Starry Nights

by Daisy Whitney

  “It definitely makes me think,” I say, because I’m quite curious if any of these biblical characters hop out of their frames at night here in the Louvre. I’ve never been here when the museum’s closed. Does the art make appearances for anyone when the doors are shut? I peer more closely at the brightly lit candle a young Jesus holds for his earthly father, as if the painting could reveal its nighttime secrets to me.

  “Well, what does it make you think about?” Claire asks as if she’s testing me, and I feel like I’m in school again.

  I try to fashion an answer when a sharp and hot pain sears my hand. “Ow,” I say, and I look at the source of the pain. Hot, burning candlelight has jumped from the painting into my hand. Nothing like this has ever happened during the day. The paintings I encounter are always quiet when the sun is up. “Fire. It makes me think of fire,” I mutter, as I clasp my hand shut. I can’t let on to Claire that her paintings are behaving strangely, so I keep my hand clenched until the flame dies out. When I open my hand, my palm is shaded a reddish-pink.

  Claire turns to me and looks at my hand. “Oh dear. Your hand is all red.”

  I step back in shock. “You can see that?”

  She narrows her eyebrows. “Yes, I can see your hand. What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I pull my hand away, but I’m flooded with equal parts relief and vindication. This isn’t only in my mind. I half want to jump for joy to celebrate that I’m not nuts. But when I look at the La Tour again, I stumble. “Claire,” I whisper.

  “What is it?”

  I point to the painting. The candle in it is almost burned out now. Is this because I snuffed out the fire in my hand rather than returned it to the canvas like I do with Cézanne’s peaches and Olympia’s cat? Prickles of fear run across my skin. Have I ruined a painting?

  She gives me a funny look. “What do you mean?”

  “The candle. The flame in the La Tour. It’s gone.”

  She glances back at the painting and then to me, then laughs dryly. “Ah, you are so young and so funny. It looks the same to me. Perhaps next time you might want to bring along a more seasoned coworker.”

  The painting appears fine to Claire. But is it fine? Because when I look at it, it’s blackened and dark. Only the smallest speck of white candlelight is left. The painting hasn’t returned to normal like our paintings do after they come out and play. But I’m the only one who can see that it’s changed, even though she definitely saw what the painting did to my hand.

  “Sorry. I was just kidding,” I say, trying to recover. Marie-Amelie, thanks for sending your son. He’s an idiot, but you knew that. “But seriously, everything looks great. Just terrific. Fantastic. Stupendous, in fact.”

  “And the Renoir of the young girls at the piano looks amazing here. Please tell Marie-Amelie I’m so grateful for the loan.”

  I look at the piano girls. The painting is perfect, and the sun damage is completely gone. But when I lean in closer, I can see one of the keys that was brightened back to whiteness is turning pale once more. Claire’s staring at the painting too, and my chest is tight with worry. Is the sun damage starting up again? Or is this painting afflicted with whatever weirdness has seized the La Tour?

  “I love this one so much,” Claire says and turns away. I realize she can’t see this new sun damage on the keys, just like she couldn’t see the bad behavior of the La Tour. But she could see the effect the La Tour had on my hands.

  When I take my leave of Claire, I double back through the museum, popping into galleries, searching for any other signs of molting art.

  I see none. Then I spot Bathsheba, Rembrandt’s rendering of an Old Testament scene. Bathsheba has always been a round-bellied woman, but now her stomach is distended, like she’s sick. I walk closer to the painting; bits of flesh are poking out of the frame.

  This is my chance to fix things. I’ve always been fast. My reflexes are top-notch. When no one is looking, I make a quick move. I reach for the sagging section and try to push it back into the canvas. But the fleshy part won’t budge. Soon a new group of tourists pours into this gallery, and I slink back among them.

  I leave for the nearest restroom and splash cold water on my face. I stare into the mirror at my brown eyes that Jenny insisted were hazel the day we met, and I wish I saw the world as I did back then. Back when paintings weren’t burning my hands and dribbling fleshy bits from frames that no one else can see.

  “The piano girls are fine,” I tell my mother. “Can’t tell anything had been wrong with it.”

  The only thing wrong is with me.

  “Wonderful.”

  There’s no need to tell my mother the key on the piano is fading, since no one else can see it. Besides, she didn’t tell me about Bonheur’s connections to Valadon, so I see no reason to disclose every detail either. But I hunt through our galleries later, examining many works as if I’m a doctor with a stethoscope and a tongue depressor, doing a checkup to see if our art might have a temperature now too.

  Everything here is in perfect shape. For now.

  “Dream, dreamt, dreamt.”

  My English teacher taps her pointer to the blackboard where she’s written out the first set of irregular verbs in British English for class today. The tapping is our cue to write them down. I do, shoehorning the words next to yesterday’s sentences with feel, felt, felt.

  “And now a sentence please,” she commands.

  I dreamt the art was on fire, but it was only an illusion.

  She calls on me.

  “The other night, I dreamt the school was on fire, and it felt so real.”

  She nods approvingly, since I’ve not only used the word she asked for but yesterday’s word too. She moves on to other verbs, and other students take their swings at bring, brought, brought, while I wonder what superheroes or secret agents would do if art was on fire. They’d fix it, they’d solve it, they’d save the day. But I’m no masked crusader.

  I don’t even know if any of this is real. But I know this—what happened yesterday at the Louvre didn’t feel like a dream at all. It felt like life. And at the very least it’s my life, so I need to figure it out. When the school day ends, I take the train to the Louvre, a criminal returning to the scene of the crime as guilt overcomes him. Whatever happened here yesterday is starting to spread. More keys on the piano are vanishing, a peacock feather droops from Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, and the mirror inside a Titian has a hairline fracture.

  Bathsheba looks worse too. There’s a bruise now on the rolls of her stomach, black and blue.

  The craziest thought occurs to me—did bringing that sun-damaged Renoir here, the one with the girls at the piano, infect the other art somehow? Are those piano girls patient zero in some sort of strange illness that’s spreading? But the symptoms aren’t quite the same. Because the Rembrandt, the Titian, the La Tour are all coughing and sputtering, while the Renoir simply seems to be fading again.

  Either way, this much is clear—the art here isn’t coming to life. More like the opposite.

  I call Bonheur as soon as I leave. “Is the painting okay? Is she okay?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I need to see it. I need to see her.”

  “My parents are back. It’ll have to be late.”

  “Fine. Just text me when they’re gone. I’ll sneak out.”

  Chapter 8

  Holding Hands

  My mother and father are watching a TV show, of all things. They never watch TV. But tonight they feel the need to tune into a sitcom. They’re on the couch cracking up. The indignity of parents. The annoying, irritating, vexatious indignity of parents staying up late when I need to slip out. I want to drop sleeping pills into their wineglasses or short out the tube. Instead, I’m at the dining room table doing my best approximation of studying for my exams.

  But my brain is repelling math facts, and all I’m doing is tapping my foot, and checking my parents, and wishing they’d go to bed. Bonheur
texted me a few minutes ago that the coast is clear at his home.

  I switch to literature and try to read an analysis of Proust’s l’Éducation Sentimentale that I found online, but the words are thick sludge. The details melt away from me because all I want is to see her. I tell myself it’s crazy to feel this way about a work of art. That it’s insane to want to see a painted girl so badly. But logic won’t win this battle, so I stop pretending to absorb the analysis and I let my thoughts wander. I picture a girl in Montmartre in 1885, so clever and so beautiful that two of the greatest painters the world has ever known fell for her. But she held them off because she loved madly a boy her age who liked the same things, who liked music and food and days of doing everything and nothing.

  After twenty more minutes of raucous laughter, my father rises from the couch and stretches.

  “And on that note, I think I’ll call it a night.”

  “Good night, Dad,” I say, hoping my mom will join him. In slumber, that is.

  “I better get to bed too. Final prep tomorrow for The Girl in the Garden. Very exciting, but very busy.”

  “Night, Mom,” I say. I have some final prep too.

  After the sound of water running and teeth being brushed turns into blissful silence, I walk quietly to the door, lift the latch in slow motion, and open it. I move into the hallway, sending a quiet wish that the hinges won’t creak as I slide the door closed. Once I’m outside, I text Bonheur that I’m on my way. I walk quickly to the nearest Metro and hop onto the next train to Montmartre.

  The subway only runs for another hour, so I need to be fast, and it’s at least fifteen minutes to Montmartre. When the doors open at my stop, I head up the hundred looping spiral steps at the station and sprint the rest of the way to the house on the hilly street. Bonheur is waiting outside on the sidewalk, since I can’t buzz at this hour. He’s dressed down tonight in skinny purple pants and a white T-shirt. A red scarf circles his neck, but no wig, no makeup.

  “What’s wrong? You sounded freaked out on the phone earlier.”

  I flash back to Bonheur telling me the voices were Muses. To the way he clearly believes in them. To the fact that I’ve told no one my world has turned upside down since that late night in Oberkampf and it’s as if I’m living inside a mirage. I haven’t breathed a word to anyone about my untrustworthy brain, and now I’ve come here late at night to see if a painting is safe from a strange sickness only I can see. “Can I tell you something totally crazy?”

  “Seeing as I have sheep on my balcony and a carousel in my living room, yes.”

  “I don’t even know how to begin to say this—”

  “Let me guess. The Degas ballerinas are dancing for you at night?”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded. It’s as if he’s pulled back the curtain on a play, revealing the stagehands and the lights, revealing my secret—what I see in the galleries at night. Living, breathing, moving art. “They danced Swan Lake the other night,” I tell him, like a confession. Then all the other strange secrets I keep pour out, all the ways I don’t trust my own eyes. “And the other paintings too. The Cézannes, the Manets, the Matisses, they come to life. Olympia’s cat breaks from her canvas and wanders around the galleries. The picnickers in a Monet brought their lunch out of the painting last week.” I hold my hands up, an admission that I may be loony.

  Bonheur has become his name right now. He is all grins and happiness. “I have to say, it sounds incredibly cool.”

  “Yeah. Admittedly, it is kind of cool. It’s also kind of weird, don’t you think? I mean, does your Monet come alive in the hall? Does The Girl in the Garden break free at night?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “See? That’s my point.” I tap my forehead. “I’m a mess. It’s all in my head.”

  “Julien, I don’t think it’s in your head. It’s where you are. It’s the museum. Paintings only come alive at museums,” Bonheur says with the same certainty he used when he informed me about the Muses below his house. “Not in a home, not in a private collection, not in a gallery.”

  “And how do you just happen to know that?”

  “It’s not what I know. It’s what I’ve always believed. It’s what I’ve always felt anytime I’ve been in a museum. That they must come alive at night. How could it be any other way? Only in museums because museums are sacred spaces for art. They’re like holy places, don’t you think?”

  “But how do you know this if it’s never happened for you?”

  “You’re asking me how I know of something I’ve never seen? I believe it. My sister, Sophie, believes it. My parents believe it. We all believe in the power of art even if we can’t see paintings come to life. But some people can. People like you. The Muses have always told us that there are certain people who can actually see art come to life.”

  “The Muses told you this?”

  He nods. “I’m kind of an emissary for them. Where do you think that silver dust comes from?”

  “You’re saying the silver dust in that five-legged calf you gave me is from a Muse?”

  “Yes. And the one you won from the party too. They give it to me from time to time. The basement in my house isn’t your average, ordinary cellar.”

  “It leads to Muses?”

  “They live and work far beneath Montmartre. I talk to them. We talk about art. We talk about people who can see art come to life.”

  I hold up a hand. Maybe he’s the crazy one. “And I thought I was going mad.”

  “Look, we can stand here on the street and debate Muses and madness and the magic of museums or you can come inside and see the girl you’ve kind of got a thing for.”

  I run a hand over my chin. “Is it that obvious?”

  He positions his hands into a rectangle. “Let’s just say it’s as if you have a billboard on your face that says you’ve got it bad for the painted girl.”

  “Does she come out for you or anyone else here at your house?” I ask him, trying to hold back my jealousy, like it’s a dog pulling hard on a leash, that she might spend time with others.

  “No. I just told you—paintings can only come to life at museums. Now come on. Do you want to see the girl who’s headed to your museum in a few more days?”

  “Yes.” The admission reverberates through my body, a note held long and lasting on a guitar. There is nothing in the whole world I want more right now than such a visit.

  We walk past the green door, through the courtyard, then he opens the orange door without making a sound. He taps a code into the security system and places his finger on his lips. “Shh …”

  We pad quietly down the hallway, and I can feel heat rising in me. The whole house quivers, hazy and warped. There is a strumming in my body, and a whispering in the air that leads me on. Bonheur unlocks the door and lets me in.

  It is just me and the room and this insanely gorgeous painting that I want to hold and touch, this painting that is perfect—no sun damage, no fading colors, no flowers wilting from the seams. When I am mere inches away, I lift my hand, but I am careful not to touch the frame, or even the canvas. The painting is still a painting.

  But then it’s not. There’s a stretching. As if it’s dawn and the first rays of a coral sunrise flare through windowpanes. A sound, a sweet morning yawn, delicate arms unfolding from the night. Eyelids fluttering open.

  The tips of her fingers press against her walls, imploring the canvas to curve and arc with her. First slowly, then more quickly, the girl reaches her hand through the paint, spreading her fingers. I don’t hesitate. I don’t think. I reach for her, my fingers touching hers and then sliding into them. Her skin is warm and soft and radiant.

  And confident.

  There is a boldness in her touch that makes me feel that I can do everything better.

  I can’t help myself. I press my cheek to her hand. I feel her softness against my face. Her palm is so warm, so tender on my skin. I want her to come all the way out, to talk to me, to tell me who she is.

&nbs
p; “I can’t wait to meet you when you come to the museum,” I say.

  She whispers from beyond the canvas, “Me too.”

  Chapter 9

  When Paint Becomes Body

  At school I perfect the practice of fidgeting. I tap my pencil against the desk. I twirl it in circles, flipping it between my thumb and index finger. I lean forward in my chair. I scoot back in my chair. My instructors chide me, and I try to return to the task at hand. Somehow, I manage to finish the final exam of the year and am set loose for the rest of the summer.

  I’m not far from the museum, and I’m tempted to run, but she won’t come out until the sun sets, so I walk, popping into a bakery to grab a sandwich for later, since I don’t intend to leave for a while. When I near the museum, I feel jittery nerves, like I’m ringing the buzzer at a girl’s home for our first date. I walk along the side of the museum that houses the offices and slide my card key into an entrance that takes me to a set of stairs in the administrative wing. I grab the door of the nearest stairwell and take the steps two by two up to the first floor.

  There are crowds everywhere, a platoon of visitors and tourists and residents packed around the entrance to her gallery. It’s not quite like the crowds at the Mona Lisa, but it’s close enough, and I feel like I’m at a concert, the revelers sweaty and shouting, angling to get closer to the rock star.

  Then I see her.

  My heart quickens, and my face feels flushed, and a part of me wants to push through the accumulation of people and run my hands across her painted body. But my heart settles down, a more peaceful rhythm now that the waiting is over, and the only question is whether she will like me too.

  Which is, admittedly, a big unknown.

  Eventually the museum closes, and as Gustave and another security guard keep watch, I wander through the galleries, always returning to the glass front doors to see if night is falling. The sun sets late in the summer, and I want so badly to tug it down faster on the horizon.