Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon

Author:Maureen Gibbon
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-04-20T07:00:00+00:00

When the painting is done, we look at it together the way we did with the pastel drawing. This time I can see the focus is not my breasts or a blue stocking but my face.

Just my face.

I look plain. Not ugly, but not pretty, either. My lips are pale, my eyelashes light, and I can even make out the faint dimple in my chin. I look at all those things, I do, but I keep going back to my eyes. He has made them gray-green, and as I go on looking at them, I think I have never seen that color. And I think that must be why he made the rest of the painting so simple. Why he would not let me do my hair, why he kept my face naked. Yes, I am wearing a bow in my hair and a ribbon on my neck, but for some reason I hardly notice those things.

There is nowhere to look in the painting except my eyes.

And this time I know it is really how I look, not because I have seen my face that way but because I know what it feels like to look that way.

When my mother would not speak to me. When my grandmother died. When my heart was broken.

So this time it is a different question I ask. This time I ask, “Is that how you see me?”

He says, “When you let me.”

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