knowledge, but my operatic schedule would not permit it, you see, and always my art came first. But we were very great friends." Her loose, crimson mouth wobbled, then firmed. "Well. That was some years ago. I bear no malice. Passion runs its course. One moves on to the new."

She laid a heavy hand on my forearm. "But always it was to be mine, this painting, you understand? He promised it to me some day, to me. And now I learn he has conveniently forgotten. I learn…" Her face was mottled with an angry flush. "Why should the Louvre have it? Does a freely given promise count for nothing once love is spent? Is the Louvre in such need of another picture?"