“Charlotte came to my apartment after the rumors had been circulating for a week. We already had three jobs in jeopardy. She confessed, with a sly smile, that she’d been responsible for both the fire and the talk, and if I ended the engagement, she would stage more accidents.
“I couldn’t put the firm or my mentor at risk. Once again, I allowed the engagement to stand.”
Julien stopped speaking and drank some more wine. “So you see, Sandrine? I am not racked with guilt. My mourning is dishonest. She was a spoiled woman determined to plot out her life to her own specifications regardless of my wants and desires. The question I never understood, though, was, why me? I am not wealthy. I have no pedigree. I’m just the son of a furniture builder from Nancy. There are many better catches in Paris.”
I smiled. “Did it never occur to you that she loved you?”
“How could she love me and threaten to ruin me like that?”
“Whoever told you that love was pretty?” I was picturing the paintings on the staircase. The terrible stories my grandmother had told me. Atrocities committed in the name of love, by a woman who could still, after almost three hundred years, yearn for a man who had spurned her.
That night was the first since we had become lovers that we were together without making love. But Julien was clearly exhausted and emotionally drained and needed rest.
I put him to bed in the royal bedroom, which I’d appropriated as my own. As he slept in the goose-down bed, under its gilt headboard of fat cherubic putti and garlands of roses, I watched him. In the silver moonlight illuminating the room, I could see that all the tension had left his face. When his eyes were open, their intensity was commanding. You didn’t notice the rest of his features. But with his eyes closed, and his lashes dusting his cheeks, he looked quite different. Younger and, even though he was not classically handsome, beautiful. Like the aristocrat in the Agnolo Bronzino portrait of Lodovico Capponi hanging in Mr. Frick’s mansion in New York.
Pulling back the covers, ever so slowly, I gazed at Julien’s naked body. I ran one finger down his long sinuous arm, across his chest. His muscles were like marble, carved by a master but miraculously covered by warm flesh. Leaning down, I burrowed my face in his neck and inhaled. It was easier to get drunk on his scent than on absinthe or wine.
Between my legs I felt the first stirrings of desire gathering . . . growing . . . as if my want was picking flowers . . . adding one and then another, until all the single stems were one huge fragrant bouquet of lust.
Innocently, unaware of me, Julien slept on.
I gazed at his stomach, his thighs, his shoulders. The wonder of his body in rest. I was unsure which I wanted more, to paint him or make love to him.
Why, I wondered, were there so few sensual portraits of men? None of the female artists had tackled this subject. Not Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot or Suzanne Valadon. They kept to mothers and daughters, female nudes.
Why were women afraid to paint a man the way Courbet or Titian or Rubens or Klimt or Renoir painted a woman? As creatures desired, as creatures of passion?
The needs to make love to Julien and to paint him merged in my mind. To do one would be to do the other. I would take him both ways, inside of me and on canvas.
Stealthily I crept out of the bedroom. It took two trips to gather my paints and a canvas and an easel, and while I set up everything in my bedroom, Julien slept on, undisturbed.
Once my palette was ready, the satiny paint glinting in the moonlight, I began, first sketching out Julien’s form with a medium round and a thinned wash of burnt umber. I filled the foreground with him, in slumber, satiated, at rest and at peace. I painted his arms, his legs, his long neck . . . and behind him, his beautiful wings extended in all their glory.
He was my model for the mythological god Cupid. And in the shadows, approaching the bed, I painted Psyche, coming forward with her candle, expecting to see a monster. I shivered to think of how she must have felt when light fell on her husband and she beheld his beauty.
All night I painted with my heart and all of my desire. Painted Julien until the canvas was filled with a picture of a dark bedroom, slivers of moon glow illuminating the god’s glorious iridescent feathers and luminous skin.
Here was Cupid as no one had yet painted him. Full of desire and passion for his Psyche, dreaming of laying with her again and again. And Psyche acting out the dangerous curiosity that would almost destroy her. Here was a story of tests and punishment and divine favors and redemption. A story that resonated in me, for was it not so like my own? So like La Lune’s? Except hadn’t she found her lover was a monster? Wasn’t she still searching for redemption?
All through the night, the twin desires—to keep painting Julien and to make love to him—did battle. Finally, at daybreak, I put down the palette and brush and went to him. Lightly, I kissed his neck. I didn’t want to wake him, not yet. But I needed to feel him, to touch him. I wanted to become Julien’s dream. Wanted to be deep in his darkness, where he could not resist me. Certain that once I was there, he’d be mine.
Ours.
Had I just heard that? Or had I just imagined what La Lune might have said if the stories were true? But they were not. She was a tale. A myth. A legend. I had heard a door creak, the wind outside the window. I had heard a cat in the courtyard scampering up a tree. Only in my imagination was it a three-hundred-year-old woman’s voice.
I ran my hand down Julien’s thigh. His skin was so warm. I inhaled the smoky maleness of him and wondered if she had smelled it, too.
What was I thinking? Why did I care what she had seen, smelled, thought, wanted? She was gone. I was not.
Careful not to move too abruptly so as not to jiggle the bed, I inched down until my face was even with Julien’s hips and took him into my mouth. I held him like that, barely moving, only putting a little pressure on him with my lips. Not enough to wake him. Just enough to arouse him in his sleep.
Was I in his dream now? Was he dreaming of me as he grew and then grew some more? In his sleep—or was he even still fully asleep?—he began to thrust. I matched his rhythm, letting some of him slip out, then taking him back in deeper. Looking up, I saw his eyes flutter open. A smile played on his lips.
I let go of him. Climbed up and lowered myself down on top of him, all the while watching his beautiful face, thinking that it was a miracle I had found him, that I could open my body to a man, that I could find and experience pleasure after all.
I lifted my hips. Slid down and then again up. My body was one motion of agonizing pleasure. One motion of sliding and rising, sliding and rising. Feeling full, filled . . . I was on fire. Burning up. He was burning me up. He was allowing me to stay in control; he asked for nothing. I ground myself into him, rubbing myself on him. Years of being taken roughly, thoughtlessly, dissolving. Anger at having someone move in me and inflict pain, dissolving. Centuries of waiting, of failing, of longing, dissolving. I was taking him. Grinding, sliding, squeezing, holding, going slow, slower, sliding, rising, slow, slower, sliding, rising. There was no sound but of our skin rubbing. No smells but the fragrant secret scent of my sex and his, mixed with the faint scent of paints. No feeling but those of great, gigantic swells gathering. My world had shrunk to the two of us in this bed in this one room, and I never wanted it to end, yet I urgently wanted to find the end so that I could feel the explosion, find the release, let the gathering go, because the pressure was too great to hold onto for much longer. For any longer. For any longer.
Beneath me Julien began to thrust up harder, with more intensity.
“No,” I whispered. “Not yet.”