The Light of Paris(67)

“Our eyes do much of the work.” He touched his face as he spoke, gesturing to his own eye, and Margie watched his movements, those impossibly long, slender fingers, the fine bones of his face. He was like a painting himself, all perfect lines and balanced symmetry, the warmth of his skin and the gold in his hair a perfect match for the light coming through the gallery’s front window. “It is a miracle, yes? The Impressionists know precisely how to balance clarity and color so we will see something that is not clear at all.”

He walked her through the gallery, pointing at the paintings that had come between the Impressionists and his work, and though Margie could not have named the progression of styles, she could see it happening from one painting to the next, images blurring and then refocusing, growing clear and then unclear again in new ways. Figures grew square and folded in on themselves as though they had been caught in a broken mirror, or stayed as clear as the lines of a portrait while turning nonsensical—landscapes filled with trees covered in human eyes, a woman’s ball gown with a basket beneath it like a hot-air balloon, both familiar and unsettling.

“Do you like this one?” Sebastien asked. He stopped in front of a painting of a woman dressed for a party in a pink dress, the skirt falling into uneven, loose lines at the bottom, so you could almost see it fluttering. She wore a long rope of pearls and her hair was shingled fashionably close to her head. Though she wasn’t looking at the artist, it was clear she was aware of being watched, and she was used to it. She wasn’t quite beautiful; her nose was too strong and her eyes too wide, and she was broad-shouldered and turned in such a way that she took up nearly the entire frame. There were none of the mind-bending mirror-folds of some of the other paintings, where it looked more like the subject had been folded and refolded like paper, but neither were her angles entirely clear, and her edges were soft, as though she were in motion. A curious feeling of jealousy settled in Margie’s chest.

“I do. She’s beautiful. And the painting is almost . . . alive. It’s like she knows I’m looking at her, but she doesn’t want to look back.”

“This is mine,” Sebastien said proudly. “I am glad you like it.”

“This is yours?” Margie breathed, and she turned back to the painting, looking at it again, now less as a piece of art and more a link to its creator. She wondered what she could learn about Sebastien from this—who was the woman and what was their relationship that she refused to look at him? And how did he know her form so precisely, the shape of her under the dress, the way it fell on her body? Margie blushed to think of it, and then called herself silly—the woman was fully dressed, after all. And she wasn’t classically beautiful, maybe Sebastien saw something in her, maybe artists saw beauty differently, maybe he saw Margie differently.

“I love it. What do you call it?”

“The title? A Portrait of Cécile. Come, see this one too.” Stepping toward the painting beside it, he waved her over and Margie followed. He was clearly proud of his work, and she was glad she responded to it, glad she saw his talent. He was, surprisingly, her best friend in Paris, though her mother would have been scandalized that she regularly stepped out with a young man, just the two of them, but her mother wouldn’t have understood anything about this place, this life. Margie hardly understood it herself. If she had told her parents about Zelli’s, about the cafés and the Surrealists and the bars, they would have thought it wild. Depraved, even. And here it was all of an evening. The rules were different in Paris. The rules were different when you were free and the strange evening light of Paris worked its magic on you. Margie was different in Paris. She felt it, she saw it when she looked in the mirror or caught her own eye in a shop window as she passed. Her face looked different, her cheekbones higher, her eyes wider, her collarbone sharp and clean above the neckline of her dresses. And she felt lighter, as though whatever had tied her to the ground in America had been loosened.

“This one I call Summer Ball.” The canvas was wide, long, more than six feet on its side, Margie guessed, a panorama, a horizon, but instead of being filled with a landscape, there were a hundred figures as if at a dance. It was outside; Margie could see trees in the background, some well-behaved bushes, and a row of tables filled with people sitting together. She recognized the gold and the purple of a Paris summer evening. And miraculous as it was, every one of the people in the painting seemed to have his or her own story. Each pair of figures its own tableau. This one a couple who had just met, their bodies held apart, barely turning toward each other, beginning to open their secrets. This pair deeply in love, barely an inch of space between them, though there was plenty of room on the dance floor, eyes closed, cheek to cheek, as if no one else existed—Margie could almost see them swaying gently, more slowly than the music—for them the music didn’t matter at all. These two a couple married for many years and unhappy, these two a couple married for many years and still very much in love. A couple being forced into marriage, a couple with a great sadness, a couple with a delightful secret to keep. She couldn’t stop looking at the painting, from face to face, reading their stories. “It’s like a novel,” she said at last, her voice barely a breath.

“Do you think so?” Sebastien asked, and she could tell he was excited by it, glad she had seen the stories he had created.

“It is,” Margie said, and she pointed out the couples as she told him what she saw, the relationships and histories and futures represented so carefully with the strokes of his brush.