Chapter 9
Emma
There’s a lost masterpiece in my lap. An actual Vincent van Gogh is just balancing on my knees in the back of a sleek Mercedes Benz as Stella’s driver brings me back to my place.
I grip it harder every time we hit a pothole.
Stella insisted I take the Sunflowers with me.
“It will be safer with you,” she’d stated firmly.
It’s clear she wants me and Colette and Lucie to help her sell it, but she was so exhausted she didn’t explain exactly what she needed or expected from us, what we owe her in return for our scholarship.
It’s clear to me that we will owe her something.
“We have plenty of time, dear,” she’d murmured sleepily. “Now that everything is out in the open. We have all the time.” She’d placed a papery hand on mine. “I have no doubt we will accomplish great things together.”
She wrapped the Van Gogh in a silk kimono before calling her driver to take me home.
“A gift from Her Imperial Majesty in Japan,” Stella said about the robe. “Lovely woman, terribly boring, but excellent taste in textiles.”
It’s a sizable canvas, but it feels even bigger and heavier than it actually is, and having it with me makes the car feel small, as if there isn’t room in here for both of us.
Back at my place, the driver wants me to hand it to him so it’s easier for me to get out, but I can’t do it, can’t let someone else touch her. Instead, I thrust the painting out the car door first and then awkwardly follow, nearly toppling headfirst onto the sidewalk.
Upstairs, I find my roommates sharing a bottle of wine. Lucie’s just finished work and Colette always stays awake reading late into the night.
There are candles lit on the dining room table we salvaged from a dumpster outside the Fleas when it only had three legs. Its fourth is now two cinder blocks painted bright orange. The girls look as though they’re about to have dinner despite the fact that it’s two a.m.
“Bonjour,” I call out tentatively as I hurry into my room to place the canvas carefully on my bed.
I have to prepare them for it. “You’ll be safe in here,” I whisper to it as I gently shut my door.
In between Stella’s and here I seem to have lost my damn mind.
Lucie catches me in a massive bear hug when I walk into the common area, while Colette hums a low tune from the kitchen.
It smells wonderful. She must be cooking one of her specialties—gratin dauphinois, a creamy and cheesy, utterly indulgent potato bake.
“It feels rich and hearty, but you can make it for less than ten francs and feed five people,” she explained the first time she made it for us.
We’d only been living together for about a week.
We didn’t know one another’s pasts or stories.
Colette insisted we all sit down to a meal that first Friday to start to chip away at them.
Now I can’t imagine my life without these women.
“I have some caviar we can open,” Lucie says. “Gustav insisted I take it home with me.”
Lucie never comes home empty-handed from work.
There’s often wine, usually expensive, a nice cheese, or a foie gras spread.
Her clients always want to feed her. She says it’s a care that stems from the desire to control her body more than to nourish her.
She hasn’t changed and is wearing a plaid Catholic schoolgirl miniskirt, which means she’s been with the senator from Avignon.
Her outfits always give her clients away because they all have their specific preferences.
There’s the lawyer who wants her to wear a judge’s robe, and the author who’s married to a famous feminist who likes her to dress as a traditional 1950s housewife and masturbates while she pretends to bake him cakes in his family’s kitchen.
When Lucie first told me she was going to dip her toes into the water of sex work I tried to be as open-minded as possible.
We were liberated women, third-wave feminists, reclaiming the terms bitch and slut.
We didn’t want to like bands like the Spice Girls, but we hummed their anthems under our breath anyway and secretly fawned over Posh’s outfits and cheekbones.
And what was sex but a capitalist transaction anyway?
From early on Lucie referred to what she did as performance art and called her johns her patrons instead of her clients, their trysts, her meetings.
Her side hustle supports us all, though she definitely has some bad habits that occasionally blow up her bank account, mainly purses, shoes, and some horse betting.
She knows it’s irrational and yet she truly believes she deserves the palate cleanser after dealing with a particularly trying performance the night before.
A large portion of her income still gets sent home to help support her younger sisters and bum of a father.
“This skirt is giving off major pedophile vibes,” I say to her now.
Lucie sighs. “Don’t I know it. Plus it’s itchy as hell. It’s giving me a rash.” Colette pops out of the kitchen, reaches into a plastic basket, and throws Lucie a pair of well-worn flannel pajama bottoms. “Put these on. I did our laundry today.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
“You’re welcome, love. Are you hungry?”
Even though I ate at Stella’s I can always have more.
I grab plates, all of them beautifully mismatched, from the cabinet.
Another gift of the Fleas. Selling individual place settings of vintage china isn’t easy for the vendors.
No one wants one plate. We’ve amassed a collection of Limoges, Bernardaud, and Haviland.
They’re chipped and scratched but well loved.
Once the table is set, Colette brings out the still-steaming dish of potatoes straight from the oven. The top bubbles with cream, butter, and cheese. Lucie opens a red wine.
I clear my throat, take a sip, clear my throat again.
“Are you getting sick?” Lucie asks.
“No. I have something I need to talk to you about.”
“Eat something first,” Colette encourages me. “Just a bit.” She pushes over a small bowl of salt. Until I came to Paris, I’d eaten salt only from paper packets swiped from McDonald’s. Salt in France is a meal unto itself. It’s crunchy and hearty and the crystals melt on your tongue.
I shovel some potatoes into my mouth before I begin.
My friends know that I clean Stella’s apartment and that she’s the widow of the head of Swanson Enterprises.
I’d told them the story of the lion a couple of weeks ago, and Colette had recalled another story she’d heard from the curators at Sotheby’s auction house, where she’d interned for free these past two years and where I now know Stella got her the job.
“The Swansons seem absolutely wicked,” she had said. “They own a hunting safari park in Tanzania where they let people pay to murder lions and elephants.”
“That’s apparently where they sent Stella’s cub, but he was off-limits to hunters.”
She’d scoffed. “He was the only one. Henrik Swanson, the family patriarch, the father of Stella’s husband, once took his two sons to Tanzania when they were kids, blindfolded them, led them miles into the bush in the middle of the night, and promised a Botticelli to the first one who shot a lion.
Philippe ended up shooting Maxwell in the leg.
He had a limp for the rest of his life. No one got a lion and Henrik gave Philippe the Botticelli anyway. ”
“Is Philippe still alive?” I’d asked because I hadn’t heard anything about a great-uncle from Matthew, and nothing from Stella about Maxwell’s brother.
“Dead, from what I’ve heard.” Colette hadn’t known much more than that.
Now I finally tell them how Stella revealed to me that she’s our silent benefactor.
Colette gasps. “I always assumed it was some big corporation looking for a tax write-off.”
“I figured it was a rich old man with a thing for young art students.” Lucie puffs on her cigarette.
I shake my head. “It was her. All of it.”
“But then why did she stop funding us?”
“She didn’t have a choice. None of it is her money. It was all tied up in the company and when Maxwell died it went to his son and grandchildren, though she thought he was going to give it to her.”
“She got nothing?” Colette gasps. “I assumed they would at least leave her with a fortune even if she had nothing to do with the company.”
“Nothing,” I confirm.
“But that apartment?”
“It seems like the only thing she has left, and they want to take that away and send her off to some facility.”
“How is that even possible?” Colette asks. “She must have been protected somehow.”
“She’s been fighting it, or so she says, but they’re more powerful than she is.”
“Terrible,” Colette mutters. “Pure evil. But not surprising. From what I’ve heard about the Swanson family, they’d murder one of their own for a tax write-off.”
“I need to show you something,” I say, and return to my room for the painting.
I unwrap it carefully, terrified the commute may have hurt it, which is silly because I’m sure the painting has endured worse over the years in its travels.
Still, I handle it with extreme care when I bring it into the next room.
Both of my roommates squint to make out what I’m carrying.
“That’s lovely,” Colette says, putting on her glasses. “Is it one of yours?”
I’ve painted versions of the Sunflowers before, many times. In one painting I worked on, the stems are covered in sharp thorns waiting to prick the unsuspecting finger of an inquisitive young girl.
I shake my head.
“Did you find it in the Fleas?”
“No. Stella’s apartment,” I say, propping it up on the sideboard, where we keep our paints and brushes. “It’s a Van Gogh.”