I’m very excited by my last couple of efforts, but still struggling with GPT’s tendency to string sentences together like spaghetti. This scene was huge and meandering but I got about a third of it into decent shape. I don’t know if this scene will happen in the book but I felt it was important to finally get the Sickies into the 90s. I was so excited by the sense of vitality in the Cat People scene that at last I believe I can make them live entire lives, but I still have to experiment to develop a sense of what they will feel like. I worked all night on this and now I’m going to dream with this new wave going out across the universe.

Paris, 1999.

The portrait had been hanging there since 1708. Nobody could say how many revolutions, adulteries, bankruptcies, marriages, executions, scandals, births, occupations, lawsuits and Christmas dinners it had watched. Henri-Auguste de Vautrin stood in armor beneath a sweep of blue velvet, one hand resting upon a helmet. Hyacinthe Rigaud had given him calves, lace, authority, a magnificent wig and the peculiar expression of a man who regarded posterity as another household servant.

Chuck stared up at him.

“I like him.”

“Of course you do,” Angela said. “He looks like he owns everything.”

“He probably thought he did,” Dustin was taking photographs.

He had started with the Rigaud and then turned his camera on the room itself. Through the viewfinder the Vautrins’ hôtel particulier seemed almost absurdly complete: pale stone walls washed gold by the late-afternoon light, parquet floors shining beneath Aubusson carpets, fireplaces taller than Angela, gilt consoles carrying porcelain that had somehow survived both the Revolution and generations of children, and windows so high that Paris appeared beyond them not as a city but as another possession of the house.

From the gallery they could see slate roofs falling away toward the Seine, chimneys and mansards stacked one behind another in the blue winter haze, the dome of the Invalides catching the last light and, farther off, the Eiffel Tower hovering over the city. The bare branches in the courtyard below made black calligraphy against the limestone façade. Somewhere downstairs servants were preparing dinner.

Dustin photographed all of it with obsessive concentration.

“He still owns this wall,” replied Chuck, thoughtfully.

Alvin, holding champagne, stepped backward to appreciate the effect. Noting that Henri-Auguste was extremely ugly, he tried to think of something nice.

“He knew how to stand.”

“He had Rigaud to tell him how to stand,” Graylyn said.

She was sitting on the parquet floor. She wore narrow black trousers riding low on her hips, a thin charcoal-gray T-shirt under a cropped black leather jacket, and square-toed ankle boots. Her dark hair was twisted up and secured with a tortoiseshell clip, leaving loose strands hanging around her face.

Her sketchbook lay open across one thigh, a thick black-bound book swollen from use, its corners crushed and its spine repaired with cloth tape. Pages had been stuffed into it until it no longer closed properly. There were quick studies of people on the Métro, hands copied from Velázquez, the shoulder of a woman seen at dinner in Milan, a sleeping dog, three attempts at a Rembrandt eye, the cuff of Henri-Auguste’s coat, a waiter in Geneva, the curve of somebody’s spine, a Bernini angel, Dustin asleep on an airplane. Graylyn drew without hierarchy. A seventeenth-century duke and a girl waiting for a bus could occupy facing pages.

It occurred to Drake, with a small private shock, that the battered object which Graylyn had left lying unattended on café tables all over Europe was probably worth more than most people’s houses. Not officially, of course. Officially it was a used sketchbook held together with tape. But if somebody slipped it under a coat and carried it out of the Vautrin house, Sotheby’s could never touch it and some collector in Geneva or Tokyo would still produce six figures for it without blinking.

At the moment Graylyn was making tiny notes beside a study of Rigaud’s lace: not about what it looked like, but where he had stopped painting it.

She had been studying the Rigaud for forty minutes. Not admiring it, studying it. There was a difference, and everybody in the room knew better than to interrupt when she became like this.

By 1999, even Graylyn merely looking at a painting had begun to constitute an event in the art world. Dealers noticed what she stopped in front of. Curators remembered what she returned to see twice. If somebody happened to mention that Aleksandr had spent an hour studying an unfashionable portrait in a provincial museum, photographs of the thing could be faxed between London and New York before lunch and somebody would quietly ask whether there were any related works still in private hands. Once, after she had stood for fifteen minutes in front of a minor nineteenth-century Danish portraitist in Copenhagen, three paintings by the man appeared at auction within the year.

Graylyn was aware of none of this in any practical sense. She knew, abstractly, that people watched what she looked at, that a dealer might make fifty thousand dollars because she lingered before the wrong canvas, that some owner in Zürich might suddenly decide not to sell because Graylyn Aleksandr had asked to see the back of his picture. The knowledge had acquired weight.

And the effort of will required to ignore that weight had changed the way she looked.

Drake had watched it happen over the years. Graylyn no longer glanced at paintings; she seemed to pass through them. Once her attention settled on a canvas, everything around it—the gallery, the people, the little earthquakes of money and reputation her interest might cause—simply ceased to exist. The concentration required to make all that disappear had intensified her gaze until there was something almost supernatural about it.

Drake could no longer watch Graylyn look at a painting without thinking about the whole history of Western art: generations of painters standing exactly as she stood now, staring into other people’s pictures, stealing from them, arguing with them, misunderstanding them, discovering some tiny trick in a sleeve or an eyelid and carrying it forward another hundred years. Titian looking backward. Velázquez looking at Titian. Manet looking at Velázquez. Sargent looking at all of them.

And now Graylyn sat on the Vautrins’ parquet floor looking at Rigaud.

Somewhere in Paris, at a gallery or in the offices of a magazine, people might already be calculating what that meant.

Graylyn was looking at the lace.

She could paint anyone.

She could paint in any period.

She knew what Rembrandt had buried beneath brown, what Velázquez had omitted, how Sargent could make a sleeve appear with four obscene flicks of a brush. Conservators sometimes came to her studio merely to argue with her.

But when Graylyn painted as herself, all those centuries seemed to disappear into black.

Not empty black.

Her black contained things.

Blue lived in it. Red disappeared inside it. Brown warmed it from below. Sometimes a figure seemed not to have been painted onto the darkness at all, but to be approaching through it across the spacetime of several hundred years.

Her new portrait of Claire de Vautrin was hanging temporarily at the other end of the gallery.

The effect was unsettling.

Henri-Auguste, 1708.

Claire, 1999.

A hundred feet of polished floor lay between them.

Three centuries did not.

Drake was poring over the resemblance. Not the obvious family features – those were almost trivial: the long nose, the narrow skull, the way one corner of the mouth turned upward slightly before the other.

It was the hand he was in awe of.

Rigaud had painted Henri-Auguste’s right hand resting lightly upon the ridiculous helmet.

Graylyn had painted Claire’s left hand resting on the carved back of a chair.

Same hand.

Not anatomically, psychologically. Both Vautrins seemed to touch expensive objects with the calm assurance that the objects would remain exactly where they had been placed. Three hundred years from now, the human race would be comparing those two hands – Rigaud’s and his wife’s.

Drake walked from one portrait to the other again. He had been doing that for fifteen minutes.

“Do they know?” he asked.

“Know what?” Graylyn did not look away from the Rigaud.

“That they do that.”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t talk about things like that. They’ll become rumours.”

“That’s irritating. I’m your significant other.”

Graylyn finally looked at him. “Sometimes I know things like that. Sometimes I don’t know that I know.”

Drake waited. She searched for the words and failed to find them.

“It’s not like thinking. I get into a state where everything starts communicating with me at once. And then there are things I can’t account for at all. I can explain every piece of the painting, but I can’t explain why all the pieces suddenly became that person. There’s a point where you stop making the picture. You’re watching it happen, except your hand is the thing doing it. And you know things while it’s happening that you don’t seem to know afterward.”

Drake looked from her to Claire, then across the gallery to Henri-Auguste.

“So it’s magic.”

Graylyn made the smallest shrug.

“I don’t know what else you call something that works before you understand how it works. Please don’t talk about it, okay?”

Drake smiled, “Thank you.” He was content, although he knew his role in history had been relegated to that of the husband of a painter.

He loved houses like this, and he was looking forward to a seven-course dinner. The Vautrins had spent fortunes on stupid things and fortunes on beautiful things. The distinction interested him considerably more than the fortune. At the windows, Dustin was explaining something about digital image compression to Angela, who was understanding approximately sixty percent of it. Alvin had already become intimate with three members of the Vautrin staff and had explained what everyone was having for dinner. Unfortunately he had done so in French so Drake was simply hoping it was edible. Chuck had discovered the eighteenth-century equivalent of a liquor cabinet. And Trish stood on the balcony beside her boyfriend, Nicholas Vane, admiring the view of Paris.

Vane was trying to look as though he belonged in an hôtel particulier and not a roadhouse.

He had dressed carefully: black dinner jacket, white shirt, good shoes, nothing distressed, nothing deliberately dangerous. Even his hair had been persuaded into something that suggested dinner rather than a stage soaked in sweat. He kept catching himself slouching and straightening again, trying to shed the aura that followed him everywhere now—the rock concerts, trashed hotel rooms, narcotics, backstage girls, the whole lurid mythology his record company had wrapped around him.

Around the Sickies, it bothered him more than usual. They didn’t seem to have to perform belonging. Drake could wander through a drawing room like this without seeming either impressed by it or eager to impress it. Trish on the other hand, seemed completely at home there. Alvin could make himself at home practically anywhere. Even Chuck’s bad behavior had the assurance of somebody who had never worried that he might be asked to leave – not that he wouldn’t be, he simply wasn’t worried about it.

Nick was trying to become simply a well-dressed man standing among them.

This was difficult because somebody had left a magazine on the table, one with his picture on the cover. Bare chest, black leather trousers, hair hanging damply across one eye, a silver chain disappearing below his waist. The headline said:

YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU

Chuck picked it up.

Nick closed his eyes. “Don’t.”

Chuck turned the magazine around. “Is this you?”

“No.”

“It looks remarkably like you.”

“That guy died.”

“What killed him?”

“Publicity.”

Trish snatched the magazine away.

“Leave him alone.”

“I’m conducting cultural research.”

“You’re conducting Chuck.”

“As usual. Did you expect something else? So, Nick, I’m your pal – tell me what to think about this.”

Nick Vane was twenty-nine years old and had written two extraordinarily good albums about desire, self-disgust, jealousy, abandonment and the terrible moment when a person realizes that wanting somebody does not make loving them possible. The records were dense, violent, strangely tender things. His concerts had once been nearly austere, but then the second album sold four million copies. After that, the photographers discovered his cheekbones and his abs. Suddenly Nicholas Vane was no longer merely a musician. He became a phenomenon involving leather, sweat, bruises, hotel rooms, cigarette smoke and women photographed in their underwear.

He shrugged, partly relieved and partly sheepish. “None of it is entirely false – that’s the problem. They take real things and enlarge them until the human feeling disappears.

I do smoke. I do suffer. I have had shitty relationships with women, which hopefully I’m getting over – ” he glanced at Trish, who smiled and put her hand on his arm – “And I do take drugs.”

“And you do look great naked,” laughed Trish.

“So everybody in the industry has decided they need to be looking up my butthole every day to see what coolness is this year. I promise you, there is nothing in the world that can make you feel less cool.”

Graylyn finally rose and walked toward the Rigaud.

Nick followed her without realizing it. He liked Graylyn, possibly because she appeared to be the only person he had met in eighteen months who was completely unimpressed by him. She was examining the lace at Henri-Auguste’s wrist.

“How does he do that?” Nick asked. “He gives you three things and your eye invents twelve.”

Graylyn glanced over.

“The cuff?”

“Everything.”

“He cheats.”

Nick laughed. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Nick moved closer. From ten feet away the lace seemed astonishingly intricate. From eighteen inches away it became paint.

Graylyn pointed. “He knows you’re going to finish it for him.”

“What?”

“Painters like this want the person to live,” she said. “That’s the whole game. You know the viewer wants it too. Nobody stands in front of a portrait hoping to see a convincing arrangement of pigments. They want to see the dead live.”

She pointed with the end of her pencil toward Henri-Auguste’s face.

“So while Rigaud is painting him, he’s also standing where we’re standing. He keeps becoming the viewer. He makes a mark, steps back, and feels what it does to him. Does the eye answer you? Does the mouth make you wonder what he’s thinking? Do you want to know him? If you don’t, the painting is dead, no matter how beautifully it’s painted.”

Nick looked up at Henri-Auguste.

Graylyn’s voice became more certain.

“That’s what Rigaud is so good at. He gives you faces you want to know. There’s always the sense that they’re experiencing something you could almost feel if you got a little closer, and that desire creates the depth. Rigaud doesn’t have to paint the depth. He makes you supply it.”

“So the viewer finishes the portrait.”

“They always do. But Rigaud makes you want to. And if you’re as good as he was, the invitation lasts three hundred years.”