The Long Way Home

“Is this the painting Myrna said was so good?” asked Reine-Marie. She looked at it and saw what Myrna meant. The rest were good. This was great. Mesmerizing.

She rallied herself and turned to Ruth. “Are you ready to leave or are you measuring the windows for curtains?”

“And would that be so laughable?” Ruth asked.

Reine-Marie was shocked into silence. Stunned not by what Ruth said, but by her own behavior. Belittling, even ridiculing, Ruth’s feelings for the professor.

“I’m so sorry,” said Reine-Marie. “That was stupid of me.”

Ruth looked over at the elderly man, pulling out yearbooks, examining them, then returning them.

The old poet drew herself up and said, “Noli timere.”

Reine-Marie sensed the words were not for her ears, just as the look on Ruth’s face was not for her eyes.

“Here it is.”

Professor Massey walked toward them holding up a yearbook in triumph. “I was afraid it’d gotten lost in the renovations. Or sealed up in the walls. You’d be surprised what they found when they took them down.”

“What?” asked Ruth, while Reine-Marie took the yearbook.

“Well, asbestos for one, but they expected to find that. That’s why they did the renovations. It was the other stuff that was a surprise.”

The yearbook was dusty and Reine-Marie turned to the professor. “Asbestos?”

“Yes.” He looked at her, then understood why she’d asked. He laughed. “Don’t worry. That’s just two decades of dust. No asbestos on it.”

He took the book back, wiped it off with his sleeve, and handed it back. He led them to the sofa.

Ruth and Paul Massey sat, while Reine-Marie stood and flipped through the yearbook.

“What did they find in the walls?” asked Ruth. Her voice was almost unrecognizable to Reine-Marie.

“Old newspapers mostly. Turns out the building, or its foundations, were much older than anyone thought. Some Italian workers had left parts of sandwiches, and biologists were able to grow some tomato plants from the old seeds they found. Plants that had become all but extinct. They also found a couple of canvases.”

“Was that one?” Ruth pointed to the painting they’d been looking at, at the back of the studio.

Professor Massey laughed. “You think that’s garbage?”

He didn’t seem insulted, simply amused. Pleased even.

“Professor Massey painted that,” said Reine-Marie, jumping in to smooth over a potentially embarrassing moment, though she seemed the only one uncomfortable over what Ruth had said.

“You can see the paintings they found in a display case near the front door,” said Massey. “Nothing remarkable, I’m afraid. No Emily Carr or Tom Thomson stuffed in for insulation.”

As they talked, Reine-Marie studied page after page of photographs of young men and women. Most of the students were white. Most with long greasy hair. And tight turtlenecks, and tighter jeans. And petulant, disinterested expressions.

Too cool for school. Too cool to care.

Reine-Marie stopped and turned back a page.

There, unmistakably, was Clara, with hair that looked like Einstein’s. Wearing a shapeless smock and a huge, happy grin on her face.

And beside her on the sofa, the same sofa Reine-Marie had just been on, various students slouched. Professor Massey, younger and even more vigorous, was standing behind them, speaking to a young man.

They were locked in earnest conversation. A cigarette hung from the young man’s mouth, a puff of smoke obscuring his face. Except for one eye. Sharp, assessing. Aware.

It was Peter.

Reine-Marie smiled at the photograph, then returned to searching for Sébastien Norman. But when she found the section on the professors it was a disappointment.

“I’d forgotten,” said Massey, when shown the section. “That was the year the editors decided not to use our actual photographs. Maybe in response to the Salon des Refusés, they published pictures of our art instead. I think they deliberately chose the most embarrassing examples.”

He took the book back and turned a few pages, and grimaced. “That’s mine. The worst thing I think I’ve done.”

There were columns of bright paint, with slashes through it. It seemed to Reine-Marie quite dynamic. Not bad at all.

But then, artists probably weren’t the best judges of their own work.

“May I take this?” she asked, indicating the yearbook.

“Yes, as long as you bring it back.”

He spoke, not surprisingly, to Ruth. He said it so tenderly that Reine-Marie was tempted to answer for her.

“I’ll be waiting,” he said to the old poet. “I just sit where I’m put, composed of stone and wishful thinking.”

Reine-Marie recognized the quote from one of Ruth’s poems. She wanted to warn this man to stop. She wanted to tell him that while he might think he was wooing Ruth with her own words, he had no idea what he was poking.

Ruth turned to Professor Massey and spoke, her voice strong and clear.

“That the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal.”