Page 25 of The Art of Vanishing

Jean

She was not back on Saturday night, nor was she back on Sunday. No one was. Days passed and the galleries remained empty. I’d never known how reliant I was on the constant ebb and flow of museum visitors until the seas sat still for days on end.

We stopped assuming our positions each morning. The nights bled into the days; the days were no different from the nights. Before Claire, I’d romanticized my loneliness. I had no one, but I needed no one. I was most myself when I was alone. I’d made it my prevailing personality trait.

Today and every day now, my loneliness felt oppressive.

It threatened to crush me, and I didn’t have it in me to get out of its way.

Marguerite and Pierre had tried to engage with me at the start, but it was increasingly clear that this time was in no way weighing on them the same way it affected me.

If anything, this was something like a vacation for them, each free to spend all their hours however they pleased.

They came back occasionally to check on me, always under the pretense of having forgotten something or of needing a break, but I saw right through them.

Whatever they saw in me was not what they were looking for.

I had always been so good at waiting. I couldn’t figure out what part of myself I had lost—why I couldn’t sustain myself through this time like I had all the other times when isolation had been my normal.

I couldn’t read; I felt sick when I looked at the violin.

I entertained myself for a while with games of the imagination, trying to picture what Claire was up to wherever she was, but that lost its charm quickly, as was to be expected.

I couldn’t envision what her life out there was like.

I couldn’t guess what anyone’s life out there was like.

I took to wandering through the various landscapes, trying my best to avoid all other people.

It wasn’t as hard as it sounds, despite how many of us there were in the museum.

The others tended to congregate in the usual spots: around the card table, at the races, by the pier.

I never went near Le Bonheur de vivre . I took the long routes, winding my way through abandoned spaces.

I came to prefer the landscapes on the first floor that faced the large, two-story windows.

I watched through the glass for any signs of life outside. I rarely saw anyone pass.

I thought maybe there’d been some apocalyptic event and we didn’t know that we were the only ones left.

But I realized paintings probably wouldn’t have survived the apocalypse either.

And I knew that some people remained out there; every so often, I would see a car driving along the street, just visible through the tree line.

I missed the tour groups, with the guides trying to make the art accessible to students and the patrons striving to make their experience the best it could possibly be.

I missed the chatter in the galleries, picking up on small pieces of the lives of strangers I would never see again.

I missed the museum associates, careening from room to room with a sense of urgency. I missed Linda.

I missed Claire so fiercely, I sometimes wondered if I had made the entire thing up.

One hundred years in the same place seems like it could bring on a bout of madness; maybe it had finally caught up with me.

The thing was, I hadn’t felt mad then. I felt mad now.

I caught myself replaying the conversations we’d had, murmuring aloud the words we’d exchanged.

It reminded me of how I had acted before she had leapt into my world, desperate to find a way to communicate with her.

That was a shadow of a sentiment compared to the way I wished for her now. Knowing her had ruined me forever.

There was no respite; it was me and my wild emotions and little else. I never needed to be alone with my thoughts again. And yet there was no end in sight. Barring the museum reopening, which didn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon, I couldn’t see a way out. I was trapped.

I was sitting on a bluff, staring out at the water.

This was the same sea I’d taken Claire to after our first night at the racetrack.

The same small purple clouds hung in the sky; the same swells crashed gently into the shore, each dotted with the same white foam.

Everything felt the same and entirely different all at once.

I was lost in my memory of us together in this place, one of the only past times I actively sought out these days.

Motion startled me back to the present. A great pouf of black took over the right side of my field of vision as Odette sat down next to me, tucking her voluminous black skirts around her.

I hadn’t seen her since Claire and I had been to visit her gallery during Antoinette’s inaugural art history lesson.

At first, we were both silent, as I had been before she joined me.

After many minutes, she turned to me and said, “You are sad.” She was right. I nodded to show her so. “You miss her.” I nodded again. “I have seen you, all these weeks, moving like a ghost through the museum.”

I hadn’t run into her once; I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

“From across the room,” she clarified, gesturing at the gallery we were in right now, looking toward the paintings on the opposite wall. That made more sense.

“Did you follow me here?” I hadn’t spoken aloud in days; my voice cracked with lack of use.

“I guess you could say that.” She danced around the question. “You caught my eye from across the way. I thought you could use someone to talk to. We used to talk, you remember, I am sure, though it has been a very, very long time.”

It had been more than half a century since I had spoken to Odette one on one. So much had changed since. I hardly even saw myself as the same person I’d been then.

“I remember,” I responded simply.

“It is a neat bit of magic, what you and she have pulled off.”

“It’s not me who did anything,” I said. “It’s her. She’s the magic one.” I meant it, with my whole heart.

“I’ve been wondering: How did she think to try in the first place?” Odette asked.

“She says she’s always had this feeling, since she was a kid, that she could just lean a little closer, stand a little taller, and fall right through.”

“Accessible to all, maybe, who dare to believe it’s possible.”

“Have you ever heard of something like this before?”

“It’s funny,” she mused, not answering my question. “To think of a time before we knew of the inner lives of art. Do you ever think about what your relationship with paintings was like before you inhabited one?”

“Not in so specific a way. I think, in the past, I harbored jealousy for paintings and their ability to consume my father’s attention so completely. But I had no sense of, no critical thought about, no ability to envision the movement beneath their surface level.”

“What are you going to do, Jean?” Odette sharply changed the topic. “Wait?”

I always waited. “I don’t know what else there is to do.” Odette let out a small hmm . I didn’t know what she expected from me.

“And do you think she’s doing the same?”

I had no idea. I’d lost track of how much time had passed, but the trees coming to life with green through the windows told me we were undoubtedly in spring.

What if it had been too much time? What if she’d had to move on to someone new?

Or back to her fiancé? I shuddered at the thought.

What if waiting had hurt her as much as it was hurting me?

I hoped for the opposite; I hoped whatever was going on out there took her mind off me. I hoped she was preoccupied. I hoped, against all odds, that if it would help her to move on, she would do so. I only wanted what would make her happy.

“I’m sorry,” Odette said. “It wasn’t my place to pry.

I only meant to say that humans…They can’t always be what we want them to be.

Things change, people make choices. And these are certainly”—she gestured to the empty gallery in front of us as she chose her words carefully—“unprecedented circumstances.”

“That they are,” I agreed gruffly.

I wasn’t eager to share the darkness of my internal monologue with Odette, but I was surprisingly not annoyed that she was there. It was kind of reassuring to have someone force me to speak after so many weeks. I’d forgotten I was even capable of it.

“What have you been doing to entertain yourself?” she asked. “I’d never noticed how long a day could feel until the hours of freedom basically doubled. I’ve wished more than once that we needed to sleep after all.”

“I haven’t really done anything,” I said. “I kind of just exist in here right now.”

“Well, I’ve read practically every single book in this place. Many of them more than once; some are significantly better than others.”

“I’d basically done that,” I said. “Before all the…you know, before Claire.”

“Yes!” she said. “I remembered you were a reader. I thought of you as I hunted down the various books of the museum.”

“You can borrow my book sometime, if you want.”

“Really?” Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “Thank you, Jean, that’s very kind.”

“I’ve read it so many times I can’t even count.”

“I bet you have.” She laughed gracefully; everything about her was graceful. “I will absolutely take you up on that.”

“Okay,” I said. She let us fall into silence again.

We watched the waves crash along the shore.

A seagull spun lazy circles above our heads, finding a place to land near his colony that was already dotting the beach.

“Do you think he notices anything different?” I asked Odette about our unhurried flying friend.

“Absolutely,” she said. “He’s watching the same world as the rest of us, isn’t he?”

“What do you think is going on out there?”

“I have a hard time picturing anything of their world.” I nodded; I struggled with the same blocked imagination.

She continued. “But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered what it could be.

Financial foreclosure was my first thought, trouble with the museum, but they would have sent people in here to appraise us by now.

I’ve thought of war, but I’m not sure that’s it.

I feel like if it was war, the kind of war that kept even the curatorial and janitorial staff from coming in, even just once, I feel like we’d be able to see it.

Maybe that’s out of date but when I think about the Paris I left, the one of the war, this just isn’t the same. ”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “And I keep thinking if it was a war, we’d hear planes flying overhead, feel bombs hitting the ground. We’d maybe even be a target. And instead, we hear…”

“Nothing.” She filled in the blank of my dangling sentence. “Some kind of mass illness, maybe? There was one, right at the end of my previous life, starting to cause trouble in the cities. But is shutting down the museum how they would have dealt with that? It seems hard to imagine.”

“You know,” I said, changing the topic, “in some of the paintings, they’re reveling. If you’re bored, you can definitely find a party elsewhere. I bet Marguerite could point the way.”

“I’m sure she could.”

“They see this as some big vacation.”

“And why shouldn’t they? Nothing else is required of them, not now.” She ruffled her brilliant red hair, each piece of it falling perfectly into place in response. “But that will get old, I’m sure. The wine tastes the same night after night, you know.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied.

“Well,” she said as she stood. Her skirt fell into elegant ripples around her, but she smoothed it out anyway. “I’d best be off, but I’ll come find you again. To borrow that book, as you said.”

I nodded enthusiastically. “Please do. Odette,” I said, her name tumbling out of my mouth.

“Yes?”

“Thank you. For coming to find me. I think I needed this—to talk to someone else.”

“Of course, Jean,” she said as she tossed her head to the side, sweeping her bangs across her face without using her hands. “Something’s going on and you shouldn’t have to handle it alone. None of us should. What else are old friends for?”

With that, she sauntered off toward the horizon, her hands behind her back carrying a paperback book. I considered her words—“old friends.” Was that what we were? I noticed that for the first time in so many days, my chest felt a little less like it might crack open at any moment.