Starry Nights (27 page)

“Why were you crying back there?” I ask once we're safely on the bridge.

“It was the Vermeers.”

“Well, are they okay? Did you fix them?”

“Yes, they look so beautiful now.” Her voice breaks. “I was overcome.”

We go to Chicago.

The sick Morisot is only a few rooms away, and I'm so pummeled now by witnessing Clio lose her love that I barely care if I get caught. Besides, she's arrived at the final destination, and what's the worst that can happen? She doesn't need me anymore so she could just slink out of the museum in the morning and find the Chicago entrance back to her Musely home. As for me, I suppose the worst is happening so I don't bother to draw a jumpsuit or a dog. I've never been to Chicago, and I've always wanted to see Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks,
his image of three lonely people in a diner. Why not? I've made it this far. It's a few rooms over, and I go inside and order a chocolate milk shake.

The guy at the counter nods and hands me the drink.

It's fantastic, and I feel as if I could stay here all night. No one talks to each other. The other three people just stare off with empty eyes at their lonely worlds.

But I have friends back home, and I could really use them now.
More than ever. So I leave, and I walk to the Japanese bridge where Clio's already waiting. A guard sees me, calls after me. I understand him perfectly.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Getting a milk shake,” I tell him, and keep going.

The guard grabs for the belt buckles on my jeans, and I roll my eyes.

“Seriously? That's the best you've got?” I speak to him in English but don't bother with an accent. Let him report back to the Chicago police about the boy with the French accent who drank milk shakes in his museum.

“You want to be arrested, smart aleck?”

I pull away. He's no Cass Middleton. He's sluggish and I'm nimble, and I suppose all things being equal, I'd really rather be in Paris right now, so I run to the bridge painting and dive into it with Clio.

I don't make it all the way in. He's grabbed a boot. Clio's got me by the forearm and is pulling me farther into the Monet, and the guard is yanking harder on my boot. With the sole of my other shoe, I push the boot off and slide into the painting, picturing a guard in Chicago bewildered by the worn black boot in his hand.

“Good night, Gustave.”

“What happened to your other boot?”

“Lost it somewhere. Go figure,” I say.

“Maybe your prince will find it, Cinderella,” he teases. “Hey, did you hear about the Monet that was left in the bathroom at the Louvre a few hours ago? Some crazy collector left it there, along with an envelope too.”

“Your friend found it?”

“Yup. Packed it all up and has it ready to be returned.”

“Ah, but that's the real Cinderella story,” I say, and head for the doors, Clio by my side.

I pause when I lift the handle to leave the museum, remembering when she told me how easy it would be to free her.
You don't need a crazy car chase or knife fight to free me. Nothing violent, nothing dangerous. It's simple because art is grace. Art is class. You can free me by holding open the door and letting me out.

I do the thing Clio didn't want me to do a few days ago. Because there is nothing for her on this side of the door. There is nothing to tie her to the museum. Not her frame and not me.

She crosses the threshold and her feet touch outside ground for the first time in a hundred and thirty years. If I were to look back at Gustave right now, he'd probably be as shocked as the Chicago guard with the boot in his hand, because now there is a girl beside me who wasn't there before.

Anyone can see her. She's no longer bound to the painting Renoir trapped her in. She's bound to being a Muse, and she can't wait to start up again.

We walk down the steps, like two acquaintances, like two coworkers who did a job together. A job well done, but now they move on. To the next city, the next assignment. I walk her across the river, and to the block with La Belle Vie. Bonheur has alerted Thalia to meet Clio there. I called him a few minutes ago and asked him to let her know the missing Muse would be coming home.

I stop on the rue de Rivoli. “Good-bye, Clio.”

“Good-bye,” she says, her voice clipped and cheery. She doesn't even use my name.

“Do you even remember what happened with us?” I ask tentatively because she seems like a robot, like she had her chip erased of all past memories.

“Of course I remember. We had a nice time together,” she says and smiles brightly, but her eyes are empty. There's nothing there for me. “And now I get to go back to work.”

Get to.

“It's been so long,” she continues. “I can't wait to find out
what's next, what new assignments are waiting for me. I've missed it so.”

No, you didn't,
I want to tell her.
You didn't miss it. You were tired of it. You wanted more.

I know it's not personal. I know it's not me. But that doesn't stop me from feeling, from wanting, from aching.

Thalia steps out of La Belle Vie and beams, like a mother welcoming back a long-lost child. Clio rushes to her. She doesn't look back at me. Not once. But I can't take my eyes off her. I can't stop watching her.

I will never stop seeing her everywhere I go.

My heart is a padlock on the lovers' bridge as it's sliced. I am all the
cadenas
ever placed there, chopped off at once.

Paris is quiet, and the sun is peeking over the horizon, like a small child checking the covers before pitter-pattering out of bed. Pink streaks leak across the blue of night as I find my way home and crash in my bed.

I think my mother tries to wake me and urge me to come to work. She is unsuccessful and she gives up.

When I finally make it out of bed in the late afternoon, she's sent me several texts. They are full of exclamation points and many smiley faces. The reports have come in from the museums, and all the curators are rejoicing. I send her back a smiley face. Bonheur has texted me too, letting me know his mother was thrilled with the part their painting played.
Awesome,
I write back. Then he tells me he's having another party soon, and that I better be there. I can even see my Muse again, he adds. He doesn't know what happened to us last night, and I'm not ready to tell that story. I don't answer either of his messages.

I turn on my computer so I can read the news.

First, there was the Cézanne and the Degas miraculously restored at the Musée d'Orsay a day ago, the stories note.

Then, more tales of strange goings-on at museums came from around the world last night. Perhaps the oddest of all is the story of the security guard in St. Petersburg who had a picture of a young guy standing in front of the Monet exhibit at the Hermitage. My mother calls when the photo surfaces.

“Look at that picture,” she says and she's laughing wildly. “He almost looks like you.”

I laugh too. I do look pretty silly with my arms stretched out wide as if I'm holding on to something awkward and large. Like a haystack. “Yeah, that guy does kind of look like me,” I say.

Then there's the story of the boot. One lone boot that a guard claims he tugged off a teenage boy who hopped inside a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“The Cinderella Boot,” the news is calling it. It's a fairy tale, they say, since all the sick paintings have been healed. And so the stories go, like a song, a chorus passed from one group to the next, singing of the healed Vermeers, the cured Turners, the Morisot restored. It couldn't be anything but magic, right?

They'll all forget about it soon enough. We always do.

The next week, I guide a group of tourists through our galleries, including a brief stop at
The Girl in the Garden.
Hope rises in my chest when I see the painting of Clio, as it does every time, every day, with every look. But the canvas has been quiet at night. No
girl has come alive, not even a painted version, like Emmanuelle or Dr. Gachet. I keep waiting for the night when she might break free, even if she's only a shadow of the Clio I once knew. I'd take that. I'd take anything.

A girl with a Brown University T-shirt raises a hand and begins speaking. “Isn't that the Renoir that was missing for years?”

“Yes. Since 1885,” I answer as clinically as I can.

“What happened to it? How does a painting just vanish for so long, then reappear?”

Another girl on the tour chimes in, probably an art student at another college. “There's a story that Renoir and Monet were both in love with her,” the second girl starts to say, and it's a knife digging around in my chest, on a blind hunt for any organ. “And the family hid the painting to protect her reputation or something.”

“Is that true?” the girl in the Brown shirt asks me.

I flinch, as if she's just raised her fists, then I let it all out, the truth of the missing Renoir, once lost, now found. “It's possible. Or she could have been a Muse trapped in a painting and was just set free to save the world's art,” I say without a smile, without a knowing wink. No one says anything. “Or maybe she's just a girl and she comes out at night when the museum is closed,” I offer.

Both girls look at me quizzically, then laughter kicks in. I've just made a joke, or possibly two, they think.

“Or maybe it's just a painting,” someone else says. “Sometimes a painting is just a painting.”

“And sometimes lost paintings are lost again,” I say, and conclude my tour so that we can all escape from my melancholy.

I walk past Emmanuelle, then Dr. Gachet. Imprints of who
they once were long ago. An idea comes to me then, a crazy one, but I have to try. Maybe there is a version of Clio out there who still cares about me.

I'm done for the day and it's only early afternoon, so I go to Gare Saint-Lazare station and buy a ticket. An hour later, the train rattles to a stop and I disembark. I walk from the station to Monet's garden, a little less than an hour by foot. The gardens are closing when I arrive, and the ticket taker tells me I will only have a few minutes.

“That's fine.”

I have seen the gardens. For real and in paint. I'm not here today to catch the tail end of a tour or to snap photos of the kaleidoscope of colors. But the place Monet once called home is, empirically, gorgeous. Summer has stolen into Giverny, bringing with it the glory of reds, yellows, and oranges that blaze under the sun.

Some might say it's better than a painting.

They have never gone into
her
painting.

I walk through lush fields and past blankets of petals and stems. I make my way to the pond where a raft of water lilies floats lazily in the blue-green waters. The other visitors begin to file out as the bell signals closing time. I let them leave, and the sun dips farther. Long shadows fall across the pond, and the weeping willow brushes its branches against the earth.

I close my eyes and I'm back in time.

“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 and there. The other side. I'm finally on the other side.”

I open my eyes and remove my notebook, sketching the door she described in painstaking detail. I take the last pinch of silver dust that I stashed away in London, and voilà. The door materializes. Clio always longed for escape when she was trapped. Maybe
that
Clio is here. Maybe
that
Clio misses me. I reach for the handle and pull it open.

There's nothing but a weeping willow on the other side.

I press a palm over my eyes. Stupid me. Stupid mind playing stupid tricks. She is gone, and all that's left is this emptiness, this loneliness, so terribly alive, in her place. No drawing will ever change that.