And Addie fights the urge to say, You already have.
“I mean, it wouldn’t look like you,” Sam rambles on, heading into the hall. Addie follows, watches her stop and run her fingers over a stack of canvases, turning through them as if they were records in a vinyl shop.
“I’ve got this whole series I’m working on,” she says, “of people as skies.”
A dull pang echoes through Addie’s chest, and it’s six months ago, and they are lying in bed, Sam’s fingers tracing the freckles on her cheeks, her touch as light and steady as a brush.
“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”
“And what kind of sky am I?” Addie had asked then, and Sam had stared at her, unblinking, and then brightened, and it was the kind of brightening she had seen with a hundred artists, a hundred times, the glow of inspiration, as if someone switched on a light beneath their skin. And Sam, suddenly animated, wound to life, sprang from the bed, taking Addie with her into the living room.
An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky. Not the night sky as anyone else would have painted it. Bold streaks of charcoal, and black, and thin slashes of middle gray, the paint so thick it rose up from the canvas. And flecked across the surface, a handful of silver dots. They looked almost accidental, like spatter from a brush, but there were exactly seven of them, small and distant and wide apart as stars.
Sam’s voice draws her back to the kitchen.
“I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art. I know I have to—that whole starving artist thing is overrated—but I miss it every day.”
Her voice dips softer.
“The crazy thing is, every one of the pieces in that series is modeled after someone. Friends, people here in the building, strangers I found on the street. I remember all of them. But I can’t for the life of me remember who she was.”
Addie swallows. “You think it was a girl?”
“Yeah. I do. It just had this energy.”
“Maybe you dreamed her.”
“Maybe,” says Sam. “I’ve never been good at remembering dreams. But you know…” She trails off, staring at Addie the way she did that night in bed, beginning to glow. “You remind me of that piece.” She puts a hand over her face. “God, that sounds like the worst pickup line in the world. I’m sorry. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I should get going,” says Addie. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Sam bites her lip. “Do you have to?”
No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.
“Sorry,” she says, chest aching, but Sam only shrugs.
“We’ll see each other again,” she says with so much faith. “After all, we’re neighbors now.”
Addie manages a pale shadow of a smile. “That’s right.”
Sam walks her to the door, and with every step, Addie resists the urge to look back.
“Don’t be a stranger,” says Sam.
“I won’t,” promises Addie, as the door swings shut. She sighs, leaning back against it, listens to Sam’s footsteps retreating down the cluttered hall, before she forces herself up, and forward, and away.
Outside, the white marble sky has cracked, letting through thin bands of blue.
The cold has burned off, and Addie finds a café with sidewalk seating, busy enough that the waiter only has time to make a pass of the outside tables every ten minutes or so. She counts the beats like a prisoner marking the pace of guards, orders a coffee—it isn’t as good as Sam’s, all bitter, no sweet, but it’s warm enough to keep the chill at bay. She puts up the collar of her leather coat, and opens The Odyssey again, and tries to read.
Here, Odysseus thinks he is heading home, to finally be reunited with Penelope after the horrors of war, but she has read the story enough times to know how far the journey is from done.
She skims, translating from Greek to modern English.
I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together
will do me in—I’m bone-weary, about to breathe my last,
and a cold wind blows from a river on toward morning.
The waiter ducks back outside, and she glances up from the book, watches him frown a little at the sight of the drink already ordered and delivered, the gap in his memory where a customer should be. But she looks like she belongs, and that’s half the battle, really, and a moment later he turns his attention to the couple in the doorway, waiting for a seat.
She returns to her book, but it’s no use. She’s not in the mood for old men lost at sea, for parables of lonely lives. She wants to be stolen away, wants to forget. A fantasy, or perhaps a romance.
The coffee is cold now, anyway, and Addie stands up, book in hand, and sets off for The Last Word to find something new.
Paris, France
July 29, 1716
VII
She stands in the shade of a silk merchant.
Across the way, the tailor’s shop bustles, the pace of business brisk even as the day wears on. Sweat drips down her neck as she unties and reties the bonnet, salvaged from a gust of wind, hoping the cloth cap will be enough to pass her off as a lady’s maid, to grant her the kind of invisibility reserved for help. If he thinks her a maid, Bertin will not look too close. If he thinks her a maid, he might not notice Addie’s dress, which is simple but fine, slipped from a tailor’s model a week before, in a similar shop across the Seine. It was a pretty thing at first, until she snagged the skirts on an errant nail, and someone cast a bucket of soot too near her feet, and red wine somehow got onto one of the sleeves.
She wishes her clothes were as resistant to change as she appears to be. Especially because she has only the one dress—there’s no point collecting a wardrobe, or anything else, when you’ve nowhere to put it. (She will try, in later years, to gather trinkets, hide them away like a magpie with its nest, but something will always conspire to steal them back. Like the wooden bird, lost among the bodies in the cart. She cannot seem to hold on to much of anything for long.)
At last, the final customer steps out—a valet, one beribboned box beneath each arm—and before anyone else can beat her to the door, Addie darts across the street and steps inside the tailor’s shop.
It is a narrow space: a table piled high with rolls of fabric; a pair of dress forms modeling the latest fashions. The kind of gowns that take at least four hands to get on, and just as many to take off—all bolstered hips and ruffled sleeves and bosoms cinched too tight to breathe. These days the fine society of Paris is wrapped like parcels, clearly not meant to be opened.