I kept thinking about what Picasso had said to me as I drove home to Mougins from Cannes, about confronting my time in New York and discovering what it meant to me by putting it on canvas. Did I even know how to do that anymore?
When I reached my little house, I sat down at the table to sketch it out. But my hand refused. The effort overwhelmed my fingers so badly they started to shake. I couldn’t even draw a straight line.
I threw my silver pencil against the wall, where it left a long graphite scratch. Turning my back on my work space, I went upstairs to pour myself a glass of brandy to help dull the pain and lull me to sleep.
That night, I dreamed that I was a portrait. An old Renaissance painting missing pigment, full of craquelure, with a rip down the middle. Picasso was working on my restoration. He cleaned and restretched the canvas and then began the inpainting on the sections with the most damage—my right hand and my eyes.
I was then standing beside him, both of us inspecting the portrait. Looking closely, I could see where the repairs had been done. They had become part of the painting.
“One and whole, together, the loss and repair belonging to each other,” Picasso said. “Over time, all paintings are damaged one way or another. A painting cannot survive a long time unscathed.”
I woke up feeling even more frustrated. Picasso could talk all he wanted about how art exorcises demons, but it was all words. He couldn’t fix me. And if I couldn’t find someone who could, I feared for my sanity. Without painting, I was becoming less than myself.
*
Sebastian was patient as long as he could be. But by the end of June, he was frustrated, too. He arrived at the studio one day with lunch—a cold chicken, a baguette, a wedge of Saint-André cheese, and a bottle of rosé wine.
At first, I thought he was just there to spend time with me, and I was grateful for the company. I hadn’t lived in the south since I was a teenager, and most of my friends had married and had families or had moved away, some to Paris, where there might be more opportunities and more men. And even though Sebastian continued to invite me to openings and dinners with his friends, I declined. The questions they posed disturbed me. I knew that Matisse and the others meant well, but their advice was of no use. I could draw and paint only the most mundane compositions. My creativity slept on. Only with the blindfold would it awaken. And I was too afraid to put the blindfold on.
“Delphine, you need to work. Not for my sake—though I do miss the income my share of your shadow portraits brought in—but because you are miserable. You can’t live up here alone just taking walks in the woods. Maman is going to start blaming me for isolating you.”
“No, she agrees that the quiet and the woods are helping to keep me sane.”
“I want you to take a commission—”
“But I told you no.”
“Yes, for weeks you’ve been telling me no. But I also know you are unhappy not painting.”
“It’s none of your concern,” I spit out, as the anger rose in me. I took a long sip of the cold, fruity wine, tasting strawberries and apples. I needed to get my temper under control.
Sebastian laughed. “Of anyone, it is most certainly my concern. Together you and I built your reputation and mine. We are tied, not just as twins but as partners. I am your manager and dealer.”
“Then you’re fired.”
“Delphine, don’t say things you don’t mean. I can’t know how you feel, but I can feel the lack of joy in your life. I can see it in your eyes. I can’t watch it anymore. It’s as if it is happening to me.”
I shrugged. “You have other artists to sell.”
“You’re being selfish. Don’t you know how much this is troubling Maman and Papa and your sisters? And me—most of all me? We’re part of a whole, and my other half is broken, and I don’t know what to do.”
“I’m not a piece of china. You can’t mend me. Why does everyone keep seeing me as in need of being fixed?”
“Because we can all see that you are not yourself.”
“I’m sick of talking about this. To you, to Maman. I’m going to figure out something else to do with my life and move on. You did. Why can’t I?”
My brother winced as if I’d struck him, then quickly recovered. “Tell me you are happy and well and satisfied. Look me in the eye, and tell me that, and I’ll stop.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“Then let me help you.”
“How? Not even Maman’s spells are helping.”
“But she’s not your manager. You can start with some regular portraits. Just to get your hands moving again.”
“But they will be so ordinary. Worse than that, I can’t even draw a straight line these days,” I said. “Anyone can do a regular portrait. It will be the theater posters all over again. Every time I completed one, I felt worse, because they were just competent illustrations.”
“Do you remember Mrs. Gould?” he asked.
It was one of the first commissions he’d set up for me. I was on my winter holiday, home after my first semester at L’école. Sebastian escorted me to the Hotel Carlton, not far from his gallery, on a bright morning for a sitting with Mrs. Eleanor Gould, a wealthy society doyenne from the United States.
After taking coffee and chatting about her impressions of Cannes and Nice, I set up my supplies. The blindfold, the sketch pad, the pencils, and my watercolors. I would do the preliminary drawings that day and also capture her skin tone and hair color. And then I would create the final portrait in my studio, after which Sebastian would present it to her.
I put on my blindfold.
“So it’s true?” she asked.
I lifted the silky coverlet from my eyes. “What is true?”
“That you wear a blindfold.”
“It is.”
“I thought it was just a story, an exaggeration. That maybe you just soothed your eyes before you started and someone got it wrong. How mad! How can you see?”
“Well, I’ve been looking at you for a while now. And I will study you again without the blindfold after I do the first sketches. Is that all right?”
She was nervous and fluttery, quite like a little hummingbird. Deceptively feeble in appearance, the bird’s wings are actually so strong that they can hover in the air for long periods of time.
With the blindfold on, I sketched Mrs. Gould with a man I assumed to be Mr. Gould in a bed of fine satins and lace and many pillows. The two people in the bed were lying back to back, neither of their faces visible, but obviously lovers and just as obviously satiated. Between them on the pillow was a diaphanous black flower, and above the bed was a burst of light.