Page 40 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

Some men of the movement regarded women as muses or sexual objects, meant for brutality or worship, but never personhood. Precious few were inducted into the pearly gates—Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini—and many gained their success only after Breton’s influence waned. Some, rebuffed by their secondary status, declined the Surrealist label altogether, despite participating in exhibitions and associating with the group.

What insurmountable obstacles must have awaitedLýas a lesbian and an immigrant, an artist who could never be truly accepted by her contemporaries, especially in the riotous decade of postwar Europe.

AndBlue Mirror. Vivi pulled up the image and scrutinized it, finding new meaning in each brushstroke, each careful application of color. The women weren’t twins or sisters, as many thought, or even doppelgängers, but lovers hiding behind the same overpainted face. Maybe the painting had been a way to immortalize their doomed story. Because it must be doomed, right? There was no avenue for a happy ending, not for a married woman and a poor artist in hiding.

Vivi ached for them, the Chaton and the Cheval Sauvage, two souls leashed by the conventions of their time. It was an old story, but it felt new and sharp and heartbreaking to her.

With these thoughts came more questions. How did things fall apart between the women? Why hadLýhidden the journal beneath the bench, of all places? Was the “offering” mentioned inLý’s letter meant for Justine, his beloved—was it this very journal? Somehow, the more Vivi understood, the more that explanation rang as false.Lý’s letter had been written in Vietnamese, drafted in a tone that suggested a deeper relationship, maybe, than romantic love.I died so you could live.

And, the question that Vivi least understood: how could the artist’s letter possibly have made its way from France to her father’s hands in Deer Creek? Every discovery was another step in a labyrinth. The closer you came to the interior, the less certain you were of ever emerging again. A part of Vivi wanted to stay lost. She was enthralled byLýand Justine’s love story, afraid of what might await her at its end.

She tried to shut the journal, but each time, her hands returned to the pages, her gaze latched onto the handwriting. She couldn’t stop now. Not when she was so close to understanding.

After a glance at Calla through the doorway, sprawled on the bed with her face now planted in a pillow, Vivi made her decision. She’d take a leaf from Calla’s book: better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Interstitial

May 15, 1943

In July, we named the cottage. We were in my bed—too small for the two of us, but we never could get close enough. The Chaton had begun paging throughNightwoodwith her delicate fingertips. I longed to take them in my mouth, as I had only moments before, sucking the salt off each one, the way I used to pry marrow from a beef bone. I could not get enough of her skin, the revelatory softness of her hips, those endless hills of cream. I’d tasted everything, but I was ravenous for more.

Had anyone ever loved like this? I would not believe it.

She read aloud a passage that I’d underlined. “‘A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own.’”

She punctuated the quote with a kiss that I eagerly returned. For the next few minutes, we forgot about Djuna Barnes.

Later, she said, “You are nothing like him, my love.”

Even as my heart sang to hear her say it, I bristled at the comparison. I’d have rather Marcel not existed at all. I never asked about him, but what a fool to think that a married woman shouldn’t be intimate with her own husband. But they did not love as we did. It was inconceivable.

She went on. “There is something familiar about you.”

I felt it too. Every moment with her brought inexpressible comfort, along with the electric tug of desire. Whatever comforts I’d experienced in my life were nothing compared to the rightness of being in her presence.

She propped the book on her bare breasts and repeated dreamily, “‘A woman is yourself.’”

“A mirror,” I said, gesturing to the antique floor mirror propped against my bedroom wall, through which I saw our nakedness, the spool of her unbound hair woven with mine.

My mind went to Narcissus at his pond, but it wasn’t an apt comparison. Justine wasn’t just my mirror, reflecting a flat, sanitized version of me. She was my other half. She didn’t reflect; she revealed.

Just then, I knew what I would paint next.

“The Château des Miroirs,” she mused. “That’s what we’ll call the cottage. Your home.”

It was not a château, of course, only a dressed-up hovel at best, but that was the charm. A cottage could become a castle in the mind of any lovestruck couple. In all the essential ways, we were no different from so many of the youths stealing into shadowy corners to consummate the truth that their souls already understood. If there was an element of danger to our love, we ignored it, even as we understood that there would be a reckoning. There always was for women.

I licked a drop of sweat off the ridge of her clavicle. “I’ll always think of this as our home.”

Without discussing it, we knew I would stay for as long as the situation would bear. But how long was that? Marcel would be returning at the end of the summer. Already, I began to attend to the signs of him that littered Maison de Notre Rêve: his fat rows of cigars; fastidious coats that needed constant brushing; the rifles proudly displayed in his study and polished with exquisite care by the maids every fortnight.

Once, the Chaton let me into that study to look at a Turner landscape she’d purchased for him—he loved the English Romantics, which felt like a departure from what I’d gleaned about his tastes—but I could only fixate on the silver rods of violence, hung with regal ceremony above his desk.

“My husband is a hunter,” the Chaton had explained, unnecessarily.

“How nice for him.” Guns would always remind me of soldiers, which reminded me of other, more tenebrous things.

“He enjoys dominance. Even the smallest creatures are worthy of a chase.”