I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Read Online Free PDF Page B

into pressure upon myself. At that point, Anne was still studying for the requisite exams that would allow her to practice law in Europe. Aside from small amounts I made selling paintings in group shows and a laughable hourly rate I got from a translating job Monsieur de Bourigeaud found me in his firm, we weren’t really making money. Oh, we would be, soon enough, or rather, Anne would be, but in the beginning, Anne’s parents took care of us, even providing the down payment on our house.
    Now, as a lower-middle-class lad from Hemel Hempstead, this kind of silver-spooning shouldn’t have sat well with me at all. And at first, it didn’t. Anne and I saw ourselves as comrades-in-arms, well educated and levelheaded, yes, but still intrepid. We wanted to do things our way. We hadn’t needed anyone’s help before this, and we didn’t see why we needed it then.
    That changed when we started visiting the flats that our paltry savings could afford us: heartless, one-room studios on the sixth floors of charmless buildings in neighborhoods where you wouldn’t want to walk alone at night, and all this while Anne was seven months pregnant. In such a place, I wouldn’t have been able to store my art equipment, let alone do any painting, and Anne began to have nightmares in which she found herself welded not just to the baby, but to the walls of the apartment, terrified that she’d be a homebound mum forever, with no way back out.
    And then one Sunday, after lunch at their home in the wooded suburbs of Le Vésinet, her parents took us to visit a small town house in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris: three stories with a tidy plot of land in the back, just big enough for a garden, and an unfinished work space on the second floor that could function as a studio. As I walked through the light-filled area of the largest private work area I might potentially ever have, I found myself hoping that Anne would swallow her pride and accept the blue blood coursing through her like a prodigal daughter coming home.
    And she did. She caved. We both did. We accepted the Bourigeauds’ financial help and started our new life. Due to a mind that is more pragmatic than mine, Anne never felt guilty about accepting her parents’ cash. Instead, she repaid their generosity by being the very best mother, daughter, and lawyer that she could be, while I let the shame of such a handout build inside of me until it made me feel like less of a man, less of an artist, less than everything I had one day hoped to be.
    It was around this time that I started looking for representation in Paris. Although I’d had several pieces from my thesis work along with some of my former installations exhibited in group shows around Europe, I couldn’t find a gallerist willing to give me my own show. Apparently, I wasn’t coming atthe political-­pop angle in the right way. My work wasn’t loud enough, it wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t neon pink. Others told me that there wasn’t enough cohesion among my various pieces, or that there was too much of it, to come back and visit when I was “known.” Of course, you couldn’t “be” someone without getting your own show, and you couldn’t get your own show if you were a nobody. Feeling despondent, I nevertheless forced myself to visit the last three galleries on my list, one of which was the Premier Regard run by Julien Lagrange.
    When he looked through my portfolio, he fixated on a photograph I’d slid near the back, a section most people never got to because they’d already decided that I didn’t have that “thing” that they were looking for. But Julien was interested in The Blue Bear , the one painting that had nothing to do with all my other work, the one painting that was schmaltzy.
    â€œDo you have other ones like this?” he asked.
    â€œWhat,” I said, “like, awful?”
    He laughed. “No,