The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 12

I practiced what I planned to say to Madame Alouette on my walk back to the mask studio. I came up with various reasons I might want to examine her book of Jean Luc’s columns. All of them logical, but were any of them believable?

Upon arrival, an assistant informed me Madame was working with a soldier and asked if I could wait, or would I prefer to come back? Afraid if I left I’d lose my nerve and never return, I agreed to wait.

When Madame Alouette came out, her hands and smock smeared with gray clay, she seemed excited to greet me.

“Have you received another message?” she asked right away.

Taken by surprise that she knew, I started to answer without thinking. “I have been-” And then I stopped myself. In my nervousness, I almost admitted something that I could not share with her, certainly not yet. “No, not that. I came because I have been thinking”-I tried covering my error-“about your son’s columns. I went to the newspaper’s office to buy old issues, but they only sell a month back. The woman there told me,” I lied, “sometimes family members keep scrapbooks of newspaper stories a loved one has written and I thought-” I needed to stop rambling. Her expression suggested I’d made a very odd request.

“Yes, I do have a book just like that. All the ones that were printed as well as some that weren’t. You’re interested in reading them? Because of something else he told you?”

“No, there’s nothing…” I tried to make light of it, but what could I say that would make any sense? What had I been thinking in going to see her? I’d upset her and now I owed her something more.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sometimes the voices of the soldiers, of the soldiers I talk to, get inside my head. Almost as if once I’ve heard them they get stuck there. It’s happened now with your son. I’m not sure why, but I thought if I could read the columns, get to know him better… perhaps I might be able to…” I searched for the word. “Dislodge him.”

Behind me, one of the other mask makers or soldiers must have opened a window because a strong gust of wind blew at my back. I turned. All the windows but one were shut against the rain. No one stood beside the opened one.

“Eloise?” Madame Alouette called out. “You need to get the concierge and tell him one of the windows needs to be fixed. It just flew open.” She circled back to me. “The lock must be loose. Things are always going wrong here. It’s such an old building.”

I nodded, even though I was certain the concierge wouldn’t find anything wrong with the lock.

“The book is at our apartment. Would you like to come by this evening? I’d be happy to lend it to you.” She smiled. “It’s comforting to be able to talk about him, you know. So many people just tiptoe around his death and that doesn’t help either.”

At seven o’clock, I rang the doorbell at no. 5 avenue Van Dyck. A dog barked somewhere inside. After a few moments, Madame Alouette opened the door and a little Maltese rushed out to greet me.

“Meet Maxime,” she said as she ushered me into the vestibule.

I bent to pet the fluffy white fur creature who was pawing at my legs.

“Enough now,” Madame Alouette scolded the dog as she scooped her up. “We are on the first floor,” she said as she led me to a sweeping staircase with an ornate wrought iron banister.

Jean Luc walked on these stairs every day coming home from school, I thought, as I stepped on the well-worn marble.

On the landing, Madame Alouette ushered me through large lacquered doors into their apartment. Into his apartment, I thought.

I followed her through a beautifully appointed foyer, decorated simply with a black-and-white marble floor and a round table with a tall art glass vase in its center. Instead of flowers, it held creamy white peacock feathers the same shade as the walls. The high ceilings were capped with baguette moldings of repeating floral wreaths.

After seeing the simple entryway, I wasn’t prepared for the profusion of art decorating the next room we entered. Pieces by artists I knew from my father’s work as an architect and my mother’s as a painter crowded the parlor.

Fabulous Art Nouveau chairs, couches, and end tables covered in lush velvets in wine colors. Grape, ruby, and rose stained art glass lamps twisting and turning on their wrought iron stem-like bases. Garnet and crimson rugs scattered all over a gleaming parquet floor. A pink-cheeked Renoir of a child at a piano hung above a fireplace carved out of marble the same shade of pink. Other colorful impressionistic paintings by Monet, Manet, Matisse, and Cassatt graced the claret-colored walls. Sensual white marble statues of lovers in various poses stood on pedestals in the corners and in front of the windows, and bronze busts occupied tabletops.

“Is this your work?” I asked Madame Alouette, indicating the sculpture.

“Yes, and this,” she said, pointing to a white marble bust on the mantelpiece, “this is my son.”

I wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with Jean Luc. He was staring out at me, almost as surprised to see me as I him. His almond-shaped eyes gazed intelligently, all seeing. Were they the same midnight blue as his mother’s? From the lock of hair Madame Alouette provided, I knew that Jean Luc’s hair was dark brown, but now I could see it had once fallen in waves over his forehead.

The shock of seeing him in three dimensions, of learning what he looked like after hearing him inside my head, literally made me unsteady on my feet, and I put out a hand, grabbing hold of the back of the chair closest to me.

“Are you all right?” Madame Alouette asked. “You’ve lost all the color in your cheeks.”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I just… I’m fine.”

She looked at me with her eyes both kind and wary at the same time. And I didn’t blame her. Who was this off-balance woman, practically a stranger, in her living room, becoming weak while looking at a bust of her son? I should have turned to her and reassured her I felt fine, lied and said I’d forgotten to eat that day, but I couldn’t turn to her, not yet. I couldn’t glance away from the sculpture.

Were Madame Alouette any less talented, my reaction might have been less intense, but she had been a student of the brilliant Auguste Rodin and it showed. The technique she used to carve the stone had produced results as close to real life as I’d ever seen. I was almost certain if I reached out and touched it, the stone would be warm, not cold, and I would be able to feel Jean Luc’s pulse beating in his neck.

I took in more of his features: a broad forehead, an aristocratic nose with a slight bump high on the bridge, a small mouth with full lips. A sensitive, seductive face, one that seemed to be inviting me in with a secret smile playing behind the stoic pose.

“I suppose I should introduce you to my son. This is Jean Luc Forêt,” Madame Alouette said. As tears filled her eyes, I felt tears fill my own.

He was dead, I reminded myself. He was dead, and even my being there was absurd. The voice I heard, that I believed belonged to the man this used to be, was my imagination. We are not meant to speak to people after they pass over. It cannot logically be done. Picking up a message from the departed, from the ether, was one thing; conversations with a ghost, quite another.

But what if that was happening? What if it was an aberration, a mistake of time? And if it was, I blamed my mother. For the hundredth time, or the thousandth, I cursed my mother for having children. A witch who has abilities and powers like hers? Didn’t she understand what she would be passing on?

“He was very handsome, don’t you think?” Madame Alouette asked, with a twist in her voice. As if she were like any mother matchmaking, trying to interest a young woman in her son.

I looked away from the marble and turned to her. “Yes, he is.”

She frowned. “Do you speak of the soldiers like that because you are in touch with them? Because you hear them speaking to you?”

I had been unaware of my use of the present tense until her comment. Another mistake. I’d need to be more careful of how I spoke. In truth, no, I never referred to them in the present, but to me Jean Luc wasn’t gone.

“Yes, I suppose I do,” I lied.

“Can you ever talk to them without one of these?” she pointed to the crystal orb I’d made which hung around her neck.

“No,” I said, not filling in the rest… not saying what I wanted to… that I never could until she came to Monsieur’s atelier.

Madame Alouette seemed to take stock of where we were. “Forgive my manners. Would you like to sit down? Have an aperitif?” I had almost declined when it occurred to me that if I stayed, perhaps she would show me Jean Luc’s room. Maybe I could peek at his things.

“That is such an imposition,” I said, in that polite way one did before one accepted.

“Not at all. You would be giving me a great gift. Allowing me to indulge in talking about Jean Luc for a bit longer.”

She rose and went to the sideboard, where she reached for a bottle of Lillet. As she poured the golden-orange wine, I noticed a round table across the room covered with at least a dozen silver-framed photographs. I was too far away to make out many of the details, but I recognized Jean Luc in some of them. Madame Alouette and a man I assumed was her husband in others. I longed to go and inspect them, drink in Jean Luc’s features, study his expressions, but before I worked up the courage, Madame Alouette returned, handing me a crystal glass.

While we sipped the aperitifs, she recounted stories about her son. A mischievous child, always curious, he loved going off and exploring places on his own. One of Madame’s favorite memories was of the first time she took him to the Louvre. He was only four, but he loved touching her sculpture at home so much and seemed so interested she thought he’d enjoy the excursion. As soon as he saw the Winged Victory, he ran up to it and threw his arms around its base and set to howling when she tried, along with the guard, to pull him off. After that, she said, his favorite outings were visiting museums. They’d walk through the Tuileries and go to the Louvre and afterward walk over to Angelina’s for hot chocolate.

I nodded; it was a favorite haunt of my great-grandmother’s as well, and I went there with her as often as we could. We’d always see mothers and children there, the little boys or girls absorbed in the heady drink, glistening brown with clouds of whipped cream floating on top.

“Until we realized he needed eyeglasses, he wasn’t a good student. But outfitted with the correct spectacles, he became an avid reader with at least three books open at once.” She smiled, remembering.

Under my dress, I felt the talisman warm against my skin. Was he here with me? Could he hear what his mother was saying?

“Jean Luc went to university in Oxford,” Madame Alouette continued, “and then stayed on in England to write a series of articles about castles for a magazine. His stepfather and I were so proud of him. When Jean Luc came home, he got a job with Le Figaro and started writing his art column. He loved it. His job gave him an excuse to spend days wandering through Montmartre, searching out artists, studying their work, trying to understand what drove them and our reactions to their work. He was so passionate and cared so much about art. About society rewarding an artist’s individuality, not condemning it. And then the war broke out.”

Even with all the information she’d fed me, I remained hungry for more. The skeleton of a description wasn’t enough for someone starving. She must have read something of my desperation, for suddenly she stood and said, “Would you like to see his room?”

I nodded, rose, and followed her back into the foyer and up a sweeping staircase. Down a hall, she opened a door at the far end on the right.

I smelled the scent as soon as I stepped inside. The same curious concoction accompanying Jean Luc’s visits. Exotic and pungent limes mixed with verbena with a hint of myrrh. At once a scent of the past and the present. An odd mixture of times and places.

If I imagined the visits, how would I have known about the scent? Unless Madame Alouette wore it that first time we met. Grieving her son, had she taken to wearing his cologne?

Breathing it in, I responded physically, stirred and excited by memories of the titillating nighttime magic Jean Luc’s ghost brought with him. Heat flushed my cheeks, and I hoped Madame Alouette didn’t notice.

“It’s very distinctive, isn’t it? A perfumer we use, just a few blocks from here, created it for him. Jean Luc never wore anything else.”

“L’Etoile’s?”

She nodded.

“I know that perfumer. He makes my grandmother’s scents too.”

One of Paris’s most prestigious firms, the House of L’Etoile dated back to before the Revolution and their shop on rue des Saints-Pères was just a few doors down from my family home.

If I went there, would they sell me a flacon of Jean Luc’s scent? Usually, once they created a bespoke perfume, no one else could purchase it. But what if the owner of the scent has passed on? Was it still protected? Or could I lie and say I’d come to pick up a bottle for him? Would they sell it to me then?

Madame Alouette turned on the light. Bookshelves, filled to overflowing, covered the walls. More books next to the bed, and another pile on the table next to an armchair.

Standing close to his desk, I glimpsed a sheaf of notes and an uncapped pen. An inkwell left open, the purplish ink dried out and flaking on the glass. He must have been in the midst of writing when he’d been called away. To the right, the typewriter still retained a sheet of paper in the carriage. Beside it, a small stack of paper covered with characters. On top of them, a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray, with a few inches of gray ash still inside it.

The covers on the bed were rumpled, and upon them, a book lay open, facedown.

Imagining that last afternoon, I pictured Jean Luc reading in bed, coming across an idea, rising, and going to the desk. He started typing, then stopped to think. Lit a cigarette. He’d smoked as he committed his thoughts to paper and then… what happened?

“I know I shouldn’t keep it like this in here. I should empty out his closet and give away his things but… I can’t…”

I nodded. Mothers spoke to me like this all the time. “When was Jean Luc last here?” I asked.

“Right before he…” She still couldn’t use the word. “He’d been home on leave. He and a friend were taking the train back that afternoon. Jean Luc was up here working when I called up to tell him Alain had arrived. Jean Luc came downstairs and I made both of them something to eat and then the time came for them to go. Jean Luc had already packed and left his luggage by the door. He must have forgotten about these unfinished notes and never come back up. The following day was Saturday, and my housekeeper doesn’t come on weekends. So no one straightened up the room. Marie fell ill and remained indisposed through Wednesday, when we got the telegram. When she finally returned on Thursday, I told her not to touch anything in here, but just to dust. Since then, that’s all she’s done. I can’t bring myself to straighten it up. If I leave it like this, I can pretend…”

“But pretending isn’t good,” I said. Talking to myself really.

“No. But it’s all we have.” Was she talking only to herself? Or was I included in the “we”?

Somewhere beyond the door I heard footsteps.

“Madame Alouette?”

The housekeeper, who I now knew as Marie, came to say she was needed in the kitchen. Excusing herself, Madame Alouette told me she’d be right back. Then she left me in Jean Luc’s room.

For the first few seconds, I didn’t move. Like a child staring into the window of a toy store, I just eyed the riches before me, overwhelmed with the gift I’d just been given.

“So this is where you lived?” I whispered as I strode over to the bed and stroked the depression his head had left in the pillow so long ago. I half expected it to be warm. But of course the linens were cool to the touch.

I imagined lying on the bed and fitting my body into the space where he’d lain. Would I feel his arms come around me? But I dared not muss Madame Alouette’s shrine. I touched the coverlet where his shoulders once had pressed down. Where his hips… his calves… his shoulders… left an imprint.

But like the pillow, all these spots were cold. Nothing of Jean Luc remained here anymore. The apartment had been his home, but he’d left it behind. The most his room could offer was insight into the man, what made him Jean Luc Forêt and not someone else.

I started with his bookshelves, seeking to learn what I could about him through his reading. I passed over the childhood classics we’d all read and concentrated on his adult tastes: experimental literature by the British, Americans, and French, as well as popular fiction. My finger ran along the spines of André Gide’s The Immoralist, Dubliners by James Joyce, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.

Among the shelves of art, architecture, and art criticism books, I recognized the authors Ruskin, Stendhal, and Clive Bell from conversations we’d had at home. Both my parents were highly critical of these critics.

From the condition of the spines of the books on the middle shelf, I guessed these were Jean Luc’s favorites, fiction and nonfiction all mixed together: Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, C. G. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Having recently finished Leroux’s gothic love story, I felt a thrill thinking of Jean Luc poring over the words and wondering when he’d read it-and what if we’d been reading it at the same time?

I took the book off the shelf and let it fall open to a random page.

Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!… Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!… Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!

I shivered and put the book back. As I did, a volume with a curious purple stain on its green spine caught my attention because of its similarity to La Lune’s signature crescent-moon shape. Was it wine that colored the leather? Certainly not blood. I pulled out the book. Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, a dry title indeed. The book fell open to a familiar passage.

Art is the most intense mode of Individualism the world has known.

Beside it, in ink, Jean Luc had written:

The soul of the artist fighting the mediocrity of the masses. An artist, like a lover, cares not for convention. In fact, convention is his enemy.

A memory opened in my mind. My father and I after dinner, reading Jean Luc Forêt’s column on individualism, quoting this passage from Wilde’s essay. My father became excited. For exactly that reason, my father explained to me, freedom of expression should be defended at all costs.

As I flipped through the pages, I found several more highlighted phrases.

“Know thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be thyself” shall be written.

The notion appealed to me; I wanted to write it down and send it home to my father. He’d appreciate it every bit as much as I had. For a moment I envisioned the spirited conversation Jean Luc, my father, and I might have had around the dinner table. My mother, smiling her little cat smile, agreeing with just an elegant nod of her head while my father had much to say and many questions to ask.

“He loved to read,” Madame Alouette said. Her return startled me.

I turned to her. “So do I.” What made me say that? To voice aloud what we shared? She looked at me gently. Sensing my emotional reaction to her son, or caught up in her own?

“If there’s anything you’d like to borrow, please do. Jean Luc loved lending his books to his friends.”

Overwhelmed by the offer, I searched the shelves, reading through the titles. How to know which would give me the deepest view into the man’s soul?

“I think I’ll just take this one,” I finally said, referring to the Wilde already in hand. Surely not the most romantic of his books, but all the annotations in Jean Luc’s handwriting were too intriguing to ignore.

“I am sorry to rush you, but we are having a little dinner this evening and I need to dress,” she said, gesturing to the door.

“May I just look out of the window first?”

“The window?”

“Just for a second. To see the street from here.” As I asked, I realized how eccentric a request it must seem. But how to tell her I wanted to gaze upon what he had gazed upon? How to explain I wanted to fill my eyes with what he had seen?

“Certainly, it’s a lovely view,” she said, and opened the curtains for me and I looked down onto Parc Monceau. “One of his first Ma chère columns from the front referred to this view-you must read it.”

I stood at the window for a few moments, trying to see what Jean Luc had seen, but Paris wasn’t dressed in lights because of the war and I couldn’t see anything but a dismal foggy night settled over a patch of darkness.