Eva reached into a leather folio to present the formal write-up of the pitch to Kitomi: the multimillion-dollar estimate of the painting’s value that would be presented to the public, what we thought the market value actually was, and the reserve—the secret amount Sotheby’s would keep as the price below which we would not sell.
I rose from my seat, about to ask for a restroom when I remembered I wasn’t supposed to speak. Kitomi looked up, her eyes black buttons. “It’s down the hall,” she said. “Left at the end.”
I nodded and slipped away. But instead of going to the bathroom, I found myself standing in front of the painting.
A lot of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work was about movement. His earliest art captured horses, then he focused on dancers and the circus and bicycle racing. But even later paintings felt like they were kinetic. At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance—one of his most famous paintings—showcases a tilted perspective on the floor to make the viewer feel off-kilter and a little drunk—while the eye is drawn to the red of the dancer’s stockings and to the pink of a fine lady’s dress and then to the gentleman she is watching and then to the flurry of another dancer’s petticoat behind him—all these angles make you feel like you are spinning, like you are in this loud room moving about, as small details catch your eye.
Kitomi Ito’s painting, on the other hand, was all about stillness.
It was the moment after intimacy, when you weren’t joined to your lover anymore, but still felt him beating like blood inside you.
It was the moment where you had to remember how to breathe again.
It was the moment where nothing mattered more than the moment ago.
The model had red hair, and it was one of the only splashes of color on the background, which was tan, like cardboard. The field was white with bits of pastel in it. The woman—Rosa la Rouge—sat up half-nude. Behind her was a mirror, reflecting the direct gaze of the man who faced her from the bottom right of the painting: Lautrec himself, turned to the side, so you saw his bared shoulder and his profile, his beard and the wire edge of his glasses. The artist’s shoulder—a pallid green—was the only other bleed of color in the painting. I wondered if it was meant to flag illness, like his bent legs under the covers; or jealousy over this woman who would ultimately be the end of him.
Or maybe it was a flash of the hidden heart of a man most often described as aloof.
I shook myself away from the painting and continued down the hall to the bathroom, passing an open doorway. The room was familiar to anyone who had ever seen the Nightjars’ final album, with Kitomi and Sam Pride in that very bed. The only thing missing, of course, was the painting that, for the album cover, had been hung behind Kitomi.
But there were things in the room now that were not part of that photo. On one side of the bed was a nightstand with a stack of books, a glass half-full of water, a pair of purple reading glasses, some hand cream. On the other was a nightstand with only one item on it: a man’s wedding ring. Neatly aligned on the floor was a battered pair of men’s leather slippers.
I backed away, feeling even more voyeuristic now than I ever had seeing Kitomi half-naked on an album cover, and went to the bathroom. When I emerged, Kitomi herself was standing in front of the painting.
“His cousin was a medical student,” she said. “He let Henri scrub in and do paintings of surgery.” She turned, a smile in her eyes. “I’ve always thought of him by his first name, not Toulouse-Lautrec,” she said. “He was hanging over my bed for years, after all.”
I took a few steps toward her. I wondered if I should tell her that I knew all that. But Eva had warned me to stay silent.
“He was placed in a sanitorium because of alcoholism and syphilis, and to prove to doctors he was sane enough to leave, he painted images of the circus from his memory. But he still died at thirty-six.” Kitomi’s mouth twisted. “Some people burn too bright to last long.”
Her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “Auctioning it off feels like an amputation. But it doesn’t seem right to have it in Montana, either.”
Montana.
I thought of Kitomi saying she wanted to turn the page.
This was not, I realized, a woman who wanted a clean break, a new life. This was a woman who was so tied to her dead husband she was going to live out the dream he didn’t.
I thought: Eva is going to kill me. But I turned and said, “I have an idea.”
On the way to El Muro de las Lágrimas, or Wall of Tears, Beatriz and I detour past the remains of a mermaid. Yesterday, she stretched at the edge of the beach where the dry sand met the wet. Scales of shells mounded her tail; her hair was a tangle of seaweed. But today, our sand art has been all but swallowed by the sea.