Even though I ate at Stella’s I can always have more. I grab plates, all of them beautifully mismatched, from the cabinet. Another gift of the Fleas. Selling individual place settings of vintage china isn’t easy for the vendors. No one wants one plate. We’ve amassed a collection of Limoges, Bernardaud, and Haviland. They’re chipped and scratched but well loved.
Once the table is set, Colette brings out the still-steaming dish of potatoes straight from the oven. The top bubbles with cream, butter, and cheese. Lucie opens a red wine.
I clear my throat, take a sip, clear my throat again.
“Are you getting sick?” Lucie asks.
“No. I have something I need to talk to you about.”
“Eat something first,” Colette encourages me. “Just a bit.” She pushes over a small bowl of salt. Until I came to Paris, I’d eaten salt only from paper packets swiped from McDonald’s. Salt in France is a meal unto itself. It’s crunchy and hearty and the crystals melt on your tongue.
I shovel some potatoes into my mouth before I begin.
My friends know that I clean Stella’s apartment and that she’s the widow of the head of Swanson Enterprises. I’d told them the story of the lion a couple of weeks ago, and Colette had recalled another story she’d heard from the curators at Sotheby’s auction house, where she’d interned for free these past two years and where I now know Stella got her the job.
“The Swansons seem absolutely wicked,” she had said. “They own a hunting safari park in Tanzania where they let people pay to murder lions and elephants.”
“That’s apparently where they sent Stella’s cub, but he was off-limits to hunters.”
She’d scoffed. “He was the only one. Henrik Swanson, the family patriarch, the father of Stella’s husband, once took his two sons to Tanzania when they were kids, blindfolded them, led them miles into the bush in the middle of the night, and promised a Botticelli to the first one who shot a lion. Philippe ended up shooting Maxwell in the leg. He had a limp for the rest of his life. No one got a lion and Henrik gave Philippe the Botticelli anyway.”
“Is Philippe still alive?” I’d asked because I hadn’t heard anything about a great-uncle from Matthew, and nothing from Stella about Maxwell’s brother.
“Dead, from what I’ve heard.” Colette hadn’t known much more than that.
Now I finally tell them how Stella revealed to me that she’s our silent benefactor.
Colette gasps. “I always assumed it was some big corporation looking for a tax write-off.”
“I figured it was a rich old man with a thing for young art students.” Lucie puffs on her cigarette.
I shake my head. “It was her. All of it.”
“But then why did she stop funding us?”
“She didn’t have a choice. None of it is her money. It was all tied up in the company and when Maxwell died it went to his son and grandchildren, though she thought he was going to give it to her.”
“She got nothing?” Colette gasps. “I assumed they would at least leave her with a fortune even if she had nothing to do with the company.”
“Nothing,” I confirm.
“But that apartment?”
“It seems like the only thing she has left, and they want to take that away and send her off to some facility.”
“How is that even possible?” Colette asks. “She must have been protected somehow.”
“She’s been fighting it, or so she says, but they’re more powerful than she is.”
“Terrible,” Colette mutters. “Pure evil. But not surprising. From what I’ve heard about the Swanson family, they’d murder one of their own for a tax write-off.”
“I need to show you something,” I say, and return to my room for the painting. I unwrap it carefully, terrified the commute may have hurt it, which is silly because I’m sure the painting has endured worse over the years in its travels. Still, I handle it with extreme care when I bring it into the next room.
Both of my roommates squint to make out what I’m carrying.
“That’s lovely,” Colette says, putting on her glasses. “Is it one of yours?”
I’ve painted versions of the Sunflowers before, many times. In one painting I worked on, the stems are covered in sharp thorns waiting to prick the unsuspecting finger of an inquisitive young girl.
