A splinter of pain coursed through her at the mere mention of Émilienne’s name.
“Surely she knew Charles was gravely ill.” Marthe’s voice cracked. “I know she was the one to suggest they take the cure in Switzerland. So his death couldn’t have taken her by surprise.”
“Yes,” the artist agreed. “But it is always terrible to be the one that discovers the body.”
Marthe flinched.
“I was told she’d gone into his bedroom that morning, thinking he had only slept late. In what she mistakenly thought to merely be a deep slumber, she said he so resembled their son.”
***
Marthe knew she would never be allowed to attend the funeral. She would never have the opportunity to receive the mourners nor partake in the public rituals of grief. But she could still wear black and grieve privately for Charles. They could not rob her of that.
She had Giselle move all of her soft, pastel-colored dresses to an alternate wardrobe and had her replace them with only black ones. Now, the carved armoire in her bedroom was filled with black taffeta dresses, dark silk faille skirts, and silk chiffon blouses that were the color of smoke.
Her world felt emptier than ever. She saw traces of Charles everywhere. The furnishings, the original objets d’art, were like fingerprints he had left behind. She looked at the sparkling crystal ashtray, since cleaned of Boldini’s ashes from the day before. She would never again smell Charles’s tobacco or the scent of his cologne.
She ate little and spent most of her afternoons sitting in the parlor staring at the portrait. Her mind tried to re-create every minute of the last evening they spent together before he had collapsed.
She imagined him there beside her. Conjuring up every detail of him: his soft hands, his chiseled profile, the fine gabardine of his suit that he had tailored to fit his lean frame. She felt him sitting there beside her, a ghost. She tried to fill her head recounting every one of his last words. He had called her his “painted dove,” and she had clutched his hand trying to stave off the cold.
***
If it hadn’t been for Boldini, she would have stayed inside her apartment alone, never leaving for even a stroll in the park. She had no desire for anything. She had even lost interest in her love of collecting.
“Come outside with me,” he implored her one afternoon when he visited her a few weeks later. “The cherry blossoms are in bloom. The women are wearing the colors of spring. Put on one of your dresses... perhaps the lilac one. It offsets your blue-gray eyes.”
She decided to indulge him. She was beginning to feel like a vampire with the curtains drawn for so long. She saw how grateful Giselle looked when Boldini had insisted, and the girl had gone to the other wardrobe and laid the lavender silk dress on her bed.
***
In the mirror, with her black silk faille skirt draped over the divan, she saw how her muscles had slackened over the weeks she had indulged her grief. The sculpture-like quality of her physique, the dancer-like muscles that had always defined her shoulders and back, and the tautness of her derriere, all of that had softened.
When he suggested later that evening they go to a dance hall, she agreed. She needed to start moving again. To be alive. And to fill herself again with light.
***
Under candlelight they drank. He ordered abundantly from the menu, and she drank the brine from the oyster shells and ate small toasts with wedges of foie gras.
The energy from the dance hall permeated her body. She looked at the young girls kicking up their skirts, laughing with their headsback and their mouths open, and she felt like she was her twentysomething self, back again at the theater.
“You’ve breathed life into me,” she whispered in Boldini’s ear as he pulled her into another dance.
“If only I were taller and more handsome,” he answered. “I know you’d fall in love with me.”
Marthe did not answer. She knew better than to say anything that might hurt him.
Her heart had become like a piece of furniture over the years. While most people imagined their hearts with chambers that kept the blood flowing through their veins, Marthe imagined hers as a cabinet of secret drawers. In one she kept the memory of her family, in another she kept the only image she had of her infant son. Only Charles was kept in a sacred space for romantic love.
“It does not become you to play the widow, when you’re not, my dear. Charles would not have wanted you to dress in black for the rest of your life.”
“One cannot force these things,” she said as she sat down again at their table. A small votive flickered between them, bathing her face half in light and half in shadow.
“We speak the language of art and friendship,” she finally said as the music came to an end. She took his hands in her own and squeezed them. “I will always be indebted to you. Your painting has graced me with eternal life.”
28.
Solange
