He took the stairs to the upper floor. A cramp had worked its way beneath his diaphragm and his throat felt raw, but behind all of that there was this feeling, a tingling of power and magic and anger—a sense that perhaps…
Now that he was up amid the rooms and corridors of the great Impressionist works, he forced himself to slow down. The big gilt frames, the pompous marble, the names and dates of artists who had often died in anonymity, despair, disease, blindness, exile, near-starvation. Poor old Sisley’s Misty Morning. Vincent Van Gogh in a self portrait formed from deep, sensuous, three-dimensional oils. Genuinely great art was, Gustav thought, pretty depressing for would-be great artists. If it hadn’t been for the invisible fields that were protecting these paintings, he would have considered ripping the things off the walls, destroying them.
His feet led him back to the Manets, that woman gazing out at him from Dejéuner sur l’Herbe, and then again from Olympia. She wasn’t beautiful, didn’t even look much like Elanore…. But that wasn’t the point. He drifted on past the clamoring canvases, wondering if the world had ever been this bright, this new, this wondrously chaotic. Eventually, he found himself face to face with the surprisingly few Gauguins that the Musee D’Orsay possessed. Those bright slabs of color, those mournful Tahitian natives, which were often painted on raw sacking because it was all Gauguin could get his hands on in the hot stench of his tropical hut. He became wildly fashionable after his death, of course; the idea of destitution on a far-away isle suddenly stuck everyone as romantic. But it was too late for Gauguin by then. And too late—as his hitherto worthless paintings were snapped up by Russians, Danes, Englishmen, Americans—for these stupid, habitually arrogant Parisians. Gauguin was often poor at dealing with his shapes, but he generally got away with it. And his sense of color was like no one else’s. Gustav remembered vaguely now that there was a nude that Gauguin had painted as his own lopsided tribute to Manet’s Olympia—had even pinned a photograph of it to the wall of his hut as he worked. But, like most of Gauguin’s other really important paintings, it wasn’t here at the Musee D’Orsay, this supposed epicenter of Impressionist and Symbolist art. Gustav shrugged and turned away. He hobbled slowly back down through the galley.
Outside, beneath the moonlight, amid the nanosmog and the buzzing of the powerfields, Gustav made his way once again through the realities. An English tea house circa 1930. A Guermantes salon. If they’d been foreal, he’d have sent the cups and the plates flying, bellowed in the self-satisfied faces of the dead and living. Then he stumbled into a scene he recognized from the Musee D’Orsay, one, in fact, that had once been as much a cultural icon as Madonna’s tits or a Beatles tune. Le Moulin de la Galette. He was surprised and almost encouraged to see Renoir’s Parisian figures in their Sunday-best clothing dancing under the trees in the dappled sunlight, or chatting at the surrounding benches and tables. He stood and watched, nearly smiling. Glancing down, he saw that he was dressed appropriately in a rough woolen navy suit. He studied the figures, admiring their animation, the clever and, yes, convincing way that, through some trick of reality, they were composed… Then he realized that he recognized some of the faces, and that they had also recognized him. Before he could turn back, he was called to and beckoned over.
“Gustav,” Marcel’s ghost said, sliding an arm around him, smelling of male sweat and Pernod. “Grab a chair. Sit down. Long time no see, eh?”
Gustav shrugged and accepted the brimming tumbler of wine that he offered. If it was foreal—which he doubted—this and a few more of the same might help him sleep tonight. “I thought you were in Venice,” he said. “As the Doge.”
Marcel shrugged. There were breadcrumbs on his mustache. “That was ages ago. Where have you been, Gustav?”
“Just around the corner, actually.”
“Not still painting, are you?”
Gustav allowed that question to be lost in the music and the conversation’s ebb and flow. He gulped his wine and looked around, expecting to see Elanore at any moment. So many of the others were here—it was almost like old times. There, even, was Francine, dancing with a top-hatted man—so she clearly wasn’t across the sky. Gustav decided to ask the girl in the striped dress who was nearest to him if she’d seen Elanore. He realized as he spoke to her that her face was familiar to him, but he somehow couldn’t recollect her name—even whether she was living or a ghost. She shook her head, and asked the woman who stood leaning behind her. But she, also, hadn’t seen Elanore; not, at least, since the times when Marcel was in Venice and when Francine was across the sky. From there, the question rippled out across the square. But no one, it seemed, knew what had happened to Elanore.
Gustav stood up and made his way between the twirling dancers and the lantern-strung trees. His skin tingled as he stepped out of the reality, and the laughter and the music suddenly faded. Avoiding any other such encounters, he made his way back up the dim streets to his tenement.
There, back at home, the light from the setting moon was bright enough for him to make his way through the dim wreckage of his life without falling—and the terminal that Elanore’s ghost had reactivated still gave off a virtual glow. Swaying, breathless, Gustav paged down into his accounts, and saw the huge sum—the kind of figure that he associated with astronomy, with the distance of the moon from the earth, the earth from the sun—that now appeared there. Then, he passed back through the terminal’s levels, and began to search for Elanore.
But Elanore wasn’t there.
Gustav was painting. When he felt like this, he loved and hated the canvas in almost equal measures. The outside world, foreal or in reality, ceased to exist for him.
A woman, naked, languid, and with a dusky skin quite unlike Elanore’s, is lying upon a couch, half-turned, her face cupped in her hand that lies upon the primrose pillow, her eyes gazing away from the onlooker at something far off. She seems beautiful hut unerotic, vulnerable yet clearly available, and self-absorbed. Behind her—amid the twirls of bright yet gloomy decoration—lies a glimpse of stylized rocks under a strange sky, whilst two oddly disturbing figures are talking, and a dark bird perches on the lip of a balcony; perhaps a raven….
Although he detests plagiarism, and is working solely from memory, Gustav finds it hard to break away from Gauguin’s nude on this canvas he is now painting. But he really isn’t fighting that hard to do so, anyway. In this above all of Gauguin’s great paintings, stripped of the crap and the despair and the self-justifying symbolism, Gauguin was simply right. So Gustav still keeps working, and the paint sometimes almost seems to want to obey him. He doesn’t know or care at the moment what the thing will turn out like. If it’s good, he might think of it as his tribute to Elanore; and if it isn’t… well, he knows that, once he’s finished this painting, he will start another one. Right now, that’s all that matters.
Elanore was right, Gustav decides, when she once said that he was entirely selfish, and would sacrifice everything—himself included—just so that he could continue to paint. She was eternally right and, in her own way, she too was always searching for the next challenge, the next river to cross. Of course, they should have made more of the time that they had together, but as Elanore’s ghost admitted at that Van Gogh cafe when she finally came to say goodbye, nothing could ever quite be the same.