A Thousand Pieces of You

Paul jammed his hands into the pockets of his threadbare jeans, but his gray eyes met mine evenly. “They want to look perfect. They only want their best side to show. They think a portrait should be—like plastic surgery, but on their image instead of their face. Too beautiful to be real. Your paintings—sometimes they’re beautiful, but they’re always real.”

I couldn’t look him in the face any longer. Instead I turned my head toward the gallery of paintings currently hung on my bedroom walls, where my friends and family looked back at me.

“Like your mother,” Paul said. His voice was softer. I stared at her portrait as he spoke. I’d tried to make Mom look her best, because I love her, but I didn’t only re-create her dark, almond-shaped eyes or her broad smile; I also showed the way her hair always frizzes out wildly in a hundred directions, and how sharply her cheekbones stand out from her thin face. If I hadn’t put those things in the painting too, it wouldn’t have been her. “When I look at that, I see her as she is late at night, when we’ve been working for ten, fourteen hours. I see her genius. I see her impatience. Her exhaustion. Her kindness. And I’d see all that even if I didn’t know her.”

“Really?” I glanced back at Paul then, and he nodded, obviously relieved I understood.

“Look at them all. Josie’s impatient for her next adventure. Your father is distracted, off on one of his tangents, and there’s no telling whether he’s wasting time or about to be brilliant. Theo—” He paused as I took in the portrait I was finishing of Theo, complete with black hair gelled into spikiness, brown eyes beneath arched eyebrows, and full lips that would have suited a Renaissance cupid. “Theo’s up to no good, as usual.”

I started laughing. Paul grinned.

“And then there’s your self-portrait.”

Although I’ve participated in various art shows, even had an exhibition of my own in a very small gallery, I’ve never displayed my self-portrait anywhere besides my bedroom. It’s personal in a way that no other painting can ever be.

“Your hair . . .” he said, and his voice trailed off, because even Paul possessed enough tact to know that calling a girl’s hair a “disaster zone” was probably unwise. But it is—curlier and thicker and more uncontrollable even than Mom’s—and that’s how I painted it. “I can see all the ways you’re like your mother.”

Sure, I thought. Bony, too tall, too pale.

“And all the ways you’re not like her.”

I tried to turn it into a joke. “You mean, you don’t see the same incredible genius?”

“No.”

It hurt. I wonder if I winced.

Quickly Paul added, “There are perhaps five people born in a century with minds like your mother’s. No, you’re not as smart as she is. Neither am I. Neither is anyone else either of us is likely to meet in our lifetimes.”

That was true. It helped, but my cheeks were still flushed with heat. How could I feel him standing near me?

He has a softer voice than you’d think, from the big frame and the hard eyes. “I see . . . the way you’re always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you’re older than your years, but still . . . playful, like a little girl. How you’re always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It’s all in the eyes.”

How could Paul see any of that? How could he know only from the portrait?

But it wasn’t only from the portrait. I knew that, too.

Although I ought to have said something, I couldn’t have spoken a word. My breath caught in my throat, high and tight. Never once did I look away from my self-portrait and back at Paul.

He said, “You paint the truth, Marguerite. I don’t think you could work any other way.”

And then he was gone.

After that, I started work on a portrait of Paul. His face is a surprisingly difficult one to capture. The wide forehead—strong, straight eyebrows—the firm jawline—light brown hair with a hint of reddish gold to it that kept me mixing paints for hours in an attempt to get the exact shade—the way he ducks his head slightly, as if he’s apologizing for being so tall and so strong—that slightly lost look he has, like he knows he’ll never fit in and doesn’t even see the point of trying—but it was the eyes that threw me.

Deep-set, intense: I knew what Paul’s eyes looked like. But the thing was . . . whenever I painted someone, even myself, I showed them looking slightly away from the viewer. Expressions become more revealing then; it also gives the person in the portrait a hint of mystery—a sense that the real human being inside is beyond anything my work can capture. That’s part of painting the truth, too.

But with Paul I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried to paint his gaze, he wouldn’t look away from the viewer. From the artist.

He looked at me. He was always, always, looking at me.

The day after my father died, the hour after we learned Paul was responsible, I went to my room, took one of my canvas knives, and slashed his portrait to ribbons.

He made me trust him.

He made me think he saw me.

And it was all just part of Paul’s game, one small element of his big plan to destroy us all.

That’s just one more reason he has to pay.

Around midnight, my head is whirling, and I feel like I’m going to be sick, but I never stop dancing. The heavy drumbeat of the music reverberates through me and drowns out even the thump of my own pulse. It’s like I’m not even alive. Merely a puppet on strings with nothing inside.