I was pleased, of course, but these commissions matter more to Sebastian than to me. My concentration is on my classes. Maman’s training was excellent, but she focused mostly on my style and substance. I agree with my professors, who have pointed out that my composition and perspective sometimes show room for improvement.
My goal—a lofty one indeed—is to have a painting in the prestigious 1920 Salon d’Automne. An extreme effort because I’ll be competing with the Montparnasse painters—Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, and Georges Gimel. All older, more famous, and far more experienced than I.
While I measure myself against these well-established artists, my brother measures himself not just by how many commissions he obtains for me but also by how high up in society the sitters are. I want him to succeed. I need to know he is happy. But today, despite my efforts to please him, I didn’t want to stay and discuss his newest conquest.
I wanted to see Mathieu and was afraid that if I was late, he’d leave.
Torn, I longed to run off but felt that I’d be abandoning Sebastian. As if anything I don’t share with him is a betrayal.
Finally, I told my twin I was going to be late for a class and, adding guilt to the other emotions coursing through me, rushed out of the house.
I ran down the block and turned the corner, hoping Mathieu would still be there, fearing he wouldn’t be. But he was. Standing still, the sun glinting in his golden hair, he was leaning against a lamppost, reading a small book that, when I got closer, I saw was a leather-bound volume of poems by Musset.
When I approached, he smiled and proceeded to read a stanza out loud to me:
Again I see you, ah my queen,
Of all my old loves that have been,
The first love, and the tenderest;
Do you remember or forget—
Ah me, for I remember yet—
How the last summer days were blest?
And then he took my hand, tenderly, carefully, as if it were fragile instead of a painter’s well-exercised hand, and together we walked to a café on rue Jacob.
Inside, he got a table and ordered us two coffees. After the exuberance of his reading, we were a bit shy with each other and quiet. But the silence was comfortable in an unusual way. At least for me. I couldn’t stop staring at him, no matter how hard I tried not to. But he was staring at me, too. We laughed, and after that, it was easier to talk.
When he realized I’d only been living in Paris since I’d started at L’école in September and had spent so much time at school that I hadn’t really explored the city, he declared that he was taking it upon himself to be my guide.
“But I’m not going to show you the Paris of tourists . . . not even the Paris of the bourgeois. I’m going to show you my secret city.”
Just the words thrilled me. The promise felt like an embrace.
Chapter 9
The morning after my dinner with Clifford, in that first week after Monty Schiff’s death, New York City was immobile. More than five inches of snow had fallen overnight and was still coming down. I made a pot of coffee and was sitting by the window watching the flakes, lost in the same mindlessness I’d been wallowing in for a week.
At ten, Clifford knocked at my door, insisting that I come over and bring my sketchbook and pencils and work with him.
“I’d really rather not, I’m feeling—”
“I told you last night,” he interrupted. “I’m not leaving you alone.” And he gathered up my supplies.
Against the wintry scene outside his window, Clifford had set up an ersatz garden. Two men in summer suits and three women in flimsy chiffon dresses lounged on a picnic blanket. Paper flowers grew out of paper grass. Paper trees were taped to the window.
An uptown restaurant had commissioned the mural, paying handsomely to have a Clifford Clayton original grace their walls. Diners would enjoy his charming, slightly salacious, always beautiful scene and never guess that the flora and fauna and blue skies had begun in a snowstorm.
I didn’t want to be there. But Clifford was stubborn, and I knew he’d be relentless unless I acquiesced. And maybe, I thought, if I forced myself to draw something new, I’d stop seeing that other horrific drawing over and over in my mind.
But as I stared at the models, dragging my pencil across the page, I felt a hopeless rush of ennui. Even my fingers rebelled against holding a tool.
After an hour of fruitless effort, I quit. “I’m going back to my studio,” I told Clifford.
He shook his head. “I’ll just drag you back here. Do just one more sketch. That’s all. Then we’ll brave the elements and get some lunch.”
Although I didn’t want to, the idea of fighting him required even more energy than doing what he asked, so I sat back down and tried again.
As I drew the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders, my thoughts wandered to Clara and Monty. Where did the dark impulses that tempted them stem from? What kind of animals were we that our sexual urges put us in such extreme danger? Why did some people find themselves able to resist while others danced right into the abyss, eyes open, lips pressed together?
Clifford called a break after a half hour and came over to see what I’d done.
“Well, that’s certainly different from how I interpreted the picnic,” he said.
I had drawn one of the men with a tiger’s head, the other with the head of a jaguar. The three women all had lush female bodies and snake heads. And they weren’t enjoying a picnic on the blanket but were engaged in a naked bacchanal. I had turned the scene into an illustration of my thoughts.
*
After a few more days of Clifford’s coddling, I told him that I needed work but couldn’t return to my shadow portraits—not yet, probably never. He contacted a Broadway theater manager who’d been after him to do some work and pressured him into hiring me to do a poster for an upcoming play.
My assignment was to create an illustration for a romantic tale, Dark Angel, which would be opening at the Longacre that spring. The synopsis contained enough of the story to suggest ideas.
During the war, Captain Alan Trent—on leave in England with his fiancée, Kitty Vane—is suddenly recalled to the front, before having been able to get a marriage license. Alan and Kitty spend a night of love at a country inn “without benefit of clergy,” and he sets off.
At the front, things go badly for Alan, who is blinded and captured by the Germans. When Alan is reported dead, his friend, Captain Gerald Shannon, discreetly woos Kitty, seeking to soothe her grief with his gentle love.
After the war, however, Gerald discovers that Alan is still alive, in a remote corner of England, writing children’s stories for a living. Loyal to his former comrade in arms, Gerald informs Kitty of Alan’s reappearance. She goes to Alan, who conceals his blindness and tells Kitty that he no longer cares for her. She sees through his deception, however, and they are reunited.