“But you are a woman. All of the Surrealists are men.”
“I see you’ve been listening to your parents’ dinner conversation. So they are, and so I am,” I said, as I drained my glass of champagne. “Be my savior, will you, and get me a refill?” I held out my glass.
“You’re acting as if you’ve had enough.”
“One can never have enough champagne.”
“One might not, but you have. Delphine, you’re not yourself.”
“No, I suppose not. I looked death in the face and didn’t much like what I saw.”
Tommy, though not strong enough to stand up to his parents and fight their boycott of him marrying a Jewess, was still fond enough of me to be worried and to do something that in the end had unforeseen and far-reaching ramifications.
For a long time that spring and into the summer, I cursed him and his meddling and hated him for interfering with my life after he’d walked out of it. Looking back from a distance, though, it’s clear that in his way, he did, in fact, save my life. My depression, drinking, and dissolute ways had me headed for disaster.
But three weeks after Muffy’s party, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in late March, when I heard the knock on my door, I didn’t know that.
I’d woken up and begun drawing without bothering to dress. I often did that in those days. My animal series kept me in a state of perpetual bewilderment. I’d expected to find understanding of our impulses and impetus to embrace danger, but insight still eluded me. I kept waiting for that ephemeral spark to come back into my world that had disappeared since I’d put my blindfold away in a glove box. For good, I had thought.
Wearing a silk robe with a green and blue circular pattern on it, and nothing underneath, I sat at my easel and drew a man with a faun’s head, lying on a zebra rug in a jungle that was similar to Gauguin’s but a bit more realistic. The man on the rug was, of course, nude. The woman sitting astride his midsection looked a bit too much like me, with her short curly hair, extreme cheekbones, pouty lips, and flashing eyes.
I’d stopped drawing twice so far to check my position in the mirror, to figure out first a bend in an arm and then a curve in a leg. I had some charcoal smudges on my cheek and on my breast where my robe gaped open. There were black fingerprints on the label of the bottle of wine sitting beside me. I’d started drinking early that day.
When I heard the knock, I pulled the robe a bit tighter and opened the door, expecting it to be the food I’d arranged to have the restaurant on the corner send up. Clifford was away, and I was a dreadful cook. Making plans took too much energy. After the long days of frustrating drawing, I needed something to eat before working all night or venturing out to another party.
But when I opened the door, the man who stood there wasn’t holding a tray of food. In one sweep, his evergreen eyes went from my face to my chest and past me to the canvas of the fawn on a rug, naked and tumescent.
“Mon Dieu, Delphine! I was in touch with Clifford, who said he was watching out for you. But then Tommy wrote and said you were in bad shape. He certainly didn’t exaggerate,” said my twin, as he sauntered past me into my studio, taking in the bleak scene. “Thank goodness he alerted us. And thank goodness you broke off your ridiculous engagement to him. Not only is he totally unsuitable and ordinary, but it would have meant your remaining in New York forever. And that would have been completely unacceptable.”
My brother, to whom I was closer than anyone else, whose hand I had been born holding, who managed my career from afar and sold my paintings in his gallery, rearranged my robe on my shoulders and then took me in his arms.
Sebastian towered over me by at least six inches. I tucked my head under his as he rubbed my back in little circles, the way he had done all my life. I wanted to cry, but this time no tears came.
Chapter 12
“You need to come home with me, Delphine.”
Sebastian and I were sitting on my velvet-covered couch, drinking the strong coffee he’d insisted on brewing instead of the wine I wanted to pour. Outside, the sun was setting. I hadn’t turned on the lamps, and my studio had taken on the gloom of twilight.
“No, I live here now, in New York.” I gestured to the window from which one could see the rooftops and water towers that constituted my city view.
“Maman could see with her scrying that things had gone terribly wrong. She was coming to bring you home.”
“Why didn’t she, then?”
“She contracted some kind of food poisoning, so I took her stateroom.”
“Maman never gets sick.” It was true. My mother had uncanny health, thanks to the potions and elixirs she made.
“Oysters.” He shrugged. “It is possible for even Maman to succumb to a poisonous crustacean.” He stood. “I’m getting more coffee. Do you want some?”
“No.”
He walked to the kitchenette, still chattering. “We have tickets to return home on the SS Ile de France on Tuesday. Enough time to pack you up, pay the bills, and leave.”
“But I’m not going with you, Sebastian. I’m happy here.”
“Happy?” Sebastian laughed sarcastically. “You are as far from happy as I’ve ever seen you. It’s as if you are somehow getting pleasure from the pain you are in. It’s masochistic. It’s hard to leave something that’s broken and do the work of moving on, but you must.”
“I don’t understand anything you just said.”
“I have a friend studying psychiatry in Zurich, and he’s explained to me the theories being expounded at the clinic there. You need to come back home. You need to remember who you were and give yourself a chance to reclaim that, Delphine. You don’t have to stay in France forever if you don’t want to, just until the end of summer. I’ve put together a dozen commissions for you.”
“I can’t do shadow portraits anymore. Ever.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t. Ever again.”
“We’ll talk about it, but if you really can’t, then fine. You won’t have to put on the blindfold. We’ll arrange for ordinary commissions. As if”—he winked at me—“any of your work could be ordinary.”
When we were children, that wink had been a secret we shared. His acknowledgment that we were twins, connected in ways that our other siblings weren’t.
“Come home with me, Delphine. We’ll go to the beach and get all brown. Maman will make magick spells to cure you, and Papa will spoil you with presents. You can come back here in the fall if you must, but you can’t stay now . . .” He spread his arms out. “It isn’t healthy for you anymore.”
My brother and I didn’t look very much alike. I favored my mother, with my russet hair and honey eyes that flashed almost orange. Sebastian looked like my father, tall, with hair the color of raven’s wings and dark forest-green eyes.
“I am fine,” I insisted.