woman with thick, kinky hair and lips set in an amused pout, slumped on an outline of a couch in nothing but a wrinkled tank top, hand oscillating between her legs, black pupils leaving not a trace of doubt as to her ability to provide for her own pleasure. Fabrice Mansaré intuited another presence, the gaze of the beholder swollen with desire not unmixed with pain. The gallery owner held his tongue, aware these drawings dredged up complex feelings in prospective buyers, from depths not always easy or advisable to plumb.
‘This drawing here,’ asked Fabrice Mansaré. ‘Is it for sale?’
‘It is,’ the gallery owner confirmed, at a price he specified.
Fabrice Mansaré pulled from the left pocket of his pelisse a little leather-bound notebook. An entry copied from the bottom of the drawing, Faya Sitting, 18/20, accompanied by the price, was appended to the list of the morning’s purchases, themselves part of an inventory constantly evolving with moves to antipodean cities where he more or less began his life anew. It wasn’t a sense of economy that led Fabrice Mansaré to track expenses: it was a game to him.
‘When can I pick it up?’
‘At the closing,’ Alban Wouters informed him. ‘In two weeks. You should come. We’ll serve drinks.’
‘Let me write you a cheque,’ Fabrice Mansaré said, and with these words removed from the right-hand pocket of his pelisse a chequebook, on the first page of which he wrote out the requested amount and signed, as per his recent habit, Charles Rose.
‘Mr. Rose,’ said Alban Wouters obsequiously, writing a receipt.
‘If you would be so kind as to tell me the date,’ said Fabrice Mansaré.
The gallery owner was so kind. The date was memorable: the birthday of Alice, the big sister Fabrice Mansaré had not seen, as he was reminded every time he thought of her, for at least twenty years. Putting this memory aside, he knotted his scarf, buttoned his pelisse, and, with a wave to the proprietor his silhouette disappeared into the last gasp of February.
The next day Fabrice Mansaré heard from his contact, whose vehicle had been put out of commission by the storm, hence the delay. An appointment was made. Work was back on. Two days later, Fabrice Mansaré turned up, with a single carry-on, no more than one hour early, at the Bruant International Airport where, after the usual check-in formalities, he walked right past a lengthy line of travellers and through a doorway marked Diplomatic Passports, where we could no longer lawfully follow him.
At that very moment, a woman emerged from that very airport. Back from a symposium in the Mediterranean, she greeted the brown snow under the taxis’ tailpipes with a scowl. The sky was hesitating between shades of grey; a cold wet wind forced its way into the gaps of her hastily fastened coat. She hailed a car. The driver helped stow two heavy bags in the trunk, then they merged onto the spaghetti-tangle of highway where the usual thousands of cars collectively idled.
It would be hard to say how old this woman was. Without her cap, the chalky hair crowning a pinkish face that wrinkled slightly in the corners provided less an answer than a new set of hypotheses. There was nothing particularly feminine about her appearance: her no-nonsense mouth, strong cheekbones, and cropped hair could all have belonged to a man. We might flesh out this portrait by mentioning her voice, by turns shrill and gruff; her movements, frequently brusque; or her stature, short. All we can say for sure was that her first name was Simone. Her surname is another story for another time. The taxi, cleaving for better or for worse to the congested highways, covered several kilometres of exurban sprawl before reaching a winding road that bisected fields as if cut out by a child’s scissors. It continued to a hamlet of no more than half a dozen homes. Simone bade the driver stop at a white specimen with pretty green trim and dormer windows.
The driveway was unshovelled but a light was on inside. When Simone finally set her two heavy suitcases down in the hall, snow covered her pants up to the knee. A radio warbled in the living room. The smell of tobacco floated in the air.
‘Faya?’ Simone ventured.
No answer. Already Simone had taken off her boots, hung up her coat, shaken out her pants, and carried her suitcase to her room. She badly wanted a hot bath.
‘I’m home,’ she said again, still eliciting no response.
Simone’s bed was unmade. An overflowing ashtray shared the nightstand with a pile of open magazines and splayed sociology books. Articles of clothing were strewn in the vicinity of a dirtyclothes hamper. The heater spared no expense. An open closet door revealed a standing mirror in which Simone caught sight of her exhausted face.
She undressed, put on a robe whose sleeves she saw peeking out from under the bed, and finally located two slippers before heading back down to the main floor where she tried once again to make herself heard by Faya, who clearly hadn’t gone outside since Simone had left town. She found her in the bathtub.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Faya.
‘I need a bath,’ Simone stated. ‘Do you think you could?’
‘Get out? In this cold? No way.’
‘The heat’s on full-blast,’ Simone observed. ‘I asked you not to touch the thermostat. And you’re going to shrivel up like a raisin.’
‘Like a raisin! Shrivelled up like a raisin!’ Faya sang, vaguely in tune with the melody on the radio still crackling in the distance.
‘We’ll make a fire,’ Simone offered.
‘Five minutes!’ Faya pleaded. ‘Five measly minutes. Please!’
‘Okay, I’ll come back in five,’ Simone conceded.
‘And leave me the robe,’ Faya stipulated.
Simone headed to the living room for a wait certain to exceed five minutes. Night fell. There was wood to be fetched from outside. A pack of cigarettes, not Simone’s, but she helped herself. It wasn’t that Faya’s presence irked her. And yet … And yet …
Simone fell for her models more often than she cared to admit. Men and women both passed through her studio door, where her discretion built a trust she promised herself never to betray. Step by step she proceeded, from preliminary sketches to studies of faces, hands, and feet; then, as her subjects laid themselves barer and barer, she set their bodies down in oil pastel on yellow paper while her dulcet mezzo and easy charm set them at ease.
After more than fair warning, Simone invited her models to take part in scenes of a more intimate nature and immodest, concupiscent bent. At times like these, she loved the way the bodies got away from her, forgetful of the artist’s presence, in tête-à-tête or single-handed pleasures. Simone was fond of difficult things; all this lubricious movement she undertook to fix on paper at breakneck speed, with patiently observed sketches for a scaffold.
Not until later, labouring over a final drawing, did Simone conceive for her models an amorous affection that plunged her into that sweetest of dilemmas. This feeling, when it came at all, did so only days later after she had studied her drawings at length to select the best, remembering only then the physical presence of the people who inspired her, and dropping into a curious carnal reverie that, more often than not, remained private. It didn’t have that much to do with the success or failure of the drawings – not always anyway. She felt desire for women and for men without distinction, and sometimes also for the couples they formed rather than individual members thereof.
And sometimes, never quite fortuitously, this desire gave rise to an actual love affair, though rarely one that lasted more than a day or two. Sometimes she had to reluctantly put an end to it: no matter how lovely they were, Simone didn’t like her affairs to drag on. And then there was Faya.
Faya. Simone couldn’t say whether what she felt was love, but it was intense, vexatious, and difficult to extirpate, compounded by the fact that the object of this feeling seemed in no rush to end her tenancy in this home she had moved into over a month ago and now occupied as if it were ever thus and Simone were the interloper.
‘Faya,