Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That afternoon, Yves, Sabine, and Aubin borrowed a car, got on the road, and headed southwest from Paris. Yves let Aubin drive so he could take several meetings by phone; he kept his earbuds in and talked in very fast French about films, funders, and deadlines.
Sabine missed Willa and texted her. Willa was planning a picnic with Max and sent food pics of the seven-layer taco dip she’d made—her biggest wooing yet. She wanted to know how things were in France.
Sabine: No idea.
Willa: Uh-oh. What’s up? Something happen w Aubin?
Sabine: No.
Willa: Hey, YOU texted ME! Spill.
Sabine: I have no idea what to do with my life.
Willa: No Sorbonne?
Sabine: Wouldn’t take me this late.
Willa: Then universities here! Come out East w me! PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE
Sabine couldn’t explain her hopelessness—not by text.
She looked at passing cars. The vast sky.
She was like an astronaut sent outside the spaceship to fix a broken panel, tethered to the ship but floating in her sealed space suit, unable to be agile or react.
Out her visor, she could see shining stars, far off.
Space was beautiful but dangerous. One leak in her suit and she’d suffocate, alone, adrift in nothingness.
She started to panic. Eyed a spot on her sleeve. Was that a tear?
Sabine awoke with a jolt. She’d drifted off but the panic remained.
“Are we almost there, wherever ‘there’ is?” she asked. They were off the highway and driving through beautiful countryside.
“Yes,” said Yves, as they came around a bend to see a castle—a huge manor house, really, giving onto a courtyard and formal French garden, flanked by two wings, each with a tower. Out front was a manicured garden, with land stretching out behind the chateau and becoming forest.
“Et voilà!” Yves instructed Aubin to turn into the drive. “Chateau Beaupré, run by my friend Delphine.” Sabine sat up, curious.
“She is a large-scale artist,” he said. “Paints incredible tableaux. I want her to design the sets for my next movie. She inherited this chateau, and it sat in ruins as she studied art in New York, then travelled, made a name for herself, won art prizes. Eventually she decided to return to France. She made a few huge sales, invested the money in restoring this place, and now she paints and runs artist residencies. It is, how do they say, worth going to the death?”
Sabine laughed. “To die for?” And it was. To die for.
Delphine met them out front. She was in her thirties, wore high-heeled platform shoes, a beaded tank top, hoop earrings, sparkly blue eyeliner, and tight jeans that looked painted onto her thighs.
“Bienvenue,” she said. “Yves, your daughter is gorgeous.” Yves smiled. Sabine beamed. Delphine took in Aubin, too. “I hear you are both artists. Aubin, what do you do?”
“I guess … I make dance music,” said Aubin.
“We have many musicians here. They hold evening concerts in the garden or Le Grand Salon. And you, Sabine, what do you make?”
“I don’t really make anything special … I just play around.”
“C’est merveilleux. This is all artists are asked to do.
Art teachers, the good ones, spend years trying to get their students to just play.
Instead, their fears get in the way, they overthink, they make it more complicated than it should be.
If what you do is play, Sabine, then you are already there. Will you show me what you make?”
How had Sabine gotten herself into this?
Delphine picked up on her reluctance. “It’s too soon. Art is shy. It sometimes needs coaxing. That is why I made this place. Maybe you will show me later. Let’s start with a tour.”
She invited them into a grand entrance hall.
Brocade wallpaper above wainscotting, giant oil paintings framed in gold, chandeliers thirty feet up.
Huge arched windows gave onto more gardens out back and a fountain.
She took them through the dining room, shoes clacking against the varnished floors.
Staff were setting tables. “We have a resident chef, Chef Louis. He runs the kitchen, the herb and vegetable gardens out back, and all the parties we host.”
They wandered through the Grand Salon, and a music room where instruments hung off all the walls, which she could see Aubin absolutely loved.
“Recording equipment is in that armoire,” Delphine said, “and you can play with any of it. One musician carries it all into the forest and samples nature sounds and mixes it out there.”
“Can I stay forever?” asked Aubin.
“It might be expensive, but I would not say no,” she said as they continued through the halls. “Above us are rooms for artists in residence. The East Wing is where the staff lives. The West Wing is studios. Let’s go there.”
Delphine put her arm in Yves’s and walked with him.
Aubin and Sabine followed. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s like a dream,” she said. “I’m just not sure what we’re doing here.” Aubin took her arm. It was good to feel him close.
They walked through the studios. One artist was a knitter.
His studio was full of yarn of all colors, all over the floor.
He was knitting three giant tapestries that had taken him fifteen years so far.
A potter’s studio was filled with clay sculptures—nothing practical, no bowls or mugs, just wild things.
There was a jeweler, several painters, a writer, a projection designer.
Delphine’s studio was filled with giant canvases, some only half-finished, piles of mostly squeezed oil paint tubes, brushes, and half-empty Fritos bags.
“I have a problem with Fritos,” she confided. “I order them online and they come in a big box. But who is to dictate artistic necessities?”
Sabine eyed a canvas that was all pinks, swirling and fading into one another.
“It doesn’t know what it wants to be yet,” said Delphine. “I am waiting for it to tell me.”
Sabine nodded, feeling the same—not about a piece of art, but about herself.
Out back, they sat by a fountain. Chef Louis brought out blue cheese and sliced pears.
“So what do you think?” asked Delphine.
“It’s the most amazing place I’ve ever seen,” said Sabine.
“You don’t have to show me what you make, but can you at least tell me?”
“I make these,” said Sabine, pulling out two half-finished tiny books. She’d seen so much art today, most of it still in process, so she felt it was safe to share. “I don’t usually know I’m going to make one until I pull the paper out of my notebook.”
Delphine lit up as she flipped through them. “Merveilleux! You have a beginner’s mind. This is an intangible, magical bit that all great artists have and only so-so artists dream of.”
Sabine had never thought about her little books as an art form.
“Aubin asked you what made you happy,” said Yves, “and you said these books. Maybe what you need to do is just play with them. Put university on hold for a year. Come here.”
“How much does it cost?” Sabine asked.
“A thousand euros a week for French artists,” said Delphine, “two for internationals. We are booked into next year, but there is always a spot for someone special.”
Sabine’s heart broke. It was nice to be thought of as special, but this to-die-for place was out of reach, whether she was special or not.
Luc found Marlow pacing outside Maison Perdue, close to losing her mind about the Rémy-induced state of affairs, and about Ruth from Cincinnati visiting the next day to settle the house.
He grabbed a box of palmier cookies from his kitchen and pulled her down to the Nenier lot where his little Renault was parked.
“I have an errand to run, and you could use a break.”
She wept most of the way. Just when she thought she was done crying, she’d start again. She ate the entire box of palmiers herself. Then she cried about that, too.
“It’s OK, I have had them before,” he said.
They arrived at a run-down stone cottage on the edge of a hilly forest. “Sylvain is the mushroom expert in Haute-Marne. My friend Camille needs mushrooms.”
“But I’m blotchy,” said Marlow.
“The blotches are fading, and while I don’t want to make your twenty-thousand-euro day any worse by forcing you into public, it’s just Sylvain. He doesn’t care about such things.”
They found Sylvain in his study, wearing two pairs of readers and poring over legal documents.
He was in his eighties, had a full head of grey hair, mutton chops, his T-shirt pulled over the circumference of his pot belly, and he was apparently a big fan of the seventies Adidas shorts, socks, and sandals look.
He greeted Luc warmly, kissing him on both cheeks.
“Je vous présente mon amie, Marlow,” said Luc. “Elle vient du Canada.”
“Bonjour la Canadienne,” said Sylvain. “Il fait froid chez vous, même en juillet?”
Marlow laughed and explained that it could be cold in Canada, but not usually in July.
Sylvain listened as he slipped into old mud-caked running shoes (he called them his “baskets”) without undoing the laces.
He grabbed a big walking stick from a collection in the corner.
Luc took one and offered another to Marlow, but she didn’t think she needed it.
Sylvain lifted a weathered Airways travel bag off a hook.
“Où est ton sac?” he asked Luc.
Luc pulled out a grocery store plastic bag which he’d stuffed into his pocket.
“Les champignons vont détester ce sac!” said Sylvain with disdain. “Ils seront écrasés dans ton sac!” He despaired that the mushrooms would hate Luc’s bag and be crushed in it. “On y va!”
And off they went, following Sylvain into the forest behind his house.
He was fitter than he looked. Almost immediately, the ground got steep; he traversed it with no difficulty at all, using his stick for balance.
Marlow regretted refusing one and found a substitute on the ground.
From here on in, I’m taking people’s advice.
No more of this “no thank you” nonsense.