Free Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling

and she nodded, her head against her knees, and I kissed the ridges of her spine that stood out against her neck. My hands felt along the backs of her legs. Rose pushed them away.
    “Max,” her voice was tender, even apologetic.
    She stood, turned, and found the box of matches. The firecracker she lit did not sparkle but was a steady flame, as bright blue-white as a flashbulb, a flare, the kind the enemy would use, in less than a year's time, to drop from hot air balloons over Allied lines at night. She held the flare above her, and in the bright light, in the second beforeshe leaped, I thought of all the paintings of women who transform to escape the lust bearing down on them, Syrinx to a flute, Daphne to a laurel, and Rose now like a comet. The flare extinguished. She came up, laughing at the water's cold.
    ROSE'S MOTHER GREW STEADILY STRONGER DURING THE time we spent in Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs. We left on the afternoon of the third day. What I had not told Rose was that I had desired, were her mother well enough, to ask her for her daughter's hand. But despite my earnest intentions, uncertainty overcame me. And Rose, as always, was a step ahead. She must have seen the velvet box with my mother's ring. In the car ride, after two hundred kilometers of silence, she said, “I have never expected to marry. Perhaps I am ill suited for it. Or, perhaps there are things that occupy me more.”
    I, not listening, understood this as a temporary state.

Chapter Five
    W HEN ROSE AND I RETURNED FROM THE ISèRE , Lucie reported that my parents had left the day before, setting out early for their annual pilgrimage to the South. Father was concerned over Matisse's ill health. The painter suffered from terrible stomach pains that were, he believed, the result of a botched appendectomy years before. Matisse could not stand up to paint but was comforted with sketching, he said. He sent Father a note, which was left out on his desk (and which I read), saying, A col-orist makes his presence known even in a single charcoal drawing. Father, who was unable to receive a consensus on which Parisian doctor treated stomach ailments most successfully, took two down with him. Lucie followed my parents that evening. I was glad to be in the house unobserved.
    I sent Bertrand an urgent message, asking him to meet me at La Palette. My friend arrived an hour late, wearing a gray cashmere suit coat with some war medals from the 1870s pinned to it. When I commented on his attire, Bertrand said, “I'm prepared for battle, as always,” and saluted. We sat at an outside table. He hailed the waiter, and two cups of coffee appeared.
    Bertrand withdrew a notebook and scribbled into it. “I've a new idea for a play, about my uncle Nissim, the famous Camondo. I'll interview veterans from the war. It will have a Greek chorus, except the chorus is all wounded beggars, and they're telling the story ofmy uncle and how it seems—at least it seems to me—that he had to die, like Icarus in a monoplane.” His uncle Nissim, family darling, equestrian, and airman, had been lost over the Atlantic in the Great War. When his aircraft disappeared, Bertrand's grandfather gave his house—and in it, the largest collection of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French furniture and art outside of the Louvre—to the French state. I always thought this strange, though I never spoke of it to Bertrand—this Turkish Jew's obsession with French art at its most frivolous. And then the grandfather donated his museum, as if it were his self, to the country that had killed his son. Though of course the Count de Camondo did not see it this way. His sacrifice was supreme, nationalistic, a sign of how French his family had become in less than a generation, as if by collecting art, he had arrived. As he told my father, “I am a banking man so my children can collect art and theirs may paint.”
    An artist next to me sketched Bertrand as he wrote, shadowing his hollowed cheeks,