‘An honour so many here could claim,’ Pierre-Luc shot back.
‘The Simone Fan Club,’ The Bear rambled on.
‘What about you?’ parried Pierre-Luc.
‘I don’t know how long we’ve known each other,’ said The Bear dreamily. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m a close friend. We see each other once in a while. I do a little work on her house sometimes. What about you?’
‘About the same,’ Pierre-Luc judged. ‘She comes to my drawing class once in a while. The students love her.’
‘Oh, wait a minute,’ said The Bear with a spark of recognition. ‘The drawing teacher. She talks about you all the time.’
This unexpected tidbit should have cheered Pierre-Luc up, convinced him of his significance in Simone’s eyes. But no: he saw instead an illustration of the confounding multiplicity of his friend’s lives, most of which he had no sense of or part in. To be nothing more than a member, even a member in good standing, of the Simone Fan Club was not what he wanted, was not what Pierre-Luc wanted at all. Jealousy had gotten its paws on him, and he found he was ashamed.
‘Excuse me,’ said Pierre-Luc to The Bear. ‘I’m waiting for someone. I’m going to go see if.’
Back in the main room of the gallery, Pierre-Luc pretended to examine another artist’s abstract paintings, displayed in all their pastel blandness. From time to time he shot a look toward the front door, where Sarah-Jeanne Loubier continued to fail to appear. His glass was empty, his wrist a constellation of pins and needles. A little later the tall Black man in the pelisse walked out of the gallery. He was alone, which tempered Pierre-Luc’s jealousy, but he carried under his arm a package wrapped in kraft paper that all available evidence suggested must be an acquisition.
A connoisseur of erotica, said the narrator of the novel in Pierre-Luc’s mind. Italics his.
At this point, one would expect Pierre-Luc to retreat to the backroom to find Simone, where she might still be surrounded by an exuberant throng of admirers. Let’s entertain, however, the possibility that, driven by the misplaced pride with which artists have created so many dramas, Pierre-Luc decided instead to mope around on his own until such a point in time as Sarah-Jeanne Loubier should choose to appear.
‘We’re going to eat,’ Simone would say. ‘You coming?’
‘No, no,’ Pierre-Luc would say by way of an excuse, ‘I’m waiting for my student.’
‘Have it your way,’ Simone would counter, masking her surprise.
Pierre-Luc would answer with only an enigmatic nod. And then wait.
Only much later would Sarah-Jeanne Loubier darken the door, eyes half-hidden under bushy chestnut bangs, back bent under a too-heavy bag, looking apologetic to be there at all.
‘Oh,’ she’d say. ‘You’re still here. Sorry I’m so late. What happened to your wrist?’
(Insert further explanation of tendinitis.)
‘So you’re saying you were forced to stop drawing?’ Sarah-Jeanne Loubier would exclaim, deeply moved by his account.
‘Yeah, but that also made me a teacher,’ Pierre-Luc would offer as mitigating circumstances. ‘If it weren’t for the tendinitis,’ he would say, committed to dancing with the story he’d come with, ‘I wouldn’t have had the good luck’ – Would he really say ‘luck’? He would – ‘to teach you.’ And I don’t know if I was really good enough to make it as an artist. I was okay, sure … I think I’m better as a teacher.’
‘But we’ll never know now,’ Sarah-Jeanne would say.
‘I could have put out a comic or two,’ Pierre-Luc would reckon, ‘but I probably would have spent most of my time on illustration contracts. They pay better. Slowly but surely I’d have given up on my own work; best case, maybe I’d be a well-paid freelancer for magazines and kids’ books. Just another name in the directory of the illustrators’ guild. I’m not saying it’s a bad way to go, you know. A lot of you will end up as illustrators. Only a few will have the kind of career we’ve dangled out in front of you. It’s tough, but that’s how it is. And you have to understand that it’s better that way, I think, when you have a talent like yours, and good healthy muscles, it’s important to push to the very limits of what you can do. Seize every opportunity. Sorry to be so harsh. It’s not really my style but it has to be said. We live in a brutal world. Especially the art world.’
After this discussion they’d survey the backroom, which was, after all, the reason for their visit. They’d be the last ones left, aside from the gallery staff, busy cleaning and closing.
‘I didn’t know she drew that kind of thing,’ Sarah-Jeanne Loubier would let slip, and with it the appearance of, what, the seed of some trouble?
In any event, Pierre-Luc would feel, at the sight of Simone’s drawings of bodies inflamed with desire and unconscious of their nudity, an ache of his own compounded by his student’s uncomfortably close physical presence.
‘It is her favourite subject,’ he’d eventually spit out. ‘Want a glass of wine?’
‘White, I guess,’ Sarah-Jeanne would say quietly, still intent on Simone’s drawings.
‘Listen,’ Pierre-Luc would say in a commanding tone. ‘Go talk to her. She’s approachable. You have an exceptional talent, she thinks so, you’ve already heard it enough from me surely, and she can give you good advice, introduce you to the right people, galleries, artbook publishers, so you’ll never have to sell out. There are some things you can’t learn from me. See what I mean?’
‘You’re funny,’ Sarah-Jeanne would reply with a serene smile, she who never smiled.
And Pierre-Luc would know he had said too much.
Fabrice Mansaré had been walking with his brown-paperwrapped package under his arm for a few minutes when a sedan with tinted windows, grey this time, pulled unhurriedly up alongside him. Two thick men got out. One opened the back door. Fabrice Mansaré coolly took his seat next to a small phlegmatic man, different from the last one. The engine started.
‘We don’t know exactly what you’re up to,’ said the man, ‘nor do we particularly care. We just want you to lie low. For as long as it takes to.’
‘I was running some errands,’ explained Fabrice Mansaré.
‘Sure,’ conceded the phlegmatic man. ‘Errands. Far be it from us to interfere with your “errands.” You’re a free man. We’re all free men here.’
The man pondered this aperçu at length, like an oenologist according a grand cru the deep and penetrating consideration it deserved. He’d been warned about this Charles Rose. Some said he was a bit of a maverick. But then who wasn’t unorthodox, in their field? And was not this unorthodoxy the very hallmark of excellence? The phlegmatic man wondered about Charles Rose’s purchase. A work of art. A collector. But the phlegmatic man soon discarded this conclusion, as that epithet had never been applied to Fabrice Mansaré, who, though he might be smiling nervously as he thought of the work laid flat on his knees, secure in its sealed kraft-paper wrapping, was doing so for personal reasons that might well be indelicate to say out loud, but had decidedly nothing to do with his being a connoisseur of erotica, as Pierre-Luc insinuated upon watching him leave the gallery.
‘I promised to pick this up in person,’ Fabrice Mansaré continued, ‘and didn’t want to break my word.’
‘You could have sent someone,’ the phlegmatic man argued with a certain cogency. ‘We have no shortage of boots on the ground, for “errands” of this kind. Your job,’ he stressed, ‘is to lie low. And now we’d like to drop you off. Do you have other errands to run on the way?’
The car stopped in a supermarket parking lot. One of the massive men re-emerged half an hour later