Roman was back, like a relay runner, to grab the pen. Yale returned to his own list, the hopeful empty spaces for dates beside each piece, but he found he had nothing to add to the timeline but 1912—arrival in Paris.
“And next to me was a man with dark, curly hair—quite like yours, Yale, although his face was longer—and as he sat there, he made himself a crown of paper clips. Linked them in a circle and put it on his head. He sat there like it wasn’t the least bit unusual, the sun glinting off him. I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I’d never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don’t know if that makes sense, but there it was.”
Yale tried to say something, but didn’t know how to begin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lincoln Park lagoon, the two of them sharing Richard’s Leica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting with the world that was simultaneously selfish and generous—grabbing at beauty and reflecting beauty back. The benches and fire hydrants and manhole covers Nico and Richard stopped to photograph were made more beautiful by their noticing. They were left more beautiful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found himself seeing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the ripples of sun on a record store window.
He said, “I get it, I do.”
Roman, meanwhile, was sweating, his face shiny. Yale wondered if it was this talk of love that made him nervous, or if he was getting sick. The way he shifted on the couch made Yale suspect the former. Well, the last thing Yale himself needed right now was a love story.
“Ranko was hosting a picnic the next day and he invited me along. And that was it, I was lost. He smelled right, like a dark closet. So much of sex is in the nose. I do believe that. And he was in love with me too.” She stopped, held a finger up, appeared to concentrate on breathing. Yale was tempted to ask a question, just to fill the silence, but here was Debra, with big white mugs of coffee for both Yale and Roman. No sugar, no cream: just coffee so thin you could see the cup bottom through it. Roman took the mug awkwardly, rested it straight on the coffee table. Debra leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, a statue of bored impatience.
“Is this still about Ranko?”
Yale nodded. Roman said, “We’re at the paper clips.”
“He’s the entire reason she gave you the art. You know that, right?”
“I don’t deny it,” Nora said before Yale had to decide how to respond.
Roman asked what she meant, but Debra laughed loudly. “Seventy years is just a really long time to be obsessed with someone,” she said. “Don’t you think? Like, I’m sure he was a great guy, but he’s been dead forever, and she’s still choosing him over her family.”
Roman said, “I don’t get why that means she had to give the Brigg—”
“Debra,” Yale said. And then he found he had no idea what to say next. He’d just been desperate to break the tension, to change the subject. “Is there any sugar?”
And when she stormed back to the kitchen, Yale got up to follow, signaled Roman to keep writing.
Debra opened the refrigerator and stared into it; this surely wasn’t where the sugar was kept, but Yale hadn’t really wanted any, anyway. He’d been hoping Debra didn’t hate him as much as she once had. She’d be a valuable resource after Nora passed away.
He said, “It has to be so stressful, taking care of her.”
Debra didn’t answer.
“Emotionally and financially, both. Hey, look, if you want to get that jewelry appraised, I’d be happy to introduce you to the right people. You don’t just want to go to some shop up here. If you’re interested in the monetary value—I mean, you might be surprised. I know someone in Chicago who would even drive up here. As a favor to me.”
Debra turned. She was holding, for some reason, a bottle of mustard. She had tears in her eyes, but they must have been from a minute ago. She said, flatly, “That’s sweet of you.”
“It’s no problem.”
“You know, I’ve never been mad at you personally. It would be easier to hate you if you were an asshole. This is how you get stuff from people, isn’t it. You’re nice. And it’s not even fake.”
Yale used to believe he was nice, but Charlie might say different. Teddy would too. He shrugged and said, “No, it’s not fake.” To his great amazement, Debra smiled at him.
Nora was telling Roman, when they returned, about moving in with a divorced fellow student from the Académie. “We were in a little flat over a shoe repair shop on Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Oh, dear,” she said to Roman, “do you speak French?”
“I do, actually. I’ve—my dissertation is on Balthus, and I’ve—”
“Ha! That pervert! Well, good, you can spell. The husband supported her still, sent money every month. I bribed my aunt’s bonne with a few francs, and my poor aunt was too far gone to notice I’d left.”
Yale sat, tried to skim Roman’s notes, but he hadn’t written much. Debra pulled a dining room chair in.
“So those were my student years. Drawing, painting, being with Ranko. Those cow sketches are from that time, from a trip we took around Normandy. March of 1913, I’d say.”
Yale jotted the date next to the three Ranko Novak sketch slots. The absolute least important of the details he’d been sent for. If he returned with only the cow sketch dates, Bill would think it was a prank.
“We wanted to get married but we needed to wait, because in April, Ranko entered the Prix de Rome. It wasn’t just a prize, it was a contest for students, a yearlong thing, and they’d eliminate you one by one. It was like Miss America, the way each round they send those poor girls off crying. And—can you guess?—it was only open to unmarried men. You had to be French, and of course another student raised some nonsense that Ranko wasn’t truly French—it was his name, I suppose, the fact that he wasn’t named Renée—but they let him go forward anyway. It upset him, though.
“He was quite fragile. And strange! Now, he’s one who should not have been at the Beaux-Arts. It was the establishment, you know, and they wanted to tame him. It was the age of the bohemian, and the last thing you’d want was a pat on the back from the old standard-bearers. He was always tamping down his oddness for them. It worked, unfortunately, in the end. He sanded his work down till they loved it.”
Roman said, “Those two paintings don’t seem sanded down.”