Affairs of Art Read Free Page B

coffee, his cat, and sometimes the words that pirouette beneath a lamp. They had poked about in the long bookcase that started low on the wall, to leave room for paintings. Only novels were corded there, aside from the Flaubert section that held stacks of biographies and secondary material, forbidden to even the closest friends.
    Denis Léman was the last to have had the chance to be amazed by it. To secure François after an affair of a few days, he had made him a drawing. A wavy line emerging, black, from a red triangle, to which he believed he had succeeded in giving depth. What was important was the title: An Unbroken Lament Rises from the Ergastulum (Flaubert). But Dubeau knew the quotation came from the Robert dictionary, he knew everything, and he had given back the drawing and the trickery, had shown him to the door, had banished him without a word. That evening, François Dubeau had stopped needing disciples — or wanting them.
    The air is heating up in the living room where the seven invited guests take their seats, squeezed onto the leather sofas three by three. Denis Léman will make do with the piano stool, with its view of the poignant Betty Goodwin that depicts in a pink holocaust the death of the body of a woman who has grown up without being born.
    Marianne Dubeau came in only minutes before them but the Bordeaux is already in the glasses, simple ones, on the table — bare, Italian. The silence, the absurdity gnaw at them. Denis Léman thinks of those novels by Agatha Christie that assemble murderers or future murderers on a desert island or a train so they can inflict upon themselves the fate that has already been assigned them.
    Dubeau was no joker, indeed he imposed gravity. Denis Léman wonders if he is going to die, though he has no sign of the terrible disease, nor does his lover of the moment, who faces him without meeting his gaze. A slow-acting poison, perhaps. It is still so obscure, the virus that is beginning to kill within their ranks, the plague that some say has a latency period of ten years. It has been three or four years since Denis Léman became entangled with Dubeau, and what does he know about Jean-Marc Daigle, his soon to be ex-lover of the moment, who was so beautiful before the terrible shadows killed his already dark eyes? Their gazes meet amid a shared terror brushed with hostility.
    Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The Seven Deadly Sins. Better, the seven of hearts, immortalized in Dubeau’s bathroom by a Québécois emulator of Warhol, now consigned to obscurity. François was fond of that lithograph, printed in an edition of seven copies; it suggested a secret formula behind the number in the shape of a question mark. A sign, well, well, like the gold-and-black engraving that’s just been burnt along with him. Seven of hearts, the death card. They had all been naked before the seven of hearts, surrendered during the most innocent ablutions. Certainly the boys, and, Denis believed, most likely Hélène and the calm dark-skinned woman who introduced herself as Évelyne and who is now meditating before a minute sketch by Dallaire, a cat-blue vase under pastel peonies planted on both a Niçois sea and a grandmother’s shawl (1951). Denis Léman doesn’t remember this weakness of the critic’s. Pachelbel again. Surely François cannot have died a contrite convert.
    He follows the thread and finds nothing. They’ve all slept with François Dubeau. The girls, no one knows when, but Jean-Pierre, the eldest man, has always maintained that François could as well have loved women — a poet like Hélène, a bright shadow like Évelyne. The other three are former lovers but above all the heirs apparent. Jérémie Viens, Parallels second official critic, who visited the Scandinavian countries with François, bringing back material for a thesis on modernity and the idea of North, which has just been given a