by M. J. Rose
“The house is closed and will be for some time. There’s no question about you living there.” She stood.
“I’ll find out. I want to know, and I’ll find out.”
She whirled around, bent down, and slapped me hard on the cheek. I felt the sting of her fingers. The pain where her rings had hit my flesh.
“You will do what I say. I don’t care how old you are. You are under my care and protection now, and I will not stand for your insubordination and tone. I am telling you that you will stay away from La Lune.”
I laughed. From shock? From anger? The sound was scarlet and strong and nasty. The way a snake might laugh when confronted by a strident mouse.
“Try to control me, old woman. Just try.”
“What did you just say to me?” She was staring. Both horror and disgust on her face. She picked up my glass of water and splashed it in my face. “How dare you? Who are you to talk to me like that?”
The water did nothing to deter me. She was a fly on the wall trying to contain me. To control me. And I would not be controlled.
My robe was soaked and uncomfortable. I pulled it open, separating the wet, clinging silk from my skin, mopping the water with a napkin.
“What is that on your neck? What are you wearing?” my grandmother shrieked.
She was pointing to my neck. My hand went to my throat.
“Where did you get that?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. To tell her the truth would mean I would have to admit that I had been inside the house. Perhaps the necklace had been hidden in that secret space long enough that even she didn’t know that’s where it had been.
“It’s something Papa gave me.” I lied. “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s the same as the necklace that the women in the portraits are wearing.”
I knew full well what she was talking about but feigned innocence. “The portraits?”
“On the staircase in La Lune.” She was still frowning as she stared at the necklace. “I haven’t seen that since I was a little girl. My mother kept it with her other jewels, and it was the only piece I wasn’t allowed to play with.”
“Why was that?”
Grand-mère shook her head. “How did your father get it? ”
“Perhaps it’s not the same one? Maybe he had it made because he remembered it from the portraits and liked it.”
“Take it off. Give it to me.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why. Take it off, Sandrine. Give it to me.”
“Tell me why.”
“I said take it off!”
Before I could react, she had her hands on the necklace and was working the clasp.
I tried to pull her hands off.
She swatted my hands away, gave up on the clasp, curled her fingers under one of the rosettes, and pulled hard. The necklace dug into my skin. She pulled harder. The chain didn’t break, didn’t come apart. How was that possible? She was pulling so hard the pain was extreme. I didn’t want to be fighting with her. This was my grandmother. A wave of nausea overwhelmed me for a moment.
I grabbed my grandmother by the wrists and pushed her away. She stumbled but righted herself by taking hold of a chair.
I walked past her and out of the room.
Behind me I heard her shout. “Take it off, Sandrine, take it off.” It was a combination of a plea, a prayer, and a threat.
Chapter 17
I was still thinking about my grandmother’s behavior and my own, which was so unlike me and which I admit I felt both sad and guilty about, when I arrived at the Louvre to paint with Maître Moreau and a dozen of his students.
“I’m impressed by your technique,” Moreau said when he came up behind me. “You said it was a teacher in New York who gave you such a good grounding in Renaissance practices?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping he would not ask me for a name.
“At what school did you say?”
“At the Art Students League.”
Of course I had never studied there, but as I offered up the lie, I was seeing my teacher. He stood over my shoulder, just out of sight, advising me on how to mix rich pigment with pure oil to get the right transparency in the glaze I was using so as I built the layers, they would create the impression of depth.
He was not handsome but compelling. His nose appeared broken, a scar ran through his right eyebrow separating it, his red lips were too full and almost mean, and his eyes were dark and hooded. He spoke French, but with an Italian accent.
I could see his face so clearly. He was so familiar to me. Who was he? And then I knew. Of course. It was the man in the portraits in the bell tower. The portraits painted by LL. I was imagining I had been taught by Cherubino. That I had been taught by La Lune’s teacher.
When the class ended, I packed up my canvas and paints and returned to the house on rue des Saints-Pères, hoping that Julien would be there waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him, other than when I’d shadowed him, since he’d returned from Nancy.
He wasn’t at the house, but he’d been there and left a note saying that he’d returned to Paris and would meet me the next day since Moreau didn’t teach on Fridays.
Without Julien there, I might as well go back to my grandmother’s apartment for dinner. I began to undress in order to change back into my gown. The air in the studio was always chilly if no fire was lit, and I wasn’t going to bother to start one. I could maneuver by the light of the candles and then leave.
I removed my jacket, shirt, pants, pantaloons, and stockings. The cold air was refreshing. I stood there naked for a moment but for the rubies around my neck, shimmering in the candlelight.
Suddenly I wanted to paint.
I opened the hidden cabinet, where I’d found La Lune’s and Cherubino’s drawings, and began to pull out the fabulous fabrics that I had discovered there. I stepped into a long skirt of pearl lace that only partially concealed my naked legs and the V of darkness where they met. The tiny silk vest embroidered with dragons I slipped on came to just beneath my breasts and left my cleavage and part of each nipple exposed. Slippers of silver shot through with ruby threads and gold combs studded with rubies completed the costume.
I stood back and examined my reflection. Since coming to Paris, I had adopted the costume of a male art student. Now I appeared a half-naked siren, a seductress.
I grabbed a canvas from the stack by the wall, one that had been stretched and primed but never painted on, placed it on the easel, opened my box of paints, and prepared my palette.
Ready, I looked from mirror to canvas, mirror to palette. I dipped my brush in burnt ochre, thinned it with some oil so it was translucent, and began.
With broad strokes, I sketched out her figure, standing, staring out at the viewer. Me, and yet someone else, too. I’d never looked like this. Never been a wanton, sexual creature. Never been a woman so determined. With sure strokes, even though I didn’t have a model, I roughed out the man behind her. With his arms around her, locked in a sexual embrace. While she stood watching me, it seemed, he was taking her from behind.
Despite the cold studio I began to grow warm as I felt his hands on my breasts and his thighs against the back of mine and his fingers on my nipples. His voice burned in my ear as he whispered urgent words of lovemaking.
On and on I painted, all the while shuddering as he moved behind me, his hardness asserting itself, determined to find its home.
He sighed. I moaned.
On and on I painted as he grew larger and larger inside me. He slipped out as the brush dipped in the vermilion. As the brush slid across the canvas, he slid back inside. He thrust with every brushstroke . . . again and again . . . He moved and the brush moved . . . until with a great shudder I felt all the colors on the canvas explode inside me, and I dropped the brush and the palette and sent splatters of paint in
a dozen directions.
When my breathing returned to normal, I examined what I’d created in the white-hot heat.
I had thought as I worked that I was painting Julien and myself, but the people in the painting were not us. I had been La Lune painting herself and her lover, Cherubino.
Without taking off her clothes or jewels, I sat on the daybed, staring at the canvas, trying to make some sense of what was happening to me.
I woke up to bright sunshine shining through the openings in the roof of the bell tower. The room, which should have been cold without a fire burning all night, was warm. It only took me a moment more to comprehend that, along with the paints and turpentine and linseed oil, I smelled coffee. And then I understood I was not alone.
Julien was sitting in a chair by the table, drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling a croissant while staring at the portrait I had painted in my heated frenzy.
As I stretched and fully came awake, I remembered I’d never gone home the night before. What had my grandmother thought? Did I care? She had slapped me and thrown water at me. Did I even have to go back? I could just move in here, into this bell tower. Keep selling jewels at the pawnshop until I ran out and then move on to selling the antiques. There was enough silver and china and artwork to last years.
“Good morning, Sandrine.” Julien’s luxe voice and penetrating eyes made my skin tingle. “You look quite fetching.”
I glanced down. I’d forgotten how naked I was with my see-through lace skirt and tiny vest. Trying to be demure, I covered myself with my shawl, got up, and visited the small lavatory inside the tower. I would have preferred to go into the main part of the house for the convenience of the modern plumbing, but it was a long walk in the cold, and if La Lune had been able to live like this for years, certainly I could manage one morning.
When I returned to Julien, he was inspecting the still-wet painting.
“Did you do this yesterday?”
“Last night.”
“All night?”
“Until very late, yes. I don’t actually know what time I finished.”
“It’s marvelous. And brave.” He turned to me now. “Thinking of you painting it makes me want to—” He broke off, took two steps to where I was standing. He pulled me toward him and kissed me full on the lips.
I had read enough books to know what to call it, but I’d never experienced a swoon before. I truly did not think I was going to be able to remain on my feet. I became that kiss. Became its emotion, its sensation. Everything around me disappeared: the tower room, the painting. There was only the wave of euphoria and the weakness that made me hold on to Julien all the tighter.
Pulling him with me onto the daybed, I undressed him, unashamed in my desire to see him naked. To feel him. There on the rumpled blanket, I took him with a hungry mouth and active hands. And he watched me in wonder until he succumbed to my ministrations, and together we went into the dark purple and red and magenta and orange world of colors and scents and feelings that was inside my mind and behind my eyes and deep in my womb where the explosions caused ripples that left me breathless and panting.
And then I heard it, that faint chiming I’d heard before when we’d made love, the hum of those glorious, ancient bells.
After we had recovered, we set to putting the room back in order, and I told him what had happened with my grandmother and the fight we’d had.
Julien was planning to remain at La Lune that day; he had work to do in the main part of the house. I wanted to stay with him, but he encouraged me to go home to my grandmother’s and make peace with her.
“She’s a strong, stubborn woman, but she’ll get used to the idea of you becoming a painter. Why wouldn’t she? She’s worked her whole life. Surely she will understand your desire for your own kind of independence. She can’t be that superstitious. I’ve met her.”
“I know, but she becomes irrational when it comes to La Lune and me painting, or even me staying here in Paris.”
After folding up the clothes I’d worn the night before into neat piles of fabrics, I opened the cabinet to put everything back where I’d found it. Rays of sunlight coming through the oblong windows illuminated the interior, and I noticed that one of the panels was a slightly different color wood.
Reaching out, I touched it. It wobbled.
“Julien, come look. There’s something here.”
Beside me, he peered into the semidarkness.
“It’s empty.”
“There.” I put his hand on the edge of the hidden panel—surprised I’d been so bold to take his hand. And then I laughed at myself. I had taken so much more in the bed only minutes ago.
“Do you think it might be a hidden compartment?” I asked.
He knocked on it, and we heard a hollow echo. “It appears to be one.”
“Do you know how it opens? You’re an architect. You must know things like that.”
He laughed. “I must? Well, let’s see . . .”
Julien pressed on one corner and then the next. Nothing happened. But well-versed in secrets and how to reveal them, he tried another way, and then another. Finally he pressed the panel in the right combination, and it sprang open.
“I can’t see much—this goes fairly deep,” he said.
I lit a candle, brought it over, and he thrust it inside the cabinet.
We both peered in.
“There’s something in there, isn’t there?” I said.
Using both hands, Julien reached inside and then, struggling, pulled out a well-wrapped and very large package.
The burgundy silk wrapping appeared expensive, ancient, and musty. It gave off the same odor I’d smelled the first time we’d visited the tower: a lush fragrance that combined ancient air, frankincense, cedar, myrrh, and roses.
Gingerly I pulled the fabric away to reveal a thick book, bound in creamy brown leather. There was no writing on the back cover, so I turned it around to see if there was anything on the front.
Where there had been a title, only tiny fragments of gold were left, as if someone had traced the word’s outline with a finger over and over. Nothing was legible any longer.
I opened it to the frontispiece and found the page had been ripped out, and only a ragged edge of it was left near the spine.
What remained was the part of a name, two Roman numerals, and the words Paris, France.
The first two complete pages contained three columns of small medieval type in what appeared to be archaic French, for some of the words were foreign to me. There was foxing on the edges, and the thick paper had a landscape to it, little hills and valleys, the way very old manuscripts do.
As I turned to the next set of pages, more of the same mystical, spicy fragrance escaped, almost drugging me. The heady scent added to the mystery of what this ancient volume might be.
“Look,” Julien said, pointing to the margin, where tiny handwriting filled the white spaces. Inky scratches faded to a pale brown.
I bent lower and tried to read the inscriptions, but the words were too faint and too small.
“We’ll need a magnifier,” he said.
“There must be one downstairs.”
“If not, I can bring one tomorrow from my office.” He turned the page. And I gasped.
Painted over the writing was an illustration of a woman drowning in a pond. The expression on her face was sheer terror. In the margins onlookers watched with horror, except for one creature jumping into the air, wild with enjoyment, his brilliant verdant-green eyes shining with delight. Horns broke thought his reddish-brown hair, and he sported a long tail.
Next to the drawing was another notation in the same minute handwriting and same pale ochre ink, but this one was slightly more legible. I read it out loud.
“ ‘To call upon a ghost, stand in the front of a tomb and call out loud the names of the angels of t
he first camp, holding in your hand a glass bowl of pure honey mixed with the oil of almond and say: I command you, O Spirit, Ram-bearer dweller of the graves, who sleeps upon the bones of the dead . . .’ ”
Beside me, Julien Duplessi did not take even one breath until I stopped.
“What kind of book is this?” I asked.
“Have you ever heard of a grimoire?” He answered with another question and with what I thought was a touch of dread in his voice.
Chapter 18
From the back of the carriage, it seemed my grandmother and I had left France and traveled to some other country. Haussmann’s remolding of Paris had not extended to the ghetto in the Marais. The cobble streets were narrow, the buildings ancient. Signs in Hebrew identified the various shops. The setting sun glinted off mezuzahs nailed to door frames as if the houses were all catching fire.
Beside me, my grandmother seemed restless, no doubt due to the words we’d exchanged when I’d returned home earlier that afternoon. If she had noticed that I’d not slept in the apartment, she didn’t refer to it, but she did sniff the air when I came in. Her nose wrinkled as if she smelled cow dung. She told me I stunk of oil paints and requested I bathe since I was to accompany her to dinner at her cousin the rabbi’s house.
“It would be appropriate to wear your new bottle-green satin gown,” she’d said. One of the dresses Grand-mère’s dressmaker had created for me, it was fancier than my clothes from New York, with its black bows and black lace edging. The accompanying small hat, in the new style so many Parisian women were wearing that season, sported two tiny bunches of velvet grapes, one in green, the other dark purple.
Was she telling me which dress to put on to ensure I didn’t wear my art student’s costume? I didn’t argue—it didn’t matter. I’d been too preoccupied with what Julien and I had found to care. Looking back, I think that must have been why I even agreed to accompany her. The discovery of the book in the tower had shocked me. Disturbed me. And confused me.
A grimoire, Julien had explained, was a book of spells. He’d designed a special cabinet for them in Dujols’s shop. And knowing that finding one would exacerbate my interest in the strange occurrences happening around me, he wasn’t pleased with the discovery.
