I knew. I understand Mr. Lindsey’s in charge of the show, but you’re the one who’s going to make sure it’s cared for the right way.”
This wasn’t true in any official sense, but Yale nodded. “Of course,” he said.
“Because you’ll understand: It was a ghost town. Some of those boys were dear friends. I’d studied next to them for two years. I’d run around with them, doing all the ridiculous things you do when you’re young. I could tell you their names, but it wouldn’t mean a thing to you. If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss. It—you know what, it prepared me for being old. All my friends are dying, or they’re dead already, but I’ve been through it before.”
Yale hadn’t particularly thought of Nora having current friends. Somehow he’d always thought of friends as the people you met early and stayed bonded to forever. Maybe this was why his loneliness was hitting him so hard. He couldn’t imagine going out and selecting a brand-new cohort. How unimaginable that Nora had lived another seven decades, that she’d known the world this long without her first adult friends, her compatriots.
Nora said, “Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft. They don’t see the empty spaces.”
Yale wished Roman weren’t in the room, that he and Nora could sit and cry together. She fixed him with her wet eyes, held his gaze as if she were squeezing it.
Roman said, “And Ranko wasn’t around?”
Nora blinked. “Well. No one knew where he was. Some of my friends were still at Colarossi, but I didn’t have money to go back; I’d only saved enough for the trip. I stayed with a Russian girl who’d been a classmate, a terrible influence.
“There were paid evening classes for the public, and some of the instructors would let us sneak in. I thought I’d skip around town and paint things, but I was at such loose ends. I wanted to paint boys who’d lost arms, but I couldn’t bring myself to. So in the midst of all the chaos, there I sat drawing fruit. The same brainless exercises I’d given those children in Philadelphia.”
“And you met these artists then?” Yale prompted. “That year, or later?”
“That summer and that fall.”
Roman took the notebook from Yale, flipped to the back. “Modigliani returned to Paris in the spring of 1919,” he said. He’d made a timeline in there, color coded and everything. “With Jeanne Hébuterne and their daughter.” Yale could smell Roman’s sweat from here—not a bad scent, but one he’d been up close to yesterday, one that accosted him with its familiarity.
“Fantastic. Well, and he was dead himself the next January. So that must give you a time frame, no?” She looked pleased with herself. “Modi had studied at Colarossi, and he would come back to strut around. He looked like an opera villain, and he was already famous. Terrible breath, terrible teeth, but when I saw him I was starstruck. He was in the hallway with our instructor, and I found some excuse to ask a question. He was the first to ask me to model.
“The thing is, I wanted to be a muse. It had to do with my own art, the way it wasn’t expressing the losses I felt. And if I couldn’t paint it all myself, maybe someone could paint my soul. It was a stab at immortality, of course.”
Yale had a million questions, one of which was whether being a muse involved sex, but what he asked was, “So this was spring? Summer?”
He tried to imagine someone, sixty years from now, pinning him down on the minute details of his life: Which happened first, the test or the hand job? Who died first, Nico or Terrence? Where did Jonathan Bird live when he got sick? When did Charlie die, exactly? Where were you when you heard? When did Julian die? What about Teddy? Richard Campo? When did you first feel sick? He’d be the world’s luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all, to be the one left, trying to remember. The unluckiest too.