Starry Nights (16 page)

She gives me a sideways look. “Right. Not me. But just in case, I want you to get those irises.”

“So I should just reach in there with my hands?”

“This from the guy who kissed a painting the other night.”

I blush. She knows.

“I'm not going to hurt the art though?” I ask, thinking of the other Renoirs. I don't want to add to the list.

“You're a muse. You can't hurt a painting.” Her voice softens and she dips her fingers into mine. “Your hands are no ordinary hands. Your eyes are not like the eyes of others. You see things other people can't see. You can touch things other people can't touch.”

She uncurls my fingers one by one, kissing the tip of each softly. I want to do so much more with her hands. But I let myself exist in this one achingly magnificent moment, with her velvet-soft lips against my skin.

“Now,” she instructs. “Reach inside.”

I take a breath, fighting back all the instincts that tell me I could damage the art. But I do it anyway, like I'm petting a nervous animal, or maybe
I'm
the nervous animal. The canvas feels crackly, the petals on the irises chipped. “More. You can't hurt it, Julien.”

I press harder against the canvas, but it's still flat and dry, and I feel stupid. I'm standing here trying to grab the guts of a painting, like a twisted medicine man stretching his hand into a chest to retrieve a beating heart. I pull my hands back, stuffing them into my pockets.

“I feel like an idiot. I can't do this.”

“It's okay,” she whispers in my ear, her voice pure poetry. “Close your eyes and just feel.”

There's something about Clio that makes me believe I can be better than I ever have before. So I do as I'm told, letting her words be my guide. I close my eyes, take my hands out of my pockets, and reach forward. Everything is dark now, and I am blind by choice, but I can touch. This time the canvas bends back. Like a dance partner letting me dip her, the surface stretches and
invites my hands in. Against the blurry black of my closed lids, I see a momentary flash of silver, and in my palm I can feel the softest flutter of a petal, smooth and real. I grasp, tenderly but firmly, a bouquet of irises. I open my eyes.

“I told you so,” she teases.

“Holy blue irises in my hands.”

“Now put them back.”

I do the reverse, and the flowers are lapped back into the frame.

“And now, perhaps you'd like to come on inside and see ‘my house,' “ she says and sketches air quotes. “Just don't take anything with you except the clothes on your back.”

I take a quick look at her painting—odd without her in it. The space where she resides is empty, but not blank white. It's filled in by other colors, but as if the colors have spilled into the middle. I reach my hand through and the midsection of the painting expands inward, creating a weird and warped sort of tunnel. There's a rushing sound far away, like wind is whipping a secret passageway open.

“Oh, this is definitely a ladies-first situation.”

She steps inside the painting, and I follow her. The canvas folds in and closes up, calm again, quiet again, and I am on the other side.

I have been to Monet's garden before. An hour west of Paris, it's a popular destination for many visitors to France. You feel transported, like you've been swished back in time to the late 1800s when Monet painted so many of his masterpieces.

But this. This is more than the real thing. This is like a high-definition version of the gardens, with orange dahlias that blaze like the sun and pink poppies the color of a seashell. All the flowers are in bloom. In front of me lies a blanket of pale-blue forget-me-nots that look like the Impressionist paintings they inspired because they
are
the Impressionist paintings they inspired. All the colors are more vibrant than any palette I've seen on the other side. They are a new color wheel, like someone spun all the colors in the world faster and faster, and made them vibrate, and now they've become more electrifying versions of themselves, like the notes played by a virtuoso violinist.

“We're not in Giverny,” I say, in a daze.

“No, we're not.”

We are someplace else entirely. Someplace that doesn't exist for anyone else, anywhere else. Someplace that exists only beyond a painting. The flowers, the pond, and the trees are fully alive, but also slightly gauzy, slightly surreal.

“Do you want to see the bridge that Monet painted over and over?”

“Heck yeah.”

Clio points past some purple tulips that edge the pond. Hovering over the glassy-blue surface is the green bridge from Monet's backyard. We walk along the pond, and I watch the water lilies, hazy and quivering in the water. We duck under weeping willows that brush our backs, and when I stand up straight again I step onto the Japanese bridge.

“Do you hate it here, Clio?” I ask, because even though it's a strange and wondrous place, it's also her cell.

“Sometimes, yes. I used to pretend there was a door at the end of this bridge. A plain, simple wooden door with an old-fashioned ring handle. Dark metal. You pull it open”—she demonstrates opening an invisible door, pulling easily—“and there. The other side.” She stays frozen like that, in her mimed pose. “I'm finally on the other side.”

She turns back to me, and my heart aches for her for being stuck for so many years. “But this is escape too. With you,” she says, letting her voice trail off as her lips zero in on mine. She presses lightly at first, grazing my lips, and I let her lead, like she seems to
want to. She could take me anywhere, and she has. I push my hands through her soft, golden hair, letting the strands form waterfalls through my fingers. She leans into my hands, like a cat, and lets out a small sigh.

This is an escape, and like most it's both lovely and temporary. I know this thing between us can't last. She'll either want to or need to leave soon enough, or her painting will fade from existence if the damage keeps spreading.

“Why don't you leave then?” I ask when we pull apart. But even if she left, what would she have? Where would—or could—she go? It's as if she's slipped through time.

“I told you last night. Do you want me to just keep saying it over and over? Because of you.”

I laugh. “It doesn't really get old to know an awesome girl is into you.” I lie down with her on the bridge. The overhead sun warms us. “Even if I'm the only boy you've seen in more than a century.”

“Oh. So I'm just a desperate girl then?” Her voice hardens. She has a tough edge.

“I don't mean it like that.”

“How do you mean it, then?”

I run my hands through my hair. “I just mean you're beautiful and funny and smart and sweet and you could have anyone.”

She scoffs at the last part, but all the things I feel when I draw adequately and turn in assignments adequately rise up. “It's just, I'm hardly ever good enough. I'm like this interloper. I want to be an artist, but my drawings aren't special, so I lead tours instead. And my parents are these hyper-overachievers—scholar and
curator—and I can barely keep it together in school. And you come along, and I just think,
why me?
”

“Because, really, I was looking for a scholar?”

I manage a laugh. But I wonder if I should have shared all that. If I should have let the girl I'm falling for see my stupid insecurities.

“Actually, I think I want a scientist,” she says, pretending to be deep in thought. “Someone who works in a lab and wears a lab coat. Oh wait. Not that. A banker. That would be great. Or how about an athlete? Since I just love sports so much. But no, instead, I like someone who likes the same things and who cares about me.” She touches my wrist as she talks and runs a finger across my palm. My worries slink away. I plant a soft kiss on the inside of her hand. “So I thought I would finally tell you who I am.”

I prop myself up on one elbow, all eager and then some. “I want to know.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“Like about my family?”

“Yes.”

“And where I'm from?”

“Tell me everything.” I lace my fingers through hers. She squeezes back.

She props herself on her elbow, mirroring me. “I have eight sisters,” she says. “
Eight.
”

She says the number as if it's the answer to a riddle, and I have to figure out the question. It lingers between us—
eight
—and I picture a swirling figure, two intertwined circles.

“I'm like you,” she continues. “Only eternal.”

It's as if there were a few notes playing in your head and then someone turns up the radio and the song is blasting at full volume, and you know all the lyrics. “Do you have a sister named Calliope?” I ask, in a hushed breath.

She nods happily, like she enjoys revealing this secret.

“And another named Thalia?”

A grin spreads across her face. “Yes. Though Thalia is more like a mom to me.”

“I don't remember the names of the others,” I admit, and I feel stupid for not remembering that Clio's the name of one of the nine Muses. Which means Clio isn't just a sixteen-year-old girl from Montmartre. She's so much more. No wonder her painting needed so much protection. No wonder Suzanne Valadon made a fake to trick Renoir.

“Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpischore, and Urania,” she says, rattling off the names of the other Muses from myth.

“You're a Muse? Like a real Muse? Not just like a human muse? But the Muses from forever and ever?”

“As I live and breathe, I'm a Muse. An Eternal Muse. Thalia made me. She made all of us.”

“Made you?”

“Well, we weren't just born from human moms. We were made to be Muses.”

The sky could fall, the earth could split open, the garden could tear into two, and I wouldn't notice. I am inside a painting with a Muse, and I know this second is just a mirage, or maybe it is hazier than that, a reflection of a mirage, a dream within a hallucination. If I was amazed at paintings coming to life, if I was astonished to learn why I can see them, that's nothing compared to learning this. That the girl I'm seeing secretly at night, in the museum, inside a painting, the girl no one else can see, is a Muse.

She flicks her fingers, and a spray of silver dust lands on me.

“Holy crap. You're like Spiderman.”

She shoots me a curious look. “Who's that?”

I forget that our cultural touchstones are not the same. That while we may be able to talk about classic art and music and literature, she won't know much about modern creations—comic book characters, pop music, hit movies. “He's this superhero who makes webs, super-strong spiderwebs, from his fingers.”

“Sounds—how do you say it these days?—hot?”

“Maybe to the girls,” I add, and it occurs to me that in some ways I am dating a foreigner once again. The difference is she's not from another country; she's from another time altogether. She is from
all time
.

I touch her bracelets. They should be wispy, since they're hairsbreadth thin, but they are as solid as a bank vault. “Is that where you keep the silver?”

She laughs and shakes her head. “No. Our bracelets are our marks. They mark us as Muses. And I'm the Muse of painting.”

“I thought Clio was the Muse of history or something?”

“I was, but when painting became big during the Renaissance I switched.”

“Switched,” I say, then laugh. “Like a mid-career change.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you do with that silver dust?”

“It's for inspiration.”

“Oh, sure. No biggie.” I pretend to flick my fingers. “
Hey, here's my silver dust. Want to be inspired
?”

She pushes my shoulder and laughs. “You're the one who drew shoes with it, silly.”

“Why can't I make silver dust with my fingers?”

“Ooh, are you jealous of my Eternal Muse skills?”

“Maybe a tiny bit. But what I really want to know is how on earth one of the nine Muses has been inside a painting since 1885?”

“I told you. Renoir trapped me,” she says, and it all starts coming together why everyone has wanted her painting. The legend of two artists smitten with a girl was just that indeed. A story, cooked up to shield an even more valuable secret, the one of a Muse caught in a web she couldn't escape from. “That's why I didn't tell you right away who I am. The last person—the last
human
I saw—essentially put me in a cage. I have a tiny bit of trust issues,” she says and holds her thumb and forefinger together to make light of the statement, but it's a heavy one nevertheless. Of course she'd have trust issues. “But I felt that you were different from the first time I met you. I wanted to make sure. I wanted to tell you when I knew I could trust you.”

“You can totally trust me, Clio. I would never do anything to hurt you. But why did he trap you?”

“Oddly enough, it had to do with human muses.”

“What?”

“We used to talk, Renoir and Monet and Valadon and I. I was the Muse for all of them, and we had many discussions about the nature of art. So one day, Renoir and Valadon and I were in Monet's garden and he was working on a painting, and the three of us were talking about what separates the good from the great. Valadon believed strongly that art could be for anyone and by anyone. But Renoir had firm beliefs that only great artists like himself should make art, be inspired, be known around the world. And I didn't agree with him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him—I stood there in the garden, and I said, ‘I believe it's my destiny to guide art and artists to a more open age where anyone can make art and anyone can show it.' Things were different then, Julien. During his time. Art was very closed.”