by M. J. Rose
“I will not embarrass you, I promise.”
I don’t know why I was so certain that I would rise to the challenge and be a quick study, but I was.
Monsieur Duplessi was still looking at me skeptically.
“Please don’t worry. I have a plan.”
“So you said.”
“We’re going to tell them I broke my wrist and my fingers in a horseback riding accident last spring and that I am learning all over again. That this is how I had been painting and need to relearn.” The fiction came so easily.
“But there’s another problem, no?” he asked, pointing to the paintings.
I examined them, unsure of what he meant. And then felt a flush creep up my neck and reach my cheeks. Yes, there was a problem. The paintings were far too sensual. La Lune had painted Cherubino Cellini with lust. It was layered into her glazes. It saturated her colors. And I was going to be applying as a man.
Aware of Monsieur Duplessi’s presence close to me, I was overwhelmed with the desire to turn and look at him. I refrained, but he turned away from the paintings and in my direction. Then I faced him. I almost took a step toward him, but couldn’t.
“What are you afraid of?” he whispered.
How had he known, even before I had, that I was afraid? And why was I afraid?
I wanted to draw him. To capture his elegant long neck, the graceful slope of his shoulders, his hair falling in curls over his forehead, his right eyebrow arching just a hint and making him look slightly devilish. He was so long and lithe, bending toward me just a hint, like a willow reaching toward a lake. I wanted to learn his face so that I could paint it and have it with me forever. So that from this moment on, whenever I was lonely or lost, I could gaze at the portrait and remember how he was looking at me and know that, for a moment, a man who was this exquisite had wanted me.
But why did wanting to paint him frighten me?
Because it wasn’t all I wanted. I wanted him to touch me, but was afraid that if he did, I would feel nothing, the way I felt nothing when my husband touched me. I didn’t need more proof that I was incapable of passion. I had years of it.
The daybed was behind us. The pillows on it smelled fresh and sweet, as if they’d been scented that morning. I imagined us falling against them. I’d open his shirt buttons. Feel his warm flesh on my fingers. He would touch his lips to mine.
Maybe I had changed. After all, I’d never felt desire like this for Benjamin. And before him, there had only been Leon, and I’d been too young and really only playing at being grown up to know what I’d felt.
I knelt down on the floor and began to search for less suggestive canvases, looking through a new cache of paintings stored in wooden slats—to protect them, I assumed, so they wouldn’t lean against each other while drying. There were several I could use, studies of Cherubino in more formal poses. I was about to stand up when I noticed there was a cupboard behind the storage unit.
I swung out the slats and opened the door to a cubbyhole.
Inside was a tumble of fabrics: silks and velvets, chiffons and lace twisted into one another. And beneath them was a pile of drawings on thick yellowed paper.
I withdrew a handful of the sketches and examined them. All were of the same man and same woman from the paintings. But these were even more intimate. How uninhibited they had been to draw each other as they were undressing, as they were becoming aroused, as they touched themselves. If the drawings weren’t so beautiful, they would have been lewd and indecent—and possibly would have landed the artists in jail on morals charges. And since they were hidden away like this, the artists must have known that.
“What did you find?” Monsieur Duplessi crouched beside me. The sunlight coming through the windows cast a shadow from his thick, dark eyelashes onto his cheeks. “May I see?”
It was far easier to show him than explain. “Please, do.”
He fanned through them. “Well . . . these are certainly evocative.” His voice sounded thick and heavy, like a long drip of honey.
Starting at the beginning, he examined them one by one, and I looked over his shoulder. Seeing them for the second time, I noticed what else was on the pages, other than the nudes.
In the corners were odd-looking symbols.
“Do you know what those are?” I asked Monsieur Duplessi as I pointed.
“Yes, do you?”
“I believe so. My father was interested in all the esoteric sciences and collected ancient books on subjects from alchemy to astrology. These look like ancient magick and Hermetic symbols. I think this one is satanic.” I looked at him. “What are they doing here?”
Chapter 9
As we left the studio, I carried one canvas and Monsieur Duplessi the two others that I thought would serve my purposes. After making the trek down the dangerous staircase, made even more so by our encumbrances, we returned to the main part of the house.
I excused myself to wash up.
A few minutes later, emerging relatively dust and dirt free, I found Monsieur Duplessi in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine.
“I thought some fortification was necessary if I’m going to figure out how to get you into Les Beaux-Arts.”
“So you will help?”
“After the help you’ve given me, I have no choice, do I?”
“What help have I given you?”
“Let’s go sit down and I’ll explain in situ, so to speak.”
We took the bottle and glasses into the fantasy drawing room at the front of the house and sat on opposite couches, facing each other.
“Everything here is amazing . . .” He gestured around the room. “The antiques and artwork are as opulent and wonderful, as one would expect. But the treasures in the bell tower are a remarkable find. The artist’s studio might make designing the museum more challenging, but potentially adds so much interest that I’m bound to get more recognition for the project.”
“I’m glad for you.” I sipped the Bordeaux out of a crystal glass that had belonged to my grandmother’s mother.
“You seem disconsolate.”
“I’m sure you’re a wonderful architect and that you’ll do an amazing job and the critical acclaim will propel your career. It’s just not what the house wants. She doesn’t want to be on public display.”
“She?”
I stood, began to pace. I had barely articulated to myself what I sensed about this ancient building—how was I going to explain it to Monsieur Duplessi?
“In theory, as an architect, can you accept that a house might be a living thing?” I asked.
“Of course, it’s made of organic materials: wood, stone, plaster, and cement. It moves imperceptibly in strong wind, swells in extreme dampness, shrinks back in the heat.”
I nodded. “And might that be more complex? Could a house be inhabited by the soul of the one it once belonged to?”
“Now you’re treading into territory where I have to shake my head. Ancient souls and ghosts? No. I told you before, I have friends who dabble in the occult. I’ve done work for them. I’m afraid none have been able to convince me of forces and powers from beyond the grave.”
“I never would have thought I could be convinced . . . In fact, I’m not yet convinced, but I do feel as if this house is a living thing. And that she would be upset . . .” I stopped to search for the word. “That it would be sacrilegious to let strangers traipse through here, gawking at what was bought and paid for with . . . with women’s bodies.” I had shocked myself, but it was true.
Everything in this house had been bought with the money given to my ancestors by their lovers and consorts in exchange for sexual ministrations.
“To put this house on display would be like going about undressed in public. We’d be baring the breasts of each woman who made the best of what she had and engaged in the profession into which she had been
born.”
“That’s an extraordinary way of describing what I thought of as making a display of all the beautiful things here that no one has ever seen but the handful of men who’ve visited your grandmother’s soirees over the years,” he said. “Come look at this the way a stranger would.”
Standing up, wineglass in hand, Monsieur Duplessi walked out of the room into the hallway and then the grand salon. I followed.
“Stand here.” He pointed to the center of the room. “Now turn around slowly. Really look at where you are.”
As if looking through a stranger’s eyes, I examined the grandly decorated, great, and gilded room. I had never spent much time here as a child and hadn’t ventured in here during my previous visit.
An almost full-size marble sculpture of Diana wearing her crescent-moon headpiece stood on a pedestal between the windows. Someone had draped a double string of gray pearls around her neck, and they hung there still.
I walked over to them and fingered them. Were they real? If they were, they were quite valuable. Suddenly, I was seized with an idea. I spun around, examining the room. There were so many precious objects here—surely no one would notice if I borrowed one or two and pawned them. Just for a short time. Just until I could arrange to get some of my own money from America.
Could I do this? Did I dare remove something that didn’t belong to me from my grandmother’s house? Such a brash idea was so uncharacteristic of me, but so was my sudden determination to attend art school and my daydreams about taking a stranger as a lover.
Monsieur Duplessi was gesturing to a painting that hung over the couch and talking, but I’d missed what he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I was just saying this Georges de la Tour might be my favorite painting in the whole house,” he said.
“It’s always been one of my favorites, too.”
I turned back to the room with purpose. Like in Ali Baba’s cave of mystery and delight, every corner was filled with wonders, curious oddities, fanciful amusements and riches, all gleaming and shining. Did I really dare borrow one of these treasures?
We all belong to you, they seemed to be whispering. Take whatever you need.
I began my search. A collection of Japanese netsukes of men and women in erotic poses graced one table. Silver repoussé vases filled with iridescent peacock feathers were tucked in corners. On the mantel were a half dozen birds’ nests made from spun silver, each holding eggs carved out of semiprecious stones. On the top of the grand Bösendorfer piano was a collection of tiny enamel- and jewel-framed miniatures of women’s eyes or breasts painted on ivory.
Everything was too out in the open. Any one of these items might be missed. I wandered over to a pair of six-foot-tall glass-and-wood breakfronts flanking either side of the fireplace. Each of these elegant vitrines had four shelves. The cabinet on the right was filled with flowers and plants, the one on the left with animals, all of them exquisitely carved from crystal and gemstones. What duke or lord or banker or vintner had given them to which of my illustrious ancestors? Every piece was worth a small fortune, and there were more than thirty.
Yes, one of these would do.
I opened the jeweled zoo vitrine.
“You seem to have a knack for opening locks in this house. How did you do that?” Monsieur Duplessi asked. He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. “Your grandmother gave me these so I could open those cabinets and take inventory.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps she forgot to lock them.”
“Perhaps,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
On the top shelf was an onyx panther with sapphire eyes, a turquoise-and-coral fish, and a pair of agate owls with onyx eyes. Behind the one on the right, I noticed a glimmer of green. Pushing aside the bird, hidden behind it, I found a small jade frog with ruby eyes.
“Perhaps you should turn around,” I said to Monsieur Duplessi. “I don’t want to implicate you in my crime.”
“What crime?”
“If I told you, I’d be implicating you, wouldn’t I?” I joked as, with trembling fingers, I picked up the frog and slipped it in my pocket.
Had Monsieur Duplessi been watching? Even if he had, I’d been quick, and he was halfway across the room, sitting on the couch; he couldn’t have seen what I’d done.
As I was about to close the vitrine, a light glinting off an amethyst-and-ruby parrot on the bottom shelf caught my eye. Was another object hidden there, too?
Reaching in, I dug my fingers behind the shelf and found an opening in the back of the cabinet. Inside I felt cold metal, a smooth surface . . . I grabbed and, with a little effort, pried out a ring. It was very old, its gold shank worn down by wear so thin it looked as if it might snap if I just touched it wrong. Its bezel held a black cameo surrounded by a halo of tiny rubies. The carving detailed a cherub, with his bow and arrows slung on his back between his wings.
“Look what I found,” I said as I slipped it on my ring finger, which it covered from the base almost to the knuckle.
Monsieur Duplessi joined me at the cabinet.
“I think this was a man’s ring.” I showed it to him. “Don’t you?”
He took my hand to look. The contact shocked me and shot through me and startled me all at the same time. I had been handled by men before—but this was more than my skin being touched; it was as if my very soul were being pierced.
“Yes, a man’s ring,” he said. “And I would guess it’s very, very old. The rubies are cut in a style that suggests it dates back to the Renaissance.”
I left it on, liking its heft, and reached back inside. This time I fished out a pair of emerald-and-diamond earrings.
There was still more that had slipped down in the cubbyhole—or been secreted away in this perhaps intentional hiding place. I pulled out a wide bracelet that matched the earrings and then a ring that completed the set.
I reached back in. There was only one item left, harder to extricate because it was all the way at the bottom of the cavity, and I had to stretch my fingers to grab hold of it.
I had it and pulled it out. I’d rescued half a dozen rubies the size of large walnuts carved into rosettes, strung on a platinum chain. A clasp of a dragon with ruby eyes, his tail in his mouth, operated in a toggle fashion. It was like the circle around the “LL” in the paintings in the studio, and it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite find it in my memory.
I held the necklace up, and the light caught the facets, and the jewels glinted. “It looks familiar, but I can’t figure out why.”
“It’s the necklace that all the women in the portraits are wearing,” Monsieur Duplessi said.
I shivered. He was right. How had I not recognized it right away? In my hand, between my fingers, the jewels began to vibrate slightly. Almost as if they were coming to life. But that was impossible. It had to be my hand that was causing the sensation. Not the necklace.
I walked over to a large gilt-framed mirror and held the piece up to my throat. The rubies had an inner glow, like coals that had been burning for a long time, and strangely they felt instantly warm against my skin, not cool the way jewelry usually feels when you first put it on.
I tried to open the clasp, but my fingers shook so much I couldn’t manage.
“Let me help you.”
Monsieur Duplessi stood behind me. I saw him in the mirror, his black hair curling over his forehead as he bent to focus on the clasp. His lips, the same dark wine color of the stones around my neck, pursed in effort.
His breath heated the back of my neck. As he closed the clasp, its metallic click sounded almost like a murmur, as if the necklace was relieved to once again be worn.
Monsieur Duplessi remained standing behind me a moment longer than necessary. I felt the heat coming off his body and imagined what would happen if I turned around and kissed him. I had never done anyt
hing so spontaneous with any man. I was astonished I could even imagine it. I’d only known him for two days. Certainly the woman who had left New York three weeks ago could never have even thought anything so bold. But everything about her and the city where she lived and the tragedy she’d endured seemed far in the past.
I turned. We were only inches apart. His eyes were burning black-green, and a slight smile played on his lips. He waited and watched.
I don’t know for certain, but I believe that I moved toward him first. After all, he wasn’t the type of gentleman to take liberties unless he was sure the attention was wanted.
The kiss was a revelation. An embrace to get drunk on. It sent me into a spill of overwhelming sensation. Behind my closed eyes, I saw my blood in a rainbow of reds. All the shades of ruby from every jewel that had ever been mined. I felt the pressure of his lips as if he were branding me for life and believed that when he pulled back my lips would be burned. This was something to be afraid of and give yourself over to. To worry that it would end and that it wouldn’t.
I could hear my heart beating, or was it his heart beating? I felt a hunger that was more animal than human. I wanted to taste more of him, to feel his fingers on my skin, to feel his skin with my fingers.
He ended the kiss. The air in the room cooled and assaulted me. He stepped back, looking at me, curious, examining me. I should have lowered my eyes. Been demure, ashamed even. I barely knew this man, and yet I did neither of those things.
“Why did you stop?” I asked. Words that could not have been mine. Words that I could never have imagined uttering the day before this day. Or even the hour before this hour. Where was this forwardness coming from? Who was I?
“I do not want to take advantage of you, Mademoiselle Verlaine.”
“Sandrine, my name is Sandrine.”
He gave me one of his dazzling smiles. “And mine is Julien.”
“What a pleasure to meet you, Julien.”
He bowed, took my hand, pressed his lips to it, and then brought my hand up and held it in both of his. For a moment he just stood there, holding my hand and looking at me, as if he was trying to see through me.