Page 12 of The Art of Vanishing

Claire

I stumbled away from Jean’s gallery that night, giving him a small wave from the doorway before I disappeared down the hall. My legs were wobbling and my heart was racing; once I was safely out of his sight, I stopped to catch my breath.

It had all started when he brushed one of my perpetually out-of-place curls away from my face, his fingers warm against my forehead. Sparks had followed his touch, and I wanted the curl to fall back out of place so he would do it again.

I’d covered for my obnoxious heart, beating so loudly I was sure he could hear it, by plowing on through that story about my first visit to this museum.

I’d even snapped at him when he asked about my mom, my brain putting up all its usual walls to keep us protected.

But then he went and took my hand in his, not to shake or to help me get somewhere, just to hold, and my body went on the fritz all over again.

There was just something about him. Even though I hardly knew him, with him I felt like a whole new version of myself.

I could show him all the pieces of my brain, even the ones I hadn’t fully figured out.

He seemed to understand all of it. He was so much more alive than I ever could have dreamed during all those weeks I’d spent staring at his painting, wishing he could talk back. I couldn’t wait to see him again.

I needed to get back to work, but as I surveyed my next assignment, curiosity got the better of me.

Of course Jean’s living room had been the right place to start.

I would never have worked up the confidence to try to cross through without his obvious invitation.

I would have been too embarrassed to try and fail, even if it was just in front of the other paintings.

But now that I was alone and aware of what I was capable of, I wondered if my abilities were confined just to that gallery or to that frame.

Did I need Jean’s help to make it through?

Would my magic work in other paintings? Would it work in other museums, or was there something special about this place?

I picked a warm landscape, a few trees on the beach leading to the bluest ocean I had ever seen. It was tranquil, empty of any inhabitants except for some sailboats in the distance. The shady sand looked like a soft place to land if I stumbled on my entrance.

The bottom of the frame came right up to my waist. I placed both of my hands on it, preparing to kick off the ground, when I heard a voice call across the room.

“Claire!” Linda bellowed. I lost my balance, cutting my jump short and stumbling backward. I landed on my butt and she walked over, offering me her hand. “What in god’s name are you doing? Trying to lick the paintings?”

“Just got a little excited trying to dust the frames is all.” I laughed it off. “How have you been?”

“Can’t complain, can’t complain. You done in here? I was just heading out, if you want to walk out with me.”

“Yup, all set!” I answered before she could get a good look at the place and realize I’d only just begun. “Let’s get our stuff and I’ll walk you to your car. How’s Didi?”

That was a close call, closer than I ever needed to be again. I needed to be smart about this. I’d be more wary of where Linda was in the museum before I next dared to try something like that.

—

Jean and I picked up the next night right where we’d left off.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you an artist?”

“I don’t know,” he confided. “I loved to create things as a kid, but I wasn’t even twenty when I was frozen in this version of myself.

I’d just left for the war a few weeks before and had kind of put making plans on hold until I learned more about what life had in store for me.

Maybe I would have been a great soldier and would have traveled up through those ranks.

Or maybe I would have died young. Or maybe I would have survived and done something else entirely.

I loved art, but that always seemed like my father’s calling. I don’t know if it was mine too.”

I wanted to know more about Jean—I’d offered up bits and pieces of myself the last few nights, but I couldn’t help but ask him more questions every chance I got. I wanted to know everything.

“He painted you and your family, your father did?”

“He did,” Jean confirmed. “He painted us from memory, placing us where he wanted to see us in this domestic scene. I was gone, training for the army.”

“But he didn’t paint himself into the painting?”

“No, just the rest of us. He’s the uncaptured viewer. It’s honest, truth be told, to how we operated as a family unit. It would have been a bit bizarre to have him in here with us forever.”

“So, you are…were?” I slowed down for a moment.

I didn’t want to offend him, but I was desperate to understand how this all worked.

“You’re a real person? Or you were at some point before you were made in this world?

Not that you’re not a real person now—clearly you are—” Somehow, we were holding hands again.

I tapped the back of his hand with my thumb as if to prove my own point.

“But in my world? There exists—or existed—another version of you?”

“Yes, I guess that’s kind of how I see it,” he replied. “But I realize now that I just assume that’s how it works. I don’t have any real way of knowing.”

“And you don’t know what happened to other-world you?” I asked.

“I mean…” He was being surprisingly sheepish.

I waited, giving him time to fill in the silence.

“Part of me hopes that the me out there became an artist. But I was so young, it embarrasses me a little now. I don’t know if I really was on the precipice of having some kind of talent or if I was just saying what I thought my father wanted to hear.

I did hear a guide say something about it once. ”

“What did they say?”

“They called Pierre a collector—the guides talk about that occasionally. He must have been a big deal. But this guide, he also described me, calling me a sculptor, I think,” Jean admitted.

“For months, I was desperate to know more, but it was never mentioned again. It was so brief; I wasn’t even sure I’d heard them correctly. ”

“I could google it, if you wanted me to,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought to do so before, but I could answer this question. I could help Jean fill in this puzzle piece.

“What does that mean—‘google’?” he asked.

“That I could look it up on the internet,” I explained, not sure how deep I needed to go into my explanation of search engines and the World Wide Web.

“Could I ask you for a favor?”

“Of course,” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

“Could you not look it up? I don’t know what access you have to newspaper records or whatever sources might give you the answer, but I’m a different man from the man I was out there.

I’ve spent many, many years as this version of myself.

And while I don’t know what happened to the former me out there, I don’t want more versions of me to live in your head.

I want it, this, to just be us. Does that make any sense? ”

“Sure,” I said. I was surprised by his question.

I hadn’t really assumed he had anything in common with the man he was more than a century ago in a different world.

I tried to explain why this request didn’t bother me.

“I mean, the many versions part gets a little screwy in my head when I try to think about it too deeply, but I get what you’re asking.

This is just about us. But—” I knew this was my moment to get all that I wanted, all that I craved, which was just knowing Jean.

“You have to give me a little more. Who is this Jean? Who are you in here?”

So, he let me in. He gave me so many little pieces of himself.

He confided in me that he was a little afraid of his older sister, Marguerite, that their relationship had always been somewhat fraught.

Marguerite and Jean’s dad had a complex relationship and the trauma from that still haunted her.

But she was also like another mother to Jean.

I loved hearing him talk about his siblings and his mother, what their relationships were like, how Marguerite and Pierre had gotten closer out of sheer proximity in the painting.

“Do you have relationships with other people in here?” I asked on another night as we circled the garden path yet again.

“What, like friendships? Or like love?” he asked.

“Oh, I meant friendships,” I said, taken aback by his reply. “But now I obviously need to know about the love part.” Was that jealousy that was heating the back of my neck? I told that voice inside my head to stop being ridiculous.

“Well, yes, relationships pop up in here all the time. Some are short-lived, some people have been together for decades.”

“You didn’t really answer my question,” I pointed out. “I was asking about you.”

“I’ve had a few—um—dalliances before.” He coughed and I gave him one of those looks. “But nothing really of note. And nothing for a long time.”

“What about people like me? Has anyone ever knocked on your frame before?” I asked mostly as a joke, but the look on Jean’s face told me I had struck a chord. “Wait, really, though? Who was she? What happened?” He looked so stricken. “It’s okay, Jean. You can tell me.”

“It was a long time ago, multiple decades at this point.”

“And there was someone else who could see you?”

“A new curator, just out of school, probably only two or three years older than me. She had just joined the team. Well, she had joined in the sense that she had technically been hired as staff at the museum. But the men in charge of the foundation at that time, they basically refused to acknowledge her presence. They would walk through the halls and leave her trailing ten steps behind them. I watched them turn away whenever she dared to raise an idea, carrying on as if their ears couldn’t hear the sound of her voice.

You could just see it on her face—she’d fought hard for this position and the reality of it was a bitter one. ”

“That sucks,” I said.

“It did; it sucked. Did I use that right?” he asked.

I nodded. “The foundation has come so far in its leadership. But not fast enough. This woman, Ellen, she started wandering the museum by herself instead of following the pack as they moved through the galleries. She visited us often. And she started to feel like a friend. She’d come by after the museum had closed with a notebook or a sketch pad and just hang out.

She was brilliant with a pencil. She’d draw these little comics of her interactions at the museum.

And when she was done, she would turn her pad around and show them to me. ”

“Oh,” I gasped. “So she knew you could see?”

“I think so,” Jean said. “At first, I thought I was just her imaginary friend.” I smiled, knowing I’d called him exactly that before I’d met him.

“But after some time, I could tell she was really watching me, watching us. And while I could never speak back to her, she kept talking to me, showing her drawings to me.”

“What happened to her? Did she get a new job? Somewhere they respected her?”

Jean shuddered. “The horrible part is I’ll never truly know. The knowledge of our secret world, she couldn’t keep it in for very long. I get it; she had dedicated her life to art and here she was with this discovery that could change everything.”

“But they didn’t believe her.” I guessed the ending to this story.

“Not even for a second, they didn’t even try. They mocked her mercilessly when she tried to explain.”

“And then they fired her?”

“If they didn’t, they made her so uncomfortable that she was forced to find another position. I haven’t seen her in a very, very long time.”

“That’s heartbreaking. And she never came back.”

“No, it’s been dozens of years, but I do think I’d still recognize her.”

“That must have been hard for you, losing a friend.” I could see the lingering hurt in his eyes.

“It was,” Jean said. “It wasn’t just how lonely I felt when she was gone. It was also that I felt complicit in her dismissal, in the way they’d tortured her. Like I’d shown her too much, gotten her in trouble. I took it really personally.”

“But you didn’t do anything,” I assured him. “That world was stacked against her. It’s not your fault that she could see more than those men ever could.”

“I put her in danger. I could tell she could see the real me and I didn’t follow any of our usual rules of decorum.

I didn’t stay frozen for her. You have to keep this a secret, Claire,” Jean begged.

“I mean, you don’t have to do anything, of course.

But I can’t imagine what I would do if the same thing happened to you. ”

I felt my heart flutter; I loved how much he cared. Goodbye always came before we were ready, but it was time and I had to get back out to my real world.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.” I made to leave for my world but changed my mind and turned back to Jean. I stood on my tiptoes, just for a moment, and placed a whisper of a kiss on his cheek.