A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend Read Free Book Online Page A

for a home, and that made him angry with himself. An artist thrived on imbalance, on the edge of deprivation, which made him strive for more. Comfort bred complacency. He leaned against the studio wall, which bowed under his meager weight. He straightened, steadied the wall.
    This painting wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure why. It was like a sentence left trailing off. It was like his French: fine, but not eloquent, not quite right. He was calling it
La Gare
, and it was simply the corner of a nonspecific railway station, a gypsy beggar and a woman having a nervous smoke. He was trying to work mostly with a gray palette, branching out into olives and mauves, but the subjects refused to blend adequately, almost like he had cut out and collaged separate paintings. There was something unfluid about his work. Gabriel’s professor at the École had called it “brutal.” The gallerist he’d convinced to pay a studio visit said it felt “unfiltered, diffuse.” But it wasn’t that. The canvas was somehow always present in his work. Like a helium balloon tethered to a chair, it was never able to transcend its medium.
    When Gabriel was stuck, he liked to copy paintings in his sketchbook.He opened the dog-eared coffee table book he’d bought off the
quai
for ten euros at the end of a long, rainy day. A plate of Canaletto’s
The Feast Day of St. Roch
was most interesting because of the trio of figures standing along the canal edge. Though blurry, there was a naturalness to their poses; something had caught their eyes while they were busy with other tasks. A man in robes, two women, one of whom was carrying her shopping. Quickly, Gabriel got absorbed, picking up his pencil and sketchbook. He sat on the high stool and began to draw. He sketched the form of the man, his female neighbor next.
    He hummed nearly silently, “The doge is coming, the doge is coming,” to remember why the figures were staring at the palace, though nothing was happening. “The doge is visiting. It is an important day, a day to keep heads up and eyes bright. A day to shade foreheads to see farther in the setting sun.” Gabriel sketched a sharp shadow, a raised flat hand. “The robes swirl in a sudden gust of wind. The sleeves of the woman puff and undulate. She clutches her basket. She has purchased … a chicken and …”
    His own preparatory sketches looked anemic, incomplete, yet this one, in Canaletto’s style, for Canaletto’s painting, that had already been long completed, was alive. The lines were fluid, like Canaletto’s, the hand sure, the graphite thick. This was not the way art was done. This was backward, drawing sketches of museum pieces would get him nowhere but the weekend swap at the
marché aux puces
.
    Disgusted, Gabriel lit a piece of incense, aware that if Marie-Laure were here, she’d yell over the partition. He felt constricted—roommates, studio-mates, boss, even his fucking pants were too tight. Fuck mother-fucking Canaletto.
    Sure enough, Marie-Laure’s tight soprano summited the corrugated walls. “We agreed you wouldn’t light that in here,” she said. “You know it bothers my lungs.”
    And yet the turpentine and oil paints and fixative are mountain air, Gabriel thought. Out loud he said, “Sorry.”
    His phone vibrated. It was a text message, which he had to hold far from his face to read the small letters. “What’s up?” it read.
    It took him several minutes to type out, “Who is this?” Why did everyone think texting was so much faster than calling? He could not get his phone to put in the correct accent marks.
    “Colette :)”
    Was that a sideways smiley face? Still, he sat up straighter. This was an interesting development.
    “What are you up to?”
    He tried to make his fingers hit the small keys, but he kept passing up letters and turning them into numbers. Without meaning to, he pressed call.
    By the time he realized what he’d done it was too late. Colette answered on the fourth ring. She