Paris Red: A Novel, page 12
And I am turning away from the glass front of the café when I see him walking toward me from across the street. He kisses me lightly on each cheek.
“I thought you’d be inside,” I say.
“I came out to look for you.”
I do not want to tell him that it took me longer to get ready than I planned because I decided to wash my hair, that it is still damp at the back. That even though I have on my best dress I still feel all wrong. It is not just that I want to hide those things from him.
I want to hide them from myself.
But now that he is standing there beside me—now that he has kissed me lightly on my cheeks so I can feel his mustache and smell his cologne—I can feel some of the panic in me subsiding. I glance at one of the café tables there on the street, one where there is a carafe of water so cool that water beads on the outside of it, and in that instant I want nothing more than to go inside and sit with him at a table and drink a glass of cool water. So I do the thing I learned to do when I stand in front of him, naked, or when he asks me to put on one of his silly costumes.
I pretend.
I pretend that it is just the two of us, the way it was on Boule du Temple when we were sweethearts like anyone else. And because I am seventeen and wearing the green boots of a whore, and because I know what passes between him and me when we are alone on the divan or in my room, it becomes real. It becomes real because I believe in it.
I tell myself the inside of me feels as cool and clear as the water in the carafe, and I take that coolness with me when we walk through the doors and into the back room at the Café Guerbois.
When we walk toward one table, two men stand up. They each nod and take my hand, and he tells me each of their names.
“We’re pleased you came, mademoiselle,” the one closest to me says, the one he called Tonin.
“You didn’t see Duranty out there, did you?” the one named Astruc asks him.
“No, but I’m sure he’ll be by,” he says. “You know he lives here.”
“It’s his turf, isn’t it?”
The three of them fall into talking about whatever it was they were saying before, and it is a kindness, I think, when they do that. It makes me relax a little, and even though I listen and nod, I also look around—at the room itself, and at the faces of his friends.
This back room could not be more different from the front. The walls are wood at the bottom and painted brown at the top so that the whole room feels like a warm cave. I can see green-topped billiard tables at the back of the room, and a door opening to a garden. There is enough smoke in the room that the air seems filmy with it in places.
Of his two friends, it is easier to look at the one named Tonin. He is the only one who does not have a beard, and I like being able to see more of his face. Astruc is dark-haired and more energetic, and when I catch his eye, he looks at me directly and intently. Not unkindly—I do not mean that—but almost as if he wants to take me apart and see if I match the girl he saw in the paintings and the pastel.
And yet Astruc is not the only one studying and observing me. Each time my eyes fall on Tonin, he seems to be watching me, but he smiles a little, as if he wanted to encourage me, not examine me. And after a few minutes, I realize I have heard the name before: the night he brought Nise and me the copy of Journal Pour Tous with the “Langage des Cheveux” in it, it was his friend Tonin he was going to meet. So then I feel like I know this friend of his, and I smile back a little.
The three of them are talking about a book they read, something about the life of Christ, and I cannot follow all the conversation, but in a little while he says, “I’ll give them a Christ if they want a Christ. But it will be a Christ of the people, with dirty feet and a cut in his side. A real Christ.”
“No one at the Salon is ready for Christ to be real,” Astruc tells him.
“There’s only beauty in what’s real,” he says.
The conversation goes on and I follow as much as I can, but at a pause, his friend Tonin turns to me with his brown eyes and kind mouth.
“Mademoiselle, where did you meet this one? When we ask him, he won’t ever say.”
For a moment I wonder what answer he wants me to give, and then I remember what he said when I asked him if he wanted me to do anything special: Be yourself.
So I say, “We met in the street. In front of a shop of knives.”
No one says anything, and for a moment I think I got it wrong. I think I should have lied and said something more elegant. But then I see Tonin glance over at him, so I do, too.
“She’s right,” he says. “I found her on the street. Un porte-bonheur.”
“A redheaded lucky charm,” his friend Astruc says, nodding. “It’s rich.”
I look at Tonin, and something about his eyes tells me to speak, to say whatever it is I have inside me.
So I look from Tonin to Astruc and then at him.
“But I found him, too,” I say.
For just a moment no one else is at the table. For a moment it is just him and me. Two lovers. It takes just another moment, and then I see his eyes flash and then go liquid and dark.
Which I know is his pleasure. Because sometimes words are like touch with the pleasure they bring.
I do not know how or why, but I end up telling Tonin all about Baudon and what it takes to burnish silver, and how now sometimes when I am posing, I feel like my hands do not know what to do with themselves. I think I probably would have gone on talking and confiding in him, but then a fourth man approaches the table, and everything stops.
The fourth man greets the others and then takes a chair. He hardly glances at me.
At first I think it must be the Duranty they spoke about before, the one who comes to the Guerbois every day after lunch and after dinner. But something about this man’s face does not match the stories they have been telling, and then I hear his greeting to the man: Cher Baudelaire.
“We thought you were in the North,” Tonin says.
“I was, but you know I can’t stay away. Yet when I get back I see nothing has changed in my absence.”
And I can tell that he meant to introduce me, that he means to do it, but the man immediately begins talking, and there is no space to make the introduction.
There is something dramatic about the way the new man talks, and something impatient. I keep watching his face to understand more, but while he looks from face to face at the table, he makes a point of not looking at me.
He talks at length about a place called Honfleur, and in a little while I understand it is a place on La Manche. And yet I feel that he does not mean for me to hear any of what he is saying, so I do not know what to do exactly. I do not feel I can go on talking with Tonin privately, the way we were before. So instead I listen to the new man, to cher Baudelaire as he holds forth. I listen and find a place on the wall opposite the table to study. When I look over to the green billiard tables, I see Tonin glance at me, and I think I can read something in his eyes, but I keep my face flat.
In the end, he has to break in. Tonin cannot do it, nor Astruc. It is not their place. Only he can do it.
“Baudelaire, I’d like you to meet my new model,” he says finally, simply, interrupting the stream of the man’s words. “Mademoiselle Victorine Meurent.”
And only then does the other one look at me.
He tilts his head down slightly, ever so slightly, and studies me from beneath his brows. And though I know it does not make any sense, the look reminds me of nothing so much as the way my mother would sometimes look at me. With disapproval and curt words ready on her tongue.
Yet the one they call Baudelaire does not say anything. He just looks at me with some kind of challenge. And in that moment I realize he thought I was just some girl working the café, someone one of his friends picked up for the evening as entertainment. That he is annoyed he has to somehow include me.
And I do not know how I know what to do next, but I know.
When we first came inside the café from the street, I knew where he had been sitting because he left his gloves on the table. They are his favorites, thin leather, with three tucks stitched on the back, the yellow color of the center of a daisy. Inside they are stamped: Gants Boucicaut, Médaille d’Or, Paris 1862. They smell of smoke and his skin and cloves—I know because I have brought them up to my nose many times. And someplace someplace someplace, the gloves must smell a little of me.
His gloves are soft as skin, are skin, and when I reach over to take one, it feels like I am taking his hand in mine. I pull one glove on, and it goes over my hand easily because it is big. And yet it is still like a second skin, like his skin on mine. I let myself feel it for a moment, and then I pull on the other glove.
The whole thing takes seconds. And then I say to the glowering face, to cher Baudelaire, “Pleased to meet you.”
And something shifts in his gaze. Something becomes sorrowful in those eyes, and instead of saying something cutting, or just droning on and on, cher Baudelaire goes silent.
And then, to break the moment—because it is too much, it is too much to hold his gaze, and to go on being stared at, and it is too much for everyone at the table to watch—Tonin stands to get the waiter to bring another bottle of wine. And in another moment Astruc says, “I thought Duranty would be here by now.”
Quickly, everyone latches on to that, to telling stories of Duranty. Only Baudelaire and I are quiet.
And because I am seventeen and wearing the bottle green boots of a whore and a black ribbon at my neck, and because I reached over and took my lover’s gloves and pulled his skin onto my own—I know what I see when I turn from cher Baudelaire and look around.
I see everything at the table has changed. I see everyone at the table has changed.
And when I look to him, to the one whose skin I just pulled over my own, I see he is watching me.
Because he saw the change, too. He saw the whole table change when I pulled on his gloves.
And I feel safe wearing his yellow leather gloves, with his skin on mine.
He and I do not speak until we are blocks away, and when we do, I am the one who says, “Don’t you want to go back to your friends?”
“I see them all the time.”
“You see me all the time,” I say.
“That’s different.”
“Baudelaire was away, so you can’t have seen him all the time.”
“I thought he was still away.”
“He thought I was a working girl,” I say. “Working the café.”
“I wouldn’t have subjected you to him if I’d known. Sometimes he needs to be the only voice in the room. And he’s cruel about women.”
I think back to the painting of the mistress, the one with the flat face and awkward leg. I wonder if Baudelaire is her lover. I wonder and then I know.
“But he can’t be cruel all the time,” I say. “He loves his broken doll.”
He does not say anything to me then, just looks at me sidelong. But at the corner, when we step down into the street, he takes my hand up to his mouth and kisses my fingers. Because I have given him back his gloves, because I am bare-handed just like I always am.
He kisses my fingers and then pulls me to him, there on the street.
Later, when we are lying in my bed on La Bruyère, he wraps his hand in my hair and asks, “How did you know to do it?”
“Do what?”
“Put on my gloves like that. It was like watching someone pull on sunlight.”
“I didn’t know.”
“But you did. You did the one thing he couldn’t pretend to ignore. It was a conscious gesture.”
I do not say anything. I do not know why I did what I did with his gloves. I just knew to do it.
In another moment he tells me, “Tonin likes you very much.”
“He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”
“If a man can have such a thing.”
We go on lying there, watching each other in the dark, touching, talking. But as my eyes are getting heavy, I know the answer to his question. It comes to me.
“I didn’t know to pull on your gloves,” I tell him. “My body knew.”
He looks at me after I say that. He looks at me for a long time and I let him. I let him watch me, and I return his gaze until I cannot, until I have to let my eyes close. His hand still in my hair.
The next day after he leaves, I am out walking. I came out to buy some kind of lunch for myself, even though it is nearly four in the afternoon. That is when I see the little white sign in the shopwindow.
BAGUE PORTE-BONHEUR
OR SUR ARGENT CONTRÔLÉ
BIJOU CHARMANT POUR FILLETTES
I remember what he said last night to his friends: I found her on the street. Un porte-bonheur. And Astruc saying, A redheaded lucky charm.
Then I keep the word porte-bonheur in mind the whole time I am walking. And in that way the word itself becomes a kind of charm.
This time when he tells me he does not need me for the day, I do not panic. I go to Raynal’s for breakfast but then I come back home. That is the thing, I have a room to come to. I can lie on the bed all day, staring at the ceiling or out the window or at my box of candles. Veilleuse Universelle, Félix Potin, Paris, Exiger ce Timbre.
But I do not just lie on the bed to nap. For the first time in a long time I take out my notebook and try to figure out what to draw in the room. The creased sheets? The angle of the beam by the mansard? And then I know: I want to draw the window and what is outside the window. The white sign with black letters on the brick red building, HERBORISTE.
I try to draw it with my pencils but in a little while I know I can only get at part of what I see. Because the sign is not really white but bluish white, and the brick is not just red but brownish purple. And that makes me think of what he always says, that colors are the only thing. That there are no lines in nature, just one color next to another. Une tache à côté de l’autre.
I need color.
So I get a brush and a couple of old tubes of watercolor paint that I took from his trash once, from the can beside the back door of the studio. The brush is a bit stiff and the tubes are crimped and flattened, hardly anything in them, but I like just seeing the smears of color and the names: vert de cadmium, bleu de cobalt. The colors of leaves and flowers.
I work the ruined brush in my fingers until the bristles soften a bit, and I think that is it, that is what I want to try to paint. Flowers. Morning glories. And I think I remember them, I think I can see them in my mind’s eye, but when I look back at my sketch from the day I went to Toucy with Nise, I see I had it wrong. The flowers are not round but are made up of five triangles, five tiny panels that make a bell.
So that is what I dab on a sheet of paper from my carnet with the gleanings from the paint tubes and a little water from my pitcher: five-sided flowers and still-closed twists of buds, the twirling tendrils of the vines, leaves that are the shape of a pique from a deck of cards.
I would like to try painting other flowers but the truth is I do not know the shape of them. Not really. Not delphiniums for certain, but not even lilacs. When I try to paint a sprig of lilac from memory, it just looks like a tree or an odd bunch of grapes. So while there may not be lines in nature, there are shapes, and to paint something, you have to be able to see it.
That is how I decide the next thing.
The mirror hanging above the dresser is small, but if I prop it at the back of the table, I can see my head and shoulders and a tiny bit of my breasts. I cannot paint the right colors but I can at least paint shapes. So I make my braid a green vine on my shoulder and my face a blank, blue oval. Each shoulder is a rounded blue stain where I push the brush flat, and my neck becomes a blue column.
I make myself the color of a flower.
At the end I cannot say the portrait resembles me because it has no features, but there is something right about the angle of the head and how the hair spills over the shoulder—even if the head is blue, even if the hair is green.
It is still me.
And something about all of it pleases me. Maybe just the colors themselves, and thinking about purple and blue flowers, or maybe it is the quiet way I spent the day, adding drops of water to the dried-up tubes to coax out the last bit of paint. The day reminds me of the quiet times with my mother, with her sitting and sewing and me play-sewing, or, when I was older, truly helping her by basting, ripping seams, or just sweeping up.
When I look at the portrait again, it does not seem strange any longer that I gave myself hair the same color as my boots. That green has been inside me nearly my whole life. And when the pages turn dry and crinkly, I stand them up on the table, propped up against the wall. So I can see all the flowers. So I can see myself.
When he first shows me the canvas he wants to work on, I do not understand. There is already a woman there, already a rough image painted. Someone lies on the divan, propped up on a pillow. Her face is a muddy cloud, and much of her body seems to be an outline. After the first moments of looking, I realize that what I think is an outline is not that at all. It is what is left. There was once paint on the canvas, and it has been taken away.
“What is it?” I say.
“A failed effort. A start with no finish.”
I look more closely at the thing, and in spots I can just make out the weave of the canvas.
When he sees me studying the painting, he says, “It’s scraped almost all the way down.”
But it isn’t scraped all the way. Along with the outline of a body, I can still make out details of a face. The light and dark areas of the eyes, the shape of the nose. And a maw where the mouth should be.
“The face was wrong,” he tells me now. “Some faces are dead. You saw it yourself.”
And I think back to the first day in his studio, the day he showed Nise and me the different nude photographs. There was the pretty one he called Augustine, but there was also the photo of the girl who looked dead. But I never said that to him. I just told him that I thought the girl looked bored.
