by Moriah Jovan
The last Saturday he worked on the wall before putting it all away for the winter, he came into the living room where she and Giselle lay on the floor poring over fashion magazines as if they were both twelve years old. He dropped into an overstuffed chair and said, “Eilis, what are you doing Wednesday night?”
“Nothing,” she said, a little depressed that she didn’t have to think about it.
“Good. I’ll pick you up at six. Casual.”
Eilis looked between a very smug Giselle and a very blank-faced Bryce and opened her mouth, then closed it again, deciding not to waste her breath.
* * * * *
97: TUATHA DÉ DANAAN
A triptych twelve feet high and twenty-six feet across hung by heavy cables from the high ceiling in Kirkwood Hall at the center of the Nelson-Atkins gallery.
It was titled The Goddess and Her Lover, and, by all accounts, it was a magnificent work: explicit in its sexuality, layered with symbolism, bold in its use of color and lines, extraordinarily detailed.
It wasn’t for sale.
Buyers offered auction houses tens of millions of dollars for it; Ford, through his agents, had declined to speak of it, much less entertain the offers. He had loaned it to the Nelson-Atkins Gallery for as long as they wanted to display it, with certain conditions for the first few weeks of its debut:
It had to be facing a large blank wall.
It had to be lit to very stringent specifications.
Music had to be playing while the gallery was open, and only select pieces of classical music would be allowed.
The top third of the painting, spanning the width of the panels, was a woman, nude, her skin an iridescent white-gold. When the light wasn’t at all right, it was beautiful. When the light was perfect, it sent millions of prisms out onto the wall in front of it and duplicated the contours, shades, and nuances of her body perfectly.
Her eyes were vivid: one green and one blue. Her mouth was full and red, one corner of it tucked in a tender smile. Her hair was gold. Each of those features, too, twinkled in green, blue, red, and yellow on the wall, along with her brilliant body.
Her hair was a rich, vibrant gold, light and airy, floating around her face, shoulders, and arm as if on a breeze. Her pubic hair was only a tad darker. Her face was incredibly detailed and it was wondered at that a woman so perfect had a broken nose and a scar that made her look as if she were crying.
She lay on her side on a bed of clouds. One didn’t know where her skin ended and the clouds began; indeed, one breast seemed to be cloud. Her head rested on a lazily outstretched arm that dropped off the left edge of the canvas as she looked down upon the earth, her face etched with great love: the love of a mother to her children. Her other arm dangled over the bed of clouds.
She was very pregnant.
Her bottom knee was bent slightly and her top leg stretched out beyond the right edge of the canvas. Behind her sat a man whose back, it seemed, leaned against the right edge of the canvas, and his shoulders rose above the top edge of the canvas. He was gray and dull, blending into the shadows, his impressive musculature vaguely delineated in slightly darker gray. It seemed his carved chest and ribs, what could be seen of them, were criss-crossed with scars. His arm lay over her broad hip, his huge hand, strong and wide, stretched out across the lower part of her pregnant belly, two of his fingers curling deep into her pubic hair. His knee rose from behind the valley of her waistline and his other arm lay across it, a myriad of paint brushes and knives dripping with vivid colors, laced through his fingers and spearing up out of his fist.
The lower two-thirds of the panels showed the earth in all its seasons. The narrow left panel was winter; fields lay fallow under snow, the watery sun lay low along the horizon. A large stone altar ran bloody with the sacrifice of a boar, a nude priestess raising the animal high above her head. Bonfires blazed behind her and her bloody altar.
The large middle panel was of spring fading into summer over the course of three-quarters of the canvas. Rain poured from beneath the bed of clouds over an immense landscape of spring crops, flowers, blossom-covered cherry trees. A nude woman squatted upon bricks—half of her in the spring rain and half of her in the summer sun, her head back, her face contorted in pain—giving birth, the Goddess’s lazily dangling iridescent hand catching the bloody child that fell from the mother’s hips in her palm easily, dripping blood through her fingers onto the soil. Under the child’s and mother’s commingled blood, the grass was thicker, richer, greener.
The summer sun was highest of all and the land was a rich green, simple, restful.
The narrow right-hand panel was of autumn, its fields stripped and barren. A nude huntress drew an arrow back and took aim at something beyond the right edge of the canvas, a slain doe at her feet, bleeding into the ground.
A masterpiece, it was called, a testament of a Man’s love for a Goddess and her love for her children.
* * * * *
98: WANTED: ONE SUPER-EGO
Sebastian’s heart was breaking. Eilis wouldn’t take his calls. She didn’t answer his emails. If she actually happened to be at work, she made herself scarce if he came into the building and her employees were all the warning she needed to know when he came in. She wouldn’t let him in her gate. He went to all the tribe parties he could manage, but she was never there.
Now he knew how she’d felt when he’d shut her out after leaving her at Christie’s, and he felt sick.
All he wanted to do was explain. If, after that, she still felt the same way, he’d let her go because he hated feeling like a stalker. Sebastian was almost out of options, except for this one.
He needed Giselle in a way that she had never needed him. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t in a power position, didn’t have any leverage, and wasn’t above groveling for her help. He understood why Knox had hung onto her all these years; no matter what, Giselle would never have said “suck it up” to Knox.
And she didn’t say it to Sebastian when he hesitantly presented his request. She said, “Ask Bryce.” Sebastian raised an eyebrow, but did as she directed. Kenard had shrugged and immediately said, “No problem.” Then Giselle had hugged Sebastian and told him things would work out.
That was when he caught a glimpse of the Giselle she kept hidden away from him, that nice, sweet Mormon girl he hadn’t seen for years, the soft-hearted girl to whom he’d said “suck it up, princess” to harden her, to keep her from getting hurt so easily, and never respected that part of her that couldn’t be hardened.
This was the Giselle who’d taken under her wing a girl who needed her protection and love—without question, without hesitation—and who had protected and loved her from the first day she’d met her.
The Giselle who’d taken care of Eilis with such tenderness and selflessness and love after the shame Sebastian had made her feel, which was the first time Eilis had ever known such kindness from anyone—the Giselle who’d wept over Eilis and with Eilis and was the mother Eilis had never had, who’d braided her hair and rocked her and sung her lullabies. Who’d been the only person Eilis had ever told her history.
“Sebastian,” Giselle had finally said, thoroughly exasperated with him for wanting to know what Eilis had told her, “it didn’t happen. In her mind, in her soul, none of it happened because you decluttered it all and took out the trash, I scrubbed her clean, the tribe validated her, avenged her, and filled her back up with all the love she could take. It’s gone. The trash truck has been by and the trash cans are empty. You don’t need to carry it any more than she does.”
“Well, what about you?”
She shrugged. “I can sympathize. I can remember what she told me. I can cry about it here and there. But it didn’t happen to me, so it’s like a sad novel I read and put back on my bookshelf with the rest of the books I keep but never read again.”
Sebastian supposed he could understand that, when she put it that way.
The Giselle whose warrior soul was fed and driven
by her love for her family, for whom she’d sacrificed everything she had—and had nearly sacrificed her life. Twice.
Sebastian’s missionary training came back to him in a flash: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.
He felt a deep, deep shame in knowing that Giselle had kept this part of her from him all these years because he would’ve ridiculed her for it. He remembered the time he’d caught her reading her dog-eared scriptures and praying, alone and quiet in her room, and he’d mocked her for that; he knew she still did it and always had, but she’d made sure he never, ever caught her at it again. She hadn’t locked her door the night she’d taken Kenard as her mate, but she’d always locked it to study and pray.
That told him more about himself than it did about her. Knox had been right about him. And Knox! Sebastian closed his eyes when he thought of the depth of what Knox had done—for honor and love. He’d sacrificed everything he was, everything he believed in, everything he owned to right the wrong he had done to the Faery Queen he’d married and it stabbed Sebastian in the chest. Whether Knox would yet survive it alone, without help, was anyone’s guess, but Sebastian would make sure to be there to pick him up and put him back on his feet if he fell.
Sebastian coddled his clients and was gracious to strangers; he treated them better than he’d treated either Giselle or Knox, who’d both been part of his soul since he was six years old, and they’d loved him unconditionally.
Still deep in his guilt and shame, Sebastian showed up at the appointed time and place, keeping to himself, mostly hidden in the shadows, but people were too engrossed in the art to pay any attention to anything else. Hundreds of people streamed through, gasping, exclaiming and he couldn’t enjoy it, even from the shelter of his anonymity.
He couldn’t bear to look at that painting, though he knew it was his finest work. Nothing he could ever do now would top that. Of course, he couldn’t stop painting, but everything after this would be anticlimactic for everyone. That painting represented his soul, what he believed, who he loved and why.
It was also a catalog of his deficiencies, weaknesses, and character flaws.
One of the music pieces on the short list to be played during exhibition hours was the chamber version of Carmina Burana. While the gallery was reluctant, it had complied and the effect had been so powerful that soon after the opening, it had applied to the Kansas City chorale and the percussion section of the Kansas City symphony to perform live on Friday and Saturday nights for a premium price that people were more than willing to pay.
Every once in a while, someone would tap the canvases slightly with a pole to make the prisms dance.
It was displayed as performance art—exactly as he’d intended.
“What are you going to do with it when it’s taken down?” Giselle asked him quietly, sneaking up on him—or probably not, since he was lost in thought and the music called to him.
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “I guess I could store it in Knox’s barn, but that’s falling down. I have nowhere else to put it and the only places with spaces big enough are in galleries. Maybe I’ll leave it here on permanent exhibit. Maybe I’ll let it travel. Maybe the Louvre will show it. Who knows?” He looked down at her then. “Giselle,” he said softly.
She looked up at him, startled, suspicious, and he hated himself for that. “What.”
“I’m sorry.”
Softening with confusion, she stared at him. “For what?”
“For mocking you. For being a bastard to you. You’re my little sister; I should never have treated you that way.”
Her mouth was open and her eyes wide. She blinked. “Oh.”
Sebastian took a deep breath, because he didn’t want to tell her this, but felt he must. “I didn’t paint you to help you with your pain over Kenard. I did it for my career. I was sick of painting random nude women; I wanted to go in a different direction and I used you to do it.”
She was silent a moment, then sighed. “You do remember that I’m fairly well educated, right? I can even do double-naught long dye-vision. Did you think I didn’t know that?”
He started.
“I wanted to be painted nude. I needed that validation, that I—my body—could be the object of desire. But I didn’t want to ask you because you’d want to know why and I didn’t want to explain because—” She bit her lip.
He sighed. “I would’ve told you to suck it up.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“So . . . posing nude was about sticking it to Aunt Trudy?”
She shrugged. “Pretty much. Cheap therapy. Breaking her face didn’t cost me anything, either.”
Sebastian chuckled.
“But I also didn’t want to look like just another one of your models you fucked. I did not want to be seen that way and I so wasn’t going to masturbate in front of you. Eww.” She shuddered, gagged, and made a face that made Sebastian laugh. “So . . . I let you badger me about it for a while, made you sketch it out for me so it wasn’t sexual. Win-win.”
“Does Knox know this?”
She slid him a glance. “He does now. I didn’t know he was going to hit you over the head with it or I would have told him before.”
Sebastian chuckled and shook his head. “Tell me something, Giz. What pain do you live with?”
She said nothing for a moment. “I take on other people’s pain, Sebastian,” she finally said, “and I try to protect them from it. I don’t know why I do that. Maybe that’s my mission in life, I don’t know, but my personal knee scrapes don’t measure up to the ones other people go through. Eilis? Knox? Ah, and let’s not forget my husband—who won’t tell me what his are because he doesn’t want to burden me with them. He thinks he’s protecting me because he knows what I do. That he withholds that part of him from me is painful. It’s not like he unloaded on someone else like Eilis did and then things were better in his world. He hasn’t spoken of it to anyone and he carries it like it’s a punishment he has to endure. That’s painful to watch, knowing I’m not trusted to help him get rid of it or even help him carry the load.” She paused, then burst out,
“He says he’ll tell me, but every time I’ve asked, he wants another couple of days to get his thoughts together and that turns into a couple of months. Oh, and then kids? He doesn’t want any children with me because of the pain he can’t deal with on his own, but won’t ask for help. That kills me—the evil bitch got his kids, but I don’t. That’s not even including the whole church thing, which he also won’t talk about. Yeah, that hurts.”
Huh. She did sound rather bitter for all her protestations of having no pain.
They stood there for a while in companionable silence, Sebastian absently looking about for a gold and diamond Viking goddess, turning what Giselle had said over in his head.
“You’ve always brought stray people home, Giz. I guess I never noticed before.”
She chuckled then. “My mom sure did.” She paused, then, “Sebastian, you take care of me; you’ve always taken care of me. You protected me from boys who wanted to hurt me. You took vengeance on boys who did hurt me when I was too small and physically unable to fight for myself, which protected me from anyone else who might have thought I was a good target. You taught me almost everything I know about waging war, being fearless, having courage, meting out justice. You never, ever made fun of me for being fat—and that alone is worth every single ‘suck it up, princess.’
“You came to me the night my bookstore burned and you took me home and gave me a place to stay, no questions asked, no deadlines. You invested the rent I paid you and you returned it to me a thousandfold.
“You were with me the night I got shot and killed those men. You went with me to the hospital and you stayed with me the whole time I was there. You started the war with Fen because he’d tried to kill me. You’ve always pulled me out of the rapids when I got in too deep. Yes, you tell me to suck it up, you mock me sometime
s, but that’s just you; you’ve always done it; I’ve always dealt with it. I’ve always been secure in your love for me. I’ll tell you one more thing: Fen admires how you raised me. What you made me is what he loves, why he feels about me the way he does.”
That startled him and he looked down at her. She didn’t look back and invited no comment or question. So Sebastian waited, because while her words warmed him and lightened his load, there was a “but” in her voice. With Giselle, there was always a “but.”
“But. When you have children, don’t expect them to suck it up and don’t mock them. Listen to their hurts without expecting them to tough it out every time. They won’t have the luxury of growing up with you, understanding when you make mistakes, feeling free to mock you back and knowing that in spite of everything, you still love them. They won’t understand; they’ll think you don’t find them worthy to be your children. They won’t have the luxury of being able to stand over you all night and force you to face your flaws.
“Your children will be small and helpless. Your job will be to teach them character and honor. Whatever you’re apologizing for? Done, forgiven, blah blah blah. But take your epiphany and learn from it and don’t do it to the people who will depend upon you most for kindness and understanding. Check your ego at the door of the maternity ward and leave it there.”
He was silent for a moment, both more reassured and worried than he was before, but— “I won’t be having any children, so I s’pose that’s a good thing.”
Giselle rocked back on her heels, her hands behind her back. “If you say so.” Then, “In case you’re wondering, Eilis is with Bryce. He felt it best to let him do the talking. He knows what it’s like to be in love with a woman who won’t talk to him.”
Sebastian nodded heavily. It was a good thought and he appreciated their understanding of what needed to be done.