Free The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney Page B

technical schools for which the area was known, toward Gobelins. The streetlamps came on. Reflections from the rain-slick pavement twinned the passing traffic—headlights, taillights, white and red.
    It annoyed and discouraged Max that already, at mid-career, he was the subject of an academic paper, let alone one written by somebody as demonstrably misguided, even disturbed, as the girl he’d just encountered.
    A gloom settled over him, frustration at having wasted the day and its possibilities. He thought of his daughter, struggling to make a place for herself, and of Odile, never fully predictable but also, since the break-in, tense and preoccupied, inclined to brood. He felt keenly the fragility of their intermingled lives, of other people’s lives. Something like pity welled up in him, so enveloping that it soon encompassed everything and was all he felt. Then, abruptly, it left him, and he knew only exhaustion.
    Making a right on Glacière, just blocks from home, he noticed the local video store was still open. He glanced at the cardboard promotionals in the window—most of them for an American space-epic remake—but kept on walking.
    The store didn’t even stock his films.

CHAPTER 6
    BALAKIAN HAD HIRED a publicist for the opening, a Congo-born Belgian blonde who stood just inside the gallery entrance monitoring arrivals and pouncing triumphantly on those she believed useful to her. Young female journalists circled behind her, notepads in hand, while photographers jockeyed for position.
    Turner’s first impulse was to step back into the night, but the Belgian gleefully called out his name, kissed him hello, then asked loudly in French whether he still provided intimate services for his preferred clients. He knew what she was referring to, and though the incident, years past, had been largely her invention, considerable trouble had ensued from the brief account of it she had managed to place in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids. He was careful now to appease her before plunging ahead into the crowd.
    It was largely an art-world crowd, ambitious people imaginatively dressed and coiffed, but there was also a scattering of foreign nationals, men in suits, demi-celebrities, and downtown hipsters—notables of the sort that routinely appeared at the Belgian’s events. They milled around the soaring exhibition space, a former trucking depot whose interior had been gutted and elegantly refurbished, drinking wine from plastic cups, conversing in small groups, discreetly vigilant for company more desirable than their own.
    The flags upstaged them all. Unframed, suspended from clear plasticclips high on the walls, the crimson banners charged the gallery with their presence. After inspecting the initial seven that Turner had sent him, Balakian had requested three more, and they now hung two or three to a wall, positioned so that each commanded enough surrounding space to be seen for itself without appearing isolated. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Kosygin, Brezhnev—all looked perfectly at home in the quasi-industrial setting, as if they were reviewing yet another May Day rally. Taken as an ensemble, though, the blazing monochrome fields with their iconic figures—figures once recognizable to virtually anyone, anywhere—strongly resembled an Andy Warhol exhibition of the late 1960s or early ’70s, the time of his Marilyns and Jackies and Maos. The same mix of adulation and irony, awe and indifference, suffused both bodies of work. Such had been the zeitgeist, big faces for impossible times, as much a force in the Soviet Union as in the U.S., and Turner rejoiced at his perspicacity. A serious man didn’t become less so just because he was attempting to turn a profit.
    Turner made the rounds, greeting clients, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, taking care not to appear connected to the show, which was being presented as a Balakian production pure and simple, but when talking to critics or journalists he allowed