Something in his voice washed over me, warm like summer. “Spoken like an artist.”
His hand lowered from his face and went behind his back. I wished I could see his fingertips.
“I have an extra drawing pad.” I took a step back. “Stay, please. Stay and sit with me awhile.”
He hesitated for just a moment more. Then he stepped out of the shadows.
He was in a bad way, that was clear. A fragmented shell, maybe. They tore like bread knives. Or a bayonet, swung too near. I was learning to identify what caused each injury. Long scars ran from the side of his jaw upwards. More than scars, though; they sank deep, like the trenches running across the Western Front. The right side of his face was unmarred, but the left, that whole side was a battlefield. I kept my gaze firmly on it, forced myself to look at every ridge, every crater, every shell hole. The map a soldier brought home.
He stood tall, shoulders back, as though daring me to recoil.
But I didn’t. I knew his face was a private hell for him, but I had seen worse cases in the studio. Men missing noses, men without chins, men whose faces sank in on themselves like deflated balloons. One of those poor men sat over at the checkers table right now, waiting for a few final dabs of enamel paint on his false nose. Then he was planning to go home to see his mother for the first time since he was wounded. Though the soldier standing so defiantly in the doorway had it bad, I had seen plenty worse.
So I made sure to look him square in the eye. I made sure to modulate my breathing so he wouldn’t hear an extra hitch in my throat. I made sure he knew that no matter what reactions he met walking down the streets of Paris, he would not find them here. Instead I asked, “How do you take your tea?”
I settled him in at a table and filled a chipped cup. Mrs. Ladd was American and assumed the French thought as much of tea as she did. The few British artists in the studio certainly didn’t mind. While I busied myself with unwrapping my charcoals, sharpening my pencils, squaring up my sketch pad, he took a polite sip. I passed him a pad of his own and then the tea grew cold.
At first he didn’t do much, just stared down at the paper as though he didn’t know what to do with it. I wondered if I was wrong. But then he picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers. “These are the pencils my father always used to prefer.”
“They’ve always been my favorites.” I took one of my own.
He started drawing.
I began with the outline of his face. “How long have you been in Paris?” In my few months here, I’d learned how to ask questions carefully. A direct “How long ago were you wounded?” would cause that familiar look of anguish to flash through their eyes.
He still flinched at the words. He saw straight through it. “Nineteen seventeen. Bastille Day.”
A year and a half, though, to him, it probably felt like more. “Have you been in Paris all this time?”
He pulled a cigarette case from his jacket pocket but didn’t open it. “Wouldn’t you be?”
I worked on sketching in the good side of his face. A narrow eye, brown like an almond, with long lashes. My pencil loved drawing those in. Thick curved eyebrows. A high, smooth forehead ending in short curls. A sharply angled cheek with a nick of a scar on top. “A work of art,” I murmured.
“I’m sorry?” He looked up from his drawing.
“Works of art.” I stared down at the lines beneath my pencil. “In Paris.”
He watched me.
As though a mirror were down the center of his face, I began copying the features from one side to the other. “What’s your favorite museum in the city?” I drew the curve of his chin in an unbroken line. “And you’re a liar if you say the Louvre.”
He blinked and leaned back in the chair. “Musée Jacquemart-André,” he said without hesitation.
“So intimate, yet so elegant.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Where else could I see Venus Asleep?”
That lip twitch was definitely an attempt at a smile. “I shouldn’t be surprised to find an art lover in a studio.”
“And I shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a soldier.” My pencil smoothed in the lines of his missing cheek. “As a girl, I visited France. It only takes once to fall in love.”
“That it does,” he said with a touch of wistfulness. His pencil scratched softly.
“What are you sketching?” I finally asked.
“Just that.”
“France?”
“Love.”
I didn’t ask to see what was on his page. “There,” I said. I turned the sheet of paper around to him. “Where should I make adjustments?”
He stared for a moment, then quietly offered a few suggestions—eyes a little wider, nose narrower, a tiny divot in his chin.
“Fine,” I said, my pencil already flashing. He waited, watching. And I drew. But something wasn’t right. Everything felt shifted to the left, off-kilter. The angles didn’t match up.
I set down my pencil and wiped my fingers on the sides of my skirt. “I need an accurate portrait of your face before…before now.” His eyes flashed understanding. “Would you allow me?”
Without waiting for his assent, I closed my eyes and reached forward.
My fingers found his face, the one side smooth, the other rough beneath my fingertips. Gently, I traced up along the edges of his face, along his cheekbones and the curves of his eye sockets, down the bridge of his nose. I ignored the scars and the jagged edges for what was beneath. With light fingertips, I felt the lines of his face. I opened my eyes.
He sat motionless, breathless, eyes wide-open and on me.
I flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s the way I learned to create a face.”
