by M. J. Rose
Muffy said she had been worried about me since I’d dropped out of sight and wanted me to come to her birthday party the following week.
“You can’t just hide away forever. We all miss you.”
“I won’t put on my blindfold if I come.”
The waiter brought over our steaming cappuccinos, a drink Parisi had introduced to New York.
“That’s fine. I don’t want to hire you. I want you to have some fun. You look …” She hesitated. “You look like you need some. And you need to show off that new do—it’s so brazen.”
As she sipped her coffee, I thought she’d chosen the perfect word. I felt broken and brazen. I was a miserable artist, barely making my own way in New York. Maybe it was time for me to get out of the studio and put some distance between me and the Clara and Monty incident.
*
“Delphine? What did you do to your hair?” Tommy asked.
I’d only been at the party for a half hour and had only had one glass of champagne. I wasn’t ready to see my former fiancé quite yet. It had been almost a month since he’d delivered his coup de grace and severed our relationship. But there he stood, examining me with a disturbing scrutiny.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course.”
“You look …” He trailed off just as Muffy had.
“How do I look?”
“Different.”
“Is that so?”
“Wild.”
I laughed.
“Your hair …”
“Yes, I dyed it.”
“But it’s almost orange.”
“I prefer copper.”
“And your dress.”
“You sound quite idiotic, Tommy. Are you going to dissect me completely?”
“Well, the dress makes you look practically naked.”
“It’s no business of yours, but I’m not even close to naked. It’s simply a flesh-colored slip with a sheer chemise over it.”
He was still staring. Then he leaned down and said, sotto voce, “I miss you terribly.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t suppose you might let me take you home later tonight?”
I laughed sardonically. “No, I don’t suppose I might.”
“I’ve heard you are painting couples mating.”
I burst out laughing. So Muffy had been talking about the paintings I’d shown her, and word had already gotten around.
“Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. I call them ‘Exploring the Beast.’ I’m just following in the surrealist footprints of what’s being done in Paris.”
“But you are a woman. All of the Surrealists are men.”
“I see you’ve been listening to your parents’ dinner conversation. So they are, and so I am,” I said, as I drained my glass of champagne. “Be my savior, will you, and get me a refill?” I held out my glass.
“You’re acting as if you’ve had enough.”
“One can never have enough champagne.”
“One might not, but you have. Delphine, you’re not yourself.”
“No, I suppose not. I looked death in the face and didn’t much like what I saw.”
Tommy, though not strong enough to stand up to his parents and fight their boycott of him marrying a Jewess, was still fond enough of me to be worried and to do something that in the end had unforeseen and far-reaching ramifications.
For a long time that spring and into the summer, I cursed him and his meddling and hated him for interfering with my life after he’d walked out of it. Looking back from a distance, though, it’s clear that in his way, he did, in fact, save my life. My depression, drinking, and dissolute ways had me headed for disaster.
But three weeks after Muffy’s party, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in late March, when I heard the knock on my door, I didn’t know that.
I’d woken up and begun drawing without bothering to dress. I often did that in those days. My animal series kept me in a state of perpetual bewilderment. I’d expected to find understanding of our impulses and impetus to embrace danger, but insight still eluded me. I kept waiting for that ephemeral spark to come back into my world that had disappeared since I’d put my blindfold away in a glove box. For good, I had thought.
Wearing a silk robe with a green and blue circular pattern on it, and nothing underneath, I sat at my easel and drew a man with a faun’s head, lying on a zebra rug in a jungle that was similar to Gauguin’s but a bit more realistic. The man on the rug was, of course, nude. The woman sitting astride his midsection looked a bit too much like me, with her short curly hair, extreme cheekbones, pouty lips, and flashing eyes.
I’d stopped drawing twice so far to check my position in the mirror, to figure out first a bend in an arm and then a curve in a leg. I had some charcoal smudges on my cheek and on my breast where my robe gaped open. There were black fingerprints on the label of the bottle of wine sitting beside me. I’d started drinking early that day.
When I heard the knock, I pulled the robe a bit tighter and opened the door, expecting it to be the food I’d arranged to have the restaurant on the corner send up. Clifford was away, and I was a dreadful cook. Making plans took too much energy. After the long days of frustrating drawing, I needed something to eat before working all night or venturing out to another party.
But when I opened the door, the man who stood there wasn’t holding a tray of food. In one sweep, his evergreen eyes went from my face to my chest and past me to the canvas of the fawn on a rug, naked and tumescent.
“Mon Dieu, Delphine! I was in touch with Clifford, who said he was watching out for you. But then Tommy wrote and said you were in bad shape. He certainly didn’t exaggerate,” said my twin, as he sauntered past me into my studio, taking in the bleak scene. “Thank goodness he alerted us. And thank goodness you broke off your ridiculous engagement to him. Not only is he totally unsuitable and ordinary, but it would have meant your remaining in New York forever. And that would have been completely unacceptable.”
My brother, to whom I was closer than anyone else, whose hand I had been born holding, who managed my career from afar and sold my paintings in his gallery, rearranged my robe on my shoulders and then took me in his arms.
Sebastian towered over me by at least six inches. I tucked my head under his as he rubbed my back in little circles, the way he had done all my life. I wanted to cry, but this time no tears came.
Chapter 12
“You need to come home with me, Delphine.”
Sebastian and I were sitting on my velvet-covered couch, drinking the strong coffee he’d insisted on brewing instead of the wine I wanted to pour. Outside, the sun was setting. I hadn’t turned on the lamps, and my studio had taken on the gloom of twilight.
“No, I live here now, in New York.” I gestured to the window from which one could see the rooftops and water towers that constituted my city view.
“Maman could see with her scrying that things had gone terribly wrong. She was coming to bring you home.”
“Why didn’t she, then?”
“She contracted some kind of food poisoning, so I took her stateroom.”
“Maman never gets sick.” It was true. My mother had uncanny health, thanks to the potions and elixirs she made.
“Oysters.” He shrugged. “It is possible for even Maman to succumb to a poisonous crustacean.” He stood. “I’m getting more coffee. Do you want some?”
“No.”
He walked to the kitchenette, still chattering. “We have tickets to return home on the SS Ile de France on Tuesday. Enough time to pack you up, pay the bills, and leave.”
“But I’m not going with you, Sebastian. I’m happy here.”
“Happy?” Sebastian laughed sarcastically. “You are as far from happy as I’ve ever seen you. It’s as if you are somehow getting pleasure from the pain you are in. It’s masochistic. It’s hard to leave something that’s broken and do the work of moving on, but you must.”
“I don’t understand anythin
g you just said.”
“I have a friend studying psychiatry in Zurich, and he’s explained to me the theories being expounded at the clinic there. You need to come back home. You need to remember who you were and give yourself a chance to reclaim that, Delphine. You don’t have to stay in France forever if you don’t want to, just until the end of summer. I’ve put together a dozen commissions for you.”
“I can’t do shadow portraits anymore. Ever.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t. Ever again.”
“We’ll talk about it, but if you really can’t, then fine. You won’t have to put on the blindfold. We’ll arrange for ordinary commissions. As if”—he winked at me—“any of your work could be ordinary.”
When we were children, that wink had been a secret we shared. His acknowledgment that we were twins, connected in ways that our other siblings weren’t.
“Come home with me, Delphine. We’ll go to the beach and get all brown. Maman will make magick spells to cure you, and Papa will spoil you with presents. You can come back here in the fall if you must, but you can’t stay now …” He spread his arms out. “It isn’t healthy for you anymore.”
My brother and I didn’t look very much alike. I favored my mother, with my russet hair and honey eyes that flashed almost orange. Sebastian looked like my father, tall, with hair the color of raven’s wings and dark forest-green eyes.
“I am fine,” I insisted.
“Are you blind? Look around. There are plates and glasses everywhere. Clothes dropped wherever you took them off. Empty bottles of wine gathering dust.” His jaw was tight, his hands clenched into fists. His anger was a red aura around him.
But I was angry, too. We never referred to the time I’d lost my eyesight. He knew better than to raise the specter of my nightmare, and yet he had. And so callously. And he knew it.
“I’m sorry, Delphine. But you are being so stubborn. Always stubborn.” Picking up his cup, he stomped into the kitchen and made more noise than was necessary, first cleaning out the coffeepot and then starting a new one.
I often felt Sebastian’s fury inside my own chest, like a ball of fire, burning me. I also sensed his fear as cold, puckering my skin. His sadness affected me, too. As if the ground under me was giving way.
His pleasures eluded me, though. When passion overwhelmed him, I wasn’t aware of it. If he was happy, the only way I could tell was by hearing laughter in his voice.
My mother always said my judgment was clouded when it came to the negative aspects of my brother’s character. She loved him, too, of course; he was her son. But she said she saw his faults and I didn’t. How could I? He was my savior and protector. Maman said I made him into a star that shone too brightly and that it wasn’t good for either of us. Whenever she could, she would point out one of his failings, but instead of listening to her, I’d become defensive and argue with her that she wasn’t being fair to him.
Now Sebastian walked over to my easel to inspect the drawing of the faun on the zebra rug. The silence in the studio was broken only by the sound of a bird outside. After a long minute, he turned back to me.
“A debauched life, Delphine, is poison for a talent like yours. You were given an amazing gift of sight and the ability to translate what you see onto a canvas. You create mystery and magic. You can’t throw it away over people you barely knew who made mistakes that weren’t your fault and a man who didn’t have the guts to stand up to his parents for you.”
“I know. Tommy was …” I sighed. “I’d been wrong to think that we ever had a chance.”
“You couldn’t have known. Clifford told Maman. Tommy insulted you by throwing you over, and his parents have insulted our entire family. What confuses me is that I know you didn’t love him. So why—”
“I don’t want to talk about him or his parents.”
“You must exact revenge.” Sebastian’s eyes twinkled. “Come home with me. Come back to Cannes. We’ll relaunch your career. Your star will shine. You don’t need the Prouts and their money. You don’t need to be a part of their collection. One day soon, they’ll beg me to buy one of your paintings, and I won’t sell it to them. Now, won’t that be sweet?”
As a child, I was too sensitive to being teased, and my school years were filled with tears. It’s easy for children who don’t understand infirmities to make fun of them. For fourteen months, I was blind, and then, until age fourteen, I wore thick glasses while my mother continued working her magick. During that time, I was the recipient of much cruelty. No one ever teased me twice, though, because anyone who made me cry was subjected to Sebastian’s retaliation.
From frogs in lunch pails, to homework assignments mysteriously missing, to rumors about cheating on tests, Sebastian was a master at exacting revenge. When the unkindness to me was especially malicious, Sebastian would get me to read the troublemaker’s secrets and reveal them in anonymous notes to our classmates.
My parents didn’t approve of his efforts at all. They forbade him to retaliate, but he flat-out ignored them, risking and then suffering their ire. Whenever he was caught, they punished him severely, taking away all privileges. More than once, I overheard my parents talking about Sebastian’s mean streak and how worried they were for him. I didn’t see what he did as cruel. I was never brave enough to retaliate on my own behalf, and I loved my brother all the more for stepping up as my defender.
Sebastian could be devious and vengeful and, in business, ruthless, but I always saw it as proof of his love for me. My mother warned me that I was wrong. And what transpired in the summer of 1925 proved it.
Chapter 13
Almost as soon as we’d left New York Harbor and I started breathing salt air, I began to escape the tight confines of my own thoughts. The stranglehold of the images I’d drawn at the party and those I’d witnessed as Monty fell to his death began to loosen its grip.
The farther we traveled and the more space there was between me and the buzzing metropolis, the less frenetic I became. Walking the deck every morning and afternoon with Sebastian, eating three meals a day, and not disappearing into my complicated canvases settled my soul a bit.
On our third day out, I woke up early and went on deck to watch the sunrise. I was contemplating the vast ocean and its ceaseless swells. Thinking about how little control any of us had. The sea’s motion lulled me into a state of calm. Suddenly, I understood that it wasn’t Monty’s death or my relationship with Tommy that I’d been mourning in New York all those weeks. I hadn’t been drinking to drown the sorrow of those losses. But rather, it was because I couldn’t accept that my gift, my own precious gift, was evil.
But how could it not be? I’d ruined my own life with it and now the lives of three strangers. And yet I still yearned to put on the blindfold. The magick of seeing was a drug.
I’d been trying to resist its pull by sedating myself with wine, by entering into a series of paintings more provocative than anything I’d ever done, so much so that I was almost embarrassed for anyone to see them. And neither effort had succeeded.
I couldn’t imagine my life as an artist without wearing my silken mask. But I knew that doing so would be too great a risk. The bigger problem now was how I was going to convince Sebastian that he couldn’t ever ask me to wear it again.
During the crossing, we discussed my professional future often, and while he promised me that the work he was getting me was all on the up-and-up, he made it clear that the shadow portraits were where I would make my mark as an artist and that if I wanted the kind of success our mother enjoyed, I couldn’t abandon them for long.
Each time he brought up the shadow portraits, I remained silent. I had never been able to talk my way out of Sebastian’s control before, and I was very uncertain about how to do it now.
By the time we docked in Le Havre, I’d gained some much-needed weight and had stopped consuming so much wine. Even if I hadn’t figured out what to tell Sebastian about the future, my head was clearer than it had been in a
long time. I was not less unhappy, but I was less confused.
We immediately drove north to Cannes. As soon as the car started its climb up our driveway and I got my first glance at the pale-pink Art Nouveau villa my father had designed every inch of, I felt a surge of relief. Things would be better now that I was home. Getting out of the car, I smelled the cypress trees that encircled the house. Fuchsia bougainvillea vines climbed the walls. Forest-green ceramic pots of night-blooming jasmine flanked the door. Yes, things would be better now that I could wake up to the south’s golden light flooding in through the extra-large windows my father had installed.
That night, we ate in the dining room at a rosewood table with carved wisteria vines creeping down the legs, sitting in matching chairs. On the walls, my mother’s murals of lush gardens brought more of the outside in. She’d arranged for a feast of all my favorite dishes, especially those that weren’t plentiful in New York in the winter. A big pot of bouillabaisse, the freshest green salad with olive oil pressed only miles away. Crusty bread, still warm from the oven, and butter churned at the farm our housekeeper’s husband owned. For dessert, there were oranges and runny cheese and more of the bread I’d missed so much in America. And with it all, crisp white wine that smelled of summer grass and sunshine. I had two glasses but refused my parents’ customary eau-de-vie after dinner.
That first dinner at home was a quiet affair, with just Sebastian and my parents and my favorite cousin, Agathe, who lived nearby. My older sister, Opaline, and my younger sister, Jadine, were both living in Paris and had written warm letters of welcome. They would be coming home to visit but not until later that season.
