In the Palace of Repose

by Holly Phillips

  The flashlight flickered, then steadied into a dimmer radiance that allowed the blacks and grays of the midnight mansion to ease a little closer. The intruder wanted speed, but she forced a careful pace, slippered feet silent on hardwood, whispering over oriental rugs, creaking minutely on the stairs. The yellow circle of light conjured wraiths of porcelain and marble, slumberous fires of silk, glass, gold.

  Be ghost, the intruder thought. Be smoke.

  There were bedrooms on the second floor, their occupants in sleeping ignorance. Also a study, half office with computers humming on standby, half library with shelves of leather-bound books and cases of jade miniatures so delicate they could have floated on a breath. The intruder was momentarily tempted to set them free, but she lost the thought. The flashlight had moved on to open a window on another world.

  Despite long training in disappointment, a seed of hope quickened in the intruder’s breast. She stalked down the path of the flashlight’s glow, narrowing the circle of illumination until all was darkness except the painting inside its rosewood frame. The Madonna sat by a window, her head weary against the wall, her child sprawled across her lap. The child was plump-cheeked and rosy with sleep, fat-creased limbs escaping the shawl that hid the mother’s hands with its fringe. The mother had creamy skin, tawny hair, heavy eyes. Her child was ruddy-brown, coppery in the morning light that streamed over her shoulder. In a courtyard below the window, half-realized in the half-shade of a silvery olive tree, a man stood with his back to the viewer, his right hand holding an axe by his side, his left hand clasping the back of his neck. His lowered head was black with curls, his face hidden. The intruder stepped closer still, until the flashlight illuminated nothing but the man, the mother’s arm, the child’s face.

  “Dad?” Less than a whisper. A breath. Gloved fingers grazed the polished wood of the frame. “Daddy?” Grief bloomed, a loss rehearsed a thousand times.

  For while the trembling light shivered the leaves of the olive tree and stirred the fringes of the shawl, the figure in the courtyard did not turn.

  She went to her mother’s house, pretending, until she was nearly there, that she was headed somewhere, anywhere else. Early morning painted the water, the seawall, the low clouds in varying shades of gray; the iron railings that hemmed the sidewalk on the ocean side of the street were black as prison bars against the ebbing tide. Eyes burning dry within heavy lids, she sat on her mother’s step, pulled her sketchbook and pen from amongst flashlight, gloves, ballet slippers, lock picks, wire cutters, patch cords, circuit boards. Opened the book on her knees, uncapped the pen with her teeth, and drew.

  The sash window above the door shuddered open. “Cézanne?”

  Her mother’s voice, weary as the Madonna’s eyes. Cézanne muttered something around the pen lid. She did not look up, but could not keep her shoulders from stiffening. In a moment the window chattered shut again. Not long after that the door at her back swung open. A wave of warmth and the smell of her mother’s sandalwood soap curled around her.

  Jule, her mother, said stiffly, “I’ll put coffee on. Come in when you’re done.”

  She was done. Black lines, white space, ink threaded through the paper’s weave. When she was sure her mother had retreated down the hall, she slipped book and pen into her pack and stood, taking care the bag was zippered all the way closed before she went in and shut the door.

  Against the warm gleam of the kitchen, the morning outside faded to barely dawn. Polished copper reflected movement, light. Terra cotta floor tiles echoed red granite counters, the cupboards were butter and cream. Jule’s whole house was like this, its colors chosen to compliment them both, Jule’s paleness, Cézanne’s cinnamon brown. Cézanne sat on a stool by the sink and watched her hand, spread for balance on the countertop, curl into a fist.

  Jule shook grounds into the filter, found mugs, sugar, cream as the electric kettle began to mutter. Her springy hair lay like a mane across her shoulders, the color of beach sand, tawny-gray. Her robe was cream silk. Her eyes were the Madonna’s eyes, greeny brown like a hazelnut’s shell, tired with motherhood, their lids creased and smudged with shadow.

  Cézanne dropped her gaze before their eyes met, just. “The school called you?”

  “Not before coffee,” Jule said.

  The kettle growled and snapped itself off. Jule poured the water into the filter, searched in a disinterested way for rolls, oranges, leftover quiche. Cézanne ate cold quiche, hungry, with her fingers, before the coffee was even poured. Then she dumped sugar and cream into the mug and stirred, her spoon clinking in counterpoint to Jule’s. Jule sipped, and sighed, and sipped again.

  Finally, she said, “Three days. Three days, Cézanne.” She waited, or at least was quiet a while. Then, “Do I want to know where you were? Should I just be glad you’re still in one piece?”

  Cézanne chased a loose ground on the surface of her coffee with her fingertip. “Will they take me back?”

  “Do you care?”

  She caught the ground, flicked it onto the counter. Looked up and met her mother’s eyes. “You know I won’t live in this house.”

  “Cézanne, stop. Please, stop. I can’t—” Jule thumped her mug on the counter, scrubbed her face with both hands, pushed her fingers through her hair. “Yes! They’ll take you back!”

  “Good!” Cézanne shouted back, buoyed by the relief of anger.

  Jule let her hands fall to her sides. “I’ll drive you when I’m dressed. Will you just, please, promise me you’ll stay there for longer than a month?”

  Cézanne picked up her mug and held it before her mouth. “No,” she said, and drank.

  The curator made it easier for her by coming during the day.

  The girl’s school had a stone wall around the perimeter, low, but mounted with motion detectors; the administrators operated as if they were under siege. They had made Jule sign a paper, several papers, but had otherwise evinced no great concern over Cézanne’s habit of escape. They were too frightened of what might get in to worry about Cézanne getting out. The alarm system had been valuable in her education. She had never had reason to think that it gave the curator any trouble at all.

  The lawns were groomed even during the winter, but the band of trees that bordered the wall was half wild, a circle of woodland where leaves were allowed to lie where they fell. Waiting, Cézanne sat on a punky stump and sketched the skeletons of maple leaves while a chill breeze toyed with the edges of the paper and flipped the hem of her uniform skirt above her knees. A shadow fell across the page. She looked up, pen in hand.

  The curator was tall and thin, had deep grooves chiseled across his forehead and around his mouth, fine gray hair beneath a tweed cap. From her low vantage Cézanne could see dirt smudged across the knees of his trousers and the hem of his raincoat, but she took nothing for granted. It was easier to imagine him walking through the wall than climbing over. He was as much a mystery to her now as when he had first approached her. She looked down, closed her sketchbook, capped the pen.

  “Did you find the Madonna?” he asked in his light, incurious way.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it the one?”

  She stood up. “No.”

  “It is an early work.” He looked at her face, but avoided meeting her gaze. “But of course you knew that.”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes touched on the trees around them, the stump where she had been sitting, the pen in her hand. The bag at her feet. His gaze flinched from that as from her eyes. She bent and opened the zipper. Only then did he ask, “What did you bring me?”

  A small square of canvas, edges frayed where it had been taken off its stretching frame, stiff with oil paint.

  “Ah.” The curator made his first gesture, reaching with both hands for what she held. “The study for First Summer, Then Wine. Yes. Yes.”

  She held the canvas against her, paint side in. “What did you bring me?”

  His hands twitched, closed. If hands could carry e
xpression, these set one aside, picked up another. Prosaically, they opened raincoat and suit jacket, reached into a pocket for a thick envelope. “The Birdwell Foundation bought The Gate Behind Them. It’s a later work. Very,” his eyes flinching again from the canvas she held, “very powerful. It has been lent to a private gallery in Midford. The insurance company demands a security guard as well as the alarm system— But this will tell you everything you need.” He held out the envelope.

  She took it, passed him the small canvas. He barely looked at it before he slipped it inside his jacket, did up the buttons, tied the raincoat’s belt. She dropped the envelope in her bag and tried to pin him with a look.

  “You know these aren’t the ones I want. They’re all too early. I need the last ones, the ones he was working on before he disappeared.”

  “The ones your mother sold.” The grooves around his mouth implied another smile. “I know. It isn’t easy. They were all private sales. Some of them may even have been gifts.”

  “No. She sold them.” Cézanne could not catch his gaze. Angrily, she said, “I’m not going to go on giving you everything I have left of him unless you give me what I want!”

  “I will find them. I want them, too.”

  She cooled. “I won’t steal them for you. You know I’m not a thief.”

  “I know.” He pressed his hand against his side—against the study for First Summer, Then Wine, but it looked as though he were in pain.

  As he had said, the envelope contained everything she needed: circuit diagrams, floor plans, lock types, personnel schedules. She finished the day’s classes, had dinner at the scarred refectory table, isolated from the other girls by her preoccupation. Later, sitting at the desk in her small room, she worked through algebra problems and the rough draft of an essay on Hawthorne and Poe. The curtains were open on the night, so the desk lamp made a mirror of the window. She looked up often to see the blunt bones of her skull shaping her cinnamon skin, the springing black umbra of her hair. After a while she closed her school books, tied the fat curls back with an elastic, opened the envelope and spread the papers across her desk. It was hard to concentrate on the details. She was waiting again. She locked the papers away in her trunk.

  The trunk held her tools, also her father’s sketches, studies, even brushes and palette knives: everything she had stolen from his studio during that brief time between his disappearance and her mother’s treason. She could not have said, now, what had prompted her to steal. She had been so terribly surprised when she came home to find his studio stripped, all his last paintings gone, that she could not believe she had somehow suspected Jule’s intentions. The surprise had been like a wound. So it must have been instinct, a faulty instinct that had reached without knowing what for, or that, knowing, had not dared to reach far enough. The paintings themselves were too large, too valuable, too great with power. Even the small things in her trunk burned with it. It pained her that they should spend themselves in the curator’s hands.

  And even as she thought it, green light seeped through her reflected eyes.

  First summer, then wine. An alley of grape vines, perspective bearing the viewer’s eye off to the right and away. The foreground filled the frame, light-filled leaves, hidden grapes small as pearls, the twisted feet of vines digging into earth. Breathless with summer heat, sweet with the promise of juice. Somewhere, a thin man with gray hair and hungry, cowardly eyes entered that lustrous summer day and drained its warmth.

  Somewhere, a painting died.

  When the vision of green was gone, Cézanne, sick with grief, with guilt, with envy, with need, crawled into her dormitory bed and cried herself to sleep.

  She trailed the security guard softly from room to room, the easiest way to avoid being surprised. No need for the flashlight. The gallery was a series of white-walled, birch-floored rooms, track lights burning low for the guard’s sake. In the light, Cézanne was too dark and solid to be ghost or smoke. She thought of cats, and felt small, silky-soft and prowling through the gallery’s treasures. The guard’s shoes squeaked, always a room ahead.

  The Gate Behind Them had a wall to itself. Two tall canvases, a foot of white space between them. On the right, Eve, naked, her tear-streaked face half hidden in her tawny tangle of hair, her left hand curved protectively, sensually over her belly, her right hand, open, reaching. On the left, Adam, dark skin smudged with lighter mud, right hand clenched protective over his heart, left hand, big knuckles swollen and scarred, reaching. Eve looked ahead shyly through her tears. Adam craned to look behind him, his broad shoulders twisted, his face almost hidden but for the line of a scantly bearded jaw. The space between them white as a burning sword, forever separating their reaching hands.

  Cézanne stepped close to touch Adam’s painted hand. She did not speak, her throat swollen with hope, with awe, with, strangely, sympathy for Adam’s plight. But the fingers did not warm, nor turn to clasp hers. The guard’s shoes began to squeak their return path through the gallery. She let go and ghosted away, even under the lights her substance gone.

  Easter came early that year. The school refused to allow her to stay in residence over the holiday, and Jule was nearly as adamant, so she went to the house by the sea. The first night Jule made a supper of appeasement, spicy goat with rice and aki and peas. It was good after the relentlessly institutional food at school. Cézanne ate steadily, hungrily, and felt Jule across the table from her relax. This, at least, was normal: a hungry daughter home from school. Cézanne kept her gaze on her plate. She could not look at Jule without seeing the Madonna’s tired eyes, Eve’s rounded belly and breasts. Adam’s averted face.

  The next morning they walked together to the big park around the community center. The Japanese garden had recently been refurbished, and it was a good day for a walk, a subtle day of fog and sunlight, of sea breezes braided with calm. There were others in the park, but it was quiet among the green paths and damp gray stones. Moss, cool light, running water. Alleys of bamboo. Jule left Cézanne at the teahouse, a tiny structure of bamboo and stone, while she walked the perimeter. Cézanne sat on the bench that overlooked the small lake, its craggy rocks and reeds, the arched bridge. She pulled out her sketchbook and pen.

  It was uncanny, the way so much solidity and distance, so much color and depth and light—so much reality—would consent to be bound and anchored by a few lines of black ink on a page. It almost frightened her at times. The hand moved, the pen let down its ink, and the garden was reborn, twinned. A whole new world recreated from the old. A whole timeless age born from a captive moment. The reality of earth and water and growing things snared in all its power and forced to serve—

  “You,” someone said, “are your father’s daughter.”

  The pen froze. She looked up, disbelieving. The curator, here. Standing at her shoulder. She had felt no presence at all.

  His hungry eyes were on her sketch. She closed the book and his gaze flickered away across the lake.

  After a moment he said, “I may have found one of the paintings you wanted. One of the last. One of the untitled ones. I thought you would want to know.”

  Cézanne capped her pen, trying to shield her shaking hands from his gaze. She coughed to unfreeze her throat. “How did you find me?”

  “Do you want to know? I could tell you.” His voice was cool. “I could probably teach you how.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She hunched her shoulders to disguise a shudder. “Which painting? Where is it?”

  “You know I have never seen them.”

  She could feel him look at her, and belatedly stood, sketchbook and pen in hand. He stepped away, putting almost the whole width of the teahouse between them.

  “Where is it?” she said again.

  “Quite close. I have the address here.” He opened his raincoat, slipped a hand inside his jacket, then paused. “Do you have something for me?”

  “At school. It— I didn’t think I’d see you. Here.” She swallowed. “I can give it to
you when I go back.”

  The curator withdrew his hand from his jacket pocket. He held a slender envelope, white, unaddressed, sealed. “Of course I trust you.”

  She started to reach for the envelope, but he did not hand it to her.

  “I do trust you. So I am willing to accept, shall we say, a down payment?” His eyes flicked to the sketchbook in her hand, to her face, and away.

  She looked at the book herself, her throat stiff again, her eyes unaccountably hot.

  “Really?” he said, as if it didn’t matter to him. “A schoolgirl’s sketch more valuable than a Russell Porter?”

  “No,” she whispered. Her fingers were stiff and cold as she opened the book, tore out the page, traded it for the envelope. She did not watch as he folded the sketch and tucked it carefully away.

  He said, “I look forward to hearing about the painting. Perhaps” the grooves deepened around his mouth “perhaps you might make me a sketch.” He walked away.

  She slipped the envelope with the book into her bag, then looked up to see Jule standing on the arch of the bridge.

  Jule was up late that night. Cézanne sat on her bed, in the dark, her pack in the cradle of her crossed legs. Cars swished by outside, the sound mixing with the draw of the waves, while the headlights swam between the opened curtains, in and out again, a fluid gesture of light across the empty walls. Jule came upstairs finally, clattered and splashed with the bathroom door open, the habit of a woman who lived most of the time alone. Cézanne clenched her teeth, listening. It was hard to wait until the house was quiet, harder to wait the time it would take for Jule to fall asleep. Did Jule usually sleep well? Would having her daughter in the house make her more likely to lie awake, or less? Cézanne gave her an hour, then slipped out of her room and down the stairs.

  She was almost to the front door when Jule’s voice came from the darkened living room. “That bloody school might not care. I do. When you’re in my house, you’ll damn well stay put.”

  Electric jolt of shock to the heart. Then fury: if she had been so careless in another house, she would be facing a bullet, or jail. Rage, at first self-directed, spilled over.