Starry Nights

by Daisy Whitney

  Get to.

  “It’s been so long,” she continues. “I can’t wait to find out what’s next, what new assignments are waiting for me. I’ve missed it so.”

  No, you didn’t, I want to tell her. You didn’t miss it. You were tired of it. You wanted more.

  I know it’s not personal. I know it’s not me. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling, from wanting, from aching.

  Thalia steps out of La Belle Vie and beams, like a mother welcoming back a long-lost child. Clio rushes to her. She doesn’t look back at me. Not once. But I can’t take my eyes off her. I can’t stop watching her.

  I will never stop seeing her everywhere I go.

  My heart is a padlock on the lovers’ bridge as it’s sliced. I am all the cadenas ever placed there, chopped off at once.

  Chapter 33

  Drawn to Dust

  Paris is quiet, and the sun is peeking over the horizon, like a small child checking the covers before pitter-pattering out of bed. Pink streaks leak across the blue of night as I find my way home and crash in my bed.

  I think my mother tries to wake me and urge me to come to work. She is unsuccessful and she gives up.

  When I finally make it out of bed in the late afternoon, she’s sent me several texts. They are full of exclamation points and many smiley faces. The reports have come in from the museums, and all the curators are rejoicing. I send her back a smiley face. Bonheur has texted me too, letting me know his mother was thrilled with the part their painting played. Awesome, I write back. Then he tells me he’s having another party soon, and that I better be there. I can even see my Muse again, he adds. He doesn’t know what happened to us last night, and I’m not ready to tell that story. I don’t answer either of his messages.

  I turn on my computer so I can read the news.

  First, there was the Cézanne and the Degas miraculously restored at the Musée d’Orsay a day ago, the stories note.

  Then, more tales of strange goings-on at museums came from around the world last night. Perhaps the oddest of all is the story of the security guard in St. Petersburg who had a picture of a young guy standing in front of the Monet exhibit at the Hermitage. My mother calls when the photo surfaces.

  “Look at that picture,” she says and she’s laughing wildly. “He almost looks like you.”

  I laugh too. I do look pretty silly with my arms stretched out wide as if I’m holding on to something awkward and large. Like a haystack. “Yeah, that guy does kind of look like me,” I say.

  Then there’s the story of the boot. One lone boot that a guard claims he tugged off a teenage boy who hopped inside a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  “The Cinderella Boot,” the news is calling it. It’s a fairy tale, they say, since all the sick paintings have been healed. And so the stories go, like a song, a chorus passed from one group to the next, singing of the healed Vermeers, the cured Turners, the Morisot restored. It couldn’t be anything but magic, right?

  They’ll all forget about it soon enough. We always do.

  The next week, I guide a group of tourists through our galleries, including a brief stop at The Girl in the Garden. Hope rises in my chest when I see the painting of Clio, as it does every time, every day, with every look. But the canvas has been quiet at night. No girl has come alive, not even a painted version, like Emmanuelle or Dr. Gachet. I keep waiting for the night when she might break free, even if she’s only a shadow of the Clio I once knew. I’d take that. I’d take anything.

  A girl with a Brown University T-shirt raises a hand and begins speaking. “Isn’t that the Renoir that was missing for years?”

  “Yes. Since 1885,” I answer as clinically as I can.

  “What happened to it? How does a painting just vanish for so long, then reappear?”

  Another girl on the tour chimes in, probably an art student at another college. “There’s a story that Renoir and Monet were both in love with her,” the second girl starts to say, and it’s a knife digging around in my chest, on a blind hunt for any organ. “And the family hid the painting to protect her reputation or something.”

  “Is that true?” the girl in the Brown shirt asks me.

  I flinch, as if she’s just raised her fists, then I let it all out, the truth of the missing Renoir, once lost, now found. “It’s possible. Or she could have been a Muse trapped in a painting and was just set free to save the world’s art,” I say without a smile, without a knowing wink. No one says anything. “Or maybe she’s just a girl and she comes out at night when the museum is closed,” I offer.

  Both girls look at me quizzically, then laughter kicks in. I’ve just made a joke, or possibly two, they think.

  “Or maybe it’s just a painting,” someone else says. “Sometimes a painting is just a painting.”

  “And sometimes lost paintings are lost again,” I say, and conclude my tour so that we can all escape from my melancholy.

  I walk past Emmanuelle, then Dr. Gachet. Imprints of who they once were long ago. An idea comes to me then, a crazy one, but I have to try. Maybe there is a version of Clio out there who still cares about me.

  I’m done for the day and it’s only early afternoon, so I go to Gare Saint-Lazare station and buy a ticket. An hour later, the train rattles to a stop and I disembark. I walk from the station to Monet’s garden, a little less than an hour by foot. The gardens are closing when I arrive, and the ticket taker tells me I will only have a few minutes.

  “That’s fine.”

  I have seen the gardens. For real and in paint. I’m not here today to catch the tail end of a tour or to snap photos of the kaleidoscope of colors. But the place Monet once called home is, empirically, gorgeous. Summer has stolen into Giverny, bringing with it the glory of reds, yellows, and oranges that blaze under the sun.

  Some might say it’s better than a painting.

  They have never gone into her painting.

  I walk through lush fields and past blankets of petals and stems. I make my way to the pond where a raft of water lilies floats lazily in the blue-green waters. The other visitors begin to file out as the bell signals closing time. I let them leave, and the sun dips farther. Long shadows fall across the pond, and the weeping willow brushes its branches against the earth.

  I close my eyes and I’m back in time.

  “I used to pretend there was a door at the end of this bridge. A plain, simple wooden door with an old-fashioned ring handle. Dark metal. You pull it open and there. The other side. I’m finally on the other side.”

  I open my eyes and remove my notebook, sketching the door she described in painstaking detail. I take the last pinch of silver dust that I stashed away in London, and voilà. The door materializes. Clio always longed for escape when she was trapped. Maybe that Clio is here. Maybe that Clio misses me. I reach for the handle and pull it open.

  There’s nothing but a weeping willow on the other side.

  I press a palm over my eyes. Stupid me. Stupid mind playing stupid tricks. She is gone, and all that’s left is this emptiness, this loneliness, so terribly alive, in her place. No drawing will ever change that.

  I flop down in the grass and lie there until the door disappears and an old man who tends the gardens tells me it’s time to go.

  Chapter 34

  Dancing in the Streets

  Simon has a plan. Forget clubbing in Oberkampf. Don’t even think about bolt cutters. This one is guaranteed to eradicate any longing for any girl who’s stomped on your heart, he declares as he escorts me along the street vendors across from Notre Dame. He gestures grandly to the secondhand booksellers who peddle old books along with postcards of landmarks and matted prints of famous destinations in the green boxes by the river.

  “Here’s the plan. We apply for a bouquiniste license and we set up shop.”

  “What will we be selling exactly? If memory serves, neither one of us has a collection of antique books or access to a stash of cheap postcards.”

  “Ah, but see, post
cards will just be our loss leader. What we’re really going to be selling is our ghost-removal skills. The book vendor thing is just going to be a front for a ghost-removal shop.”

  I manage a small “huh.”

  “Picture it,” he continues. “We’re practically pros. Can you name anyone else who has successfully exorcised a spirit, let alone the spirit of a great artist?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “All we have to do is convince the tourists that Marilyn Monroe or Jim Morrison is inhabiting them, and we’ll work our hocuspocus again.”

  “We’ll be rolling in the euros,” I say without much enthusiasm.

  He pats me on the back. “Someday you’ll be happy again, Garnier.”

  I honor a commitment to another girl. The one at the Paris Ballet.

  The lights are low. The music swells. I feel more human than I have in days here in the opera house where the Ballet performs. Maybe because the dancers aren’t shadow girls. Dancers keep moving, keep swimming. Emilie looks as if she is gliding through waves, a dolphin, sleek and mammalian, as she performs her solo in Sleeping Beauty.

  The only music I hear is coming from the orchestra pit. Emilie feels confident onstage, and it shows. I lean back against the cranberry upholstered chair in the second row and watch, glad to not be at the museum with its phantom people. In here art is alive for real, and it is flying.

  When the ballet ends, I join the rest of the audience in a standing ovation. As the dancers take their bows and curtsies, I lock eyes with Emilie. She can’t stop smiling, and I feel the first touch of happiness in days, even though it’s fleeting.

  The balletgoers in their tuxes and suits, their gowns and evening dresses, make their way out through the arched doorways. I follow the directions Emilie gave me to the stage door. When she emerges, she’s in jeans and a tank top, but her hair is still in a bun and she has full makeup on.

  “You were magnificent,” I say as I give her kisses on each cheek. “Do I know what I’m talking about or do I know what I’m talking about?”

  “Was I really good?”

  “The best. So good that I don’t even hear music right now.”

  She snaps her fingers, a faux regretful gesture. “Darn. I thought it was kind of cool that you heard things.”

  “Cool? Really?”

  “Sure. All artists are a little bit insane. I was hoping that was your crazy.”

  “An artist I am not, and that’s okay. But I’ve got all kinds of crazy, so don’t worry there. Coffee?”

  “Always coffee.”

  We walk to the front of the opera house, and Emilie gasps when she sees a girl dancing on the steps.

  “Look at that,” Emilie whispers to me.

  “Yeah, she’s dancing. Just like you were.”

  The girl wears jean shorts and high black heels. She has a boom box and is moving to some kind of balletic hip-hop.

  “I wish I could dance like that.”

  I give her a curious look, but then it hits me. Emilie doesn’t have the abandon to dance when no one’s expecting it.

  “You are afraid to dance on the street,” I say, calling her out.

  “Nooooo,” she says in a long, drawn-out, and obvious denial.

  “C’mon. You just danced for thousands of people who paid plenty of money, and you won’t dance on the street outside the opera house?”

  “Another time.” She grabs my elbow and pulls me away.

  At the café we order espressos and talk about the ballet. She tells me how nervous she was before her solo, but how she left her fear backstage when she stepped under the lights.

  “I could tell,” I say, and Emilie smiles.

  “I love talking to you like this. You really understand what it’s like.”

  “I try.”

  “But it’s more than trying. You just get it in a way that so few do, and so—” She stops when the waiter brings our drinks. After he leaves, she lowers her voice. “Listen, I’m really glad you came, and I was just wondering, because, you know, we get along so well, if you’d want to go out on a date-date sometime?”

  I’ll admit the offer is tempting, but I could never do that to her. “I would love to, really, I would. But I can’t.”

  Emilie covers her face with her hand. “I’m such an idiot. You have a girlfriend, don’t you?”

  “No. But I had one.”

  “She broke your heart?”

  “You could say that. I’m pretty much wrecked for relationships for a while.”

  “We’ll be friends then. Like we already are.”

  “Of course. That won’t change. But I’m going to have to insist you dance in the streets.”

  She laughs and shakes her head.

  “Okay, how about this? My friend Bonheur is throwing an apron party. I hate the thought of going, but he won’t take no for an answer, and if I have to go, you should have to dance at the party.”

  “An apron party? What is that?”

  “I’ve obviously never been to an apron party. But if I were you, I’d get one.”

  “You’re not going to wear an apron, Julien?” she asks with a bit of mischief in her voice.

  “He’s making me go to the party. He can’t make me wear an apron.”

  “Something tells me no one could make you go to a party. Maybe you actually want to go.”

  Maybe I do.

  Bonheur wears a light-blue apron with red cherries. Sophie has gone meta and her apron has prints of mini aprons on it in orange, yellow, purple, and blue. Lucy is dressed to the nines in a black-and-white-striped skirt topped with a pink apron with black piping, like a sexy ice-cream-parlor girl. Simon can’t keep his hands off her.

  Emilie has on leggings and a pink tulle apron.

  “I told you I could bring back aprons as an accessory,” Bonheur declares as he invites us into his home. The Japanese bridge is on the wall. I force myself not to look at it. I force myself to look anywhere but the door that leads to the basement. The door that leads to her.

  Sophie brings around a tray of macarons—combos of saffron and peach, of caramel and pistachio, and a grapefruit-wasabi one.

  I pass.

  “You never take the food I try to give you,” Sophie says, narrowing her eyes. “It’s like with the falafel. I swear I don’t have cooties.”

  “Just not in the mood for macarons.”

  “Suit yourself. Someday you’ll regret it.” Sophie heads to another group of partygoers as Bonheur drapes an arm over my shoulder.

  “I’ve got the music file you sent me. Just say the word when you want me to cue it up.”

  “I will.”

  Then he lowers his voice. “Don’t you want to see her again, Julien? You haven’t come by at all. Have you just been going through La Belle Vie?”

  “She doesn’t want to see me,” I say.

  His jaw drops. “What? After all that? After all you did?”

  “It’s just one of those things about Muses,” I say, and explain briefly what happened to us when Clio saved the art. “So, if you ever see me go near that trapdoor, handcuff me and keep me away.”

  His eyes are sad. He was looking forward to being my Muse wingman. But he perks himself up quickly. “Well, let’s just find you an aproned girl here who likes boys then.”

  Everywhere I turn, one of my friends is trying to set me up.

  He introduces me to more girls than I can count, girls from his school, girls from the neighborhood, even a girl from New York with sharp brown eyes and a droll wit who says she’s going to be studying art history at Columbia in the fall. She’ll be here for the rest of the summer, she says, and leaves the veiled offer hanging there. But I am hopeless, so I say it was nice meeting her, and I return to Lucy, Emilie, and Simon. Maybe we’ll be something of a foursome after all. One couple, one set of friends.

  “Hey, Emilie, you owe me that dance,” I remind her.

  She covers her eyes, embarrassed.

  “Oh, c’mon. Didn’t you once
say you wanted to do Swan Lake to some sort of techno pop? Like Protracted Envy,” I say, reminding her of the band-ballet-mash-ups we brainstormed the last time we were supposed to go to a Bonheur party.

  She takes her hand off her eyes and looks stunned. “You didn’t.”

  I tip my forehead to Bonheur. “Cue it up.”

  He switches music on his portable stereo system, starts blasting the mix I made for Emilie, and ushers all of us through the courtyard and onto the cobbled sidewalk outside his house.

  “You’re terrible,” she says to me.

  I just shrug and wait for her to dance. Everyone else is looking on too, and soon they start urging her to show her moves. “Dance, dance, dance.”

  “You can do it, Emilie,” I say gently, just to her. “This is how you wanted to dance.”

  “Okay,” she says in a shy, quiet voice. She looks around, then twirls once across the cobblestones. As the music shifts to a pop-pier sound, she shifts too, moving to a faster beat, a clubby rhythm, but with the grace of a ballerina. She looks classical and totally trendy. Lucy joins in, bringing Simon to the impromptu dance floor, and Sophie jumps around too. The girl from New York moves her hips, and Bonheur takes Emilie’s hand.

  I watch them all. Dancing the way they want, listening to the music they like, and I think of Gustave and his subway art, of Max and his caricature classes, of my friends and their random toasts to things like aprons and five-legged calves and flash mobs on the curving corner of a hilly street in Montmartre.

  I don’t know that Renoir would have liked this party. But I do.

  I’m pretty sure Clio—or at least the Clio I knew—would have liked it too.

  Later, Bonheur disappears for a while. When he returns to the party he pulls me aside. “Thalia wants to see you tomorrow morning. Can you meet her?”

  “Why?”

  “She just asked if you could be at the bridge between the two museums at nine. What should I tell her?”

  I don’t know if I like Thalia. I don’t know if I want to see her. But I still say yes.