A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend

its revolving museum-like galleries. She looked at the drawings, let her gaze soften, and became, just for the moment, the artist himself. Apart from her acquired knowledge about paper, materials, subject matter, and style, she could effect this transubstantiation. That and her position at Tinsley’s led to her acknowledged preeminence in the field.
    Ian poked his head through her door, then came in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “So, up near Columbia, right?” he said. It took Elm a minute to figure out he was talking about his visit to the Attic. “Picture one of those old buildings that has housed academics for the past couple hundred years. The lobby’s marble has grooves between door and mailboxes and stairs. The elevator—unspeakable. I took the stairs, of course. Fifth floor. I knock. There’s no answer. But I’d made an appointment with the caregiver. Finally, a shuffling noise, and the door creaks open, straight out of some Bela Lugosi film. This woman, one hundred years old, skin hanging off in folds, some nightmare of old age, answers the door and without speaking waves me in.”
    Here Ian paused for effect. Elm loved his stories the way Moira loved being read to at night. She wanted to hear them over and over again, revel in the inconsistencies, in their slight variations.
    “So I walk into this apartment, and I swear it is unchanged from 1940. I half-expected to see Marlene Dietrich waltz in from stage right. Not only that, it hasn’t been cleaned since then either. And piles and piles of stuff—newspapers, folders, advertisements, boxes, envelopes. Just like the those brothers … What’s their names?”
    “The Collyer brothers,” Elm filled in. They were part of New York lore, the brothers who saved every newspaper for fifty years and then died inside their prison of newsprint.
    “Right. Complete with the paths between piles from kitchen to bedroom to toilet.”
    “Just like the marble grooves in the lobby.”
    “Don’t throw my storytelling inadequacies back at me. What, Homer never repeated an epithet?”
    “Sorry,” Elm said. She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, pantomiming rapt attention. “Pray, continue.”
    “She still hasn’t spoken to me, but we go into the bedroom, where a wan light is shining through the windows, illuminating the dust motes.”
    “Poetic,” said Elm.
    Ian ignored her. “And then she points to the drawings, which are in a Woolworth’s shopping bag, circa, say, 1920. And I’m wondering if the bag is the artifact she wants us to appraise. So I take the gloves out of my pocket and lean over and remove the drawings—”
    “That like an idiot I forgot to ask to see,” said Elm, sighing.
    “And they’re beautiful. At least, I think they are considering there is no light in the room at all. So I tell her they are beautiful. And then she says to me, ‘Young man, are you a homosexual?’ Ian did his best Katharine Hepburn accent, so that the word sounded like “homo-sucks-shell.”
    “What?” Elm burst out laughing.
    “I know. So I’m imagining all these great responses, like, ‘The guy I’m fucking thinks I am,’ or, ‘I prefer the term fudgepacker’ or something. But I’m such a good boy that I just say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Then she looks up at me, and her eyes are all filmy with cataracts, and she says, ‘My late husband was a homosexual.’ ”
    “Wow, you wandered into some weird gothic novel or something.”
    “Then she turns around and hobbles out of the room. So I put the drawings back. Their archives, by the way, consist of two pieces of construction paper connected with a piece of tape so yellow it’s merged with the paper.”
    “People like that don’t deserve art.” Elm breathed disapproval.
    “Wait. This is the good part of the story. I follow her, and over the bed there’s this painting. So I walk over and wipe the glass with the glove to see the attribution. There’s a note.
‘À Indira avec