“No, somewhere in the country outside of Paris. He used to be in the newspapers. He dated Carla Bruni before she married our president.” Jacques stood to clear the table for the last time. “You should go somewhere and tap, tap, tap, and figure it out. Yes?”
“Yes, we should. It’s late. We have to get back and make sense of all this.” Jacques double kissed me and held my hands for a few extra seconds. I squeezed them. “Merci pour tout. It was one of the loveliest nights I’ve had in a long time.” I meant it. This polished, warm gentleman reminded me so much of my father that I ached. His intensity, his curiosity. The fact that he was about the age my father would have been in 2011 made my heart hurt. I felt like I’d witnessed how my father would have aged, mellowed. My father would have accepted an envelope from a stranger, I was sure.
Jacques seemed to feel some special connection, too. “Come back and tell me what happens with everything. And, if I hear anything about the sketches, I will let you know.” I handed him my card with my number. Jacques slipped it in his pocket with his medal. “Goodbye, Nate. Off you go. Tap, tap, tap.”
Nate and I were in the back of the car, headed back to the hotel. He was distracted by the site of the brightly lit windmill as we passed the real Moulin Rouge at the edge of Montmartre, patrons exiting after a midnight performance. Then he pointed to the envelope. “Ready?”
I wasn’t. “I need a second. That was intense.” There were a million question marks floating around in my brain: Beckman, the ticking clock, the cult of Joan and the Panthéon Sketches, the coin, the letters to my mother, the comforting familiarity of a total stranger. I couldn’t shake this feeling that a giant sinkhole of understanding had opened up in Atelier Artemesium. “My parents never told me much about that time in Paris. Why have I never heard of Jacques de Baubin? Obviously, that was a relationship that my father kept up. He gave him the Joan coin, sent him that Hopper print. Jacques has kept that photo album for thirty years. That year I lived in Paris, my mother sent me all these letters of introduction to her friends here, like I was a Victorian traveler, but she never mentioned Jacques. It seems so strange that this is all new to me.”
“You were pretty young when your father . . . died, right?” Like most people, Nate didn’t know exactly the right word to use about what happened to my father. You could tell a lot about people’s religious and political point of view from their word choice. The most outraged used “murdered by . . .” and then tossed in names of various terrorists, political figures, or movements. One time I even got “Murdered by deteriorating standards and loose morals,” which stunned me into silence. My religious white friends used “passed away,” while my religious Black friends said “passed,” which had made me laugh inappropriately, thinking that my father had escaped through some rip in the universe, a fate he would have enjoyed. I usually said that my father had been killed, but “died” struck the right tone to me in this circumstance. “I mean, did your parents tell you everything about their lives? Probably not.”
He was right. At least, not in the sense that they confessed or came clean. My father would go quiet for months if he was working on a piece, and my mother was a spinner of stories, with her memories having a beginning, middle, and end, full disclosure optional. Entertaining, pitch-perfect, but not necessarily honest. Maybe a detail like a long-ago friend didn’t seem worth the trouble to explain.
Or maybe I should have asked my mother more questions. “I had just graduated in May of 2001. I was pretty self-absorbed, like most college kids. And my parents, even though they had public lives, they were very private people. Despite what you think, Nate. They weren’t open in that ‘let’s all get in the hot tub together’ way. They had barriers with me, for sure. I was an only child raised around adults, but it wasn’t a free-for-all. And now? My mother has higher walls than ever.”
The streets of Paris were quiet, and we were making quick time back to our little secret spot in the middle of the Seine. As the light whizzed by, my mind was still on what Jacques had told us. “I’ve read textbook descriptions of Bright & Dark. Seen photos. The last summer I spent with my father, we went over timelines of the exhibition in a clinical fashion, but he never talked about the people he was with. And he never, never talked about the audience response, how the viewers perceived the event. I never even thought to ask about the impact on the audience, people like Jacques, watching the different events unfold.”
I thought again about the week they visited me in Paris and I’d gone to Munich instead. Maybe I would have learned this history, been introduced to Jacques, relived Bright & Dark in some way. But I’d chosen to go to Germany and drink beer because I thought I had all the time in the world to ask my father the important questions. We’d all come to Paris again, right? My father had hinted at some sort of official twenty-fifth anniversary of Bright & Dark sponsored by the French government in 2005. There would be time. I felt no sense of urgency at age twenty to know everything about my parents. “I asked my mother in an email the other day if she had any friends in Paris, and I got nothing back, except the names of her modeling friends. But not Jacques. None of the other people in those photos.”
“And not Peter Beckman?”
“No.”
“Maybe these two were really friends of your father’s, not your mother’s?”
“That could be. Connected to my father through his . . . secret boys’ club. No girls allowed except Joan of Arc. Or maybe the people in those photos were never friends in the first place, only people in the same place at the same time.”
Nate put his hand on my thigh and said with all sincerity, “Later, when it’s appropriate, can you tell me what Mick Jagger’s really like?”
“Absolutely.” My phone pinged several times. We were back in service. Nate immediately got on his phone to search for Peter Beckman. All I could think about was that photograph in the window. Captured maid, prince, and silent knight. I thought I knew my father’s story, but maybe not. Was he the prince or the silent knight?
“I’m ready.” I ripped open the envelope. This time the notebook page was unexpected. No calculations or dimensions, just a sketch of a woman who looked to be my mother. Or maybe not. The truth was, my father wasn’t very strong at figure drawing. Most of his sketches had a generic quality, like it could have been anyone. In this sketch, the human figure was not accomplished, half-drawn, but the background was complete with a café scene, some buildings, and a street sign that read “Impasse.” It was dated 4 April 1980. I didn’t recall having ever seen this page, but there were thousands of total pages in the notebooks, and I’d done only cursory cataloging. Something like this could have easily slipped by me.
But the date stood out. April 1980, the same month as Joan Bright & Dark. My parents would have been in Paris. I handed the page to Nate.
“Your mother?”
I nodded. “I think so.” Then I reached in and pulled out the now-familiar thick white paper with the handwritten clue. I clicked on my phone’s flashlight to see the words.
When the pure white light should fade
When all that glitter starts to stray
We’re at an impasse, aren’t we girl
Down the alley love unfurls
I’ve seen the last of her lips of gold
I’ll see her again when we are old
Come say goodbye at dawn, sweet maid
Staring down, a thought popped into my head, something Nate had said when we read the first one. Not really a poem, not really a clue. Looking at the black ink on the white paper in full, I could see exactly what they were now: song lyrics.