Page 21 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Montparnasse

Paris, France

May 17, 1936

Emi,

You did not lie when you said that L had lost weight, but you didn’t mention how much of his sanity he’d relinquished. Oh, the poor thing. What a wraith he is in the homely little château. The servants are tasked with providing the most tempting food and entertainments we can manage at Maison de Notre Rêve. So far, L is immune to temptation.

But I’m told by the maid that he has opened his crate of paints just this very morning! I’ve caught sight of him with his sketchbook, lurking among the trees. I think he works more from honor—he’s obliged to provide that painting you commissioned—than from inspiration. Yet, it is a start.

If I can help him, I will. Not in the name of art, but for his own sake. I’ve taken a liking to my wandering ghost.

Come visit soon. The company will do L good, as it will me.

Your loving JuJu

Chapter 7

What a wraith he is in the homely little château.

Later, after Vivi handedLý’s letter to Paul and left his office, she saw Justine Allard’s words floating up to her, as if they were inscribed in the air around her. The reference could be nothing, an ironic expression that mocked the humility of the servants’ cottage they wrote about. That’s what Paul thought, anyway. Or it could be everything. What was the likelihood of two significant châteaus mentioned betweenLýand Blanc?

She wanted to talk over what she’d unearthed with Calla, but Calla was wandering somewhere on campus, following whatever whim had seized her at the moment. Not that she would have been helpful. She had no patience for this part of art history: the slogging study, the false starts and dead ends. What Calla wanted was the answer, vivid and true, but she could never understand that the answer often came from the unglamorous work of being wrong, over and over again. That was what Vivi was for.

Vivi strode through Rathmore’s manicured lawns, retracing all the steps she’d walked as a student. The sun was beginning to set, throwing off limp ribbons of peach and gold through the oaks. It’d been nearly a decade since she’d last returned to Rathmore. On its surface, the campus looked the same. But there were bursts of change everywhere. Students wearing the stovepipe jeans that’d been popular when she was a kid. Scaffolding on the science lab where she’d earned her second master’s degreein chemistry. She’d been as determined to understand the science behind the art as she was the history, which meant that it took her nearly twice as long to get through her degrees, but she never doubted the decision. Art without materiality was just an idea wafting in the wind.

She stepped on a stray flyer for a student art show and picked it up, smoothing it out in her hands. All at once, she knew where Calla would have gone.

Rathmore’s gallery slept on the first floor of the fine arts building underneath the classrooms and studios. It was a modest white box space, shoddily lit and hung with recent senior works. Even though Vivi hadn’t been a studio art major, she’d spent many afternoons there, reading on a bench as she took in the work of her contemporaries. Sometimes she’d set down her textbook and stare at the paintings and sculptures on display. She played a private game in which she studied the subject portrayed and imagined how she would paint it herself.

A swish of red for the Titian beauty with the lip ring. A blur of indigo for the disorderly seascape. If she’d become an artist, she thought, her own style would have been abstract, grounded by the sensual tones of an O’Keeffe, shot through with Leonor Fini’s sense of transgression, her lithe weirdness. For all of Vivi’s precision as a conservator, she was most drawn to art that swept one up like music, experienced in consuming swells of feeling. Perhaps for her, abstraction was the only way to accurately depict an emotional landscape in flux.

But she’d never know now. She hadn’t picked up a brush in years. Once she saw how hard it would be to make a living as an artist, how very few were able to grasp at the whisker-thin threads of success, she shifted her attention to more attainable vocations. The life of a starving artist hadn’t appealed to her. She’d done enough starving in her childhood.

And there had been, after all, student loans to repay. Like Calla, Vivi had received a series of scholarships, but hers were for academics rather than art. With the help of a much-needed Pell Grant, she’d successfully cobbled together a means to leave Deer Creek. She’d vowed that theescape wouldn’t be for naught. She refused to wind up in the gutter, wailing about lost opportunities, or worse yet, drinking her ambitions away in some remote farmhouse in the Wisconsin woods.

After college, Vivi lived the barest possible existence, floating in and out of sketchy sublets shoved within abandoned corners of the city, subsisting on Maruchan packets and rice cakes, all in the name of wresting herself out of debt. Close to finally paying back the last of the loans, she moved into the Lakewood studio last winter, committing to a slightly less itinerant existence. At that point, she should have felt a relaxing of her financial constriction, but she couldn’t seem to get out of the habit of austerity. Maybe a part of her didn’t believe she’d earned the luxury of stability.

Calla had no such hesitation. She flew through the Lincoln Park boutiques with a credit card that burned to the touch. Charged lavish dinners, took a car service wherever she needed to go. She and Wayland could have lived most anywhere in the city, but they clung to Pilsen as a token of the scrappy, artistic façade that hid Wayland’s formidable security net. In Vivi’s ungenerous moments, she regarded them as children, playacting as beatniks. But Calla had never been miserly; her nature was to share what she had with Vivi. If Vivi would have accepted it, Calla would have swept her along with them into unrestrained excess and fancy.

“We deserve this,” Calla had said fiercely. “We deserve theworld.”

Inside Rathmore’s gallery, the walls were covered in large-scale installations. Each contained a single strand of light running through a wire that looped across a canvas of fathomless black. One painting, unlike the others, contained two strands of light. Silver and gold. Always next to one another, but never quite touching. Vivi read the title of the piece.We Die Alone. She did not like the installation, though she couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. Its pessimism? Its stubborn lack of satisfaction? She wanted to reach out and braid the silver and gold together.

“Bee, there you are.” Calla swirled breathlessly into the gallery, holding a dusty tome against her chest.

Vivi turned from the installation. “Where wereyou? We were supposed to talk to Dr. Quân.”

Calla waved her off. “Oh, he never liked me. You would have made more headway with him alone. Besides, I ran into that TA, Ivan, and you’ll never guess, he’s a tenure-track professor. He’s still very dashing, especially now that he’s lost that mustache.”

“Did he remember the cow patties?”

Calla smirked. “He sure rememberedme. How’d you get on with Quân?”

Vivi oscillated between annoyance and eagerness to tell Calla what she’d learned. In the end, her eagerness won out, and she described her conversation with Paul, along with the letters from Justine that she’d scanned into her phone. She read them aloud to Calla, dwelling on the mention of the Château des Miroirs. Calla was nodding until Vivi reluctantly confessed that she’d given awayLý’s letter.

“But I took a photo of it first,” Vivi said hastily.