“I love him.”
“He’ll drag you down.”
“I disagree. If anything, he’s made me the success I am today.”
“You’ve made yourself a success. If he hadn’t come along, you would have found another way. Who knows what will come along in a year, in five years?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Stop playing it safe. You’re coddled, tied down by convention, when you should be leaping into the abyss with me.”
He stopped in his tracks and grabbed her. His grip was strong, certain. When he leaned down and kissed her, it wasn’t like Oliver’s kisses. This was a claim. She grabbed his head with her hands, threading her fingers through his unruly hair, and pulled him close. He tasted like moonshine and the salty sea.
They finally parted, panting with ragged breath, as if they’d completed several rounds of boxing.
“I’m sorry.” Levon leaned over and put his hands on his knees, looking down at the sand.
Not the reaction she’d expected. She’d disappointed him. Just as she’d disappointed Oliver with the painting. Clara backtracked, trying to save face. “It’s fine. We had to do that sometime. Now it’s done. We know we’re not a good fit.”
“I suppose so.” He rubbed his chin with his hand, staring at her strangely.
As she headed back to the campfire, her heart began to calm. She wanted to have some kind of hold on him, that’s all. Who wouldn’t? Such a charismatic, talented man. But complex, unyielding. Uncompromising. She and Oliver had a bond that was calm and civilized. That should be enough.
She looked up. Oliver stood thirty feet away, up on the seawall. He must have come looking for her.
Clouds that had been covering the moon parted, revealing his shocked face. He’d seen everything.
He took off running, back to the campfire. Clara called out and ran after him, but he was fast. By the time she got back to the rest of the group, Oliver was nowhere to be seen.
And neither was Violet.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
July 1929
The morning after the campfire, Clara remained up in her bedroom until she heard Levon leave. She sat up in bed, lost in thought. The siren of her painting glared back at her from the top of the desk, where it had been left angled against the wall. Oliver hadn’t come home last night.
Clyde came to the door and barked a couple of times before giving up. Finally, she dragged herself out of bed and tossed on a navy cotton dress before heading to class, where Levon offered a cursory hello. Her shame was complete: She’d made a fool of herself with Levon and caused terrible pain to Oliver within the span of fifteen seconds. Her head ached from the lack of sleep, but she struggled through, focusing on the students and avoiding Levon entirely.
Back at the cottage, she found Oliver sitting at the kitchen table, his hair tousled, his eyes blue as the sea. He glowed, still seductive in his anger, a man who had chosen her and taken good care of her right when she needed it most.
From where Clara stood, Violet’s cloying perfume tickled her nose.
“I’m sorry, Oliver. It meant nothing. What you saw on the beach.”
“I’ve been warning you about him for months now, but you couldn’t help yourself, could you? You talk about him all the time; now you’re trying to paint like him. I knew it.” Oliver’s tone cut into her. “You can have him. Good luck to the both of you. You’ll tear each other apart.”
“I don’t want Levon; I want you.”
“We’re done. It’s over.”
“We can talk about this, can’t we? You immediately took off with Violet, after all. Maybe now we’re even.” He lifted his chin to speak, but she cut him off. “I can smell her on you, for God’s sake.”
“We’ll never be even. You’ll always listen to what Levon says over me, because he has some kind of magnetic hold over you. He’s an immigrant, a peasant, from God knows where, but he sucks you right into his delusions of grandeur. Both of you think that you’re special, above the rest of us. That you can act on impulse and get away with it. Well, now you know I can, too.”
There was no talking to him, now that his resentment had boiled over into vicious insults.
She went up to her room, needing a refuge so she didn’t strike back in anger. But something was wrong. Missing. Her painting.
She searched for it in Oliver’s room, then her own again, before storming back downstairs.
“My painting—where is it?”
“You destroyed me, and so I destroyed something you love. It’s only fair.” The coldness in his voice was unrecognizable. As if he’d turned into an entirely different person, one she’d never met before.
“You destroyed it?” She hadn’t realized how much it meant to her until then. The painting was part of the sea and the Maine winds and the people who had surrounded her this past month. It was the key to a new way of seeing the world, interpreting it. She had been gathering up the courage to show Levon the finished painting, and now he’d never see it. “You’re heartless, you know that? I would never have burned your poems to punish you, no matter what you did.”
“That only goes to show that I loved you more.”
“What twisted logic. You make no sense. I care for you too much to ever enact revenge in such a petty way.” She paused, gathering her thoughts, trying to calm her breathing. “It was a stupid mistake, what I did last night. A moment that came and went and was done for. We aren’t interested in each other, not like that.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“Please, Oliver. I’m sorry. Let’s sit and talk and hash this out. I can’t imagine life without you.”
For a split second, pain carved through his face, but as her hollow words lingered in the air, he quickly recovered his composure. “You’re saying that to get the painting back, aren’t you? You’re not saying that for me.”
He knew her so well. She had no reply.
Back in New York, Clara spent the month of August catching up on commissions from the magazines and from Studebaker, a welcome distraction from the Maine debacle. She hadn’t seen Oliver since he’d driven off with Violet, leaving Clara behind to finish up the last week of classes and endure the sympathetic looks and fevered whispers of the students. Once home, it had been a relief to hole up in her studio and work fifteen hours a day. That awful morning in Maine, when he’d looked at her with contempt and fury, haunted her in the dead of night when she couldn’t sleep.
She missed him, and the loss of The Siren still stung. But she had to let both of them go, for the sake of her sanity. Now her work could take precedence, and the frenzy for her illustrations had only increased over the summer. But each new success was tinged with the sadness of not being able to share it with Oliver. With anyone, really. On the same day that a newspaper interview hailing Clara as the “highest-paid woman artist in the country” was published, Mr. Oliver Smith and Miss Violet Foster appeared in the wedding announcements. They were to honeymoon in Paris before settling down in Los Angeles. She imagined the newlyweds walking along the Seine, exclaiming over their good fortune.
Miss Lillie Bliss, the society maven who’d asked for Clara’s advice just five months earlier, opened her modern art exhibit in the Heckscher Building to great fanfare in November, just after the stock market took a dive. Like most of her acquaintances, Clara dismissed the drop as a temporary adjustment. After all, the headlines trumpeted a return to normal quite soon, followed by an orderly, if not promising, end to 1929. The success of the art exhibit created an uproar of its own, convincing critics and buyers that modern art was exciting, something to take a chance on instead of dismiss out of hand. Clara heard that Levon had been invited to participate in the next Museum of Modern Art show, scheduled for the following spring, and that Felix was selling his works off at a great clip. But his success meant that he taught fewer classes that fall, and they rarely crossed paths. Probably better that way. Although she missed his kinetic energy, their encounter on the beach had left her depleted.