Appropriate Place Read Free Page A

and silent Gaucher, so brilliantly closed around its interior
folds that it takes away your appetite for images. “What he’s done is give a colour
to a bad mood,” said Pierre in the tone of a budding connoisseur, already a touch
snide. Anne Ashton’s dog provided an opportunity to put him in his place, to explain
to him that Gaucher’s terrible break with the living could be found just as well in
the rendering of an animal from another century, whose artificially arched posture
in a fake warren questioned any wish to paint reality, world without end, then and
now. And had he not noticed the insect on a rose petal that didn’t correspond to any
known species? It would take a great deal of subtlety to grasp the new directions of
art, the deceptive return to the anecdotal that seemed attractive, sometimes witty,
but that always carried with it an impression of death.
    He had to struggle to listen, no doubt because of his lack of
vocabulary, and afterwards he avoided expressing an opinion on the works
prematurely. Instead, he let his opinions fall as questions until he finally
approached the most intimidating, the series of paintings in the corridor,
near-frescoes that seemed to be formless beings intertwined, hairless and with heavy
stomachs, neither men nor women, breasts wounded, sex gashed, lashing under a pale
sky shot through with thorns. “Still, you could think that the painter used velvet
brushes,” he ventured to say. Gabrielle taught him that this expert, amorous series
was the work of a young woman. Laurence Cardinal’s line, shot through like the mind
of a medium, had more to say about the gentleness and the cruelty of lovers than she
would ever learn, though artists’ loves are supremely tormented.
    Pierre had become obsessed with these uninhibited canvases that seemed
to move as he walked past them. And Gabrielle had been caught up in the game of
educating him, to the point of mentioning without embarrassment the desire
smouldering under the ashen grey of the faces, the shudder that flowed beneath the
light brown of the thighs, the orgasm that cut the red, colour of blood and of sex,
of the flesh — all that linked by a furious charcoal that had streaked the scenes as
if they were the last ones.
    â€œYou can’t know,” she’d begun without thinking, in the middle of a
leaden Friday. And now, because it was the logical next step, he wanted to know. As
if he were inquiring about another painting, he had asked her to make love. Because
the time had come, he said, and because girls his age paid no attention to him.
Anyway, it was reciprocal, he preferred the company of older women, like his
mother’s friend who had taken him in for the summer and was now all wrapped up in
her lover’s recent death.
    Gabrielle had given in without a fuss, perhaps a competitive spirit
still inhabited her, she’d be a contrast with the weeping widow. Besides, she’d felt
an urge for that particular game, belly and legs abruptly hot, it would be good on
the floor, on rough sheets smelling of camphor already stained with ivory white, he
could spill himself onto them without embarrassment because she’d throw them out
afterwards, she had planned it.
    Gabrielle brought their plates inside, turned off the air conditioner,
joined Pierre in the shower to be at the beginning no more than a shadow, matte and
brown, against his, pale and musky. It would be best to hide from him the creases
under her breasts, at her knees, at the place where shoulder meets arm. She’d have
hidden them even from a man of fifty, she wasn’t one of those women who enjoys bites
— the light is one. She rubbed him slowly, then soothed him while she guided his
hand towards other creases, those that stay beautiful, that open and flow with her
particular milk in the lavender-scented foam and the fingers of an overexcited boy.
She pressed her sex at length against his thigh because