Chapter 30
30
The church bells across the river strike midnight. We’re starting now so we can reach all the museums while it’s still night in their time zones. I leave my messenger bag and phone under a bench, a home base here in the Musée d’Orsay. A few feet away is the Japanese bridge Monet painted. I step inside it with Clio, and we place our clasped hands together on the railing.
“To the Louvre,” she says, and we step forward, our feet landing on another bridge, this one in Remy’s painting.
I jam my palms out but still smack the tiled floor of the ladies’ room hard with my hands. Clio falls out next, banging her forehead on a metal pipe.
Ouch , she mouths.
“You okay?”
She nods and rolls out from under the sink. She stumbles as she stands, getting tangled in her long dress. I reach out for her hand so she won’t trip. She steadies herself, and I crawl out next. I smile at my partner in crime, or rather, my partner in uncrime. “It worked,” I whisper, relieved that the painting’s been safe from people and water since closing time.
“It’s showtime,” I say, and hold open the door for Clio. She heads for the Géricault, and the halls are eerily silent.
I have work to do too. I’d picked this entry point so I’d have a place to hide while I took care of Remy’s painting. Hunching under the sink, I carefully remove the tape from the canvas then find the padded envelope Sophie hid between the trash can and its liner.
I check the time—Clio should have healed The Raft of the Medusa and be onto the Rembrandt now. So when I hear someone coming, I know it can’t be her. I slip into a stall, close the door, and hop up onto the toilet seat, holding the Monet and the envelope. The door opens, and through the crack in the stall door, I see a security guard leaning into the mirror to search for something between her teeth.
“There you are!”
I’m tense enough that I almost jump and fall off the toilet. But she’s talking about whatever she removed from her teeth and rinsed down the sink.
She opens the door to leave when her radio crackles.
“Problem at the Mona Lisa ,” the garbled voice says.
I hold my breath. Please be safe, Clio.
The guard brings the radio to her mouth. “What’s the problem?”
“I think she’s drunk.”
The guard scoffs. “Really?”
“She’s telling a dirty joke, I think.”
“You think?”
“My Italian is rusty.”
“I’m on my way,” the guard barks into the radio. The door swings shut, and she’s gone.
I exhale, and then it hits me—the Mona Lisa is doing what? Suddenly, I like the overrated painting a little better. Creeping out of the stall and putting my ear to the door, I listen, but my Italian is more than rusty.
The joke stops, and a minute later, Clio opens the door, breathing hard. “I had to fix the Mona Lisa too,” she says.
“That’s what’s behind the famous smile?” I ask as I position the padded envelope with the Monet on top of it on the tiles near the door. “A tipsy Mona Lisa telling a dirty joke?”
“More like the satisfaction at her dinner guests’ shocked faces.” Clio flashes a smile of her own. “She was ordinarily such a gracious hostess.”
We’re laughing as we step into the Monet and return to the Musée d’Orsay.
We’re also still holding hands, grinning at our success as we arrive back in the familiar blue-walled gallery. Clio’s touch is almost enough to make me think there might be room in her heart for both art and me. But already she’s not quite holding my hand the way she used to, she’s not touching the inside of my palm with a finger or tracing lines on my wrist. I’m more like a guy she likes, not the guy she loves.
I call Remy. He answers his phone before it has time to ring. “Please have good news.”
“The paintings at the Louvre are done. Call the number I gave you for the security guard and tell him you left your Monet in the ladies’ room this evening. He can’t miss it; it’s right by the door. And it won’t be the weirdest thing he’s seen this week.”
Remy sighs in profound relief. “Thank you.”
“Thank you . We could not have done this without it.”
He rings off to call Gustave’s friend at the Louvre.
I turn to Clio. “How was the art? What did it look like?”
“Titian’s mirror repaired itself. Bathsheba reshaped. The flame in the La Tour relit, and it’s flickering in paint now,” Clio says, and she’s so animated and excited to tell me about the reformed art.
“And the Géricault?”
“It was as if the water crashed backward and the waves rolled right into the frame. Then the canvas sort of slurped it all up. It looks just like the day it was made.”
“It’s amazing,” I say. “Russia now?”
“To Saint Petersburg we go.”
* * *
Clio might not be visible to anyone but me, but she’s audible to everyone. Including a guard who happens to be one room over from the Monet exhibit at the Hermitage. To complicate matters, the museum hasn’t updated its website lately, because the layout we saw of this gallery is just a tad wrong.
The guard jerks his head when Clio’s footsteps clip past him on the way to the Goya. But when he swivels around and sees me, I must appear—though it would be impossible—to be the source of the footsteps. At the very least, I’m an intruder. I’m about to jump into the closest Monet, the one I picked in advance for protection, but all the Monets near me are his earlier works that Clio inspired—thanks for nothing, Hermitage website—and I’m not about to take shelter in a painting that could collapse in on itself.
I scan the room quickly as the guard calls out to me in Russian.
I don’t know what he’s saying, but he’s not happy. He moves toward me. I spot a later Monet, one of the Haystacks . It’s a few feet from me. I step toward it as the guard comes closer. I reach my hands inside the painting and take out the haystack. It’s big, but it’s not heavy. I hold it in front of me as a shield. I don’t think he can see the haystack, since he’s not a muse. But like Olympia ’s cat and Cézanne’s peach, the haystack is real, and it occupies space.
More Russian words fall from his lips. I shrug my shoulders but stay silent. Accents won’t disguise me. The guard is now mere feet from me, and he tries to grab me, but the thick bale of straw is a prickly buffer between us. He keeps lunging and keeps getting bounced back by the invisible haystack. Finally, he fumbles for the radio on his belt and calls for backup. He goes for his phone next and snaps a picture of me, of the Teflon guy he can’t touch.
C’mon, Clio. It’s only one painting.
I hear heavy running footsteps bringing another guard, who fires off more Russian orders at me. Seconds later, Clio’s racing through the halls, and both guards turn their heads at the noise. When she slides into the gallery, she sizes up the situation with a glance. She knocks off the second guard’s cap, and when he swivels around, Clio comes up behind the first guard and says something in Russian. His eyes widen, and he looks down at his pants, his face reddening. It gives Clio a chance to grab my hand, so I drop the haystack, then we run like hell to the bridge.
“What about the haystack?” I ask as soon as our feet touch safe ground.
“I’ll go tomorrow morning and put it back. It’ll take two seconds, but that was more time than we had just then,” she says.
“Right. How was the Goya?”
“Oh, it was beautiful.” She lays a hand on her heart. “I was so happy to see it again.”
Happy. I wince.
“But I still like you,” she says, and she sounds like herself, or as much of herself as there still is. She’s got that shy and sweet look about her, and part of me thinks she may even dive in for one more kiss. But she doesn’t.
“What did you say to that guard in Russian?”
“I told him his fly was down.”
I laugh, and she smiles, and we’re still in this together.
“Hey, Clio. As a favor, could you try to be just a little quieter when you run down the halls? I’d kind of like to not run into another security guard if I can.”
“Maybe you should draw me some padded socks,” she says with a wink, and I enjoy what I suspect might be our last inside joke.
* * *
The Impressionist room at the National Gallery in London is blissfully quiet. So is Clio as she taps the Muse dust into my hand. I close my fist around it then put the loose dust in my front pocket. Meanwhile, Clio heads—with careful, silent steps—away from the Monets and on to the Turners, a few rooms away.
I spy the bench I’d picked out and reach underneath. Yes! Simon’s friend Patrick came through. I untape the sheet of paper and pencil, lie flat on my stomach, and sketch quickly. The drawing is a contingency plan, so I tuck it under the bench and, with thirteen minutes left to wait, pop into a painting of Monet’s water lilies, out of sight of any passing guard.
I’m soaked to my knees the second I enter the painting, but it’s peaceful here at Monet’s pond, and so I slosh to the bank and sit, careful not to let my jeans pockets get wet. There are more than half a dozen damaged Turners here in the National Gallery, so fixing them will take time.
But it will also take more than that. Clio will pour her love into the Turners and they’ll be right again, and my world will be wrong—I can’t imagine she’ll feel much of anything for me after repairing that many paintings.
When I leave the painting ten minutes later, I leave the water behind too, coming out completely dry.
The room is still quiet, so I pace and wait. I should have stayed in the painting a little longer.
I drop onto the bench too hard and push it an inch or two. That’s all, but in the quiet, I might as well have blown a trumpet.
Cursing my impatience for making me careless, I pluck the drawing from under the bench and sprinkle it with a pinch of the Muses’ dust from my pocket.
Two sets of footsteps move with purpose toward the Monet room. One set is Clio’s, and she rounds the corner into the Impressionist room.
“Guard coming!” She mouths.
“Did you get it done?” I ask the same way, relieved when she nods.
Jerking my head toward our exit painting, I trace my drawing with silvery fingertips, cupping my hand around the bird that comes to life. I release it near the door and hear the flurry of wings and the startled guard saying, “Bloody hell!” Just as we go, I get a snatch of him calling wildlife rescue.
Clio and I walk toward the bridge inside the painting, and she tells me about the magnificent sight of the waters and the sunsets being remade, of how the light streaked across the paint in just the way Turner had always envisioned. As I listen to her, it occurs to me that in some ways she’s not that different. She isn’t cold or callous. She’s still warm and glowing, but she only has eyes for the art now. She is slipping away from the woman she was with me and reverting back to the Muse she was made to be. I want to share this moment with her, to rejoice in the saving of the art, but each reborn painting crushes me a little more.
She almost forgets to reach for my hand when we walk onto the bridge on the way to the Met. I feel as if the ground is starting to sway as she changes.
“Oops, sorry,” she says, like it’s no big deal, and it isn’t to her, because she no longer has the desire to hold my hand.
* * *
For no good reason, I opt to bide my time in a church. Tired of water lilies, I guess. The real Rouen Cathedral in Normandy was bombed during World War II, but here it’s still perfect. I thought it would be peaceful waiting for Clio there, and it is.
Much too peaceful, and my thoughts are too loud.
My feelings churn from angst to resignation to anger at the unfairness of having to participate in the excision of Clio’s love from my life.
I leave the painting before I really start to wallow in misery.
My feet are barely on the floor when there’s a cry from another room.
Clio.
I bolt down the hall and then turn into a room full of modern art, spinning around when I realize it’s not the direction where the noise came from.
There’s a shadow by the entry, a not-Clio shadow, and my heart stops.
I quickly survey the room and dive into the nearest painting. My jaw drops when I reach the other side of the drip marks, and I think I may laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed in my life. Jackson Pollock always said his abstract art was about the art and the paint itself, nothing more.
Pollock lied.
I’m inside a gigantic refrigerator. There’s a jar of pickles, a container of mustard, and some yogurt that is probably way past its expiration date.
This is what art historians and modernists have been ruminating on for years?
I’m here to say Jackson Pollock painted appliances.
I leave, and thankfully the shadow from before is gone, as I double back to our exit. Clio is waiting for me by the bench. I can tell she’s been crying, but she looks worried now, and when she sees me, she motions for me to run. I do, as quietly as I can, and she surprises me by grabbing my hand and pulling me under the bench, shifting so I’m on top of her. The front of the bench shields us from view, but this is the cruelest torture. I’m pressed against her, and I can feel her heart beating against mine. I want to smother her in kisses, but she’s simply my accomplice now, nothing more.
She presses a finger against her lips. Footsteps pass dangerously close to us. I don’t breathe until they leave the room. Then she rolls out from under me, and we head for our final destination.
“Why were you crying back there?” I ask once we’re safely on the bridge.
“It was the Vermeers.”
“Well, are they okay? Did you fix them?”
“Yes, they look so beautiful now.” Her voice breaks. “I was overcome.”
* * *
Chicago is our final stop.
The sick Morisot is only a few rooms away, and I’m so pummeled by witnessing Clio losing her love for me that I barely care if I get caught. Worst-case scenario, she can slink out of the museum in the morning and find the Chicago entrance back to her home. She doesn’t need me anymore to get around.
As for me, I’ve always wanted to see Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks , his image of three lonely people in a diner. Tonight, I can commiserate.
It’s a few rooms over, and I go inside and order a chocolate milkshake. The guy at the counter nods as he hands over the tall, frosty glass.
It’s fantastic, and I feel as if I could stay here all night. No one talks to each other. The other three people just stare off with empty eyes at their lonely worlds.
I thought I would fit in here, but I don’t. My heart is being ripped apart, but my world is not lonely. I have friends back home, enough to keep me from becoming an empty-eyed nighthawk. I have places to be that aren’t this diner.
So I leave, and I walk to Monet’s Japanese bridge, where Clio’s already waiting. A guard sees me and calls after me in American English.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Getting a milkshake,” I tell him, and keep going.
I don’t bother hiding my British accent. It will make a better story when he reports it to the Chicago police.
“You want to be arrested, smart-aleck?”
No, I don’t. I’d rather not be arrested and stuck on this side of the pond without a passport.
Surprise on my side, I spring into motion and run to the bridge painting, diving into it with Clio.
I don’t make it all the way in. He grabs one booted foot. Clio pulls me farther into the Monet, and the guard yanks harder on my foot. With the toe of my other shoe, I push the boot off and slide into the painting, picturing a guard in Chicago bewildered by the worn black boot in his hand.