Chapter 32
32
Paris is quiet, and the sun peeks over the horizon like a small child looking out from under the covers before pitter-pattering out of bed. Pink streaks leak across the blue of night as I find my way home and crash in bed.
When I finally make it out of bed in the afternoon, my phone is brimming with texts. Adaline’s are full of exclamation points and emojis. She shares the news coming in from the curators in all the museums.
Remy texts too, asking if I’ve seen my boot on the news (I haven’t, but I pull up the BBC website on my computer), telling me he’s going to have a party, and teasing me about seeing my Muse there. I answer the first and ignore the others. I haven’t told anyone the personal cost of last night’s triumph, and I don’t know when or if I will.
I scroll through the news from museums across the world. If every memory wasn’t excruciating, I would be tickled at the way the stories have grown and evolved, even overnight. The guards in Saint Petersburg. The live bird in London. The “Cinderella Boot” in Chicago—because it’s like a fairy tale, the way the paintings have all been restored. And why look for another answer when the unknown makes for a better story?
It will be old news tomorrow and forgotten the day after. All the noise of the rest of the world will drown out the music of this minor miracle.
And I can’t decide if that will be a relief or a tragedy.
* * *
The next week, I guide a group of tourists through our galleries, including a brief stop at Woman Wandering in the Irises . Hope rises in my chest when I see the painting of Clio, as it does every time, every day, with every look. But the canvas has been quiet at night. No one has come alive, not even a painted version, like Emmanuelle or Dr. Gachet. I keep waiting for the night when she might break free, even if she’s only a shadow of the Clio I once knew. I’d take that. I’d take anything.
A girl with a Brown University T-shirt raises a hand and begins speaking. “Isn’t that the Renoir that was missing for years?”
“Yes. Since 1885,” I answer as clinically as I can.
“What happened to it? How does a painting just vanish for so long, then reappear?”
“It’s not so unusual, except that the artist is so famous. Families hide their valuables during war or disaster, and if nobody survives to remember where they put them . . .” I give an open-handed shrug. There you have it. Please, let’s move on.
But another hand goes up. “Is it true that Monet and Renoir were in love with the woman in the painting?”
Another voice asks, “Does anyone know who she was, or what happened to her?”
“That’s unknown,” I say, going through my answer by rote. “She’s not a model who appears in other works by the same artist. She could indeed be a woman whose family didn’t want rumors affecting their social status. Or maybe she’s someone trapped in a painting, who comes out at night when the museum is closed.”
There are titters at my joke, and it feels so good to let out the truth.
“Or maybe she wasn’t a woman, but a Muse under a curse, and she was set free to save the world’s art,” I say without a smile, without a knowing wink. No one says anything. What does it matter? No one will believe me.
“Then again,” I say with a bland smile, “sometimes a painting is just a painting.”
With that, I conclude my tour so that we can all escape from my melancholy.
I walk past Emmanuelle, then Dr. Gachet—imprints of who they once were long ago—and an idea comes to me. It’s a crazy one, but I have to try. Maybe there is a version of Clio out there who still cares about me.
I’m done for the day, and it’s only early afternoon, so I go to Gare Saint-Lazare station and buy a ticket. An hour later, the train rattles to a stop, and I disembark. I walk from the station to Monet’s garden, a little less than an hour away by foot. The gardens are closing when I arrive, and the ticket taker tells me I will only have a few minutes.
“That’s fine.”
I have seen the gardens. For real and in paint. I’m not here today to catch the tail end of a tour or to snap photos of the kaleidoscope of colors. But the place Monet once called home is empirically gorgeous. Summer has stolen into Giverny, bringing with it the glory of reds, yellows, and oranges that blaze under the sun.
Some might say it’s better than a painting.
They have never gone into her painting.
I walk through lush fields and past blankets of petals and stems. I make my way to the pond where a raft of water lilies floats lazily in the blue-green waters. The other visitors begin to file out as the bell signals closing time. I let them leave, and the sun dips farther. Long shadows fall across the pond, and the weeping willow brushes its branches against the earth.
I close my eyes, and I’m back in time.
I can hear her voice.
Recall her longing.
Her greatest wish.
I used to pretend there was a door at the end of this bridge. A plain, simple wooden door with an old-fashioned ring handle. Dark metal. You’d pull it open, and there. The other side. Now I’ve finally been on the other side.
I open my eyes and remove my notebook, sketching the door she described in painstaking detail. I take the last pinch of silver dust that I stashed away in London, and voilà. The door materializes. Clio always longed for escape when she was trapped. Maybe that Clio is here. Maybe that Clio misses me. I reach for the handle and pull it open.
But there’s nothing but a weeping willow on the other side.
I press a palm over my eyes. Stupid me. Stupid mind playing stupid tricks. She’s gone, and all that’s left is this emptiness, this loneliness, so terribly alive, in her place. No drawing will ever change that.
I flop down in the grass and lie there until the door disappears and an old man who tends the gardens tells me it’s time to go.
I leave, still missing, still wanting.
Wanting this terrible ache to end.