Chapter 5
5
A sheep grazes above on Remy’s spacious balcony, nibbling on a patch of grass.
The sheep keeps company with a goat. The sheep baas and the goat bleats and Simon gleefully rubs his hands together. “A party with farm animals. This is exactly what I needed for my Thursday night.”
We ring the buzzer on the green door with the iron gate. Remy opens it and ushers us in grandly. He wears a plain black polo shirt and jeans. A contrast for the fashionable man.
“What a surprising outfit,” I remark, and Remy grins in delight that I remembered the theme of his party. Surprise . “I’m shocked how much you look like… not y ou.”
“Sometimes I feel like… not me ,” he says with a grin.
There’s a girl with him, and her perky brown ponytail swishes as she eyes the three of us with interest. She looks like the underclassmen at university—no, that’s not right. She looks like an underclassman at an American school, because I’m not sure a French girl would wear jeans and a faded orange T-shirt with a unicorn leaping over a rainbow.
“This is my little sister, Sophie,” Remy says. “She’s supposed to be upstairs working on a term paper.”
Sophie doesn’t look bothered by the comment. “My surprise was escaping the campus to come to his birthday party.”
“I’m pretending to be surprised she would flee the dormitory on the least excuse,” he says.
“Nice to meet you, Sophie,” I tell her. She shares her brother’s insouciance, the kind that makes her likable straight away.
“Happy birthday,” Lucy says to Remy after I make the introductions, and then to Sophie, “I’m loving the shirt.”
“Merci .” They exchange grins. “Your skirt is magnificent.”
Remy guides us through the courtyard, and Simon comes right out and asks, “What’s the story with the goat and sheep?”
“They ward away bad spirits,” Remy answers, entirely serious.
Lucy asks with an intrigued hum, “What sort of bad spirits?”
Remy throws open the door from the courtyard to the house, and I’m glad to be heading closer to my goals for the party. “Anything that threatens to ruin a good party,” he says.
Sophie slips inside first, walking backward toward the stairs leading to the balcony. “In fact, it’s my job to tend to the flock,” she says as she excuses herself. “But I wanted to meet you first. I didn’t believe Remy when he said there would be guests younger than middle-aged.”
He moves like he was going to poke her in the ribs if she didn’t dodge. “I will make you eat those words when you turn twenty-nine.”
She dances away with a laugh. “I’m not worried. You’ll be nearly forty then and too old and decrepit to catch me.”
Remy shakes his head as she disappears. “I don’t know where she gets such cheek.”
I turn a laugh into a cough.
He grins then waves the whole matter away as he closes the door. “Enough of that. Come and enjoy the party.”
He escorts us farther in, and Simon and Lucy marvel at the decor. I find my gaze drawn to the end of the hallway and force my focus onto the living room, a vivid swirl of party guests honoring Remy’s dress code of bright colors, save himself. His friends are decked out in swirling pinks and deep scarlets and swaths of blues and greens that mirror the sea. There’s no phonograph playing carnival music tonight; instead, a high-tech sound system plays upbeat songs from pop superstars in America and England.
As Simon goes to grab drinks for us, Lucy takes the chance to pull me aside and ask, “What happened with Emilie? Did you not like her?”
Talk about straightforward. My eyebrows climb. For as long as I’ve lived in Paris, I’m still rather English sometimes. “She’s lovely. I liked her just fine.”
Lucy narrows her eyes, obviously unsatisfied with my answer. “From Simon’s description of you, I thought you and she would be perfect for each other. You’re very cultured, he said. You know—ballet, art, and such.”
“Right.” I draw out the word as I imagine how Simon might have said that.
“So maybe we can all go out again?”
“Of course. But you know, Emilie’s pretty focused on that whole ballet thing.” I’d like to go out again as a group—a friend group—but I don’t want to lead anyone on. I lighten it up with a teasing. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”
Lucy rolls her eyes, but with affection. “That’s where you come in. I want her to have a life too. Get out of the studio sometimes. Have fun!”
“Sure. But maybe dancing is her life.” Immediately, I want to take that back or amend it to something less cliched and . . . cheesy. But it’s the truth—and I can understand it. Art requires sacrifice, whether it’s comfort or riches or a social life.
Simon rejoins us at the same time as a woman in dark eyeliner and slinky jeans brings around a tray of what look like pillowy pastel shish kebabs. I look from the candy to the woman and raise a brow. “Rafe has been busy in the kitchen, I take it?”
“Who else would he allow in there?” she asks with a smile.
I take a soft raspberry-colored cube and pop it into my mouth, and as it melts, each individual sugar crystal seems to sparkle on my tongue.
Rafe appears from the kitchen and greets me warmly, as he and Remy make the rounds, pointing out the spread of confections laid out on the table. I spot Sophie by the beverages, making sure everyone has a drink. The hosts are busy, the party is getting lively, and I may not get a better chance to satisfy my twin curiosities.
I tug Simon and Lucy around the corner into the hallway. “I need your help,” I whisper as I make my way to the room with the painting, but as I suspected the door doesn’t budge when I turn the handle.
“Breaking and entering? You are an excellent social coordinator,” Simon says approvingly.
“Indeed. And now can you two coordinate lookout for me?”
Lucy’s smile takes on epic proportions. “Yes. What do you need?”
Quietly I pad back to the door to the media room. I turn that handle, and breathe a sigh of relief when it gives.
“I have some recon to do. Keep watch, OK?”
Simon shrugs a yes. “Should we have a secret knock in case someone comes this way?”
“If they do, they’re probably looking for the loo.” I point across the hall. “Just send them that way.”
Lucy tries to get a glimpse into the room as I open the door the rest of the way. “What is it you’ll be doing in there? Can’t you tell us?”
“Research. Art research,” I say, quietly closing the door. “Tell Simon about your favorite cheeseburgers.”
She laughs, pointing at me. “I like him.”
Through the door, I hear Simon say, “Me too. Which is why I put up with his crazy.”
I don’t waste the window of opportunity, and take a quick look around the room. Nothing has changed since the day I was here, including the drawing on the trapdoor. I slide back the latch and pull it open as soundlessly as before. Below, the stairs corkscrew down into the bedrock of the hill where the house perches. In the dark, there’s no telling how far down they go.
I take out my phone and use the flashlight as I descend the spiraling steps. After six or seven rounds, the air feels mustier, heavier. Even with the light, I can only see one stair below, and I seem to circle forever.
I’m dizzy by the time I finally reach the bottom. I step away from the security of the stairs, and my footfalls on the stone echo back to me, giving me a sense of the enclosed space. I point the light on the floor until I reach a wall, then sweep it up over the featureless stone. The other walls are bare too.
Cellars are always a bit creepy somehow, but the emptiness of this one, added to the long trek down and the mystery of its existence, makes it almost unnerving. “Cellar” might not even be the right word, since the space doesn’t seem to have any purpose that I can see. It’s impractical for storing anything, except perhaps a vampire or maybe the man in the iron mask.
I regret the thought immediately, but it’s too late. Now I’m remembering that the door latches from the outside and that all this stone makes the place utterly soundproof. Even with the trapdoor open, I can hear nothing from the world upstairs.
At least, I don’t think I do.
I stand still and listen again.
There it is—the faint sound of voices. The quality is too soft and the cadence too melodic to be noise from the party. And it’s not coming from above.
The sound rises from below.
From where there’s nothing but stone and earth and bedrock.
It’s illogical, and I feel ridiculous even as I do it, but still I kneel and press my ear to the floor. Impossible, irrational, whatever you want to call it—I definitely make out women’s voices.
Their words are indistinct, but there’s a lilt to them, like poetry, like someone’s speaking in sonnets. Or maybe it’s that the sound makes me feel the way a sonnet does. I want to lie on the floor, one ear pressed against the cold stone, and listen all night to this siren song.
I want that with a yearning that makes little sense. A nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced before.
This is impossible. Even if the sounds could travel through stone, the way the house is built on the hill, there can be nothing under this floor but dirt and bedrock. I cannot be hearing people speaking below.
And yet there they are—soft, gliding words. It’s the sound of snowflakes drifting from a gaslit sky. Then comes laughter, like a bell, pure and bright.
I jump up, rejecting the madness. I pace as far as I can until the wall stops me, and then I turn and stare searchingly into the empty space.
Am I going mad? From the cat stepping out from its painting, to ballerinas turned loose in the Musée d’Orsay, to orchestra music playing in the square . . . and now these impossible voices. It doesn’t seem possible that hallucinations could feel so real.
I catch my runaway thoughts and surprise myself with a laugh. Too real to be all in my mind—that’s just what a madman would say, isn’t it?
All right. I’m here and the voices aren’t going away, so it seems like a chance to find a possible explanation. Maybe I’ve misjudged the house’s position on the hill. Maybe there’s a crack in the stone, or some trick of acoustics.
I’m staring at the floor from an angle, which is how I see it—a rectangular outline in some kind of silver dust. I’ve seen something like it recently. Then I remember—it was in the calf Remy gave me.
Crouching for a closer look, I see the dust fills a crevice, and I blow on it, trying to clear a space and see if there’s a slot of some kind. A latch, maybe, or a keyhole?
All I manage to do, though, is blow the outline out of existence and fill the beam from the flashlight on my phone with a dancing cloud of sparkles—pretty, but useless for my mission.
It seems like a sign that I’ve done all I can, and a glance at my phone’s screen says I’ve been here longer than I intended. I drag myself from the mystery and the voices, and sprint up the stairs two at a time, like if I don’t go fast, I won’t be able to pull myself away at all.
It seems to take less time to go up the spiral than down. The trapdoor above is a square of light and reality, and I climb out into the TV room, safe and undiscovered.
The hallway door is still closed, and I yank it open. Simon and Lucy topple into the room, a tangle of limbs and lips.
Simon catches himself and Lucy both before they hit the floor. She giggles as he grabs her waist and sets her upright.
“Whoa! PDA much?”
“Nothing to see here,” Simon says casually. “Just blocking the doorway. Make it too awkward for anyone to ask to get by.”
“That’s very ingenious of you,” I say dryly.
“It was a chore,” he says with a grave face, “but sometimes you have to suffer to help out a mate.”
I look solemnly at Lucy. “Thank you for your sacrifice.”
She points at me and wiggles her finger. “You owe me now. Don’t think I’ll forget.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” I say, enjoying how quickly Lucy gets on with anyone. She’s perfect for Simon.
We step into the hall, and as I close the door behind me, Remy rounds the corner.
“Are you having the time of your life?” he asks sunnily.
Lucy takes a loud breath like a sob and declares, “I’m having the worst time. The absolute worst, most awful time of my life.”
Covering her face, she breaks into tears. The genuine shock and dismay on Remy’s face is classic. He only manages a distraught stammer before Lucy takes pity on him.
“Gotcha!” She flashes him a grin.
Remy wags a finger at Simon’s new girl. “You are trouble, I can tell. But well done, well done.” He steps to the side and gestures toward the festivities. “Your reward should be some hot chocolate in the kitchen. It’s Rafe’s own recipe, spiked with cayenne. Sweet with a kick—perfect for lovebirds.”
Simon glances at me, brows raised to ask if I’m good with that, and I tell him, “Have fun, Romeo.”
Remy watches with an indulgent smile as the pair goes by, then he turns back to me, head cocked, eyes smiling like we share a secret. “The voices are lovely, aren’t they?”
I blank my expression the best I can, trying to look unsurprised. He must mean something up here, something I should know about. He can’t mean the cellar voices.
“Like a poem,” he adds.
I’m still not sure how I should react. If he’s heard them too, does that mean I’m not hearing things, or are we suffering from the same delusion?
But I have to know, and denial won’t help. “What are they?”
The question pleases him, judging by his grin, like I’ve passed a test. “They’re Muses.”
“Muses?” I echo. I don’t know what I expected, but not that.
Remy nods, enjoying my reaction. “Inspiration personified.”
I know what the Muses are—they appear in Classical art from Greek statues to the Romantic period, where they’re more allegorical. But he isn’t exactly reassuring me on the non-delusional front. “There are Muses in your cellar?”
“Of course,” he says. His casual certainty catches me off guard. Somehow makes things seem more plausible.
“How did you come to have mythic creatures in your basement?” Not “if” but “how.” That’s how far gone I am.
“Julien,” Remy chides, “they aren’t mythic. They’re real. And they’ve always been there. Though, technically, we have a door to the Muses. They don’t live down there.”
“Right. Because that would be ridiculous.”
“It would,” he agrees, then continues. “I don’t know which came first—the Bonheur patronage of the arts or our connection to the Muses. Family lore says the connection goes back at least to the Middle Ages.”
“You don’t mean Muses metaphorically?”
“I am not given to metaphor at the moment. Not as it relates to the Muses.”
I’m not sure how long this candid Remy will stick around before charming, quirky, and unhelpfully enigmatic Remy returns. So I don’t waste time.
“Here’s where I admit I wasn’t paying attention when Rafe and Adaline talked about provenance of Woman Wandering in the Irises the other day. How did the portrait come to be in your family?”
His eyes flick toward the media room door then back to me. “You seemed familiar with the artist Suzanne Valadon?”
“First woman admitted to art school in Paris? Contemporary of Renoir, Monet, and other Impressionists during their heyday?” I give him an “I see what you did there” stare, picturing the drawing on the trapdoor. “Model for some of Renoir’s paintings, like Dance at Bougival ?”
Remy grins. “She’s the one. She’s my great-times-whatever grandmother. She and Renoir were collegial at one point, but they fell out over ideology, hers being an artistically egalitarian one and his being an elitist exclusionary one.”
“Right. Like the five-legged cow thing.”
“But she loved Woman Wandering in the Irises . It has been passed down through the family, along with the duty of keeping it safe.”
I realize I’m staring at the white door at the end of the hall. Remy follows my gaze and smiles slyly. “Would you like to see it again?”
Good sense says I shouldn’t. This goes over the line from eccentric to delusional. I know that the deeper I go, the stranger my life is going to get. The most rational part of me says get out while I can.
But something else whispers, Stay.
It’s the same thing that drew me to follow the sound of dancers on the parquet floor in the museum to see what was there. To find out how much reality there was in my imaginings.
“What do you mean ‘keeping it safe’?” I ask.
“It’s not like other paintings, Julien. It’s quite special, and it needs protection from harm. So we are charged with its care.”
Protective outrage pushes aside confusion. “Why? Who would want to hurt that painting?”
Remy shrugs in that “it just is” way of his. “Why does anyone want to ruin beautiful things?”
I consider the stories that Adaline dismissed. Two artists in love with the subject of the portrait. Maybe her family wanted to hide or destroy the portrait to protect her reputation. Maybe there is some other shadowy reason I can’t speculate.
Who is she, this woman who inspired love, aroused jealousy, and needed protection?
“Then why let it go now?” I ask Remy.
“It’s time. And I think you’ll keep it safe at the museum.”
“Of course.” It’s a vow, even though I’m only an intern. Even though I don’t know where my career will take me.
We’ve been moving toward the room as we’ve talked, and Remy unlocks the door and guides me inside without following.
“Sit. Take your time.” He might be grinning, but I only have eyes for the painting. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
The door clicks shut, and I walk over, hypnotized, to Woman Wandering in the Irises .
Warmth seems to radiate from the canvas, reaching across the short distance between us as if the sun that lights the garden doesn’t stop at the frame. As if the woman has body heat, a heart pumping blood through her skin. As I study her, she looks back, her lips parted ever so slightly, looking impossibly kissable.
I want to trace a finger across those red lips. What was she saying to the artist? What was she thinking? Was she raising a hand to greet a lover?
She stays still and silent, but the room feels expectant, like the hushed anticipation between the dimming of theater lights and the rising of the curtain. I watch for something, roaming my eyes over her, and when I do, I see the faintest of outlines.
A shimmer of silver.
The canvas buckles near her hand. I hold my breath, afraid to hope for more but pleading for it at the same time. This has to be real. Please let this be more than an illusion. There’s a rustling sound, and then one slender feminine finger pokes out. My heart stops then restarts; I have to breathe, but I don’t want to risk breaking a moment that feels as fragile as a cobweb.
I lick my lips and wait, not sure what I’ll do if enough of her hand appears that I can grasp it and pull her free.
“Come out,” I whisper. “Come out.”
I move closer, inches away now, so close that my words would stir the wisps of her hair. That sunny warmth spreads over my chest, as if I could wrap my arms around her and hold her against me.
I stare, full of anticipation. “Who are you?”
There’s the gentlest swish of a skirt from behind the frame.
“What is your name?”
Then a distant sound, like a far-off bell.
“What are your favorite things?”
There’s the sound of merriment, but it’s not coming from the party. It’s as if the canvas is echoing a sweet, inviting laugh.
I put my hands on the frame. This is as close as I have come to touching her. “What are you like, woman behind the paint?” I ask, and for a moment, I can hear soft breath and the beating of a heart, and I’m sure neither one is coming from me.
The canvas is quiet the rest of the night, and the woman doesn’t emerge from the painting any farther. I stay until the party noise dies down, and I’m one of the last to leave. I say goodbye to Rafe, injecting gratitude even though I feel disconnected, as if I’m waking from a too-long nap.
Remy walks me to the courtyard door, where he presses the pink polka-dotted calf into my hands and tells me I earned it.
“I want to see her again,” I tell him. “Before she comes to the museum.”
He gives me an arch “I thought so” look. It’s the look of a successful matchmaker, and I don’t care. He asks for my phone and programs his number into it. “I will be your go-between. Like the priest in Romeo and Juliet .”
He might be joking, but I’m too distracted to interpret sarcasm. “Things didn’t end well for that pair. Maybe you could just be my friend.”
As serious as I’ve yet seen him, he nods decisively. “That I will do for you. And for her.”
We’re no longer calling it Woman Wandering in the Irises . It’s a she. She’s a woman. I want her to step from her painting so I can learn the texture of her dress and the smell of her hair.
So I can look into her eyes. Talk to her. Learn all about her.
Perhaps this is madness, but I’m terribly certain she doesn’t exist only in my mind.