Chapter Twenty-Three
The hotel room comes back to me in fragments. The heavy curtains, the dark floor, the huge lighting, the mirror.
The mirror.
I can see myself in the mirror. I’m on the floor, sprawled out like a rag doll. I hate the fact you can see my ribs, but there’s also a naked Emmett which I love. I think I blacked out for a moment there, and now my chest is rising and falling quickly, as I start to panic.
‘Nice of you to rejoin us.’ Emmett rolls on his side to face me, and I’m rewarded with a great view of his arse in the mirror. My mouth is dry though and I’m still feeling shaky. Emmett realises a fraction of a second after I do that I don’t feel good. My pulse is rapid, beating hard in my head.
‘Luna,’ Emmett frowns, ‘is everything okay?’
Not really, the edges of my vision are blurred.
‘I haven’t taken my meds yet,’ I tell him, blinking quickly, trying to count my breaths. ‘My pill box is in my bag, could you maybe bring it?’ I say, settling back against the pillows that he drags off the bed and props under my head.
I hate feeling like I’m broken.
‘Hey, it’s okay.’ A still-naked Emmett hands me the pills and a glass of water. Since I sort them into a box that has times of the day on it, it doesn’t say what the medicine is for, but still.
‘That’s a lot of medicine for someone who had glandular fever,’ Emmett says, kneeling next to me and putting the back of his hand on my forehead as I knock them back like the pro that I am.
‘It’s like vitamins and stuff.’ I don’t even sound convincing to myself and I think, tell him now, you idiot! He’s here, helping, he’s a doctor, he can help.
But I’m leaving tomorrow. That’s all we get. And information like this, it fills up space and time. There’s no shying away from it. It would take all of everything.
‘I feel better already.’ Emmett puts a blanket over me.
It’s true, I do. Maybe I did just need to rest.
I want to get back to feeling sexy. Emmett is still naked, and I’m only human after all, but there’s just no natural segue back from squeezing someone’s nipple and then moments later handing them a giant pill organiser. What do you do next?
Emmett obviously doesn’t know either; he’s just kneeling next to me, looking stressed. There’s a vein on the side of his forehead that wasn’t there before.
‘Hey, it’s fine,’ I tell him. ‘I feel fine, relax. Get in here.’
He gets more pillows and comes to lay next to me on the floor, brushing my hair back off my face. ‘You’re okay,’ he tells me. ‘I’m okay.’
I mean, I’m not. And the weight of the constant lying settles over me as Emmett kisses my forehead.
My eyes flutter shut as the kisses carry on; it’s gentler this time, softer. Sometime later we make it onto the bed at last; I think I want to take this moment and stretch it out for all of time. As Emmett moves above me, I think that I want this to never, ever have to end.
My body is in a sort of constant battle between being excited and just wanting to go to sleep. An afternoon of sex with a long-lost love and a couple of mild cardiac episodes will do that to a person.
‘I booked the class,’ I tell Emmett. He has his head buried in my hair where I’m laid over his chest.
‘You’re tired,’ he says, ‘you don’t have to go.’
‘It’s my last chance – the final point in the quest. Now or never.’
He is silent for a beat. And then he’s moving.
‘Come on then, we’d better go.’
It feels like Paris itself knows that something big is happening.
The stars seem especially bright. The streetlights glow with extra warmth.
People laugh louder, or else chatter in cafés with more vividness.
It’s like the city knows that there’ll be a choice to make, and soon.
Or maybe I’m projecting, looking for things that aren’t really there.
‘Are you okay to wait and eat after?’ Emmett asks. I think he’s become a feeder in his old age. He’s obsessed with feeding me.
‘I’m fine, honestly. I’m too excited to eat.’
We’re walking slowly now, the pace dictated by me and my pitiful body. Emmett knows where we’re going, so I try to remind myself to take in the streets as we pass them until we arrive at a small, nondescript building.
‘It’s here,’ he tells me, halfway down some regular Parisian boulevard. The blue door. The final thing that Earl painted.
The door is old, worn. The stones around it are crumbling, their edges no longer sharp.
It’s the same as at the cemetery – the feeling that Earl was here, in this very spot. I can feel him urging me on, pushing me forward towards the door.
Inside, the lights are on, but the windows are frosted. Emmett doesn’t move.
‘Maybe this is where they met?’ he says.
‘I think so too.’
‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours. I have my phone – call if you need me?’
We’d swapped numbers earlier, self-consciously and quietly. I hadn’t wanted to think about the fact that I’d have a means of always contacting him now, if I needed one.
‘Okay, but are you sure you don’t want to come in?’ I ask. For a man who just had sex twice, Emmett seems heavy, weighed down in a way that reminds me of the past.
‘No, this is for you. Go, and I’ll see you soon.’ He leans down and kisses me, gently. It feels like the intimate gesture that it is, and his being in such close proximity addles my senses and makes me wish with everything that I have that things were different.
By the time I push the door open, Emmett is already gone. I’m greeted by a bright room, people sat around the middle of a space where a stool is covered with a white cloth.
‘Bon soir, madame.’ A man with an expansive beard comes over to me. He’s pencil thin and wearing a stripy suit.
‘Bon soir, I have a booking, for the life drawing…’ but before I even manage to finish half a sentence, the man lets out a string of very loud, very French exclamations. I’m almost certain that I just heard every French swear word going.
‘It is you!’ he finishes.
‘Er…’
‘Louis! LOUIS!’ Another man, this one in every way diametrically opposite to Louis, appears in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. ‘The model is ready, she will wait no longer. MERDE!’ The man in the Hawaiian shirt also spots me.
‘We must talk after class,’ Louis tells me, before he and the guy in the shirt have a whole conversation about me.
I can’t interrupt them because a model is walking through the space now, a white dressing gown draped loosely over her shoulders.
And then there’s a naked woman on the stool.
I stumble towards one of the spare easels.
I’m having some sort of out-of-body experience; it’s all just happening so fast. Obviously I’d signed up to the drawing class, but didn’t I realise that I don’t do that anymore?
Drawing makes you feel free, but I’m not free. I’m trapped inside a broken body.
The model arranges herself into an artful position, one knee raised, which she rests her elbow on and her chin on her hand.
And yet… I’m in front of a blank canvas. I can hear Louis and the other man still arguing in the back room.
I must look like a startled deer who has never so much as wielded a pencil because the person next to me, who is head to toe in neon pink Lycra, leans over and says in heavily accented English, ‘Is just a little fun, yes?’
I nod, grateful even as stress claws at me, pulling me towards the blue door and away from here.
She gives another encouraging smile, readjusts her tiara and then sets to work.
Fun.
Some people are inclined to think that artists are a bit snooty. And probably some of them are. But I love artists. Artists might be lots of things, but they are rarely boring.
It’s weird if I just sit and stare at the model without drawing.
I could just do a little. I didn’t think that I could come to Paris, and here I am.
I didn’t think that I’d ever see Emmett again and look what happened there.
In Paris, anything is possible. So yes, surely I can survive one art class.
I mean, I’m light-headed, and my heart is pounding, but I think it’s the paint fumes. Hopefully, it’s the paint.
I pick up a pencil, far more my medium than paint, and try to ground myself in the moment. I’m somewhere that Earl was. He might have painted in this exact spot.
I look between the model and the blank canvas.
Everyone thinks that with life modelling you’re all thinking the same thing – that there’s a naked person in the room – and maybe some people are, but I’ve never felt like that.
I’ve always been excited to capture the realness, or as close to it as I could.
That’s what I’ve always loved about art.
No matter how good at it we are, we can never fully capture the human experience.
Even the most accurate depiction of a human form is just that, a depiction. And yet we keep trying.
It’s probably another reason why I quit art, though. Because who wants to study the human form when my own is so persistently lacking?
I try to push the thought from my mind, focus instead on the model – the shape of her back as it curls over, the rise of her knee.
I’m trying to sketch it out, to let myself bleed into the ebb and flow of the scratching of my pencil.
I’m out of practice, and my swollen hand is cramping; it makes each stroke fragile, delicate and lovely, and I think that’s it, isn’t it – no matter how fragile we are, we’re still lovely.
No matter how thin the line between life and death becomes, no matter how much some of us might feel like we’re straddling both worlds, the living and the dead, so long as we can make art, we are life and life is us.
Louis, now back and with a lit cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, raises his eyebrows and nods as he walks past behind me. I don’t draw for approval, though, you can’t – it’s too subjective.
Earl taught me that art is what we make it. I see art everywhere, or at least I used to. Art magnifies the human experience. That’s why I stopped.
I’ve been trying to make my life as small as possible.