The Children(58)

What were her rules? In New York, within her incestuous little private school circle, the Ninth City thing just was. She didn’t talk about it; she didn’t have to. Here, where she knew no one, spoke 1.5 languages at best, and couldn’t tell a Danish accent from a Swedish one, she would use any tool at her disposal. Blonde hair, blue eyes, strange fame.

She smiled. “I don’t have any rules.”



* * *




The gallery lights made a faint mosquito tink tink as the girl—her name was Clara—switched them on.

She told Guinevere the man who owned the gallery had discovered Ennis selling paintings along the Seine. He’d been so taken with them he gave Ennis a job at his gallery and a lead on cheap studio space. Ennis Sharpe was, Clara said with pleased authority, a rising star.

Guinevere absorbed each piece of information with a hunger she tried to hide. She sensed Clara was feeding on her, too: the next best thing to Ennis. A stranger who walked in from the night, wearing his face. Beyond the vestibule where they stood were the two large rooms of the gallery, unlit. Clara flipped the switches and said, “Please look. I will make tea.”

When she’d gone Guinevere stood a moment longer, listening to the lights and the quiet. After all her searching, she felt almost afraid to go on. Breathing in like a free diver, she stepped into the first white room.

Ennis’s paintings were so beautiful she had to close her eyes.

Pride took her like a hand to the throat. Stealing her breath, making visions pop brightly in her mind. He’d wanted this. Wanted so badly to do and be this. When they were children, Ennis loved to draw and paint. When they were children, he—

Ruthless as a Fate with her scissors, she cut off the thought.

The paintings ranged in size from Mona Lisa to Starry Night. According to Clara, each depicted and was named for a famous fire.

As Guinevere approached the nearest canvas its colors swelled and saturated. The paint was static but it didn’t seem to be. It kept your eye moving, constant, restless. Its mesmeric effect was that of a slowly shifting screensaver, Anne’s influence obvious. The gallery label said Watchman’s Error.

The next piece was rimmed with an irregular outline of pale smoke. She saw Ennis on his stomach on the Farmhouse floor, staring hungrily at a page in Llewellyn’s Kandinsky book: Painting with White Border.

The title on the wall read A woman could piss it out. So strange it stayed with her. Later she would look it up and find it was a reference to the Great Fire of London. She squinted and moved on.

The paintings were orange and yellow and red and white. Threaded with grays and blacks, touched with astonishing flame-belly blues. In some there wavered an intimation of structures, even people, breaking, falling, being eaten alive. By the time she’d circled the first room her skin was prickling with sweat.

She thought: How could he. Not morally, functionally, how could he have done this? After the way their childhood ended, how? When she was lying in her bed at Bitsy’s place, grinding her teeth inside another blinding nightmare, was he sleeping peacefully in his dorm room? Maybe he’d cut that last night at the Farmhouse right out of himself, the way he’d cut out his sister.

Or maybe these paintings were an exorcism.

What did other people see when they circled this room? Beauty and movement, a breathtaking understanding of color. A sense of inevitability: if Ennis Sharpe wasn’t famous yet, he would be soon. At the threshold of the second room, she looked back. Where was Clara with the tea? Taking her time, out of sight.

Guinevere stepped through.

The lighting here was different. Lower, angled so the room held a dimness at its center. It made for an obscuring effect that clung to three of its walls, all empty. On the fourth hung a single painting, the only piece in the room. She looked at its painted flames and experienced a flashback so complete she could smell it.

Pine and dirt and cold. The bad candy scent of dying leaves, her brother’s sharp adolescent sweat. And the hard metallic fug of a hundred-year-old farmhouse burning.

Ennis hadn’t fit all of it. He didn’t capture the moment when the flames went vertical as hedges. He didn’t paint the smoke that raced toward them like an army of ghost runners. But this was, without question, that fire.

How could he. This time the thought was acidic. It was acid, burning her brain. Guinevere opened her mouth on a burst of hot copper: she’d bitten her tongue. She swallowed blood and read its title on the wall.

Paint It Black

Clever Ennis. Other people would think it was a reference to the song. Its usage here a little trite, the minor stumble of a developing artist. Guinevere alone would read the label and think of that final night. Jonathan Froud bent desperate over the record player, the Stones covering the sound of breakdown.

The painting’s lights and darks swam in an uneasy tandem. First one was dominant, then the other. The canvas was very close, though she didn’t think she’d moved. She heard music now. On the other side of the wall, Clara was singing.

Or was it singing? Was it music at all?

The paint was so thick it cast little shadows, made her see things that weren’t really there. Made her see, made her think, almost, that she saw, the outline of a—

The illusion would dissipate if she got closer, right up to the paint. But when she took another step, it clarified. And it was music playing, she was sure of it.

Guinevere stood inches from her own worst flashback, and the fear was gone. She reached for the shape in the paint.