It's been more than twenty years since Véronique walked into and out of my life, but my recollection of her is so vivid I can still envision the freckle on her left hip, the creamed tones of her complexion, or the trademark upward curl of her lips--I don't think she was capable of frowning even if she'd wanted to.
Of course, having a painting helps keep her ghost fresh. I have photographs, too, but as reminders those aren't as potent. Each brushstroke I made anchored her that much deeper in the harbor of my memory.
I was living in Paris. My apartment adjoined a loft at the top of a boarding house that had been old when Charles De Gaulle was an infant, a building that was torn down a few months after I returned home to northern California. I'd install myself in that time and place all over again if I could find a genie to grant the wish. I suppose everyone has their favorite period of life. Nearly every week my drinking buddy Marty will haul up another chestnut about his glory days as a high school quarterback.
For me, high school was boring, and personal events since '79 or so have been wrapped in spiderweb strands of faculty duties, bills, alimony, taxes, and academic politics. In the interstice, I took an unpleasant detour through a little country called Vietnam, worked much too seriously on a college degree funded by the G.I. Bill, and only then did I get my break. I set aside one year to kick back and live a dream.
A little luck and a well-placed advertisement hooked me up with a pair of kindred spirits. The first was a thirtyish red-haired barrel of a Scot named MacInnes, a man permanently afflicted with wanderlust. He'd sojourned in Paris before and was a living guidebook to the city. The second was an exchange student from Boston named James. MacInnes and I called him Jimmy, because although he'd reached adulthood, he still blushed like a kid.
MacInnes found the loft. I was the only one who resided in the adjoining flat, but we shared the large room as an artist's studio. We imagined ourselves master painters in the making. We paid a twelve-month lease in advance and had just enough money to scrounge out a Bohemian existence in the Latin Quarter, à la Whistler as a youth. Our art classes were our reason to live.
Frankly, I wasn't sure I could succeed. Jimmy was the talented one. MacInnes was less gifted but his salesmanship allowed him to make the most of what he could produce--his line of post cards and calendars is doing quite well for him, last I heard. I had neither extreme talent nor the knack for huckstering, but I'd like to think I had the best spirit. Once I had immersed myself in the lifestyle, nothing was going to yank me out of it prematurely.
So there we were--Jimmy in front of his easel amazing us with his genius, MacInnes feverishly working on a "waifscape"--one of those scenes populated by a row of little kids with BIG eyes--that the Scot had discovered could loosen cash from tourists like cutting a slit in their wallets, and me standing there unsure whether to use oils or acrylics for my next work. A knock came on the studio door, and even before we'd answered it, in walked Miss Unforgettable.
"Hi, I'm Veronica," she said in what I took to be American English. At our puzzled expressions, she tapped her forehead in a "duh" gesture and added, "I mean, Véronique. That's the name the agency told you, right?"
"Right," I said, when I could catch my breath. "You're the model?"
Our art instructor had recently assigned us to paint nudes. Six nudes, in fact--all posed by the same person. His theory was that rendering a single subject half a dozen times could teach more about technique than could be learned doing twenty or more unique scenes. Even at that early stage we were astute enough to realize he was right, so we had splurged and hired someone to sit just for us.
None of us had expected this. Most of the models at the art school had been three-hundred pound mamas with bellies so slack you couldn't see their pussies, or buffed young males that smiled at us far too sweetly for our heterosexual peace of mind. Véronique defined the phrase "easy on the eyes." She was neither as anorexically thin nor as strikingly gorgeous as a fashion model. Rather, her beauty tended toward the healthy, wholesome, approachable prettiness of a cheerleader.
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