Paris Red: A Novel, page 14
And because he can tell I feel uncomfortable around Moulin, he takes over the conversation.
“What are you drawing in your sketchbook these days?” he asks.
“Flowers. My room,” I say. “The window in my room.”
But my voice sounds strained, and I feel the strain in my throat and it hurts to talk.
“What else?”
But I don’t say anything and close my eyes for a few moments.
“Do you need to put your head down?”
When I nod, he says, “Just put your head down then. Rest for a moment.”
I turn over on the divan so that my breasts are pressed against the lace coverlet, and I shut my eyes. Shut out the room and Moulin. Shut him out, too.
And that is the first photograph Moulin takes. He takes a picture of me lying on my side and belly with my back to the camera. That is the sound that brings me back from wherever I have gone in my head: the sound of him at his camera.
So I turn around. Let them see me.
“I don’t know what to draw next,” I say—because I want to hear my own voice and want to be more than just a naked girl on a dirty divan. “What do you think I should draw?”
“Draw anything,” he says. “Anything that catches your eye.”
“What catches your eye?”
“Everything. Girls who stand in the street sketching. Girls in green boots.”
When he says that, I look at him.
“What else do you remember?” I say.
“The way you had your hair pinned. Some of it up and some of it down.”
“What else?”
“The night you slipped your hand over my leg at Flicoteaux’s.”
“What else?”
“Your feet on my shoulders.”
He says more private things to me, things that are not meant for others, but Moulin is just a noise behind the camera. He might as well be a shadow.
The two of us talking, that is what Moulin photographs. Even though he does not lie with me on the divan, he is there all the same. His voice is in my head and on my skin, and it is as if he is touching me.
I know because this time I do not go anywhere in my head. I stay right there on the divan with his voice. And once I look at Moulin’s camera, I do not turn away.
That night when I go home to La Bruyère, I think again about how I felt when I saw the lace throw on Moulin’s divan. How what immediately came to mind was all the other girls with dirty feet who had lain upon it. Shown their asses and breasts or splayed their legs.
They were probably like girls I grew up with, or girls at Baudon.
ANGÉLIQUE BACHERET
MARIE CHENART
CLÉMENTINE DOULCET
VIRGINIE TROCHELLE
HONORINE MORANT
EMILIE NALOT
FRANÇOISE RONDOT
REINE THIBAULT
HONORÉE PONCET
ANASTASIE LOISEL
THÉRÈSE JOLIVET
SUZANNE BLONDEAU
ROSE VALOIS
MARIE LOUISE DARCY
ANNETTE COURTOIS
TOINETTE BONAMI
Girls like me.
After Moulin’s, something new begins to happen when I take off my clothes and lie down on the divan in his studio.
When I first started posing naked in front of him, it was still about pretending, just the way it was at Moulin’s. I pretended that none of it bothered me, and soon enough it did not. Soon enough I became the thing I saw in his eyes. But now another thing begins to happen.
I get bigger. In the space I take up, in the way I feel in the air of the studio. I let myself fill the room.
And if I do it right, I become someone else. Not just the thing I see in his eyes. Someone bolder, more experienced.
And that is what I always craved—experience. With the boy I stayed out with all night when I was fifteen, with the man I left home for, with the long-lashed soldier who held me on his thighs, who made my tongue sore. Because even as a girl I never believed older people when they said things to warn me. I wanted to be taken out of my level of experience. My depth. Sometimes things happened and they were shocking. Or painful. But that is how I became accustomed. And some things I never became accustomed to. That was the price I had to pay for experience.
There is the body he sees and what I am. I know they are two different things. I understand that. But more and more, I can be anything he likes. Anything I like. A matador, a street singer, a society woman in a pink silk robe. And it is not just costumes and clothing I can change—I can even alter the way my face looks by changing what I think about.
Sometimes I remember his story about the soldiers and seeing the body of the man who sold him sandalwood soap, and my face changes. Or I think about what muguet des bois smells like, or peonies, or even my mother’s metal shears, because metal has a smell, too. And my face changes again.
Sometimes I think about how it feels when he is behind me on the divan, how it is deeper than when we lie face to face. I do not know what shows on my face when I think of that, but I know something does. I can feel it.
I can give anything he wants me to give. And anything he wants to take, he can have, because I have more. I always have more.
When he shows me Moulin’s photos days later, it takes a while to recognize my face.
But why would I recognize myself. I do not know what my face looks like when I am with a man, and that is what Moulin captured. Me with him. Even though he was not part of the photos, even though we did not touch at all, he is there all the same.
In one photo I have my head turned to the side a little but I am still looking toward the camera. My eyes are heavy-lidded, and I look knowing and patient.
In another photo, I see the beginning of a lazy smile but not the smile itself.
But it turns out he is not interested in my face.
“I’ll work from life for your expression,” he tells me. “It’s the shadow and light I want.”
In the photos I do not look at all like the serious girl in the portrait he painted of me in my work dress. The only photo that looks anything like that portrait is one that Moulin took of me standing. My back is to the camera and I look sideways over my shoulder, so the photograph shows my face is in profile—the plane of my cheek and my eye from the side. I do not know why a profile should look most like the portrait he painted, but it does. There is something similar about the seriousness of my face in both. And that is the only thing linking the photographs and his painting. They might as well be depictions of different girls.
And yet even as I think that I know it is not right. Of course the photos are me. All of them. Just as the portrait with the blue ribbon and the red chalk sketches are me. Faces change all the time. I am different now, standing there with him at the table in his studio, than I was this morning when I woke up in my room and stared at my blue box of candles.
Different phases of the same person.
Different accounts of me.
Sometimes he works right after we lie together. Sometimes he stands naked, too, working. His cock still slick with me.
On those days the studio feels like the freest place in the world. The whole room is filled with us. With him, with me.
After a few days, when he shows me the ink washes beside the photographs, I understand why he wanted me to go to Moulin’s.
When he sketched with red chalk, he pared everything down to shape and line. Now, working from photos, he distills everything down to light and dark. Images made of sepia ink and white paper. Sometimes a bit of charcoal pencil.
In two, he uses a thinner wash of ink to show shadows. Mostly, though, it is the deep brown of the ink versus the white of the paper, and that is all. Dark and light. On those sketches, if I pull back and look a certain way, the ink shapes do not even look like a body. But then my eye takes over and makes a picture of them again. Makes them into me again.
So there I am: a swath of dark ink along one side and under the other arm, a crescent moon of ink for a breast, a line of ink to show the up-and-down indentation of my belly. Ink for hair.
Looking at the new washes I do not know which I like better: the airy, red chalk drawings that I thought were perfect, or the bold inks.
When I tell him that, when I ask him how he will choose which one to use as a guide, he says, “I don’t choose. I need it all.”
The thing is, as soon as he begins to say it, I know what he is going to say. And understand it without him explaining.
“You never did so many sketches before.”
“I think it will be an important painting,” he tells me. Then he says, “What else would I be doing with my time anyway?”
And from the sound of that I know he is pleased with the inks. Pleased with himself, and with me.
When the knock comes at the studio door, I am lying on the divan, and he is getting ready to begin a new ink sketch. I take my clothing and slip behind the screen he has at the back of the studio, but there is no time for him to tuck away the new work or stow the chalk sketches he has spread over the table and clothespinned to a length of cord strung along the wall on the side of the studio.
“You’re not still working, are you?” I hear a man’s voice say. I know the voice—I heard it the night he introduced me to his friends—and in a moment I am sure it is the one he calls Astruc.
“I certainly can stop by later,” the voice says.
“No, it’s fine. I was finishing for the day.”
I can tell by the way the voices sound that the two of them are standing in the side entryway, a narrow nook of a room, and yet even when he brings Astruc into the studio itself, he keeps him there at the front, where there are wooden chairs and a small table. Still, Astruc must see the state of things, because again he says, “Really. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back later.”
“Have a glass of wine with Mademoiselle Meurent and me,” he says then. “We’ve both worked hard enough for the day.”
And he must gesture to the screen at the back of the room because I hear the voices turn, as if both men had turned their backs to my direction. Not that there is anything to see—the screen blocks off a small recess, which is its own room really. I am changing back where he keeps painting supplies and canvases.
Except I left my boots in the room, there beside the divan, and when I come out a moment later, I am dressed but my hair is down and I am just in my stockings.
He turns first, and only when he nods does Astruc turn.
“I didn’t know I was interrupting a working day,” he says. “But it’s a pleasure to see you, mademoiselle.”
“And a pleasure to see you,” I say. Then I sit down on the divan and begin to pull on my boots.
Astruc walks over to the chalks hanging from the clothespins and looks for a long time, standing up close, not saying anything. Walks from sketch to sketch and then back again.
“But these are astonishing,” I hear him say.
And even though all of the sketches are of me, even though I am naked in each one, and even though I am sitting in the same room as the sketches, not ten meters from him—the comment is not directed at me.
“Ils sont naïfs,” Astruc says then. “That’s their strength. They’re plain and bold.”
“I draw what I see.”
“Are they studies?”
“Of a sort,” he says, shrugging, and that is when I understand he wants to get Astruc away from the sketches. That he is not ready for anyone else to see them, or to talk about the painting he is planning.
“Even I only know what I need to know,” I say from the divan, where I am buttoning my boots with the buttonhook he keeps there in the studio.
And I do not know if it is the drawings, or the sound of my voice, or the fact that I am buttoning my boots in front of him, but Astruc seems surprised and then embarrassed. As if he realizes in that moment that I have just been naked in this room, or that I am still getting dressed. And maybe it is something else altogether—I cannot tell. All I know is how he looks.
And he begins apologizing for interrupting. Says he should have known better than to call so early in the day. That if we will forgive him he will be on his way.
“Goodbye, mademoiselle,” he tells me, but he is already heading toward the side room and the door.
I am still sitting on the divan, still buttoning my boots, when he and Astruc go out onto the street. And when they are gone for a while, clearly having some kind of conversation, I know it was me who made Astruc nervous. My stockinged-feet presence on the divan, or my chalked- and inked-presence in the sketches—I do not know which.
“What was all of that?” I say when he comes back in.
“Where do I start?” he says, shaking his head. “He thinks I’m doing something groundbreaking. He fears it won’t be understood. He thinks you are the most natural woman. He thinks the sketches show that naturalness. He wants to write a poem about you.”
I wait a moment and then I say, “How can he write a poem about me? He doesn’t know me.”
“It doesn’t matter. He feels he knows you.”
And I sit there. At first I do not know what to think, and then it seems funny to me.
“I think my stockings frightened him,” I say.
“I think they went to his head,” he tells me. “But I am supposed to give you a message from him.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Please tell her Zacharie Astruc said, Never cut your hair.’ So now you know.”
“I think he loves you very much as a friend,” I say. “I think he loves you and admires you.”
“I think he admires and loves,” he says. “But I’m not sure I’m the target.”
“All he saw were my feet.”
“And the rest,” he says, and looks over at the red chalk drawings that are on display.
I do not know if it is jealousy or righteousness or just being egged on by Astruc’s words, but he keeps me on the divan a long time after that. Showing me just how well he knows me, pleasing me. Pleasing himself.
He gives me the bracelet after I am already on the divan, naked, and when he is about to start work on another set of sketches—the final ones before he paints, he tells me.
“So this is what you want me to wear?” I say.
“Yes, I’m giving it to you.”
“To wear for the painting.”
“It’s for you and I want you to wear it for the painting,” he tells me. Only then do I think I understand.
“So it’s a gift,” I say.
“I’m not very gracious.”
“It’s not that. I just wasn’t sure.”
A small oval locket dangles from the bracelet chain. Of course when I open it, I see it’s empty.
“My mother had a locket similar to that,” he tells me. “She kept a lock of baby hair in it.”
“Yours?”
“Mine or my brother’s,” he says. “By the time we were older she couldn’t remember.”
“But this isn’t her bracelet,” I say.
“The mother of my son has that locket.”
“With a lock of his hair?”
“With a lock of his hair,” he says.
He seems embarrassed then, as if he knew the whole topic was wrong, as if he knew he handled it badly.
So I tell him, “I like it. I think it’s pretty.”
But when I go to put it on, he stops me.
“Can you wear it on the other arm?”
“Like the girl in your painting? The one without any bones?”
“The copy of Titian?”
“The one with the dog at her feet.”
If he is surprised that I remember the detail, he only lets it show for a second.
“Like that,” he says.
“You have to help me then,” I say. “I can’t do the clasp with this hand.”
After he closes it for me, he brings my hand up to his mouth and kisses it. I do not tell him that is the hand he kissed the night I fed him cherries, the night he turned my palm into a mouth and kissed the nest of veins in my wrist.
Instead I say, “Do you know that’s the first thing someone’s given me? Besides my parents and my grandmother and the whore?”
And I can tell that now he is the one who does not know what to say. I did not mean to be sad about it, or make him feel like the bracelet had too much meaning—I just wanted him to know the truth.
After a little while, he tells me, “I’m glad, then.”
He tells me the mother of his son was his piano teacher.
At first I do not understand why he is saying it and then I guess: he tells me as he sketches the locket on my wrist, which is like the family locket that the mother of his son has.
“I was seventeen and she was twenty-one when I began the affair,” he says. “Isn’t that rich? She got pregnant when I was nineteen. I wanted her because she was nearby. Because she was there.”
“You don’t mean that. You told me she had a beautiful neck.”
“That’s how it is when you’re seventeen,” he tells me. “Maybe it’s different for girls.”
“It’s not so different,” I say.
“I didn’t think about anything else.”
“That you might get her pregnant?”
“That. Or how we were two different kinds of people.”
“So that’s why you didn’t marry her.”
“No. I would marry her. I feel obligated to her.”
“Then why?”
“It’s complicated.”
I nod a little but I do not say anything. I want to say, No, if someone like me has a baby at nineteen, that is complicated. For you it was an inconvenience. But I do not. I know he means something else.
“People aren’t what they appear to be,” he says then. “Especially the ones who are supposed to be something. Who think they are something.”
“You mean people in society.”
“Yes.”
“Men like you.”
He waits and then says, “Yes, men like me.”
I do not know what he thinks I will say next, but I tell him, “Plenty of people aren’t what they appear to be. Some women leave their children. They have turning doors at some hospitals. Les tours.”
