The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 14
“And what kind of sky am I?” Addie had asked then, and Sam had stared at her, unblinking, and then brightened, and it was the kind of brightening she had seen with a hundred artists, a hundred times, the glow of inspiration, as if someone switched on a light beneath their skin. And Sam, suddenly animated, wound to life, sprang from the bed, taking Addie with her into the living room.
An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky. Not the night sky as anyone else would have painted it. Bold streaks of charcoal, and black, and thin slashes of middle gray, the paint so thick it rose up from the canvas. And flecked across the surface, a handful of silver dots. They looked almost accidental, like spatter from a brush, but there were exactly seven of them, small and distant and wide apart as stars.
Sam’s voice draws her back to the kitchen.
“I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art. I know I have to—that whole starving artist thing is overrated—but I miss it every day.”
Her voice dips softer.
“The crazy thing is, every one of the pieces in that series is modeled after someone. Friends, people here in the building, strangers I found on the street. I remember all of them. But I can’t for the life of me remember who she was.”
Addie swallows. “You think it was a girl?”
“Yeah. I do. It just had this energy.”
“Maybe you dreamed her.”
“Maybe,” says Sam. “I’ve never been good at remembering dreams. But you know…” She trails off, staring at Addie the way she did that night in bed, beginning to glow. “You remind me of that piece.” She puts a hand over her face. “God, that sounds like the worst pickup line in the world. I’m sorry. I’m going to take a shower.”
“I should get going,” says Addie. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Sam bites her lip. “Do you have to?”
No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.
“Sorry,” she says, chest aching, but Sam only shrugs.
“We’ll see each other again,” she says with so much faith. “After all, we’re neighbors now.”
Addie manages a pale shadow of a smile. “That’s right.”
Sam walks her to the door, and with every step, Addie resists the urge to look back.
“Don’t be a stranger,” says Sam.
“I won’t,” promises Addie, as the door swings shut. She sighs, leaning back against it, listens to Sam’s footsteps retreating down the cluttered hall, before she forces herself up, and forward, and away.
Outside, the white marble sky has cracked, letting through thin bands of blue.
The cold has burned off, and Addie finds a café with sidewalk seating, busy enough that the waiter only has time to make a pass of the outside tables every ten minutes or so. She counts the beats like a prisoner marking the pace of guards, orders a coffee—it isn’t as good as Sam’s, all bitter, no sweet, but it’s warm enough to keep the chill at bay. She puts up the collar of her leather coat, and opens The Odyssey again, and tries to read.
Here, Odysseus thinks he is heading home, to finally be reunited with Penelope after the horrors of war, but she has read the story enough times to know how far the journey is from done.
She skims, translating from Greek to modern English.
I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together
will do me in—I’m bone-weary, about to breathe my last,
and a cold wind blows from a river on toward morning.
The waiter ducks back outside, and she glances up from the book, watches him frown a little at the sight of the drink already ordered and delivered, the gap in his memory where a customer should be. But she looks like she belongs, and that’s half the battle, really, and a moment later he turns his attention to the couple in the doorway, waiting for a seat.
She returns to her book, but it’s no use. She’s not in the mood for old men lost at sea, for parables of lonely lives. She wants to be stolen away, wants to forget. A fantasy, or perhaps a romance.
The coffee is cold now, anyway, and Addie stands up, book in hand, and sets off for The Last Word to find something new.
Paris, France
July 29, 1716
VII
She stands in the shade of a silk merchant.
Across the way, the tailor’s shop bustles, the pace of business brisk even as the day wears on. Sweat drips down her neck as she unties and reties the bonnet, salvaged from a gust of wind, hoping the cloth cap will be enough to pass her off as a lady’s maid, to grant her the kind of invisibility reserved for help. If he thinks her a maid, Bertin will not look too close. If he thinks her a maid, he might not notice Addie’s dress, which is simple but fine, slipped from a tailor’s model a week before, in a similar shop across the Seine. It was a pretty thing at first, until she snagged the skirts on an errant nail, and someone cast a bucket of soot too near her feet, and red wine somehow got onto one of the sleeves.
She wishes her clothes were as resistant to change as she appears to be. Especially because she has only the one dress—there’s no point collecting a wardrobe, or anything else, when you’ve nowhere to put it. (She will try, in later years, to gather trinkets, hide them away like a magpie with its nest, but something will always conspire to steal them back. Like the wooden bird, lost among the bodies in the cart. She cannot seem to hold on to much of anything for long.)
At last, the final customer steps out—a valet, one beribboned box beneath each arm—and before anyone else can beat her to the door, Addie darts across the street and steps inside the tailor’s shop.
It is a narrow space: a table piled high with rolls of fabric; a pair of dress forms modeling the latest fashions. The kind of gowns that take at least four hands to get on, and just as many to take off—all bolstered hips and ruffled sleeves and bosoms cinched too tight to breathe. These days the fine society of Paris is wrapped like parcels, clearly not meant to be opened.
A small bell on the door announces her arrival, and the tailor, Monsieur Bertin, looks up at her through brows as thick as brambles, and makes a sour face.
“I am closing,” he says curtly.
Addie ducks her head, the picture of discretion. “I am here on behalf of Madame Lautrec.”
It is a name plucked from the breeze, overheard on a handful of her walks, but it is the right answer. The tailor straightens, suddenly keen. “For the Lautrecs, anything.” He takes up a small pad, a charcoal pencil, and Addie’s own fingers twitch, a moment of grief, a longing to draw as she so often did.
“It is strange, though,” he is saying, shaking the stiffness from his hands, “that she would send a lady’s maid in place of her valet.”
“He’s ill,” Addie answers swiftly. She is learning to lie, to bend with the current of the conversation, follow its course. “So she sent her lady’s maid instead. Madame wishes to throw a dance, and is in need of a new dress.”
“But of course,” he says. “You have her measurements?”
“I do.”
He stares, waiting for her to produce a slip of paper.
“No,” she explains. “I have her measurements—they are the same as mine. That’s why she sent me.”
She thinks it is a rather clever lie, but the tailor only frowns, and turns toward a curtain at the back of the shop. “I will get my tape.”
She catches a brief glimpse of the room beyond, a dozen dress forms, a mountain of silks, before the curtain falls again. But as Bertin slips away, so does she, vanishing between the dress forms and the rolls of muslin and cotton propped against the wall. It is not her first visit to the shop, and she has learned well its crevices and crooks, all the corners large enough to hide in. Addie folds into one such space, and by the time Bertin returns to the front of the shop, the tape in one hand, he has forgotten all about Madame Lautrec and her peculiar maid.
It is stuffy among the rolls of cloth, and she’s grateful when she hears the rattle of the bell, the shuffling sound of Bertin closing up his shop. He will go upstairs, to the room he keeps above, will have some soup, and soak his aching hands, and go to bed before it is full night. She waits, letting the quiet settle around her, waits until she can hear the groan of his steps overhead.
And then she is free to wander, and peruse.
A weak gray light seeps through the front window as she crosses the shop, pulls aside the heavy curtain, and steps through.
The fading light slides in through a single window, just enough to see by. Along the back wall there are cloaks, half-finished, and she makes a mental note to return when summer gives way to fall, and the cold sweeps through. But her focus falls on the center of the room, where a dozen dress forms stand like dancers taking up their marks, their narrow waists wrapped in shades of green and gray, a navy gown piped white, another pale blue with yellow trim.
Addie smiles, and casts the bonnet off onto a table, shaking loose her hair.
She runs her hand over skeins of patterned silk and richly dyed cotton, savoring the textures of linen and twill. Touches the boning of the corsets, the bustles at the hips, imagining herself in each. She passes the muslin and wool, simple and sturdy, lingers instead on worsted pleats and layered satin, finer than anything she saw back home.
Home—it is a hard word to let go of, even now, when there is nothing left to bind her to it.
She plucks at the stays of a bodice, the blue of summer, and stops, breath held, when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. But it is only a mirror, leaning against the wall. She turns, studies herself in the silvered surface, as if she were a portrait of someone else, though the truth is, she looks entirely herself.
These last two years have felt like ten, and yet, they do not show. She should have long been whittled down to skin and bone, hardened, hewn, but her face is just as full as it was the summer she left home. Her skin, unlined by time and trial, untouched in any way, save for the familiar freckles on the smooth palette of her cheeks. Only her eyes mark the change—an edge of shadow threaded through the brown and gold.
Addie blinks, forces her gaze away from herself, and the dresses.
Across the room, a trio of dark shapes—men’s forms, in trousers and waistcoats and jackets. In the low light, their headless forms seem alive, leaning into one another as they study her. She considers the cut of their clothes, the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
And then, she is reaching for the nearest form, sliding off its coat. Unfastening the buttons down its front. There is a strange intimacy to the undressing, and she enjoys it all the more for the fact that the man beneath her fingers is not real, and therefore cannot grope, or paw, or push.
She frees herself from the laces of her own dress, and finds her way into the trousers, fastening them below her knee. She pulls on the tunic and buttons the waistcoat, shrugs the striped coat over her shoulders, fastens the lace cravat at her throat.
She feels safe in the armor of their fashion, but when she turns to the mirror, her spirits sink. Her chest is too full, her waist too narrow, her hips flaring to fill the trousers in the wrong place. The jacket helps, a little, but nothing can disguise her face. The bow of her lips, the line of her cheek, the smoothness of her brow, all too soft and round to pass for anything but female.
She takes up a pair of shears, tries to trim the loose coil of her hair to her shoulders, but seconds later, it is back, the locks on the floor swept away by some invisible hand. No mark made, even on herself. She finds a pin and fastens the light brown waves back in the style she has seen men wear, plucks a tricorne hat from one of the forms and rests it above her brow.
At a distance, perhaps; at a passing glance, perhaps; at night, perhaps, when the darkness is thick enough to smudge the details; but even by lamplight, the illusion does not hold.
The men in Paris are soft, even pretty, but they are still men.
She sighs, and casts off the disguise, and passes the next hour trying on dress after dress, already longing for the freedom of those trousers, the stayless comfort of that tunic. But the dresses are fine, and lush. Her favorite among them is a lovely green and white—but it isn’t finished yet. The collar and hem lie open, waiting for lace. She’ll have to check back in a week or two, hope that she catches the dress before it’s gone, wrapped in paper and sent on to the home of some baroness.
In the end, Addie chooses a dark sapphire dress, its edges trimmed in gray. It reminds her of a storm at night, the clouds blotting out the sky. The silk kisses her skin, the fabric crisp and new and utterly unblemished. It is too fine for her needs, a dress for banquets, for balls, but she does not care. And if it draws strange looks, what of it? They will forget before they have the chance to gossip.
Addie leaves her own dress draped around the naked form, does not bother with the bonnet, lifted from a line of clothes that morning. She slips back through the curtain and across the shop, skirts rustling around her, finds the spare key Bertin keeps in the table’s top drawer, and unlocks the door, careful to still the bell with her fingers. She pulls the door shut behind her, crouching to slip the iron key back through the gap beneath the door, then rises and turns, only to collide with a man standing on the street.
It is no wonder she didn’t see him; dressed in black, from his shoes to his collar, he blends right into the dark. She is already murmuring apologies, already backing away when her gaze lifts, and she sees the line of his jaw, the raven curls, the eyes, so green despite the lack of light.
He smiles down at her.
“Adeline.”
That name, it strikes like flint on his tongue, sparks an answering light behind her ribs. His gaze drifts over her new dress. “You’re looking well.”
“I look the same.”
“The prize of immortality. As you wanted.”
This time she does not rise to take the bait. Does not scream or swear or point out all the ways he’s damned her, but he must see the struggle on her face, because he laughs, soft and airy as a breeze.
“Come,” says the shadow, offering his arm. “I will walk you.”
He does not say that he will walk her home. And if it were midday, she would scorn the offer just to spite him. (Of course, if it were midday, the darkness would not be there.) But it is late, and only one kind of woman walks alone at night.
Addie has learned that women—at least, women of a certain class—never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day.
To walk alone in the morning is a scandal, but to walk alone at night, that is something else. Addie knows. She has felt their looks, their judgment, from every side. The women scorn her from their windows, the men try to buy her on the streets, and the devout, they try to save her soul, as if she hasn’t already sold it. She has said yes to the church, on more than one occasion, but only for the shelter, and never the salvation.
“Well?” asks the shadow, holding out his arm.
Perhaps she is lonelier than she would say.
Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none.
Addie does not take his arm, but she does start walking, and she does not need to look to know that he has fallen in step beside her. His shoes echo softly on the cobblestones, and a faint breeze presses like a palm against her back.
They walk in silence, until she cannot bear it. Until her resolve slips, and she looks over, and sees him, head tipped slightly back, dark lashes brushing fair cheeks as he breathes in the night, fetid though it is. A faint smile on those lips, as if he’s perfectly at ease. His very image mocks her, even as his edges blur, dark into dark, smoke on shadow, a reminder of what he is, and what he isn’t.
Her silence cracks, the words spill out.
“You can take any shape you please, isn’t that right?”
His head tips down. “It is.”
“Then change,” she says. “I cannot bear to look at you.”
A rueful smile. “I rather like this form. I think you do as well.”
“I did once,” she says. “But you have ruined it for me.”
It is an opening, she sees too late, a crack in her own armor.
Now he will never change.
Addie stops on a narrow, winding street, before a house, if it can be called that. A slumping wooden structure, like a pile of kindling, deserted, abandoned, but not empty.
When he is gone, she will climb through the gap in the boards, trying not to ruin the hem of her new skirts, will cross the uneven floor and go up a set of broken stairs to the attic, and hope that no one else has found it first.
She will climb out of her storm-cloud dress, and fold it carefully within a piece of tissue paper, and then she will lie down on a pallet of burlap and board, and stare up through the split planks of the ceiling two feet over her head, and hope it does not rain, while the lost souls creep through the body of the house below.
Tomorrow, the little room will be taken, and in a month, the building will burn down, but there is no sense worrying about the future now.
