The last time Paloma Rosen presided over a large dinner party she was twenty-nine and married, and living in a high-ceilinged apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement that received wonderful northern light and had immediate views of Boulogne Park and the Eiffel Tower. It was a long, cool place owned by her husband’s family, and while Jean-Pierre was at the office, she painted in the deliberately unfurnished room he called, without irony, l’atelier de ma femme. That last dinner party had been splendid: artists, writers, philosophers, and poets Paloma had known for years or a day. Although Jean-Pierre could not follow the corkscrewing conversations—“Au-delà de mon métier,” as he said—he was a fine host in other ways, smiling and laughing and unstinting with the Besons’ store of fine wine. Paloma had been a vision, all pale definitive beauty. Dressed exquisitely in a long-sleeved white gown, slashed open from clavicle to sternum, waves of glossy brown hair falling down her bare back. She was applauded as the chef de cuisine at the end of the evening, which did not occur until the early hours of the new day. She and Jean-Pierre had fallen into bed when the light was breaking, made love, and did not wake again until the cocktail hour.
Not the next day, or even the next week, but the following season, early spring in Paris, she knew with certainty that both painting and marriage were too confining. In her studio that spring afternoon, Paloma stepped away from her canvas in progress and moved to the windows. Thunderclouds roofed the sky, the birch trees along the sidewalk, and the Eiffel, were shrouded in fog, and the park, spread out below in virgin green, was empty; no one strolling along the romantic promenades, not even the old man who led his crippled dog on a long walk in all kinds of weather.
She thought of how her husband of five years loved her, and was mostly competent in bed, and did not press the issue of their unborn children, and showered her with handmade jewelry soldered together with diamonds. But their years together had demonstrated there was something too angelic about Jean-Pierre, he lacked imaginative bad habits, could not fathom the internal propulsion that drove her. Paloma Rosen was made more sternly, and although Jean-Pierre would crumple, her defection wrenching his heart, she could not continue on if she wanted to live according to the precepts of her own personal faith, distant from any notion of religion.
Paloma considered the tangential selflessness of her disappearing act: Jean-Pierre would recover and be better off with a soft woman who wanted to become softer still, who wanted her belly to rise and her breasts to fill with milk, who would only ever use her hands for love and tenderness. Paloma understood what she had long known: she was not that soft woman, this sweet and tender life was not what she wanted, and painting was not her way forward.
By four, the thunderheads had released a slanting rain that hit the cobblestones hard, creased the tall windowpanes, and Paloma saw herself walking into the fog a free woman. Of course, there would be legalities, the divorce and all of that, but Jean-Pierre was an avocat and he could properly attend to the particulars, or instruct someone else to do so. At some point, she would have to sign documents severing their bond, but that could wait for future instructions she would leave at their bank, about how and where she could be reached, when she herself knew.
By five, her tubes of cadmium red, Prussian green, titanium white, lamp black, vermillion, marigold, and cerulean, and the thin and thick brushes made from hog bristles, red sable, and the hairs of other unfortunate animals, and the cans of thinner and turpentine, and her stained wooden palettes and knives were neatly packed away in boxes. She wrapped up in old sheets the blank canvases she had stretched herself and nailed into place on sturdy wooden frames. Against a wall, she set all of her finished work, made sure her name marked every piece. Perhaps one day these paintings, the last she would ever make, might be worth something, and she wanted Jean-Pierre to remember her fondly in the unfolding years, to possibly benefit from his tenuous connection to her, which would have faded by then.
Jean-Pierre was still at his office when Paloma placed the keys to their apartment on the tray atop the antique table in the blue foyer. She carried two bags: one of clothing that would see her on her travels, the second of her treasures—sketchpads and journals and a few favorite books. She debated the dramatics of leaving a note. To disappear without one was preferable, but Jean-Pierre, though he had the simple views of a man born into a well-to-do life, did not deserve that, he was good after all, and so Paloma set down her bags, and in his navy silk-walled study, she penned a few lines on his fine stationery, cribbed Jean-Pierre’s name across a matching envelope, sealed the end of their marriage within, took the envelope back into the foyer, and left their relationship next to her keys.
The front door solemnly fell into its lock, protecting all she no longer cared about, was leaving behind. Out in the hallway, sepulchral light streamed through the tall framing windows at each end, and she saw that the angry rain had been tamed, a drizzle now, more mist than drops. Her heels clicked on the seafoam tiles as she walked the long corridor toward the lift.
She passed M. Alvien’s door, where his wooden table with the indefatigable vase of dried flowers still stood just to the left, there the day Jean-Pierre carried her over the threshold of their own apartment, she in her wedding gown, a delicate, lacy confection that served up her breasts, something Marie Antoinette might have worn lounging at Versailles, and in the blue foyer of her new home, Jean-Pierre had unbuttoned every one of the hundred ivory satin buttons that trailed down her spine while she, out of character, stood docile as a lamb.
She reached the Montes’ front door and there, on the wall, was a finger-painting made by Luc Monte during a morning spent with Paloma when he was seven. She saw Luc sometimes, swooping into the lift on his skateboard. He was a big boy now, nearly twelve, his nose too large for the under-face that spoke of his childhood, the shadow of distinct, distasteful hair emerging on his upper lip, and whatever artistic grain was once within him had disappeared. As far as she knew, the painting she was looking at was the only piece of art Luc Monte would ever create; she thought it unlikely he was destined for anything great.
No matter how hard and fast Paloma pressed the button, the lift was not rising, and she felt suspended, neither staying nor leaving, until, at last, it finally juddered to a stop on the seventh floor. For the first time in all her years living a married life in the lovely apartment with a husband who adored her, painting her pictures like a cossetted housewife whose art was viewed as merely a hobby, the filigreed door with its artisan-hammered metal leaves cut into her skin when she pulled it open. There was blood on her fingers, a cut across her palm. When she pulled the door shut and descended to the ground, her own blood sent her off, a crimson smear that told her this version of Paloma Rosen was already gone.
She headed to Gare de Lyon, the station from which she would travel by train to the first of several stops in other countries, on a quest to discover a material with which she wanted to work, an expressive material she could love over the long haul of the life she planned to create for herself. She wanted something tough and masculine, the kind of substance that required strength, that would decimate those who possessed no true bravery, some magical substance that once in her hands would make everyone forget the work had been done by a woman.