About four years after what I would later come to call ‘the incident at Place des Vosges’ (or simply ‘the incident’ to my more witting informants) I came across a photobook on display at the Art Institute gift shop that was entitled Murder! and sported a cover image of a faceless young woman bleeding out at the middle of an abandoned intersection with the shadow of a totem pole looming in the distance. The kitschiness of this bit was admirable enough that I was ready to buy the book in its shrink-wrapped state even if it wasn’t authored by one Graham Hartnell and dedicated to none other than ‘somebody that I used to know’ (ie. obviously me, Suzy Niles, who had tried to contact him intermittently throughout that four-year period enough to realize with certainty that he had positively zero desire to maintain any kind of correspondence with yours truly)—more than even the fact that somehow the publication of Murder! had missed my notice or that Graham was successful enough to have a book on display at the Art Institute I was struck by how vastly his sensibilities had shifted from the old Graham I had known in Paris that liked nothing better than to go on cigarette-fueled rants about how preparation and staging were the antithesis of photography as an art form and how ultimately it was naturalism, more than anything, which was the place of any serious photographer’s aspirations. For a while there as I was flipping through the pages of the album—which the cover image was a fairly good encapsulation of—I entertained the idea that Graham Hartnell was more common a name among photographers than one would usually imagine, but then there he was on the last page, bespectacled and scruffy, face locked in that state of mild confusion which you wouldn’t ever guess was only his natural resting state. I mean you can probably already tell how much I liked him, which makes his involvement in this story somewhat of a nuisance; I’ll try not to digress.
This was in Chicago, but the incident took place, as I mentioned previously, in Paris, at the Place des Vosges square, a short distance away from this very chic Haussmannian apartment I’d been renting during my year abroad as a painter’s assistant that completed the final piece of the ‘quartet’ of graduation requirements which my needlessly posh art history program at Scripps mandated, a quartet which was functionally a ‘quintet’ because the unsaid rules of this assistance also required me to carry out several studies of a variety of Parisian paintings deigned to be ‘masterpieces’ by my host, an inadvertently haughty but genial old woman I called Judith. Judith was her middle name—her real first name was Daniella and she was actually Mexican, but that was an aspect of her identity she tried not to play up for reasons I have a hard time understanding. Most of her art consisted of sculptures that she would trace back in some manner or another to phallic imagery though my private thoughts were that they were significantly more complex and accomplished than what she gave them credit for.
I’d never actually wanted to be an artist. Truth be told, this was a point in my life where I didn’t really want to ‘be’ anything, and the idea of actually rolling up my sleeves and going at something which could amount to an actual activity gave me the cooties. It was a time I would not hesitate to call simple, insofar as simple meant spartan and not uncomplicated—I do seem to recall a number of ‘deep’ and ‘inner’ feelings stumbling on top of each other, but the things that I were doing throughout the day were like maybe four in number. In fact a lot of my time in Paris was subsidized by my mother, who had a lot of trust in me as an individual and was blissfully unaware of this propensity of mine—several of the other girls were working at bookstores or as baristas. Even so, it’s not like I was drinking cocktails every day; somewhere or the other my Iowa father had imprinted upon me a real go-getter attitude, and what I was actually doing with my time was spending copious amounts of it staring slack-jawed at whatever new exhibition came around. (You know who else was from Iowa? Graham—a real born-and-raised Des Moines boy, which apparently meant that he was allergic to clothing that wasn’t three sizes two big or didn’t somehow incorporate both a plain white T and a chambray overshirt; when I took him shopping that August it was at Les Halles and not any one of the perfectly available thrift stores in our vicinity because he found the whole endeavor too, quote, ‘French.’ You’re living in Paris, boy, time to drop the Norman Mailer routine—what a fool!) The big one was the Paris Internationale, a contemporary art fair held at the Grand Palais that I visited in October—my second month in Paris—and which convinced me, for the first and last time in my life, that my interests in art history remained limited solidly to the ‘history’ side of things. Much of the artwork I saw there amounted to a gooey gray sludge, but, like, literally—lots of exhibits actually consisted of slimy-looking properties arranged in slimy-feeling ways, and the labels were rather nonsensical in terms of what they expressed. My main takeaway was that anyone who wants to become an artist is probably ill-equipped to actually make art, and the vice-versa implied that I’d be a pretty good candidate for artistry. And that is the story of how Suzy Niles became a painter.
This redoubling of my painterly efforts was very pleasing to Judith, and it was partly due to this newfound sense of interest that she soft-upgraded my assistantship to something more resembling an apprenticeship, allowing me access to her more Catholic (and ultimately interesting) side. Though her most acknowledged contributions to the art world were those phallic sculptures, she was also an accomplished painter and introduced to me various textured canvases that consisted of studies of the crucifixion, a subject that was also healthily expressed in her choice of masterpieces. The crucifixion was one of those things that had an effect on my state of mind during the incident at the Place des Vosges as a whole. That and the baby Jesus, and Caravaggio’s ‘flagellation’ of Christ, and Saint Sebastian, so on—Judith was under the impression that I should be introduced to the full range of religious iconography in classical art, and later Graham told me that the reproducing the success of religious iconography was almost certainly how photographers learned this technique of ‘elevating’ the photographic subject to quasi-religious terms (except for Graham—at least at the time—this wasn’t Jesus so much as kids skateboarding). Basically what Judith wanted me to learn was how to make things look grand. So what I did, naturally, is spend incredible quantities of time just sitting and staring at great works of art and trying to internalize all the things that they did in order to make them so compelling, not just in the aesthetic sense but also in terms of how they performed this religious elevation; once I had absorbed that toolkit I could utilize it to elevate whatever I wanted. For example, the placement of the artwork was important not merely in terms of arrangement but also in terms of actual location, like how many of these early-renaissance Italian frescoes looked rather blasé lined out endlessly in the Louvre, but similar and often less-accomplished French variants were breathtaking when presented in one of the many Églises in town. I had a fair command of technique—I mean, there was certainly some reason I was going to art school beyond simply the fact that I could afford being a socialite—but the actual iconographic underpinnings of the work was something I was sorely lacking, and that, more than anything, was what Judith was trying to imprint. I got fortunate in that when she looked at me she saw more than a real estate-selling character.
So instead of sitting around looking pretty in the multitude of cafés in the Marais, what I was doing that year is taking full advantage of my student card to make after-hours visits to the Louvre—and eventually to the Musee d’Orsay and the Musee d’Orangerie—and developing, simultaneously, the personality that the girls at the Sorbonne (where I attended a class on modern and contemporary art towards the end of the year) would come to call ‘bitchy.’
That said, sitting around in cafés would probably have been a better use of my time. Getting after-hours access to these museums is rather complicated, but apart from being a late waker I was also somewhat twitchy around large groups of people enveloping artworks in unison, and while I would have forgiven a lot of what the tour guides called ‘context’ if it was merely banal instead of being outright facile, in its present state I would rather hit myself in the head with a hammer than listen to them babble on about Monet’s emerging blindness for the umpteenth time. So instead I went the whole way and got the necessary emails and signatures and even learnt the modicum of French I needed to converse nontrivially with the museum staff (turns out un croissant, s’il vous plait doesn’t get you too far in those kinds of circles) just so I could spend 6-9PM of every day in the gallery of my choice. I finally managed to get my pass by mail on the 9th of November and made my first visit on the 10th, following which I was promptly apprehended by the gendarmerie for being a potential witness to the first successful Louvre heist since 1998 that had happened to occur in the Galerie d’Apollon the very minute I was making my first solo foray into those Italian renaissance paintings I had so wanted to view in the nightlight.
As much as I would like to be generous and say that the reason for my detainment was a simple mix-up, I need to make it clear that it was engineered by night administrator and my then-nemesis Nathalie Dufort who found my brazen attempts to learn French inadequate and hence allowed the aforementioned gendarmerie to carry me away to the closest Préfecture de Police—which was marred by a flurry of activity in light of the break-in—where they seated me in the French version of an interrogation room and brought out a bespectacled gentleman who had his face loaded into a persistent gape. I was later told that this was a translator. It was all fairly film-like: I went though a baggage inspection at the entrance at the Rue de Rivoli following which actual alarm bells went off (I remember distinct possibilities of weapons being dropped surreptitiously into my tote bag in the metro) and a number of police sirens made their way outside—then there was a long and complicated flurry of events and all I can recall is being asked to step into a police vehicle from wherein I could see the smirking image of Miss Dufort a short while away.
After about five minutes of back-and-forth with the translator he turned back to the police and spat out some delicious words (at the very least I heard pute and merde), following which I was asked to fill out a form and transferred to a windowless waiting room which held only one other inhabitant, a confused but cheery-looking American boy with thoroughly animated facial expressions.
‘Qu’est-ce qui vous amène—’ he began, but I shut him down with a wave. Then—‘damn! What’d they bring a stateside girl like you in for?’
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
He laughed. I really would like to say that I was taken in by him immediately, but if we’re keeping score it took more like half-an-hour—the officer who had restrained me had about him a floral scent and the characteristic French ruggedness with long, flowing hair, and something about the fact that he was restraining me had gotten me all worked up… I’ll stop, I’m sorry.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘What’d you do?’
‘How about you go first?’ I said, unimpressed. While I wasn’t really in the mood to talk, I could tell that he knew more French than I did; apart from the classic Nom and Prénom on my sheet I had little clue what I was supposed to fill out, and Graham was the only assistance around.
‘Fair enough,’ he yawned. ‘Vandalism, what else? Smashed up a mailbox as a prank, but turns out the building’s got a security guard—although it looks like I’m getting out scot-free this evening, no thanks to the alarm bells. Say, you got any idea what’s going on?’
‘I think there’s something going on in the Louvre,’ I said. ‘Although je ne parle pas bien français, so you can’t trust me. I think there’s been some kind of break-in.’
‘A break-in at the Louvre? What is this, 1965?’
‘Well, I just heard you say “stateside,” so—’
He winked—the audacity! ‘So you were at the Louvre?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘It’s like 9PM on a Thursday.’
‘Well, I’ve got after-hours access. I’m an art history student.’ He was making odd beatboxing sounds, and his posture was very careless. ‘What’s that you’re humming?’
‘I don’t know, something I picked up at a concert, I think. Art History, huh. I used to do that.’
‘You used to study art history?’
‘Sorta. I went to the Sorbonne.’
‘But you’re American.’
‘Uh-huh. Dad wanted to move out here a few years ago, so I said why the hell not. I’m a photographer. Work for a French magazine.’ He looked awfully young to be a photographer, but I was at that point in my 20s where everyone around me still felt like a kid despite them being factually not.
‘I like your nails,’ he finished.
I stifled a smile. ‘What’s that?’
‘Your nails,’ he repeated. ‘I like them. They’re kind of floaty.’
I had gotten some new acrylic nail extensions at the salon. ‘Floaty?’
‘Like they’ve got gems or something embedded in them. Can I touch them?’
‘You want to touch my nails?’
‘If you’ll let me.’
‘Will you help me fill out the form?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said, shrugging, then slid over to my side of the bench.Without asking, he held up my hands to examine the nails in detail, then flicked one of them, causing the embedded rhinestone to pop off.
‘Ow!’ I yelped, slapping him on the wrist.
His face immediately assumed a cartoonish expression of apology. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Are those things expensive?’
‘That cost me 15 bucks,’ I said, which seemed an appropriate number for this context.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you out with the form.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, trying not to smile. I’d met him for about five minutes, but the alarm bells in my head were already a lot louder than the ones that had gone off in the Louvre.
I realize I haven’t given you much in the way of describing my cohort—at Scripps there were only about eight other girls who were enrolled in my Art History program in the first place, and all of them save me (and this one other girl who went to Houston, God bless her soul) ended up spending their year in New York City, which was unfortunate because while I was not particularly close to any of them I certainly remembered them being bright and having an understated sense of humor I did well with. In Paris, on the other hand, the program I had found my internship through largely supported a sickening—not to mention revolving—scene of NYU girls. The dispositions here were bimodal: either nauseatingly cheery or outright vile, and that both could coexist in the same individual was deeply disconcerting. I interacted with them so little that I have no idea what they thought of me. Presumably they thought of me very little if at all. All that’s to say that until I met Graham it had not occurred to me that I was being a bit of a recluse. My contrarianism which had led me to avoid stereotypical Parisian activities had also led to the unfortunate side effect of turning me into a shut-in. Despite living in the Marais I had somehow avoided taking a walk by the river until Graham invited me for one the very next day—he’d called, actually, in the old-fashioned way, seeing as to how I’d scribbled my number on his arm with the pen I’d been given in the Préfecture; the fool had left his phone at home knowing that if the police caught hold of him they’d almost certainly go through it, and so I couldn’t just punch it in.
My worry that he wouldn’t call was alleviated practically the moment I awoke at my customary eleven—there were already several missed calls on my phone from a French number. He picked up my return call immediately and asked me to meet him at the Pont Louis-Philippe round about nine.
The Haussmannian apartment I was staying in had been procured via semi-illegal means, having been registered officially under a woman who would have been one hundred and twenty six years old if she had still been living but owned unofficially by her niece who carved up complex ‘sublets’ for tax reasons—it was quite an excellent studio with the only major downside being that the location warranted some amount of noise from the street down below and the apartment, being old, also had a slanted floor which was a source of disorientation for me at the very beginning of my stay. Because of this I got it for a price that seemed fair in the sense that my mother was not unwilling to pay it. I had surmised that it be possible that Graham would visit that evening, and so I spent my entire morning tidying it up and also trying to find ways to block the sound emanating from the street outside which was strangely unconcerned with the state of my window; it was actually unclear where the sound was even coming from, since the window was affixed with a very nice rubber gasket that was certainly succeeding in blocking some of the sound from passing through—it didn’t do much for the humdrum buzz of the shoppers but dampened the honking a fair bit. Ultimately I was not able to find the source of this sound and would instead make it a point to complain about to Graham every time he would come over, to which his constant reply was that he hadn’t even perceived it until I pointed it out, and now he was annoyed that he was fixated on that sound. I spent most of the rest of that day sampling ice creams and aimlessly walking through Sephora, too distracted to get any work done, and by the time I saw him on the bridge my legs were already plenty worn out. One of the things I liked most about Graham was that it was not hard to tell what was on his mind, and judging by his face on our first formal meeting I could tell that in this particular circumstance it was excitement and sex.
Needless to say it took about a week before Graham Hartnell became my boyfriend, so to speak, the first real boyfriend I had ever had and even the first makeshift boyfriend unless you counted Randy Cunningham of Bertfield High who had once kissed me on the mouth under the pretext of jointly inhaling weed smoke while we were discovering bongs in the tenth grade—I remember that the thing that drew me to him was his propensity to wear several rubber wristbands which carried the names and logos of several indie rock bands that we were into at the time such as the Arctic Monkeys or the Strokes; where he had procured them was unclear, but he was in any case a stereotypical ‘bad boy’ not in the sense of being actively dangerous in any way but rather simply being a bit generally idiotic and kind of impulsive. These qualities—being silly and impulsive—are yet the qualities I am instinctively drawn to in any kind of man, and they serve me okay, on the whole, because it is hard to not be good-natured when you are silly. At least such was true for Graham. Of our first meeting I recall everything but am wont to reproduce because it is the kind of thing that sounds a lot better in my head than it does on paper, being as to how we spent a lot of it pretending to be frivolous pop culture characters and how he did an impassioned Philip Marlowe impression to which I replied that he would better serve as Inspector Clouseau, and how he ended up taking me to a kebab shop not far from Pont Alexandre III and then kissed me in the drizzling rain on my lips essentially on impulse, just out of nowhere, really, not bothering to hold my waist or anything or present some kind of dramatic moment but just went for it as if it were the most natural thing in the world—very pleasing. He did not end up in my room that particular night but was there a week after and all those things.
Just as the incident would not have occurred if not for Judith’s insistence that I study the masterpieces of classical art, it would also not have occurred if I had not been deeply in love with Graham, and the two combined into an edifice that transformed this promising young woman into something more resembling a razor blade.