Epilogue
EPILOGUE
December 25—Four months later
Clio
“Christmas is my new favorite thing,” I say between deep inhales of spicy-sweet steam curling up from the mug of mulled cider cradled in my hands. I’m bundled up in flannel pajamas, a thick sweater of Julien’s, and fluffy wool socks, and tucked into the corner of the sofa for warmth.
“You say that about everything,” Julien teases, mirroring me in the opposite corner.
“Not about wintertime,” I reply. Perpetual summer in Monet’s garden has thinned my blood.
“Me? I have only one favorite thing.” He sips his cider, slanting a mischievous look at me from under his lashes. “My favorite thing never changes, because my favorite thing is you.”
“Oh, Julien,” I say, my heart melting, “that is the sweetest, cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He wiggles his ice-cold foot into my bundle of blankets and finds bare skin, and I shriek, trying to wiggle away without spilling my drink.
“Incoming!” Adaline calls from the hall. “Should I avert my eyes?”
“No need,” says Julien, but his grin promises we’ll be scandalous later, and thinking about later warms me as much as the cider.
His sister ducks into the kitchen and comes out with her own drink.
It’s rare that all three of us are home at the same time, between the hours Adaline puts in at the museum, the hours Julien puts in at the museum, plus his graduate classes and the occasional summons to troubleshoot a misbehaving painting, and the hours I put in at school.
I don’t go to school.
I teach now.
Painting mostly. But drawing classes, too, at an art school in Montmartre.
I thought I’d become a painter, and while I do love creating, I find I love teaching even more. So much more that it feels like this was what I was always meant to do. I suppose in some ways that’s true.
Perhaps in most ways.
Guiding others in their passion, helping them see the way through creation, is my new joy.
I’m, quite simply, happy as an art teacher.
Julien is happy too.
And together we squeeze so much life and love into every moment we’re together. Also, there are practical matters to attend to. Things like protection, and we use it now, since I suspect I can conceive now that I’m human. But there will be time for babies down the road. Of that I’m sure.
For now, it’s been good for me to discover who I am, beyond art, in this modern human world. I don’t just mean learning to use the Metro or the time I exploded the microwave.
I’m learning what I love besides art and Julien.
I love meeting Remy and his husband, Rafe, in the park and playing with their new puppy, Rosa. Rafe brings me homemade pastries, and Remy occasionally brings regards from my sisters. They are happy for me and wish me well, even if they cannot fathom my choice. But having never experienced the kind of love I have with Julien, of course, they don’t understand the despair of facing an eternity without it. Remy and Rafe get it – they have that love. Simon and Lucy understand too. They are wrapped up in each other.
Love…it makes us all human.
And so many of us love art, in so many forms.
Sophie and I are taking tap-dancing classes together. I had no idea what tap dancing was or that it would be so much fun, and for a while, that was my new favorite thing. The thing before that was the online video game Simon and Lucy taught me. (I play as a powerful healer, of course, indispensable on raids.)
Julien and I like to go to the ballet—on our first visit, the lights came up at intermission and he found me teary-eyed and sniffling.
“What’s wrong?” He’d put his arm around my shoulders, his thumb brushing soothing circles on my skin. “Does this make you miss being a Muse?”
I’d shaken my head in vehement denial.
“It’s just so beautiful,” I’d said, wiping tears from my cheeks.
I told his friend Emilie the same thing when we met her after the performance. Like many in Julien’s circle, she seemed puzzled when we first met, as if trying to come up with why I looked familiar. Most accept at face value the story that Renoir’s model for Woman Wandering in the Irises is my ancestor. Though I still catch Adaline studying me with speculation every now and then.
Whatever she’s thinking, she’s been welcoming almost since the day I walked into the flat with Julien on that summer afternoon four months ago.
First, she had to recover from the shock of Julien bringing a girlfriend home “out of thin air”—a phrase more appropriate than anyone knows.
“Join us, Adaline?” I ask now, and nod to the empty chair.
She raises her mug in a sort of toast and points toward her side of the flat. “Thank you, but I have a video date.”
“On Christmas?” Julien asks, but his sister is already gone.
“Love knows no season,” I tell him sagely.
His brows climb into his tousled hair. “Love? You think?”
“I don’t just think. I know.”
Adaline, as an expert and curator of such a large collection of Renoirs, consulted on an international forgery investigation, resulting in the capture of an infamous father-daughter forger duo who had come out of seclusion to flog what a London newspaper called “the most convincing Renoir forgeries that experts had ever seen.”
When Oliver and Cass Middleton were arrested, Julien and Simon bought a round at our usual pub to celebrate. Julien suspected they’d taken what they’d learned from the spirit of Renoir and painted some new “lost” masterpieces.
The authorities theorized that they’d been inspired by the recent rediscovery of Woman Wandering in the Irises , and had overplayed their hand.
I’d toasted to them being jailed because Cass was the one who’d dealt my man all the bumps and bruises I had soothed that night under Van Gogh’s starry sky.
And Adaline has been dating the Interpol agent in charge ever since.
Even as a Muse, I couldn’t have inspired a result that had made so many people happy.
Funny that Renoir brought about so many good things by trying to keep good things from happening to humankind. He’d trapped me in the painting because he wanted to hoard inspiration and beauty—and love, in a way—for himself and those like him. He tried to stop an age of human enlightenment, and instead his actions brought Julien and I together to fall in love.
A love large enough to uphold a world full of art.
Wide enough to span the globe and bridge the gulf between everything eternal and everything mortal.
Strong enough to let me choose who and what I wanted to be.
Strong enough to bring me back to Julien.
Loving him has fundamentally changed me. We’ve changed each other.
Maybe our love will change the world, or maybe it will just change our small piece of it. I just know that it deserves to be nurtured and tended. That I want to see it reach its potential. That I will pour myself into making us thrive.
But I’m not a Muse anymore, and Julien, while beautiful to me, is not a painting.
And I’m so glad about both of those things.
Because when I pour my love into Julien . . . I get so much love in return.
And kisses. Lots and lots of kisses.
Like now. With his sister in the other room, I set down my mug, then his, and I loop my arms around his neck.
“Kiss me, my muse,” I demand playfully.
“Anytime,” he says, all too happy to oblige.
As he brushes his lips to mine, all thoughts of art and paintings fade away.
I am all woman, and I love this brave new life.