Page 11 of The Art of Vanishing

Jean

I kept a closer eye on the patrons the next day, but I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

I thought about testing afew of the guests who lingered in front of us, wonderingwhat would happen if I stood or moved about, but I knew I was frozen in place for the duration of the day.

Whether it wasmagic or my own sense of decorum, I couldn’t say.

But the insatiable desire to crawl out of my frame that had gripped me for the past few weeks was subdued today.

For once, I knew, or hoped I knew, the outside world would be coming tome.

That night, Claire rushed into the gallery and walked right up to me. I was waiting for her, sitting on the floor with my legs crossed at the ankles like a young boy. From this position, we were just about at eye level.

“Hi,” she said with a smile. I waved and mouthed “hello” in return. “Tonight, I’m going to get my work out here done first so I don’t have to worry about it once I come in, okay?” I nodded; anything she wanted was fine with me. “Okay.” She gave me a thumbs-up. “Be back in a bit.”

She returned to her supplies and pulled a tangle of thin white cords out of her pocket, inserting them into her cellphone and pushing play.

At first, she was silent as she began her cleaning of the gallery, but I soon heard her softly singing, not full songs but brief snippets.

I thought she might be singing along to something I couldn’t hear.

I felt weird watching her; now that she knew I was here, it felt like an invasion of her privacy.

I got up and sat at the piano bench for a bit, flipping through the sheet music Marguerite and Pierre kept on the music stand.

Maybe I could learn something new to play on the violin.

I began feeling out the rhythm and despite myself, got a bit lost in the moment.

As I played, I grew anxious. What if we couldn’t repeat the magic that we’d performed the night before? What if it was a onetime occurrence? Or if it had all been a dream of some kind? I shuddered at the thought and looked back out into the room. Claire was standing in front of the frame.

“Okay,” she announced. “I’m ready.”

I crossed to her immediately, kneeling down to offer my hand. She grasped it and I pulled her in, holding my breath the entire time. This time, she gave herself a bit of a push. The whole maneuver was much more graceful than what we’d done the night before.

“Hi,” she said once she had found her footing.

“Bonsoir,” I replied, delighted that all my fears had been for naught.

“Bonsoir, how fancy.” We brushed our clothes back into place, both of us in uniform, in a way, now that I thought about it: Claire in what the job required, me in my only option.

“How was your day?” I asked, as if this was the start of any normal conversation.

“It was good. Fine. Actually, I don’t really remember. All I could really think about was getting back here.”

“I’m familiar with that feeling myself.”

“I’m not,” Claire confessed. “It was incredibly distracting. Should we go for another walk?” she asked. This time, she led me to the open garden door. “I feel like I’ve got to do something with my legs.”

I liked her proactivity. I responded, “Yes, let’s do that,” and followed her lead. I pulled my cigarette case from my inner jacket pocket and offered her one.

“Oh, god no. Ew,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose.

“What?” I asked, pulling the case back toward myself. I was a bit embarrassed by her reaction.

“Smoking is, like, not a thing anymore. Well, I guess it still is in some places. My grandmother still smokes, even though I’ve been trying to help her quit for years. She thinks she hides it from me, but I know.”

“Well, where I come from, smoking is very much a thing,” I said as I pulled a cigarette out and lit it.

“And where is that?” Claire asked.

“France.”

“What part of France are you from?”

“Are you familiar with the country?”

“No, god no. I mean, I wish. It just seemed like a proper thing to ask.”

“It’s been a very long time since I was there, in Paris. I can’t imagine what it’s like now. I wouldn’t say I’m familiar with it either, at this point.”

“Where are we now?” She gestured to the garden aroundus.

“The neighborhood just to the south of Paris where my family’s house is. It’s called Issy-les-Moulineaux.”

She repeated it back to me, butchering the French with a smile and I was overwhelmingly charmed. I complimented her on her attempt. “If only you saw how it was spelled.”

“And what year is it?” she asked.

“In here? I think it’s 1917.”

“1917, wow,” Claire said as she took in her surroundings. “What was life like in 1917?”

“Dark,” I said. “We were in the midst of a war and every day brought some kind of danger.”

“I’ve never experienced a war at home like that, but I can imagine how scary that would have been.” She said it with such care, I felt her empathy wrap around me like an embrace.

Night after night, we walked and we talked. I became obsessed by chatting with Claire. There was something about getting to talk to her that was better than I could have ever anticipated in those imaginary conversations I used to dream of. She was a real person, intense and questioning and funny.

“It’s so awesome,” Claire mused one night. “Even when I thought I could see you all moving in the paintings, I still thought of you as art, like it was an effect of some kind. I never imagined what the sound of your voice would be like or that we’d even be able to converse.”

“Maybe that’s better,” I joked. “Then you’re not over there thinking, ‘Wow, his voice is so much more grating than I expected.’?”

“Never,” she said sincerely. “You have a perfect voice.” Her compliment dangled in the atmosphere between us like a swing just abandoned by a child.

Conversation flowed easily between us. We were both hungry to learn more about each other, but she preferred to answer my questions with ones of her own, putting the spotlight back on me.

But I stumped her when I asked if she’d ever considered herself an artist. I told her I’d noticed the care she took to see each of us here on the walls.

She dropped her jaw at the suggestion. “You’d put me in the same sentence as the works in this room?

That makes me laugh out loud,” she said, but I heard no such laughter.

“No,” she continued, “I’ve really never been very good at any kind of art, not even doodling in class and stuff.

I just like to look at it. Where I come from, there aren’t a lot of places to even do that. Not like this, at least.”

“Where is it that you come from?”

“A little town just a few hours away from here, if you just drive, like, straight west into the state. I remember hearing someone say one time that it was one of the poorest towns in the country. Not sure if that’s actually true, but it sure as hell felt that way sometimes.

We never really went anywhere else for my whole life, had no way to get there, so art-wise, we got what we had.

“I’d never been to a museum until I was eleven,” she went on.

“My school held a contest and anyone who wrote an essay about art would be included in a field trip to come here. Well, not here, this was before they’d moved all of the art to the city.

We went to the old location, but you know, same art.

You remember that old place better than me, I’m sure,” she said.

I nodded; a single curl had come loose from her bun.

I tucked it behind her ear and she blushed. She continued.

“I didn’t really know anything about art.

Or anything about anything. But my mom had this one print that hung in our kitchen, no frame, just thumbtacks in the corners.

She probably found it on the street; she was always bringing stuff back other people thought was trash.

It drove everyone else up the wall. But this print was bright and sunny, and I used to stare at it every day.

I literally couldn’t help myself; I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.

“It was of a kitchen, but that kitchen was nothing like the one I sat in while I ate my cereal or my noodles or whatever had made its way to the table that night. I’d stare up at it and imagine I was there—it was warm and yellow and had flowers on the table and a window that looked out on these green hills, and it’s in that style where all the lines are a little wobbly, and it felt like something from that moment right before you wake up where your dream starts to shake back into your reality.

“I was a super short kid; I was always the smallest in the class, and I always felt like if that picture had been just a little closer to the ground, a little closer to me, maybe I’d know it even better.

“So anyway, there’s this essay contest and you just had to write about art, any art, so I wrote a story about a little girl who loved a painting and she stood and looked at it every single day, but it was just a little too high up on the wall.

One day, she stood so tall on her tiptoes, peering down into the painting, that she lost her balance.

She fell forward and her nose hit the canvas, except it didn’t hit the canvas, she just kept going.

She toppled end over end and when she landed on her butt, she realized she was smack-dab in the kitchen of the painting.

And it was real to her. She could sit at the table and feel the sun on her face and smell the grass on the hills through the window.

It felt like a dream, but she never had to wake up.

“And I submitted the story and I won. I think even my mom was proud of me.

Actually, that might have been the last time I ever felt that she was.

The school brought the whole class here.

And we wound our way through all the rooms and there was art everywhere, not just one painting on each wall but five or seven or ten paintings all together, and they were in frames and it was overwhelming.

“Because I’d won the contest, they printed my story and gave a copy of it to all the other students on the trip.

People laughed at me because no one else had written a story, they had all written some boring essays just listing the things they could see in a random piece of art because they’d wanted to go on the field trip so they could skip class for the day.

Except for my one friend, Brianna, who told me she thought what I’d written was so cool and that we should try it ourselves.

So, at one point, when the teachers weren’t watching us, we crept over to a painting that was so big, the bottom of the frame was below our knees, and we started to get up on our tiptoes, when a guard came running over.

He scared the crap out of us and yelled at us for standing too close to the art.

We backed off and ran to rejoin our group.

“I never thought to try it again. I had no idea it would actually work.” She smiled a little bit. “I wonder if Brianna’s been doing it this whole time,” she said.

Part of me thought about telling her right then and there that I was in love with her, but my fear of coming off as the heartsick lonely man in the painting, desperate to fall for the first girl he had touched in decades, kept me quiet for the moment.

The intensity of my feelings shocked me; nevertheless, I was certain that there were no other words to describe the way I’d come to feel about Claire.

And of course this wasn’t the first opportunity I’d had.

People fell in and out of love all of the time in our network of interconnected art.

I knew Marguerite had her fair share of past dalliances.

I think my mother had even had a suitor or two try to catch her eye, though she was a tough woman to please, but I’d never had the same luck within our world.

Time had shown me that it was me, not them, who could never make it fit.

I had only myself to blame for my self-imposed solitude.

“Does she know that her kitchen painting started it all, your mom?” I asked.

“No,” Claire said. “I don’t speak to her anymore.” She offered no further explanation and I certainly was not going to press. I allowed silence to fill the holes of the conversation.

Claire took her hair down and screwed it back up.

When she had finished and relaxed her hands at her sides, I reached to hold one of them in mine.

While we clasped palms each night as I pulled her into my world, this was something hitherto unexplored.

A little squeeze from her let me know she was feeling it too.