“Men like me, we take what we’re offered. We can’t afford to expect anything more.” I touched my metal cheek. “A man like me can’t hope.”
Arms wrapped around myself, I left her standing on the pavement in her sweater.
—
When I got back to the apartment, I needed to wash away Clare.
Demetrius whistled “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” so I shushed him. Lysander, ever the fretter, took up my shushing. I poured out a pitcher of water and splashed a handful their way, until they bristled with outraged squawks. Lysander smoothed down his feathers; Demetrius swore in English.
I took off my new mask and scrubbed with icy water until my arms and face were red. I stripped off all my clothes—the outfit I’d picked out with such care that morning for the studio. The pressed suit, the shirt the color of cornflowers, all neat and all new, like I was setting off for a wedding. I changed into a soft pair of old pants. Dripping, shirtless, I stared down at the enameled face on the washstand. I wondered what Clare saw.
But when a knock sounded on the door, my heart gave a funny leap. I threw a towel over the parrots’ cage. I fastened my mask over my wet face and pulled a clean shirt from the hook.
It was her.
“What are you doing here?” I nudged open the door, enough to see the pale curve of Clare’s face beneath the brim of her red hat. “How did you find me?” Behind the door I buttoned my shirt one-handed.
“Mrs. Ladd gave me your address.” She hesitated. “Are you angry?”
I ran a hand through my damp hair. “No.” A cold drop slid down the back of my neck. “But I’ve been home for an hour at least.”
“And I’ve been standing across the street for an hour at least.”
I leaned against the door, waiting, ignoring those funny little leaps in my chest.
“I just…” She twisted the cuff of her jacket. “Luc, you said back there that a man like you can’t hope.” She barely breathed the next words. “But you can.”
I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you—”
“May I come in?”
I glanced back over my shoulder, at the stained and threadbare rug, the unmade bed, the foul-mouthed parrots, the cracked, dirt-streaked window I kept open because the latch was busted. “No,” I began, but she pushed through anyway. And stopped.
Though my single room was gray and narrow, pale frames hung from each wall, each containing a single pencil drawing. The reasons I lived in this dingy room, why I never had money for the streetcar, why I bought day-old bread. Clare stood in the middle of my room, her open hands straight down at her sides, and spun to see her own drawings.
“I saw them and—” I started, but she cut me off with a chop and a shake of her head.
She’d seen me lying back on that table in the studio, plaster in my eyebrows, my face under the light. Now I was seeing her just as naked.
All of those memories, jumbled up, came back, all of those rare instances of Clare’s face as open and unguarded as it was right now. How her eyes shone at the first sight of the Brindeau caves, how they laughed when she saw my childhood portraits, how they stared into mine that moment when she touched my face and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to again right now.
“I never thought I’d see these again,” she breathed. She stepped to one framed drawing of a man, craggy-faced and harsh, yet holding to him a small boy with such tenderness that you almost didn’t notice his withered arm. “He was born the day the war began. The bluest eyes, like his father.”
I cleared my throat. “Your cross-hatching…I thought they were blue.”
“As cobalt.” She turned to a picture of a young soldier balancing a harmonica on two stubbed wrists. “He brightened the hospital with his music.” A woman, pale hair tied beneath a head scarf, sat with elbows on her knees, bared forearms puckered and scarred. Her chin rested on open palms with seven fingers between them. “She’s from Belgium, a nurse who I met at the Princess Louise Hospital. Lost everything but her grandmother’s knitting needles. She made me this scarf, you know.”
Eyes still on the framed pictures, she unwound the scarf from her neck and passed it to me. It was as soft as new grass.
“So you were the one who bought all of my drawings,” she finally said. “Monsieur Santi said I had a secret admirer.”
“Secret…” I handed back the scarf. “I didn’t think you’d want to know it was me.” I wrapped my arms around my chest, suddenly aware that I didn’t have a jacket on.
She stopped her perusal of the drawings. Those bright eyes were turned on me. “I don’t hear from you for years—not a word—and when I find you, it’s to see every drawing I ever sold hanging on your walls.” Her voice lowered, brittle at the edges. “You never even asked what I’ve been doing these past years.”
“I don’t have to. I can see.” I waved a hand around the room at the frames. “You were off capturing life. Like you told me all those years ago, telling a story through art.”
The last framed drawing was of a man seated shirtless on a bed, one trouser leg rolled up. A wooden leg rested lengthwise across his lap. He held it loosely, watchfully, reverently, but he looked out through a thick tangle of hair with eyes warm and appreciative.
“I don’t know your subjects, but I know how it feels to be on the other side of your sketch pad.” I dipped my head. “For a moment, you made them feel whole.”
She touched her cheek, as though holding in a blush. “Is that how you felt sitting across from me in the studio?”
That’s how I’d felt that very first time she sketched me, under the chestnut tree. I nodded.
“It’s my job,” she said, and twisted the scarf in her hands.
“These days, I frighten small children.” I tried for a smile. “It was nice to sit and not frighten anyone for an afternoon.”
She took a step forward. “Do you think your face bothers me?”
“It should.”
“It doesn’t.” She reached out, her hand smelling warm like clay, and unhooked my mask.
I tried to catch it, to put it back on, but it slid off. “Please, no,” I said, and closed my eyes. I heard a soft clink as she set it down.
And then I felt her lips on mine.
I allowed myself half a second. Half a second when the world was all right, and then I pulled back. “No. No, no, no.” I opened my eyes. She was right there, so close her exhales brushed across my neck. So close she couldn’t help but see the wreck of my face. “Please.”
She moved forward, half a step, and dropped an index finger on my lips. “You didn’t ask what I was doing all of these years.” Through her glove, her finger was warm. “So I’ll tell you.”
From outside the window, the bell at Bonne-Nouvelle rang out three, but I stayed still in the middle of the room.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy who taught me to see the world through the eyes of an artist.” She drew her finger straight down to my chin. “A face is circles and angles, shadows and light, bones and muscle, tension and desire.” She traced up the right side of my face. “The line of a jaw?” And down the left. “Beauty.”
“I don’t—”
She stopped my words again with that soft finger. “I’m not done telling you my story.” She gave a little smile and her hand trailed down to my shirt, damp from my bath. “Even after that boy left my life and, far away, grew into a soldier, I remembered what he taught me. I searched for beauty, through Morocco, through Algeria, through Mauritania, through Glasgow, through Paris. I haunted the halls of Fairbridge and the School of Art, I wandered the winding streets of the Latin Quarter, seeking those truths in lines and shapes that the artist-boy taught me to look for all those years before.”
As she talked, she slowly drew out the buttons of my shirt until it hung loose and open. I shrank back into my shirt, but she slipped her hand, so warm in that glove, onto my chest. I swallowed.
“I’ve thought about that boy. I’ve wondered what he looked like, grown up. I’ve tried to picture those brown eyes I remember watching me under the chestnut tree. The sound of his voice, the one time he accidently asked if I’d stay forever, that sound was just beyond my imagination. I knew, if I ever met him again, that he’d be taller. Stronger. More comfortable in his own skin.” With both hands under my shirt, she slid it from my shoulders. “I found that.”