New York, October 2012—The Museum of Modern Art
IT WAS A WEEKDAY AND THE MUSEUM WAS NOT BUSY, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL anytime. A striking, fair-skinned brunette, her hair pinned up with chopsticks, in an elegant suit of ultramarine blue wool and impractically tall shoes, stood in front of Starry Night, staring into the white and yellow swirls painted through a night sky of Sacré Bleu. She had staked out a territory directly in front of the painting, about a meter away, making the other museum patrons look around her, or just peek at the painting as they passed by, most thinking she was a self-absorbed model, as there were a lot of those wandering around this neighborhood, and her skirt seemed confidently well fitted about the bottom. She rubbed at a pendant on chain around her neck as she examined the painting.
“This is mine, you know?” she said. “I wouldn’t try to take it. I’m not going to take it, but it’s mine.”
The young man, who sat on a bench nearby, sighed, slightly amused. He was about thirty, and had dark eyes, and a shock of dark brown hair fell across his forehead.
She said, “He painted it at night and had Theo store it in the dark. That’s why Poopstick couldn’t find it.”
“As you’ve told me,” said Lucien. “Don’t you have someone you have to be?”
She did. There was a boy in the Bronx who painted subway cars with spray cans, who loved a Latina girl with vibrant blue eyes. She would go to him, enchant him, inspire him, and leave the Juliette doll in an apartment with Lucien to wait. And when the boy finished his work, she and Lucien would go to a tunnel or depot where no one was around, and Lucien would light the fires and chant the strange words, sending her into a trance, then he would scrape the Sacré Bleu from her body, as he had done now for more than a century, as the painting on the train faded away.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Shall we?”
As they walked, she continued to worry the pendant, which looked like a scrap of distressed leather.
“I wish you’d get rid of that thing.”
“It’s a memento. He gave it to me.”
“It’s a dried-up old ear.”
“Oh, Lucien, I would carry your ear if you gave it to me. Please don’t be jealous.”
“Never, chérie. Never,” he said. He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.
Hand in hand, the handsome young couple, the painter and the muse, walked out of the Museum of Modern Art into a soft autumn New York day.
Finis