Starry Nights Read online

  Endpaper images courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library: Left-hand page, clockwise from the top: Olympia, 1863 (oil on canvas), Manet, Edouard (1832–83)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon; Still Life with Open Drawer, Cezanne, Paul (1839–1906)/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images; Young Girls at the Piano, c. 1890 (oil on canvas), Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841–1919)/Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France/Giraudon; Starry Night over the Rhone, 1888 (oil on canvas), Gogh, Vincent van (1853–90)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon; Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather, 1894 (oil on canvas), Monet, Claude (1840–1926)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Peter Willi. Right-hand page, clockwise from the top left: Dancing at the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, 1895 (oil on canvas), Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (1864–1901)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France; Dr. Paul Gachet, 1890 (oil on canvas), Gogh, Vincent van (1853–90)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon; Ballet Rehearsal on the Stage, 1874 (oil on canvas), Degas, Edgar (1834–1917)/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon; The Japanese Bridge, 1918–19 (oil on canvas) (see detail 382336), Monet, Claude (1840–1926)/Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, France/Giraudon; Dance at Bougival, 1883 (oil on canvas), Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841–1919)/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA/Picture Fund.

  This book is dedicated to my amazing friend Theresa.

  How lucky am I that our paths crossed so long ago

  and that we’ve stuck together through the years?

  Love you so much

  Contents

  Prologue: The Lovers’ Bridge

  Chapter 1: Of Painted Peaches, Cats, and Dancers

  Chapter 2: Silver to Life

  Chapter 3: Chocolate-Plum Iris

  Chapter 4: House History

  Chapter 5: And Music Is Her Scent

  Chapter 6: Voices in the Cellar

  Chapter 7: A Vision in Flames, Then Sizzles

  Chapter 8: Holding Hands

  Chapter 9: When Paint Becomes Body

  Chapter 10: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

  Chapter 11: The Gnarled Hands

  Chapter 12: The Appearance of a Key

  Chapter 13: Rubies Found

  Chapter 14: An Accent Is Worth a Thousand Words

  Chapter 15: Invisible Girl with Real Lips

  Chapter 16: Degas Dancer, to the Fifth

  Chapter 17: For Everyone’s Eyes

  Chapter 18: Coffee Cup Thief

  Chapter 19: Irises in Hand

  Chapter 20: Inside the Cage

  Chapter 21: The Masters

  Chapter 22: Falling in Moonlight

  Chapter 23: The Flooding

  Chapter 24: Layer Cake Paris

  Chapter 25: Healed Rose, Sliced Skin

  Chapter 26: The Reckoning

  Chapter 27: The Calm Before

  Chapter 28: When Paintings Weep

  Chapter 29: Travel Plans

  Chapter 30: Last Dance

  Chapter 31: Night at the Museums

  Chapter 32: Freedom

  Chapter 33: Drawn to Dust

  Chapter 34: Dancing in the Streets

  Chapter 35: Write Me Anew

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  The Lovers’ Bridge

  Several Weeks Ago

  The padlock glistens with rain. Hooked into a link on the lovers’ bridge, it is snuggled against countless other cadenas d’amour.

  But not for long.

  “Bolt cutters, please,” I say to my best friend, Simon.

  He couldn’t be happier to be wingman. He never liked Jenny, and he especially didn’t like her when she took off with Christophe last week. I didn’t like that either.

  “As you requested.” He hands me the orange bolt cutters. I press on the handles, slide the metal teeth around the loop of the lock, and slice. Within three seconds, the wet padlock falls into my open hand. I used to wonder if it was the police or fire department that cut old padlocks from the bridge to make way for new promises, but now I know it’s neither.

  “And with that she’s ancient history,” I say, hoping she truly will feel that way soon. I tuck the bolt cutters into my backpack and drop the broken padlock in the nearest trash can. Jenny insisted on hanging the cadenas a few months ago. As is the custom, she wrote our names in black Sharpie—Jenny + Julien—then clamped the lock closed on a link of the bridge. She tossed the keys into the Seine, and I pictured them touching down next to thousands of keys lining the riverbed. Then I told her I was crazy about her and we kissed. Stupid me. Tourists and locals fasten locks with their names to this bridge every day, but I bet few couples stay together for long.

  “Now, on to part two of the Purge of Jenny from Pittsburgh,” Simon declares as we catch the Metro to Oberkampf.

  “Jenny? Who’s Jenny from Pittsburgh?” I say, as if I’ve never heard the name.

  “Exactly, Julien. That’s exactly the kind of attitude I want you to foster.”

  On the train, Simon tips his forehead to a pair of pretty girls sitting not far from us. They’re dressed for a night out, with low-cut shirts and lots of leg showing. “We should invite them to come along,” he says.

  “It’s as if you can read my mind.”

  “Or maybe just that my mind is on the same thing all the time.”

  “What else is there to ponder?” I say, and we knock fists and head over to the blonde and the brunette. Simon says hello and asks where they’re going. When they say the same stop as us, he flashes a big smile. “What are the chances?”

  It’s my turn. “There’s a group of us going to this club. We would love it if you’d both come along,” I say, and it’s the best I can do, given my state of mind, but it’s enough, because they say yes, and that’s all I really need right now anyway.

  We exchange names as the train rattles into the next stop. The doors open, and the four of us walk down the cobbled street in search of a neon-lit door that leads to an underground club. Inside, the music is so loud that I can’t hear anyone—not the girls we just met, not any of my other friends from our school, or from nearby schools, and nearby cities too it seems, that Simon has corralled into the dimly lit corner. Everyone dances and moves to the pounding bass from the sound system, including the girls from the train, one on each side of me. I banish Jenny from my mind, and the music helps because it drowns me in a riot of sounds that give no room to think of her.

  Soon our group thins, the girls say good-bye, and the night has served its intended effect.

  I leave well after the trains have stopped running, and even then I don’t go home. My parents are out of town, so I go to the Musée d’Orsay, where I lead tours after school. There’s no tour now in the middle of the night, but I’m allowed in whenever I want. This place is like a home to me, and the paintings on the walls are often the best kind of company. I say a quick hello to the security guard and take the stairs to see my favorite Van Gogh. But I don’t make it to the second floor because I spot someone in a skirt rushing into a nearby gallery.

  There’s only one guard here at night, and I haven’t a clue who could be roaming the halls. When I turn the corner, I nearly stumble and fall. I grab the doorframe, then blink several times at the scene unfolding before me. A girl is pirouetting across the floor. I spin around, looking for the security guard, looking for corroboration, but he’s strolling the galleries, making his rounds, blind to the young dancer twirling in a flurry of white as if she’s rehearsing for a ballet in the museum’s main thoroughfare.

  If I were seeing genies riding on magic carpets while huffing on hookahs, I’d be less shocked. Instead, all my senses are ignited, and my brain is buzzing, and it feels like I’m dreaming, but I know I’m wide awake and seeing art come alive. This girl has danced her
way right out of a Degas.

  Chapter 1

  Of Painted Peaches, Cats, and Dancers

  Present Day

  A peach falls out of a Cézanne.

  I grab the fruit before it rolls down the steps and out to the lion sculptures, near where the security guards make their nightly patrols. This peach looks tasty, the kind that would drip juices on your chin and you wouldn’t care. I run my thumb over it, fuzzy and tender, begging to be eaten, then bring it to my lips. If I take a bite, I will know whether it’s real or a figment of my imagination. But I don’t entirely want to know if my mind is playing tricks on me, so I resist.

  Instead, I do what Cézanne did—capture its likeness. I rustle in my backpack for my notebook and pencils, then kneel down on the floor, the soles of my heavy boots pressing against the polished hardwood. Quickly, I sketch. When I’m done, I look at the peach, then I look at my drawing, and I see an anatomically correct peach. Nothing more. I have just drawn a page for a how-to-draw-a-peach handbook, not something delicious you want to wrap your lips around. Not the kind of peach that makes the girls swoon, that makes a girl like Jenny leave you for another artist. A better artist, like Christophe, the oh-so-talented young sculptor.

  I close my notebook and stuff it back into the bottom of my bag, amid the crinkled pages of homework that I’ve barely glanced at.

  I carry the escapee back to its home on the wall and tuck it into its frame, as I have done before. The canvas stretches itself around the piece of fruit, making a sucking sound, like a slurp, then goes quiet. The peach is two-dimensional again.

  A black cat rubs up against me.

  “Meow,” she murmurs.

  She swishes back and forth against my jeans, her chest rumbling on my calf as she purrs. No wonder this cat keeps company with Manet’s Olympia; she is the feline form of that naked woman. Sometimes I think Olympia watches me too; I swear I have seen her eyes flick back and forth, following me as I walk from one end of her gallery to the other. She always stays put though, stretched out seductively on the white silken sheets of her painted bed.

  “How did you make it all the way over here?” I say as I scoop up the cat and bring her back to her nearby home. With the fifth floor closed for a summerlong renovation, nearly all our art is camped out here on the main floor. “They say black cats are trouble. That you’re a sign of trouble. Is that true?” I ask as I escort her to the edge of the canvas. She is silky, luxurious to the touch. She meows one more time, but the sound is cut in half when she folds herself back into her regular pose—arched back, fierce yellow eyes, completely still.

  Almost as if she never leaped out.

  I hear soft footfalls from another gallery, the delicate sound of toes tucked into slippers twirling against hardwood floors. My heart speeds up. The dancers—they’re gorgeous. I hurry across the hallway. Two dancers in white dresses, including the girl from that first night, have jetéd their way out of a Degas and are now spinning in dizzying circles. They make regular nighttime appearances now, and many others have joined them too. Last week, all the dancers here in the Musée d’Orsay, and a few musicians from an orchestra scene too, peeled away from the paint Degas rendered them in more than one hundred years ago and formed a ragtag, makeshift company to perform Swan Lake in the main gallery at midnight. The only thing missing was the male dancers to lift them up. No one painted them. The only men Degas painted were teachers or choreographers, and they never leave the art.

  I half want to ask the ballerinas if they’d ever consider adding in a little underground music, maybe even something cool and modern, because I like the traditional as much as I like the avant-garde. I’d have them all do a more streetwise number some night, flash-mob style, down the steps in our main gallery. I could play deejay, cue up my iPod on a set of speakers, and blast some of my favorite tunes from an Internet station that broadcasts out of Brooklyn.

  The dark-haired girl dances past me on the way back to her frame but stops short. She turns around, grins wildly, then spins en pointe, again and again, a bravura coda to the impromptu show.

  She crashes, crumples to the floor.

  I rush over to her and kneel down as she whimpers and cradles her foot. “Are you okay?”

  She nods bravely.

  “Let me help you,” I say. She leans against me, small and lithe, and I loop my arm underneath her. She stands up, wobbly at first, then sturdy again. I’ve never touched one of the dancers. I’ve never touched any of the painted people. She feels so real. Warm skin, beating heart. Like me, like life. I don’t know what I expected, but then again, I never expected paintings to perform.

  A loose tendril of her hair brushes my arm.

  “Thank you,” she says, tucking the hair into its proper place. I help her into her frame, the canvas wrapping gently around her, sensitive to her wounded state.

  The museum is still again.

  Or maybe it’s always been still.

  Maybe it’s all in my untamed imagination. It’s not as if the dancers twirl during the day for our visitors, or even in the evenings for my mother. But for now, if my life is becoming a Dali landscape, I’m lucky that my mother runs the Musée d’Orsay. Our walls are filled with the prettiest paintings, the kind you long to see alive.

  On my way out I catch the spot on the wall where we will hang a new painting soon. The Girl in the Garden will look stunning there. It would look magnificent anywhere. It’s a Renoir and it’s been the most sought-after lost painting for more than one hundred years, a work of art collectors and historians around the world have salivated over. Every several years someone claimed to have seen it, spotted it in an antique shop, caught a glimpse of it at a flea market. But now it’s been found. Now, The Girl in the Garden is coming here, and she’ll be one of the final paintings I show on my tours. I’ve only seen photo reproductions, but to have her on our walls and become flesh at night …

  I head out, saying good-bye to the security guards. The gray-haired one, Gustave, gives me a curt nod. He fiddles with a piece of copper wire and teardrop crystals that he bends and twists into a miniature sculpture. He is an artist too.

  Aspiring, I should say. Just like me.

  “Your piece is coming together,” I say.

  “Thanks.”

  “See you tomorrow, Gustave.”

  As the door closes behind me, I bring my palm to my nose. My hand smells like a peach. I am sure of that.

  Chapter 2

  Silver to Life

  I walk home along the inky quiet of the Seine, listening to a California radio station, since they do cool new music in America way better than they do in France. After a few songs, I turn away from the water and wind through the streets to my neighborhood.

  I push off my headphones when I hear a rubbery thud on concrete. Next, the back wheel of a bicycle pops up, perpendicular to the rough stones.

  It is Simon. King of bike tricks, the unofficial star act of nighttime riders and skate rats in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and this is his base camp outside a pair of popular cafés.

  “Want to know what this move got me tonight?” Simon’s back on two wheels now, his feet planted on each side of the fire-enginered frame of the bike that’s far too small for him, especially since he is insanely tall to start with.

  Simon and I met at school several years ago and discovered a shared penchant for hijinks. One afternoon when we were both thirteen, Simon found a stash of cheap plastic Eiffel Tower replicas hidden under a blanket near the river, so we grabbed berets and baguettes and did our best to look like forlorn young boys who had to peddle tourist trinkets just to buy bread for the family. Never mind that poor French boys wouldn’t have berets or baguettes. We made a killing the next few days outside the Eiffel Tower. Pretty much every American mother buying a tchotchke paid us double because we didn’t seem like street scammers, like all the other “salesmen” waggling cheap silver, gold, and copper tower replicas in the faces of tourists.

  But our fellow countrymen were none
too happy. We’d infringed on the turf of some Algerians, and they ran us off their patch of sidewalk, telling us they’d track down our mommies if we ever tried to horn in on their trade again.

  “What did your move score you?” I ask.

  Simon executes a quick fishtail on the cobbled street. “The phone number from one of a pair of lovelies here tonight. The one with the long hair may have been custom made for your friend Simon.”

  “Really?”

  “Her name is Lucy, and she is tall, hot, and totally witty. The other I’ll save for you.”

  “Aren’t you generous. I suppose she is the wicked stepsister?”

  “No. The other one, Emilie, she’s just kind of shy. But she’s a dancer, so maybe I’ll just take both at the same time.”

  “Have fun with them. I better get on home. My mom will have a fit if I’m any later.”

  “Wait,” Simon says, and for a moment he is nervous. “Um, I have a date with her Friday night. With Lucy. I need you to think of something really interesting for us to do.”

  “Right, because I’m what? A social organizer? A date planner?” I joke, though there’s some truth to it, because fun and games are the only subjects I’ve ever excelled at.

  “Because you’re the creative one, idiot,” Simon informs me.

  “And you’re the charming one. Or so you think.”

  “See! That’s why the ladies love us. We can make it a foursome. I’ll see if her friend can come along,” Simon calls out as he wheels off toward his favorite set of steps, and I turn down the quiet lamp-lit street that leads to the only place I’ve ever lived.

  When I’m inside my home, my mother shuts the door behind me and motions to the kitchen, where we can talk freely. My father must be asleep. He’s a professor, and he has an early morning class tomorrow.

  “I have something for you,” she announces, barely able to conceal the sneaky smile on her face. I pretend to look behind her back as if she’s hiding something.