Wish You Were Here(32)

It was the moment after intimacy, when you weren’t joined to your lover anymore, but still felt him beating like blood inside you.

It was the moment where you had to remember how to breathe again.

It was the moment where nothing mattered more than the moment ago.

The model had red hair, and it was one of the only splashes of color on the background, which was tan, like cardboard. The field was white with bits of pastel in it. The woman—Rosa la Rouge—sat up half-nude. Behind her was a mirror, reflecting the direct gaze of the man who faced her from the bottom right of the painting: Lautrec himself, turned to the side, so you saw his bared shoulder and his profile, his beard and the wire edge of his glasses. The artist’s shoulder—a pallid green—was the only other bleed of color in the painting. I wondered if it was meant to flag illness, like his bent legs under the covers; or jealousy over this woman who would ultimately be the end of him.

Or maybe it was a flash of the hidden heart of a man most often described as aloof.

I shook myself away from the painting and continued down the hall to the bathroom, passing an open doorway. The room was familiar to anyone who had ever seen the Nightjars’ final album, with Kitomi and Sam Pride in that very bed. The only thing missing, of course, was the painting that, for the album cover, had been hung behind Kitomi.

But there were things in the room now that were not part of that photo. On one side of the bed was a nightstand with a stack of books, a glass half-full of water, a pair of purple reading glasses, some hand cream. On the other was a nightstand with only one item on it: a man’s wedding ring. Neatly aligned on the floor was a battered pair of men’s leather slippers.

I backed away, feeling even more voyeuristic now than I ever had seeing Kitomi half-naked on an album cover, and went to the bathroom. When I emerged, Kitomi herself was standing in front of the painting.

“His cousin was a medical student,” she said. “He let Henri scrub in and do paintings of surgery.” She turned, a smile in her eyes. “I’ve always thought of him by his first name, not Toulouse-Lautrec,” she said. “He was hanging over my bed for years, after all.”

I took a few steps toward her. I wondered if I should tell her that I knew all that. But Eva had warned me to stay silent.

“He was placed in a sanitorium because of alcoholism and syphilis, and to prove to doctors he was sane enough to leave, he painted images of the circus from his memory. But he still died at thirty-six.” Kitomi’s mouth twisted. “Some people burn too bright to last long.”

Her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “Auctioning it off feels like an amputation. But it doesn’t seem right to have it in Montana, either.”

Montana.

I thought of Kitomi saying she wanted to turn the page.

This was not, I realized, a woman who wanted a clean break, a new life. This was a woman who was so tied to her dead husband she was going to live out the dream he didn’t.

I thought: Eva is going to kill me. But I turned and said, “I have an idea.”

On the way to El Muro de las Lágrimas, or Wall of Tears, Beatriz and I detour past the remains of a mermaid. Yesterday, she stretched at the edge of the beach where the dry sand met the wet. Scales of shells mounded her tail; her hair was a tangle of seaweed. But today, our sand art has been all but swallowed by the sea.

“I bet it’s totally gone by curfew,” Beatriz says.

“Tibetan monks spend months making sand mandalas and then they brush them away and throw them into a river.”

She turns, pained. “Why?”

“Because it’s not permanent and that’s the point.”

Beatriz looks at the ruins of our sculpture. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, and she picks up her water bottle and starts walking. “Are you coming, or what?”

Today she is taking me to a site that is part of a former penal colony. It’s a two-hour hike through parched terrain, past scrub and cacti and, yes, poison apples. Even though we have left early, the sun is strong enough to make my shirt stick to my back with sweat, and I can feel my scalp burning where my hair is parted.

Beatriz is still cagey with me, but there are moments when she lets down her guard. Once or twice I’ve made her laugh. It may be foolish to think that she’s any less sad in my company, but at least I have eyes on her. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any fresh cuts on her arms.

“I thought art was supposed to be something you left behind so everyone would remember you,” Beatriz says.

“Something doesn’t have to be finished and hanging on a wall for you to remember who made it,” I say. “You ever heard of Banksy? He’s a British street artist and activist. One of his paintings—Girl with Balloon—was auctioned off by my company in 2018. Someone bought it for $1.4 million … ?and as soon as the gavel came down, the canvas started to slip out of the frame, in shreds. On Instagram, he posted Going, going, gone, and said he’d built a shredder into the frame intentionally, in case the work ever sold at auction.”

“Were you there?”

“No, it happened in England.”

“What a waste of money.”

“Well,” I say, “actually, it went up in value when it was torn into ribbons. Because the real art wasn’t the painting—it was the act of destroying it.”