We make our way into the massive and strange museum. The Pompidou’s insides are on its outsides because the architect chose to put its structural and mechanical elements and machinery on the exterior walls, uncovered for everyone to see. It makes me happy that Stella still looks around it with wide-eyed delight.
“Did you know that when Renzo Piano designed it, he insisted that this was so much more than a museum, that it would be not just a building, but a town where you find everything—lunch, great art, a library, great music,” she says with awe.
“It revolutionized the idea of a museum,” I chime in, giddy at our shared enchantment. “It transformed those pompous and elite institutions into places where real people could gather and live their lives among the works of art.”
“It’s divine. The antidote to the Louvre.”
We make our way to the modernist galleries. Stella pauses in front of a plaque dedicated to her late husband.
“Tell me more about him,” I ask quietly.
“We don’t have nearly enough time.”
“Start with the short version.”
“Maxwell was a fascinating man. He had a hard life before he met me. Absolutely joyless. And I like to think that I made it somewhat easier and much more fun. His father was a very difficultman. Oh the stories I could tell you. He began taking Maxwell to visit prostitutes when he was only fourteen years old in the hope that it would help him avoid attachment to his future wife or any woman who might distract him. Love would take away from his work, you see. His father wanted him to marry and to have children, boys preferably, to carry on the family legacy, but he wanted no distractions from the growing Swanson art empire. It worked on the first go-round. Maxwell married the homely daughter of a wealthy American doctor when he moved the family to New York City. It was essentially an arranged marriage when they were only nineteen. She bore him a son within a few years. He lived to work, and to please his father, which would always be an impossible task. Henrik Swanson was a monster.”
There is so much vitriol in her words that I almost expect her to spit on the polished concrete floor of the gallery. I don’t dare interrupt though.
“After we met, I worried Henrik, Max’s father, might kill me rather than let me marry his son. He actually said that to me when we met for the first time. He said, ‘I’ll murder you before you become a Swanson,’ but by then it was too late. Maxwell had served his first wife with divorce papers. She was very difficult and refused to sign. Came up with all these ridiculous terms. He gave her absolutely everything she wanted so we could elope. At the time I didn’t realize exactly how much he had agreed to or how much it would hurt me later on. His son, Louis, never stopped resenting me.”
“How did you first meet?”
Stella smiles slyly. “He wanted something from me. He wanted many things, but in particular he wanted to buy a painting from me.”
“Which one?”
Instead of answering, she pinches me on the hip. “We’re here.”
The Valadon we came for is directly in front of us.
“I love this piece so much,” she says. Next to the painting of three men fishing on the banks of the river is yet another plaque declaring it part of the Swanson collection. “All of these men are the same person, her younger lover, which was part of the scandal when she tried to exhibit it. She wanted the movement of the bodies to be sensuous, to be reminiscent of Matisse’sDance. Suzanne wanted the viewer to desire this man as much as she wanted him. One art critic actually spit on the painting, called her an old bitch, and stormed out of her exhibition. I always wish I could touch them when they’re in here. It feels strange not to be allowed to touch the paint and feel it beneath your fingertips,” she murmurs.
We stay until the museum closes. Stella has a tale to tell about nearly every painting, some of them personal and gossipy about the people who have bought and sold them over the years. Some are facts and mythologies. All of it is more entertaining than any class I’ve ever taken, even Pascal’s.
By the time we walk out of the museum, the streets of the Marais are alive with young Parisians and tourists drinking beer and wine on the sidewalks of a dozen identical cafés. Paris thrives after nine p.m. The night air is crisp with bad decisions tinged with cigarette smoke.
“It’s gorgeous to be young here.” Stella gazes at them longingly. “You must adore it. The first time I came to Paris I didn’t think it could possibly be real.”
“I felt the same way. Like I had walked onto a movie set that would disappear the moment I closed my eyes.”
I’m suddenly seized by the fizzy urge to take Stella out on the town. Should I take her to some filthy basement club and dance till dawn to Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams?
She yawns a little. “Let’s head home.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I say.
I expect Stella to be as exhausted as I am on the drive home, but I’ve never seen her so energized. I offer to help her up to the apartment, not ready to leave her just yet.
“I want to show you something,” she says when we get upstairs. “Could you make me a stiff nightcap?”
I agree and head to the kitchen, then make it as weak as I can without her noticing.
“Dammit!” I hear Stella shout as something heavy crashes to the floor.
“Stella?” I call out. Nothing. Taking her to the museum could have been a terrible idea. Her bad hip, her high blood pressure. What have I done? I make my way carefully down the hallway, calling for her again. This time I hear her.
“Emma…”
