He was waiting for me when the taxi pulled up to the address. He helped me out and then, still holding my arm, steered me in the direction of the Palais de la Découverte. After we passed a small white sculpture of the Swiss Alps in front of vine-covered columns, he led me to a stone staircase seemingly heading nowhere. We descended the broken steps and walked through an archway and into another world. The sounds of traffic from the Champs-élysées were gone, magically replaced by bird calls and splashing water.
Maples and bamboo trees dappled shade on the sinuous pathways. Lilacs, roses, and vines heavy with wisteria perfumed the air. We were lost in green. Awash in nature. There in the middle of Paris, we had found an overgrown garden, magnificent in its obsolescence.
When I was a girl, my father took me on expeditions in the Languedoc region. We’d leave behind the safe, familiar world I knew to climb mountains and explore ruins, while he’d tell me fantastic tales about the Cathars and the Knights Templar.
Now Mathieu is the one introducing me to other worlds, right here in the middle of Paris, all unlike anything I’ve ever known, full of sensations and emotions, ecstasies and delights.
Past the wooden footbridge, we wandered through arches overgrown with ivy. A meandering pathway led to a pond, where we stopped to watch the last rays of sun illuminate orange carp as they slowly circled their home.
The quiet was profound. Rock alcoves offered benches, but we kept walking past the pond till we reached a large marble sculpture.
“It’s titled The Dream of the Poet. An homage to Alfred de Musset,” Mathieu told me. “Quite a romantic one, too. Look at how he’s daydreaming about all these lovely women. It’s said each was one of the loves of his life.”
Orange and lemon trees scented the air. A bird whistled. The stream rushed by.
“Did he write the line in the note you sent this morning?” I was hoping Mathieu would say he had written it himself.
“He did.”
“Will you write me a poem one day? A poem of your own?”
He shook his head in warning. “That part of my life is over.”
“Not if you bring me to places like this. Not if you can see all this beauty and respond to it.”
“There’s only one way left that I know how to respond to beauty . . . Only one way the war didn’t destroy,” he said, and then bent down and kissed me.
Even when I anticipate the sensation of his lips on mine, every kiss takes me by surprise. How many kisses have we given each other by now? A hundred? A thousand? Each is still new and shocking. I can’t describe them, but I can paint them. Bursts of molten colors, cadmium reds, flowing into ruby pinks.
This afternoon, there in the park, Mathieu was hungry. He pulled me into one of the hidden alcoves, where we sat on a bench and the kissing resumed. He opened the top button on my blouse and put his hand against my neck. I opened the next two buttons myself and pushed his hand down inside. When his fingers sneaked under my silk brassiere and found my breasts, I lost my breath.
It wasn’t enough anymore to have him touch me. I wanted to feel his skin. Had to feel it. I worked my hands under his jacket and undid his shirt, to find his warm and smooth chest muscles. I moved my hands around to clasp him tighter and then felt the hard ropes of his scar, bumpy and uneven.
For a second, I was overwhelmed with the horror of the damage, but then his hand cupping my breast, fondling my nipple, made me forget. My fingers continued down his chest. I pulled his shirt open and then my own. I lifted my brassiere and pressed my naked chest to his. The feel of our skin touching awoke a need in me that was more powerful than anything I’d felt so far.
“I want more,” I whispered to him.
“What more?”
“I want you inside me. Now.”
“Here?”
I nodded.
The park was deserted, and twilight was descending on Paris. Mathieu found a mossy bed hidden behind a copse of evergreens and laid me down in the green and purple shadows. Joining me, he leaned on his elbow and stared down into my eyes.
“You are sure?”
I nodded again.
He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. As gentle as his words and hands were, as soft as his lips were, there was a fierceness in his eyes that had turned them dark blue-gray.
I reached up under my skirt and pulled down my lace and silk bloomers, inviting cool air onto the warm place. I took Mathieu’s hand and boldly put it there, between my legs, so he could feel how ready I was for him.
It was the first time a man ever touched me there, stroked me there, caressed me there . . . All my words disappeared into colors—swirls of orange-hot red bursting into citrine, whorling into canary yellow, whirling into a light so bright it burned white. Then the white opened and bloomed into a million shades of red and purple and pink.
“I want to know all of you,” I whispered.
He undid his belt buckle, and I heard the sound of him unfastening his pants.
I reached for him, bold and brazen. Of course, I’d seen statues and nude models at L’école. Studied erotic postcards with friends when I was younger. I knew what to expect, but, like his kisses, like the feel of his naked chest on mine, I had no idea of how the experience would feel.
I ran my fingers down his ready, smooth shaft and around it, grasping it. He thrust just a little with his hips in a forward motion, and I realized I was doing the same dance against his hand between my legs.
A burst of a deeper red-purple flashed behind my eyes and surged to a royal blue as I guided him into me.
How did I know what to do? Why wasn’t I scared? How was it possible that there was so little pain? There was only a momentary lime-green splash of resistance that burst through the scarlet when he entered me, and then it was gone. The sounds of his breathing and the stream and the birds turned into indigo and cobalt and pine-green music rushing over rocks. Sparks of cherry red and mandarin sapphire swirled into ruby, swirled into amethyst, swirled into turquoise, into violet.
And then the maelstrom of colors all pulsed and surged at the same time, all scarlet and ultramarine and lapis and vermillion and emerald and carmine and crimson, like a dam bursting out of its confines and flooding me with an entire rainbow of sensation.
“Now,” he whispered. “Now . . .” And then another whisper. “Now you know all of me. I know all of you.”
Chapter 22
As June moved into July, my mother’s tinctures continued to help me improve. I slept better, ate better. But they did little to restore my creativity. The days passed without painting. Without creating a single drawing that depicted any originality. The quality of my roses and leaves, my grapes and peaches, improved but were bland recreations of nature.
The hot summer days stretched out ahead of me as the bees buzzed around my subjects. I didn’t know what would become of my life if I never painted again. I read and reread my Book of Hours, losing myself in memories. Even though only a little more than four years had passed, it seemed a lifetime ago. Sometimes I didn’t miss Mathieu as much as I yearned for the girl I’d been, so full of wonder and hope and passion.