Paris Red: A Novel, page 13
I go on looking at the remnants of the body and the mess where the face should be, and then I say, “Was she your model? Before?”
“She came for a few sittings.”
“So you must have liked her.”
“There was no way to know what would happen. Some people go flat in a pose.”
Maybe it is his words or hearing his voice and staring at the rawness of the model’s mouth—but something happens inside me just then. And I do not say a word to him. I do not do anything but turn away from him and the ruined canvas. In another moment I know I have to get out into the courtyard or onto the street—anywhere away from the scraped-down figure.
I pick the back door leading out into the weedy courtyard because it is closer. And I open it and walk through.
“I should never have attempted that painting,”
He stands somewhere behind me. Neither of us has said anything until now.
“I didn’t think she was the right model from the start,” he tells me.
“Why did you hire her then?”
“I wanted to start the painting.”
“What was so wrong with her face?”
“The shape. The planes of her cheeks. Her expression. Everything.”
“What’s wrong,” I tell him, “is to erase someone like that.”
For a moment he does not say anything, and that means something. At least he is thinking about what I said. Considering my words.
“I believe you’ve misunderstood,” he tells me. But he says it quietly. And when I hear that quietness, something in me stills. Whatever in me was alarmed by the wreck of a face and that maw of a mouth—that piece of me stills a little, like an animal.
“It’s composition. I scraped away paint,” he tells me. “Not her.”
I understand—I do. And yet. The other model is there. The remains of her legs and torso and face. It is not my imagination. Yet if I am going to pose for him, if I am to become the woman who replaces the erased figure, I have to find a different way to think.
So I remind myself that I am a modèle de profession. That this is a job and not a courtship.
“Why do you think it will be different with me?” I say.
“It will be different.”
Which is possibly a lie. I know if he decides he does not like my face, he can scrape it away, too. He can leave a hole where I once was, just as he did with her. Yet just the way I knew he would come over to Nise and me the first day we met, when she and I stood drawing outside the coutellerie, I know my face will be the one he keeps. I will myself to believe it.
“D’accord,” I tell him, and I nod. I nod as much for myself as for him.
I am still not sure I understand the canvas he showed me, or what he wants and does not want, but I do understand one thing: my will. My will to wear the green boots of a whore, to not be like anybody else. To be seen.
I do not want to be erased.
“I thought you wanted to work,” I say.
Because for all the trouble he took convincing me about the scraped canvas, when we come back inside the studio, he does not go to the canvas or his sketchpad.
He takes me to the divan instead. He makes me lie down and then he kneels on the floor.
“Everything shows in your face,” he tells me. “I can’t draw you if you’re upset.”
So he stays on the floor beside the divan. Opening me.
And for all the fear I felt when I first saw the scraped canvas, I think of it now as a ghost. And like any ghost, I push it from my mind.
I let him open me.
He wants a specific kind of pose, so that is where we begin: by looking at other paintings of naked girls on divans.
He shows me a print of a fancy-looking painting, and an actual painting on a wood panel. The print shows a curvy woman from behind, looking over her shoulder, with a peacock fan in her hand. The other, the real painting, shows a woman from the front with one hand draped over her sex and the other holding some kind of leaves. A silky dog sleeps near her feet.
“Those women don’t look real,” I tell him. I point to the woman with the silky dog and say, “This one doesn’t have a bone in her body.”
About the other one, the print of the woman with the peacock fan, I tell him, “Her back is so curved she looks like a snake.”
He laughs a little and then shakes his head at me. “That’s Ingres. A classic. And I painted the first one. It’s a copy of a Titian.”
The names do not mean anything to me, but I feel odd knowing I just said something about one of his paintings. Yet it is not just the painting that seems wrong—it is the woman herself.
“Aren’t there any paintings that look like real women look?” I say. “Like your gypsy girl?”
He looks at me for a moment and then goes to his cabinet. When he comes back, he holds something much smaller than the print or the painting he just showed me. It is a photograph, but it is a photograph of a painting. He hands it to me and I look at it for a long time.
“It’s a little better,” I say. I do not tell him that the breasts look all wrong—too far apart and pointing in different directions—or that the woman’s feet are too small. All I say is, “Her body’s too long. And she doesn’t have a neck.”
“It’s a photo of a painting by Goya.”
Just the way he says it, I can tell I annoyed him, so I say, “Of the three, I think yours is the best.”
The woman he painted may not have any bones, but I still like it better than one whose breasts seem cockeyed, or the snake-woman, whose face is so perfect it does not even seem as if it belongs to a woman. It is a statue’s face, or a face from a cameo.
“It looks as though her breast is in her armpit,” I say, pointing to the place on the snake-woman.
And he laughs at that. Really laughs.
“So that’s your opinion of the Odalisque,” he says.
“I’m just telling you what I see.”
“I don’t much care for it, either,” he says. “It’s dead. It’s a masterpiece but it’s always been dead. The closest is the Goya, but I don’t even want to paint that. Not that I could.”
“Why couldn’t you paint it?”
“No one should paint like anyone else.”
“But you could if you wanted?”
“I don’t want to paint the past. Not even Goya’s past. Il faut être de son temps.”
I know I do not understand all of what he means, but I do understand that he wants to be different from anyone else, that he wants to paint something entirely new. As we stand talking, things begin to feel relaxed again between us, the most relaxed since he showed me the canvas with the scraped-off face.
“The thing is, lots of women’s breasts are uneven,” I say.
He wants to start with sketches, so that is what we are doing. The legs of the model were down in the scraped-off painting, but he tells me to lie on the divan with my right leg bent at the knee. It is the leg closest to him.
“Now touch that knee with your other hand,” he says.
So I do. And then I bend my right arm, the one that is closest to him, at the elbow, resting my hand up by my collarbone.
The position feels complicated, as if I am all crossed up, but I understand some of why he wants it: by bending my knee I hide my sex, and by reaching across to touch my own knee, at least my other arm shows. At least I do not look like a one-armed woman.
“What made you think about other women’s breasts?” he asks.
“That last painting. Goya. Her breasts are pointing in different directions. They’re cockeyed.”
“But why say most women’s breasts are uneven?”
“My mother sewed for women,” I say. “She saw their bodies. She talked about it.”
“What about you?”
“My breasts are pretty equal,” I say.
I can tell he wants me to say something else, to somehow go on, but I do not say anything else. He has told me he does not like to talk while he is working, but just then, I am the one who wants to stop the conversation. Not because I do not feel like talking—I could. But I do not need to. I feel content not talking.
And something happens then between us, in the middle of the idle talk. I feel connected to him, but there is also something about the silly, flirtatious talk that puts me at ease. I feel not just his desire but his pleasure at my company. As if there is some kind of delight he takes in me, not just in my body but in my thoughts and the things I say. Once I become aware of that, I feel weightless and settled at the same time there on the divan. Even though I am naked, it feels as if something were resting very lightly on me—a sheet covering my legs on a summer night, or a loose cotton chemise on my skin.
And that is what the sketches themselves are like. He draws them all in airy red chalk, with just the hint of my features, or with no face at all. But the blank faces do not bother me the way the erased face on the painting did. The drawings are exactly what they were meant to be: sketches. Yet there is also something perfectly finished about them. I see them and do not want any more.
And even though there is no face in any of the chalk drawings, I see myself perfectly in them. My head and hair, my breasts—even my hands. The pose with my hand resting on the opposite bent knee felt awkward, but the way he has drawn it is simple and straightforward. The hand that rests on my knee looks strong—the fingers and thumb look strong enough to belong to a brunisseuse at Baudon, and yet they are pretty. My other hand is turned in, and though you cannot see the fingers, you know I am playing with the end of a twist of hair.
Which I do not remember doing until I see it. But when I see his drawing, I remember. Remember the feeling of my own hair in my fingertips.
The next day, after I am done posing, I watch as he walks back to one of the red chalk drawings. He looks at it for a long moment, and then I see his arm begin to move.
He goes on working when I come to stand behind him, and it takes me just a second to see he is making the shadows of the drawing darker, a deeper red. There is a shadow behind my ankle, one beneath my knee, one behind my shoulder, and one along my wrist. The shadow at my wrist is different from all the others because it is on me, not on the cushions of the divan. So he puts the red chalk along my wrist. On my skin.
I do not know if he notices or not, but as he lays in the deeper color, both of his hands move, even the left hand that is not holding any chalk. The left hand seems to want to help with the drawing, so it moves a little, too.
I wear a new dress on Sunday when I go to see my mother. The talk about sewing and women’s breasts made me miss something about her, which surprises me. Or maybe I just do not want to spend the afternoon alone.
That I miss my father goes without saying.
When I walk in the door, my father hugs me and touches my hair, the way he always does.
My mother takes me in with her eyes.
She notices the dress—of course she notices the dress. That it is blue instead of gray, that it is made of something other than the cheapest fabric, that there is a bit of lace at the collar. That it is not a dress a brunisseuse could buy.
All of that works itself out in her face in the seconds before she embraces me. But she does not say a word of it. All she says is, “Go ahead and sit down. You’re father’s hungry so we have to eat. You know how he is.”
So I sit and the three of us eat. My mother and father and me.
After lunch my father sits in the one comfortable chair there is.
“I have to rest my belly,” he says.
I help my mother clear dishes and wash up, and when we are nearly done, she says, “If you have time, I wouldn’t mind some help with two dresses. I promised one for tomorrow, and I still have most of the finishing to do. And I have another to get ready to fit.”
I look at her for a moment, and she must feel me doing it, because without even looking over at me, she says, “Of course only if you have time.”
“I have time,” I say.
And in that way we fall into our old Sunday habit of her working as my father sleeps and snores, and me helping with small tasks.
“Would you mind doing the hem on this one?” my mother says, handing me a pale green dress. “It’s pinned.”
And I know without even asking what she wants: a tiny, anchored blind stitch, which, if you do it right, disappears under the lip of the folded cloth, almost invisible on either side of the fabric. I knot the thread and begin, sewing as quickly as I can, but carefully.
For the first few inches of hem, I do the thing I always have done: I push all thoughts from my mind and just focus on the stitches until my fingers find the rhythm and the spacing. In a little while I can think again, but not for those first minutes. For the first minutes I cannot do anything except sew.
“You never lose the knack, do you,” my mother says when she looks over at me from her chair.
“I suppose not.”
We do not look at each other as we work, but every few minutes she will say something about someone she is sewing for, or tell me something about my father. And it occurs to me that it is peaceful in a way to be sitting there, but that it is also my mother’s way: she does not know what to do if she is not working. She would never be able to sit still in a chair until she fell asleep on a Sunday afternoon.
When I am almost finished with the entire hem, she comes over to the table where I am sitting and looks at the work. She shakes her head at me and before she walks back to her chair, she says, “I believe you do a finer stitch than I do.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. But it is still high praise, coming from her. If you work hard and do good work, you can have my mother’s respect.
“I see you have a new dress,” she says. “The color suits you.”
I look over at her, but she already has her head bent, is already back at her own work. I do not know what to say—I do not know what she wants to hear.
“I’m not at Baudon anymore,” I say.
We both go on stitching, not looking at each other, and in a moment my mother says, “No, I guessed as much.”
“I’m an assistant now,” I say. I know it is a vague thing to say, but it is true: he sends me out on his errands for paints and pastels, and sometimes just for lunch. And I am not about to say the words modèle de profession to my mother.
Besides, there are plenty of things about me my mother does not know about me. I never told my mother about going to Moulin’s with Nise, I never told her about the day that blood ran down my legs and dripped into my boots.
But if she has a reaction, she keeps it to herself. Instead of asking a question or saying something disapproving, my mother does not say anything. She just goes on sewing. And in a moment it comes to me.
If I showed up at the door looking poorly, she would have plenty to say. But I am wearing a good dress, and I look well. There is nothing she can say. And I knew that. I knew that when I got dressed this morning to come here.
So when I stand up with the finished hem, when I say, “Well, that’s a job well done,” I am surprised by what she does choose to say.
“It’s pleasant to work with someone here,” she tells me.
And in another moment she is taking the pale green dress from me, the hem completed, and handing me the bodice of the dress she has been sewing.
“If you would do one last thing and press these seams open, I’d be grateful,” she says.
So I go to the pressing board and move the tip of the iron up and down the tight rows of hand-stitching.
“I don’t know what we’re going to have for dinner tonight,” she tells me then, and her voice sounds fretful. “I don’t have time to cook and finish this.”
I think about telling her I could stay longer, but I do not. I just nod and go on moving the hot iron, keeping close to the seams.
When he asks me if I will go to Moulin’s for photos, I do not say anything at first. Then I say, “Why do you need his prints? I can come here every day. On Sundays, too, if you want.”
“It isn’t what you think. I need you to model, too,” he says. “But the camera bleeds away middle tones. I want to see that effect.”
I look away from him and then walk away from the table where we have been standing.
“Is that what you want to do?” I say. “Paint from a photograph?”
“Sometimes it helps,” he says. “But if you don’t want to go, I understand.”
Yet when he says that, I know I will have to go. It is not just that I want to please him, either. If I admit that any of it bothers me, it will be bigger than I am. Or maybe I just want to do whatever I can to make sure I am not the one who is erased.
I know it does not matter why I say what I say, only that I say it. So I tell him, “I’ll go if you come with me. To Moulin’s.”
He nods, and as soon as I see that, I wonder why I hesitated. Something in me feels powerful for having said yes. Because if I can give him the thing he wants, I will be the one who gains.
Because I have something he needs.
When we get to Moulin’s studio, of course I see the same tatty lace spread on the divan. I wonder how many girls with dirty feet have lain down on it since Nise and I were here.
He greets Moulin and they spend a little time talking in their hearty way about this acquaintance and that, but I cannot bring myself to listen. When I step out from behind Moulin’s screen in one of the robes he keeps there, Moulin is the one to say, “All right then.”
And we start. It feels so awkward to be in front of Moulin with him there that I wonder why I wanted him to come at all. When I drop the robe on a chair and go to lie on the divan, my whole body heats up, and I can feel a little bit of moisture starting right there at my hairline.
“How is your friend?” Moulin asks as he fiddles with the camera. “Wasn’t it you who came here with a friend? Pâquerette?”
“She’s fine,” I say.
