Drawn to You Page 15

  Of her father, Christine had very little to say besides, “I don’t want anything to do with him.”

  “Do you care about the rumors that he might be dead?” the journalist asked, seemingly trying to get a rise out of her. “Don’t you want him to know he shouldn’t kill himself?”

  “That’s a foolish question,” Christine declared. “Of course I don’t want him to kill himself. Why would I ever want that? I simply want him to stay as far away from me as possible, for the rest of our lives. I don't think that’s too much to ask for.”

  Of Christine’s current life, the journalist didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  “The nineteen-year-old artist currently resides in Paris, where she’s taken up with the sorts of people Mario, her once-teacher, hung around whilst he, himself, was working as an artist in Paris. Apparently, her painting of Mario has made her into a kind of celebrity. After its short stint at the MOMA, the painting will be brought back to Paris, to hang at the apartment of renowned rock star and art collector, Peter Eclaire, a Frenchman with particular ties to Mario.

  “Of Eclaire, Christine has a seemingly very clear opinion,” the reporter continued. “She says she’s smitten with him. Although she’s reportedly around twelve years younger than he is, she’s moved into his Paris apartment, declaring that it’s the perfect place to make art and concentrate on her brimming career. I suppose the rest of the world is hungry, waiting for whatever it is she’ll cook up next.

  “Of Mario, the subject himself, this reporter attempted to reach out to him for comment. It seems that he, much like Max Everett, has disappeared. It’s unclear why. When asked why Mario was the subject of Christine’s painting, she simply shrugged her shoulders, her eyes glistening with something that looks like a mix of hope and nostalgia. She says she will never tell. I think we all know what that means.”

  Mario was vaguely sure that Leonardo had continued to speak about him, rattling on about who Mario “truly was” in a way that resembled banter or laughter. Mario blinked up at him, feeling as though he might vomit out the coffee that swirled in his stomach. With slow motions, he closed his newspaper and cinched it tight at the fold, wondering how on earth he could proceed with the rest of his day. The rest of his week. The rest of his life.

  “Mario? You’re really quite green,” Leonardo offered, furrowing his brow. “Is there something wrong? Mario?”

  Slowly, Mario slipped off his stool. He pushed his saucer toward Leonardo, bowing his head. “I’m terribly sorry. I have to take my leave.”

  Leonardo sensed, for the first time, that perhaps this news of the painting wasn’t entirely good. He tossed the newspaper back down, across the top of the counter, as if he were trying to pretend it no longer existed. He looked flustered.

  “Please. I really don’t want you to go,” Leonardo said. He hadn’t much family, and Mario had sensed that he thought of Mario as a kind of son, especially in the winter holiday months. “Mario, I promise. There will be no mention of this painting again.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Leonardo,” Mario said, stepping toward the door. He gave Leonardo a quasi-salute, wishing he could translate the sort of “home” feeling that Leonardo had given him throughout the previous few months. He wished he could be honest. Instead, he slid out the door before he could get a full read on what Leonardo was thinking. It was better this way.

  Mario scrambled back into his apartment, feeling cold sweat drip down his back. Everything felt off, like his body belonged to someone else. Even his spine felt unaligned. He reached for the wall, spreading his palms wide across the crackling paint, thinking about Christine. About Max. About everything he’d run from, thinking he wouldn’t have to deal with it any longer.

  Christine was now at the mercy of Mario’s old friend Peter Eclaire. This thought had Mario immediately awash with fear, knowing full-well the sort of man Peter Eclaire was. Peter was the sort to arrive at a party with every pocket filled with drugs. He was the sort to ensure that you were drunk off your ass before eight o’clock in the evening, telling you the only way to live was to live in a “fucked up” way, as nothing mattered. Peter had toured wildly across the United States, Australia, and Europe, before landing his iconic flat in Central Paris, where he’d held some of the most raucous parties Mario had ever attended…

  And now, Christine — nineteen years old and wide-eyed and optimistic — was surging in the center of all of that chaos.

  Mario knew what he had to do. He ached with fear for the next steps, wishing he could just “unsee” that newspaper, unlearn what he’d just learned. It went against the bounds of reason. If he didn’t act now, he knew that Christine would meet an untimely end. “It’s better to say something. Say the thing,” Christine had told him that night in Venice. And in this case, Mario knew he had to “say the thing” with regard to her safety, even if it meant ripping her from whatever life she’d suddenly built for herself, in the wake of both Mario and Max leaving Venice—and, subsequently, her.

  It was about saving her life. It was about ensuring that Max didn’t go through the hardship of truly, totally losing his daughter.

  Mario knew that if he did this, he wouldn’t necessarily see Max ever again. In fact, he might make a mortal enemy of Christine, which would create a never-ending rift between him and Max—if that rift didn’t already exist.

  He didn’t have time to pack. He leafed through his few documents, drew out several hundred euro bills and his passport, and headed back out the door. He hadn’t been in Paris since a particularly wild evening at Peter Eclaire’s flat, when Mario had imbibed enough tequila to fill a river and sang songs atop the Parisian cobblestones, bemoaning his father’s death and Mario’s own inner, artistic death. “I’ll never make art again!” he’d declared to Peter, feeling rage sputter up within him. “You’ve drained it from me. I no longer give two shits about art.” A painting Mario had made of Peter had hung above them in the midst of this argument, one Peter had commissioned Mario to paint several years before, when they’d been twenty-five years old and high off the adrenaline and power they’d had in the world. Peter still had that power. And now, he was using it for evil.

  In some sense, Mario wondered if Peter was utilizing the situation to yank Mario back to Paris. He felt it like a sort of trap, drawing him back to the place where he’d officially first lost his mind. Back then, he hadn’t understood the brevity of falling in love. He hadn’t yet held Max in his arms and felt what it truly meant not to be lonely. Now, he ached with that loneliness. It was his bread in the morning; it swirled in the coffee he drank.

  Flights from Rome to Paris left every few hours. How easy, Mario thought as he slipped the two hundred euros over the counter and watched the woman print out a ticket. She chewed gum slowly, flashing the bright green of it. She was Danish, or perhaps Swedish, Mario couldn’t quite tell; but she spoke decent, if stunted and ordered Italian.

  “Have a safe flight,” she told him. “Thank you for flying with us.”

  The wheels burst down on the runway two and a half hours later. Mario blinked at the date on his watch. It read December 28. Three days after Christmas, and just three days before the end of the year. What a colossal year it had been. And he felt it would close with a bang, an explosion, if he even opened his eyes in the new year at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mario

  Mario had lived in Paris throughout much of his twenties. Entering through Charles de Gaulle airport was a smack of nostalgia. His body shook with the hit. He stopped at a little airport cafe, ordering a pain au chocolat and stuffing it between his teeth, chewing quicker than was perhaps reasonable. An old, wrinkled Frenchwoman gaped at him, muttering to herself in French.

  “Thinks he’s some sort of pig…” she said.

  “I can speak French, you know,” he uttered back.

  The woman hadn’t a hint of embarrassment to her, as if the entire concept of being called out for her actions was foreign to her. She sniffed and si
mply turned her body a quarter-inch away from Mario, as if he were no longer worthy of her attention.

  The train into Paris left Mario a great deal of time to reminisce about his earlier life. But just as his mind traced stories of wild Parisian parties, of nights along the Seine kissing one man or another, his body all electric with want and desire, the surge of emotion led him straight back to thoughts of Max. Shouldn’t he attempt to contact him, given what he knew about Christine’s whereabouts? He tried to envision that phone call.

  “I’m sorry I left. It was the worst decision of my life…” perhaps he would begin.

  Or: “Max, I know it’s best that we don’t speak with one another. I know that it’s best that I left, and that we’re no longer a part of one another’s lives. Perhaps it was too intense. Perhaps in this, we can use what we learned from one another and continue on…”

  Or: “Max, it’s Christine. She’s the only reason I’m calling you, just now. I’m afraid she’s in trouble. Real trouble.”

  Mario hadn’t the strength to turn his phone back on. He worried that turning it on would mean he would find an influx of messages from Max, all demanding where on earth he’d gone and why he’d abandoned such “emotion” between them.

  Even more than that, he worried that Max hadn’t messaged him at all. What if he hadn’t cared that Mario had left him? What if he’d proceeded on with his regular life without another thought to Mario and the love that had brewed between them at all?

  Before Mario knew it, the train spit fumes at Gare du Nord station. He cut onto the platform, streaming through the seas of people, before lodging his place on an escalator and feeling carted up, up, up. His heart fluttered wildly whilst he hunted for the relevant metro to take to take him to the Marais district, where Peter’s flat was located. According to his watch, it was already seven in the evening — and thus had been dark for hours. Would he struggle to find the flat before morning?

  Of course, memory was a strange and fickle thing. Before long, Mario felt himself guided by an invisible force, trudging down the very streets on which he’d spent his wild twenties, dodging about half out of his mind with Peter Eclaire, the rock star. “You and me, man,” Peter had said, in broken English. “We’re going to take over the world. You put my music to art form, you know that? It’s like one of us couldn’t exist without the other. We’re going to know each other for life.”

  The Marais district was located just a stop away from Republique. Mario felt himself chase his ghost up the steps and onto the crowded streets, which swirled with smells of baking breads and sounds of squabbling French people and raucous motorbikes. It wasn’t as loud as Rome, no, but it had a very different flair to it. A different sensibility. It wasn’t necessarily as friendly, perhaps, and it was certainly a great bit colder. Mario tied up his scarf around his neck, watching his breath turn to smoke before him.

  Peter Eclaire’s apartment was just off the main road, in a tight alleyway. Mario found himself in front of the door, staring at the black doorbell, which he’d rang time and time again several years before. Always, the jolt of the bell had given him a sort of electric excitement, a knowledge of the party and life that would come after it. Now, it filled him with dread.

  “We can get married, if you want to,” Peter had told him, when he’d discovered Mario was gay. “It can be you and me, me and you. I don’t want to fuck around with you, no. But like, if we had a woman between us? Maybe we could make it work.”

  Mario shivered and finally thrust himself forward, ringing the bell. There was a long silence, during which he prayed that Peter and Christine were out for the night, that he’d missed them. Perhaps he could leap on the plane back to Rome. He could say he’d tried.

  Then, a breathless voice answered the bell.

  The voice was American.

  It was bright, authentic.

  Happy.

  “Bonjour?” it asked.

  Mario knew immediately that the voice was Christine’s. His hands dropped to his side. Christine waited before saying it again, “Sorry. Bonsoir!” she said, correcting herself.

  “Christine?” Mario said, feeling his shoulders slump forward. “It’s um. It’s Mario.”

  There was silence. The silence was deafening, making Mario feel like his head was nothing but an impossibly huge black hole. He allowed his chin to drop to his chest. He yearned for someone to punch him directly in the face, so that he didn’t have to feel.

  “Christine. Could you come down here? I need to speak with you,” Mario said.

  It was clear there was no one on the other line any longer. Mario waited, watching the steam course out of his lips before disappearing. And seconds later, the door in front of him ripped open, revealing the rugged, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, multi-tattooed Frenchman, who immediately brought his arms wildly in the air on either side of him, going in for a hug.

  “MARIO!” he cried. “MARIO, my darling boy.”

  Mario’s head was trapped against the Frenchman’s chest. He closed his eyes tight, inhaling the stench of whiskey, of stale clothing, of things he’d never wanted and never needed and had therefore left behind.

  Behind Peter came the ringing laughter of Christine. Mario yanked his head back, blinking into the darkness behind Peter, searching for her. She ran toward him, dotting a kiss on either side of his cheek. She looked every bit a Frenchwoman, after only two months of living in Paris, with cinched-tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a cigarette between her lips.

  Somehow, in a flurry of scattered talk and yelps, Mario was dragged to the elevator and soon found himself tucked between Christine and Peter, his lips pressed together tightly whilst Peter espoused how “wonderfully bizarre” this all was and how “insanely grateful” he was that Mario had finally decided to show his beautiful face.

  Once inside the penthouse, with its incredible view of the Eiffel Tower, its shimmering antique mirrors, its flickering candles and its three levels, Peter positioned Mario in his “throne,” which he’d purchased in Morocco, apparently, and then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him. He blinked up at him, his smile still as wide as it ever was. Christine sat just behind him, still smoking cigarettes, even though they were inside. This had been against Peter’s flat rules, back in the day. Perhaps the rules didn’t apply to Christine.

  “Well, well. Mario,” Peter said. “Fancy seeing you in Paris. Coming all the way to my door, as if you didn’t abandon me here years ago!”

  Mario shifted atop the throne, wishing he was anywhere else. He turned his eyes to Christine, willing himself to speak. “I had a reason to come.”

  “Right. Right. It seems we have a mutual friend, don’t we?” Peter asked. He tapped his hands atop his knees. “Christine and I met just about two months ago, didn’t we, Christine? She was just fumbling around Paris, without many cents to her name. You remember Ulrich? He discovered her at some cafe somewhere. Said she was the most beautiful and innocent girl he’d met in his life. So he goes over to her little apartment, right? Not even an apartment. Some shitty hostel somewhere. And she shows him the piece of art she brought with her to Paris…”

  At this, Peter’s face grew particularly bright. Mario yearned to rip a punch through his cheeks. He imagined them jiggling back and forth.

  “Anyway, Ulrich took a brief leave and ran outside, calling me immediately. He recognized you from back in the day. Said this girl either had an original of yours, or she was a damn good copy. So I go on over there. I’m telling you, this place was a squat. I could hardly breathe in there. But Christine, she’s, of course, a doll. And she immediately tells me the story of the painting. How she was madly in love with you, but her father was, too. Ha! I had a big laugh about that one.”

  Christine batted her eyes at Mario, clearly too drunk to give much notice to the severity of the conversation. She shrugged her shoulders, casting out a little laugh.

  “He asked to buy it on the spot,” she said.

  “So I did. I offered h
er two billion,” Peter said. “Course, I wanted the world to see it. I have a buddy over at MOMA who said he’d display it as soon as he could. What with you being such an important force in the art world all those years ago, I knew it would generate attention. I wanted to make little Christine here a star.”

  “And you just moved in with him. Like that,” Mario said, speaking to Christine.

  Christine shrugged. “I didn’t have many other options.”

  “Because we fell in love,” Peter said, speaking arrogantly. “You know how that is, don’t you? What with your love for her old dad.”

  Mario erupted from the throne, standing on shaking legs. He glared at Christine. “You really should come back to Italy with me,” he said. “This guy. He’s not…”

  “Come on, Mario!” Peter said. He, too, leaped to his feet, with the excitement of a child. “You can’t think that I would ever do anything wretched to little Christine, here. Like I said, she’s going to be something special. We’ve situated a little studio for her, up in Montmartre, and already she’s kicking up another round of paintings. Nothing as powerful as the one she did of you, of course. We’re getting there. You know I’ve always wanted to nurture an artist, the way I felt I was nurturing you. You just didn’t appreciate it enough, Mario.”

  Peter smacked his palms together. The sound rang out. “Regardless, I’m planning a party tonight, dear Mario! It’s been ages since we were together, and it’s essential we remain together and have all the conversations we were always meant to have.” He reached into his pocket and drew out his phone, clicking it several times. Mario felt a strange shadow pass over the city, as if Peter was casting his net over all the people he’d ever known. Within hours, he sensed that the apartment would be filled to the brim with wild partiers, the very people Mario had retreated from in order to build a “real artist life.”

  Peter excused himself to go take stock of the alcohol supply, leaving Mario and Christine in the room alone. “You two behave yourselves!” he called back.