Chapter 22
22
After we leave Starry Night , we head to Gabrielle with a Rose , and Clio puts her hands on the painting, closing her eyes as she concentrates on repairing it. She smooths her palms over the shawl where the work is the most faded, and tries to coax the color back into the layers of paint.
Without success.
She might try until the sun rises, so I finally tug her away and see her to her painting, giving her a good morning kiss before she goes still.
On my way out, I pass Gabrielle with a Rose again, and I catch sight of The Swing hanging nearby. I step closer—a woman stands on a swing in a sun-dappled garden, and the dark-blue bows on the front of her dress are now gray-blue, and the whole gown looks faded from too many washings. I pause to touch it gently with my palm, the way Clio had smoothed Gabrielle’s shawl, and I feel as if I’m saying goodbye to another friend.
When I reach the front doors, I wave to Gustave. “How did your sculpture in the subway art contest go?”
He grins broadly. “Fantastic! Can’t thank you enough for helping me figure it out.”
As I congratulate him, something Clio said hits me—about helping artists realize the potential in their work. I did that for Gustave. I keep hearing how I’m a human muse, but it’s only in this moment that I feel like one.
And it feels pretty damn good.
His phone rings, and he glances at it. “My buddy at the Louvre,” he says, offhand. “I wonder what bizarre story he has this time.”
“I wonder,” I echo, but with a pit in my stomach.
Gustave answers the call, waving goodbye. I return it but pretend to check my phone for an excuse to stand there and eavesdrop.
“Oh, sure, I believe you,” Gustave says a few exchanges in. He catches me still there and rolls his eyes at whatever his friend is telling him. “Our seascapes spring leaks all the time.”
I raise my brows in a silent question, as if it doesn’t matter and my gut didn’t just knot like a pretzel. Gustave tilts his phone away from his face and stage-whispers, “The big Géricault in room seventy-seven is dripping onto the floor, apparently. Told you he was a loon.”
“Sure,” I say. “A real nutter.”
Worried my face will break, I turn toward the door, and Gustave turns back to his phone call. “Well, just mop it up. See you on Sunday for cards?”
I stagger outside, like I’ve been trounced all over again.
* * *
The Louvre doesn’t open for another four excruciating hours. I go home and manage a bit of sleep, then wake so tired that I wonder why I bothered. A shower helps, and so does coffee, then I’m out of the flat and at the museum in time to be one of the first people in the door.
The Raft of the Medusa is an early eighteenth-century painting of survivors of a French shipwreck clinging to a raft in a storming sea. I take the marble steps to the upper floor two at a time, my mind on where I’m going, not where I am, and I nearly flatten a red-haired woman heading the opposite way. I say sorry, but she’s already gone.
If people are running away, it’s got to be worse than the drip Gustave’s friend reported.
I turn the corner and freeze. It’s like gawking at a train wreck—wanting to look away, wanting to see everything, wanting to help and knowing you can’t. The Raft of the Medusa is gushing. Seawater pours out of the massive canvas from the rocky waves Géricault painted, the ones Clio helped him to create.
A custodian races by with a mop and a bucket, wholly inadequate. Next comes management—a man in a suit, barking instructions into a phone until he sees the flood and stops, jaw agape, no clue what to do. When an assistant runs in, slips, and belly-surfs across the gallery, the suit goes back to yelling, and the custodian gets to mopping futilely.
“Close this gallery. Close this gallery now!”
No one notices me duck through the crowd trying to get a look at the chaos. I find the Ingres in the next gallery and recoil at the sight. The blue cushions have folded over the concubine, and all that’s left of her is one eye staring out desperately as the cushions squeeze and strangle her.
The candle in the La Tour has become a red-hot flame, setting the whole canvas ablaze. I reach the Titian just as the mirror tips out of the canvas and plummets to the floor with a deafening crash and a spray of shards. I find Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath shriveled up into tiny hardened pieces, like pork rinds, on the floor.
I text Remy as I join the stream of visitors exiting the Louvre. It’s short and not so sweet.
Julien: I need to talk to the Muses. Now.