Free Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland

it back, establishing the cut.
    When the piece was released, I said, “I wrote a letter to the Louvre today.”
    He gave me a look of complete perplexity.
    “You see how Pascal’s still life looks so good now that I’ve washed the wall behind it? I’m going to wash all the walls, so all his paintings will shine. I want to do that in the Louvre.” I knew that the next thing I would say would sound silly, but I had to tell him anyway. “So I wrote a letter asking for a job washing walls.”
    “Lisette! You mean you’re going to leave Pascal and me and go off on some fool’s errand to be a washerwoman ?”
    “Not now. Someday, when we’re living in Paris again.”
    “Oh, my naïve darling.” He set down the piece of molding and put his arms around me.
    “Why do you think Pascal is so intent on telling me his experiences with painters?” I responded. “It’s because being a participant in art meant so much to him. I want that just as much.”
    “But not as a scrub woman!”
    “How else? I can’t paint. I can’t go to university. I have no qualifications, no money. But what I can do is to be a frame duster or a washer of walls in the Louvre.”
    “Don’t think so lowly of yourself. A gallery assistant, someday. Maybe not at Galerie Laforgue. But no, oh, no. Tear up the letter. Or give it to me. Let me burn it.” He held the back of my head and kissed my forehead. “We’ve got to be patient, Lise. We’ll help each other be patient.”
    “I already mailed it,” I said against his chest.
    He grasped my shoulders and pushed me back to look at my face. “Truly?”
    I nodded.
    “Go back and get it. Tell the young woman in the post office that it was a mistake.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “I want to read what my humble darling wrote. Then I’ll burn it. Go now.”
    I did leave, dutifully, but I lingered in the bakery, chatting with Odette. She knew everything about everyone, and she shared recipes with every housewife in town, concocted herbal remedies, even helped to deliver babies. I liked her easy manner, the way she mothered the whole village.
    Between Odette and her daughter, Sandrine, the post office clerk, nothing slipped by unnoticed. Sandrine announced with good cheer, “The poste was just picked up, and your letter is on its way. My, my,” she said, her hand patting her heart. “To think youhave important business with the Louvre!” She handed me a letter. “The driver left this for you.”
    It was from Maxime. I hurried home to read it aloud to André. Maybe Monsieur Laforgue had fired that woman.
    19 SEPTEMBER 1937
Dear André and Lisette ,
Mother and I were finally able to get tickets to the Exposition Universelle. We stood in a crowd from all nations staring at the pompous, propagandistic architecture and sculpture of dictatorships—Germany and the Soviet Union facing each other with a snarl in stone. Seeing it, Maman held my arm and shuddered .
Thirty works by Picasso were exhibited in the Spanish pavilion. They made me think your grandfather’s study of women’s faces might be his. Guard it well. It may be worth a fortune someday. Picasso’s most monumental and disturbing work was the central mural, Guernica, a Cubist jumble of anguished bodies in tortured positions and a screaming horse, the whole chaotic scene commemorating the Basque town destroyed by German bombers in April. The painting was shortsightedly dismissed by the press as the dream of a madman. As for me, I can’t get it out of my mind .
We both felt more comfortable in the Finnish pavilion, surrounded by trees and made entirely of wood, with undulating ceilings and curved walls. You would have appreciated the craftsmanship, André. When night descended, the Eiffel Tower and the banks of the Seine were lit gorgeously, as though strung with diamonds. I wish you could have seen that .
I miss you both and want you back in Paris soon .
    Your best friend ,
    Maxime              
    The letter took me