by M. J. Rose
He finished his repair of the toy sailboat and returned.
“The wine?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Wonderful. Let me just tell my sister-in-law I’m leaving. That’s her, there.”
When he returned once more, he offered me his arm, and we left the pond, Mathieu leading us toward the north exit of the gardens.
Looking back on it now, I don’t remember feeling that those first steps were portentous. I did not know then that I’d met the man whose soul could speak to mine. Who would change the trajectory of my life. Who would tear my heart open.
As we walked, the twilight deepened, and the temperature dropped. Crushed grass and sweet wisteria scented our progress to the pavilion, where he secured us a table inside.
The Art Nouveau decorations were tasteful despite being ornate. The grapevine theme carried through the intricate carvings at the bar, the wrought-iron light fixtures, and the stained-glass shades and window panels. I hadn’t been in every home, store, restaurant, or café that my father had built, but it only took me a few moments to know this was his work.
Mathieu ordered a carafe of red wine. As soon as the waiter departed, I asked him if he’d known that my father designed the restaurant.
“Is that why you brought me here?”
Mathieu looked at me quizzically. “Wait. Your father is Julien Duplessi? I’ve admired his work for years and have sought out all his buildings.”
I nodded.
“I couldn’t have known. I don’t even know your name.” He gave me half of one of his hard-won smiles. “Even though you know mine.”
I introduced myself.
“Now I understand. My uncle and aunt have spoken about you—and your mother, of course. She’s quite well known in their circle.”
I nodded. “She met your uncle when she first came to Paris. They’ve been friends for twenty-five years.”
The waiter brought the wine and poured us each a glass.
Mathieu held his glass out to me. I raised mine. He kissed the rim of my glass with his. He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and finally said, “To an auspicious meeting. Thank you for coming to my aid.”
I took a sip, as did he. And then his glance rested on my notebook. I’d put it on the corner of the table beside me. Picking it up, he examined the soggy mess.
“If you’ll allow me, I can take it to my shop and try to salvage it. I’m a bookbinder, and I might have more luck than if you just set it on a radiator. You deserve at least that for coming to my rescue.”
“Well, it looked like you needed saving.”
He was silent for a moment. And I could almost hear him running through different responses in his mind. “I did.” His voice dropped. “I still do, I think.” His words sounded the way his burnt-vanilla, honey, and amber cologne smelled. He had a rich, gold-toned voice. “Now, please, will you tell me again what you saw?” He hesitated. “I just hope I can bear hearing it.”
I held off, a bit afraid. He was leaning forward intently. His eyes bored into mine. Worry lines creased his brow. His whole body appeared tensed, alert, as if about to be dealt a blow.
“It’s all right. Go ahead,” he urged.
“It’s going to seem strange, and you probably won’t believe me.”
“I’m not sure why, but I think I’ll believe anything you tell me.”
His words sent sparks running across my shoulders and down my arms. My cheeks felt warm. I wasn’t sure what to say. Sebastian had recently started getting me paid commissions for shadow portraits based on my peculiar expertise, but we never revealed my process. We simply said that I was good at reading minds and made it sound playful. But I knew I could trust Mathieu with knowledge of my special gifts. He was part of Dujols’s world and associated with people who claimed to have far more bizarre talents than scrying.
“When someone sits for a portrait, if I put on a blindfold and keep my eyes closed, I can sketch shadows of things that have happened to them.”
“Scenes from their life?”
“Yes. Usually secrets. Almost always secrets.”
“But you weren’t drawing me,” he said.
Now came the embarrassing part. “Actually, I had been sketching the scene of you helping your nephew.”
“And you closed your eyes?” he asked.
“The sun was shining right in my eyes. For a few moments, I couldn’t quite see the real scene. When I opened my eyes, I saw the reflection of a man approaching you in the water. Or so I thought. Sometimes images also appear to me in a mirrored or reflective surface.”
“So you’re a scryer?” he said, with a mixture of awe and curiosity. “It’s an ancient art. And you do it while you are drawing? That’s quite astonishing. Does my uncle know?”
“He does, but I asked him not to tell anyone. I’m still learning about it.”
“You can trust me. Now, tell me as exactly as you can. What did you see?”
“A man in uniform. Wearing a gas mask. And a helmet gleaming in the sun.”
Mathieu’s eyes clouded over. The odd blue-gray transformed into indigo.
“He was creeping up behind you, pointing a rifle … a bayonet and—”
“Stop.”
“You don’t believe me,” I said.
He remained silent. The only movement on his face was a throbbing vein on the right side of his forehead. And then he stood up and walked away without a word. At first, I thought he must be headed to the WC, but no, he walked right out of the café.
Astonished, I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been abandoned in a restaurant before, or anywhere else, for that matter. I didn’t have enough money with me to pay the bill. I was furious. So what if what I’d said seemed unbelievable? He’d asked. He’d wanted to hear. Except it was my fault for telling him, wasn’t it? My mother and I had talked about this before I’d left for Paris. We kept our abilities to ourselves. We didn’t share them with people unless we knew them well and had developed a sense of trust. As I had just experienced with Mathieu, even the most open minds sometimes had trouble grasping what sounded impossible.
I picked up my glass to get the waiter’s attention. If I was going to have to hand over my necklace for the owner to hold until I retrieved money from home and came back to pay, I thought I might as well enjoy more wine. I was certainly upset enough to want it.
It wasn’t unusual for a woman to sit in a café alone, but I was uncomfortable nonetheless. People around us had seen Mathieu get up and leave. But that wasn’t really the cause of my upset. I was disquieted because while Mathieu had sat across from me, looking at me and listening to me, when he’d reached out to take my sketchbook, I’d experienced an awareness of him unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’d liked boys in school well enough and had a few crushes for short periods of time. But they never amounted to anything more than girlish fantasies. My sister Opaline had a boyfriend long before she was my age, and I used to spy on them, even sneaking down to the beach to watch them. I was twenty years old, and I’d never gone to the beach with a boy at night. As I’d told my brother, I was satiated with my love of painting. With learning.
But Mathieu, with his golden hair and his eyes full of encroaching evening colors and his reticent smile, had touched something in me.
“I apologize.” He was standing behind me.
I turned. More glad than I should have been that he’d returned and at the same time angry that I’d opened up to him and he’d walked out in the middle of my tale. I felt like a fool.
He pulled out his chair, sat back down, and drank half his glass of wine before he said another word. “I shouldn’t have run out like that. But I couldn’t listen to what you were telling me.”
“No, it was my fault,” I said, as I pushed back my chair, the legs scraping harshly on the tile floor. Now that he had returned to take care of the bill, I could leave. “I shouldn’t have told you. I know you think I was making it up and trying to take advantage of you somehow. But I’m no
t. It’s too complicated. That’s why I don’t talk about it.” I made a move to get up out of my seat, feeling a tear slide down my cheek. I needed to leave before I embarrassed myself further.
But Mathieu grabbed my hand. “Don’t go. I do believe you. It’s complicated for me, too.” He took a breath. “I don’t talk about it, either. What you saw is what happened. We were ambushed. I can only remember parts of it.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them and began again. “A German soldier attacked me. What happened afterward … it’s all blank.” He began to rub his right arm. “But I have the evidence that he ripped my arm and my back to shreds. I almost died, but I didn’t. So many in our unit died that day. My brother died. The worst day of my life. So please stay … Maybe you can see the rest of it.”
My tears were flowing more freely by then. Not out of anger or embarrassment but empathy. Mathieu stopped talking, took his handkerchief, and wiped my eyes. As he did, he opened my heart and stepped inside.
*
The following week, there was a package by my place at the breakfast table. I opened it and found a sketchbook bound in Persian green-blue turquoise leather that was much more vivid and luxurious than the journal I’d accidentally hurled into the pond at the Luxembourg Gardens. This one shimmered like a piece of jewelry, all the more special because of the decorative silver tooling. Concentric circles in a modern design floated like bubbles coming up through water, and in the center, where two of them met, were my initials in block letters.
Opening the fine leather cover to the frontispiece, I read the words Mathieu had inscribed:
“To love beauty is to see light.”—Victor Hugo
I couldn’t save your book, but please accept this one in exchange.
From a very grateful believer,
MR
I sucked in my breath, remembering that long year when I had seen no light and had no beauty to look at. When in that darkness I had started to see secrets … secrets I was afraid of still.
In time, Mathieu’s gift became more than a sketchbook. In addition to my drawings and notes about the art I saw and the art I wanted to make, I wrote everything that Mathieu and I did into my Book of Hours, as I came to call it. I created a log of every day we were together, where we went, what we saw, what we said.
Even then, at our very beginning, I had a premonition that my time with him was limited. That I had to preserve each memory like an insect in amber, for the days when I would be alone and bereft, missing him, mourning him, wishing for a different ending from the one I wound up forcing.
And so it was that four years later, in New York City, after Monty died, after Tommy and I parted ways, after I stopped wearing the blindfold and stopped painting, it was to my Book of Hours that I returned again and again. Reading each precious day over and over. If I could imagine no future, at least I could remember the oh-so-glorious past.
Chapter 8
Book of Hours
May 25, 1920
I’ve decided only to share Mathieu here, in the journal he made me, my special Book of Hours. I don’t want to speak of our romance out loud or try to fit it into mere conversation. Normal words can’t describe the magic of us. They will dilute what is exceptional and wonderful and make it sound like something ordinary.
I almost didn’t see Mathieu today. We’d planned to meet outside the florist shop two blocks from Grand-mère’s house. She was otherwise entertained, and I thought it would be easy to slip out, saying I was going to an extra drawing class. She usually didn’t require any more detail than that, and I wasn’t usually any more forthcoming.
But as I was walking out the door, Sebastian arrived home and urged me back in. Full of excitement, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the parlor to tell me about the Russian noblewoman he’d met at the art gallery that handled our mother’s paintings, where Sebastian sometimes worked learning his trade. And that now Madame Botolosky wanted to have her portrait done by me.
I was pleased, of course, but these commissions matter more to Sebastian than to me. My concentration is on my classes. Maman’s training was excellent, but she focused mostly on my style and substance. I agree with my professors, who have pointed out that my composition and perspective sometimes show room for improvement.
My goal—a lofty one indeed—is to have a painting in the prestigious 1920 Salon d’Automne. An extreme effort because I’ll be competing with the Montparnasse painters—Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, and Georges Gimel. All older, more famous, and far more experienced than I.
While I measure myself against these well-established artists, my brother measures himself not just by how many commissions he obtains for me but also by how high up in society the sitters are. I want him to succeed. I need to know he is happy. But today, despite my efforts to please him, I didn’t want to stay and discuss his newest conquest.
I wanted to see Mathieu and was afraid that if I was late, he’d leave.
Torn, I longed to run off but felt that I’d be abandoning Sebastian. As if anything I don’t share with him is a betrayal.
Finally, I told my twin I was going to be late for a class and, adding guilt to the other emotions coursing through me, rushed out of the house.
I ran down the block and turned the corner, hoping Mathieu would still be there, fearing he wouldn’t be. But he was. Standing still, the sun glinting in his golden hair, he was leaning against a lamppost, reading a small book that, when I got closer, I saw was a leather-bound volume of poems by Musset.
When I approached, he smiled and proceeded to read a stanza out loud to me:
Again I see you, ah my queen,
Of all my old loves that have been,
The first love, and the tenderest;
Do you remember or forget—
Ah me, for I remember yet—
How the last summer days were blest?
And then he took my hand, tenderly, carefully, as if it were fragile instead of a painter’s well-exercised hand, and together we walked to a café on rue Jacob.
Inside, he got a table and ordered us two coffees. After the exuberance of his reading, we were a bit shy with each other and quiet. But the silence was comfortable in an unusual way. At least for me. I couldn’t stop staring at him, no matter how hard I tried not to. But he was staring at me, too. We laughed, and after that, it was easier to talk.
When he realized I’d only been living in Paris since I’d started at L’École in September and had spent so much time at school that I hadn’t really explored the city, he declared that he was taking it upon himself to be my guide.
“But I’m not going to show you the Paris of tourists … not even the Paris of the bourgeois. I’m going to show you my secret city.”
Just the words thrilled me. The promise felt like an embrace.
Chapter 9
The morning after my dinner with Clifford, in that first week after Monty Schiff’s death, New York City was immobile. More than five inches of snow had fallen overnight and was still coming down. I made a pot of coffee and was sitting by the window watching the flakes, lost in the same mindlessness I’d been wallowing in for a week.
At ten, Clifford knocked at my door, insisting that I come over and bring my sketchbook and pencils and work with him.
“I’d really rather not, I’m feeling—”
“I told you last night,” he interrupted. “I’m not leaving you alone.” And he gathered up my supplies.
Against the wintry scene outside his window, Clifford had set up an ersatz garden. Two men in summer suits and three women in flimsy chiffon dresses lounged on a picnic blanket. Paper flowers grew out of paper grass. Paper trees were taped to the window.
An uptown restaurant had commissioned the mural, paying handsomely to have a Clifford Clayton original grace their walls. Diners would enjoy his charming, slightly salacious, always beautiful scene and never guess that the flora and fauna and blue skies had begun in a snowstorm.
I didn’t want to b
e there. But Clifford was stubborn, and I knew he’d be relentless unless I acquiesced. And maybe, I thought, if I forced myself to draw something new, I’d stop seeing that other horrific drawing over and over in my mind.
But as I stared at the models, dragging my pencil across the page, I felt a hopeless rush of ennui. Even my fingers rebelled against holding a tool.
After an hour of fruitless effort, I quit. “I’m going back to my studio,” I told Clifford.
He shook his head. “I’ll just drag you back here. Do just one more sketch. That’s all. Then we’ll brave the elements and get some lunch.”
Although I didn’t want to, the idea of fighting him required even more energy than doing what he asked, so I sat back down and tried again.
As I drew the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders, my thoughts wandered to Clara and Monty. Where did the dark impulses that tempted them stem from? What kind of animals were we that our sexual urges put us in such extreme danger? Why did some people find themselves able to resist while others danced right into the abyss, eyes open, lips pressed together?
Clifford called a break after a half hour and came over to see what I’d done.
“Well, that’s certainly different from how I interpreted the picnic,” he said.
I had drawn one of the men with a tiger’s head, the other with the head of a jaguar. The three women all had lush female bodies and snake heads. And they weren’t enjoying a picnic on the blanket but were engaged in a naked bacchanal. I had turned the scene into an illustration of my thoughts.
*
After a few more days of Clifford’s coddling, I told him that I needed work but couldn’t return to my shadow portraits—not yet, probably never. He contacted a Broadway theater manager who’d been after him to do some work and pressured him into hiring me to do a poster for an upcoming play.
My assignment was to create an illustration for a romantic tale, Dark Angel, which would be opening at the Longacre that spring. The synopsis contained enough of the story to suggest ideas.
During the war, Captain Alan Trent—on leave in England with his fiancée, Kitty Vane—is suddenly recalled to the front, before having been able to get a marriage license. Alan and Kitty spend a night of love at a country inn “without benefit of clergy,” and he sets off.