Art Dealer

by Monika Andrulytė

It was a curious thing, turning twenty-two in Paris.

As I waited in line to enter the Musée d’Orsay, the cutting wind gnawed at my body like a rabid raccoon. Even though I had taken care to match myself to the colors of May—I wore a dress the shade of lilacs, a pink blazer draped over my shoulders—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was out of place, like a piece of furniture left in an open field.

It was my grandmother who had suggested that I go to Paris and visit the Musée d’Orsay, home to her favorite paintings.

“There’s nothing like taking in the paintings of Géricault, Redon, and Ensor in the flesh,” she said. “These painters descended to hell for us so that we could experience the heights of our darkest emotions from a safe distance.”

And yet, as I stood in front of the artworks she’d mentioned, I knew I would have given a few drops of my blood to reduce the distance between me and the paintings. My fingers tingled with the desire to touch the dark paint raised in places like protruding veins, but as other visitors crowded in behind me, I had no choice but to remain as still as hardened clay.

Many people described me as tactile, and it never sounded like a compliment—more like an accusation softened with a smile. But if I didn’t touch objects every day, they would dissolve in me like salt in the water, I reminded myself, as I placed my hands on leather-bound books and old photographs, on lichen-coated rocks and furrowed tree trunks, on things moist and dry, anything that seemed to hold the spirit of the world.

Along with the visual pleasure they evoked, paintings were even more bewitching, luring me in with their dense impasto—especially those that hung in well-known museums. Museum guards often called me out for getting alarmingly close to a painting, my nose almost brushing against rugged surfaces, the fine hair on my arms raised in arousal.

Rodin’s bronze nude glinted under the onslaught of my gaze when suddenly, from behind me, a man’s voice asked, “Do you like this sculpture?”

I turned and saw a suited middle-aged man, his long-lashed eyes mottled with greens and blues as bright as peacock feathers. He had a commanding smile that made me feel vulnerable—still forming, like a fetus.

“It’s majestic,” I replied, trying not to stare at the white scar snaking across the man’s right cheek. Introducing himself as an art dealer, he extended his hand and said his name was Emmanuel.

“Susie,” I said, my fingers clasping his. And then I immediately regretted it, wishing that I had lied and offered a noble name like Theodora or Cordelia.

Scrutinizing me from head to foot, as if to verify an artwork’s authenticity, he commented that I was English. I didn’t know how to react, so I just nodded. As we slowly zigzagged between display cases, his long nose pointing forward like a compass, he mentioned that one of the paintings he owned was recently exhibited in the museum.

“It’s a pity we haven’t met earlier,” he said, his voice like crackling wood. “I would have shown it to you.” He spoke English with a thick French accent, pausing in mid-sentence to search for the right word. Once he found it, he would spit it out like the pit of a cherry.

Even though I knew that glass served to protect certain exhibits from people like me, keen to experience it with fingers, a tremor passed through my body when we stopped for a moment before a painting behind glass. I leaned closer to read the title: L’homme blessé.

“He doesn’t look like a blessed man,” I remarked, my gaze sliding from the wounded man to his sword.

Emmanuel snorted. “Blessé in French means injured,” he said.

There was a thin line between being injured and being blessed, I concluded then. That idea reverberated in my mind when we stepped out into the open air, when Emmanuel suggested we continue the conversation at a Parisian brasserie, when I nodded my accord vigorously.

I was interested in what he had to say about art, but before I’d even decided which questions to ask, he was already questioning me—how long I was staying in Paris and in which arrondissement; what my life looked like in London. A look of disappointment passed over his face when he learned I was studying history. What did he expect, I wondered—that I was a painter or an art critic? I instinctively clasped a small fold in the tablecloth.

“Your high cheekbones evoke the curves of an apricot,” the man said out of the blue and flashed me a smile.

A self-conscious scarlet reached my face, hot enough to singe my eyebrows. Then the food arrived, but I found it difficult to enjoy my steak tartare as I saw how quickly fish and curly fries dissolved on Emmanuel’s tongue, and how neatly he bit off the head of a huge shrimp. What a ferocious mouth, I thought, gripping the tablecloth even tighter. My throat narrowed. Fearing my steak tartare would get stuck in the wrong pipe, I pushed the plate away.

“What about your favorite artworks?” I began, hating the childish softness of my words, falling like feathers from a leaking pillow. By the time they reached his ears, they barely held any weight. “What draws you to certain pieces?”

“I like nineteenth-century painters, though I recently started buying more artworks from the early twentieth century. Though if I follow my own preferences, I would be broke.” He chuckled. “Before acquiring a painting or a sculpture, I always have a buyer in mind.”

“So what do your buyers want?”

“Beauty. Beauty conveyed in neutral tones, something they could hang in a living room to please the eye. For customers less interested in polite neutrality, female nude paintings are a common alternative,” he said.

I looked down at my lilac dress. Under the honeyed lighting, the fabric looked duller, loose like spare skin.

“Do you own works by female painters?” I asked.

“Oh, I could tell you were a feminist. Not many, actually. But one painting by the French painter Jacqueline Marval hangs in my hallway. It’s splendid, truly a quintessential work of hers. Since I couldn’t find a buyer, I decided to keep it for myself. Do you know her?”

“I believe I’ve seen some of her works,” I said, my voice wavering. In truth, it was the first time I’d heard of her, but I didn’t want to come across as ignorant. I liked the sound of the painter’s name: Marval. She must have been a marvelous artist.

He did not wait long before asking if I would like to see the painting. His house was just twenty minutes’ walk away.

I took in his proposition with a rush of excitement. All my life it seemed that everything happened to other people, while I remained on the brink of something that had never materialized. Unexpectedly, I remembered the Tarot reading my grandmother had given me when I was only twelve. She had told me a young, sweet boy with blond hair, smooth skin, and a slender body would be my first lover. At twenty-two, I had never had a boyfriend, but I eagerly awaited the one that was promised to me.

While my gaze traveled from Emmanuel’s scar up to his graying hair, then down his broad shoulders, I reached my decision: I would no longer wait for a sweet boy. Longing for a morsel of lived experience, I was ready to provoke my fate.

“Yes, I would love to see it,” I replied at last.

The bright face of daylight had been drowned by rain by the time we left the restaurant. Dark clouds gathered over the Parisian roofs. It grew windier as Emmanuel led me down a narrow street to his arrondissement; fierce gusts blew paper scraps and lilac blossoms, which caught in our clothes and hair.

“The wind will carry you off,” he exclaimed, and put his arm around my waist.

“My body likes gravity,” I said with a faint smile, wondering if from the look on my face he could tell how I felt, my mind full of thrill and fear. I reasoned that, mysterious as he seemed, Emmanuel could have been a thief or a forger. Then the reflective beetle charm on my bag caught the light, and an image flashed before me: Emmanuel as a kid luring fireflies into empty glass jars—not out of malice, but for his own pleasure. I flinched.

The intensifying pulse in my temples carried with it the sensation of two birds lodged in my head, struggling to wriggle free. I remembered reading that house sparrows have a short lifespan because of their speedy heartbeat. In my case, it was a voluntary act—shortening my life for a scar-faced art dealer.

What I saw upon entering his house only deepened my unease: a classic entryway lined with paintings (all behind glass) and big mirrors. In the corner on the console table stood a tall clay sculpture of some pagan goddess, which reminded me of everything I disliked about myself: elfish ears that stuck out from my bitter yellow hair like oyster fossils and a chest flat enough to pass for a chopping board. Feeling giddy, I asked where the bathroom was. Emmanuel pointed to the wooden door on the left.

“I’ll be right here,” he said.

As I walked into the bathroom, I gasped in surprise: where the entryway felt dated, his bathroom looked brand-new, lined in expensive marble tiles. It was like a separate limb attached to an aged animal. An electric diffuser placed on the sink cabinet released an overly sweet fragrance, thick enough to choke me. I couldn’t stay there any longer.

When I pushed the door open, I heard the pop of a wine cork. Emmanuel was waiting in the living room, looking at me with a broad smile. The table lamp behind his back made his face glow eerily.

“Come up here,” he said, patting the seat next to him on the couch. “Please feel at home.”

The red wine in the glasses looked black and smelled of foul berries. I knew it would leave dark stains on my teeth, yet I swallowed a few mouthfuls, like medicine. I had a knack for making people feel good, so it was easy to pretend to be taken with his stories about the most expensive paintings he had sold. I watched him relax into the coach, his back slightly hunched. Once his breathing turned uneven, I knew Emmanuel was going to touch me, but I didn’t know where. With my dress riding up, my legs were an easy target, bare skin smooth like melting wax.

It took him a while to drain his glass. But as soon as he did, he leaned closer to me, ran his fingers from my temple to my cheek, passed his thumb over my lips and continued toward my neck, his movements all precise and careful, as if capturing a rare butterfly. Goosebumps gathered on my arms, rough like grains of sand; I managed only one phrase:

“The painting,” I whispered.

From how he arched his eyebrows, it began to dawn on me that the painting he had told me about did not exist, although he soon regained his unreadable expression and carried on the lie:

“When you were in the bathroom, I brought the painting to my bedroom,” he said. “For better light.”

Halfway up the spiral stairs leading to his bedroom, my shoes felt filled with stones, but I didn’t pause, ready to witness his fabrication. Confrontation was on the tip of my tongue: “Why did you use the painting as bait? Couldn’t you come up with something else?”

The bedroom was small—with a single bed, a shelf wardrobe, a nightstand, and a window through which the moonlight fell in sprinkles, discernibly, like oil on water. One hand on his hip, Emmanuel looked satisfied upon pointing to the painting, which he had placed on the wooden headboard of the bed: “Voila!” he exclaimed, beaming. “Odalisque à la Plume Rose. In English it means ‘odalisque with the pink feather.’ Rather than depict a woman in a harem, Marval rendered a cabaret dancer.”

The dancer stood partially nude, her skin the color of the lotus root, the background otherworldly silver. Her huge eyes looked trapped between her cheeks and long eyebrows, her blazingly red lips a wound. For a few breaths I was stupefied, arrested by the existence of the painting.

“You didn’t put it behind glass,” I blurted.

“Good eye. I didn’t have time, but I’ll do it later. It’s important to protect paintings from dust and sunlight.”

He’ll hold her captive, I thought, shuddering. The sun won’t be able to warm her face. I would have examined the dancer more closely, hoping to etch every line of her face into my memory, but Emmanuel parted my lips with his suddenly, eclipsing her from my sight. A moment later, he drew back to tell me to relax, but I couldn’t, for I didn’t know how to respond to his long tongue. Rivulets of sweat formed on my temples.

“Being with you produced heat in me too,” he whispered, his breath damp, fogging my vision.

Before long he removed my clothes and gently pushed my body into the bed. As I knocked an apple off his nightstand with my hand, it felt as though I’d ruined a still life.

His chest, when he unbuttoned his shirt, looked like ones I’d seen many times on public beaches, hairy and muscular, but even so, there was something different about it: it seemed as if there were no organs inside, just some fiberfill, like in a stuffed animal. The moment Emmanuel buried his face between my legs, it occurred to me that only water had come that close before. I felt no pleasure. Lightheaded, I moved my eyes from his bushy hair up to my belly, which lay flat, as though pressed down by a summer downpour.

What appeared to be a decent bed turned into an unsteady ship by the time he entered me, his freckles multiplying before my eyes like bacteria. He flipped me over and pulled me onto my knees, much to my relief because I no longer had to look at his face.

I tilted my head and gazed at the painting until there was just the dancer and me: as our eyes locked, she moved into the dance, the fibers of her muscles firing as she gyrated her hips, her arms swaying. Warmth coursed through my flesh as if heated oil paint were gushing out of my heart instead of blood. My heart came loose and my guts relaxed, churned with music as I moved my hips, the lines of my body flowing. We swung in unity, me and the dancer. Nothing resembling sex touched me, it was divine to be all body without armor, to penetrate the painting and be penetrated by it in return.

It wasn’t until I heard Emmanuel’s voice that I became alert to my surroundings again. He asked if I was okay, but I couldn’t speak. I gave a small nod. I didn’t know how long I stayed sprawled on the bed like that, akin to a painting, oily to the touch.

Coming back from the kitchen with a glass of water, Emmanuel offered to let me take a shower first, his eyes blank, like plates scraped clean after a meal.

“You first,” I managed to utter, sensing the opportunity to have another tête-à-tête with the dancer.

As soon as he went to the bathroom, I drew closer to the painting, hot and sweaty. My pointy tongue, when I stuck it out, resembled a miniature flame. As I licked the dancer’s face with a flare of affection, I could sense that a human tongue had never touched her. I was her first. Looking into the dancer’s eyes, I whispered: my grandmother foretold my first lover—blond hair, smooth skin, a slender body. The gender was wrong; the rest held. You were promised to me. Words dripped from my lips in a slow thread, like honey fresh from the comb.

I slipped into my dress, grabbed the painting and sidled down the hallway, ears pricked. The painting, firmly in my hand, was light, barely heavier than a grenade. Slowly, slowly, I descended the stairs, the sound of the running water ringing in my ears.

The wind chilled my face the instant I dashed into the yard, breathing heavily, clutching the painting like a shield. To reach the entrance gate, I had to push aside thorny shrubs that appeared to have grown taller while I was inside.

Off had slipped the plain coverlet of the night, the witching hour laying bare its charm. As the birds arrowed above the trees and dogs howled in the distance, the sky ruptured, and I welcomed its teasing spit on my skin. The thunder was loud when I approached the Musée d’Orsay, the streets empty. I carried the painting with a keen clarity—had a bolt of lightning hit and ripped me open, my flesh would have liquefied and turned into silver, flowing into the Seine like mercury. I felt something warm trickle down my thighs, but I knew I wasn’t injured. I was a woman, a dancer with feathers, all things blessed and chimeric.

Monika Andrulytė is a teacher with a Master’s degree in comparative literature. She lives in a Swiss mountain valley, where she is at work on her first novel.