Iza Boit hated the picture I had made. She considered it an act of betrayal. So I was told by mutual friends. She and I never spoke of it. Indeed, for a long time she never spoke to me at all.
I submitted the painting for the Salon of 1881. Everyone said it was very strange, but it attracted just the right balance of approval and satire. It won first place.
With that Iza Boit decided that she had been right all along to hire me and began to let it be known that the composition of the painting had been all her own idea.
The Boits returned to Boston around that time. Boit and I had lunch together several times before they left, but I was never invited to the apartment on the Avenue de Friedland again, nor did I ever see the girls or Iza Boit.
At least there was never a scandal.
I worked, I read, I spent time with friends. Every minute, I longed to see the creature again.
I told myself that that was madness, that I had escaped insanity and had saved the Boit girls from it as well. All this was true, and as the months passed and summer filled France with its green and golden glories, I began to believe these things.
I spent part of that time at the beach, and the light and the wind there cleansed me of regrets and nightmares. The hollow in my heart was still there, but it didn’t hurt as it had.
While I was there, I met Judith Gauthier and became friends with her. Judith was a weaver of relationships among the artists and writers who mattered to the art world. She was considerably older than I was; but we had everything in common, and we spent much of our time together.
One day as I was sitting on the beach, watching the waves strike on the rocks and dazzle the air with spray, she called down to me from the dunes. I turned and saw her, and the wind rippled her dress. I had a moment of perfect beauty. It was the first since I had lost the creature.
At last I returned to Paris. While I was certainly not in love with Judith Gauthier, and her age gave me pause, I still thought I might become so, given time.
The evening of the day I reached Paris was soft and blue. It drew me out to stroll the broad ways around the Champs Élysées, simply enjoying the feeling of being back in the most beautiful city in the world. I nodded to every couple I passed, smiling for their happiness and for the hope that was growing within me that I might one day be happy too.
I turned down the Avenue de Friedland and passed the building where the Boits had lived.
In the last light of the day, I looked in at the darkened windows and thought about what had gone on behind them. It was beginning to seem strange, as if it had happened to someone else. Or perhaps in another time, long ago.
I turned back; and as I did, I saw someone in the shadows up the street looking at me. It was only a flash of eyes—sad, angry eyes in an eerie, pale face—and then a lift of the head, a tilt that spoke of absolute disdain, and beyond disdain, self-reliance. Then the figure turned and was gone into the dark.
I ran after it, feeling the same strange energy I had felt each time I had been close to her, but there was nothing to pursue.
I stopped, breathless, feeling my old longing surge back and knowing that time would never heal it.
Above me the sky filled with the bulk of the Arc de Triomphe. It divided the darkening air like a gate. The gate between all pasts, all futures, all possibilities. The gate between this world and the next, where human beings encounter our gods and demons. Between madness and sanity.
I had killed Popau too late. The creature was free of me.
And since that night I ask myself over and over. If she has appeared to me, has she also appeared to the girls? And will they again follow her through the Janus Gate?