What Disappears, page 12
“And am I to be nude, wherever it is you’re taking me?”
“Ah, no, my fairy princess! You will be arrayed in costumes that will bedeck, two weeks from now, the reigning fashion queens of Paris.”
“Do I have to pose again en plein air? Oh, Paul, it’s cold outside! I’ll freeze.”
“We’ll make a little fire. You’ll be just as warm as a new-baked croissant. And you’ll be the very first to model the fall line of the soon-to-be king of fashion, Paul Poiret.”
“You are incorrigibly conceited.”
“I am going to launch my own label. And I think I’ve found a place for my maison de couture, on rue Auber—conveniently enough, for you and me, just behind the Opera.”
So that was why he’d asked his mother for the 50,000 francs! Jeannette raised up her free hand to lift the blindfold and steal a peek at him. She wanted to see his face at the announcement of this stunning news. Paul was wildly successful in everything he did—but this, at the age of twenty-four, was truly astounding.
He grabbed her hand and filled it with a hunk of crusty bread slathered with a marvelous-smelling truffled paté.
“Oh, you know how to bribe me, don’t you?” She took a bite and chewed it with delectation, followed by another gulp of champagne. “Why so far from the rue de la Paix? How will you ever get the grandes dames to visit your shop?”
“Ah, you’ll see! Eat and drink—and rest, my dear. Relax! We have a long road to travel before we reach our destination.”
Jeannette felt him press something small, round, and supple against her lips—a grape, she guessed from the texture and fragrance. It burst, when she bit down on it, with a vivid sensation of taste and, somehow, a dark purple color, even though she couldn’t see it. She resolved to try eating blindfolded by herself sometime. She already felt a little tipsy.
He unbuttoned her boots then, very gently, and slipped them off, along with her stockings.
She sighed with pleasure. “Oh, it’s not fair!”
First kissing the high arch of her left foot, he cupped it in his hands as if it were something holy. “I brought some oil, cherie. My footsore darling!”
It was a lavender-scented oil. Just the smell of it—and the familiar sense of anticipation—made her happy. How she loved Paul’s unconditional acceptance of her! His desire for her, whether she was dirty or clean. She moaned softly as his strong thumbs massaged her arches and stroked her metatarsals, comforting the little trough beneath her mangled toes, running his oiled fingers and thumbs up over her ankles.
She knew he found her pleasure to be arousing. It was all part of the choreography of their relationship, in its seventh year now. After thoroughly and knowledgably rubbing first one of her feet and then the other, eliciting what he judged to be the requisite complement of sighs and groans, Paul stole both hands up one of her legs, under her skirt. “I love your thighs, just there,” he said. “Everywhere else along your legs, the muscles are hard and strong. But just there, on the inside—just beneath your origine du monde—”
Earlier that year, in the spring, he’d taken her to a party where, in the wee hours, inside the bedroom of their host, a Turk, he’d shown her Courbet’s notoriously explicit painting of a woman’s most private parts, revealed in a way they rarely were in real life, not least to women themselves. Far from feeling shocked, Jeannette had found the painting to be both fascinating and strangely beautiful.
“Must I keep this blindfold on?”
“I insist!” He laid her back against the cushions and pulled her culottes down, murmuring tenderly and kissing her, here and there, along the way.
“Incorrigible,” she said.
Unlike other men with whom she’d found herself in close proximity, Paul always smelled good. His hair and beard were meticulously groomed. He somehow managed to smell as if he’d just emerged from a swim in a mountain lake, or from a rainy walk through the woods.
“You mustn’t, Paul,” she said. “If you had told me…” She whispered in his ear, “I don’t have my sponge with me.”
He climbed on top of her, anyway. “My little wife!” he said in a husky whisper.
Jeannette chose to hear it as a promise.
When she woke, the light was magically perfect outside the carriage windows—low-slanting in a landscape of golden leaves mounded up like a molten sea surging around gray islands of rock, all of it presided over by trees with their most glorious autumn foliage on display.
Paul gave the driver some money to take himself out for a rest and a meal while Jeannette hastened to clean herself up. She was still only half-dressed when Paul, after unloading his painting things, extended his hand to her. Looking around first to make sure they were alone, she leapt barefoot out of the carriage and did a series of passé turns on the leafy ground, ending in an arabesque allongé.
Paul, who was setting up his easel, shouted, “Brava! I must paint you in that last pose.”
“Only if you have fairies who can hold my leg in the air.” Jeannette rubbed at a spot on her foot where a twig had poked her. “Oh, Paul, don’t you understand the slightest thing about how the body works?”
“How the body works is your art form, cherie. Mine is knowing how it looks.”
He took off the rest of her clothes. And then, one costume at a time, mostly just draped over her and pinned, he posed her and painted what he saw, using his favored English horsehair brushes and gouaches.
“I hereby declare war on the corset!” he said as he put the finishing touches on one of his watercolor sketches. “No longer will the female body be entombed and distorted, divided into two badly fitted pieces by the wretched things. These designs are much better without.”
She walked behind the easel to inspect his paintings, admiring how chic she looked in them—herself and yet not herself. She’d never seen any clothes like these before.
Paul stood before his drawings with his head cocked first to one side, then the other. “Yes, yes—they’re brilliant. If I were designing the world, every female would have the body of a ballerina.” He slung an arm around her, pulling her close. “But you are shivering—and I promised you a fire.”
He gave her his own jacket to put on over the final ensemble with its sheer fabrics and flowing lines. And then, with a degree of woodcraft that never failed to surprise her, he arranged some stones and sticks and built a little fire for them. They sat there, enjoying the flames and eating the rest of the picnic Paul had brought for them. Jeannette nestled against his well-padded shoulder. She felt a little drunk, quite exhausted suddenly, and very safe.
“What a good muse you are, my dear. When I am done forming you, there will be nothing left of Jeannette Dupres, minor dancer for the Paris Opera Ballet.”
Why did he always have to remind her of her own unimportance in the world—while puffing himself up so constantly? “What shall I be then?”
“Why, people will look at you and say, ‘There goes Paul Poiret’s mannequin!’”
The driver tramped into view, obviously cheered by his outing.
“My good fellow!” Paul called to him. “Lend us a hand here. Help me put leaves into the carriage.”
“Are you mad, Paul?” Jeannette whispered as she put her clothes to rights.
“A mad genius, perhaps. Come now, my dear—we need your efforts too. The light is fading.”
He was scooping up great handfuls of leaves and throwing them through the door of the carriage, along with some low-hanging tender branches still bedecked with bright yellow foliage. The driver, no doubt thinking about the big tip he was likely to get, pitched in with gusto.
Jeannette mostly stood by watching. She didn’t think she wanted to be anyone’s mannequin, not even Paul’s. Not if it meant the obliteration of all she’d worked so hard to achieve. All she’d sacrificed to become a dancer. She knew there were countless aspiring ballerinas who would tear her eyes out for the chance to steal her place in the company. After all these years, Paul still had no idea about who she really was, apart from knowing every secret about what pleased her body. In that, he was the world’s expert. Her artistic aspirations meant nothing to him.
When he handed her up into the carriage and they sat down, they were half-buried in detritus from the trees—and both of them had yellow leaves stuck in their hair. “Like a fairy king with his queen,” Paul said, clearly ignorant of the hurt he’d caused. He had none of the self-consciousness of the other women-liking men Jeannette knew: Paul Poiret liked nothing more than playing dress-up.
“We’re bound to get spider bites,” she said. “Really, you are the most impractical person I have ever known.”
“Nonsense! I am a visionary—haven’t you noticed?”
Jeannette was already starting to feel a little itchy. “What are you going to do with all these leaves?”
“Have you still failed to discern my plan?”
She hated when he spoke to her that way. The feeling of safety, comfort, and magic she’d felt earlier was nearly gone now. “There’s no need to be insulting. How can I know your plan when you haven’t breathed a word of it? I’m not a clairvoyant.”
“They’re for my display window!” he said with so much childish glee that she forgave him a little.
“Leaves in a window? You are mad.”
“You’ll see, my child. All the fashionable people of Paris are going to flock to the windows of Maison Paul Poiret to see what wonders he has created there.”
She tried to imagine what he was talking about. Dressmakers displayed clothing in their windows, not leaves. They wouldn’t last very long, as she knew from the walks through the park she used to take with her mother, when she would be allowed to pick out two or three of the most beautiful autumn leaves to take home with her and press between the pages of their Bible.
It was so comforting, thinking about her mother—and also so very sad. Paul pulled her closer—and raked his fingers through her hair as she drifted off to sleep, imagining that she was a little girl again, safe and whole.
Paris
1909
Jeannette stands for a long time, in a light rain, concealed behind a topiary outside the gate of 109 rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. A beige Renault Torpedo, its protuberant
headlamps gleaming with bravado, rattles up to the curb, driven by the Poirets’ liveried chauffeur. The front door of the mansion opens. Paul’s young wife, that celebrated gamine fashion plate, Denise Poiret, trips down the path and lets herself into the car. She is wearing emerald-green kid boots and a hat unlike any Jeannette has ever seen before.
Patiently Jeannette waits a little longer, until a wagon and workmen arrive with more furnishings for the Poiret’s new home, which is being readied for yet another of Paul’s increasingly famous parties.
While the gate is open, she walks up one side of the elaborate front garden, which looks like a miniature Versailles, past the sculpted hedges and flowerbeds and through the door, which has been left ajar.
Jeannette is prepared to shout at the Poirets’ servant, if need be—to demand to speak with Paul. But here he is, standing just inside the entryway, directing traffic. His smoking jacket, she thinks, is quite ridiculous. He’s dressed like a Chinese emperor.
“This way, madame, this way,” he says to her, describing a pathway with his right hand—the hand that is the only thing about him that betrays his origins as a man of the people. She loves his hands, the thick fingers strong and clever when touching her body or making his sketches but clumsy when it came to plying a needle and thread.
When she just stands there, he tries to look at her face, which is hidden behind the spotted veil of the frumpy little hat she borrowed for the occasion. The rest of her is well disguised beneath a plain black cloak.
“Is it you?” he says tentatively, in a low, intimate voice.
Slowly she lifts her veil. She is not wearing any makeup. She sees his confusion. She tries as hard as she can, given the circumstances, to assume an expression of goodness and innocence, tempered by weariness. She smiles without showing her teeth. She sees him panicking.
“I didn’t expect you!” he says.
She will not speak—because she knows that will give her away.
“Come in, come in,” he says, taking her hands, trying to pull off her gloves—
trying to peer at her body beneath her cloak. “My dear heart,” he says. “My dear little flea!”
Coming close to him—standing close enough to feel the soft skin of his ear against her lips—she whispers, “Say my name!” She has tried to speak with a Russian accent, easy enough to affect after spending the last two weeks with a troupe of Russian dancers.
He holds her at arm’s length, smiling. “Won’t you take off your cloak?”
She shakes her head slowly. Then, sighing, she makes her shoulders slump in a way no well-trained ballerina would ever do.
“Sonya!” he says, with obvious relief. “What a marvelous surprise!”
Jeannette throws her hat and her cloak onto the boldly patterned black-and-white marble floor. She wishes she’d thrown them at his face. “You knew!” she says, almost sings with the frenzy of an operatic soprano, finally making sense of what happened in Pavlova’s dressing-room. “And the child is yours too!” She is screaming now. “Isn’t she?”
Paul holds his head in his hands. He is aware of the sudden coldness of his fingers, a faint sense of pressure at the back of his head, and, incongruously, a rush of blood to his groin. He has suffered several episodes of insomnia since first hearing the rumor of Sonya’s resumption of work for Pavlova, knowing, as he did, that Jeannette was dancing as an extra with Diaghilev’s troupe. He has been dreading this very scene—and yet has also been vaguely thrilled by the prospect of experiencing the denouement of this long-running episodic drama that has delighted his idle hours for the past six years. He is as thrilled as he feels at the theater when the play and the actors have taken possession of him to the obliteration of everything else.
“Does she know?” Jeannette asks him in a voice drained of feeling. “Does she know about us?”
He shakes his head no. In his fantasies, the scene always ends with an episode of spectacular lovemaking, made all the more intense by his anguish and that of whichever twin has discovered his betrayal of her.
Jeannette peels his hands away from his face, so that she can look into his eyes. “You allowed her to bear your child—but not me?”
Tenderly, Paul leads her over to one of the bright yellow velvet and rosewood chairs lined up against the wall—he loves those chairs. She sits, looking down at her shoes. They are stout, practical shoes of the kind she noticed the seamstress was wearing. She had to comb the flea market to find a similar pair.
He sits in the chair beside hers. He has not let go of her hands. “You are mistaken about the child,” he says, looking around to make sure no one is there to hear them. “Sonya already had her children when I met her.”
“Children?”
“I believe,” says Paul, “she has two.” He frowns, impatient with the way this sort of detail seems to elude him, whereas other things—things that really matter to him—are jealously hoarded in his memory. “Or is it three?”
“Three! Perhaps they’re all yours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jeannette. Sonya first came here in January of ’03. I remember precisely, because it was the year I left Worth and launched my label.”
Jeannette’s eyes are wide. “The year of our excursion to Fontainebleau.”
Paul makes a sympathetic face to make sure that she knows he’s caught her reference. Of course! Nasty business, that pregnancy. Rather careless on his part.
“She came here looking for you,” he says. “Well, ostensibly to scout the fashion houses for Anna Pavlova.”
Jeannette snatches her hands away from him. “You never told her you knew me? How could you be so wicked, Paul?”
His sense of displeasure in himself passes quickly. He smiles and his brown eyes sparkle, like those of a naughty boy caught red-handed but nonetheless proud of the feat of mischief he’s managed to pull off.
“It was too delicious,” he says to the mistress he’d so recently told, as gently as he could, that it was over between them. He’d promised his wife. He catches Jeannette’s hands again, then wanders up the length of her arms, which have the beautiful firmness of all the ballerinas he’s ever known. And yet, of all of them, she has the silkiest skin. “Oh, my sweet,” he whispers huskily. “How I’ve missed you!”
Again, she pushes him away.
An attractive young woman appears in the doorway, holding a beautifully dressed three-year-old child by the hand. The little girl looks a lot like Paul—and also like the little girl Jeannette saw in Pavlova’s dressing room, although not nearly as pretty. Not as pretty as the child Jeannette and Paul might have made together.
“Ah, Miss O’Reilly!” he calls out in English, and then, opening his arms wide, “Rosine, my angel!” The child leaps into his embrace, covering his face in kisses.
“Papa, mon cher Papa!” she says with effusive adoration.
Jeannette would have given anything for such a warm and loving relationship with her own papa. The nanny—who is so pretty that Jeannette knows it must be annoying to Paul’s wife—straightens the child’s dress when he sets her down. “Say ‘Good morning,’ Rosine!” the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, says with a charming Irish accent.
“Good morning, Rosine!” the child lisps, giving a toddler’s version of a curtsey.
