The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [79]
“Didn’t Levi commit suicide too?”
“Yes.”
Noel became conscious that Samira was staring at him. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, her tilted head against the wall, watching him through half-closed eyes, like a painter looking at a canvas. He wanted to reach out and touch her black hair, blacker than the raven wings of midnight, as Poe would say.
There’s a suggestion of Norval in his face, Samira thought, but it’s like a bronze sculpture copied in wood, or a melody sung slightly out of key … How cruel, she thought, to think like that. It would be so much better, in fact, to be in love with him, not Norval. So much easier. “Does it bother you when people say you look like Norval?”
Noel sighed. “I used to be sensitive about it. It was always that I looked like him, of course, that I was a pale imitation of him—which is only natural, I suppose, since he was the famous one, the more attractive one …”
“What does your mother say about the resemblance? Doesn’t she think he could almost be her son?”
Noel slowly emptied his cup of tea. “She’s never met him.”
“No? Why not?”
Noel paused, examining the faint rings inside his tea-stained mug. “Sometimes I wonder if, subconsciously, I didn’t want her to see a betterlooking version of me. Or if I didn’t want to share her with him. But I don’t think that’s it entirely. I suppose I didn’t want him to make fun of the way my mother and I got along, our intimacy, the fact that we’re each other’s best friend.”
“Why would he make fun of that?”
“Because he despises his mother. Unnaturally, psychotically. He’d never understand our closeness, and besides, I just didn’t want to explain … you know, everything, her illness. I kept putting it off, in any case.”
“Putting off introducing them?”
“Yeah. For some reason I didn’t want him to see all that. He’s come over a few times—but I just couldn’t open the door.”
Samira remained silent as Noel finished his last crumpet, her gaze resting on various objects in the room.
As in Norval’s loft, the walls were covered with peculiar images. There was Kandinsky’s Blauer Ritter, Hockney’s illustrations for Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, a sepia image of Solomon Shereshevski,32 a multicoloured drawing of Iris, the rainbow goddess, and a large poster of the Nine Muses, with their names and domains written beneath them: CALLIOPE, Muse of Epic Poetry (holding a writing tablet); CLIO, Muse of History (holding a water clock); ERATO, Muse of Lyric and Love Poetry (playing a lyre); EUTERPE, Muse of Music (playing a flute); MELPOMENE, Muse of Tragedy (wearing a tragic mask); POLYMNIA, Muse of Sacred Poetry (a pensive look on her face); TERPSICHORE, Muse of Dancing and Choral Song (dancing and holding a lyre); THALIA, Muse of Comedy (wearing a comic mask); URANIA, Muse of Astronomy (holding a globe).
Samira sat with her legs ajar, her black skirt draped between them as she examined each figure in wordless absorption. In the frame of an oval mirror, she then spotted a wedding picture, presumably of Noel’s parents, as well as a Polaroid of Norval, with longer hair, standing regally before the red curtain of a theatre. Her heart trampolined. “Norval looks like a decadent prince in that photo,” she said trying to hide a tremor in her voice. “He’s not an aristocrat or something, is he? He certainly acts the part.”
“Yes, a certain majesty is assumed.” Noel set the silver platter on the floor. “But in fact he does have some blue blood in him. The de Blaquières were minor and poverty-stricken Norman nobility who arrived in Quebec in the eighteenth century. A violent, dissolute and pathologically irascible bunch—at least, so he tells me.”
“But he was born in France.”
“His father studied in France in the sixties, where he