A Masterpiece of Revenge by J.J. Fiechter Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œSuch 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.
    Jean-Louis, a mere toddler, kept me from giving in to terror and despair. With time I experienced a sort of rebirth, the kind that comes when the heart, wrung dry, finds another reason to live.
    I began loving Jean-Louis like a mother and a father. Sophie’s love for him had become part of my love for him. Through him, she lived in me. Sometimes the sensation of her presence is physical. She is sitting on the bed. I can feel the weight of her head on my shoulder. I can caress the folds of her dress while talking to her, even smell her perfume.
    Slowly, brush stroke by brush stroke, my life after her death regained some of its fullness. I had two missions, two guiding lights: Jean-Louis and art. Everything else meant nothing. I had few friends, no hobbies. I concentrated only on what was essential, on what lay at the heart of my existence. With that kind of focus, I almost had no choice but to become famous.
    The disdain with which I treated my growing renown made me all the more renowned.
    I became France’s best-known expert on seventeenth-century painting by dint of sheer hard work, intuition, and a steady eye. “Only the eyes of the master can really see,’ says La Fontaine. I not only learned to see, I learned how to listen to art.
    I