The Muse

by Lauren Blakely

  Remy clamps his messenger bag between his arm and his side, but not too tightly. “It’s like carrying around a freaking diamond. No—thousands of diamonds.” He puts his fingers to the side of his neck, then grabs my hand and presses my fingers somewhere sort of around his pulse point. “Feel this. My heart is beating ten thousand times a minute.”

  I pat his shoulder with a small laugh. “You’ll live. You want to go over it again? The Monet canvas is inside the bag, right?”

  He nods. Walking himself through the steps does seem to settle him a little. “We took it out of the frame and off the stretcher bars,” he says, referring to the wooden bars that keep canvases taut inside their frames. “Then we put it into a padded envelope and caught a taxi, because there was no way I was taking a Monet on the Metro.”

  “Correction. I took it off the stretchers. Your hands were shaking too much to do that,” Sophie points out.

  Remy holds up a now steady palm to his sister. “Whatever.”

  I continue to review the plan. “Security will scan your bag like any other bag. There’s nothing to set off an alert, but even if they decide to look through it, there’s no law that says you can’t take a work of art you own out for a stroll.”

  “Plus,” says Sophie, “who is going to believe that it’s the original? Because that would be crazy, carrying around an original Monet in a mailing envelope.”

  “Right. Right.” Remy nods as if the repetitive motion will calm his nerves. “Then we go to the ladies’ room on the second floor.”

  “The small one by the far stairwell,” I confirm. “The one least likely to be patrolled.”

  “I have the double-sided tape in my purse,” Sophie says, as always up for anything. “I take the canvas from the envelope and hang it under the sink where no one will see it. Then we leave the padded envelope behind in the bathroom.”

  “Piece of cake,” I say, and clap them both on the back. “I have complete faith in you both. Now, get in there quick, before they close.”

  Remy salutes me, and Sophie grabs his elbow, and they head inside through the pyramid entrance. I can’t take the chance of being seen there by someone I know.

  So I wait and I pace, and twenty minutes later, they rush out, breathless and elated.

  “We did it!” Sophie declares, then tells me how she hung their prized Monet. It’s now out of sight, taped to the wooden underside of the sink counter. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I secured it on the very outer edge of the canvas, painted side down to further hide it, not risking a brushstroke of Monet’s.”

  “Excellent.”

  Now all I have to do is hope that no one goes into that bathroom for the next several hours.

  29

  I don’t have any carry-on luggage. This trip doesn’t allow it, since we can’t take anything into a painting. All we need are our hands and wits. I hope they’re mightier than the sword, or the nightstick, I should say.

  “Ready?”

  “I just need to do one more thing. Come with me,” Clio says, and walks across the main floor. I follow her, and we stop at a Toulouse-Lautrec. She tilts her head and offers a faint smile tinged with regret. “A proper goodbye?”

  That is something I can’t resist. I take her hand, and the museum is gone, wiped away by the sounds of the cancan, a dance that originated at a cabaret with windmills at the top of Montmartre. How I wish I were truly dancing with her in Montmartre. But this is as close as we’ll ever come. We’ve fallen into the festivities as only Toulouse-Lautrec could imagine them, surrounded by turn-of-the-century-dressed men and women with high-laced boots and ruffled skirts who don’t notice that we’ve crashed their painted party. Music plays from a band on the stage, drinks are shared freely, and revelers are everywhere. It’s always a fête at the Moulin Rouge, but it is bittersweet tonight.

  She holds her hands out. “May I have this dance?”

  “But of course,” I say with a smile, trying my best to keep the sadness at bay.

  “This is what I want you to remember of me, not what happens next. This is what I’ll remember. The before,” she says, and her eyes are so tough and so earnest at the same time. I know she wants to believe what she’s saying. I know right now she suspects she’ll never forget this. But she won’t feel it again. I will be just another memory, the same as all her other memories. Nothing special—just the week she ditched work. What made it so compelling? She’ll wonder that days and weeks from now, barely able to recall the depths of our emotions.

  Sick with the knowledge of what’s about to happen, I wrap my arms tight around her as she leans into me, and I take my here and now. I do my damnedest to forget the destruction aimed at my heart. Instead, I layer kisses on her neck, and I taste her lips once more. I kiss her with everything I have, knowing it’s our last. She kisses me back almost the same way. With almost the same passion. Almost the same wish to get lost in this final kiss. The dancers kicking their legs high in the air onstage might as well be in Peru. This is all there is. This is all I want. “I will never forget you.”

  “You saved me, you know. You saved me from being trapped. You’re the reason I can be free from that painting,” she says, and with her words, my heart is both caving and pounding. “I want you to know how much I wish there were another way. I love you, Julien. More than art.”

  That, in a nutshell, is the problem.

  I fold her into my arms, and we dance for a few minutes inside the Toulouse-Lautrec, aware the whole time of the ticking bomb on the other side. But I let this moment stretch into itself.

  I wish I could say I don’t care if I ever return to the real world.

  But I can’t say that.

  The enemy was never really Renoir. The real enemy has always been the impossibility of us.

  I kiss her once more, a last kiss that has to last for all time.

  30

  The church bells across the river strike midnight. We’re starting now so we can reach all the museums while it’s still night in their time zones. I leave my messenger bag and phone under a bench, a home base here in the Musée d’Orsay. A few feet away is the Japanese bridge Monet painted. I step inside it with Clio, and we place our clasped hands together on the railing.

  “To the Louvre,” she says, and we step forward, our feet landing on another bridge, this one in Remy’s painting.

  I jam my palms out but still smack the tiled floor of the ladies’ room hard with my hands. Clio falls out next, banging her forehead on a metal pipe.

  Ouch, she mouths.

  “You okay?”

  She nods and rolls out from under the sink. She stumbles as she stands, getting tangled in her long dress. I reach out for her hand so she won’t trip. She steadies herself, and I crawl out next. I smile at my partner in crime, or rather, my partner in uncrime. “It worked,” I whisper, relieved that the painting’s been safe from people and water since closing time.

  “It’s showtime,” I say, and hold open the door for Clio. She heads for the Géricault, and the halls are eerily silent.

  I have work to do too. I’d picked this entry point so I’d have a place to hide while I took care of Remy’s painting. Hunching under the sink, I carefully remove the tape from the canvas then find the padded envelope Sophie hid between the trash can and its liner.

  I check the time—Clio should have healed The Raft of the Medusa and be onto the Rembrandt now. So when I hear someone coming, I know it can’t be her. I slip into a stall, close the door, and hop up onto the toilet seat, holding the Monet and the envelope. The door opens, and through the crack in the stall door, I see a security guard leaning into the mirror to search for something between her teeth.

  “There you are!”

  I’m tense enough that I almost jump and fall off the toilet. But she’s talking about whatever she removed from her teeth and rinsed down the sink.

  She opens the door to leave when her radio crackles.

  “Problem at the Mona Lisa,” the garbled voice says.
>
  I hold my breath. Please be safe, Clio.

  The guard brings the radio to her mouth. “What’s the problem?”

  “I think she’s drunk.”

  The guard scoffs. “Really?”

  “She’s telling a dirty joke, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “My Italian is rusty.”

  “I’m on my way,” the guard barks into the radio. The door swings shut, and she’s gone.

  I exhale, and then it hits me—the Mona Lisa is doing what? Suddenly, I like the overrated painting a little better. Creeping out of the stall and putting my ear to the door, I listen, but my Italian is more than rusty.

  The joke stops, and a minute later, Clio opens the door, breathing hard. “I had to fix the Mona Lisa too,” she says.

  “That’s what’s behind the famous smile?” I ask as I position the padded envelope with the Monet on top of it on the tiles near the door. “A tipsy Mona Lisa telling a dirty joke?”

  “More like the satisfaction at her dinner guests’ shocked faces.” Clio flashes a smile of her own. “She was ordinarily such a gracious hostess.”

  We’re laughing as we step into the Monet and return to the Musée d’Orsay.

  We’re also still holding hands, grinning at our success as we arrive back in the familiar blue-walled gallery. Clio’s touch is almost enough to make me think there might be room in her heart for both art and me. But already she’s not quite holding my hand the way she used to, she’s not touching the inside of my palm with a finger or tracing lines on my wrist. I’m more like a guy she likes, not the guy she loves.

  I call Remy. He answers his phone before it has time to ring. “Please have good news.”

  “The paintings at the Louvre are done. Call the number I gave you for the security guard and tell him you left your Monet in the ladies’ room this evening. He can’t miss it; it’s right by the door. And it won’t be the weirdest thing he’s seen this week.”

  Remy sighs in profound relief. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you. We could not have done this without it.”

  He rings off to call Gustave’s friend at the Louvre.

  I turn to Clio. “How was the art? What did it look like?”

  “Titian’s mirror repaired itself. Bathsheba reshaped. The flame in the La Tour relit, and it’s flickering in paint now,” Clio says, and she’s so animated and excited to tell me about the reformed art.

  “And the Géricault?”

  “It was as if the water crashed backward and the waves rolled right into the frame. Then the canvas sort of slurped it all up. It looks just like the day it was made.”

  “It’s amazing,” I say. “Russia now?”

  “To Saint Petersburg we go.”

  Clio might not be visible to anyone but me, but she’s audible to everyone. Including a guard who happens to be one room over from the Monet exhibit at the Hermitage. To complicate matters, the museum hasn’t updated its website lately, because the layout we saw of this gallery is just a tad wrong.

  The guard jerks his head when Clio’s footsteps clip past him on the way to the Goya. But when he swivels around and sees me, I must appear—though it would be impossible—to be the source of the footsteps. At the very least, I’m an intruder. I’m about to jump into the closest Monet, the one I picked in advance for protection, but all the Monets near me are his earlier works that Clio inspired—thanks for nothing, Hermitage website—and I’m not about to take shelter in a painting that could collapse in on itself.

  I scan the room quickly as the guard calls out to me in Russian.

  I don’t know what he’s saying, but he’s not happy. He moves toward me. I spot a later Monet, one of the Haystacks. It’s a few feet from me. I step toward it as the guard comes closer. I reach my hands inside the painting and take out the haystack. It’s big, but it’s not heavy. I hold it in front of me as a shield. I don’t think he can see the haystack, since he’s not a muse. But like Olympia’s cat and Cézanne’s peach, the haystack is real, and it occupies space.

  More Russian words fall from his lips. I shrug my shoulders but stay silent. Accents won’t disguise me. The guard is now mere feet from me, and he tries to grab me, but the thick bale of straw is a prickly buffer between us. He keeps lunging and keeps getting bounced back by the invisible haystack. Finally, he fumbles for the radio on his belt and calls for backup. He goes for his phone next and snaps a picture of me, of the Teflon guy he can’t touch.

  C’mon, Clio. It’s only one painting.

  I hear heavy running footsteps bringing another guard, who fires off more Russian orders at me. Seconds later, Clio’s racing through the halls, and both guards turn their heads at the noise. When she slides into the gallery, she sizes up the situation with a glance. She knocks off the second guard’s cap, and when he swivels around, Clio comes up behind the first guard and says something in Russian. His eyes widen, and he looks down at his pants, his face reddening. It gives Clio a chance to grab my hand, so I drop the haystack, then we run like hell to the bridge.

  “What about the haystack?” I ask as soon as our feet touch safe ground.

  “I’ll go tomorrow morning and put it back. It’ll take two seconds, but that was more time than we had just then,” she says.

  “Right. How was the Goya?”

  “Oh, it was beautiful.” She lays a hand on her heart. “I was so happy to see it again.”

  Happy. I wince.

  “But I still like you,” she says, and she sounds like herself, or as much of herself as there still is. She’s got that shy and sweet look about her, and part of me thinks she may even dive in for one more kiss. But she doesn’t.

  “What did you say to that guard in Russian?”

  “I told him his fly was down.”

  I laugh, and she smiles, and we’re still in this together.

  “Hey, Clio. As a favor, could you try to be just a little quieter when you run down the halls? I’d kind of like to not run into another security guard if I can.”

  “Maybe you should draw me some padded socks,” she says with a wink, and I enjoy what I suspect might be our last inside joke.

  The Impressionist room at the National Gallery in London is blissfully quiet. So is Clio as she taps the Muse dust into my hand. I close my fist around it then put the loose dust in my front pocket. Meanwhile, Clio heads—with careful, silent steps—away from the Monets and on to the Turners, a few rooms away.

  I spy the bench I’d picked out and reach underneath. Yes! Simon’s friend Patrick came through. I untape the sheet of paper and pencil, lie flat on my stomach, and sketch quickly. The drawing is a contingency plan, so I tuck it under the bench and, with thirteen minutes left to wait, pop into a painting of Monet’s water lilies, out of sight of any passing guard.

  I’m soaked to my knees the second I enter the painting, but it’s peaceful here at Monet’s pond, and so I slosh to the bank and sit, careful not to let my jeans pockets get wet. There are more than half a dozen damaged Turners here in the National Gallery, so fixing them will take time.

  But it will also take more than that. Clio will pour her love into the Turners and they’ll be right again, and my world will be wrong—I can’t imagine she’ll feel much of anything for me after repairing that many paintings.

  When I leave the painting ten minutes later, I leave the water behind too, coming out completely dry.

  The room is still quiet, so I pace and wait. I should have stayed in the painting a little longer.

  I drop onto the bench too hard and push it an inch or two. That’s all, but in the quiet, I might as well have blown a trumpet.

  Cursing my impatience for making me careless, I pluck the drawing from under the bench and sprinkle it with a pinch of the Muses’ dust from my pocket.

  Two sets of footsteps move with purpose toward the Monet room. One set is Clio’s, and she rounds the corner into the Impressionist room.

  “Guard coming!” She mouths.

  “Did
you get it done?” I ask the same way, relieved when she nods.

  Jerking my head toward our exit painting, I trace my drawing with silvery fingertips, cupping my hand around the bird that comes to life. I release it near the door and hear the flurry of wings and the startled guard saying, “Bloody hell!” Just as we go, I get a snatch of him calling wildlife rescue.

  Clio and I walk toward the bridge inside the painting, and she tells me about the magnificent sight of the waters and the sunsets being remade, of how the light streaked across the paint in just the way Turner had always envisioned. As I listen to her, it occurs to me that in some ways she’s not that different. She isn’t cold or callous. She’s still warm and glowing, but she only has eyes for the art now. She is slipping away from the woman she was with me and reverting back to the Muse she was made to be. I want to share this moment with her, to rejoice in the saving of the art, but each reborn painting crushes me a little more.

  She almost forgets to reach for my hand when we walk onto the bridge on the way to the Met. I feel as if the ground is starting to sway as she changes.

  “Oops, sorry,” she says, like it’s no big deal, and it isn’t to her, because she no longer has the desire to hold my hand.

  For no good reason, I opt to bide my time in a church. Tired of water lilies, I guess. The real Rouen Cathedral in Normandy was bombed during World War II, but here it’s still perfect. I thought it would be peaceful waiting for Clio there, and it is.

  Much too peaceful, and my thoughts are too loud.

  My feelings churn from angst to resignation to anger at the unfairness of having to participate in the excision of Clio’s love from my life.

  I leave the painting before I really start to wallow in misery.