Free A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend

wide and head bobbing as if to encourage belief.
No, really
, her eyes said, blinking rapidly.
    She blew smoke away with the hand that was holding a cigarette, not clearing the air much at all. The lit butt followed her at all times, a firefly punctuating her sentences. Would she lose her charm when the smoking ban went into effect? Gabriel wondered. Or would it simply transfer to another expressive tic, like buttoning and unbuttoning a sweater, or worrying her clamshell telephone?
    Tonight she wore more elaborate makeup—her eyelids had a sheen to them and her mouth was painted a bright red. The story finished in a burst of giggles, which Gabriel mimicked. He had gotten used to only half understanding his surroundings. He liked the remove his foreignness gave him. Sometimes, being outside of a culture was like having a one-way window into other people.
    He was free to contemplate her in a way that was completely visual. What did her cheeks do when she inhaled? How did her shoulders react to a touch or a perceived slight? Examining a person became part of a narrative he continually constructed, that he always wanted to put in his paintings but emerged only in his drawings, his derivative drawings, his Connois and Canaletto homages. Someday, he would work that sense of completion into his real work, when the pendulum swung away from abstraction and confession/expression and back toward observation and the notion of the artist as a commentator on modern society.
    “Do you want to order for me?” she asked. “I don’t know what any of this is, anyway.”
    “Um, okay.” Gabriel felt a quick, airless second of panic, then he settled. “Do you not like anything?” As soon as he said the sentence, he realized he’d said, “Don’t you like anything?”
    But Colette graciously or unconsciously ignored the fault and said, “I’m French. I eat whatever doesn’t eat me first.”
    “So you trust me?”
    “Implicitly,” she said.
    When the waiter came by their table Gabriel ordered paella for two, with
mariscos
, and a beet salad and some sausage and dates to start. Thewaiter took the menus and Colette sighed with relief; now there was room for her elbows.
    He took a gulp of wine, feeling courage well up in him in inverse proportion to the sinking alcohol. He said, “You look beautiful.”
    She smiled, pursed her mouth as if to deflect the compliment. Then she sat back in her chair. “Where are you from in Spain?”
    “Near Barcelona.”
    “Barthelona,” she mimicked his accent. “Hmmm, I liked it there. It was … God, this will sound stupid. It was very Parisian.” She laughed.
    Gabriel smiled. “No, I see it,” he said. “Large boulevards, old, parks, cafés …”
    “Well, I meant more like, when you study art, you get an idea of a place. My idea of Barthelona—” She paused.
    “Very good,” he said.
    “—was from Picasso and Dalí and Miró.”
    “Picasso was barely from here. There.”
    “I know,” she said. “Which is why I should have expected that his Barcelona would look like Paris. But, I didn’t.”
    “Have you always lived in Paris?”
    “Oh, no,” she said. “Can’t you tell by my accent?” Gabriel shook his head. She continued, “You know Parisians, unless you’re born here you might as well be from Mars. I’m from Chalon-sur-Saône. Do you know it?”
    He shook his head again, contemplating her assessment of Parisians. So she too understood the continuing alienation of being a foreigner. Apparently her accent, which he couldn’t hear, branded her as an outsider too. He wanted to take her hand, but resisted.
    “Nobody does,” she said. “It’s completely without interest. My father owns a smoke shop.” Colette pointed to her cigarette as if it were the natural result. She stubbed it out in the silver ashtray. It was an ingenious contraption that when lifted released the ash and the butt inside. “And what do your parents do?” she asked.
    “My mother baked bread for