Starry Night

 

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For Bill Clegg

 

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Author's Note

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

 

Author's Note

This is a work of fiction. None of the characters exist in the real world. Wren is not me, the schools are not schools I went to, and nothing in the book actually happened. Of course all of it comes from my heart, experience, and imagination, so if you know me, it might seem recognizable, but everything in the book is a mishmash, a brew, or plain old make-believe.

 

“Love I get so lost, sometimes.”

—Peter Gabriel

 

1

I don't think you fall in love
for the first time until something—or someone—feels dangerous. I don't mean dangerous like going to jail, I guess I mean just different, really different. Different can feel dangerous, right? Like, I think it feels dangerous when your heart pounds so hard you are sure it's visible beating under your shirt. Or when you can't sleep, or catch your breath, or concentrate or listen, or when you turn a different color just thinking about his face, or when your relationships with your friends get all screwed up, or when you fight with your parents. When you change direction or your mind, or when tears fall and fall from your eyes for hours, when your whole life gets put in a Cuisinart—all because of a single person.

For me, it started at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and it ended there too. I am not sure why the person that I was in love with ended up not wanting to be in love with me anymore. A part of me thinks it was my fault. That does
not
sound strong, but sometimes I don't feel strong. What I hear is that we are very strong, we girls. Girls can do anything. We are leaders, we are intuitive, we are brave, we are smart, and we kick ass. “If women ran the world there would be no war.” Don't you hear that? Maybe it's true; I'm certainly not going to say it's not. But if it is true, then how come it can all feel so impossibly fragile? How come you can feel like you are getting it entirely wrong?

Maybe boys don't feel strong all the time either. I don't think van Gogh felt strong, and look at everything he did—look at
The Starry Night.
Maybe you can feel fragile and still paint
The Starry Night.
Or maybe you can paint it because you are fragile. Maybe you can be strong and still be vulnerable, like a tree. Have you ever seen a tree filled with birds? There seems to be one on every branch, and then all of a sudden something happens, possibly from the atmosphere or the surroundings—or maybe not, maybe it's something having to do with the tree itself, the branches, the leaves, or even the roots—that causes the birds to fly away in unison. And the tree is just left there—maybe strong, but left.

The air felt loaded in New York City. It was one of those days that you feel not only that the temperature will drop but that something tremendous is going to happen. It was a Monday in November and the sky was so blue it was violet, uninterrupted by clouds. The sidewalks reflected the shining sun, making us squint. Mostly, I remember this crazy wind. It was so forceful you knew the meteorologists were talking about it on the news. It was pushing us around. Our hair whooshed over our heads, twisting and tangling. Sometimes a gust would come and push us a few steps faster than we would have usually walked. This made us squeal. We were suited up in fall sweaters and jean jackets over our dark blue, pleated school uniforms and black leggings, scarves wrapped multiple times around our necks. Fall clothes are the best ones—I feel so much safer in a cardigan and boots than in some flimsy dress and sandals. But even in our chunky sweaters, we weren't dressed for the sudden change in weather; we weren't at all ready for it. The three inches of leg between where the stretchy legging fabric ended and my ankle booties began were red with cold, and that was just the beginning. We were not protected. We should have been wearing parkas, heavy ones.

Farah, Padmavati, and Reagan were coming over to my house after school because that night my father, who is the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was hosting the opening of a new exhibit he was curating,
and
—for the first time—my friends and I were invited to the party. Charlie, our only friend-who-is-a-boy, was meeting us at my house. He was probably already there because his school, St. Tim's, is on the west side of Manhattan, where we all live. My brother, Oliver, goes there too, but he's a senior, and we are sophomores. St. Tim's is just for boys, and Hatcher, where Farah, Padmavati, Reagan, and I go to school, is just for girls. It's on the east side of Central Park. But it's not really where we met. We've known each other since we were born. Since before we were born really. We're Turtles. Fifteen years ago on the Upper West Side, five babies were born all in the same month (basically) to parents in the same reading group, all because of
Lady Chatterley's Lover.
It sounds like a reading group orgy—but really, it was because of the discussion of one hot scene and what happened when everyone got home.

Our parents called us the Turtles because turtles lay so many eggs at one time.

 

2

Several weeks before the very windy day,
it was an early autumn evening, the first one where you knew summer was truly gone. I was procrastinating in the living room with my parents.

“Can they all come?” I said to my mother and father.

“When are they not all invited to everything?” Mom said, pointedly sliding her new orange-and-purple reading glasses farther up her nose as she dog-eared a page in the
Architectural Digest
she was reading. Dad stood up and poked the fire.

“They can come to everything here, but they have never been to a Met thing. Can we sit at the same table? Me, Vati, Farah, Reagan,
and
Charlie?”

“Darling, we have no idea how we'll do the tables now,” Dad said, in his slight Dutch accent that just sounds European unless you know what you are listening to. A log rolled awkwardly off the pile and he bent down to prop it back up. Although he is one hundred percent city, he does things like kick around burning logs on the fire like someone who lives in the country. And Dad wears Barbour oilskin jackets on the weekends like Prince Charles.

“But we can all stay till the end, right?”

“Yes, Wren! Goodness, the exhibition isn't for months. Relax, this is worse than you are about Halloween.” Mom put her glasses up on her head and looked at me with wide, this-is-getting-annoying eyes.

“I don't dress up anymore,” I said, and pulled a random thread on the upholstered armchair I was sitting in.

“Don't pull
that
, Wrenny!” My mother kicked her leg over in my direction to get me to stop.

“Sorry.” I really do pull on things too much.

“The whole chair will unravel!” She winked at me, put her glasses back down on her nose, and resumed her reading.

“It will be fun, my love. You all can dress up and hobnob with the nobs.” Dad was finished futzing with the logs in the small arched marble fireplace, but before he sat back down on the love seat to read his book, he came over and kissed my head. “Are you all done with your homework?”

“No.” I scrunched my nose up, knowing that he knew I wasn't and that's why he asked.

“Well, get to it and leave us to think about parties. Your B average that is
required
to apply to Saint-Rémy isn't going to materialize by itself, and I believe you have some work to do in that area.” He raised his eyebrows.

I had just started my sophomore year at Hatcher, but I was already working on my application for this unbelievable, impossible-to-get-into junior-year-abroad program in France that I had been wanting to go to since the end of eighth grade, when my art teacher, Mrs. Rousseau, looked at a collage of a jungle I'd made and told me about the program. She said anyone who could draw a leopard like that (it was quite fierce and a little crazy-looking) should go to Saint-Rémy. It's an art school in an old nunnery next to the asylum where Vincent van Gogh convalesced for a year and painted one hundred and fifty works of art, most of them masterpieces. He painted
The Starry Night
there.

“Oh my god, I'm never going to get in!” I slid down the chair onto the wool sisal rug next to our old corgi, May, and curled up with her in front of the fire.

“Wren, please—you won't get in if you lie around on the floor with May. Get upstairs and Go. To. Work. That self-portrait isn't going to draw itself either, you know,” my mother said.

Lying on the floor in the glow and heat, I wished I could just be May. How was I going to do that self-portrait? You had to produce a great one to be considered for this program—it had to be genius. Self-portraits are so intense. Have you ever seen Frida Kahlo's? The one with the monkey and the hummingbird around her neck? Oh my lord, she is giving such a look you can't believe it. She actually said, “I was born a bitch.” And you can see that very clearly in the painting. There is no hiding in a self-portrait; everything comes out.

I put my head on May's side and her insides made a low guttural gurgle. I closed my eyes and pictured
The Starry Night.
It's my favorite painting of all time. Sometimes when I feel that I won't be able to do something, or I want something really badly, I put this painting right in front of my mind's eye and wish on one of its eleven stars. There might be more than eleven if you are counting the flashes of yellow that swirl around in the midnight sky, but I don't count those. There is one bigger ball I guess you could call a star, but I think of it as the moon. No, I count eleven true stars. That night I picked the bright one next to the cypress tree to wish on.
Please, star, give me what I need to draw a real self-portrait and get into the France program next year. Please … please … please …
I drifted blissfully around in the thick blue swirls of van Gogh's paintbrush marks. The fire was soaking into my face and hands and May's thumping heart beat steadily beneath my ear.

“Wren? What's going on down there?” Mom called from her chair.

“Mama?” I was shocked to hear her voice. I had been in the cosmos.