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EIGHT

M y love affair with Party is becoming more consuming.

Calliope sucks up most of my daylight hours, and the only time I can find to be with the object of my affection is when I’m usually in bed.

To push the analogy further than it should be pushed, it’s similar to the way you’re always exhausted during the early days of a relationship because you’re having lots of sex instead of sleeping.

Obviously, I’m not actually fantasizing about having sex with a painting—particularly one that represents my family to me, which, I suppose, would be incest—but the desire to be near it feels comparable.

I don’t get it, but I’m learning to live with it, to embrace it, even.

Again, I’m not hugging the painting, but I do admit to lightly touching some of the thicker brushstrokes, feeling the sensual rise and fall of the oil ridges.

I’m sure this is yet another thing that Jonathan Stein would suggest I not do.

It’s the middle of a workday, and I shouldn’t take a break, but I pull up the Museum of Fine Arts’ website anyway.

The museum is less than a mile down Huntington Ave from the office, and I search for édouard Manet.

They have eight of his paintings, and I need to see them.

If I’m having a love affair, will this be like cheating on Party ?

Okay, I’ll stop.

When I tell Alexander I’ll be back in an hour, he gives me a surprised look—I hardly ever leave the office except for appointments on my calendar, which he has access to.

Then he nods, no questions asked. I slip on my sneakers and head to the museum.

I’m embarrassed to say that in all the years I’ve lived in Boston, I’ve only been to the MFA a smattering of times.

Mostly for fancy benefit dinners or for impressing a visiting scientist or regulator, not for appreciating the artwork.

I pause when I reach the edge of the semicircular drive in front of the main entrance.

The building is made of white granite, grand and imposing, intimidating—or at least it is to me.

A portico five stories tall, lined with Ionic columns, flanks a wide set of steps.

Wings flare off both sides, each with dozens of towering, mullioned windows two or three times the size of a person, topped by carved lintels.

I think the style is called neoclassical.

I pay my admission and go to the information desk. “Can you please tell me where I can find these paintings by édouard Manet?” I hand the young man with dreadlocks a list of the eight titles.

He checks his computer. “We do have all of these paintings in the collection, but only four of them are on display today.”

“But they’re by édouard Manet,” I say, put off that the museum would keep my famous uncle’s works out of view. “Why wouldn’t all of them be on display?”

“I know,” he says. “It would seem that way, wouldn’t it? But the museum has so many major pieces that we need to rotate them. Not enough wall space.” He takes a map from the top of the pile next to him, circles the galleries where I can find the four.

I thank him and, far more disappointed than I should be, walk to the closest one, Execution of the Emperor Maximilian .

My disappointment intensifies when I see it.

It doesn’t look like Party at all. It’s dark, kind of horrific, most of the faces and bodies obscured by gun smoke.

I’d taken a quick look at the renditions on the website but not that closely.

This is realistic and detailed, not what I expected.

I glance at my watch and hurry to Monk in Prayer .

It’s creepy, also starkly real, with none of the freshness of my painting’s dappled light.

The monk is wearing a dark-brown robe against a dark-green background, and the little light there is falls partially on his homely face and outstretched hands, but mostly on a gruesome skull on the ground in front of him.

I’m amazed that the man who created Party on the Seine also created this.

But an artist as talented and skilled as édouard Manet must have dabbled in all sorts of styles over his lifetime, and these are most likely early works. When I check my phone, I see I’m right.

The next two canvases are more reminiscent of Party , and I find myself strangely relieved.

The Guitar Player depicts a handsome woman in a billowing white dress, the skirt almost alive as it streams from her body.

Can a dress stream? Under Manet’s hand it does.

The model is holding a guitar that’s dark against the dress’s whiteness, but its colors are so rich and deep and sensuous that it seems alive too.

Street Singer is another portrait of a woman, a hand covering her mouth as she looks steadily out on the world.

Both are more detailed and realistic than Party , but I can see the connections.

The two portraits are compelling, the women unique and strongly rendered, but somehow the paintings don’t pull me in like Party does.

Nor do they draw my intense curiosity over the brushstrokes or the subjects’ personalities.

Party should be relieved that, fickle as I sometimes can be, my ardor is not about to wander off to any of these four.

Sorry. Now I really will cut it out.

ON MY WAY home from work, on impulse I stop at a store that sells art materials and buy a drawing pad and a package of colored pencils.

I played around with art in high school, and I’ve always been able to draw a reasonable facsimile of what’s in front of me, but I’m certainly not an artist. Even though a number of my art teachers were encouraging, math and all that STEM stuff was more to my liking, along with a lot of partying.

But now that my interest has been piqued—not to mention that I’m related to the great Manet, even if far removed—it seems like I should give it another try.

Then I duck into the pot shop on Columbus and grab a container of Wana mango sativa gummies, my favorites. What better way to incentivize my DNA than by adding some cannabis into the mix? And what better way to get to know Party then to get stoned and sketch it?

It’s after ten when I’m able to clear my desk and settle on the couch with my pad and pencils.

I open the box, inspect the colorful array neatly nestled within, then flip to the first page.

Party is across from me, its complexity overwhelming.

The blank sheet on my lap taunts me. I can’t draw this.

What was I thinking? Pure hubris. Blasphemy, even.

And yet I want the connection, to the painting, to my family.

I’ll start with a small piece of it. Maybe just one person.

While most of the people in the painting are interacting with others—it is a party, after all—there are a few standing alone.

The woman leaning against the railing catches my eye again.

Although she’s gazing moodily at the unseen bank on the other side of the river, she’s also looking right at me, like in Manet’s other portraits.

She’s beautiful, much more so than the models for The Guitar Player and Street Singer .

Curling tendrils of black hair frame her face and brow.

Her equally dark eyes are large and penetrating.

Go ahead, she seems to be telling me. What the hell do you have to lose?

Although I’m pretty sure no woman of her day would phrase her encouragement in that way.

My first attempt isn’t good, but it’s better than I thought it would be—admittedly, a low bar.

Her facial features are all wrong, not even close, but I did an adequate job capturing the slope of her shoulders and the curve of her arms resting on the rail.

I try to replicate the flow of her skirt.

A complete failure, but I’m thinking I can do better.

I check my phone. It’s almost three in the morning. I put my pencil down and realize I forgot to take the gummy. Which gives me even more hope for my next attempt.

But when I climb into bed, I can’t fall asleep.

I keep seeing the woman, the way her eyes locked onto mine, the sense of familiarity hovering around her, my desire to know more about her.

This appears to be Party ’s superpower, a scene filled with people who are complex individuals rather than mannequins holding a position in the composition. Full of light and questions.

As I start to drift off, I have a shadowy recollection, a fleeting certainty that I’ve seen the black-haired woman before.

I try to push this away, to fall into sleep, but it nags at me, pushes back.

Defeated, I stare at the ceiling, try to catch the memory, and then I remember.

Or think I remember. Her face. It was on a computer screen.

Was she a model for another of Manet’s paintings?

Or did I see her during my initial searches about my family?

But there weren’t any faces in that search.

My relatives were all unknowns. Except for Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandmother Berthe.

It might have been on her Wikipedia page.

I need to sleep, but I take my cellphone off the night table, aware its light will be yet another impediment. I search “Berthe Morisot.” There she is, the woman at the railing, my grandmother times four. I’m going to be a zombie at the office tomorrow.

I MANAGE TO get through the day without any major errors, extricate myself at seven, and race home to be with Party .

To hang with my grandmother times four. As soon as I walk in the door, our eyes engage, a connection I feel in my stomach.

Not only was this painted by my own great-great-great-great-great-uncle, but it includes the figure of my own great-great-great-great-grandmother.

Wow. Not a particularly sophisticated response to an artistic masterpiece, but there it is.

All these prefixes are growing cumbersome and unwieldy, so I’m going to drop all the greats and just think of them as édouard and Berthe.

I see now that although there are many others on the boat, Berthe is the central figure.

Not necessarily larger, but she’s the only one whose gaze is focused unswervingly on the viewer.

Subtle but commanding. I get out my pencils and turn to a new sheet on the pad. I’m going to try to capture those eyes.

I have to keep removing and then putting my glasses back on, which is a pain.

I need them to clearly see the painting, but they’re too strong for the close work of drawing.

After almost a dozen attempts scattered over the page, I have to admit defeat—and I can’t blame my poor vision.

Drawing eyes is too advanced for someone with my limited skills.

I have a little better luck with the skirt, improving on what I did yesterday, but not much.

Many of his strokes are unfinished, suggesting rather than specifying, bringing the observer, me, into the painting as I mentally fill in the gaps.

And somehow, what’s left out makes it all that much richer, more real, more like the way it would be if I were actually standing on the boat instead of looking in from the outside.

If that makes any sense, which I’m not sure it does.

I pop one of my mango gummies, make a quick omelet, scarf it down, and return to the couch.

I punch a pillow behind my back, pull the wool coverlet over my shoulders, and settle in.

The sketch pad and pencils are next to me, but instead of picking them up, my mind wanders through the painting.

I see myself raising a glass from the cluttered table, eating a grape, eavesdropping on the conversations.

It seems the woman with the two suitors prefers the one leaning in, and the two men with their heads pressed together are brothers.

Could they be édouard and Gène, my great-great-great-great-grandfather?

There’s a young girl with a big red bow in her hair.

Aimée? I can almost taste the colors, smell the breeze off the river, and I drop into it.

When I come back to myself, Berthe is looking at me strangely.

I know that sounds bizarre, but that’s what it seems like.

She’s still staring out of the frame as she was before, but now her eyes, which held such a confusing mix of melancholy and defiance, are almost smiling.

At me. Maybe in a loving, grandmotherly way?

I shake my head, take my glasses off, wipe them on my shirt, and then return them to my nose.

Her head is now cocked to the left, where before I could have sworn it sat tall on her long neck.

And then she winks at me. Okay, right. She didn’t wink at me.

The THC content in gummies can fluctuate from batch to batch, and clearly this is a hell of a potent one.

It’s only ten o’clock, but I leave my materials in the living room and, for once, go to bed early.

Even more than I need the rest, I want sleep to wash me free of the fright intertwined with exhilaration.

THE NEXT MORNING, I feel much better. Both well rested and convinced that whatever I thought I saw last night, I hadn’t.

As if a woman on a canvas painted almost 150 years ago could have winked at me.

I check the strength of the gummies. The label claims each contains five milligrams of THC, the usual dose. Still, it’s not an exact science.

In the late afternoon, Alexander comes into my office and hands me a certified letter. My first thought is that it’s from the FDA and, from its slimness, not good. But the letter has nothing to do with Calliope. The return address is the édouard Manet Foundation in Paris.

It’s from Damien Manet, the director of the foundation, presumably a distant cousin of mine, which electrifies me—until I read his words.

He informs me that his duties include compiling and overseeing Manet’s catalogue raisonné, the official listing of the artist’s work.

This involves not only obtaining the description and authentication of each piece, but also ascertaining its current location.

He was notified that the Claims Conference had determined I was the owner of Party on the Seine , and he’s writing to apprise me that this is an error.

That as a direct descendant of édouard, he’s the rightful heir.

That I’m only from a side branch of the family—which I guess is true—and that all of édouard’s works were left to his son, Léon, Damien’s great-great-great-grandfather.

He demands that Party be sent to him immediately and offers, oh so graciously, to arrange for the foundation to pack up the painting and transport it to Paris at its own expense. Shit.