Chapter 10 #2
she fell straight into a fitful sleep. She thrashed on the silk pillows, dreaming of vines wrapping around her legs, tugging
her down into an oubliette in the earth. A single beam of sunlight pierced the heart of the darkness like a lance. When she
reached for it, her skin turned to ash and blew away.
Hours later, she woke to the strains of Vivaldi’s summer concerto. Vivi had always found this composition strangely elegiac,
especially as a representation of summer. It sounded like a hunt gone awry. A marathon of grief, frantic and breathless. Not
cocktail hour music, at any rate.
On the lawn, to the right of the pool, the terrace soaked the dying light into its grooves. A man wearing a black tuxedo played
a violin with his eyes closed. A few feet away, a woman in her sixties danced on the grass, mouth open as if to swallow each
note. Her dress had a metallic sheen, reminding Vivi of crumpled aluminum foil. Calla was dancing next to her, her hair a
streak of carbon. For one heady moment, it seemed as if they’d been transported back into the romantic ebullience of the Années
folles.
Vivi shook the sleep from her limbs and went downstairs to join the guests, knowing and not caring that she was underdressed.
She was at least three decades younger than everyone there, except for Calla and Jean, who milled without her romance novel but did not manage to dislodge the ennui from her features.
Jean gave Vivi a nod of acknowledgment when she approached.
“How did you settle in?”
“Too well. The jet lag took me down.”
“At least you didn’t lose a full day to it, as some do.” Jean indicated her head toward Calla. “Your companion seems to be
settling in fine.”
“My sister. She’s a well of energy. Always has been.”
“To be young.”
“Have you worked here long?”
“For the last ten years. My mother was a housekeeper before me. And before her, her grandfather was a gardener. We’ve kept
this place running for generations.” Pride ran through Jean’s words.
“What was it like? Back then.”
“In my grandfather’s day, Maison de Notre Rêve was a private residence, charming and beautiful, but you know what happens
to all those old estates. They get too expensive to maintain. People move away, lineages die out.”
“I read that Marcel and Justine Allard were the owners in the 1930s. Do you know of them?”
“I recall the name, yes. They didn’t own the property for long before Marcel sold it to a distant nephew of his. Marcel was
an important man from what I remember.”
“Are there any records from their time here?”
She frowned. “Perhaps.”
“I’m an art scholar,” Vivi explained. She told a version of the truth. “In 1936, a painter named K. P. Ly came to stay at Maison de Notre Rêve for a summer. Or so I suspect. I’m hoping to find evidence of this.”
“Why?”
“I believe he painted some of his last works here. He might have even painted Justine Allard. That would be of interest to
you, wouldn’t it?”
If Moonbathers was painted at the estate, who was to say that Blue Mirror, his most mystifying work, couldn’t have been too?
The more Vivi thought about Blue Mirror and Emil Blanc’s letters to his sister, the more she thought it likely that Justine might have inspired Ly enough to appear on the canvas.
It was, after all, common practice for an artist to pay homage to a patron in this way.
Vivi pulled up one of the pixelated images of Moonbathers and showed it to Jean. Interest flickered across the other woman’s face, then sank back into the pool of her boredom.
Jean said, “He wouldn’t be the only artist to have been inspired by Maison de Notre Rêve.”
“Maybe he was the first.”
She twisted her lips, then offered grudgingly, “I can look in our archives. If I have the time. They are not well maintained.
Our staff is much smaller than it once was.”
“It would mean the world to me and my sister. Our late father loved Ly’s work.” Was that true? Love didn’t feel like the right word, but one couldn’t very well talk about deathbed obsessions to
a stranger.
“I make no promises.”
“If you find something, could I please review the documents myself? The originals. It would be immensely helpful for my research.”
Jean gave a shrug that could have meant yes or no or anything in between, then pivoted from Vivi and began speaking with a
man in coral trousers. It was as clear a dismissal as she could have gotten but, elated by Jean’s concession, Vivi turned
away with a smile. Here was hope, arriving in tiny yet discrete droplets.
On the terrace, petrichor hung like tinsel in the cooling air. She took a glass of seltzer and swam among the artists, eavesdropping
as she made her way to Calla. Their conversation, taken piecemeal, sounded like the enjambment of magnetic tiles on a fridge,
sparse yet poetic.
“A great storm that—”
“Was a promising young—”
“Question.”
“Did you see—”
“The amphitheater—”
“Of broke Americans.”
Calla had abandoned her dance. Now she stood next to a painter who’d set up an easel on the uneven pavers. Whenever he set
brush to canvas, the legs of the easel slumped one way or the other. He was unperturbed by the setup. The paint on the canvas
mottled together with violent pointillism, but once you glanced away, then looked back, the splotches somehow coalesced into
a vision of the scene in front of them. He hadn’t captured the exactitude of shape or hue, but something of its ambiance.
“My sister, back from the dead,” Calla called. “Jerome, this is Vivi.”
The painter surveyed them. “I would never have guessed you were sisters. You don’t look at all alike.”
Where Vivi had inherited her father’s height, his thick brows and hard jaw, Calla was small and soft, her slight frame belying
the iron will beneath. Vivi had always felt like the less beautiful sister, and she didn’t mind it usually. She was happy
to watch Calla be admired from the sidelines. But sometimes it smarted, inhabiting the shadow against the light. Wayland had
been the only person who, given the choice, had turned his gaze on her first.
Vivi said to the painter, “I like your landscape.”
“It’s not good. But I’ll get better.”
Calla said, “I was telling Jerome that he picked the right place for inspiration.”
He swiped his brush on a rag. “We all think genius is like osmosis. The closer we stand to it, the more likely we’re going
to become the next Van Artist. It’s stupid. But here we are. Are you artists?”
“Yes,” Calla said.
“No,” said Vivi at the same time.
“I was a scientist in a past life.”
“What did you study?” Vivi asked.
“Viruses. Now I study light. I used to think my work was so important. It was. But science never gave me the sort of joy I feel when I sketch some throwaway thing in my backyard. What legacy matters
more?”
“Maybe we think too much about legacy,” Vivi said.
“As opposed to?”
“Living?” She didn’t know why she said it as a question. She scratched an itch near her wrist.
“Art is the antidote to death, they say.” He dabbed a scarlet anemone into the corner of the canvas.
“Could you sketch us?” Calla asked impulsively. “Something to remember this trip by.”
“Button,” Vivi began.
But the painter got out his sketchbook. He indicated that they should sit together at one of the tables. Minutes passed as
his hand moved deftly across the page. There were so few photographs that existed of the two of them. Candids from disposable
cameras at parties, a stiff portrait from Calla’s wedding, in which Vivi looked to be suffering from indigestion.
And Wayland’s photograph, the one he named The Seekers of Deer Creek. He’d taken it during one of those summer evenings when hours seemed to spill from an endless fountain, languid and inexhaustible.