But then I spotted him, stretched beneath a plane tree. He’d shucked his jacket and his hat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. It was white, coarse, tucked into a pair of loose blue pants. On his feet, braided leather sandals. He lay on his stomach, surrounded by curls of orange peels. But he wasn’t eating. With a wide pad spread out before him and a red Conté crayon in hand, Luc Crépet was drawing.
He’d once tucked a sketch into a letter, a quick, breathless Paris café scene, yet I’d never seen him with a pencil. I wanted to see more of his world, of the restless city where he lived during the week. It was the City of Light, the city of love, the city where revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and Impressionists stormed the Académie. I had been waiting, with each meeting, with each letter, for another glimpse of Paris. I had to be content with his words; they painted nearly as vibrant a picture.
I stepped closer, breath held. I wanted a peek at his sketch pad. Luc, away from his black suit, away from his studies and tennis, away from his maman, away from the château dripping with art, he was drawing. I wanted a peek at this private, stolen moment.
But it wasn’t Paris or even Mille Mots, those crumbling stones I always drew. It wasn’t the trees or the caves in this solemn little clearing or the carpet of wood violets. It wasn’t the orange peels. On his paper, Luc drew me.
This drawing, it wasn’t casual, like the inked Paris café, dashed off over, I imagined, glasses of wine and heady conversation. This one was careful, lines overlapped, erased, drawn in again. In sanguine, the drawing glowed. It was me and not me. My hair was pinned up, for one. My neck longer. My shoulders bare above a froth of lace.
I took another step and a branch cracked under my foot. “That’s not me,” I said.
Luc spun at my voice. An elbow crushed into his sketch pad as he pushed upright, leaving a streak of red on his shirt.
“I said it’s not me.” My face was hot. “You’ve made me look much older.”
Something about it—whether the upswept hair, the bare shoulders, the challenging expression—made me think of Mother and the painting I’d found in Monsieur Crépet’s studio. A forbidden pose, something undoubtedly adult, and it made me furiously embarrassed.
Luc looked every bit as furious. He flushed, then scrambled to his feet, snapping the book closed so quickly the cardboard cover tore. “Who asked you anyway?”
“That’s exactly it. Nobody asked me.” I rubbed my cheeks. “Did you? Did you ask if you could draw my likeness?”
He didn’t look the least bit apologetic. Rather, just discomfited at being caught out. “You’re the daughter of an artist, aren’t you? You should be used to it.”
Maybe the son of Claude Crépet would be used to posing. I’d seen the hallways of portraits. But my own mother, she never let me near while she was at her easel. I asked her more times than I could count if she’d paint me, draw me, trace me in the dust on the piano, but she always refused.
I parroted the response Mother always gave. “Artists do not choose what to paint. They are chosen.” It’s what she said as she sat in front of blank canvases, waiting for inspiration to strike. She looked so beautiful, so confident, so artistic, that what could I do but believe her?
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “The world is full of things to capture on the page. To say otherwise is to ignore a world of beauty.”
His scornful tone incensed me. As though, as a Crépet, he was the expert. “And how do you know what inspires someone?” I asked. “Are you the keeper of the muse?”
“If you wait for inspiration to strike, you sit before an empty canvas. And then what have you gained?”
“Greatness.”
“Wasted time.”
I shook my head. He was wrong. Mother knew what she was doing. Her empty canvases, her discarded studies, they were waiting for perfection. “The masters were patient. They created, they perfected, and they achieved.”
“Even the masters had to put bread on the table.”
“And where is the romance in that?” I protested. “In painting for money rather than painting for art’s sake?”
“What is romantic about starving in a Paris garret? About begging rent from friends ‘for just one more week’? About waiting for that next big commission that might never come?” He tossed the crayon aside. “In the meantime, you eat soup and lentils, if that’s all there is in the kitchen. You stop up the leaks in the roof with old canvases that you’ll never sell. You chase your children out into the world to pick up education as they can.” He drew in a broken breath. “You tell yourself that it is all in the name of art. You tell yourself that it’s worth it.”
I looked to the red crayon lying in the leaves. “Clearly we don’t agree.”
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
I left, before he could see hot tears in my eyes. I was upset by his secretive sketch, by his disagreement, by his assertion that, all along, my mother had somehow been failing. I furiously kicked a rock.
As I wound back around the stone face, past the dark openings of the little caves, he called out behind me.
“Wait, mademoiselle.” Dry leaves crunched. “Clare.”
Back to the “Clare” of that quiet moment in the hallway of paintings, the “Clare” of the letters. I turned.
“I’m sorry.” He exhaled. “Being an adult is sometimes exhausting.”
“Everything you said about the leaking roof, the children being sent out into the world…that’s all real, isn’t it?”
He rubbed at his eyes and nodded. “I work in a café, as a waiter, after my classes are done for the day, after my studying, after my precious few matches with Bauer. Something has to fund all of that.”
“But your parents…”
He shook his head. “It’s all they can do to keep Mille Mots.”
I shifted. No one had ever talked to me about money.
“I do some tutoring. That’s where I met Bauer. At the café, sometimes I sketch the customers. Mostly tourists. They buy the sketches as a little remembrance of their trip.” He shrugged. “It’s not drawing what I want, but it buys my wine, my books, my coffee, new strings for my racket.” He touched his inside pocket. I wondered what else money bought.
“You must do what you must do.” I tugged at the sides of my skirt. “I didn’t mean offense.”
“I know.”
“You startled me with that sketch. That’s all.” It sounded inane when said aloud. What was there to be startled about? Being noticed? Being pinned to the page? “I don’t look like that, you know.”
Softly he said, “To me, you do.”
