Starry Nights

by Daisy Whitney

  “I told you so,” she teases.

  “Holy blue irises in my hands.”

  “Now put them back.”

  I do the reverse, and the flowers are lapped back into the frame.

  “And now, perhaps you’d like to come on inside and see ‘my house,’ “ she says and sketches air quotes. “Just don’t take anything with you except the clothes on your back.”

  I take a quick look at her painting—odd without her in it. The space where she resides is empty, but not blank white. It’s filled in by other colors, but as if the colors have spilled into the middle. I reach my hand through and the midsection of the painting expands inward, creating a weird and warped sort of tunnel. There’s a rushing sound far away, like wind is whipping a secret passageway open.

  “Oh, this is definitely a ladies-first situation.”

  She steps inside the painting, and I follow her. The canvas folds in and closes up, calm again, quiet again, and I am on the other side.

  Chapter 20

  Inside the Cage

  I have been to Monet’s garden before. An hour west of Paris, it’s a popular destination for many visitors to France. You feel transported, like you’ve been swished back in time to the late 1800s when Monet painted so many of his masterpieces.

  But this. This is more than the real thing. This is like a high-definition version of the gardens, with orange dahlias that blaze like the sun and pink poppies the color of a seashell. All the flowers are in bloom. In front of me lies a blanket of pale-blue forget-me-nots that look like the Impressionist paintings they inspired because they are the Impressionist paintings they inspired. All the colors are more vibrant than any palette I’ve seen on the other side. They are a new color wheel, like someone spun all the colors in the world faster and faster, and made them vibrate, and now they’ve become more electrifying versions of themselves, like the notes played by a virtuoso violinist.

  “We’re not in Giverny,” I say, in a daze.

  “No, we’re not.”

  We are someplace else entirely. Someplace that doesn’t exist for anyone else, anywhere else. Someplace that exists only beyond a painting. The flowers, the pond, and the trees are fully alive, but also slightly gauzy, slightly surreal.

  “Do you want to see the bridge that Monet painted over and over?”

  “Heck yeah.”

  Clio points past some purple tulips that edge the pond. Hovering over the glassy-blue surface is the green bridge from Monet’s backyard. We walk along the pond, and I watch the water lilies, hazy and quivering in the water. We duck under weeping willows that brush our backs, and when I stand up straight again I step onto the Japanese bridge.

  “Do you hate it here, Clio?” I ask, because even though it’s a strange and wondrous place, it’s also her cell.

  “Sometimes, yes. I used to pretend there was a door at the end of this bridge. A plain, simple wooden door with an old-fashioned ring handle. Dark metal. You pull it open”—she demonstrates opening an invisible door, pulling easily—“and there. The other side.” She stays frozen like that, in her mimed pose. “I’m finally on the other side.”

  She turns back to me, and my heart aches for her for being stuck for so many years. “But this is escape too. With you,” she says, letting her voice trail off as her lips zero in on mine. She presses lightly at first, grazing my lips, and I let her lead, like she seems to want to. She could take me anywhere, and she has. I push my hands through her soft, golden hair, letting the strands form waterfalls through my fingers. She leans into my hands, like a cat, and lets out a small sigh.

  This is an escape, and like most it’s both lovely and temporary. I know this thing between us can’t last. She’ll either want to or need to leave soon enough, or her painting will fade from existence if the damage keeps spreading.

  “Why don’t you leave then?” I ask when we pull apart. But even if she left, what would she have? Where would—or could—she go? It’s as if she’s slipped through time.

  “I told you last night. Do you want me to just keep saying it over and over? Because of you.”

  I laugh. “It doesn’t really get old to know an awesome girl is into you.” I lie down with her on the bridge. The overhead sun warms us. “Even if I’m the only boy you’ve seen in more than a century.”

  “Oh. So I’m just a desperate girl then?” Her voice hardens. She has a tough edge.

  “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “How do you mean it, then?”

  I run my hands through my hair. “I just mean you’re beautiful and funny and smart and sweet and you could have anyone.”

  She scoffs at the last part, but all the things I feel when I draw adequately and turn in assignments adequately rise up. “It’s just, I’m hardly ever good enough. I’m like this interloper. I want to be an artist, but my drawings aren’t special, so I lead tours instead. And my parents are these hyper-overachievers—scholar and curator—and I can barely keep it together in school. And you come along, and I just think, why me?”

  “Because, really, I was looking for a scholar?”

  I manage a laugh. But I wonder if I should have shared all that. If I should have let the girl I’m falling for see my stupid insecurities.

  “Actually, I think I want a scientist,” she says, pretending to be deep in thought. “Someone who works in a lab and wears a lab coat. Oh wait. Not that. A banker. That would be great. Or how about an athlete? Since I just love sports so much. But no, instead, I like someone who likes the same things and who cares about me.” She touches my wrist as she talks and runs a finger across my palm. My worries slink away. I plant a soft kiss on the inside of her hand. “So I thought I would finally tell you who I am.”

  I prop myself up on one elbow, all eager and then some. “I want to know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like about my family?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where I’m from?”

  “Tell me everything.” I lace my fingers through hers. She squeezes back.

  She props herself on her elbow, mirroring me. “I have eight sisters,” she says. “Eight.”

  She says the number as if it’s the answer to a riddle, and I have to figure out the question. It lingers between us—eight—and I picture a swirling figure, two intertwined circles.

  “I’m like you,” she continues. “Only eternal.”

  It’s as if there were a few notes playing in your head and then someone turns up the radio and the song is blasting at full volume, and you know all the lyrics. “Do you have a sister named Calliope?” I ask, in a hushed breath.

  She nods happily, like she enjoys revealing this secret.

  “And another named Thalia?”

  A grin spreads across her face. “Yes. Though Thalia is more like a mom to me.”

  “I don’t remember the names of the others,” I admit, and I feel stupid for not remembering that Clio’s the name of one of the nine Muses. Which means Clio isn’t just a sixteen-year-old girl from Montmartre. She’s so much more. No wonder her painting needed so much protection. No wonder Suzanne Valadon made a fake to trick Renoir.

  “Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpischore, and Urania,” she says, rattling off the names of the other Muses from myth.

  “You’re a Muse? Like a real Muse? Not just like a human muse? But the Muses from forever and ever?”

  “As I live and breathe, I’m a Muse. An Eternal Muse. Thalia made me. She made all of us.”

  “Made you?”

  “Well, we weren’t just born from human moms. We were made to be Muses.”

  The sky could fall, the earth could split open, the garden could tear into two, and I wouldn’t notice. I am inside a painting with a Muse, and I know this second is just a mirage, or maybe it is hazier than that, a reflection of a mirage, a dream within a hallucination. If I was amazed at paintings coming to life, if I was astonishe
d to learn why I can see them, that’s nothing compared to learning this. That the girl I’m seeing secretly at night, in the museum, inside a painting, the girl no one else can see, is a Muse.

  She flicks her fingers, and a spray of silver dust lands on me.

  “Holy crap. You’re like Spiderman.”

  She shoots me a curious look. “Who’s that?”

  I forget that our cultural touchstones are not the same. That while we may be able to talk about classic art and music and literature, she won’t know much about modern creations—comic book characters, pop music, hit movies. “He’s this superhero who makes webs, super-strong spiderwebs, from his fingers.”

  “Sounds—how do you say it these days?—hot?”

  “Maybe to the girls,” I add, and it occurs to me that in some ways I am dating a foreigner once again. The difference is she’s not from another country; she’s from another time altogether. She is from all time.

  I touch her bracelets. They should be wispy, since they’re hairsbreadth thin, but they are as solid as a bank vault. “Is that where you keep the silver?”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “No. Our bracelets are our marks. They mark us as Muses. And I’m the Muse of painting.”

  “I thought Clio was the Muse of history or something?”

  “I was, but when painting became big during the Renaissance I switched.”

  “Switched,” I say, then laugh. “Like a mid-career change.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you do with that silver dust?”

  “It’s for inspiration.”

  “Oh, sure. No biggie.” I pretend to flick my fingers. “Hey, here’s my silver dust. Want to be inspired?”

  She pushes my shoulder and laughs. “You’re the one who drew shoes with it, silly.”

  “Why can’t I make silver dust with my fingers?”

  “Ooh, are you jealous of my Eternal Muse skills?”

  “Maybe a tiny bit. But what I really want to know is how on earth one of the nine Muses has been inside a painting since 1885?”

  “I told you. Renoir trapped me,” she says, and it all starts coming together why everyone has wanted her painting. The legend of two artists smitten with a girl was just that indeed. A story, cooked up to shield an even more valuable secret, the one of a Muse caught in a web she couldn’t escape from. “That’s why I didn’t tell you right away who I am. The last person—the last human I saw—essentially put me in a cage. I have a tiny bit of trust issues,” she says and holds her thumb and forefinger together to make light of the statement, but it’s a heavy one nevertheless. Of course she’d have trust issues. “But I felt that you were different from the first time I met you. I wanted to make sure. I wanted to tell you when I knew I could trust you.”

  “You can totally trust me, Clio. I would never do anything to hurt you. But why did he trap you?”

  “Oddly enough, it had to do with human muses.”

  “What?”

  “We used to talk, Renoir and Monet and Valadon and I. I was the Muse for all of them, and we had many discussions about the nature of art. So one day, Renoir and Valadon and I were in Monet’s garden and he was working on a painting, and the three of us were talking about what separates the good from the great. Valadon believed strongly that art could be for anyone and by anyone. But Renoir had firm beliefs that only great artists like himself should make art, be inspired, be known around the world. And I didn’t agree with him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him—I stood there in the garden, and I said, ‘I believe it’s my destiny to guide art and artists to a more open age where anyone can make art and anyone can show it.’ Things were different then, Julien. During his time. Art was very closed.”

  I nod. “I know. It’s changing. It’s starting to be different now. There’s public art, and graffiti art, and videos, and cartoons, and experimental music, and a million ways to express yourself.”

  “And that’s what I always believed would happen. That anyone could create art, that anyone could consume it. And I told him that. I said, ‘I know you will have a great role in this, and that humans, not just Muses, would do more of the work of inspiration.’ And let me tell you, he did not like that idea whatsoever. He said to me, ‘Only men and only great artists can make great art.’ Suzanne was shocked that he’d say that. She started to berate him, but then he trapped me.”

  “How? Did he stuff you into his canvas?”

  “He took my powers of inspiration and twisted them. Muse dust is very limited but very powerful, and binding. He had been painting the gardens, and said he wanted to show me what he’d done so far, so when I looked at his canvas, he took me by the wrists and flicked my fingertips onto the painting. And I went in it. It’s like a reversal, the way he used the dust on me. The last words I heard were, ‘Let’s see if a human muse can free you someday.’ ”

  Every part of me aches for her. For the bitterness, for the pain. For having everything you love, everything you believe, turned against you.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Clio,” I say, but how do you even begin to comfort someone who’s been caged for so long, even if the bars are beautiful?

  She holds out her hands as if to say c’est la vie. “I’ve gotten used to it, I suppose.”

  “So he did curse your painting. He cursed it with your own powers. That is sick and twisted. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “Kind of. It’s ironic in a way because the thing I believed wholeheartedly in, the thing he didn’t want to happen at all, he sort of made it happen. He put it all into motion through his arrogance.”

  “But here’s the thing. He’s still after the painting,” I say, and I feel terrible for telling her that Renoir is back, but I can’t keep it from her. I tell her about the haunting of Max, and then what I learned today about Valadon swapping a fake. There’s no point in hiding it. Whatever we’re in, we’re in it together. “It’s like he’s trying to get you back. I mean, you’re safe here. You’re totally safe at the museum. But why now? What is he so worried about?”

  “I don’t know. I was cut off from everything after the moment he trapped me.”

  “Besides, he didn’t know he had the fake. He didn’t know Suzanne swapped them out, so if he was crazed enough to trap you, you’d think he’d have—” I stop talking.

  “Destroyed the painting? Destroyed the fake that he thought was the real me?” she offers, finishing the thought I didn’t want to voice.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “He wasn’t violent. He was, oddly enough, a gentleman. And he never would do that to one of his creations. He loved his art more than anything in the world.”

  “Art can be a stupid, jealous thing.”

  “In a way, I kind of know how he felt. I used to love art more than anything. But then I started thinking more about how art was created and it never made sense to me why it was only the nine of us Muses who could bring about true and great inspiration. It didn’t feel right to me. And my beliefs started changing about making art, but also about what I wanted. The only problem is you can’t really want as an Eternal Muse. You just do. You just do the work.”

  “So let me free you then,” I say, because it’s the least I can do for her. “I mean, that’s what this curse or prophecy or whatever is about, right? Let a human muse free you. Let me free you from your painting. You said all I had to do was open the doors of the museum and let you out.”

  She looks at me and lays a soft hand on my cheek. “If you did, I’d just have to go back. I’d have to work. The painting is what binds me to the museum, and the museum is what lets me come out at night. Once I leave the museum, I’ll be bound again—to being a Muse all the time,” she says, and it’s such cruel beauty, the way these traps contain her. “I miss my sisters, but I know what it’s like being a Muse. We are always being called upon. We are always working. I used to love working all the time. But being in that painting for so many years, I’m n
ot the same. I don’t know what I want anymore.”

  I circle back to the call with Bonheur from this morning. “Clio,” I say tentatively. “This is going to sound weird, or maybe it’s not. But my friend called earlier today and said the Muses were asking about you. They wanted to know if you were okay.”

  She smiles. “And what did you tell him?”

  “I said you were fine.”

  Another smile. “Good answer, Julien.”

  “Do you want to see them? Do they need you back?”

  “I’d like to see them at some point, but I’m rather enjoying where I am this second. Besides, my sisters obviously filled in for me all those years. Just look at the walls here. I didn’t inspire Toulouse-Lautrec or Seurat. The later Cézannes aren’t mine, and the later Monets aren’t either, not the water lilies, not the Rouen Cathedral. Even your favorite Van Gogh was made without me. So my sisters must have filled in for me.”

  “Muse sick day,” I joke.

  “Extended leave of absence,” she adds.

  “So you’re going to take a few more days off?”

  “They got by this long without me. So I think I’ll play hooky a little longer,” she says. “That is, if you’ll keep having me?”

  “Is that a serious question?”

  She nods, and she looks so nervous.

  “Yes. Whatever you want, Clio,” I say, even though my heart is heavy inside because whatever we are will inevitably unwind. It will never be more than an escape into a garden that isn’t real.

  She brushes her lips against mine, and I melt into her. Then she turns shy and says in a quiet voice, “It’s always just been us girls, you know.”

  “Your world with your sisters? It’s just the nine of you?”

  She nods, and I sense what she’s trying to tell me. “Have you ever been involved with an artist though? The artists you inspire? I would think Muses and artists would be items a lot of the time. I mean, writers and singers are always talking about their muses.”