Chapter 33 Armand vs. the Elements
Armand vs. the Elements
I woke up under a desk.
Well, first I woke up in an unknowable dark void that maliciously tried to strangle me. But then I realized I’d fallen asleep with my jacket over my head. On the floor. Under my drafting table.
I sat up, butting my head against the wobbly corner with the broken locking mechanism, but it didn’t wobble at all and actually hurt quite a bit.
Oh, aye, right.
For my birthday, Lucas had finally made his foray in here and unceremoniously disposed of my old desk.
He’d replaced it with a brand-new drafting table, on the pretext that I usually ended up under it in any case, and he felt better knowing it wasn’t threatening to collapse on top of me.
I had made one feeble protest at the time, but Lucas had cut me off with a kiss and an eloquent argument, the only bit of which I could remember involving his hands.
I shuddered and wrapped both arms around myself, trying uselessly to quell the guilt, the nausea, and, of course, the shame.
Wine always left me feeling heavy and bloated, like I’d eaten too many sweets, and the splitting headache I’d earned was cresting the horizon.
The demons were rallying their forces in the corners of the room, preparing for an onslaught that would undoubtedly last the rest of the night, if not the rest of my life.
I shut my eyes tight, clenching my entire body in an attempt to ward off the oncoming assault, tears and gorge rising.
One bottle. A quarter of it down the sink. A slip. Not a relapse. A slip, not a relapse. I needed to ring Karim. I needed to tell him I’d had a slip.
Not a relapse.
But I couldn’t catch my breath or find my balance. The universe spun, with me twisting miserably at its center.
When I opened my eyes again in an attempt to regain some smidge of steadiness—to find a spot on the wall and return to it even as my mind whirled—my gaze fell on the monstrously big book sitting on the old bookcase by the door.
I hadn’t touched it in years, but I still couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Lucas had dusted it.
Just the sight of it, the embossed golden letters on the spine, caused a horrible mixture of emotions to rise and coat every inch of my skin in cold and trembling memories.
A few months shy of eighteen, still under the impression I was going to grow up and become a Renaissance painter, I’d spent almost every waking moment at the museum, studying and sketching the work of the masters, fabricating as I did the long and illustrious career of the great artiste Demetrio.
A name my father had invented for the ring, but that I was going to elevate to the halls of classical culture.
One afternoon, as I sat tracing and retracing an angel-and saint-studded archway, a soft and silky voice had drawn me gently but decidedly out of myself:
“My, my, your fingers must have been blessed by the goddess Athena, my child.”
I’d looked up from my scribbling to see that one of the subjects had stepped forth from their painting—his hair hadn’t been as long then, and he still dressed a bit like an unemployed mime—but he was very much the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my short, vapid life.
I’d replied with something nonsensical, and he’d sat down beside me, slender shoulder brushing against mine. His white fingers hovered lingeringly over my drawing as he extolled its virtues in rumbling French tones, and he smelled of sex and mint.
We began meeting there daily, and Jean had provided me with a classical education the likes of which are almost no longer to be found—mixing astute analysis of themes and techniques with juicy gossip hundreds of years old.
“As I’m sure you are aware, my little student of dead men’s lives, Michelangelo and da Vinci hated each other with a great and fiery passion,” Jean whispered to me one day, as he pressed me against the marble wall, his eyes glinting in the shadows of the pillar we’d hidden behind.
“Leonardo was so full of fire—machines that flew in his mind, full of songs and philosophy, beautiful boys and mysterious women . . .”
He traced one long finger down my cheek, and grinned at the shudder this produced.
“And Michelangelo, the man of marble—he spent so much time in the cold and icy mountains, choosing his materials so very carefully and dragging them step by step to his workshop, where he slaved away over cold stone. Can you imagine—” his hand had left my cheek and traveled down to softly finger the collar of my jumper “—those two men simply meeting on the street? So much fire and so much ice . . .”
For my eighteenth birthday, he’d presented me with that book, weighing at least four and a half kilos and the cost completely unimaginable: The Definitive Biography and Works of Leonardo da Vinci.
Jean had made it clear which of the elements he wanted me to become.
As my life spun further and further off course, Jean’s gifts grew more and more extravagant: a silver chain with the image of Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dancers, when I started at the DOL House.
A conciliatory trip to the Louvre when the university informed me I was on academic probation due to absence and failing grades.
My very first bump on the anniversary of our first kiss.
Three years later, I found myself staring at Sam in confusion when they asked me what I was working on. I hadn’t worked on anything in longer than I could remember, because if I wasn’t exhausted from work, or Jean, my hands were far too shaky to draw.
It took five years and my friends’ combined forces to physically remove Jean from my life.
I was far too weak to do it on my own and went back to him more than once.
But each time was shorter than the last, and eventually I was strong enough to withstand his visits to the clubs where I danced.
I’d moved out of his penthouse and lived with Sam and Craig, but Jean still came to every show.
He sat in the front row, never making any trouble, hands folded in his lap. Smiling.
I tried to return all the gifts he’d given me, but of course he wouldn’t take them. Instead, I distributed them among my friends or charity organizations, since I couldn’t bring myself to sell them, no matter how badly I needed the money.
But the book I kept.
There was too much beauty and too much sadness and too much lost promise in it for me to let go.
A bright future squandered.
I leaned back in defeat, my body hollowed, my head knocking softly against the horribly solid and beautiful drafting table. In the morning, I was going to take that book and donate it to a library—or a school, or something—and hope someone else found it and loved it.
Though not as much as I had.