by M. J. Rose
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This book is dedicated to my friend Randy Susan Myers because as Elbert Hubbard said: “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
—PABLO PICASSO
Hotel Carlton
58 Boulevard de la Croisette
Cannes, France
August 28, 1920
Dear Mademoiselle Duplessi,
When I visited your studio in May to sit for my portrait, I found you most agreeable, so I do hope you will consider my request seriously. According to the process your brother had described to me, I expected to receive a painting depicting my innermost emotions. I wanted to share my deepest feelings with the man I cared about. To share my dreams with him in a special, private way.
Days later, when your brother delivered the portrait to my home, I was appalled. Yes, you depicted what was in my heart but not the adoration that fills it. Instead, you painted a secret not to be shared. Especially with the man I hope to wed. It was to be kept between me and his dear former wife. Whom I loved and cared for. Whom I helped in the end—even if your horrible painting shows me in the one moment when my help looks like anything but.
I refused the portrait, and I paid your brother whatever I could and begged him to destroy the painting.
I’d assumed he did.
Until I had a visit from a friend who saw that same portrait in the Duplessi Gallery in Cannes. So yesterday, I traveled south from Paris to see for myself.
I have just come back from the viewing and am distraught that this scene of the darkest day of my soul is hanging on the wall where hundreds of people can gawk over it and gossip about me.
You portrayed me as a murderess. You turned me into a killer. You exposed only a small part of the story and left out proof of my innocence. My dearest friend was in pain. She wanted to die. To end her suffering and that of her husband, who experienced so much pain watching her.
I helped her, yes, but out of compassion.
Not because I wanted her to pass out of this world.
But you illustrated the scene with a wholly sinister aspect.
And now, because of your brother’s callous greed, how many have already been exposed to this lie? And what can I do? Retract their vision of it? I can tell people it’s your fantasy. Not my truth. Some might believe me. Others won’t.
The man to whom I am betrothed won’t.
The damage has been done. My ruination has been set in motion. I fear the authorities will come after me now.
I sit here in my hotel room at a loss. And before I take more drastic steps, I am appealing to your kind nature, begging you to remove the painting from the gallery and keep it from further viewing.
I am afraid I will not be able to withstand the judgment of those I love if they see the painting … if they see this half story before I can tell them its entirety.
I beg you to help me,
Thérèse Bruis
Chapter 1
Silk lined the blindfold. Deep maroon in color, so dark, like dried blood. Magenta mixed with black if I were to create it on my palette. As I slipped it over my face, I felt the smooth fabric caress my cheeks, cool and delicious.
I recognized a familiar and particular combination of feelings well up in me: expectation, excitement, and the thrill of fear. Guilt that I was peeking in on what was not my right to see and bliss at giving in to the irresistible temptation to look deeper despite a potentially dangerous outcome.
With the blindfold on, I felt more at home in the world than at any other time. Except when Mathieu held me in his arms. But those days were long past, and my life was so different now that I often wondered if my brief time with him was real or imagined.
Adjusting the elastic wrapped around my head, positioning the blindfold just the right way, I saw only darkness. Not a sliver of light invaded its black.
Around me the sounds of the party faded. In the silver and black living room high above Central Park, the guests were still laughing and talking, drinking champagne, admiring their reflections shimmering in the huge round mirror over the fireplace.
But I had left the pleasures and attractions of the party and slipped inside a shell. Cocooned, I focused on sounds of rolling waves. Memories dredged from the beach in Cannes where I grew up. The sea echoes relaxed me, lulled me … I let go of the tensions of the actual world, opened to the magic. I became receptive.
“Delphine, aren’t you ever going to draw me?” The impatient whine from the slightly drunk partygoer splashed into my thoughts like a rock thrown into that blue-green water.
I reacted to her entreaty more slowly than usual. I never drank when I was drawing, but that night, for some reason, I’d felt nervous and had a bit of champagne. The good French stuff, smuggled into America so that all these bright young things could drink it out of wide-mouthed glasses imported—just like the wine—from my home country. Fine Baccarat or Lalique you could crush by holding too tightly. Crystal picking up the lights and sending rainbow flickers onto the walls and the men’s starched white shirts and the women’s beaded gowns. With my blindfold on, all was possible, and if I listened hard enough, I could even hear the effervescence in that champagne bubbling to the surface.
Breaking the law was never as much fun as it was in 1925, in this other city of lights, New York. Everyone who had lived through the Great War was still running away from its horrors. Trying to forget. Skyscrapers rose overnight, changing the landscape, dreamed up from the minds of architects determined to prove that tomorrow held promise. Painters, sculptors, furniture designers embraced the rounded lines and geometric cleanliness of Art Deco in their effort to give the world order. Lovers threw out all rules of propriety. Having affairs became as acceptable as indulging in bonbons. Seduced by the allure of motoring trips, we all took off in sleek, elegant cars that shone in the sun like jewels as we tried to outrace the past. Everyone, it seemed, smoked opium or marijuana at soirees that never really ended. All of us were desperate to believe that the future could be as bright as the moon, which we watched fade in the sky while we kept partying—gay and delighted and sad and lost.
Between the fingers of my right hand, I held the silver pencil that my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday, warming the precious metal. I could feel my name, Delphine Duplessi, engraved in script on the barrel.
Reaching out with my left hand, my fingers felt for the edge of the smooth paper. I had my boundary and began to draw. The air around me grew cooler and swirled like a vortex, as if I were caught in an unrelenting current, the way it sometimes did. A harbinger of disaster. I wanted to stop, but once I’d begun a session, I wasn’t capable of ending it prematurely.
Sittings for full shadow portraits, as I called them, took place over several days at the Tenth Street studios where William Merritt Chase had once had his own studio and I now had mine. This sketch was merely a party favor. An amuse-bouche of what I could do. A live advertisement for more work. I took every commission my brother Sebastian arranged for me, but it was difficult for him to manage my career from across the ocean in France. I needed to supplement my income.
The new year promised to be my best ever. I was becoming wildly popular.
When I worked, I wore a uniform of a simple white smock over a dark skirt, but at parties I had the appearance of a chic guest—dressed in the fashionable slim shift that hit just above the knees with feathers and fringe, bejeweled in the bespoke pieces my sister Opaline created for me. I spoke with a French accent and provided just the kind of entertainment the city’s avant-garde hostesses craved. It was only February, and I was booked through May.
That cold night, with the guests partying on around me, my hand moved quickly as I filled the page with the image developing in the deepest recesses of my mind. The process, a mystery even to me, involved only two steps.
First, for a period of about three minutes, I studied the sitter’s face, noticing its planes and curves, lines and contours. I didn’t search. Didn’t question. Didn’t engage in conversation. I just observed. Usually, my sitter squirmed a little after the first ten or twenty seconds. Most people are unaccustomed to being specimens. My staring was often uncomfortable for them. Only Tommy Prout, the man I was engaged to, had enjoyed it, but he’d been flirting. And he—unlike anyone I’d ever met—had no shadow secrets. Not one. Probably what attracted me to him. That and his love of art. His parents were collectors, and he treated me like one of the masterpieces that graced the walls of their Beekman Place mansion. I, foolishly, thought that would be enough.
During a session, once I burned the sitter’s face into my mind, I would slip on my blindfold, shut out the noise of the party, and concentrate on hearing the sounds of the sea stored in my memory. And then, listening to the waves pound the shore, I would start to draw, letting my imagination take over. It is easier to describe it thus, but in fact it was my second sight that took over.
Because, you see, I was not just an artist. I was a woman who had been blinded as a child and whose sight had been brought back by magick. And in the process, I had been given a gift—or, depending on your point of view, a curse. I had the ability not just to see people for who they were but also to see the secrets they harbored. The darkest, most hidden desires of their souls.
And like a thief, I plucked those images from their hearts and turned them into a parlor game. Surrealistic caricatures they could take home and frame. Or burn. And therein lay the source of my compassion, my sorrow, and my own ruination.
Chapter 2
I had already sketched a dozen guests by midnight on that cold February 5, 1925, in Betsy and Fred Steward’s penthouse. I’d delighted and surprised my sitters with silly secrets and made them ask over and over again how I knew this or that about them.
“I hadn’t even told my wife I was planning that!”
“I only found out yesterday. How did you know?”
“Yes, yes, I had forgotten all about that little escapade, it was so long ago!”
Clara Schiff was the last portrait of the evening. Twelve was my limit, but my employer for the night had begged me to do just one more, for it was Clara’s birthday that week.
I agreed. But I shouldn’t have. I was a little tipsy and very tired. Is that an excuse? If I’d been more alert, would I have realized that the image I was committing to paper was so incendiary?
I’ll never know, but I don’t think so. I’ve never been adept at censoring the scenes that come out of the shadows. A little more than four years before, I’d done a painting that changed the entire trajectory of my future. It haunted me still. If only I were able to understand more about the images that came to me. Not just for poor Clara’s sake. But for my own.
She sat in the black velvet armchair Betsy Steward had set up next to my easel and stool, in the corner of the living room adjacent to the terrace doors. For ten minutes, I drew her portrait. Quite a long time when you are wearing a blindfold. Even longer for the person sitting and watching the artist draw and not being able to see the sketch.
The graphite in my silver pencil, number 5B, glided over the eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch cream-colored, smooth-grain stock as smoothly as swimming in a currentless sea. The movement of my hand, the pressure of the stylus, all part of the sensuous nature of the act. The paper took the line and held it in a lover’s gesture. The sensation never ceased to thrill me.
For that reason and more, I am particular about my supplies. In a pinch, I went to Sam Flax, where the quality and variety were the best I could find in New York. But I preferred the shipments my brother sent from Sennelier, on the Left Bank. My mother had bought her very first paints there in 1894 with money she made by pawning a jeweled jade frog she had stolen from my great-grandmother. It was a story I loved to hear her tell when I was a little girl. I’d picture her pocketing the bibelot, frightened that she was going to be caught but desperate to get money for her supplies. Then I’d see her standing on the line at the pawnbroker’s with my father, whom she’d only met a week before. As she described it all, I would experience the wonder of her walking into Sennelier’s marvelous shop for the first time. Looking around at the shelves and shelves of paper, paints, crayons, pastels, easels, canvases—an Ali Baba’s cave of treasures for any artist.
My mother and I are descended from a long line of artists going back to the sixteenth century, when my ancestor, a famous courtesan named La Lune, seduced an even more famous painter, Cherubino, into teaching her how to paint in exchange for being his muse.
For a while, the arrangement worked. Then La Lune made the mistake of falling in love with him. Cherubino returned her emotions, but then he cast her aside for Emperor Rudolf of Prague, no less.
Distraught but determined to win Cherubino back, La Lune traded her most valuable jewels for an old crone’s lessons in witchery. The plan was to cast a spell to make her irresistible to her lover once again.
But the spell failed.
In the story my mother repeated to me, my sisters, and my brother, Cherubino became ill from the potion and died. And La Lune’s ability to fall in love with anyone else died with him.
Refusing to accept her loveless fate, La Lune, using the crone’s magick, extended her life while she searched for an antidote to the curse. Even after her body failed, she kept her soul earthbound as she continued her quest. La Lune spent the next three hundred years trying to merge with one of her descendants so she could feel love once more. But her spirit was too powerful. Those she chose to incubate died, often by their own hands, driven mad by the succubus inside them.
Only one was strong enough to incorporate La Lune’s spirit and not be broken, and that was my mother, Sandrine Salome Duplessi. After the merging, she even took on her ancestor’s name and became the first woman to attend L’École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in France—if not the world—and became one of the finest artists of her generation.
By the time I left Paris for New York in 1920, my mother’s paintings in the gallery on the famed rue Botie were selling for twenty thousand francs. Just one rung below those of the world-famous Pablo Picasso.
Of all her children, I was the only one to inherit my mother’s ability or desire to spend life inhaling turpentine and smearing dabs of oil-infused pigment on a canvas. My professional ambitions, as I considered them back then, were even greater than hers, because in addition to her art, she had a life that she cherished. She married the man she fell in love with and had four children. She was capable of casting spells and saving people’s lives, changing their luck, curing their sadness, or punishing them for their misdeeds. My mother was satisfied to be one of the best at what she did, but I wanted to be the best, because it was all I would ever have.
Like my ancestor and all the daughters of La Lune who came after her, we are cursed to have only one chance at love in our lives. When I met Mathieu, I knew immediately he was that chance. And then I lost him only four months later. All because of my hubris in believing I was powerful enough to chase away his demons.
For the rest of my life, I would have to live with the knowledge that I’d never bear his children. Never grow old with him. Never feel passion for anyone else. I would live out my days haunted by Mathie
u’s shadow portrait and the memories of our affair that ended too soon.
My sitter’s high-pitched voice interrupted my reverie. “You’ve stopped drawing. Does that mean you’re done, Delphine? My neck is aching, and I need more champagne!”
The moment when I sense I’ve finished a portrait doesn’t arrive like the closing notes of a symphony, with a crescendo and fanfare. There’s no ceremony. Rather, it’s a stillness. My right hand simply stops moving.
As I became aware of holding the pencil once again, the jarring sounds of the party and the comingled scents of sweat and perfume, champagne and cheese assaulted me. Reluctantly, I returned to the present from that alternative plane where there was nothing but me and my interpretation of a dream.
I took off my blindfold and inspected my work.
“Can I see?” Clara asked pathetically, in the same high whine she’d used to entreat me to get started, then stop.
When I finally looked at it, what I had drawn always came as a shock to me. Technically, I had seen the images in my mind, on one level was aware of them but not in a visceral way. If you’d stopped me in the midst of the exercise and asked what I was putting down on the paper, I would be able to tell you, because it existed behind my eyes in a kind of cinematic tableau. As if I had stumbled on a movie set in Nice at the Victorine studios, where my mother occasionally painted elaborate sets. And yet the finished product always shocked me. Splashed my sensibilities like the first dip in the icy Mediterranean in early May.
Had I done this? Dragged this scene out of the ether and put it down on paper?
Clara rose, ran over, and stood behind me. For a few seconds, she was silent.
“Oh, no, Delphine. Oh, no. You have to hide it.” Her voice was past whining now, edged with real fear. The color of the air around her was turning icy blue.
As part of the second sight that I’d developed during the year when I was blind, I occasionally saw the air around someone turn color when they were in a highly emotional state.