He remained silent. The only movement on his face was a throbbing vein on the right side of his forehead. And then he stood up and walked away without a word. At first, I thought he must be headed to the WC, but no, he walked right out of the café.
Astonished, I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been abandoned in a restaurant before, or anywhere else, for that matter. I didn’t have enough money with me to pay the bill. I was furious. So what if what I’d said seemed unbelievable? He’d asked. He’d wanted to hear. Except it was my fault for telling him, wasn’t it? My mother and I had talked about this before I’d left for Paris. We kept our abilities to ourselves. We didn’t share them with people unless we knew them well and had developed a sense of trust. As I had just experienced with Mathieu, even the most open minds sometimes had trouble grasping what sounded impossible.
I picked up my glass to get the waiter’s attention. If I was going to have to hand over my necklace for the owner to hold until I retrieved money from home and came back to pay, I thought I might as well enjoy more wine. I was certainly upset enough to want it.
It wasn’t unusual for a woman to sit in a café alone, but I was uncomfortable nonetheless. People around us had seen Mathieu get up and leave. But that wasn’t really the cause of my upset. I was disquieted because while Mathieu had sat across from me, looking at me and listening to me, when he’d reached out to take my sketchbook, I’d experienced an awareness of him unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I’d liked boys in school well enough and had a few crushes for short periods of time. But they never amounted to anything more than girlish fantasies. My sister Opaline had a boyfriend long before she was my age, and I used to spy on them, even sneaking down to the beach to watch them. I was twenty years old, and I’d never gone to the beach with a boy at night. As I’d told my brother, I was satiated with my love of painting. With learning.
But Mathieu, with his golden hair and his eyes full of encroaching evening colors and his reticent smile, had touched something in me.
“I apologize.” He was standing behind me.
I turned. More glad than I should have been that he’d returned and at the same time angry that I’d opened up to him and he’d walked out in the middle of my tale. I felt like a fool.
He pulled out his chair, sat back down, and drank half his glass of wine before he said another word. “I shouldn’t have run out like that. But I couldn’t listen to what you were telling me.”
“No, it was my fault,” I said, as I pushed back my chair, the legs scraping harshly on the tile floor. Now that he had returned to take care of the bill, I could leave. “I shouldn’t have told you. I know you think I was making it up and trying to take advantage of you somehow. But I’m not. It’s too complicated. That’s why I don’t talk about it.” I made a move to get up out of my seat, feeling a tear slide down my cheek. I needed to leave before I embarrassed myself further.
But Mathieu grabbed my hand. “Don’t go. I do believe you. It’s complicated for me, too.” He took a breath. “I don’t talk about it, either. What you saw is what happened. We were ambushed. I can only remember parts of it.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them and began again. “A German soldier attacked me. What happened afterward . . . it’s all blank.” He began to rub his right arm. “But I have the evidence that he ripped my arm and my back to shreds. I almost died, but I didn’t. So many in our unit died that day. My brother died. The worst day of my life. So please stay . . . Maybe you can see the rest of it.”
My tears were flowing more freely by then. Not out of anger or embarrassment but empathy. Mathieu stopped talking, took his handkerchief, and wiped my eyes. As he did, he opened my heart and stepped inside.
*
The following week, there was a package by my place at the breakfast table. I opened it and found a sketchbook bound in Persian green-blue turquoise leather that was much more vivid and luxurious than the journal I’d accidentally hurled into the pond at the Luxembourg Gardens. This one shimmered like a piece of jewelry, all the more special because of the decorative silver tooling. Concentric circles in a modern design floated like bubbles coming up through water, and in the center, where two of them met, were my initials in block letters.
Opening the fine leather cover to the frontispiece, I read the words Mathieu had inscribed:
“To love beauty is to see light.”—Victor Hugo
I couldn’t save your book, but please accept this one in exchange.
From a very grateful believer,
MR
I sucked in my breath, remembering that long year when I had seen no light and had no beauty to look at. When in that darkness I had started to see secrets . . . secrets I was afraid of still.
In time, Mathieu’s gift became more than a sketchbook. In addition to my drawings and notes about the art I saw and the art I wanted to make, I wrote everything that Mathieu and I did into my Book of Hours, as I came to call it. I created a log of every day we were together, where we went, what we saw, what we said.
Even then, at our very beginning, I had a premonition that my time with him was limited. That I had to preserve each memory like an insect in amber, for the days when I would be alone and bereft, missing him, mourning him, wishing for a different ending from the one I wound up forcing.
And so it was that four years later, in New York City, after Monty died, after Tommy and I parted ways, after I stopped wearing the blindfold and stopped painting, it was to my Book of Hours that I returned again and again. Reading each precious day over and over. If I could imagine no future, at least I could remember the oh-so-glorious past.
Chapter 8
Book of Hours
May 25, 1920
I’ve decided only to share Mathieu here, in the journal he made me, my special Book of Hours. I don’t want to speak of our romance out loud or try to fit it into mere conversation. Normal words can’t describe the magic of us. They will dilute what is exceptional and wonderful and make it sound like something ordinary.
I almost didn’t see Mathieu today. We’d planned to meet outside the florist shop two blocks from Grand-mère’s house. She was otherwise entertained, and I thought it would be easy to slip out, saying I was going to an extra drawing class. She usually didn’t require any more detail than that, and I wasn’t usually any more forthcoming.
But as I was walking out the door, Sebastian arrived home and urged me back in. Full of excitement, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the parlor to tell me about the Russian noblewoman he’d met at the art gallery that handled our mother’s paintings, where Sebastian sometimes worked learning his trade. And that now Madame Botolosky wanted to have her portrait done by me.