“I will start entertaining for the holidays this week and you must come over for a salon on Friday evening. I will not take no for an answer.”
“Oh, Anna.”
“Absolutely not. Do not make an excuse. You will put on a dress and do something with your hair, and you will come and be charming and lovely. Many of Jan’s colleagues will be there and they could be very useful to you.”
Jo’s demeanor shifts slightly and she straightens.
“I will be there.”
“Claire, would you like to join us?” I flush, slightly taken aback by Anna’s invitation. It surely isn’t my place to join them at a party.
“Please do, Claire,” Jo says quickly. “It would be a relief to have you with me. I am sure we can ask my mother to spend time with Vincent for the evening.”
“I’ll come,” I say, nervous but also excited to attend such an intellectual event, one where I am not being paid to serve. I leave Jo and Anna to their discussion. Little Vincent will be waking up soon, and I want to make sure he gets outside. He is much healthier now that we are out of Paris, and we take as much fresh air as possible during the day.
I also need to take advantage of Jo’s occupation with Anna. If I am alone upstairs I can steal some time to seek out Theo’s letters. I am more desperate than ever to know if Theo mentioned me in them, and if he did, I must find those particular words before Jo does.
9
Emma
There’s a lostmasterpiece in my lap. An actual Vincent van Gogh is just balancing on my knees in the back of a sleek Mercedes Benz as Stella’s driver brings me back to my place. I grip it harder every time we hit a pothole. Stella insisted I take theSunflowerswith me. “It will be safer with you,” she’d stated firmly. It’s clear she wants me and Colette and Lucie to help her sell it, but she was so exhausted she didn’t explain exactly what she needed or expected from us, what we owe her in return for our scholarship. It’s clear to me that we will owe her something.
“We have plenty of time, dear,” she’d murmured sleepily. “Now that everything is out in the open. We have all the time.” She’d placed a papery hand on mine. “I have no doubt we will accomplish great things together.”
She wrapped the Van Gogh in a silk kimono before calling her driver to take me home.
“A gift from Her Imperial Majesty in Japan,” Stella said aboutthe robe. “Lovely woman, terribly boring, but excellent taste in textiles.”
It’s a sizable canvas, but it feels even bigger and heavier than it actually is, and having it with me makes the car feel small, as if there isn’t room in here for both of us.
Back at my place, the driver wants me to hand it to him so it’s easier for me to get out, but I can’t do it, can’t let someone else touch her. Instead, I thrust the painting out the car door first and then awkwardly follow, nearly toppling headfirst onto the sidewalk.
Upstairs, I find my roommates sharing a bottle of wine. Lucie’s just finished work and Colette always stays awake reading late into the night.
There are candles lit on the dining room table we salvaged from a dumpster outside the Fleas when it only had three legs. Its fourth is now two cinder blocks painted bright orange. The girls look as though they’re about to have dinner despite the fact that it’s two a.m.
“Bonjour,” I call out tentatively as I hurry into my room to place the canvas carefully on my bed. I have to prepare them for it. “You’ll be safe in here,” I whisper to it as I gently shut my door. In between Stella’s and here I seem to have lost my damn mind. Lucie catches me in a massive bear hug when I walk into the common area, while Colette hums a low tune from the kitchen. It smells wonderful. She must be cooking one of her specialties—gratin dauphinois, a creamy and cheesy, utterly indulgent potato bake.
“It feels rich and hearty, but you can make it for less than ten francs and feed five people,” she explained the first time she made it for us. We’d only been living together for about a week. We didn’t know one another’s pasts or stories. Colette insisted we all sit down to a meal that first Friday to start to chip away at them.
Now I can’t imagine my life without these women.
“I have some caviar we can open,” Lucie says. “Gustav insisted I take it home with me.”
Lucie never comes home empty-handed from work. There’s often wine, usually expensive, a nice cheese, or a foie gras spread. Her clients always want to feed her. She says it’s a care that stems from the desire to control her body more than to nourish her. She hasn’t changed and is wearing a plaid Catholic schoolgirl miniskirt, which means she’s been with the senator from Avignon. Her outfits always give her clients away because they all have their specific preferences. There’s the lawyer who wants her to wear a judge’s robe, and the author who’s married to a famous feminist who likes her to dress as a traditional 1950s housewife and masturbates while she pretends to bake him cakes in his family’s kitchen.
When Lucie first told me she was going to dip her toes into the water of sex work I tried to be as open-minded as possible. We were liberated women, third-wave feminists, reclaiming the termsbitchandslut. We didn’t want to like bands like the Spice Girls, but we hummed their anthems under our breath anyway and secretly fawned over Posh’s outfits and cheekbones. And what was sex but a capitalist transaction anyway? From early on Lucie referred to what she did as performance art and called her johns her patrons instead of her clients, their trysts, her meetings.
Her side hustle supports us all, though she definitely has some bad habits that occasionally blow up her bank account, mainly purses, shoes, and some horse betting. She knows it’s irrational and yet she truly believes she deserves the palate cleanser after dealing with a particularly trying performance the night before. A large portion of her income still gets sent home to help support her younger sisters and bum of a father.
“This skirt is giving off major pedophile vibes,” I say to her now.
Lucie sighs. “Don’t I know it. Plus it’s itchy as hell. It’s givingme a rash.” Colette pops out of the kitchen, reaches into a plastic basket, and throws Lucie a pair of well-worn flannel pajama bottoms. “Put these on. I did our laundry today.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
“You’re welcome, love. Are you hungry?”
