Chapter 12
Vivi paused, feeling as if she hadn’t breathed in hours. Her throat was raw, her eyelids held open by little more than will.
She closed the pages and held the journal to her chest.
“That’s it?” Calla asked.
“No. There’s more. But I need a break.”
Vivi hadn’t expected to be so moved by the artist’s entries. The emotional echo drummed in her ears with a familiarity she
didn’t understand. As she read, she’d become Ly; saw the swoop of falcons, the tumble of grass around the estate, the celestial fire of Justine’s curls. Justine Allard could
have been the second woman in Blue Mirror. The descriptions matched. But then, who was the other woman, the muse? When did she come into the story? Perhaps she was
Ng?c, the sister Ly had written about. Maybe Ly wanted to paint the two women he loved most.
“We were right,” Calla said. She reached over and stroked the binding of the journal.
“You were.” Vivi didn’t begrudge giving Calla credit where it was due. “I don’t know that I really ever believed until we
found the box under the bench.”
“Maybe I didn’t either. But now we know. Ly lived here. He walked the same ground we did. Breathed the same air.”
“For a summer.”
“Maybe longer. They could have had an entire life at the Maison de Notre Rêve.”
Calla was laying on her belly, her ankles crossed as she listened, tracing shapes onto the comforter of the bed. Hearts and
stars and lips that gaped with feeling. Despite it all, Calla had remained a romantic. She might not have believed in marriage
anymore, but she believed in love. That streak of idealism, dim as it was, could not be fully extinguished. She set her head
on her hands and closed her eyes.
“He loved her,” Vivi conceded. “Completely.”
“And she felt the same way, I just know it. I wish I could hear it straight from his lips. Don’t you just feel so—justified—in
all of it? None of this would have happened if you hadn’t noticed the overpainting.”
“Or if you hadn’t broken into Dad’s shed.”
“Speaking of Dad.” Calla lifted her head. “I remembered the story he told me about his grandmother. Her name was Tam.”
“What made you think of it?”
Calla sketched a shape into the comforter again. “All those goofy hearts you keep drawing in the steamed glass. ‘Tam’ means ‘heart,’ doesn’t it?”
“It does, yeah,” Vivi said, a flint of surprise lighting the underside of her words.
“I remember more than you think I do,” Calla said, defensively now. “I’ll tell you the story sometime. Gruesome drowning situation.
We should get to sleep.”
Vivi opened the journal and began paging through it. Ly’s words continued to draw her back. She’d felt this same pull in her lab when she encountered some degradation she knew how
to fix or recognized the distinctive brushstroke of an artist on an unsigned painting. Even though it was late, much too late,
to do anything about Ly’s story, she was locked into it, as much a participant as a witness, her hands mud-deep in the mystery.
“Oh, call it quits, Bee.” Calla yawned, then headed toward her room. “I don’t think I’d be able to concentrate on one more
word tonight.”
“You get some sleep. I’ll let you know if I come across anything else.”
“Don’t read further without me.”
“I won’t.”
Within minutes, Calla’s low snores began to hum across the suite. A thought continued to nudge inside Vivi’s brain, growing
more insistent with each passing moment. That rolling sensation of revelation surrounded and eluded her, like a bank of fog
she couldn’t clutch. She reread each entry, more slowly this time, still unsure of what she was looking for.
Then, all at once, her mind, a step behind her roving eyes, snagged on a sentence. A word.
It’s as if we’re priestesses at moonlight—
Priestesses.
Not one woman twirling in the aqueducts, but two.
Vivi dropped the journal softly onto her lap.
That was when it made perfect sense. The swift intimacy between Ly and Justine, their frequent physical touches and public meetings that would have been inappropriate for a single man and
a married woman. Those affectionate nicknames that felt like those schoolgirls might give one another. Most of all, the allusion
of secrets that Emil Blanc had kept for his friend.
Ly was a woman. She was her own muse.
Every ion of Vivi’s body jumped in vindication. Of course, she thought. Of course Ly was a woman.
Vivi drew from her scholarship to complete the picture. In the mid-1920s, André Breton had been both founder and kingpin of
the Surrealist movement. While he spoke about liberation for women, his practices often revealed a darker and more complicated
attitude toward the female role in art and in the home. In his second manifesto, published only a handful of years before
Ly fled from Paris, Breton had written of “the problem of woman.” Additionally, Breton had been vocal about his intolerance
of homosexuality and his wary tolerance of women. One was a freakish anomaly, while the other had to earn her place in the
realm of Surrealism. And he wasn’t alone.
Some men of the movement regarded women as muses or sexual objects, meant for brutality or worship, but never personhood.
Precious few were inducted into the pearly gates—Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini—and many gained their success only after Breton’s influence waned.
Some, rebuffed by their secondary status, declined the Surrealist label altogether, despite participating in exhibitions and associating with the group.
What insurmountable obstacles must have awaited Ly as a lesbian and an immigrant, an artist who could never be truly accepted by her contemporaries, especially in the riotous
decade of postwar Europe.
And Blue Mirror. Vivi pulled up the image and scrutinized it, finding new meaning in each brushstroke, each careful application of color.
The women weren’t twins or sisters, as many thought, or even doppelg?ngers, but lovers hiding behind the same overpainted
face. Maybe the painting had been a way to immortalize their doomed story. Because it must be doomed, right? There was no
avenue for a happy ending, not for a married woman and a poor artist in hiding.
Vivi ached for them, the Chaton and the Cheval Sauvage, two souls leashed by the conventions of their time. It was an old
story, but it felt new and sharp and heartbreaking to her.
With these thoughts came more questions.
How did things fall apart between the women?
Why had Ly hidden the journal beneath the bench, of all places?
Was the “offering” mentioned in Ly’s letter meant for Justine, his beloved—was it this very journal?
Somehow, the more Vivi understood, the more that explanation
rang as false. Ly’s letter had been written in Vietnamese, drafted in a tone that suggested a deeper relationship, maybe, than romantic love.
I died so you could live.
And, the question that Vivi least understood: how could the artist’s letter possibly have made its way from France to her
father’s hands in Deer Creek? Every discovery was another step in a labyrinth. The closer you came to the interior, the less
certain you were of ever emerging again. A part of Vivi wanted to stay lost. She was enthralled by Ly and Justine’s love story, afraid of what might await her at its end.
She tried to shut the journal, but each time, her hands returned to the pages, her gaze latched onto the handwriting. She
couldn’t stop now. Not when she was so close to understanding.
After a glance at Calla through the doorway, sprawled on the bed with her face now planted in a pillow, Vivi made her decision.
She’d take a leaf from Calla’s book: better to ask for forgiveness than permission.