Chapter 29
29
I don’t have any carry-on luggage. This trip doesn’t allow it, since we can’t take anything into a painting. All we need are our hands and wits. I hope they’re mightier than the sword, or the nightstick, I should say.
“Ready?”
“I just need to do one more thing. Come with me,” Clio says, and walks across the main floor. I follow her, and we stop at a Toulouse-Lautrec. She tilts her head and offers a faint smile tinged with regret. “A proper goodbye?”
That is something I can’t resist. I take her hand, and the museum is gone, wiped away by the sounds of the cancan, a dance that originated at a cabaret with windmills at the top of Montmartre. How I wish I were truly dancing with her in Montmartre. But this is as close as we’ll ever come. We’ve fallen into the festivities as only Toulouse-Lautrec could imagine them, surrounded by turn-of-the-century-dressed men and women with high-laced boots and ruffled skirts who don’t notice that we’ve crashed their painted party. Music plays from a band on the stage, drinks are shared freely, and revelers are everywhere. It’s always a fête at the Moulin Rouge, but it is bittersweet tonight.
She holds her hands out. “May I have this dance?”
“But of course,” I say with a smile, trying my best to keep the sadness at bay.
“This is what I want you to remember of me, not what happens next. This is what I’ll remember. The before,” she says, and her eyes are so tough and so earnest at the same time. I know she wants to believe what she’s saying. I know right now she suspects she’ll never forget this. But she won’t feel it again. I will be just another memory, the same as all her other memories. Nothing special—just the week she ditched work. What made it so compelling? She’ll wonder that days and weeks from now, barely able to recall the depths of our emotions.
Sick with the knowledge of what’s about to happen, I wrap my arms tight around her as she leans into me, and I take my here and now. I do my damnedest to forget the destruction aimed at my heart. Instead, I layer kisses on her neck, and I taste her lips once more. I kiss her with everything I have, knowing it’s our last. She kisses me back almost the same way. With almost the same passion. Almost the same wish to get lost in this final kiss. The dancers kicking their legs high in the air onstage might as well be in Peru. This is all there is. This is all I want. “I will never forget you.”
“You saved me, you know. You saved me from being trapped. You’re the reason I can be free from that painting,” she says, and with her words, my heart is both caving and pounding. “I want you to know how much I wish there were another way. I love you, Julien. More than art.”
That, in a nutshell, is the problem.
I fold her into my arms, and we dance for a few minutes inside the Toulouse-Lautrec, aware the whole time of the ticking bomb on the other side. But I let this moment stretch into itself.
I wish I could say I don’t care if I ever return to the real world.
But I can’t say that.
The enemy was never really Renoir. The real enemy has always been the impossibility of us.
I kiss her once more, a last kiss that has to last for all time.