“Does he miss you?”
I sit down beside her. “Yes,” I say. I watch her create a hashtag on a rock, and color in each alternate square like a chessboard. “What are you doing?”
She slants her gaze my way. “Art,” she says.
I lean my back against the sharp stones of the wall. There are endless ways to leave your mark on the world—cutting, carving, art. Maybe all of them do require payment in the form of a piece of yourself—your flesh, your strength, your soul.
I reach for a rock. I start to carve my name into another loose stone. When I’m finished, I write BEATRIZ on another. Then I stand up and pick at some of the pebbles and sand in the surface of the wall, making space to wedge the name rocks into it. “What are you doing?” Beatriz asks.
I dust my hands off on my thighs. “Art,” I reply.
She scrambles to her feet, following me as I step a distance away. The rocks I’ve carved are pale gray, completely different from the bulk of the dark wall. They are, from back here, unnoticeable. But when you walk closer, you cannot miss them. You just have to take those few steps.
The first time I saw impressionist art, I was with my father at the Brooklyn Museum. He covered my eyes with his hands and guided me up close to Monet’s Houses of Parliament. What do you see? he asked, removing his hands when I was inches from the canvas.
I saw blobs. Pink and purple blobs and brushstrokes.
He covered my eyes again and drew me further away. Abracadabra, he whispered, and he let me look again.
There were buildings, and smog, and twilight. There was a city. It had been there all along, I’d just been too close to see it.
Squinting at the lighter shards in the wall that have our names on them, I think that art goes both ways. Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you’re looking at until it’s right under your nose.
I turn to find Beatriz with her face tipped up to the sky. Her eyes are closed, her throat stretched like a sacrifice. “This would be,” she says, “a good place to die.”
Dear Finn,
By the time you get this postcard, you probably won’t even remember what you said when we finally actually got to speak to each other, even if it was only for a minute.
I never chose to go anywhere without you.
If you didn’t really want me to go to the Galápagos by myself, why did you say it?
I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve said that you didn’t really mean.
Diana
Toulouse-Lautrec rarely painted himself, and when he did, he hid the flaws of his lower body. In At the Moulin Rouge, he put himself in the background next to his much taller cousin, but hid his deformed legs behind a group of people at a table. In a self-portrait, he depicted himself from the waist up. There is a famous photograph of him dressed as a little clown, as if to underscore that people who focused on his disabilities formed an inaccurate impression of him.
All of this made Kitomi Ito’s painting even rarer. This was the only work of Toulouse-Lautrec’s where he was literally and figuratively baring himself, as if to say that love renders you naked and vulnerable. There were other differences, too. Unlike most of his work, which had been exhibited after his death in Albi, his birthplace, at a museum funded by his mother, this one disappeared from the public eye until 1908. Until then, it had been stashed away with a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, an art dealer named Maurice Joyant. With the painting had come the express directive of the artist: sell this only to someone who is willing to give up everything for love.
The first owner of the painting was Coco Chanel, who received it as a gift from Boy Capel, a rich aristocrat who bought it to lure her away from her first lover, étienne Balsan. Chanel fell madly for Capel, who financed her foray into clothing design and her boutiques in Biarritz and Deauville. Their relationship was intense and sizzling, even though Capel was never faithful to her and married an aristocrat and kept another mistress. When he died at Christmas 1919, Chanel draped her windows with black crepe and put black sheets on her bed. I lost everything when I lost Capel, she once said. He left a void in me the years have not filled.