N. LEE WOOD

THREE MERRY PRANKSTERS AT THE LOUVRE

WE CALLED OURSELVES THE Three Merry Pranksters that summer in Paris; Andrea and Collin and Kermit, terrors of the Louvre. I was young, shy and lonely, not feeling in the least like a Prince of the City and grateful as hell Andy would even deign to speak to the likes of me. She was going to the College des Beaux Artes on scholarships, and I was studying Esoterics at the Sorbonne. Don’t ask me to explain that. I made up my own coursework and sold it in one brilliantly inspired and passionate session with the Academic Advisory Board. The drift of my argument I’ve long forgotten now.

It didn’t matter. Like all of my kind, I was filthy rich, and the French authorities usually let those of us choosing to pay our taxes in France do pretty much whatever we damned well pleased.

They did, however, make us jump through the official hoops for appearance’s sake. That’s what I like about the French. They love bureaucracy, all the forms and ID photos and official stamps, but they’re not pigheaded assholes about rules and regulations. “Alors, Monsieur does not have the absolutely mandatory obscure black-and-white, not color, slightly larger than passport-sized photograph? Tiens, the official fee for forms without the proper photograph is two hundred francs,” stamp-stamp, “Voila, here is your Carte de Merde, merci et au revoir, monsieur.”

Andy and Collin, on the other hand, were the classical starving student and artist. Andy’s mother was divorced, her father long vanished, and Andy had become a whiz at digging up every musty, dusty scholarship she could fit herself into in order to get through college. Not easy in the days before we arrived, especially in an educational system gutted by recession along with the rest of the American economy. Of course, it also helped that Andy was straight-A’s all the way, in Japanese as well as art.

She was in Paris that summer on some kind of vague Japanese American Impressionist Appreciation Society scholarship, supposedly to write a master’s thesis on the neo-classical Japanese Edo art influence on French Impressionism.

It also had something to do with Monet, Gauguin and Van Gogh snorting cocaine and drinking absinthe together, but I never could quite figure that one out.

Collin had the same sort of problem in England, although things got only slightly better after Thatcherism fell, the socialist reformation wave of conscience that swept west out of Eastern Europe somehow finding the Channel an impassible barrier. He had not been as scholastically brilliant as Andy, but his parents both worked hard to try and keep him going. When he first arrived, he’d gotten off the Chunnel train in Montparnasse wearing almost nostalgically outdated heavy-punk leather gear, purposely torn and frayed jeans artistically smeared with motor grease, his pink and orange mohawk a little limp as his own mousy brown hair started growing back in over his shaved and skull-n-crossbones tattooed scalp.

Which, after you knew him awhile, was really funny; Collin was the most politically conservative person I’d ever met. Had his parents been more affluent, he probably would never have “rebelled,” dropped out and come to Paris to be a starving artist at all. He’d be shuffling around London right now in his gray three-piece striped woolens, battered briefcase under one arm, a harried minor partner in some genteelly respectable solicitors’ firm.

Instead, he’d taken the RER and got off at the St. Germain-St. Michel Metro, the first street name he recognized. Lugging a shabby brown suitcase with the faded “No Poll Tax” sticker peeling over a crudely lettered FUK U on its side, he stumbled up out of the Metro station blinking in the sudden bright light. Across the street, in the square dominated by the St. Michel Fountain, lolled dozens more young people dressed in some variant of his own fashion sense, or rich enough to afford whatever fad in sleaze was currently chic. Clumped in groups and loose cliques, they lounged in the sunlight, sat on the edge of the fountain in the square. A couple of mangy looking, half-grown German shepherd dogs, bright red handkerchiefs tied around their shaggy necks, chased frisbees thrown into the water.

That’s where I was, leaning up against one of the pedestals topped by a bronze dragon spitting a weak dribble of water into the fountain. I was watching Andy, her face painted white with black stripes over her eyes in classic mime style, standing on the top of an anti-car bollard doing some kind of Tai Chi or Kung-fu or phony Yogi-Schmogi exercises in shiny orange Spandex leotards while the Ruddy Rat’s Asses blasted out Clunk Rock on her antique boombox. She called it “performance art,” and I called it “con art,” which she snorted at but didn’t deny. She enjoyed it.

I had never seen a naked woman, but her leotards did not leave much for the imagination. The skintight cloth emphasized every curve in her body including the rather massive ones on her ribcage threatening to pop out at any moment from the top of her low neckline arranged specifically for that purpose. Once in a while, somebody would stop, stare at her perfect, if thin, young body, and drop a few francs into the battered hat next to the boombox. I liked watching them watching her, because then they didn’t notice me quite so much.

I have never gotten used to people staring at me, and was particularly sensitive to it at that age. Although I wore the baggiest clothing I could find to hide behind, I couldn’t disguise what I was. It was bad enough just to stand out in a crowd, but the strange mixture of curiosity, envy, and hate in their faces hurt.

“It’s not fair, I’m just a kid,” I’d pouted over a kit royale to Andy after one of her panhandling “performance art” shows. Actually, I was older than Andy or Collin, but it’s hard for people to read my face. Usually, people assume I’m younger than I am because I’m fairly small. It’s sometimes annoying, but occasionally it’s useful. “It’s not like I’m acting like a prick about anything.

I don’t have my bank access number tattooed on my forehead.”

She’d laughed. “Yes, you do.” She grinned, wild curling hair wet with sweat at the dark tips. “You got filthy, rotten, stinking, disgustingly rich written all over your goddamned body, Kermit. Everyone loves to hate the obscenely rich.”

It wasn’t just the money, as we both knew, and we both knew well enough to steer clear of that particular issue. I stared down at the raspberry colored champagne bubbling along the sides of my glass. “How come you don’t hate me then?”

She leaned over the table and held up her fist, index finger extended. “Un,” she said dramatically, “Je suis une artiste; money is a petty concern beneath my lofty attention. I’m far too proud to sully my dignity with such trash. Et deux,” she held up another finger, “you always pay for the drinks.” She grinned wickedly. “Et puis trois,” she finished, “what makes you so sure I don’t?”

That was just the kind of insecurity she knew kept me trotting after her, begging her friendship like a stray dog. She loved it. I was more than happy to oblige her.

So, when Collin trudged over next to where I leaned against the fountain and dropped his suitcase onto the cement, my stomach tightened reflexively. I looked up at him in what I hoped was my best fuck-off expression.

His was better than mine. He shot a narrow look at Andy, then back at me. “You with her, or you just slummin’ it?” He shoved his hands in his pockets, glaring at me belligerently.

I caught Andy glancing at me, a little worried. “Yeah, we’re together. What’s it to you?”

He grunted and sat down on the edge of his suitcase. It creaked precariously.

“Name’s Collin. I just spent the last twenty-four fookin’ hours gettin’ ‘ere, I’m broke, I’m knackered and I’m ‘ungry, and I hain’t even found a place to crash yet.”

Great. Another goddamned beggar. Just what I needed. I reached into the pocket of my jacket for some spare cash. “How much do you want?” I asked him tiredly, pulling out a fistful of 200 franc notes.

“Fook you, space cadet,” he said, his eyes flickering to the money and back to me. He got up and opened his suitcase, a dozen unframed canvases inside. He propped the first couple against the stone edge of the fountain. “I hain’t looking for no charity handout, asshole. I wanna sell you one of my paintings.”

Surprised, I glanced at the paintings, and noticed they were good. I mean, really good. Andy stopped standing on her head with her legs in a lotus position, flipped off the music and pocketed her spare change out of the hat before she wandered up to stand behind the boy with the ridiculous mohawk.

“Why me?” I asked.

The kid laughed harshly, and looked around the square with mock innocent eyes.

“You think any of these fine upstanding citizens hanging out ‘ere got scads of money dripping out their ears and just aching to buy some bloody amateur’s scribblin’s? I see you, I know you got a roll, and you with mimegirl makes me think maybe you like art.” He emphasized the last word with a touch of irony.

Andy grinned, lopsided.

“You got a lot of nerve,” she said.

He regarded her coolly. “You panhandle your way, Yank, I’ll do it mine, okay?”

I ended up buying two paintings and lunch for the three of us at the corner brasserie.

“That y’real name, ‘Kermit’?” Collin demanded, mouth full of steak tartare.

“Don’t sound very French t’me.”

“Nah. My real name’s too hard for most people to pronounce. Kermit’s just what Andy calls me,” I said. I like steak tartare, but Collin seemed to be making a kind of personal statement with wolfing down the raw meat. I ordered oysters on the half shell instead, torturing their little writhing bodies with lemon juice and vinegar before slurping them down with what I hoped was a convincingly merciless sneer curling on my lips.

“Like Kermit the Frog, y’know?” Andy said. “French, frog, Sesame Street. It seemed to fit.”

Collin looked confused. It didn’t help clear it up when I sang the first few lines in a perfect quavering imitation, “It’s not easy being greeeeeeeeen…”

Andy laughed at his expression. “You never see Sesame Street?” she teased, “What a sad, deprived childhood you’ve had!”

“Don’t get that kinda rerun American roobish anymore on British telly. We got our own roobish, thank you very much.”

Andy grinned, Collin grinned back and became part of our group.

I bought several more of Collin’s paintings that summer, all pieces I admired, but partly because he seriously needed the cash and wouldn’t bring himself to ask me. I think he resented knowing I knew. And, maybe, looking back now, I think he might have resented giving up those paintings, even if he was pleased I bought them, because I never bought anything I didn’t think was very, very good.

I helped Andy out in paying her rent in the incredibly tiny maid’s room tucked up in the rooftop of a six-story walk-up, her tuition, her books, her art supplies. Not a lot, but art scholarships only went so far. Collin accepted nothing from me, overt or covert. Except for food. And wine. The three of us ate out everyday and I picked up the tab for all of us. I mean, what the hell? What are friends for anyway, right? But Collin didn’t have much to begin with and didn’t manage what he had very well. If my offering made him sullen, Andy’s offer to help him out from her scholarship money made him furious. It was a sore spot he never quite adjusted to.

Andy did help Collin get through all the French officialdom that stays up late at night dreaming up ways of making it insanely frustrating if you’re both an ignorant foreigner and an ignorant foreigner who can’t speak French. My French, actually, was fluent, but I didn’t volunteer. Andy could handle French bureaucracy and neither of them wanted me to be doing any favors for them.

Pride, you know? What a fucking strange pain in the ass that is.

But what we did do, and it surprised me, was start sneaking Collin into the Louvre. Most people who go to the Louvre are tourists, and like most tourists, they see a big line, figure that’s the only way in, and queue up like obedient little soldiers. But there’s at least two other ways I know of to get into the Louvre where there’s never a line and you don’t need any special passes. We let Collin in on the secret after making him swear a solemn oath not to spread it around. Tell one tourist, and pretty soon, instead of one incredibly long line and two secret ways in, there’s three incredibly long lines.

Of course, I was a Bienfaiteur of the museum, which meant I’d made a substantial contribution yearly to the Louvre, and had a pass card that got me just about anywhere I wanted to go. Andy had a Societaire card, a slight cut above the basic Adherent card, which gave her more or less the same freebies that I did, except for all the hoity-toity ministry invitations to private openings and such. It didn’t cost all that much, and for an art student on a limited budget, it paid for itself in a very short time. But Collin never had enough cash in one lump sum for a card, and paid the regular entree fee each time. Which meant, of course, we couldn’t use the private entrance for card holders only.

We’d decided to go see the Max Frankelberg exhibition in the new Richelieu wing, and were walking through the courtyard past the giant glass pyramid when Collin started cursing softly. Andy and I stopped.

“You go on without me,” Collin said. “I forgot my bloody wallet.” He glared at me, redfaced.

I knew he hadn’t forgotten; it was a convenient excuse to save face. I also knew better than to offer to lend him the few miserable francs he needed to get in.

Andy glanced at me, shifting her feet. “You know what, Collin?” she said, cheerfully, “Before I got my card, Kermit used to sneak me in. Let’s go over to the Amis de Louvre entrance, and we’ll get you in free.”

It was a lie, but okay, so what?

“It won’t work,” he protested all the way, “Never.”

“Sure, it will!” Andy kept us going. “Me and Kermit will just hold up our cards, and the guard’ll be so busy checking cards and looking at him, you just look like you belong there, and we’ll all breeze right on by together!”

“Shoulda sliced the mohawk,” he muttered.

I didn’t think it would work, but Andy was right. The guard barely glanced at the cards, too busy staring at me curiously. As Collin followed us in, the guard’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, but he did nothing.

Once inside, Andy doubled over giggling, clutching Collin’s arm. “It worked, it worked, I can’t believe it!”

“I thought you did this before!” Collin protested.

I shrugged while Andy wheezed out a new fit of giggles. For some reason, the silliness infected us all that day, and that began the Three Merry Pranksters.

The Louvre is, for the most part, an intelligently laid out museum, well furnished with upholstered backless couches to rest and look at the artwork when your feet get tired. The three of us sat, solemnly regarding Delacroix’s gigantic “Death of Sardanapale.” An Eastern Oriental monarch lounges about after drinking poison, a mysterious half-smile on his face, while his concubines and servants are being massacred, and his palace in the background burnt to the ground. He doesn’t appear to give a damn. Probably cooked to the gills on opium.

“You see there, where Delacroix uses the effect of yellow and red?” Collin was saying. “That’s supposed to give you the sensation of fire and smoke. You feel it?”

“Uh-huh,” Andy said after a pause, unconvinced. There was another long silence.

“What I want to know,” she said finally, “is why is there a horse in the guy’s bedroom?”

Collin looked at her puzzled. “What?”

She pointed. “Look, there’s a horse in old Sardanapale’s bedroom. What’s a goddamned horse doing in the bedroom?”

Collin blinked at it. “Because Delacroix liked painting horses, I guess,” he said finally. And grinned. “What I want to know is who tied the girl to the bedpost?”

It was my turn to blink. Yes, I hadn’t noticed it, and there she was, half-hidden in the shadows. Dangling by her bound wrists, one terrified courtesan twisted half naked, helplessly watching her fellow ladies being stabbed while awaiting her turn to die. Had the wicked old sultan tied her up for his depraved kicks before the slaughter? Had the killers trussed her up to make her wait her turn? Was Delacroix a perverted painter? A talented dirty old man?

We speculated, and giggled until the skinny man in the blue suit identifying him as a museum watchdog glared at us. We strolled off, in search of more funny art.

The huge Gobelin tapestry sent us into peals of laughter, a mongrel dog taking a quite graphic dump in the foreground while some king in frilly lace shirts and pantyhose, Charles or Henri, sat on his horse and pretended not to notice.

We found the Greek statuary hilarious. The three of us were giggling euphorically over a statue of a maniacally grinning peasant disemboweling some sort of goat or small cow. It hung upside down, flayed skin hiding its head, while the man’s hand plunged elbow deep into the animal’s interior, loops of intestines draping down. It inspired our first Prank, in fact.

Behind us, a guide holding up a stick with various colored streamers attached to the top, marched through the room followed by two or three dozen Japanese tourists. She droned on in Japanese with the kind of schoolmarm voice that hasn’t been used inside a classroom in a century, while dark-haired heads bobbed and murmured ahh’s and ooh’s in perfect unison. Andy turned to listen.

“What’s she saying?” I asked. My Japanese was not rusty; at that time it was nonexistent.

“She’s telling them…that the figure reclining…is actually very old and fragile…it was discovered at the beginning of the seventeenth century…it belonged to another piece…but…shit, I missed that part…some guy named Berthelot carved her a new foot…it’s sticking up at the wrong angle…his cousin carved the marble mattress to support it…see the difference in the two kinds of stone…please don’t touch the statue…” Andy made out, forehead wrinkling.

“Shit,” Collin breathed, amazed. “You understand that fookin’ jabberin’?”

Andy smiled grimly. “Japanese, Chinese, and German are required subjects in American schools these days, along with global business economics. I took four years of Japanese, but it’s not as good as it should be. Especially the writing.”

That, for some reason, took a little of the levity we’d been feeling out of us.

I knew Andy had strong if ambiguous feelings about her country and its waning prestige to the rest of the world, which Collin shared in a different way.

But I’m a true foreigner. I’ve never felt any patriotic loyalty to a specific and arbitrary plot of ground. Invisible borders don’t make sense. Growing up belonging to nowhere in particular is like belonging everywhere. But emotional divisions make me uncomfortable, even when I personally have no stake in any of it.

We watched as the tour group trotted out into the next wing, a few quick glances up at the towering marble columns of colossal women before vanishing in pursuit of celebrity masterpieces. Andy strolled over to the reclining statue, Collin and me in lagging tow. A slender Greek woman with an enigmatic smile and a boy’s penis reclined uncomfortably on a slab of marble carved into a Victorian padded mattress, lumpy and bound with tasseled cords.

“That really is hideous,” she said, “Looks like one of those blow-up air mattresses I used to camp out on.”

“Yeah.” Collin snickered. “All it needs is one of those air valves stuck on it.”

We looked at each other, and The Idea was born. Being the least imaginative of the three, I opted for buying some plastic blow-up child’s toy and taking the mouthpiece off of it. Andy and Collin promptly vetoed that, and we all headed down to the Rouge et Plie art store on Blvd. Beaumarchais. We argued about the merits of actually carving one out of marble to taking an impression and casting several, Collin, ever the purist opted for marble, while Andy finally prevailed with the voice of reason; money and time being a strong consideration.

Andy had one of those inflatable air pillows a friend had given her for plane trips. It was fairly simple to take an impression of the valve, and cast a dozen replicas (to get the exact color match) in Marblex. A bit of double sided carpet tape, and we were ready.

Then we went back to the Louvre and argued about the best place to put the fake valve. Put it at the foot of the mattress, in plain view, Andy said. Nobody ever sees what’s under their noses. Naw, guards’ll spot it straight off, Collin argued, let’s stick it way down under the side, just pokin’ out like. No way, Andy was getting mad, people’ll be so busy ogling a woman with a dick they won’t even notice the valve, that’s no fun….

I, I’m proud to say, made the final choice and proved myself a true member of the Merry Pranksters: we stuck the fake on the back, barely under the fair maiden’s pillow, both concealed and yet in plain view at the same time.

Then we sat back and watched.

It was almost disappointing. Anti-climatic, in a way. We lounged around, Collin sketching some piece of antiquated kitsch to give us an excuse for hanging around. Nobody noticed a goddamned thing! Hours went by. Tour groups plodded obediently through the halls, nodding and murmuring in properly subdued museum quality tones. Museum guides rattled off their memorized texts in polyphonic languages, while looking just above, or slightly to the side, but never directly at whatever it was they were presently lecturing about.

“Well, this was all a bit of a come-down, now wunnit?” Collin said disgustedly, glaring up over his sketchpad at the clot of bermuda-shorted senior citizens standing around our altered statuary.

The Three Merry Pranksters might have retired right then if not for one of those elderly tourists. Potbelly swelling behind a Hawaiian print shirt, camera perched around a wrinkled neck, bony knees under equally lurid shorts, he strolled around to the back of the statue where the pack was thinner. He blinked. Bent down a little closer. And blinked again. Then he looked up at the guide rattling on in Portuguese with a puzzled expression. And blinked.

Andy had to turn away, her fit of giggles choking into repressed coughs. The lines of Collin’s face twitched, a grin threatening to pop out at any moment.

As the tour group bustled away behind the guide waving her decorated stick over her head, the man lingered behind. Slowly, he raised his camera, focused on a narrow spot near the head of the reclining statue and snapped a bewildered photograph before hobbling off to join his venerable compatriots.

We celebrated by admiring one of Le Brun’s canvasses, a monstrous tableau of the Battle of Arbelles. Alexander the Great and Darius the Merciless are duking it out while friends and steeds are valiantly meeting gloriously dramatic deaths.

Truly hideous.

Except for the “good bits,” Collin the Art Historian informed us, all of it was painted by a battalion of apprentices slaving away in the artist’s atelier.

Andy, of course, speculated loudly that whoever was chief on the shitlist got stuck painting the fist-sized, flame red assholes of the dying warhorses. We got some dirty looks.

Three weeks later, our modest alteration had vanished. We were surprised it lasted that long, but by that time, we were already busy thinking up new ways to appreciate art.

I have to point out, we never damaged the artwork. We never touched a painting, for example, because the work was far too fragile and delicate. However, we didn’t have any reticence about creatively altering a few of the explanatory labels alongside them.

We concentrated our endeavors on statuary, for the most part. Small modifications were pasted on with easily removable glues. We did dozens of jokes, small, discreet. The button nipples of Roman nymphs pressing against their stone togas sprouted exquisitely detailed marble button-holes. The empty hands of red granite Egyptian pharaohs now held red granite replicas of Metro tickets. A matching pair of wonderfully executed small “bronze” busts of Charles de Gaulle and Francois Mitterand wearing laurel leaves appeared in a corner of a Napoleonic exhibition, with a proper label identifying them clearly as fakes. In perfectly correct Babylonian. I wrote it.

That was our least successful caper, and for all purposes, our last. Charlie and Frank disappeared after a mere two days, and the museum started watching for us.

We barely got away with stuffing a refashioned test tube into the empty socket in the groin of a Mesopotamian athlete which in a few weeks would sprout dainty, green marijuana leaves out the end from seeds buried in the agar. As was our usual routine, Collin sketched, Andy did the dirty deed while I strolled around to keep the guard’s attention on me, ordinarily easy enough to do. But our faces were becoming too well known, and the guards’ normally enigmatic expressions were subtly suspicious, eyes a shade narrowed. The test tube never even had the chance to sprout before it was removed, and we decided to quit while we were ahead.

Also, it was near the end of summer, time to return to classes, get serious again. Time to give up adolescent pranks and think about the future. It was the best summer of my life, and even when Andy and Collin went their separate ways, the three of us drifting apart, we kept in touch. Sort of.

Andy went back to America, married a New York corporate lawyer and opened her own successful art gallery in Soho. I had nothing to do with the financing, nor did I personally invest in the gallery, but I didn’t think it wrong to quietly mention it to my compatriots who collected. Word got around, and the gallery flourished. Its success could have had as much to do with her husband’s connections and Andy’s considerable ability and perseverance as my casual namedropping.

One of her exhibition shows, of course, was of Collin’s work. He never returned to Britain, settling instead on a quasi-cattle ranch in Argentina where the tax benefits for artists outmatched Ireland’s only by the gorgeous warm weather.

Every so often, I’d see his work in an art magazine, a fuzzy photograph of him and his newest wife on the back page of a newspaper.

I saw Collin at his last major exhibition in Amsterdam. I had just completed my sixteenth language session, including Japanese (and the rapidly vanishing Ainu dialect). Languages fascinated me, and I collected them like some people collect butterflies, or stamps…or paintings. I was now fluent in Tagalog, and close to completing an extensive bilingual Tagalog-Dutch dictionary for an Esoterica publishing house in Den Hague. It was convenient for me to zip up by the mag train to Amsterdam for the show.

I hadn’t bought one of Collin’s works in a long time. I would never have said so to him, but I liked his art when it was younger, rougher, fire behind a few of the uncertain lines. As he got older and more famous, it had solidified, each paint stroke infallible, unwaveringly sure of itself. He gradually hardened into the mold of a Serious Artist, the humor behind his work slowly leached away.

I hadn’t realized how much time had gone by since the summer of the young Merry Pranksters. I don’t have much of a sense of time, I’m afraid, never have. I don’t know if Andy or Collin could see how shocked I was.

Andy’s dark, curly hair had gone completely white, tinted with a slightly blonde rinse to keep it from looking too stark. Her face had seen its final face-lift, and the smooth taut skin over the sharp cheekbones made her look slightly cadaverous. She was still slender, thin muscles in her arms hard and cabled from daily exercise workouts, ribcage showing ridges through the soft folds of her blouse. Her once astonishing breasts looked somehow different, armored support over their swell. When she shook my hand, the old strength was still there underneath the mottled skin.

Collin hadn’t aged quite as well. He seemed to have given up the fight somewhere around fifty, and let himself grow fat. Bald now, his tattoo removed, what remained of his thin hair along the back of his skull was cropped into short, white stubble. He did, however, have a subtle pink streak in his Hemingway beard.

He wobbled slightly as he strolled through the crowded gallery, double scotch in one hand, a Royal Dutchman brand hash cigarette in the other. His wife (number seven? or was it eleven? I hadn’t kept count) hovered by his side as if to catch him if he toppled over, worry and mild exasperation pinching her young face.

“Eh, well, ‘ere now! It’s fookin’ Kermit!” he boomed, grabbing me by both shoulders and shaking me like a rag doll. His breath washed over my face, the alcohol fumes making my eyes water. “Come to check over a couple more m’scribblin’s?” He didn’t wait for any answer, which was just as well since I didn’t have one ready.

People turned, as if permission had suddenly been given that it was okay to stare at the drunken famous artist and his weird friend.

“Kermit ‘ere bought my first work, back when we were kids hangin’ out in gay Paree. Knew a real artist right from th’ beginnin’!” He slapped me a bit harder than friendly on the back. “A born connoisseur, right?” The grin was hard, white false teeth screwed into his jawbone. Shark’s teeth, mean and stark and emotionless.

His wife glanced at me, apologetic, a frazzled plea for understanding in her eyes. I muttered something, I don’t remember what. Andy rescued me, extricating me skillfully from his grasp, steered me genteelly toward the drinks, while Collin’s wife shepherded him away in another direction. The crowd’s interest ceased instantly.

The white uniformed man behind the bar poured me a drink of something without even a raised eyebrow, a real pro. Or maybe it was simply that by then my novelty had worn off. Andy and I exchanged the usual vacuous pleasantries. The words died away and we simply stood, holding drinks and looking at each other.

“Times change,” Andy said, smiling thinly. “So do people.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, staring down into the red circle of wine in my glass. “I didn’t mean it to be that obvious.”

“Oh, not you. You haven’t changed. Not one bit.” She wasn’t flattering me. I was surprised by the resentment in her voice. I was trying to find a tactful way of answering when, unfortunately, Collin shook off his watchdog wife and weaved over just in time to hear Andy’s last remark.

“‘Course not, darlin’,” he said loudly. I wondered if he was losing his hearing, and shouted the way deaf people sometimes do. I preferred that explanation to what I suspected: Collin enjoyed being the center of the scene, and like any good actor had learned to project his voice to make sure everyone could hear every word.

“Kermit’s still a kid, y’know! Hasn’t even got started on ‘is life while th’

rest of us’r dropping off like flies!” He hit me on the back again, nearly ejecting the drink out of my hand. “You don’t have kids of your own yet, do you, Kermit?” He knew I didn’t, didn’t bother waiting for an answer. “Me, I’m burning out the ladies trying to propagate me precious artistic genes!” He grabbed his crotch and roared with laughter. His wife looked stricken.

“Don’t…” Andy whispered under Collin’s laugh. I almost didn’t hear her, and I wasn’t sure who she was addressing.

Collin’s laugh cut off abruptly. He glared at Andy. “Don’t gi’ me that look,” he said, his false good nature gone. His face was flushed with anger and alcohol, eyes turned piglike small, red from the hash. “We’re all friends ‘ere, aren’t we? Say what’s on’r minds, eh?” He gestured grandly, including everyone in the room and somehow still leaving me out of the motion.

I was shaking, wishing desperately I could find a tactful way of leaving. “One for all and all for one,” I mumbled into my glass. “The Three Merry Pranksters, back to back.”

Collin wasn’t as deaf as I thought. He rounded on me in real hostility. “You.”

He said. “What the fookin’ hell d’you know about it? You don’t know a goddamned thing about friendship. You don’t know shit about serious art, laughin’ at it, laughin’ at us while you drive us off the face of the planet, you miserable arrogant asshole!”

Several people grabbed him by his stout arms, trying to pull him away as he leaned against them, yelling at me. “Who gave you the right, eh, Kermit? Who d’you think y’are, judging human beings, you fookin’…” He sputtered incoherently to a stop, staring at me, tears suddenly in his eyes. The anger had vanished and the surprising pain in its place burnt me numb. Then he whirled around, turning his back to me and nearly knocking over his entourage.

I’m embarrassed to say I fled the gallery rather ignominiously, and found myself standing in the train station, glass of wine still clutched in my hand. I cried all the way back to my hotel. I did.

Collin drank himself to death a few years later. I didn’t go to the funeral, even though I was sent an invitation. I didn’t even bother to send flowers, not because his death didn’t sadden me, but because I thought it better not to remind anyone of me.

By that time, I had returned to Paris and had bought a penthouse floor on the Quai St. Michel, just around the corner from the fountain, overlooking Notre Dame and the Seine. I still adored Paris, one of the few cities in the world that blends its ultramodern ambitious heart seamlessly with its ageless soul.

Notre Dame still shimmered golden in the sunlight, and the booksellers still sold ancient books and cheap postcards to tourists from their green vendor’s boxes along the banks of the river. Young artists from the Ecole des Beaux Artes still competed with the experienced craftsmen along the quais and in the squares. The Bateaux Mouches boats that rippled the water carrying their camera-adorned tourist cargo were identical to the boats that had plied past the twin islands at the core of Paris for a hundred years.

Small cars still clogged narrow streets, horns bleating as they fought for illegal parking spaces. They floated inches above the tiny piles of doggie doo still faithfully collected by the vacuum cleaning motorfloaters, the Merde Max patrol in their traditional green jumpsuits. The flics policing the rues and boulevards, proud in their sharp blue uniforms and their high-tech gear, still saluted civilians who stopped them to ask directions. Underneath the noisy city streets, metro trains whisked from station to station on silent mag tracks, the deep subsonic rumble from my early childhood long vanished.

There were more of us around by then, too, and I began to get the usual urges my kind get, not so unlike the rest of the world. I felt the need to settle down, buy a place to “entertain.” I started associating more with my own people, looking for possible nightly company. I was also going through that period of my life where old friends really were old, and it was painful losing them.

Andy called me, the picture muted from the public phone, a few weeks after Collin’s funeral. She was a couple of blocks away, could she come up for a few minutes?

When I opened the door, she carried a carton wrapped box, obviously crating a painting. She had aged even more, not bothering any longer to tint the white hair blonde. She was breathing hard from lugging the painting the brief few feet from the elevator to my door. “Collin wanted you to have this,” she said as a greeting. An old woman’s voice, a stranger’s voice.

I unwrapped it, gazing at it for long minutes without speaking. It was not a great painting, not technically one of his brilliant masterworks, as I suppose I expected. It was a portrait of the three of us done some years before his style had settled into Collin’s recognizable tour de force. Three young, shiny faces laughed in Parisian sunshine, mischievous, in love with life, all the world ahead of them.

“I like it.” What was there to say?

The old woman beside it smiled bitterly.

I made some coffee, and we sat on the balcony, watching the swirl of people below while we sipped.

“It doesn’t even seem like there are fewer people in Paris now, compared to when I lived here,” Andy said. And looked at me with redrimmed eyes deep in their sockets.

“Paris is still a place to see, it’s as crowded as it ever was,” I said, not wanting to get into it. “Travel is cheap. A lot more people have the time and money and want to spend it seeing the world.” I emphasized the word “people,”

unwilling to allow the verbal division between us.

She was quiet for a long time. “Collin was right, you know. It isn’t fair,” she said, voice old and querulous. “What will happen to all this once we’re gone?”

She waved a bony hand vaguely toward Notre Dame, toward the city, toward the world.

“We will protect it, cherish it, preserve it,” I said.

“Like you were able to protect and cherish human beings?” she responded bitterly. “Why can’t you preserve us, while you’re at it? This is our world, not yours. We belong here. You don’t.”

I didn’t give her the usual arguments. I’d been a naive child when my people came. Most now were born here. This was our home. We were creatures of the universe, the same as everyone else. We had as much right to be here as they did, the definitions between First World natives and Third World immigrants and Other World invaders completely incomprehensible to us and, with a little help and gentle persuasion, completely out-of-date.

It wasn’t our fault, either. When my kind started out, they didn’t know this world would already have a civilization, how could they have? It had been a hundred thousand years, and once here, we couldn’t simply say, “Gee, folks, we made a mistake, sorry about that,” turn around and spend another hundred thousand years to go back. Our “home” had vanished in a starburst, a nova that now was too faint to even be seen in the night sky.

“We’ve done what we can. We haven’t hurt you,” I said, weakly. The conditions limiting her own people had been here before we came. No one could blame us for that.

“You’re not doing anything to help us, either,” she said. “You mimic us, you admire us, you try to be just like us, but you’re outbreeding us a thousand to one while we’re mysteriously dying off.”

This didn’t seem like Andy, not my friend, my artiste companion.

“It’s not like we’re shoving people into gas ovens, or sterilizing anyone, Andy.

We’re not trying to kill your people off.” We both knew what I meant, the constantly mutating diseases we were immune to, the ever increasing rates of human infertility.

“No, of course not,” she retorted. Her hands had bailed into fists. “You breezed in with all your magic technology and took over the entire planet. Oh, yes, we were lucky to have you, I’m sure. Suddenly everybody’s a Have, no more Have-Nots. Free education, free medicine for everybody, all the improvements evened out so everyone could prosper from a better standard of living without anyone ever quite noticing there were fewer and fewer of us around to enjoy it.

It’s just all a bit too coincidental, don’t you think?”

“It’s not like that, Andy….”

Her chin quivered suddenly, her voice thick. “Really? Are you honestly going to suggest it’s just that a more educated, prosperous society tends to have fewer children? How fascinating that as our population shrinks, yours is busy filling up the vacuum. You’ve interfered with everything else human, why not that?” It was a cry of despair. I knew she had never had children.

My own anger was part righteousness and part shame. I had thought I knew her better. “Okay, Andy, maybe we should have left things as we found them. Women in India dying in their twenties worn out after having a dozen babies. Children starving in Ethiopia and Somalia and Bangladesh and Texas, for godsake.

Fourteen-year-old Catholic children in Brazilian ghettos forced to have unwanted children while their rich neighbors sneak over the border for abortions? So let’s go back to systematically drowning Chinese baby girls, why don’t we?” The heat in my gut was making me feel sick as I grew angrier, unable to stop myself.

“Tell me it’s unethical that the Kurds aren’t being gassed anymore, or that Iraqi babies aren’t dying from drinking shit-infested water. Would you prefer that the Croats and Serbs and the Israelis and Arabs and the Russians and the Ukrainians and every other tiny little piece of dirt with more than three people on it kept on hating and killing each other? Is that what you want to preserve, the right to breed gun fodder?”

I was trembling. She didn’t answer for a while, sipping at coffee that must have been tepid by then. “Tell me something, Kermit. How many children do you have?”

she asked coldly.

I sighed and shrugged, deflated. “I don’t know. A couple hundred, I’d guess.”

I didn’t know any of them. Strangers all, parentless children born able to take care of themselves within hours, huge curious eyes eager to take in their new world. A massive collective bank account, limitless funds to draw on all their lives. Each of them living four to five times longer than Andy or Collin could have ever hoped to. And every decade, another explosion of children, all of them producing thousands more children until we’d filled in the system and our natural biology slowed down to a reasonable pace. Something would have to give.

It wouldn’t be us.

“And when there are more of you than us, what will you do then? Put us in zoos?

Pack up what’s left and send us out to take someone else’s planet away from them?”

I didn’t bother to tell her we’d both be long dead by that time. It wouldn’t have been any comfort to her at all.

We changed the subject, talked about innocuous things, what we’d been doing, where we’d been, anemic gossip about people we knew. The sky darkened to red, and Andy started to fidget, anxious to leave. I escorted her to the door.

“If you’re in Paris long, I’d like to see you again,” I said, my anger forgotten. I really did mean it.

Andy stared at me, old eyes unblinking. “I don’t think so,” she said, a hard edge in the wavering voice.

It took me by surprise, painfully. “It was just a small disagreement, Andy.

We’re still friends,” I said quietly. “I thought we loved each other….”

She smiled and shook her head. “How little you understood any of us, Kermit. I thought you were amusing, and I certainly didn’t mind the financial help now and then. I had other concerns. I used you, in a way, which I apologize for now, but I’d do it again in a minute.”

I was standing stupidly, just listening, not comprehending at all what she was saying.

“I grew up always having something being taken away from me, resenting having to depend on rich people to get where I thought I deserved to be. First the Japanese and the Europeans, then you. It didn’t matter. I was smart, but dirty smart, not a genius like Collin. I had rich friends, I married well. I wanted to get on top and stay there without ever having to depend on anyone else again.

Not you. Not the Japanese. Not even my husband, rest his poor, overworked soul.

“I’m a bitch, Kermit. I told you I was but you never believed it. It was Collin who loved you. Collin who adored you, and you couldn’t see that either. He poured it all into his paintings, thinking you were the only one he could really trust to see his talent for what it was, his worth as an artist,” she laughed harshly, “as a human being. He really believed in all that wise alien superiority bullshit. He so badly wanted your approval and it hurt him when all you admired was the art and you still couldn’t see him.”

She turned, hesitated; and looked back over her shoulder. “He couldn’t see you the way I do. You’re no better nor wiser than we are, and in some way you’re much smaller. You take what you can’t make. Our art, our future, our planet. We can joke with art, be amused by it, but it’s our heart and soul and we take it all very seriously. It’s human, Kermit, something you imitate well, but don’t understand. When you run us into oblivion or out of town, you’ll have lost the most important element, and all you will have left is the shell.”

She left, closing the door gently, and I never saw her again.

I spend a lot of time in the Louvre these days. I see more and more of my kind there, and less of Andy’s. Some of them might even be my own children, I wouldn’t know. I’d like to think so, somehow.

The Etruscan exhibit is my favorite. I can stand for hours and look at the mysterious smiles on the faces of loving couples carved in stone sarcophagi. I love the little figurines all lined up in the glass cases; the little boy blowing the fire under the huge pot. A man with a comical hat playing a flute.

An obese man dancing with his companions, arms entwined around their shoulders.

The laughing statuettes of couples in playful sexual coupling. A girl playing a harp. The child holding the furious goose in his too small arms. It’s the joy and the humor and the love of life I see in these small poignant shapes.

I wonder about the people who left them. Long vanished, extinguished by the conquering Romans, their culture, religion, even their everyday language lost forever. Would they have drawn grease pencil Charlie Chaplin mustaches over the beatific smiles on the faces of their ancestor’s tombs?

I think she’s wrong, Andy was. I don’t know if I understand art. Do you need to be a dancer to love the dance? My kind aren’t good at creating it, but I’d like to believe it’s possible to appreciate it without being an artist myself. I’d like to think that the spirit and soul of these vanished people are still here, in the art, in the eyes of the people who see it and love them for it.

People like me.