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

sounded out of breath.
    “Hi,” he said. “It’s me.”
    “Hello?” Colette said. “Who’s this?”
    “Gabriel,” he identified himself.
    “Oh, hi!” she said. She was someplace loud. The gym? A restaurant? A train station? His left hand worried the seam of his jeans against his thigh.
    Colette let the silence sit over the phone. She was obviously not going to help him. But why would she have contacted him if she didn’t want to see him?
    “Would you like to have dinner?” he asked.
    “Sure,” Colette answered quickly. “When?”
    “Um, I don’t know. Tonight?” Gabriel said. There was a silence. Gabriel closed his eyes, though it felt like it was brighter behind his lids. Why was he so awkward? Had it been so long since he’d asked someone out?
    “Yeah, okay, sure. Where do you want to meet?”
    Gabriel ran through a mental log of places he’d eaten before. They were few. The couscous place near school. That place he passed by on his way to the
métro
. Very French: candles and boars’ heads and lots of silverware. Finally, he named a touristy brasserie where he’d never eaten.
    Colette laughed. “You’re hilarious.”
    Gabriel laughed as well, as though he’d meant to make a joke. “You decide.”
    She said, “La Tour de L’Oqueau,” and named an address.
    Gabriel hung up, elated. There was nothing to do to clean up, no paints to cover, no chemicals to dispose of. Just put the pencil back into the box and close the coffee table book. It was like Gabriel was never even there.

Elm
    Elm’s colleague Ian had investigated the Attic and returned with some postcard-sized oils and accompanying drawings of the Hudson River School. Whittredge, not Elm’s favorite, but still name enough to draw the Hudson River Rats out of the proverbial woodwork for the fall auctions. Elm asked Ian to do the legwork—confirm the provenance, send the pieces to the authenticator, investigate potential reserves. The Hudson River School was in a minor resurgence—there’d been a secondary exhibit at the Fogg that reacquainted the public with its existence.
    It was only later that day that she realized she had not asked to see the paintings or drawings for herself. This lack of curiosity, she knew, was a symptom of the depression she’d been suffering since Ronan died. She stopped being interested in things not directly affecting her immediate circumstances. She’d lost all natural curiosity: What’s behind that door? What did that person mean? How does wireless work? And here she was, a supposed expert, a presumed devotee, who sent the drawings directly to the lab, to science, when she probably could have told just by looking at them whether they were forged, misattributed, or the real McCoy.
    Elm was a keen judge of drawings, etchings, lithographs, and all prints prior to the twentieth century. She wished she could trust Ian’s eye, but they had both agreed, after a couple of martinis at the Algonquin Hotel one night, that Ian’s talents lay in client relations—in selling or commissioning art, not in appreciating it. He admired it, adored it even, loved being around it, took an aesthete’s pleasure in viewing it. But he lacked that critical and ineluctable something that allowed a viewerto hear a painting speak—the “eye.” Elm had it, a way of seeing through a painting or drawing, of gathering in an instant its myriad qualities, good or bad, and forming an almost infallible judgment. No amount of study or exposure could teach you the eye if you weren’t born with it. And while it wasn’t necessary to have the eye to work in art (many collectors, gallerists, and even some artists lacked it and were successful), it was essential for a director. Ian would grow and deepen, certainly, gain a greater store of knowledge from which to draw comparisons, but he would always be hobbled by his dead eye.
    Elm’s eye, on the other hand, had been honed since birth, growing up her whole life around Tinsley’s with