I had always enjoyed shopping with my mother. Indulging in silks and velvets, perfect pastels, and deep gemstone-colored fabrics was as sensual an experience for me as it was for her. We were artists first and saw fashion through that lens. That season, she took me shopping at all the best boutiques. The long pants and jersey jackets in neutral tones that they were showing suited my mood and my frame. I let my mother dress me like a doll. It was a relief to be pampered. Although dear Clifford had been such a comfort to me throughout my years in Manhattan, nothing beat my mother’s attention. It was as healing as the sun.
She bought me a pale cream-colored crepe de chine jacket with my initials embroidered on the breast. A half dozen white silk blouses. A Lanvin evening dress, a column of black edged in jet beads. At the jeweler, she bought me two long strings of pearls that glowed like the moon. She spoiled me at Coco Chanel’s shop with two pairs of wide-legged pants, one white, one black. And long silky jersey sweaters to go with them. She took me to the salon, where they reshaped my hair and tinted it back to my original color. With the copper gone and the new cut, I looked less wild and more sophisticated.
At night, I let my parents distract me with evenings at their favorite restaurants and music at the best jazz clubs and cabaret shows up and down the Riviera.
Only when I tried to envision the future did I flounder. Or when I read too many passages in my Book of Hours and remembered too much of what it had been like to be in love. To make love.
My mother found me sitting on the terrace staring out at the sea on May 16. I was especially pensive; it was the anniversary of the day I’d met Mathieu.
She sat beside me and took my hand, looking down at it as if she could read the lines etched there.
“Madame Dujols used to read my palm,” she said. “When I lived in Paris at your great-grandmother’s house. She told me so many things about you and your brother and your sisters—even though none of you had even been born. Even that you’d have a broken life line. And here it is.” She pointed.
I nodded. “She showed it to me, too. I think it must represent the time I almost drowned. When Sebastian saved me.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Maman, can a curse be reversed?”
“Sometimes.”
“How?”
“Each curse would have its own spell. Why?”
I shook my head. “Just something I was thinking about.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to start drawing a little. You’ve spent enough time processing what happened. You need to turn your back on the past and take some steps forward.”
I knew I looked better than when I’d arrived fresh off the ship. Taking walks in the sea air, sleeping well thanks to my mother’s elixirs, eating our cook’s food made with all fresh ingredients grown in the hills beyond our house, and drinking sparingly of the rosé wine the region was known for—Cannes was bringing me back to life. But was I ready to pick up my pencils again?
*
Sebastian, who lived at the Palm Beach end of the Croisette, only fifteen minutes away, visited and dined with us almost daily. He was delighted when I told him I’d begun drawing a little.
“That’s marvelous. I’ll start talking to clients about some portraits—”
“No.” My mother intervened. “Give your sister time. Don’t rush her on this, Sebastian.”
And I needed time. My thoughts were still in disarray. I wasn’t ready to paint, only sketch. And not compositions from my imagination but basic beach scenes or still lifes. I didn’t know what I wanted to tackle next. Not the Petal Mystique series. That was from another time and place. Not Exploring the Beast, either. I hadn’t learned what I’d hoped to learn from those pieces. I still didn’t know why we were driven to self-destruction. Why were we tempted by what was forbidden? Why was it that the path that would bring us peace was always the one we resisted the most?
“All in time,” my mother said, whenever I asked her how much longer it would be before I knew what I wanted to do next. Before I could see the steps I needed to take to get to the next plateau.
I knew she was right, but it was hard to wait. Impatience, like stubbornness, was ingrained in my character. Inherited from the woman who insisted that I now subdue both traits.
One afternoon, close to the end of May, Sebastian arrived and pestered me into going to an opening at his gallery that evening. So far, I’d avoided any fetes, but my parents had gone to Paris for the week. The truth was, I was lonely in the villa.
“Put on a pretty frock. I’m showing Marsden Hartley’s new canvases, but all eyes are going to be on the prodigal daughter of La Belle Lune returning home.”
My brother had wanted to be an artist when we were very young. We both clamored for brushes and paints when we were only toddlers. By the time we were six, my mother was giving us both art lessons. I had exceptional talent for one so young. Who knew whether it was the witchery I’d inherited or my own innate talent that guided my hand and my sense of color? Sebastian’s ability, though, was commensurate with his age.
My mother—fair in all things when it came to her children—still had his early work and mine hanging on her studio wall. Sebastian’s paintings had a six-year-old’s exuberance and delight. Mine were sophisticated, even for a L’école des Beaux-Arts student. Naive in terms of composition but with technique far beyond my years. I don’t say this out of pride or to boast. I didn’t work for this talent or fight for it. It was as much a gift as my red hair and orange-brown eyes.
Without the magick spark that would have elevated his work from that of an apprentice, Sebastian’s interest in learning how to paint quickly waned. The one trait we’d all—both daughters and son—inherited from our mother was her ambition, and so Sebastian moved on, searching for something at which he could excel.
By the time I regained my sight, my brother determined that one day he would be my dealer, the way Pierre Zakine was Maman’s. With my parents’ permission, he turned a long hallway in our house into an art gallery. As he continued to be interested in the business of art, my parents did everything they could to encourage him. I think my mother always felt a little bit of guilt that her daughters all had special abilities as part of their La Lune legacy, but Sebastian, because he was male, didn’t.
Sebastian’s interest grew throughout his adolescence, and he worked in a local gallery after school and during holidays. At twenty-one, he achieved his dream and opened the Duplessi Gallery on the Croisette next door to the Hotel Carlton. There he sold my work, some of my mother’s, and the paintings and sculptures of other artists he’d discovered through her and her contemporaries, most of whom had ateliers and took on students.