Chapter 33
33
Simon once again does his best-friend post-heartbreak duty: gets me out of the flat and distracts me with ridiculousness.
It’s misery, but it’s necessary.
I have to do something.
I have to find a way to get over her.
There is no other option.
We wander through the street vendors across from Notre Dame. Simon gestures grandly to the secondhand booksellers who peddle old books along with postcards of landmarks and matted prints of famous destinations.
“I say we apply for a bouquiniste license and set up shop.”
“What will we be selling exactly? Did someone will you the contents of their attic?”
“The book vendor thing is just going to be a front for a ghost-removal shop.”
I manage a small “Huh.”
“Picture it,” he continues. “Can you name anyone else who has successfully exorcised a spirit, let alone the spirit of a great artist?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“All we have to do is convince the tourists that Marilyn Monroe or Jim Morrison is inhabiting them, and we’ll work our mojo again.”
“We’ll be rolling in euros,” I say without much enthusiasm.
He pats me on the back. “Someday you’ll be happy again, Garnier.”
That feels as unlikely as a ghost inhabiting an artist.
As a painting coming alive.
Or really, as a woman in a painting staying in love with the guy who set her free.
Love like that only exists in stories.
* * *
I honor a commitment to another woman. The one at the Paris Opera Ballet.
The lights are low. The music swells. I feel more human than I have in days here in the opera house where the ballet company performs. Maybe because I’m away from the museum and its phantom people, like shadows on the wall. In here, art is alive for real, and it is flying.
Emilie is beautiful as she performs her solo in The Sleeping Beauty . No music tonight except what’s coming from the orchestra pit. Emilie feels confident onstage, I can tell, no inspiration required.
When the ballet ends, I join the rest of the audience in a standing ovation. As the dancers take their bows and curtsies, I lock eyes with Emilie, and my happiness for her is the first true happiness I’ve felt in days. It’s vicarious and fleeting, but I’ll take it.
Weaving through the balletgoers in their finery, I follow the directions Emilie gave me to the stage door. She emerges in jeans and a tank top, but her hair is still in a bun and she has full makeup on.
“You were magnificent,” I say as I kiss each of her cheeks. “Do I know what I’m talking about or do I know what I’m talking about?”
“I think you’re an oracle is what you are,” she says with a laugh. “I can’t wait to hear from you what I’ll dance next.”
“Hmm . . .” I pretend to listen. “You’ll just have to audition for everything and get all the roles.”
“ Quelle tragédie. ” She lays her hand on her forehead and pretends to swoon. “Doomed to dance in everything. Coffee?”
“Always coffee. Even when it’s awful.”
We walk to the café, order espressos, and talk about the ballet. She tells me how nervous she was before her solo, but how she left her fear backstage when she stepped under the lights.
“I could tell,” I say, and Emilie smiles.
“I love talking to you like this. You really understand what it’s like.”
“I try.”
“But it’s more than trying. You just get it in a way that so few do, and so—” She stops when the waiter brings our drinks. After he leaves, she tells me, “I’m really glad you came. I know that Simon and Lucy had a lot of ideas about us . . .”
I’m forming as kind a letdown as possible when she assures me, “No, don’t worry. It means the world to me that you came tonight as my friend and not because you want to date me.”
Now I’m not sure what to say. Should I reassure her there’s nothing undatable about her? Say “It’s not you, it’s me”? Or “I don’t have a heart to offer because mine is lying shriveled up in Monet’s garden”?
“Stop thinking so hard, Julien.” She nudges me with her foot. “I could tell when we met there was someone else on your mind. And, of course, ballet is always on my mind, so I thought we’d be good as friends. And we are.”
“We are.” I toast her with my espresso cup and then make an impromptu suggestion. “My friend Remy is throwing an apron party. I hate the thought of going, but he won’t take no for an answer. Simon and Lucy are going, and you should come too.”
“An apron party? What is that?”
“Hell if I know, but I’d get an apron if I were you.”
“You’re not going to wear an apron, Julien?” she asks with a bit of mischief in her voice.
“He’s making me go to the party. He can’t make me wear an apron.”
“Something tells me no one could make you go to a party. Maybe you actually want to go.”
Maybe I do.
* * *
Remy wears a light-blue apron with red cherries. Sophie has gone meta and her apron has prints of mini aprons on it in orange, yellow, purple, and blue. Emilie sports leggings and a pink tulle apron, and Lucy is dressed to the nines in a black-and-white-striped skirt topped with a pink apron with black piping, like a sexy ice-cream-parlor girl. Simon can’t keep his hands off her. He wears an apron with “Kiss the Chef” written on it in bold letters, and Lucy does as instructed.
“ Bonjour! Felicitations to everyone but Julien,” Remy declares as he invites us into his home.
“Why not Julien?” I protest, even though I know the answer.
“If you can’t get into the spirit of the party, how can the party spirit get into you?” He pats my cheek and gestures grandly for everyone to follow him down the hall.
Monet’s Japanese bridge painting is back on the wall. I force myself not to look at it. Seeing it makes my chest hurt. I force myself to look anywhere but at the door to the room that leads to the basement. The door that leads to her. To heartbreak.
Sophie brings around a tray of macarons—with combos of saffron and peach, caramel and pistachio, and even grapefruit-wasabi.
I pass. I don’t need another reminder. Not when I’m only now starting to feel a smidge of un-misery .
“There is something wrong with someone who doesn’t like macarons,” Sophie says, narrowing her eyes.
“Just not in the mood.” That feels true of just about everything these days.
“Suit yourself. But tomorrow you will wake up and think, ‘I wish I had a macaron right now,’ and it will be too late because I’m eating whatever is left over tonight.”
She sashays to another group of partygoers as Remy drapes an arm over my shoulder. “Don’t listen to her. Nobody ever died for lack of a macaron. Love, on the other hand . . .”
I tense, and he finally notices I’m not being coy about his matchmaking attempts. His confusion is obvious—not that he keeps his emotions close to the vest.
He turns to face me, one hand still on my shoulder, and lowers his voice. “Don’t you want to see her again, Julien? You haven’t come by at all. Have you just been going through La Belle Vie?”
I wince.
The pain in my heart is too much to hide. I turn to him, my jaw tight, my voice heavy, and tell him, hoping it will unburden me a little more. My God, I need it to. Do I ever need it to.
“She doesn’t want to see me,” I say heavily.
His jaw drops. “What? After all that? After all you did?”
“It’s just one of those things about Muses,” I say, adding a shrug, like that softens the blow to my soul.
It doesn’t.
Remy isn’t going to accept that as my final answer, so I explain briefly and emotionlessly what happened to us when Clio saved the art. “So, if you ever see me go near that trapdoor, handcuff me and keep me away. Please.”
His eyes are sad. His lips turn down. “All right. But I won’t let you stay away from our house. I would be a poor friend to let you cut yourself off from life because you are taking a break from love.”
“I won’t do that.”
He gives me a sternly doubtful look.
I raise my hand. “I vow, I won’t. How can I prove it?”
He studies me for another long moment, and then calls out, “Rafe, mon chou ! Bring me the thing!”
I already regret this.
Rafe appears beside Remy, mouths I’m sorry to me, and holds out, hooked on his finger, an apron that looks like something a unicorn coughed up. There are pink and purple ruffles, silver ribbons, sparkling trim, and violet glitter.
So. Much. Glitter.
Remy holds it out like a monarch bestowing a medal, his expression imperious. I sigh and take my cue, bowing so that he can loop the apron around my neck. When I straighten, he takes my shoulders and kisses one cheek, then the other.
“Now, Sir Julien, I command you to lead off the dancing.”
“Me?” I hardly notice Sophie tying the apron strings behind me.
“Someone has to go first. Music!” He claps twice and swans off through the gathered crowd of guests, then the unignorable beat of techno pop begins and people move outside where there’s room to dance in the courtyard, with the goat and the sheep.
Rafe kisses each of my cheeks too, claps my shoulder, and tells me, “You’ve made his night, you know.”
Then he’s off, and Sophie is pushing me to where nobody has waited for me to start the dancing.
“I don’t see any dancing, Twilight Sparkle,” Simon tells me, grinning like a madman.
Emilie grabs my hand and pulls me into an empty space. “Come on. I know you can hear that music,” she says, pointing to one of the thumping speakers. She pirouettes and moves gracefully into some clubby dance moves that I can copy.
Music, art, dancing. Those have to be the balms for me. They were for Clio.
Please, please let them be for me.
Lucy joins in, bringing Simon onto the impromptu dance floor, and Sophie jumps around too. Remy pulls Rafe out of the kitchen to dance with him, shaking his hips.
I watch them all. Dancing the way they want, listening to the music they like. I think of Gustave and his subway art, of Max and his caricature classes, of my friends and their random loves, like aprons and five-legged calves and flash mobs on the curving corner of a hilly street in Montmartre.
I don’t know that Renoir would have liked this party. But I do.
I’m pretty sure Clio—or at least the Clio I knew—would have liked it too.
For several minutes, hell for maybe even a half-hour, I don’t feel the ache.
I don’t feel the misery.
I start to feel something else.
Hope.
Hope that I might make it through all this longing.
That I might find a way to come out on the other side of unrequited love.
* * *
Later, Remy disappears for a while. When he returns to the party, he pulls me aside, a small smile on his face. “Thalia wants to see you tomorrow morning. Can you meet her?”
I arch a dubious brow. “Why?”
He shrugs, saying he has no idea. “She just asked if you could be at the bridge between the two museums at nine. What should I tell her?”
I don’t know if I like Thalia. I don’t know if I want to see her, and I don’t know what she could have to say to me.
But I still say yes.
It seems I can’t let go of hope.