The Library of Light and Shadow

by M. J. Rose

  “Delphine, you need to work. Not for my sake—though I do miss the income my share of your shadow portraits brought in—but because you are miserable. You can’t live up here alone just taking walks in the woods. Maman is going to start blaming me for isolating you.”

  “No, she agrees that the quiet and the woods are helping to keep me sane.”

  “I want you to take a commission—”

  “But I told you no.”

  “Yes, for weeks you’ve been telling me no. But I also know you are unhappy not painting.”

  “It’s none of your concern,” I spit out, as the anger rose in me. I took a long sip of the cold, fruity wine, tasting strawberries and apples. I needed to get my temper under control.

  Sebastian laughed. “Of anyone, it is most certainly my concern. Together you and I built your reputation and mine. We are tied, not just as twins but as partners. I am your manager and dealer.”

  “Then you’re fired.”

  “Delphine, don’t say things you don’t mean. I can’t know how you feel, but I can feel the lack of joy in your life. I can see it in your eyes. I can’t watch it anymore. It’s as if it is happening to me.”

  I shrugged. “You have other artists to sell.”

  “You’re being selfish. Don’t you know how much this is troubling Maman and Papa and your sisters? And me—most of all me? We’re part of a whole, and my other half is broken, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m not a piece of china. You can’t mend me. Why does everyone keep seeing me as in need of being fixed?”

  “Because we can all see that you are not yourself.”

  “I’m sick of talking about this. To you, to Maman. I’m going to figure out something else to do with my life and move on. You did. Why can’t I?”

  My brother winced as if I’d struck him, then quickly recovered. “Tell me you are happy and well and satisfied. Look me in the eye, and tell me that, and I’ll stop.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  “Then let me help you.”

  “How? Not even Maman’s spells are helping.”

  “But she’s not your manager. You can start with some regular portraits. Just to get your hands moving again.”

  “But they will be so ordinary. Worse than that, I can’t even draw a straight line these days,” I said. “Anyone can do a regular portrait. It will be the theater posters all over again. Every time I completed one, I felt worse, because they were just competent illustrations.”

  “Do you remember Mrs. Gould?” he asked.

  It was one of the first commissions he’d set up for me. I was on my winter holiday, home after my first semester at L’École. Sebastian escorted me to the Hotel Carlton, not far from his gallery, on a bright morning for a sitting with Mrs. Eleanor Gould, a wealthy society doyenne from the United States.

  After taking coffee and chatting about her impressions of Cannes and Nice, I set up my supplies. The blindfold, the sketch pad, the pencils, and my watercolors. I would do the preliminary drawings that day and also capture her skin tone and hair color. And then I would create the final portrait in my studio, after which Sebastian would present it to her.

  I put on my blindfold.

  “So it’s true?” she asked.

  I lifted the silky coverlet from my eyes. “What is true?”

  “That you wear a blindfold.”

  “It is.”

  “I thought it was just a story, an exaggeration. That maybe you just soothed your eyes before you started and someone got it wrong. How mad! How can you see?”

  “Well, I’ve been looking at you for a while now. And I will study you again without the blindfold after I do the first sketches. Is that all right?”

  She was nervous and fluttery, quite like a little hummingbird. Deceptively feeble in appearance, the bird’s wings are actually so strong that they can hover in the air for long periods of time.

  With the blindfold on, I sketched Mrs. Gould with a man I assumed to be Mr. Gould in a bed of fine satins and lace and many pillows. The two people in the bed were lying back to back, neither of their faces visible, but obviously lovers and just as obviously satiated. Between them on the pillow was a diaphanous black flower, and above the bed was a burst of light.

  When I took off my blindfold, I worked on the images for a little while and then flipped over the page and did swatches of Mrs. Gould’s coloring. Last, I did a finer drawing of her face, concentrating on her eyes, nose, and lips.

  She was in her early thirties, with dark blue eyes, a thin upper lip and full lower lip, and blond hair twisted up to show off her ears, which boasted huge teardrop pearls. There were more pearls, two ropes of them, around her neck, disappearing under the neckline of the pink satin dressing gown she’d worn for the sitting.

  “May I see?” she asked when I put down my paintbrush after a very exhausting two hours.

  “I’m sorry, no,” I said, with a smile. “It’s too rough now. You won’t like it at all. I need to refine it and show you a more finished portrait, and then, if you like it, you can buy it.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Didn’t Sebastian explain?”

  “Not to me, perhaps to my husband.”

  “Oh, yes, perhaps. The way I work is that there is a fee for today. But because these aren’t typical portraits, my sitters aren’t obligated to buy the finished paintings.”

  “Do most of your sitters buy them?”

  “About half.” I told a white lie so I wouldn’t sound as inexperienced as I actually was.

  “And what will you do with the painting if we don’t buy it?”

  “My brother will destroy it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want what you’re going to paint?”

  “Mrs. Gould, did your husband tell you what kind of paintings I do?”

  “Not really. Or maybe. I just remember he said you were all the rage.”

  Sebastian had obviously lied to Mr. Gould—a bit of publicity spin to secure our first commissions.

  “Well, I paint people’s secrets.”

  “What do you mean? Are you psychic?”

  “Something like that. I’m good at reading people.”

  She rose gracefully, aware of her every movement, and came over to where I sat. For a moment, she examined what I’d drawn. Suddenly, the flighty, refined woman disappeared. Eleanor Gould stared down at the drawing and erupted into raucous laughter.

  “You’ve captured me perfectly, Mademoiselle Duplessi. I’m sure my husband will find the painting much to his liking … I just doubt very much he’ll ever show it to anyone.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’ve painted our seduction. While he was married. While his first wife was summering in Newport. He found me in a restaurant, slaving away as a waitress, and spent all of June, July, and August turning me into someone presentable. That’s the bedroom in the home they owned on Lake Michigan, down to the color of the bedspread. That’s us in his marriage bed moments before his wife returned early from her summer sojourn and found us there. Just moments before.”

  Eleanor Gould smiled. “And not by accident. He’d arranged for her to find us. She’d refused to grant him a divorce, no matter how much he offered and however hard he pleaded. But he knew that the one thing she couldn’t stand would be to have her reputation ruined. So he had a photographer there, and the big flash you painted is when the photographer captured my husband’s first wife’s face upon seeing us in bed. And that was that. He got his divorce, and I got a husband.”

  *

  “Yes, I remember Mrs. Gould,” I said to Sebastian now.

  “Well, she is back in Cannes. She has her daughter with her and wants you to paint both of them.”

  “I told you I can’t.”

  “Will you just try? You’ve already seen her worst secret. That’s why this is perfect. You won’t have to be afraid of what you see.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Swirled it around in my mind like the win
e in the glass. What he was saying did make sense, but … “No, I’m sorry, Sebastian. I just can’t.”

  He was angry, but he didn’t say a word. Standing, he walked out of the kitchen. I followed him downstairs and outside. He still wasn’t speaking to me. He was going to leave without even a good-bye. He opened the door and stepped outside.

  It had been raining, and there were puddles of water everywhere. An especially large one in front of my house. The sky was filled with gray banks of clouds, but a single ray of sunshine had broken through and was shining down on Sebastian. I thought he was going to keep going, but he stopped just next to the puddle and turned to me. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t concentrate. In the puddle’s reflective surface, as if I were looking into a scrying bowl, I watched a series of images present themselves to me.

  A castle in the countryside. Sebastian standing by the entranceway, his hand reaching out to me. Sebastian’s voice a watery whisper inside my head.

  Unless you are here to save me, I am going to die.

  “Where? I don’t understand?” I spoke out loud to the apparition of my brother.

  “Delphine?” The flesh-and-blood Sebastian was calling my name but from a great distance. I couldn’t focus on him. I waited for my spectral twin to explain. What kind of danger? Where was here? How I was supposed to protect him without more information?

  Unless you are here to save me …

  The water rippled. The apparition was gone. I continued staring, willing him back. I didn’t have any answers. What was I supposed to do?

  Yet again, my second sight was presenting me with a future disaster. Only this time, I could be someone’s savior, not his destruction. I couldn’t risk what would be another great loss. I didn’t know where I needed to go. Not yet. But I was determined to find out.

  Chapter 21

  Book of Hours

  July 6, 1920

  The envelope was on my plate. Pale gray, with bold, bright blue letters spelling out my name. Without postage, it was obvious it had been dropped off. If I opened it at the breakfast table with Grand-mère and Sebastian watching, they’d ask me questions I didn’t want to answer. So I slipped the envelope into my skirt pocket and murmured something about it being from a friend at school.

  I still haven’t told anyone about Mathieu. He knows but doesn’t agree with my decision to keep him a secret. I am determined not to be distracted by having him in my life. Not to let my work at school or commissions from Sebastian be affected. I don’t want to disappoint my twin; I don’t want his judgment, either. I also don’t want my mother, my great-grandmother, and my sisters to know and start to meddle, no matter how loving their intentions might be.

  Up in my bedroom, I opened the note. Written out in Mathieu’s hand were an address, 3 avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, a time, dix-huit heures, and a line from a poem: With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world.

  Who had written it? From which of the famous poets he was always quoting had Mathieu borrowed these words that filled my heart with such excitement and hope?

  He was waiting for me when the taxi pulled up to the address. He helped me out and then, still holding my arm, steered me in the direction of the Palais de la Découverte. After we passed a small white sculpture of the Swiss Alps in front of vine-covered columns, he led me to a stone staircase seemingly heading nowhere. We descended the broken steps and walked through an archway and into another world. The sounds of traffic from the Champs-Élysées were gone, magically replaced by bird calls and splashing water.

  Maples and bamboo trees dappled shade on the sinuous pathways. Lilacs, roses, and vines heavy with wisteria perfumed the air. We were lost in green. Awash in nature. There in the middle of Paris, we had found an overgrown garden, magnificent in its obsolescence.

  When I was a girl, my father took me on expeditions in the Languedoc region. We’d leave behind the safe, familiar world I knew to climb mountains and explore ruins, while he’d tell me fantastic tales about the Cathars and the Knights Templar.

  Now Mathieu is the one introducing me to other worlds, right here in the middle of Paris, all unlike anything I’ve ever known, full of sensations and emotions, ecstasies and delights.

  Past the wooden footbridge, we wandered through arches overgrown with ivy. A meandering pathway led to a pond, where we stopped to watch the last rays of sun illuminate orange carp as they slowly circled their home.

  The quiet was profound. Rock alcoves offered benches, but we kept walking past the pond till we reached a large marble sculpture.

  “It’s titled The Dream of the Poet. An homage to Alfred de Musset,” Mathieu told me. “Quite a romantic one, too. Look at how he’s daydreaming about all these lovely women. It’s said each was one of the loves of his life.”

  Orange and lemon trees scented the air. A bird whistled. The stream rushed by.

  “Did he write the line in the note you sent this morning?” I was hoping Mathieu would say he had written it himself.

  “He did.”

  “Will you write me a poem one day? A poem of your own?”

  He shook his head in warning. “That part of my life is over.”

  “Not if you bring me to places like this. Not if you can see all this beauty and respond to it.”

  “There’s only one way left that I know how to respond to beauty … Only one way the war didn’t destroy,” he said, and then bent down and kissed me.

  Even when I anticipate the sensation of his lips on mine, every kiss takes me by surprise. How many kisses have we given each other by now? A hundred? A thousand? Each is still new and shocking. I can’t describe them, but I can paint them. Bursts of molten colors, cadmium reds, flowing into ruby pinks.

  This afternoon, there in the park, Mathieu was hungry. He pulled me into one of the hidden alcoves, where we sat on a bench and the kissing resumed. He opened the top button on my blouse and put his hand against my neck. I opened the next two buttons myself and pushed his hand down inside. When his fingers sneaked under my silk brassiere and found my breasts, I lost my breath.

  It wasn’t enough anymore to have him touch me. I wanted to feel his skin. Had to feel it. I worked my hands under his jacket and undid his shirt, to find his warm and smooth chest muscles. I moved my hands around to clasp him tighter and then felt the hard ropes of his scar, bumpy and uneven.

  For a second, I was overwhelmed with the horror of the damage, but then his hand cupping my breast, fondling my nipple, made me forget. My fingers continued down his chest. I pulled his shirt open and then my own. I lifted my brassiere and pressed my naked chest to his. The feel of our skin touching awoke a need in me that was more powerful than anything I’d felt so far.

  “I want more,” I whispered to him.

  “What more?”

  “I want you inside me. Now.”

  “Here?”

  I nodded.

  The park was deserted, and twilight was descending on Paris. Mathieu found a mossy bed hidden behind a copse of evergreens and laid me down in the green and purple shadows. Joining me, he leaned on his elbow and stared down into my eyes.

  “You are sure?”

  I nodded again.

  He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. As gentle as his words and hands were, as soft as his lips were, there was a fierceness in his eyes that had turned them dark blue-gray.

  I reached up under my skirt and pulled down my lace and silk bloomers, inviting cool air onto the warm place. I took Mathieu’s hand and boldly put it there, between my legs, so he could feel how ready I was for him.

  It was the first time a man ever touched me there, stroked me there, caressed me there … All my words disappeared into colors—swirls of orange-hot red bursting into citrine, whorling into canary yellow, whirling into a light so bright it burned white. Then the white opened and bloomed into a million shades of red and purple and pink.

  “I want to know all of you,” I whispered.

  He undid his belt buck
le, and I heard the sound of him unfastening his pants.

  I reached for him, bold and brazen. Of course, I’d seen statues and nude models at L’École. Studied erotic postcards with friends when I was younger. I knew what to expect, but, like his kisses, like the feel of his naked chest on mine, I had no idea of how the experience would feel.

  I ran my fingers down his ready, smooth shaft and around it, grasping it. He thrust just a little with his hips in a forward motion, and I realized I was doing the same dance against his hand between my legs.

  A burst of a deeper red-purple flashed behind my eyes and surged to a royal blue as I guided him into me.

  How did I know what to do? Why wasn’t I scared? How was it possible that there was so little pain? There was only a momentary lime-green splash of resistance that burst through the scarlet when he entered me, and then it was gone. The sounds of his breathing and the stream and the birds turned into indigo and cobalt and pine-green music rushing over rocks. Sparks of cherry red and mandarin sapphire swirled into ruby, swirled into amethyst, swirled into turquoise, into violet.

  And then the maelstrom of colors all pulsed and surged at the same time, all scarlet and ultramarine and lapis and vermillion and emerald and carmine and crimson, like a dam bursting out of its confines and flooding me with an entire rainbow of sensation.

  “Now,” he whispered. “Now …” And then another whisper. “Now you know all of me. I know all of you.”

  Chapter 22

  As June moved into July, my mother’s tinctures continued to help me improve. I slept better, ate better. But they did little to restore my creativity. The days passed without painting. Without creating a single drawing that depicted any originality. The quality of my roses and leaves, my grapes and peaches, improved but were bland recreations of nature.

  The hot summer days stretched out ahead of me as the bees buzzed around my subjects. I didn’t know what would become of my life if I never painted again. I read and reread my Book of Hours, losing myself in memories. Even though only a little more than four years had passed, it seemed a lifetime ago. Sometimes I didn’t miss Mathieu as much as I yearned for the girl I’d been, so full of wonder and hope and passion.