“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, thinking it was too damn coincidental, another of Guggliermo’s booksellers dead.

57

“Pressing the buzzer is inutile—useless. She will never hear you…” A young French hipster with a man bun and paint-stained jeans. “But if you are looking for Colette, she is almost always home.”

In fact, I had no idea who I was looking for, but the address in Belleville was right, so I nodded, and Man Bun let me in. I was amazed the old building was still standing and that I’d found it.

“Colette is at the top,” he said, “Faites attention!”

I understood the warning as I started up the wooden stairs, eroded and treacherous, the hallway and landings permeated with the smell of turpentine. Clearly, Vincent and Simone’s old building still played host to artists.

On the sixth floor, I stopped, caught my breath, and knocked on an apartment door, cracked paint exposing layers of a dozen previous colors.

Three inches of face appeared between door and chain lock, elderly, wrinkled, and heavily made up, wine-red lips and hennaed hair.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” she asked, her voice scratchy.

In my best French, I told her I had come all the way from New York, explaining that my great-grandfather had once lived in her apartment and how much I wanted to see it.

The old woman cupped a hand to her ear, made me repeat everything twice, but finally invited me into the foyer where she spoke rapidly in a combination of French and English: “J’adore les Américains!—my name is Colette—Ce n’est pas mon vrai nom but I chose it, so Colette it is! I am a widow, mon mari est mort many years now—no children—but like Edith Piaf, ‘Je ne regrette rien!’”

I kept a smile glued on my face, trying to see beyond the small foyer into the apartment.

“Venez,” she said, ushering me in.

I stopped, could not believe what I was seeing. Though the walls appeared to have been painted over many times, there were outlines of curling vines with touches of green leaves and pink blossoms—Simone’s handiwork bleeding through layers of paint and time.

Colette followed my gaze. “It always comes through. What can I do?”

I moved in closer, fingertips against the painted ivy, a memento of the past refusing to give up. It not only brought the journal to life but it convinced me it was true.

Heat pipes clanged and Colette nattered on about the noise and the price of milk, almost chasing away the ghosts, while I desperately tried to hold on. I could not stop running my fingers over the pentimento of vines and leaves that bled through the old walls, my mind alive with images of Vincent and Simone.

I followed Colette into a bedroom with clothing draped over every surface—bed, dresser, a chair—but all I saw was the small painting, a still life of fruit arranged on a red cloth, everything outlined in dark blue-black. “That painting—”