Interstitial #4
not look like me. Her clothing was still redolent of her rose perfume.
The night was crisp and fragrant. When we walked the few meters from the cottage to the Maison de Notre Rêve, Marcel came
out to meet us with his usual bluster.
“You look well, Emi. And Ly, my dear—” Wolfish eyes cast a net down my body.
“Borrowed feathers,” I said as curtly as I could manage without being rude.
“They suit you. You’d sell more paintings if you looked like this every day. Give up the jig. My friends would sooner buy
from a pretty woman in a good gown than . . . well, the other persona.”
“Ah, the cost of success is only an abandonment of my self.”
Marcel frowned and began to speak, but Emil broke in with a placating smile. “Ly is her own creature. No one should reason with a woman, as you know.”
I wanted to throttle Emil, but I also understood his desire to put Marcel at ease. For a moment, I glimpsed anger in Marcel’s
eyes, and it held a promise of retribution that made me want to shield myself. But Emil was long accustomed to managing the
moods of others and, in his capable hands, Marcel was as easily led as any.
“Indeed,” Marcel said at last, the mask of a gracious host donned once again. “Well, come, you two. Justine has been looking for you.”
We found her near the champagne fountain. She turned from her group of friends to embrace me, coolly, briefly, before giving
her best smile to Emil. Did she notice her dress on me? How it slithered on my skin, as it had hers? Did she see the innate
intimacy of our temporary mirroring? I never knew. Emil and Justine sped off to her salon, where she displayed her most prized
works.
She had recently acquired a Miró drawing that I disliked greatly. I made my feelings known, which erupted into a quarrel,
one of our first. She reassured me that she loved my work, but I wondered if she only loved the sheen of art on me, rather
than the real product of my hours. My ego continued to gnash between us. I suspected that she would use Emil’s opinion to
counter mine, as evidence of my jealousy and her superior taste. With a guzzle of champagne, I tried to put them both out
of my mind, as well as the echo of anger I had glimpsed in Marcel’s eyes.
The night was a bore. I couldn’t keep tabs on the Chaton or Emil—they were thick as thieves, scurrying off to corners to whisper—and
the champagne and bright lights made my head hurt. I hid from any would-be patrons, preferring to hug the wall as I watched
over the festivities like a gargoyle, longing for the silence of the cottage.
Once, the Chaton and I found ourselves alone at the top of a staircase, looking down upon the elegant crowd. Marcel noticed
his wife on the landing and waved his hand jauntily. She blew a kiss back, as was appropriate, but it made resentment hiss
inside of me.
“What a stylish couple you are,” I said, acid on my tongue.
She did not choose to acknowledge my ire. She asked, neutrally, as she might any other guest, “Having a nice time?”
“I’m having a horrid time. I’m tortured by you.”
“Oh, Tam.” I was satisfied to see her composure momentarily dissolve.
“I wish we were alone.”
“My dear,” she said. Her eyes darted around, to see if anyone had heard. But we were leagues above them all. “We mustn’t.”
I whispered hotly. “If I could, I would lower you onto your husband’s plush carpet. I’d kiss you from the tips of your ears
to the divot on your ankle while everyone looked on. I would slide my hands up your legs. Part you like a sea, my tongue a
pirate ship in your waves of pleasure.”
She flushed, clutching her reddening neck, and seemed on the verge of saying something. Then she turned her back to me. “No,
Tam. I cannot do this anymore.”
She did not call me her Cheval Sauvage, and that’s how I knew. Something life-giving was being gouged from my chest—it took
my breath away, the loss. I held on to the railing, watching the heaving of her back.
She continued, still turned against me. “Marcel has moved his business overseas, to Germany. Things are happening there. He
wants to be on the ground. We are relocating before the snow arrives.”
“Leaving?” I croaked. “For how long?”
“He does not intend to return to France.”
“And you?”
“I will go with him.”
There it was, the cannonball that I always saw coming. Knowing its inevitability did not lessen the impact. I reached for
her, but she was already descending the stairs. What did I expect? A tête-à-tête at this party with their friends underfoot?
A long and loving goodbye? The Chaton vanished into the crowd, this woman who could only ever offer me marginalia in the book
of her existence.
I returned to the cottage alone. The dark overwhelmed me. And my rage, it took over. After all her complaints about Marcel;
all her professions of love for me—
It came to nothing. She might have wanted me, but she did not want me enough to leave the life she’d maneuvered for herself.
I made a fist and punched through the floor mirror in the cottage. What a beautiful mess it made. Glass sparkled in the candlelight, arrayed itself on the floor like a mosaic of silver.
A line of blood rivered down my palm, jogging to meet a vein in my wrist.
As if on instinct, I turned and pressed the open wound to the surface of my secret painting.
Let it divide the women in two, as Justine had divided us.
Then I painted over my blood with cadmium red. I would not allow this pain to fade. It sought witness.
Exhausted, I fell into bed, dreaming of nothing at all. The age of dreams had passed for me.
Again, I will rest my pen. The end of the story comes too quickly.
May 25, 1943
The morning after the fête, I woke with a gnaw of dread. Sitting up on my elbows, I gazed at the blue lovers—ruined now with
that thread of blood. It was fitting, then, that this piece should be our final memento. Strange, volatile art that stirs
when it should pacify; agitates when it should soothe. Staring back at me was Justine’s fine-boned face, which could convey
any manner of feeling. She loved and then she discarded. She was deep, she was shallow. What contradiction inside such a small
and adored body!
I resolved that I should confront her one last time. I deserved more than a disappearance from the woman I loved. And so I
went to the gardens, where I knew she liked to stroll after her breakfast. And she was there, dressed in white voile, her
mouth twisted in concentration as she leaned over a spent rosebush.
I fell into step and she remained silent, not in challenge, but in despair, perhaps, or confusion. The poised socialite from the previous night was still slumbering. For a moment, she was my very own Chaton again.
Finally, she began, “Oh, Tam. How many things I would change if I could.”
“Why can’t you? Women have divorced before.”
“And then what? I have no skills, no talent on which to feed myself. I am old and accustomed to a certain rhythm of freedom.
You know this. Would I resign myself to a life as my parents’ burden? Scavenging on the crusts of society?”
It hurt terribly that her life without Marcel did not, also, include me. That alone should have said everything. Perhaps I
should have argued with her, allowed her to see what our future might entail—afternoons of love, evenings of fervid conversation,
art and music and the balm of true companionship. But I could never offer her an estate or diamonds or friends who moved through
the world like rainfall across glass. Our life would be penury and hardship in the end, and she was not built for hardship.
She liked the company of bohemians, but only as a diversion. She was, to her core, a pragmatist. An edifice of convention.
I had not seen this, because I didn’t want to acknowledge how distant we truly were. If not for Emil and her own charitable
impulses, Justine would have never glanced my way.
Bitterly, I said, “‘After all this time’ becomes ‘only for a time.’”
“Please.” She wrung her fair hands. Her eyes became pools of regret.
I considered what I had done to escape my past. I’d left my son and allowed my family to believe I’d sunk to my depths in
a rushing river. I walked for days, suffered unimaginable indignities. I knew I was no hero. For most, I would be nothing
more than a coward, a villain. And yet I did not cower when fate threw open its shadowy arms. Even as a ghost of my former
self, I embraced the future I was afraid to see. Survival, its own virtue. In retrospect, I imagine that she’d told herself
the same thing.
“You’ll regret staying with Marcel,” I said.
“I imagine you’re right.”
“And I will come to hate the memory of this summer.”
“Can’t it be something lovely we recall?”
I did not turn to see her wistful expression. I did not take her cool hand and press my lips to its palm, as I wanted to,
and I did not move the curl from her forehead, where it lay like a crescent of color on a flawless canvas. I turned and left
her to her flowers, her carefully arranged loneliness, resolving to pack my things that very moment. There was nothing left
for me in Arles.
But when I arrived at the cottage, the door was flung open. There was a commotion inside. Emil’s voice was raised. So was
Marcel’s. The secret painting, I saw, lay on the floor between them. Pieces of the shattered mirror winked from a corner.
“They are friends, nothing more,” Emil protested.
“Friends?” Marcel repeated. “You think I’m a fool? Those bare shoulders. This is an abomination.”
“Art is not always life. She was painting a fantasy.”
“If this creature’s fantasy is my wife, then that is crime enough.”
Spittle rained from his words. I shivered at the hate I heard in them. This creature. He did not even consider me human. I
saw, too, the irony of Emil’s position as my defender, when he had tried to caution against this very thing.
“Marcel, my brother,” Emil gasped. “Don’t do it.”