And on cue my stomach twists and turns and knots up with guilt. I stare at Alexandre’s rakish grin, but an image of Zaid’s gorgeous smile pops into my head. I have no reason to feel guilty. Unfortunately, my thoughts and feelings aren’t like a finely crafted Delacroix. They’re messy and abstract—loud, confused streaks and splatters of paint on a canvas.
“Right,” I mumble. “Of course. Charmant. Because what could be more charming than meeting someone who is scraping crap off their shoe?”
He grins at me. I smile back. I have to admit, it feels good. Standing here, right now, in front of the Delacroix. Smiling like I belong here. Defiant like: You tried to kill me, but you only deeply wounded me. So there. I think for a moment about what first drew me to this version of the painting in Delacroix’s series, and what led me to its mate in Chicago: There’s something disturbing, almost terrifying about the scene. It’s immediate and entrancing; it pulls you in. Two men on horseback clashing, daggers drawn, tangled ferociously in battle. The Pasha in brooding jewel tones—emerald and garnet—blood dripping from the leg of his white horse. A sharp contrast to the Giaour, the supposed infidel in a vest and simple white robe, the sinewy muscles of his forearms flexed, ready to drive his blade into the Pasha’s chest. The colors are deep and rich and striking. It’s a painting, but when you turn the corner and catch your first glimpse, it’s as if you’ve stumbled onto a real fight. The canvas isn’t even that big; it’s only about two feet wide and two feet tall. But it explodes with movement, as if the scene is about to burst from the frame.
I clear my throat. “So you said this was one of your favorites, too. Why?”
“It’s fierce. Alive. So—” He pauses, trying to find the right word.
“Viscérale?” Visceral. Sometimes the perfect word exists in both my languages.
“Yes!” His sienna eyes sparkle as he continues. “The brushstrokes are angry. And I know it’s inspired by a Byron poem, but it feels very Dumas to me. Passion. Vengeance. Beauty. Two men fighting over a woman. One loved her, the other killed her.”
I kind of get what Alexandre is saying. It’s not the first time a man has described Delacroix’s paintings this way, but his words pinch. They’re all wrong. Dismissive. Entitled. “In Byron’s poem, the Giaour and the Pasha both have dialogue, but the woman is silent. I mean, the poem is, like, nine thousand words, and she’s only even mentioned eleven or twelve times.” My voice is flat, betraying my anger. “She’s the whole reason the poem exists, but she never gets a chance to speak. A poet created her. A painter was inspired by her. But they both denied her a voice in her own story. She was erased.”
Alexandre turns to me, puzzled. It’s clear we’re not flirting anymore. “But she isn’t real. She’s fiction.”
“So are the Giaour and the Pasha.”
“We agree, then?”
I scoff, pointing to the painting’s title, named for fictional men created by real men whose art gets to endure.
“She had a name, too,” I say. “It was Leila.”
Leila
I take care to remove all my jewels, especially the anklets, lest their tinkling wake the entire serai. Tiptoeing barefoot over the stone floors, I slip in and out of the darkness. The full moon could reveal me, but she’s consented to hide her beauty behind passing clouds, offering me safe passage through the latticed corridor. Valide would have me killed if she knew where I was going, but Si’la has assured me that Valide sleeps through the night—lulled into a slumber by the dream spells of the ruya peri who dwells in the serai. Still, I step lightly through the Courtyard of Eunuchs. If I rouse any of them, my wiles will be useless to dampen their suspicions.
The Passage of Concubines leads to the Forty Steps . . . down, down, down to the hastanesi reserved only for the women of the serai. With no trace of the moon, I am in utter darkness. But I have passed these stones thousands of times, and my fingers follow the cool walls until they reach a door that is almost forgotten.
Tonight, it is my portal to a tiny world outside my golden cage.
I step through the door into the second courtyard. The smallest of the courtyards, it lies abandoned. Even the gardeners have forsaken it in fear of the jinn that lurk in the trees. Though their branches arc and reach to the heavens, heavy with green leaves, the trunks of all the trees here are hollowed, carved out into perfectly smooth caverns. They say the jinn whittled away the trunks to create hiding places. In the center of the courtyard, two trees grafted together over the years stretch to the sky, branches intertwining like lovers’ arms. Their hollows meet to form the heart of the courtyard.
The night smells of damask roses.
He is near.
Khayyam
On cue, life reminds me once again that magical thinking doesn’t work. Sometimes shit is just shit. Period.
Stepping in that merde yesterday? It’s not going to bring me “a-penis” after all. Sure, I inexplicably ran into a French guy who may possibly be able to help salvage my academic self-worth. Did I mention that’s he’s hot? Or that he is an actual descendant of Alexandre Dumas? Or that for one fleeting and lovely art-filled afternoon, I was tempted to believe in magic? Fate, even?
For a few brief hours, the Métro shutdown didn’t seem like such a pain. I spent the dreamy walk home posting scenic Paris shots on Instagram: boats on the Seine, a lone red love lock attached to a bridge, even a Robert Doisneau–style pic of a couple kissing with a black-and-white filter. I’ve been posting almost nonstop since I landed, detailing every step of this trip—except for my chance encounter with the cute Frenchman—hoping to inspire Zaid to appear out of thin air.
And now he has. With Rekha in his lap.
I squirm on the sofa, glaring at Rekha’s feed. Even on my phone’s screen she is larger than life: heart-shaped face, golden-brown skin, impossibly long lashes, and eyes that smolder for the lens. A classic Rekha selfie—stunning. Only this time her arm is hooked around Zaid’s neck. It’s classic Zaid, too—mischievous grin, long coffee-brown bangs partially obscuring his beautiful dark eyes that are clearly fixated on her. And he’s wearing his Chicago Brown Line ‘L’ T-shirt.
I gave him that shirt.
It was a memento of our first date. We took the Brown Line ‘L’ to the Music Box, where they were screening movies set in Chicago, and saw While You Were Sleeping—a classic, corny holiday rom-com that somehow takes all the clichés of mistaken identity and misunderstandings and makes them charming. Turns out that the Brown Line plays a role in the movie, too. Hours later when we shared our first kiss under the rumble of the Southport stop on that “L,” I almost fooled myself into believing that maybe, just maybe, life did have magic in it.