Page 22 of The Muse (Beautiful Magic 1)
“Would you like to show me this museum, Julien?”
I can’t help my grin. The suggestion isn’t improper, but it’s the way she says it. Like nothing could be better than the two of us, nearly alone, in the Musée d’Orsay.
Standing, I offer her my hand. “I would love nothing better than to show you this museum.”
She looks tickled by the gesture. It goes with her dress and her era, but she doesn’t seem as prim as I thought women were a hundred and thirty-five years ago. Still, she takes my hand, and as her fingers touch my palm, a tremble sweeps through me—up my arm and through my whole being.
I don’t move for long seconds that contain lifetimes.
The painted woman is real. Is holding my hand. Is touching me. Her fingers wrap delicately around mine as she stands in front of me, alive and in the world.
And it feels spectacular.
Flesh and bone, warmth and sparks.
So many sparks race across my skin at the simple clasping of our hands.
If holding hands is a gateway drug, I’m already addicted.
We wander through the galleries of my home away from home, past the paintings that are almost like family. She trails her hand along the canvases, brushing pastel bathers on beaches, bowls of peaches, and moonlit stars. She traces her fingers over vases of flowers, Tahitian women on islands, and cabarets in Montmartre.
I would tell anyone else to stop. But there is reverence in her touch, something loving and tender.
When she reaches a painting of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, she stops to consider it.
“I want to go there,” she announces, with some of the same longing as when she said she was awfully hungry. “I want to see the real cathedral. Have you been?”
“Yes. I’m studying art history, and I’ve visited a lot of the places the artists here painted. Rouen, Arles . . .” I watch her for a reaction. “Even Monet’s garden.”
Her eyes widen. “You’ve been to Monet’s garden? The real one?”
I laugh once. “Is there another one?”
“What is it like now? Tell me everything.”
There it is again. Everything is good. Bring me one of everything. She’s as hungry for the world as she was for my sandwich.
I search for words that are up to that hunger. “It’s a paradise of colors and scents and sounds. Like art made real. Walking through it is like strolling through a field of inspiration, where you can reach out and pluck an idea as easily as a flower.”
Then I hear myself, and stop with a grimace of embarrassment and chagrin. “That sounds unbelievably pretentious, doesn’t it?”
“No. It doesn’t. It sounds . . .” She looks again at the Monet, laying her hand against it to frame the doorway of the church. “It sounds like something I’d want.”
The way she says “want” is wistful and pained. It’s a wish from a woman shut away for too long.
Are the other people in the paintings trapped too? The idea never occurred to me. There’s something different about Clio, a vivacity I haven’t seen in the others. They seem content to do what they do, in or out of their frames. At the risk of a terrible pun, they strike me as rather two-dimensional.
Clio is something else.
I have so many questions. I want to ask who she is, where she’s from, but the moment is delicate, and I don’t want to break it.
“Do you want to see my favorite Van Gogh?” I ask, changing the mood and the subject.
“Yes!” She’s smiling again, sparkling again. “I definitely want to see your favorite Van Gogh, Julien.”
The sound of my name on her lips makes me want to touch her arm, to take her hand. I don’t do either of those things, or anything else my mind suggests. She’d been desperate to come out of her frame. I’d hoped—all right, assumed—her reasons were the same as mine. That we both wanted to see each other. Touch each other. Do other things with each other that I wasn’t going to admit to fantasizing about doing with a woman in a painting.
But now I don’t know if she wanted to come out for me or to be free of her painted chains, so I keep my hands to myself.
I take her to the wing on the second floor and show her Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In it, a couple walks along the River Rhône under a sky full of sparkling stars while sailboats bob in the water. Clio gazes at it for a moment, a hand pressed over her heart, then she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she reaches for the painting, her touch as soft and light as a murmur on the waves.
“Is this one of the places you’ve been?”
“Yes. Van Gogh painted this by the Rhône in Arles. That was a family trip, though, and I was too young to remember it.”
