“Yes,” he said, his inflection on the word leaving her unsure what he meant. Was it a question: Yes, what is it you want to know? Or was it an answer: Yes, the photograph was of his wife.
Nanée couldn’t say the word wife, much less her name. Elza. She didn’t want to step too far into his private grief, to make him talk about things he might not want to share, the gut-wrenching emotion captured in the photograph. She didn’t want to know it was Elza, and yet she wanted to know if he’d photographed other women too before this moment of her own vulnerability.
He whispered, “It . . . it was something she wanted to do. A demon she needed to rid herself of. No, a . . . a demon she needed to rid me of. One she knew I needed to purge from myself.”
His voice full of some pain Nanée had been trying not to touch. Some shame.
That photo—the woman bending over so vulnerably. What would drive a woman to wish to be photographed like that, or a man to want to do it? What kind of wound might that heal?
He whispered, “Can I ask you a question?”
She nodded.
“I only ask because Varian says we might leave as soon as this week.”
This week. The weight of it sinking through her. Edouard gone from her life. She’d thought for the briefest moment last night as they were dancing that he was going to ask her to go home with him. She could leave any time she wanted; she could present herself at the American embassy, and they’d help her arrange it. But could she live under Evanston Rules again? It would be a different thing too, to go with Edouard and Luki, with the ghost of Elza. And she had already failed at her sole attempt to mother a child; T had given Peterkin over for her to take to the States before France fell, but she was so unlikely a mother that even the damned bureaucrats in Biarritz could not be convinced.
“There’s a new path over the Pyrenees into Spain,” Edouard said. “I want to believe my release papers are real, but I think the only way they might be . . .”
She looked to the window, the darkness outside. She had to tell him. Like her, he couldn’t ask, but while she didn’t need to know whose body was in the photograph, he did need to understand how his release papers could be real.
“Yes,” she whispered.
She tried to make herself say the words he couldn’t ask—how she’d gained Edouard’s papers, if not his freedom, or what passed for freedom for a Jewish refugee in Vichy France. She didn’t want him to be as confused by her answer as she was by his. But he would see her differently if she told him about the night with the commandant. How could he not? She saw herself differently.
She shrugged off the top of her robe so that the soft terry cloth pooled at her hips.
Edouard was silent for a long moment. Perhaps he meant to tell her what his yes meant. Perhaps he meant to ask her to say more directly what hers did.
He murmured, “I expect this will be a little cold.”
She nodded again.
She waited in the quiet of a paint tube being opened. The chemical smell as he squirted it onto a painter’s palette he’d borrowed from Jacqueline. The paint cap being replaced.
He set the palette beside her on the bed.
The paintbrush on the skin of her back shocked, the contrast of the cold of the paint and the warmth of his touch. He used one hand to steady himself, or her, as he painted something just to the left of the small of her back.
He didn’t speak, but his breath was warm.
His other hand slid down, touching her rear, not erotically but only to steady himself as he painted.
Rear. What a prudish way to think of it.
Mon derrière. The word masculine despite her own derrière being distinctly female. Not bare. The robe pooled around it. Her arms together over her bare breasts.
Ma poitrine. My chest. Even the French saw that one as feminine.
Another shiver ran through her. How disappointed her father would be that, just like her mother, she’d fallen for a refugee without a penny to his name.
“Are you cold?” he whispered. “I’ll be quick.”
He was already painting the same thing on her right side, the same even swirls to make a second fleur-de-lis—the symbol of French royalty and Catholic saints, of the Virgin Mary.
The Lady Mary, Luki called her.
“I’m almost done.”
The palette and brush set on a cloth on a tray on her dresser. Edouard at his camera on the other side of the bed. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She sat as straight as she could, squaring her bare shoulders. She turned her head to the left, so that her face would appear to him in profile, not all the way but enough so that he could see her jawline, the hint of her lips and nose and eyes. Her left side, which was her best side, although she didn’t suppose anyone else would see any difference.