17

When we arrive at the bar Lowen suggested, a small local with plastic chairs and ashtrays on the tables, Maxime shakes his head.

“God, no, Camille. This won’t do.”

“It’s perfectly fine,” I laugh. “I’m sure even you can survive for an hour among us mortals.”

He shakes his head again, with the hint of a smile. “That’s not the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“I don’t think it’s worthy of you.”

I’m knocked off-kilter that he is outright flirting with me. “But I’m meeting Lowen here,” I say.

He sighs. “There’s a place I know just up the road. A bit more interesting. Listen, I promise I’ll walk you back here in time for Lowen.”

The hint of jealousy in his tone gives me butterflies, and once again I follow him, without any bearings of my own, to the unmarked entrance of a residential building in the old town. Maxime opens it and I follow him in.

The bar opening at my feet is a stunning space of curved pillars, mossy frescoes climbing the walls and ceiling. Spirit bottles are set like jewels against the deep windows, the soft furnishings absorbing an already hushed atmosphere. It’s late afternoon, still bright outside, but here the lights are dim—this space exists out of time, a bijou universe hidden from the world.

Maxime nods to the waiter and leads me to a table in a quiet corner, all dark, gold velvet and suede.

“What do you think?” He’s been watching me, I realize, drinking in my reaction. His white shirt stands out like the moon, the strands of his hair picked up by the gilded details of the murals; he is the centerpiece, something refined and priceless that I long to touch. As he leans back, his legs stretch under the table, his shoes nudging mine.

“This place is you distilled into a bar,” I say.

It even smells like him. Leather, and something foresty, with brown sugar.

He laughs. “So if I ask you if you like it, the question becomes a tad more weighty.” I smile, but I don’t answer. The waiter has arrived to take our order. “Absinthe?” Maxime asks me.

“I’d rather have a coffee.”

“Come on, Camille. It’s l’apéritif. Happy hour. Tongues must be loosened.”

I roll my eyes to mask my giddiness. “Absinthe it is, then.”

He orders, and my mind latches onto what he said in the museum, about Anticipation. I indulge in watching him through my eyelashes, as I throw my head back and pretend to admire the faux frescoes on the ceiling, artfully faded (flashes of Beaux-Arts students bending backward like Michelangelo in the Sistine, small trembling paintbrushes in hand, flecks of paint in their eyebrows and hair, the crushes that ignited between them like little wildfires), of some kind of Roman garden and ivy and butterflies, flickering. Pomegranates. The underworld, reclaiming the skies.

“Stop that.” Maxime’s voice brings my eyes down.

“Stop what?”

“Studying that ceiling like you need to sell it. I need you here, with me.”

There’s nowhere I’d like to be more than here with him… But I force myself to carve out a bit more space, lean back into my chair. Stay professional. “What would you like to talk about, then?”

His teeth glow in his perfect mouth. “There was something going on when I came into the museum. I saw your face. I want you to fill me in.”

I saw your great-grandmother, Constance’s deep affection for her, and how it unlocked her art at D’Arvor, and her absence in the works you put in front of me is making me doubt them.

“There’s nothing to fill you in on yet.”

His eyes are searching mine. “Did you enjoy seeing Viviane again, after all these years?”

“Immensely. Why exactly did your parents decide to part with it?”

“They thought it was a piece of local history that would be better looked after in a public collection.”

I know that’s not the whole truth. “Frédéric said something about you being obsessed with it?”

My line of sight is broken while the waiter sets our glasses on the table, and an art nouveau water fountain, with its intricate tiny silver taps. The Absinthe glows green in our glasses.

“May I?”

I watch as Maxime sets a silver slotted spoon on top of my glass and slowly pours some ice-cold water through a cube of sugar. His hands are precise, the drip of the water so exquisitely slow that I shiver.

“The green hour,” he says. “We’re joining the artists and poets who sought visions in the Green Fairy.” Still the water drips, seeping through the sugar, as it crumbles into the drink.

“Let’s hope we don’t catch their madness,” I say, unable to take my eyes off the process. They all drank Absinthe in the nineteenth century, as can be seen in works by Degas, Manet, and Picasso. The drink was eventually banned for causing psychosis, even murder. It is safe nowadays, and one glass will not have such an effect, but still. As Maxime’s eyes flash at me like emerald, I think he might be Merlin, pouring potion into my cup.

But I can’t let him intoxicate me. I need answers.

“Viviane, Maxime?” I ask when we are set, and he has leaned back again.

“Right. I was seven, or thereabouts. After you and I looked at Viviane together, I—started to feel it. I took it down to my room, set it on my desk. I spent hours looking at it, studying it. To the point that my parents got concerned and my father decided to take it away.”

“So you lost her too.”

“She always escaped me.” He brings his glass to his mouth, and I imagine swimming in it, my limbs tingling in the alcohol, the softness of Maxime’s lips along the length of my body in the most delicious, green-tinged hallucination.

Cam, please get a grip. Right now.

“My father never got it,” he continues. “Anything that goes beyond the monetary value is useless to him. He made me quit L’école des Beaux-Arts, you know. I hadn’t told him I had enrolled—did a whole year before he realized—but still, he wouldn’t have it. When he did turn up, the boot came down hard.”

I feel his bitterness on my tongue as I sip my drink. It tastes of pine trees, medicinal herbs, masked by sweetness. “But you studied art history, still?”

He shakes his head. “That was the compromise. A year doing that, then off to Paris School of Economics. It wasn’t just me. He made Fred study medicine but he couldn’t cut it.”

“I understand how you feel. My mother had loaded expectations too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“And I’m sorry you lost Viviane. I can imagine you found comfort in it.”

“It’s more than that. It is hard to explain, but, Camille, I think everybody still gets it wrong. You too, if you don’t mind me saying. The sculptures at D’Arvor—Lancelot, Merlin, Viviane—those are her most personal. Those are the way she told her love story.”

“You mean Boisseau,” I say, thinking of Anne, the golden pond, their laughter. I’m completely torn between what I found out today and what Maxime is telling me, what I sensed in the sculptures in the attic.

Perhaps Constance went back and forth, for inspiration, between her love for Boisseau and the friendship she found in Anne. Who knows which relationship had the biggest impact? Who was Night Swimming inspired by and dedicated to, and why were neither of them with Constance at the end?

“Surely you agree how important he was to her, even at the end of her working life,” Maxime says. “The sculptures confirm it.”

“I think that’s impossible to really know unless we find Night Swimming.”

“I thought Night Swimming had been found already,” he says.

I take another sip to give myself courage. “Maxime, stop playing games with me. You were there at Courtenay; you know I don’t believe that was it. If you agree with them, why would you invite me here?”

“Why do you think?” he asks, his voice low, his hand so close to mine that I feel his warmth. “I’m interested in your theory, Camille.”

“I think you might have the real Night Swimming, and for whatever reason you have been concealing it from me.”

Suspended in this semiaquatic world of ferns and soaring fish, waiters moving in slow motion, women dotted around in pink and beige like starfishes, we are two sharks in the fishbowl, Maxime and I. His eyes are darker than I thought, and I wonder if it is the room, my mistake, or the moment, but I know there is more to him than meets the eye. I know he has a plan he hasn’t been sharing with me, but I can’t make sense of the dissonance of the sculptures at D’Arvor with the ones here, or what he really wants. Finally, his mouth opens and he says, “And I think you have power, Camille, a true magical gift that you have, also, been concealing from me. So that makes two of us with secrets.”

I swear the fishes and birds of the ceiling come alive then, swooping down on me. My mouth opens but I’m too stunned to speak.

“Maxime Foucault. Good evening.”

Maxime’s knee was pressing against mine; he pulls it back as we turn to the interruption, a short, closely shaven man who would be the most perfectly average person if he didn’t sound inordinately posh, his clipped vowels erring on the side of scornful.

Maxime stands up to shake his hand. “Hello, Charles.”

“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt.” The man looks to me, but Maxime makes no move to introduce us. I see his knuckles tense on his glass as I try to recalibrate my mood to being able to pull off some small talk with a stranger, pushing aside what Maxime just told me.

“No, you’re not.”

“No need for prickliness. Just swinging by to say hi. I wasn’t expecting to see you here. I thought you would have had…work to do.” He emphasizes work as if it is a dirty secret. He turns to me again. “The poor chap never rests. He is an absolute trooper.”

“And you are?” I ask.

“Oh. Terribly sorry. I assumed… Charles-Emmanuel, Duc de Lautrec.”

“Camille Leray.”

“Enchanté.” He gives me a deep nod. His name is clearly old French aristocracy, and everything in his demeanor suggests he belongs to a class that few of us even know exists.

“Did you want something, Charles?” Maxime asks.

“Ah yes. I came to inquire. Make friendly chitter-chatter. I hear you’re cooking something, my boy, hoping to make some money at last. Always been the poor cousins—fate might turn—if anybody wants to buy crazy Connie’s little fancies, that is.”

I glance at Maxime. A tight smile is pasted on his face. “I take it this is you telling me you’re not coming to the charity ball at D’Arvor, then? I’ll make sure to cross you off the guest list—one of my many jobs.”

Charles laughs. “Oh no, we are coming. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I might even bid on Connie’s trinket. You know you can always count on me to sponsor a few tiles for D’Arvor’s roof.”

“Great,” Maxime says. “See you there.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Leray.” With one more foxish smile, Charles is gone.

As soon as he’s out of earshot, I turn to Maxime, my mouth open on a queue of questions. But I notice how fast his breathing is; he’s repeatedly tearing his napkin into pieces.

“Are you OK?”

He nods, but he tears and tears and tears, avoiding my eyes. I’m struck to see him like this. Not knowing what to do, I put my hand on his. His skin is warm, smooth, and his hand stills. We stay like this for a few moments until a long sigh escapes him and he clears his throat.

“I’m quite all right, thank you,” he says, sounding like his usual composed self. Then, as I go to take my hand away: “No. Stay here, please.”

An electric pulse starts running along my arm. Our skin touching is much more intoxicating than Absinthe could ever be.

I could stay like this for a whole night. We have so much to discuss. Then I remember Lowen.

“Oh no.” I snatch my hand off to retrieve my phone and check the time. “I need to go.”

“Do you really need to? I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Yes and yes, on both counts. Sorry. I’m already late. I can’t—I promised—”

“Of course.” Maxime is on his feet, shaking his jacket on in one swift movement. That crack I’ve just seen in his perfect countenance—that vulnerability, I swear to God… I want to tear his suit off him right here and now. A new dimension of desire has opened: he knows my gift, and I too caught a glimpse of the man behind the mask—I crave to know all his imperfections and fears.

But I can’t keep letting Lowen down. I promised myself.

“You should stay here, have another drink perhaps?” I suggest.

He shakes his head. “The last place I want to be is here alone right now. I’ll walk you.”

It is strange to be reminded that it is still early evening outside, the light bright, people hurrying out of offices or smoking cigarettes and drinking black-currant kirs on the pavements as we walk back to the other bar. I’m struggling to keep up with Maxime. In the end, I catch his elbow to attempt to slow him down.

“What was that, by the way?” I ask him.

“What was what?” He does slow but keeps looking straight ahead.

“It was uncomfortable,” I say. “That Charles guy…”

“Duke of Lautrec,” Maxime says, as if he is spitting. “He will never have any troubles in life and therefore is bored out of his mind and finds his entertainment in belittling those who have less.”

“He was very disparaging,” I say. “Crazy Connie. What is Constance to him anyway?”

“It’s not really about her. It’s about my family. We’re rivals in a way, have always been, for power, for land, generations back. Except his lineage is… well, more straightforward than mine, and he loves reminding me of this.”

I scoff and he gives me an irritated look. “I mean,” I say, “lineage? This is the twenty-first century.”

“Welcome to my world, Camille.” He sounds so tired, so flat. “So, you think family does not matter?”

I stop. “I—”

“You would not celebrate your heritage? Protect it at all costs?”

“What does he think is wrong with your lineage then?” I ask to mask how uncomfortable I am that he is speaking alien to me right now. Yes I would love to think that I’m making my mother proud, finally, that if she were to walk toward us on this pavement, in her faded peach cardigan, hiding behind her sunglasses, she would do a double take and I would notice respect, admiration, perhaps envy. Was that Maxime Foucault, Camille? You’ve been staying at D’Arvor? But also I always wanted to better her, better what she left me with.

Maxime sighs. “The Foucaults came from trade.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“People like Charles can link their family tree back to the Crusades. We never stop hearing about it.”

“Surely, it doesn’t mat—”

“But that’s fine,” he says through gritted teeth. “That’s fine, Camille; he can laugh now, he and his congenital micro-dick.” I gasp, but he continues. “Soon they’ll learn some respect and they’ll all want a piece of what we have. They’ll realize where we actually come from.”

He suddenly looks up, as if noticing my presence. It was strange to see him smiling in a sort of trance. The same smile I sometimes feel creeping onto my lips when I think of him and imagine a completely fantasist version of my life, making my mind walk those steps that don’t belong to me, yet. It is that very yet that fuels Maxime too. But what is in it, exactly?

We’ve arrived, and I can see Lowen sitting inside the almost empty neon-lit bar, the smell of chlorine bleach reaching us from the pavement.

I turn to Maxime. “We’re here.”

“Is that him?” Lowen hasn’t spotted us yet. He’s absorbed in his phone and I wonder if he’s still texting his dad everyday when he’s not around, like he used to when he lived in London. He looks tired, familiar in a way that makes my heart warm up, like buns fresh from the oven.

I nod.

“He is…a friend, you said?”

“Yes.” I wait for Maxime to say his goodbyes and walk off, but he doesn’t move.

“I’ve got time for one more drink,” he says. “Let’s go and meet your man.”

Jesus.