During my explorations, I drew men with powerful bear, jaguar, or leopard heads and women with the faces of wise owls and sly foxes. Turning people into members of the animal kingdom, I searched for the perfect metaphors.
The following week, I received a second theatrical commission and hired Gary again. After I captured the pose I needed for the poster, I positioned him in more suggestive positions, always holding an imaginary woman, his arms embracing air. After he left, I drew myself in, trying, always trying, to understand the ephemeral meaning that lay tantalizingly just beyond reach—the reason for all of this.
Once I completed the drawing, I threw myself onto my bed and touched my body, appalled but curious about how the act of painting these dreams made me so hungry for sex. Tommy and I had been only moderately physical with each other. He’d pushed for more, but I had resisted. Not because I didn’t enjoy his kisses and caresses, but something always held me back. So many women didn’t resist after the war. Tommy said he admired my strong sense of morals. And I let him think that; it was easier than trying to explain something I couldn’t talk about. I’d only been with one man, and he was still very much in my heart.
So it was ironic that February, for me, a twenty-five-year-old artist and self-imposed celibate, to be alone and finally aroused after ending the two-year relationship I’d had with a man I thought I was going to wed.
A wildness I didn’t know I possessed took me over during those winter weeks in New York. I cut my hair and enhanced the red with henna. I drew darker lines around my eyes. I didn’t eat as much as I drank. When I glimpsed myself in the mirror, I saw the wantonness that I felt. Almost desperately, I tried to stop making the drawings I indulged in. Tried to prevent the debauched fantasies that filled my mind. And when I couldn’t, I attempted to convince myself that this was an artistic quest, an aesthetic search for a carnal truth. Wasn’t there merit in looking for answers? Wasn’t it an artist’s job to find a metaphor and use it to explain the human condition? After the war, didn’t each of us need to find out what it was that had driven humans to act with such inhumanity? Wasn’t I just searching for the fence that kept us on one side of the animal kingdom and the beasts on the other? Or were we really just beasts ourselves?
And every night, before I went to sleep, I tortured myself by reading another entry in my Book of Hours. Wallowing in the magnificent pain of remembering what I’d had and what I’d given up.
Chapter 10
Book of Hours
May 30, 1920
Today began with rain, but by the time I met Mathieu at the florist around the corner from Maison de la Lune, the sun was peeking out of the clouds. He was waiting in a hansom cab and told the driver to proceed to an address in the tenth arrondissement.
“Today,” he said, “is the beginning of your secret tour of Paris. Every spot chosen for your enjoyment and delight.”
Once we arrived at our destination, after he paid, Mathieu helped me out. A few steps off the boulevard de Strasbourg, we came to an arch leading to a small alley. Taking my arm, Mathieu led me into a passageway lined with shops. We stopped at no. 34 Passage du Désir, a chocolatier. He purchased one small sack of chocolate-covered orange peel. Back outside, he opened it and pulled out a piece.
“Open your mouth, and close your eyes. Don’t bite on it at first, just let it start to melt. There’s an art to eating fine chocolate.”
I did as I was told, and he fed me. My body reacted to the delectable citrus and cocoa flavor and also to the intimacy of the act. Once the chocolate covering had melted, I chewed the candied peel.
Before I could open my eyes, Mathieu leaned forward and kissed me. My entire being reacted to this small act. Two lips pressing two lips. His tongue explored just a bit. It was shocking. But not unwelcome. Suddenly, I was unsteady. My mind reeled. I tried—but failed—to absorb and understand what was happening. A unique feeling. One kiss, a hundred sensations. I smelled the chocolate and the oranges and his burnt-vanilla, honey, and amber cologne, and the scents mixed and merged and, along with the pressure from his lips, went right to my head.
In the midst of the explosion, a voice inside me whispered, Pay attention to all this, Delphine. Savor this. It is extraordinary. Make the memory of it even as it happens. Delight in it . . . don’t squander it.
After a few more moments, Mathieu pulled back. He looked down at me and smiled his secret smile. An invitation to a new world of touch, taste, and smell, so tempting and powerful, sensational and special.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“What?”
“That it would be all right to kiss me?”
He laughed. And then became concerned. “Wasn’t it?”
“It felt as if . . .” I struggled for the words.
“It felt, dear heart, as if we had both been moving toward that kiss for lifetimes. Is that what you wanted to say?”
I nodded. Surprised he’d understood exactly what I hadn’t even begun to express.
“One of the great mysteries,” he said, running his finger down my cheek, “is what makes two people right for each other.” He touched his finger to my lips and then outlined them as if he were drawing them. “Sometimes I think we spend too much time trying to figure out the how of things—the war, man’s inhumanity, destiny, genius . . . one simple kiss that the whole world fits into. All that matters is that we try to live the best things and turn our backs on the worst.”
And then he held up the bag of chocolates.
“Now, which would you like? Another of these? Or another of these?” And he touched the center of my lips with his fingers, which set off a new avalanche of sensations.
After our second kiss, he steered me out of the passage and down one street and then one more until we reached our next destination. The short street looked fairly ordinary. Apartment houses lined both sides. A Gothic church stood at its end.
Mathieu pointed to the street sign: rue de la Fidélité.
I read it. Thought for a moment. Then smiled. “Rue de la Fidélité. We were just in Passage du Désir,” I said.
“You catch on quickly.”
“And where are we going now?”
“You’ll see.”
As we walked toward the Saint-Laurent church, he told me that it had been built in the sixth century as a monastery and then rebuilt in 1180 and rebuilt yet again in the fifteenth century. Mathieu peppered his history lesson with the story of a parishioner, a young widow, who in 1633, with the help of her confessor, Vincent de Paul, created the Daughters of Charity order to help the poor and care for the sick. The community, he told me, spread to all corners of the world and was still active in areas as far afield as Israel, the Americas, and Australia.
“They say her body is incorruptible,” Mathieu whispered in a forced dramatic sotto voce. “She’s been nominated for sainthood.”