Читать книгу The Returned - Jason Mott, Jason Mott - Страница 13

Jean Rideau

“You should be with a young woman,” she told Jean. “She would be able to keep up with you during all of this.” She settled onto the small, iron-framed bed, huffing. “You’re famous now. I’m just an old woman in the way.”

The young artist crossed the room and knelt beside her. He rested his head in her lap and kissed the inside of her hand, which only made her aware of the wrinkles and liver spots that had begun showing upon that hand in recent years. “It’s all because of you,” he said.

He had been a part of her life for over thirty years—since she was fumbling her way through college so long ago and had come across the work of an overlooked artist who died by running into traffic one balmy summer’s night in 1921 Paris—and now she had him, had not only his love, but his flesh, as well, completely. And that frightened her.

Outside, the street had finally quieted. The crowd had been scattered by the policemen.

“If I had only been this famous years past,” he said. “Perhaps my life would have been different.”

“Artists are only ever appreciated posthumously.” She smiled, stroking his hair. “Nobody ever expected one would return to redeem his accolades.”

She spent years studying his work, his life, never imagining that she would be here with him, like this, smelling the scent of him, feeling the wiry texture of a beard he desperately wanted but had always had poor luck growing. They sat up nights, talking about everything but his art. The press was doing enough of that. Jean Rideau: Return of the Artists, one of the more popular headlines had proclaimed.

He was the first of the artistic deluge, the article declared. “A genius sculptor returns! Not long before the masters are back with us!”

So he was famous now. Work he’d made nearly a hundred years ago, work that never sold for more than a few hundred francs, now went for millions. And then there were the fans.

But all Jean wanted was Marissa.

“You kept me alive,” he said, nuzzling his head into her lap like a cat. “You kept my work alive when no one else knew me.”

“I’m your steward, then,” she said. With her wrist, she pushed loose strands of her hair from her face—hair that was a bit more gray and a bit more thin each day. “Is that what I am?”

He looked up at her with calm, blue eyes—even in the grainy, black-and-white photos of him that she had studied for years, she had known they were this particular, beautiful blue. “I do not care about our ages,” he said. “I was only an average artist. I know now that my art was meant to lead me to you.”

Then he kissed her.