The Muse

by Lauren Blakely

  This hunch involves math.

  This painting and the Cézanne that just spat us out were made before 1885. But the Van Goghs, the Matisses, the Toulouse-Lautrecs came after, and they’re unharmed.

  The year 1885 is when Clio was cursed into the painting. That’s the dividing line. Before Clio. After Clio.

  I place my hands on her shoulders. “I think I know what’s going on. It’s all the art that you inspired that’s having trouble. Everything modern is fine, the later Cézannes are fine. But we were in an earlier one, from when you worked with him.” And I know something too—this is a brand-new problem. This has little to do with Renoir. This is all because of Clio. “The art you inspired is starting to crumble.”

  I pace, feeling stupid for making assumptions. “I think . . .” God, this is hard to say. It’s like ripping off a piece of flesh. It’s like tearing out a part of me. “I think that the art misses you.” I don’t, can’t, voice the rest. The art needs her to keep being its Muse.

  Clio rubs her temples the same way Adaline did.

  “When did it start? Not the fading of the Renoirs, but the art falling apart? When was that?” Her tone is desperate. “I need to know. You have to tell me.”

  I think of the dancers twirling in the halls, of Olympia’s cat coming out to play. But that was just art coming to life. I flash to the first time I saw trouble brewing—the flame, and the feathers, and the transforming of Bathsheba. “A couple of days after Remy’s party. Why?”

  Hand pressed to her side, Clio darts into the main hallway, breathing hard. “The sun is rising. I have to go.”

  “Right, right. I know.” I follow her quickly. “Let’s set you free from the painting.”

  She shakes her head. “No. I can’t go yet.”

  “Clio . . . you have a good reason to rest. Thalia will let you take it easy on your Muse jobs.”

  Her lip quivers. Her face looks pinched. “I don’t think that’s the problem with the art.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Her eyes shine with the threat of tears. “It’s daylight. I have to go back or—” She runs to her canvas and slides back inside, cut in her stomach and all.

  I call out to her, but she’s gone.

  And I have no idea why the art she inspired is crumbling, but I suspect she does.

  And I suspect, too, that she doesn’t like the answer.

  Which means I probably won’t either.

  27

  We are not alone.

  Around the world, artwork is spitting up.

  Vomiting its insides.

  A whole new spate of problems.

  I clean up under the Cézanne, bagging the sand and leaving it below the frame, as the other museums around the world have done.

  I spend my time tracking the art as it falls. A Goya in Saint Petersburg, a handful of Vermeers in the Met, a Morisot at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Renoirs are now all undamaged, that debt settled, but something far more dangerous has infected the other art.

  I scroll through my email alerts even as I grab a late-afternoon coffee to go. At least one thing doesn’t have to do with the art implosion. There’s a note from Emilie, with an attachment.

  * * *

  Hi Julien,

  * * *

  I’ve been following all these crazy museum reports. How bizarre. I have faith you’ll sort it out though.

  * * *

  If you’re not too busy doing that, I got a solo in The Sleeping Beauty (it’s fine if you say “I told you so”), and you mentioned you might like to see the ballet. I have two tickets reserved for you and your girlfriend. You can get them at the link I attached.

  * * *

  Best of luck and see you soon (I hope!),

  Emilie

  * * *

  My girlfriend. In the midst of everything, that word still makes me happy. The thought that Clio will be free by the date of the performance even makes me happy enough to smile.

  When night comes, Clio escapes from her painting looking ashen and weary.

  “I know what’s going on with the art. I figured it out,” she says in a dead voice. She slumps against the wall and drops her head into her hands. “It is all my fault.”

  I sink down beside her, shaking my head, wanting to reassure her. “Clio, it’s not your fault. Even Thalia didn’t make the connection.” I rub her back, encouraging her. “It’s going to be fine. The art you inspired needs you back, so we’ll get you back.”

  “That’s not it, Julien. That’s not it at all.” Clio lifts her face and looks at me. Her eyes are rimmed with pain. Her face is stricken. She lowers her voice to a confessional tone, like she’s admitting a terrible crime. She whispers, “I caused it.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I say, denying it for her.

  She nods. “I did.” She winces, draws a breath, then seems to steel herself. “They’re dying because I love you more than them.”

  What?

  I sputter. I blink.

  I can’t believe that. I refuse to believe that. She has to be wrong.

  I start to protest, but words are like sawdust in my mouth. “No” is all I can manage.

  She takes my hand, squeezing it. “Yes.” She sounds forlorn. She sounds like she lost a symphony. “It has to be the reason. No Muse has ever been in love before. We only love art, or literature, or music. We love each other, and the art form we’re inspiring. Our magic is for inspiration, and our love is for preservation. That’s it; nothing more. When I started caring about you, all the art I inspired, all the art I loved, got sick. It can’t be any other way, Julien.”

  “People can love more than one thing, Clio.” I sound more desperate than logical. I feel desperate. This can’t be the answer. “Emotion isn’t a finite commodity.”

  “For people, Julien.”

  I stare at her, struck silent.

  “I thought about it all day. The Géricault—that was the first to die,” she says, and puts a hand on her heart. “That painting was so hard for him. Remember how I told you that? How I had to give it so much of my love to bring it into being, and to keep it alive? The Ingres at the Louvre too. And Rembrandt. I’ve loved them all,” she says, recounting the works she nurtured, her passion for the art permeating her voice. “All I’ve ever done is put my love into paintings. Then you came along, and I started wanting you instead.”

  Her words warm my heart, but I can’t be distracted by these feelings. I have to convince her of the wrongness of what she’s saying. “That’s not true. The art started changing before you came to the museum,” I point out. “You were still at Remy’s house. The day after his party, I went to the Louvre and first saw the changes. The timing doesn’t line up for your theory to be true.”

  She shakes her head with heavy sadness. “I wish that were so. But I fell for you before I even came here to the Musée d’Orsay, Julien. It was the night you talked to me for the first time. Remember? I tried to break out then because I wanted to see you. So, you see, as soon as I felt the first inkling of something for you, the paintings began to change. The deeper I fell for you, the sicker the art got.”

  I grab onto that one light spot in the darkness dropping onto me. “The first time I talked to you, huh?”

  She smiles. “Yes. You’re so easy to like. Falling for you is the most wonderful thing I have ever done.”

  She looks radiant, like she’s glowing because of me, because of our love, and I can’t resist touching her. I grab her and kiss her hard on the mouth, holding her face. Reveling in the feel of her. In the way she responds. In how we connect.

  Her body aligns with mine, sensual and snug, her breasts pressed to my chest, her hips to my hips.

  We kiss long and deep and hard.

  We kiss like it might be the last time.

  And though I despise that thought, I love every second of her touch.

  Of these lips, this face, this heat, this life.

  She kisses me with so much passion, I know she must be right. If
I were a painting that had experienced love like this and then the love went away, turned elsewhere, I’d shrivel up and explode too.

  But I’m not a painting. I’m a man who can hold himself together so that the woman I love can do what she needs to do.

  “So how do we fix it?” I ask at last.

  “I have to do it,” she says in a careful, measured voice. “Let me try it here first. Where is the Cézanne from last night?”

  “Where we left it.”

  We walk a few rooms over to the Cézanne. The bag of sand is nestled at the foot of the frame. The canvas is a messy stew of mottled oils.

  “So, first, I’ll just touch it,” she says, and places her palms on the remains. Nothing happens. “Now, I’ll concentrate on putting the love back into it.” She lays her hands on the canvas once more, closing her eyes. Her lips part, and she looks so beautiful, the way she looked when she first told me she was in love with me. It makes me ache, and it makes me want her at the same awful time.

  As she stands like that, the sand from the bag swirls around her on a gentle wind, then dances back into the frame, where it returns to paint and the colors become grass and sea and trees again, reforming a ravaged landscape into the luscious one Cézanne created.

  I have seen so many amazing things. I’ve had my mind blown many times, but watching the art being repaired, like time-lapse photography running backward, has to be at the top.

  When Clio opens her eyes, she looks the slightest bit different. It’s hard to pinpoint how, but she looks a bit less like Clio and more like Thalia. Not in her features, but in her demeanor. As if she’s been sharpened.

  “There you go,” I say, gesturing to the painting, restored to exactly the way it was before. “As good as new. Voilà.”

  I smile like she hasn’t changed at all in the process.

  We can do this. She can do this.

  This is what has to happen, no matter how heavy the air or how hard my lungs have to work to breathe through the tightness that grips me.

  When I look into her eyes, I know what she’s going to say will slaughter my heart.

  She squares her shoulders. Draws a deep breath. “The thing is, it’s not enough for me to love the art. I have to put the love I feel for you into the paintings.” She takes a beat, then deals the punishing blow. “To save the art, I have to stop loving you.”

  28

  She is the poison, and she is the cure.

  “It’s like a debt,” she says in an even voice. She taps her chest. “One I have to repay.”

  She sounds resigned, but resolute.

  Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve been pummeled. Cut off at the knees.

  I always knew that Clio and I had met in a strange and wonderful otherness that couldn’t last forever. I thought we’d simply have to part, and that would have been hard enough. But this is worse, far worse.

  Loving her unrequited.

  Loving a woman who no longer loves me.

  Tears streak down her cheeks, and even though I feel so heavy I could sink to the ocean floor, I wrap her in my arms so she can muffle her sadness against my shirt. I want to take her pain away. Even though I know I’ll be wearing all her pain soon.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry. That only took a tiny bit away.” She touches my cheek, so soft and tender that I have to close my eyes just to contain all the feelings that threaten to burst out of my heart. “I’m still crazy about you now, Julien.”

  Now. But soon, not at all.

  “So I guess I should let you out the door. To do the repairs.” My voice is empty.

  “No. As long as I’m part of the painting, no one can see me except you. But once I leave the museum, I’m no longer bound, and anyone can see me then. Which makes doors and security guards a problem.”

  She keeps talking, thinking out loud. “I need time to focus, and to put my hands on the art. I’ll have to be there when no one else is.” I know what she’s about to say, and I want to stop her, but I can’t. “To repair the art, I need your help.”

  It’s a sucker punch.

  And I’m winded, doubled over.

  “Because with me, you can go at night and travel through the paintings.” My voice is flat. I’ll help her, but I can’t make myself excited about losing her love. “We can cross Monet’s bridges when we touch them at the same time.”

  “Exactly. Most of the museums we need have Monets with bridges, don’t they? He made all those paintings after I was trapped, so we know they’ll be intact. We can travel through them almost instantly.”

  She’s put those details together fast. She’s brilliant, and breaking into a museum through a painting should be the coolest thing I’ve ever done, but it means I’ll have to witness my own execution. I’ll have to watch her fall out of love with me.

  “Let’s go now,” I say, walking to the nearest bridge painting. I want to get this over with. The longer I have to think about it, the harder it will be.

  Clio shakes her head. “There’s a problem with now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Louvre doesn’t have any Monets, or any other Impressionist paintings of the bridge. We can’t get in that way. And I think we need to start where the problem started.”

  There is logic to that, but I don’t feel logical. I want to rip off the Band-Aid.

  As if she can read my thoughts, she wipes a hand across her face to dry her tears and steels herself. “Look, this is my problem. I can do it myself during the day after you free me. It’s riskier but not impossible.”

  “Clio . . .” Now I feel like an asshole.

  Probably because I’m being an asshole.

  She shakes her head. “I should never have asked you. It’s not fair.”

  “That’s true,” I say, and she blinks in surprise. “It sucks in every way imaginable. But I’m in this with you, and we have to fix it together. I want to protect you, and I will. The trouble is anyone can see me anytime. We have to come up with a way that I won’t be spotted on security cameras roaming about foreign museums in the middle of the night.”

  “I actually have a few ideas,” she says with a grin. “But what about the Louvre?” She looks over at the nearest Monet. “Can we somehow get one of these Japanese bridges into the Louvre?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously,” she says. “Maybe . . . one from a private collection?”

  “Sure. All my friends have a Monet or two lying around—”

  Hang on.

  Hang the hell on.

  I grin, and this is the first time I’ve felt anything good since she told me the news.

  I picture dusky-blue light on the slatted bridge, and I look at Clio and smile. “As a matter of fact . . . I do know someone.”

  We spend the rest of the night making a plan that would shame Ethan Hunt and his Mission: Impossible team. We study the layouts of the museums, mapping where the Monets are relative to the damaged paintings and plotting the fastest way to get from one to the other. I’m sure that’s not what the museums intended their interactive maps to be used for, but we end up with a plan.

  The Louvre will be the toughest. It’s huge and has the most paintings that need attention, and our solution for getting in is complex, which means more points where it could go wrong. Anything that starts in a restroom is bound to be dicey.

  The final thing we need—other than the loan of a Monet—is the phone number of Gustave’s buddy on the night shift at the Louvre. We manage that by the grace of Clio’s pickpocketing skill and dumb luck that Gustave doesn’t have a passcode on his cell phone. Number jotted down and phone returned, we’ve done all we can tonight.

  Before she goes into her painting, Clio heals the warped Degas, and the orchestra stops playing out of tune. I’m afraid to look at her, afraid she won’t care for me anymore, but she gives me one more kiss good night, and I savor it for what it is.

  The last of its kind.

  Museum security is nothing like the movie
s, where master thieves rappel in through skylights and hack surveillance cameras. And forget ridiculously complicated webs of infrared beams.

  Most museums have alarms and monitors not much different than those in houses these days, plus a couple of yawning guards patrolling the galleries after dark. But the real deterrent is that it’s virtually impossible to fence a museum piece anywhere, so robberies aren’t worth the risk.

  That said, I’d rather not be spotted by camera lenses or human eyes, and while we can travel between paintings of Monet’s bridge, I can’t take anything through the canvases but the clothes I’m wearing—no cheating with pockets. So, to be able to draw handy things into existence, I’ll need the help of an advance party. Which is where my friends come in.

  We meet up in a café that day, and, using the maps and layouts of each museum, I explain what I’ll need in each city. The rest is the basic who, why, and where of the mission. I leave out the part about Clio falling out of love with me. I don’t want pity. More than that, I don’t want to hear myself say it.

  Simon’s buddy Patrick can help in London, where the Turner seascapes pour out of their frames at each high tide. Lucy used to live in Chicago, and a friend there owes her a favor. She snaps a pic of the diagram that shows where the pencil and paper need to be in the Art Institute, and texts it to her contact.

  Remy, of course, knows tons of people in New York who can pop into the Met, but we’re out of luck in Saint Petersburg, so Clio and I will have to get creative.

  We call it a “scavenger hunt,” and recruiting remote help is surprisingly easy. Talking Remy into loaning us his Monet isn’t even that hard—the challenge is keeping him from hysterics when I explain what I need to do with it.

  Outside the pyramid at the Louvre, I almost don’t recognize Remy in jeans and a brown T-shirt. Sophie describes her own outfit as “unobtrusively understated.” What they’re about to do is totally legal, but it pushes the line from eccentric to odd enough that if anyone notices, it will throw a wrench in the whole plan.