I rush in, but she’s not in her bedroom. It’s empty and untouched since I cleaned it earlier.
“In here,” comes a muffled voice.
I approach a door in her room that has always been locked when I’ve cleaned. “Can I come in?”
“Yes! I need some help.”
The knob easily turns in my hand. It never has before. I’ve tried.
Behind it is a massive dressing room. There’s a vanity table with a gilded mirror. The top is strewn with tubes of creams and bottles of pills. Next to it are the heads of about a dozen mannequins, all of them bearing different wigs, and when I look down at the floor I realize that Stella’s real hair is a wispy gray pixie.
She’s surrounded by papers. A drawer has fallen from an antique bureau that has seen better days. I crouch beside her and the papers flutter around my thighs.
“Let me help you.”
“I wanted to find that sketch, the Valadon I bought in the Fleas, for you.”
“You kept it in a drawer?”
“It used to be hanging up, but I wanted to keep it safe. I want to keep all the things I love safe. That’s why I put them in here. They can take everything else, but they’ll have to break down that door to get in here. Only I have the key.”
Who does she mean bythey? A chill runs through me. Could it be Matthew himself, despite what he said to me about wanting to protect her?
“I’ve found it!” she exclaims, pulling a tattered piece of paper from a dusty plastic sleeve.
“See here.” Stella points to one of the figures’ left shoulder with a shaking finger. “These faint lines. These are the fishing nets from the final painting. They’re so light you wonder if she was just deciding whether to include them, trying to work out in her mind what the scene would be. Would they be on the banks of the river, or would they be smoking cigars in a salon?”
“Naked?”
“Wouldn’t that have been fun? Nude men puffing on their stogies. I always wonder why it became acceptable to have naked women lounging all over every fainting couch in the odalisques. I used to call this sketch and the paintingMen Doing Ordinary Things in the Nude.”
“I like that.”
“Suzanne shocked people. But these men working are different from the women we usually see in paintings. When men are painted in the nude they’re virile and strong, they’re in motion, they’re at war. Female nudes are soft and compliant. Have you noticed that?”
“Every time.” I pause. “I’m an artist,” I whisper softly, almost to myself. It just comes out. I nearly said it more than a dozen times in the museum, but I couldn’t. Not in front of the art. Often I feel demoralized in front of the paintings of artists who’ve succeeded because I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to make a living at this.
Stella turns her head and smiles up at me. “I thought you might be.”
“May I?” I reach out for the piece of paper. She nods.
It’s so fragile in my hands. I trace my finger along the fine lines of the man’s ass. My mind drifts again to Matthew’s matinee-idol looks, the firmness of his body, very different from the looseness of Pascal’s overly confident nude form.
Stella yawns and tries to stand, but the effort is too much for her.
“Can you help me up, my dear? I want to take off the rest of my face before we keep chatting.”
I bend over to put my hands beneath her arms. She’s so light, I barely need to exert any effort to lift her to the chair in front of the vanity. While she busies herself with her makeup remover and creams, I look around at the papers strewn all over the floor. Some appear to be handwritten letters, others contracts. A few old photos of Stella as a gorgeous teenage girl standing next to a distinguished but odd-looking man I assume is Maxwell. Her description of him was entirely accurate. He’s formidable but not exactly handsome. His features are too big for his face, his eyebrows huge and unwieldy, but his lips are wide and sensuous, his eyes what you might refer to as smoldering if you were the kind of person who described eyes that way.
“That man certainly had something,” she says when she catches me looking at it.
“I can see it.”
“Probably because you’re an artist. You’re perceptive. You are quick to see into a person’s soul. Most artists I have known are like that. What kind of art do you make?” she asks me.
“I paint. In oils mostly,” I say. “Landscapes. Often in the style of the Impressionists and Postimpressionists. And women, always women in them. The women, um, they’re sort of in danger sometimes, or you can’t always tell what the danger is. But the landscapes, they’re calm and idyllic…on the surface. Latelythough I have been painting women from the past in modern settings or modern women transported back to the turn of the century. I like to think it’s a metaphor for how we all feel out of place and time, how we all grapple to make sense of a constantly changing world.”
“You should really refine that elevator pitch. It’s unwieldy.”
