Chapter 7
What a wraith he is in the homely little chateau.
Later, after Vivi handed Ly’s letter to Paul and left his office, she saw Justine Allard’s words floating up to her, as if they were inscribed in the
air around her. The reference could be nothing, an ironic expression that mocked the humility of the servants’ cottage they
wrote about. That’s what Paul thought, anyway. Or it could be everything. What was the likelihood of two significant chateaus
mentioned between Ly and Blanc?
She wanted to talk over what she’d unearthed with Calla, but Calla was wandering somewhere on campus, following whatever whim
had seized her at the moment. Not that she would have been helpful. She had no patience for this part of art history: the
slogging study, the false starts and dead ends. What Calla wanted was the answer, vivid and true, but she could never understand
that the answer often came from the unglamorous work of being wrong, over and over again. That was what Vivi was for.
Vivi strode through Rathmore’s manicured lawns, retracing all the steps she’d walked as a student.
The sun was beginning to set, throwing off limp ribbons of peach and gold through the oaks.
It’d been nearly a decade since she’d last returned to Rathmore.
On its surface, the campus looked the same.
But there were bursts of change everywhere.
Students wearing the stovepipe jeans that’d been popular when she was a kid.
Scaffolding on the science lab where she’d earned her second master’s degree in chemistry.
She’d been as determined to understand the science behind the art as she was the history, which meant that it took her nearly twice as long to get through her degrees, but she never doubted the decision.
Art without materiality was just an idea wafting in the wind.
She stepped on a stray flyer for a student art show and picked it up, smoothing it out in her hands. All at once, she knew
where Calla would have gone.
Rathmore’s gallery slept on the first floor of the fine arts building underneath the classrooms and studios. It was a modest
white box space, shoddily lit and hung with recent senior works. Even though Vivi hadn’t been a studio art major, she’d spent
many afternoons there, reading on a bench as she took in the work of her contemporaries. Sometimes she’d set down her textbook
and stare at the paintings and sculptures on display. She played a private game in which she studied the subject portrayed
and imagined how she would paint it herself.
A swish of red for the Titian beauty with the lip ring. A blur of indigo for the disorderly seascape. If she’d become an artist,
she thought, her own style would have been abstract, grounded by the sensual tones of an O’Keeffe, shot through with Leonor
Fini’s sense of transgression, her lithe weirdness. For all of Vivi’s precision as a conservator, she was most drawn to art
that swept one up like music, experienced in consuming swells of feeling. Perhaps for her, abstraction was the only way to
accurately depict an emotional landscape in flux.
But she’d never know now. She hadn’t picked up a brush in years. Once she saw how hard it would be to make a living as an
artist, how very few were able to grasp at the whisker-thin threads of success, she shifted her attention to more attainable
vocations. The life of a starving artist hadn’t appealed to her. She’d done enough starving in her childhood.
And there had been, after all, student loans to repay.
Like Calla, Vivi had received a series of scholarships, but hers were for academics rather than art.
With the help of a much-needed Pell Grant, she’d successfully cobbled together a means to leave Deer Creek.
She’d vowed that the escape wouldn’t be for naught.
She refused to wind up in the gutter, wailing about lost opportunities, or worse yet, drinking her ambitions away in some remote farmhouse in the Wisconsin woods.
After college, Vivi lived the barest possible existence, floating in and out of sketchy sublets shoved within abandoned corners
of the city, subsisting on Maruchan packets and rice cakes, all in the name of wresting herself out of debt. Close to finally
paying back the last of the loans, she moved into the Lakewood studio last winter, committing to a slightly less itinerant
existence. At that point, she should have felt a relaxing of her financial constriction, but she couldn’t seem to get out
of the habit of austerity. Maybe a part of her didn’t believe she’d earned the luxury of stability.
Calla had no such hesitation. She flew through the Lincoln Park boutiques with a credit card that burned to the touch. Charged
lavish dinners, took a car service wherever she needed to go. She and Wayland could have lived most anywhere in the city,
but they clung to Pilsen as a token of the scrappy, artistic facade that hid Wayland’s formidable security net. In Vivi’s
ungenerous moments, she regarded them as children, playacting as beatniks. But Calla had never been miserly; her nature was
to share what she had with Vivi. If Vivi would have accepted it, Calla would have swept her along with them into unrestrained
excess and fancy.
“We deserve this,” Calla had said fiercely. “We deserve the world.”
Inside Rathmore’s gallery, the walls were covered in large-scale installations. Each contained a single strand of light running
through a wire that looped across a canvas of fathomless black. One painting, unlike the others, contained two strands of
light. Silver and gold. Always next to one another, but never quite touching. Vivi read the title of the piece. We Die Alone. She did not like the installation, though she couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. Its pessimism? Its stubborn lack of satisfaction?
She wanted to reach out and braid the silver and gold together.
“Bee, there you are.” Calla swirled breathlessly into the gallery, holding a dusty tome against her chest.
Vivi turned from the installation. “Where were you? We were supposed to talk to Dr. Quan.”
Calla waved her off. “Oh, he never liked me. You would have made more headway with him alone. Besides, I ran into that TA, Ivan, and you’ll never guess, he’s a tenure-track professor. He’s still very dashing, especially now that he’s lost that mustache.”
“Did he remember the cow patties?”
Calla smirked. “He sure remembered me. How’d you get on with Quan?”
Vivi oscillated between annoyance and eagerness to tell Calla what she’d learned. In the end, her eagerness won out, and she
described her conversation with Paul, along with the letters from Justine that she’d scanned into her phone. She read them
aloud to Calla, dwelling on the mention of the Chateau des Miroirs. Calla was nodding until Vivi reluctantly confessed that
she’d given away Ly’s letter.
“But I took a photo of it first,” Vivi said hastily.
“Wait a fucking second,” Calla interrupted. “You gave him the letter? Without talking to me about it?”
“I had to. You weren’t there. Paul wouldn’t have let us look through his research without something in exchange.”
“That letter belonged to Dad.”
“Who isn’t here.”
“Well, then it was mine!”
“I’ll remind you that you gave it to me. As a birthday gift. Anyway, why would the sketch have gone to you? I’m his daughter
too.”
Calla bit back the words, but she didn’t have to. Vivi knew what she was thinking. Calla and Tu?n’s alignment, shaky as it was, had long mystified Vivi, almost to the point of ire. Certainly to the point of resentment.
For the first half of their lives, it’d been Vivi and Calla, facing off against Tu?n. Then, somewhere along the way, Calla had allowed Tu?n back in; never completely, and never with full trust, but far more than Vivi would ever permit.
She remembered the first and only time when Tu?n visited Rathmore.
He was coming for an art show that displayed recent works from Calla and her cohort.
The sisters placed bets on whether he’d actually make the drive—he hated to pass the Wisconsin border—but there he was, standing in a corner of the gallery with his right hand shoved into a coat pocket, tapping his foot as instructors took turns introducing each artist. He seemed sober for a change, but in the room of bustling, proud parents, he also looked small, bereft of his usual power.
Or maybe the power had been an illusion all along, a glamour of Deer Creek.
Vivi thought, too, of caged animals, how scrawny and desperate they seemed when taken outside their native contexts.
At the show, Calla’s pieces were the most talked about. She’d created large-scale, mixed-media collages of the woods behind
their farmhouse. There were origami birds folded from Viet newspapers and embroidery threads coaxed into leafy patterns and iridescent candy wrappers cut into tiny darters that sprang
in arcs. Tu?n stood in front of each collage for long, silent moments, only drifting to the next once he’d examined every inch of the canvas.
In one, Calla had used a scrap of May’s favorite apron, the one with primroses and a yellowed eyelet trim, to form a pale
moon above the landscape. He reached out to touch the fabric, not caring about the glares from the professors, for whom gallery
decorum was more sacrosanct than religion.
Afterward, Calla had invited Tu?n to dinner with them, but when he glanced at Vivi, she remained cold, unencouraging. Whatever, come if you want. Finally, he said that he had to get back to Deer Creek. But he was proud. He said it in Vietnamese: Ba t? hào.
Vivi often wondered, afterward, why his pride had pained her so much. Because it wasn’t meant for her? Because it came too
late? Because it made Calla so very hopeful, when in the end, he would never be able to give her the consistency of a real
father? She remembered how Tu?n had bent his head as he shuffled back to the truck, shoulders hunched. He looked far older than his years. She almost called
him back.
Then the vignette faded and Vivi pulled herself back to the present.