Starry Nights (13 page)

“That's going to have to be up to you.”

“I like green. Lime green. Would lime-green ankle boots be weird?”

“Let's find out.” I start to draw. “I have to warn you though. They'll only last for a few minutes.”

“I will take whatever I can get.”

I sketch out a pair of shoes, with Clio giving directions along the way. Greener, higher, and not such a pointy toe. “There?”

“Perfect.”

“Here goes.” I tap out a sprinkling of Muse dust onto the drawing and trace the shoes with my fingertips. Seconds later, they become three-dimensional. Clio brings her palm to her mouth. “That's amazing.” She takes off the slippers and pulls on the boots, then stands and twirls, holding up her skirt to show me the shoes.

“What do you think?”

I stand up and pretend I'm appraising the ensemble, though I'm really just enjoying the view of her. “A pair of jeans, a tank, and I say you're ready to go clubbing with me in Oberkampf.”

“I do like dancing,” she says and then reaches for my hand and assumes the start of a ballroom dance pose. She stumbles once, then catches herself. “I never said I was any good at dancing though. I've always been better with painting. Or at least, having an eye for paintings. Like that one.”

She points to a Monet, an image of a street in Paris in celebration in the late 1870s. “I remember when it was first exhibited.”

I quickly do the math. Clio's sixteen, so she must have been nine when she saw this painting. “What was it like? Seeing this for the first time? Before Monet became, well, Monet as we know him today.”

“It was heaven.” Her lips are parted, she's about to say something, maybe more about the painting. But she stops. “What did they tell you about this curse?”

“Not much. My friends—they're related to Suzanne Valadon, great-great-great-grandkids or something—just said Renoir cursed your painting. I don't even know if artists can curse a painting,” I say with a shrug.

She looks at the calf, then back to her shoes, but doesn't say anything.

“Is there a curse on your painting, Clio? Is that why you're trapped?”

“My shoes are starting to disappear.”

I take her elbow so she doesn't trip again as the shoes dissolve
into dust, then vanish. Her feet are bare now. She wiggles her toes. “I miss my shoes. I'll have to ask you for a new pair every night.”

“I'll be at your service.”

She's quiet again as she laces up her slippers. But I still want to know about her. “If you're different than the others, can you just leave now that you're in a museum? Now that you're alive again, can you just walk out the doors?”

“I think I probably could. In fact, I bet
you
could open the door, hold it for me, and I'd be on my way,” she says, and I hate everything about that idea. “But I don't think I actually want to leave right now. I don't want to go back.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. “So what's back? Where are you from?”

She waves a hand as if she's dismissing the question.

“Do you have a family?”

“I was very close with all my sisters. But we worked all the time.”

“What kind of work?”

“This and that,” she says in that evasive way she has. “That's why I don't want to go back just yet. I'd just have to work again. I got tired of working.”

I wonder if she'd truly have to work if she went back. But it seems too cruel to point out that there isn't likely any
back
for her to go to all these years later. That her sisters probably aren't waiting around for her to pick up the household chores.

“Besides,” she says, and her blue eyes are playful now. “The other reason I don't want to leave is I rather like this boy who visits me in the museum.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“I do. I do like him. He brings me sweets and he takes me to the ballet and he makes me shoes, and he even let me touch his stomach.” She says the last part as if it's the most scandalous thing in the world, and all I can think right now is how much I want to kiss her.

Then I hear footsteps. Gustave pops into the gallery. He holds a bit of wire and some fake gems in his hands, fiddling with them. “Hey, Julien, want to hear something crazy?”

“Sure,” I say nervously. But he doesn't acknowledge Clio, only me. Clio steps forward, forming a shield between Gustave and me, but he can't see her, and she just whispers, “This will be fun,” so close to my ear that I have to resist pulling her against me with all the restraint I possess.

“So, I just talked to my buddy who runs the night shift at the Louvre. Says he saw a lemon fall out of a de Heem over in one of the galleries a few minutes ago. They were adjusting it for that
Interiors
exhibit or something,” he says, and now my frequency tunes into every word Gustave says. Could the security guard be a human muse too?

“Really?” I say to Gustave.

Gustave shakes his head. “Can you believe that? What a loon. I think he must have had one too many hits to the head back in the day.”

“That's crazy,” I say, even though it's not the least bit crazy, and I'd like to know who he is and why lemons are falling for him too. I try not to look at Clio's fingers, grabbing lightly for my
T-shirt, tapping on my stomach. I force myself to stay still in front of Gustave. “What did he do with the lemon?”

“Threw it out,” Gustave says, and my heart lurches. “Said it was stinking the whole joint up.”

Now I'm sure the guy isn't a muse. That's just not what you do with art. My mind twists back to the Louvre, to when the fire leaped into my hand, to Bathsheba's drooping belly, and now to a lemon gone rancid. It's as if the art is throwing itself overboard, walking the plank of its own canvases. I only wish I knew why the art over there is going lemming, while the Renoirs here are simply fading. I hope Clio's painting doesn't give out.

“Bizarre,” I say to Gustave.

“You're telling me,” he says, looking down at a smooth slice of copper wire and a fake ruby. “I just can't figure out how to make this look right. And I wanted to enter it in a subway art contest.”

In a flash, I picture where the wire should go, how the piece would look edgy but clever at the same time.

“Just bend the wire through the ruby.” I demonstrate by miming how to move the pieces. Gustave looks at the wire, then the miniature sculpture, then something seems to click for him. He nods several times. He does as I suggested, then holds the piece of art proudly in front of him. “That does look good. Thanks, Julien. I'm going to call it
Crazy Like a Lemon.
See ya,” he says and wanders back to his post near the front doors.

I turn to Clio and am about to ask what she thinks is going on at the Louvre. But she speaks first, grinning the whole time. “You're the muse.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. That's the other part of my crazy day. I learned I'm the first human muse. Go figure,” I say, and it doesn't feel strange to tell Clio. Everything about this—
us
—already exists on its own weird frequency.

“I thought you might be.”

“A human muse? You thought that?”

“It crossed my mind. I mean, how else would you be the only one to see the other paintings and me?”

“What about the guy Gustave mentioned? The lemon at the Louvre.”

She shakes her head. “Forget the Louvre right now. Forget lemons,” she says, trailing a finger down my arm that sends heat to every point in my body. If a lemon fell from the sky, or shot up through the earth to land in my hand, I'd toss it over my shoulder without looking back.

“Gone. Lemons are wiped from my brain.”

“Good.”

Clio backs up then, my hand in hers. She leans between two Monets, the gardens at Giverny on one side, a sailboat on a shimmery, sunlit Seine on the other. Her hips jut out slightly underneath the gauzy fabric of her dress, and she waits, expectantly, for me. This I have dreamed of. This I have imagined since I first saw her painted likeness on the wall at Bonheur's carnival of a home.

“You know what you said a few minutes ago? About the boy you like at the museum?”

She nods.

“I like you too,” I say. “I like you a lot.”

“You should really kiss me then.”

Her lips part slightly, and she seems nervous, but like she wants this as much as I do. I move closer, touching her hair first. Her golden-blond curls are like the softest cat's fur against my skin. I run my fingers through her hair, then kiss her for the first time. She tastes like a song, like a perfect summer day. She shivers as I touch her. It's so sweet and so sexy at the same time. I kiss her more deeply, and she answers me by looping her hands around my back and pressing against me.

I lose myself in her kisses. If anyone walked by, they'd see me kissing air, but I don't care, because she's not invisible to me. She's more alive and more wonderful than anything I've touched, and I'm sure the world is rotating around this moment, and this moment
is
the world.

We slow down, but we don't stop. We linger on each other with soft hints and mere whispers of kisses, until she says, “More,” and crushes her lips against mine in a feast of kissing, hungry and ravenous.

At some point we pull apart for breath. “Tomorrow I want you to come to my place.”

“The gardens?”

She nods wryly, like she has a trick up her sleeve, and I start counting down the hours.

I have only one tour today, and it's a morning one. I see a familiar face in my group—Emilie. She gives a small wave, acknowledging me, then a quick smile. I want to ask if she's heard from the Paris Ballet. She'd look at home on its stage, with the powerful and graceful way she moves, like a swan mingled with a leopard to make her. When we stop at the Degas I've gotten to know, I do a double take. Emilie is a photocopy of Emmanuelle, just a few years older. Black hair, milky skin.

Someone else notices the likeness too.

“You look just like her,” says a round woman standing next to Emilie. The group turns their eyes on the flesh-and-blood girl. Emilie's ears flame red. “Maybe you're related to her.”

“You never know,” Emilie says, looking away. I sense some discomfort in her, so I jump in and guide the group to another painting and another topic altogether.

When the tour ends and the group disperses, she waits behind at the Van Gogh, standing next to Dr. Gachet's royal-blue coat.

“So? Are you dancing under the chandelier now?”

She nods slowly, then shares a big, beaming smile. “And hanging out with the Phantom in the underground lake. But he hasn't crashed the chandelier yet.”

“I knew you'd get in. That's amazing. Congratulations!”

“Thank you.” Then there's a pause, and during that beat, Emilie seems to draw in all her courage, because the next words fly out of her mouth, as if she's released a fleet of hummingbirds. “Doyouwantogogetacoffeerightnow?”

I glance down the hall, wondering if Clio can hear, if Clio would be jealous. But coffee is just coffee. “That would be great.”

We leave and walk through a crowd of people lounging on our steps, stretched out in the warm June sun. I tense when I see Max on the sidewalk. But he's sketching a young couple, moving his pencil quickly across the paper. His hands are normal, pliable hands. I take that as a good sign that Renoir's ghostly reclamation project might have ended now that we've thwarted his forgery efforts. We walk past him, and I say hello.

“Hey, Julien,” he calls out. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“I'm going to be teaching a class on caricature at an after-school program. Just found out this morning. Applied for the gig a few weeks ago. I'm totally psyched.”

“That's great.”

“Pretty soon, a whole generation of French youth will be drawing pointy chins and big noses,” he says and laughs.

I laugh too. Mostly because it seems that Max has regained sole proprietorship of his own body.

Emilie and I pop into a café and order coffee. Like all French coffee, it'll be horrid, and yet I'll still drink it.

“So that Degas. You want to know the reason I got so red when that woman made the comment?”

“Red? I hadn't noticed,” I say playfully.

She pretends to swat at my hand. “I'm sure you saw my ears. They're like beets when I get embarrassed.”

“Why would that embarrass you, what she said?”

She taps her long fingers against the table. Everything about Emilie is long and lean. Her legs go on endlessly. Her arms could hold wings. Her fingers are slender and elegant. “You're going to laugh when I tell you. You probably won't believe me.”

The waiter brings us coffees, and Emily stirs sugar into hers. “Try me,” I say. “You'd be surprised at all the things I believe and believe in.”

“I'm like the great-great-great-something of some Degas dancer,” she says in a rush, the words a traffic pileup. “That's what my mother has always told me at least. It sounds crazy, doesn't it?”

Her
crazy is nothing compared to
my
crazy. “Emilie, that doesn't sound the least bit crazy. That you're related to one of Degas's models actually seems one of the more normal things I've heard or seen these days.”

“Whew,” she says, and wipes her hand across her forehead. There's a nervousness to her still, but it's mixed with a touch of boldness too. She seems to shuffle between the two, like she's at
war inside with who she wants to be. “So she was supposedly this amazing dancer. Her name was—”

“Emmanuelle.” We say it in unison, and Emilie looks shocked.

“How did you know her name?”