Interstitial
In July, we named the cottage. We were in my bed—too small for the two of us, but we never could get close enough. The Chaton
had begun paging through Nightwood with her delicate fingertips. I longed to take them in my mouth, as I had only moments before, sucking the salt off each
one, the way I used to pry marrow from a beef bone. I could not get enough of her skin, the revelatory softness of her hips,
those endless hills of cream. I’d tasted everything, but I was ravenous for more.
Had anyone ever loved like this? I would not believe it.
She read aloud a passage that I’d underlined. “‘A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic;
on her mouth you kiss your own.’”
She punctuated the quote with a kiss that I eagerly returned. For the next few minutes, we forgot about Djuna Barnes.
Later, she said, “You are nothing like him, my love.”
Even as my heart sang to hear her say it, I bristled at the comparison. I’d have rather Marcel not existed at all. I never
asked about him, but what a fool to think that a married woman shouldn’t be intimate with her own husband. But they did not
love as we did. It was inconceivable.
She went on. “There is something familiar about you.”
I felt it too. Every moment with her brought inexpressible comfort, along with the electric tug of desire. Whatever comforts
I’d experienced in my life were nothing compared to the rightness of being in her presence.
She propped the book on her bare breasts and repeated dreamily, “‘A woman is yourself.’”
“A mirror,” I said, gesturing to the antique floor mirror propped against my bedroom wall, through which I saw our nakedness, the spool of her unbound hair woven with mine.
My mind went to Narcissus at his pond, but it wasn’t an apt comparison. Justine wasn’t just my mirror, reflecting a flat,
sanitized version of me. She was my other half. She didn’t reflect; she revealed.
Just then, I knew what I would paint next.
“The Chateau des Miroirs,” she mused. “That’s what we’ll call the cottage. Your home.”
It was not a chateau, of course, only a dressed-up hovel at best, but that was the charm. A cottage could become a castle
in the mind of any lovestruck couple. In all the essential ways, we were no different from so many of the youths stealing
into shadowy corners to consummate the truth that their souls already understood. If there was an element of danger to our
love, we ignored it, even as we understood that there would be a reckoning. There always was for women.
I licked a drop of sweat off the ridge of her clavicle. “I’ll always think of this as our home.”
Without discussing it, we knew I would stay for as long as the situation would bear. But how long was that? Marcel would be
returning at the end of the summer. Already, I began to attend to the signs of him that littered Maison de Notre Rêve: his
fat rows of cigars; fastidious coats that needed constant brushing; the rifles proudly displayed in his study and polished
with exquisite care by the maids every fortnight.
Once, the Chaton let me into that study to look at a Turner landscape she’d purchased for him—he loved the English Romantics,
which felt like a departure from what I’d gleaned about his tastes—but I could only fixate on the silver rods of violence,
hung with regal ceremony above his desk.
“My husband is a hunter,” the Chaton had explained, unnecessarily.
“How nice for him.” Guns would always remind me of soldiers, which reminded me of other, more tenebrous things.
“He enjoys dominance. Even the smallest creatures are worthy of a chase.”
“A bully?”
“He would say that he is a patriarch. A man of consequence. His father is the same. They drink from an ancient cask handed
down by the Allard men. A poisoned one.”
She made a noise of mirthless laughter.
“Justine?” I only used her name when I was being serious.
“No—we won’t speak of him anymore.” She pressed her lips in a decisive manner. “He does not belong here in this summer, not
with us.”
I was an interloper in his house—his marriage—and yet, I experienced the prospect of Marcel’s intrusion as a blunt force.
My guilt did not announce itself subtly. On its heels, the snapping jaws of resentment. Desolation. The triumvirate of a miserable
heart. I moved my gaze from Marcel’s rifles onto the surface of the Turner, replacing one turbulence with another.
While the Chaton’s husband was away, we pretended. She brought me coffee and wine as I worked feverishly, inspired by our
lovemaking and conversation. I completed my commission for her—Moonbathers, a blue dream lifted from the spread of land around Maison de Notre Rêve. Justine was not silent in any of her opinions; she
let me know when a line wasn’t true or when a color jarred. Even Emil never went so far as to comment on my works in progress.
But I liked her forthrightness. It tore down another door between us, so all that was left were the ones imposed by others.
On rainy days, she read books in her robe, the planes of her body rippling under the silken fabric. I often asked her to model
for me, but she refused. She did not want to be immortalized, she insisted. She was no Saskia to my Rembrandt.
“And I am not young,” she told me sadly. “Older than you by years.”
“Not so many.”
“After all this time, I am another withering body.”
But I had seen every inch—touched every inch—and I longed to reassure her that no muse had ever been more cherished or flawless
in her lover’s eyes.
I said, “After all this time, yours is the only body I wish to hold.”
“You’ve been reading too much poetry.” But she was smiling.
“Love makes one foolish. And greedy.”
“Be that as it may: your memory will have to be enough, my insatiable Cheval Sauvage.”
It wasn’t. I could summon her on a canvas at will, and I did, unable to resist the lure of seeing her come into being under
the swipe of my brush, the wring of my imagination. Wretched and glorious alchemy. We artists are often more ego than empathy,
willing to sacrifice everything we have for the promise of greatness.
I should have stayed inside that moment. Or maybe, if I’d been a different woman, I would have left before he came to shatter
our peace. I’d have prized my memory of Arles and the Chaton, for it was: a temporary reprieve from a life ill-lived.
But I was not sensible, and I did neither of those things.
I cannot write more tonight. My pen is heavy with regret. I’m filled, as ever, with the knowledge that my memory is nowhere
near enough when it comes to her.
May 16, 1943
The clear and rosy dawns of August. Flickering leaves, through which I spied vulpine streaks of red foxes chasing their prey.
A chill creeping under the cottage door.
On one such morning, the Chaton burst into our chateau with such excitement that I dropped my brush, upsetting my jar of soiled water onto the floor.
I was working on an oceanic landscape, not my secret painting, thankfully.
She paused to survey what I’d done, head tilted in contemplation.
I loved seeing her like that—still, intelligent. Fixed on my art.
“The colors seem thin,” she said at last. She was right. “But the movement is sincere. You are always painting water in some
shape or form, did you know that? Water that is also fear.”
I wanted to tell her. But I was afraid that our love could not bear my confession.
Already, each moment drifted into the next in a peculiar lamenting rhythm, a dirge that only I could hear.
Just that week, Marcel had sent word that he would return to Maison de Notre Rêve at the end of the month, around the time
when the sauniers would begin to pull salt cakes from the marshes of the Rh?ne. I wanted to go back to Paris before he arrived,
but Chaton wished me to see the harvest. The Allards were planning to host a fête for the occasion. Many of their friends
and family would be coming in for it, including Emil.
Chaton and Emi promised that there would be wealthy collectors who might commission work from me. Such work might get me through
the year in Paris and—who knew?—perhaps I could come back to the Chateau des Miroirs in time. Marcel traveled often for business,
Chaton reminded me. There could be more summers such as this, illicit but sublime. That thought alone made me acquiesce, albeit
doubtfully.
At the cottage, my Chaton drew me to the table. Sweeping aside the breakfast crumbs, she laid out a curled piece of paper.
It was a drawing of a stone bench; nothing unusual about it. I prepared to smile. Chaton knew I didn’t care about the embellishments
she undertook on Maison de Notre Rêve. The excess of her lifestyle would never cease to bemuse.
But then I saw what was written across the face of the bench.
“After all this time,” I read. I swallowed, overcome.
“You have given me such a gift”—she referred to Moonbathers, now displayed in her dressing room—“that I wondered how to possibly repay you.”
“This cottage, your company, this impossible summer—gifts enough.”
“Every woman needs a tangible marker of their lives. Let me do this for you, my darling. And after the bench is installed,
we will sit on it and dream together. Then when you go back to your glamorous Parisian salons, I will sit alone and think
of how cruel you were to abandon me.” She smiled teasingly. I tried not to dwell on the bleakness that awaited me after Arles.
“So really, it’s a gift for me.”
The bench was not just a bench. We had never spoken directly of our future, uncertain though it may be, but it was there,
in that drawing, in those words. A bench would last through the storms and bird shit and any unforeseen wars that would tear
through Arles.
It was then that I resolved Justine should know everything. Our love would not be a veiled sort of compromise.
I began, “I want to tell you—”
The words grappled their way back down my throat. I’d hidden myself for so long that I no longer knew how to stand in the
light.
“What is it? Don’t you like the bench?”
“How could I not?”
“Then what?”
“Oh, Justine. How can I say it?”