Paris Red: A Novel, page 16
But when she does see me, all she does is watch. Take me in. Nothing changes in her face. The only thing that changes is her eyes, and the change is so small that anyone else would miss it. So I am the one who waves, who begins to walk toward her. Because it is what I came to do. Still, when we are within talking distance, she is the one who speaks first.
“Eh, frangine,” she says. “Did you come back looking for your old job?”
I don’t say anything, just shake my head and go on letting her look at me. But in a moment, I see her lift her chin a fraction, and I know she is waiting for me to answer.
So I say, “Ça va, Nise?” Make my voice as warm as I can.
“It goes.”
“Working hard as always, right?”
“Hardly working,” she tells me.
It is our old routine, and we look at each other for just a moment longer before falling in with the ribbon of workers making their way down the street to lunch. And it is not until we are walking that I realize there was another emotion I saw in her face just now. Not just anger and impatience, not just a challenge.
Puzzlement. And as soon as I have the word I know it is the only real response to my presence. Why?
“I wanted to see how you were,” I say. “Let’s get soup.”
“Suit yourself,” she tells me, but she drifts in a little closer to me, the way we used to walk together, shoulders almost touching.
The seller has potato soup today. And even though I do not know when I will get paid again, I do the only thing to do: I stand my friend to a bowl.
We sit on the stoop we always used to sit on. We have the bowls in our hands and do not look at each other, and for a moment it feels the way it used to. For a moment, weeks have not passed since I saw her last. But weeks have passed, nearly two months since I last tried to see her. So after a little bit, I say, “Are you still on Maître-Albert?”
“No.”
And when that is all she says, I think it might be all she is going to say, but then I hear her take a breath.
“I’m at Toinette’s now.”
“Did you go in on a room together?”
“I stay with her at her parents’. With her parents and little brother.”
“Is it all right?”
“It’s not bad. It’s almost like having a family. The grandmother lives there, too. She sleeps in an alcove by the stove.”
She waits a second, spooning soup from the bowl, and then she says, “Except it’s easier than having a family because I’m not related to any of them.”
We both laugh. And even as I am laughing, it hurts me. He and I laugh, we do, but I do not laugh with him the way I did with her. The way I do with her, even now. Even now.
“What’s really going on with you?” she asks then, straight out into the air above her bowl, still not looking at me. “Why the hell are you even here?”
I think about different things to say, different ways to say them. “I wanted to see how you are,” I tell her in the end. “I miss you.”
Yet even as I am saying the words, though they are the truest thing I can say, I know they are also a lie. Because if I could be, I would be in his studio on Rue Guyot. I would be there with him instead of sitting here with her.
I look at the side of her face, which I know almost as well as I know my own. When she turns toward me, though, I do not see the anger I saw before, or impatience, or even puzzlement. I just see tiredness around her eyes.
“Did he leave you? Is that why you’re here now?”
“No. Maybe. His father died. He’s away. I don’t know for how long.”
“Do you really think you’re anything to him?”
I let the words sink in. She has the right to say them—she knows him, knows the game he played. And she knows me. Above all she knows me.
“I think I’m something to him,” I say. “I’m not sure what.”
She watches me but does not say anything, and then she looks away from me. But there is nothing for her to say. It is not why I came, anyway—I did not come to talk about him. I came to see her. Whatever else is true, that is true. I came to see her, to sit on a step with her, shoulder to shoulder. To slurp soup.
“I think you’re bad luck,” Nise says then, still looking out into the air. “I think the only reason you’re here is that he’s gone.”
“I came once before. You were with Toinette. I felt bad about lying to you.”
Even from the side, I can see her shaking her head.
“You know, I never wanted him the way you did.”
“At the start you did.”
“Maybe. But not in the end. Not enough to lie for.”
“I didn’t want to lie.”
“But you did.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells me. “You’re not my concern.”
The two of us stand, take our empty bowls and spoons back to the marchande. After we hand them over, we begin making our way back to the courtyard.
“That was a stupid thing I said when I first saw you, wasn’t it?” Nise says just before we get to Baudon, and this time she does look at me. Even now, I still feel the space forming around me that I always felt when she looked at me. It is what her eyes do to me.
“No, I really thought, Here’s Louise. Maybe she’s come to get her old job back.”
“I’ll come back if I have to,” I tell her.
“No you won’t. You got away once. You’re smart enough to stay away. So stay away. We’re like smoke. Remember?”
It is what she and I always used to say about ourselves when we were out and about, meeting this one and that, scheming ways to get someone to buy us dinner: we were like smoke, always able to find a way in and a way out.
“You can’t come back here anyway,” she says then, and nods once at the courtyard. “You aren’t the same. You couldn’t take the job anymore.”
I do not say anything. I do not say anything about how little money I have left, or how just yesterday morning I was looking at my burnisher. I do not even bother to say, I can take it.
I hug her instead. She smells of metal, crocus martis suds, and her own scent, which is hair and skin and sweat. She smells the way I used to smell. Holding her, I think of all the times she pulled away from us—from him and me. I think of how I would have gone along with it all if she had permitted it. If she had wanted me, too.
Before she pulls away now, I say, “Je pense fort à toi.”
I think she might tell me she misses me, too—I think I can feel that in her—but she does not say anything. Just starts to walk into the Baudon courtyard. But just before she turns in, she looks back over her shoulder.
“I’m at Toinette’s. Don’t forget,” she calls.
And it is like a little light coming in at the bottom of a closed door.
The next day, to forget about breakfast, I go to Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare, La Maison du Pastel. He sent me here once with a list of colors, and I always wanted to come back. Today I feel better as soon as I see the yellow sign in the window.
PASTELS POUR ARTISTES
TENDRES
DEMI-DURS
DURS
ÉCOLIER
CONIQUE
The shop itself is filled with hundreds of drawers and wooden trays, all of which hold the pastels. But you do not have to bother anyone to open the drawers in order to see all the colors—they have a display of all their pastels hanging on a wall. Real bâtonnets glued to panels. Pastels in all their nuances at the center, surrounded by four oblong rings of colors, with the slenderest bâtonnets on the inside and the largest coniques on the outside.
That is the thing about pastels: the color is not hidden away inside a tube like paint is. So I am able to see:
the color of paving stones
the color of my room at midnight and at five in the morning
the blue of morning glories and the blue of delphiniums, as well as the greens of their leaves
the blue-green of his cedar
the bright red of the cherries he painted for the boy and the somber red of the cherries he painted for me
the color of coffee and then coffee with milk
the green of my boots
the color of clouds, which is not gray or blue but pale green
the pale gold of the sponges
the blackberry of his vest
the color of my own hair
Standing there, I think if I were going to buy colors to really use, I would need a variety—a rainbow or a bouquet. But the way the pastels seem prettiest to me is the way the shop has them arranged, color by color, with all shades side by side. You can see what black does to a color, and also white. And I know from the day I picked up bâtonnets for him that they have all the variations of a color arranged in a single drawer, in columns and rows, with the darkest at the bottom left and the lightest at the top. As if the colors were families, with the brooding ones on the bottom and the bright happy ones on top.
When the man behind the counter asks me if I have brought a list today for Monsieur, I shake my head no.
“No list today. I just wanted to see the colors,” I say, and he nods. He nods as if it is the most normal thing in the world, that someone like me—a girl with no money, in a mended dress—would come just to see his colors.
I turn to leave the store, but just as my eyes sweep over the trays one last time, I see a small wooden box on the counter, opened to show the pastels inside. When I step closer, I see they are all blues. Seven bâtonnets, seven shades of one blue family, all in a box that could fit in my palm.
“Bleu outremer,” the man tells me when he sees me looking.
As soon as I hear the name it makes me think of his box of pastels, which is nothing fine. No brass clasp on the box, and none of the bâtonnets have any paper left on them. They are broken and in pieces, some worn down to nub ends. In that shabby box he has not only shades of bleu outremer but also carmin, vert pomme, violet iris, jaune orangé brillant, rouge capucine, cadmium orangé, jaune d’or and vert forêt. Those were the colors he wanted to replenish, that he wrote down on the list he sent me to buy that day—the list I saved and tucked in the back of my sketchbook.
I do not say anything. I stand there and nod, trying to fix all of it in my mind. Not just the variety of blues, but the way they look in the box. Like tiny birds or jewels or flowers, I do not know which.
That is the picture I carry in my mind when I walk away. I do not feel hungry or scared when I think of those blues in a small brass-clasped box. Bits of sky that could fit in my hand.
From Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare I walk over to Rue Rambuteau, heading toward Rue Pirouette. I see the people around the marchande before I see her there on the trottoir, underneath an awning. She sits with four kettles around her and dishes up from the kettle right in front of her, the only one with the lid off. For ten sous you get a small piece of bread and a ladle of soup.
Still soupe du matin but so late that I get the bottom of the pot where the creamy broth has thickened with chunks of cabbage and leeks. At first I smelled the soup, so blindingly cabbage that it perfumed the air for a block, but now that I am standing here, eating, I cannot smell it. Can only feel the fullness in my mouth and the warmth going down.
Three workers in their aprons and caps stand there with me, slurping.
When I’m done, I hand my bowl to the old man sitting beside the marchande, who has been steadily washing bowls and spoons in a wooden bucket. I finish before any of the workmen.
The first meal of the day, and maybe the last. I should have taken my time eating it. Should have been more like the workmen, who did not eat as quickly as I did for fear of leaving most of their soup on their mustaches.
When I get back to my room La Dame Gaillard says someone came by to see me.
“Not Monsieur. Another man,” she says, and watches me.
“Did he leave a message?” I say, keeping my voice flat.
She does not saying anything but hands me a letter, one written on heavy paper in handwriting I think I recognize but cannot place. I do not know what to think, but I do not let anything show on my face. Do not open the envelope until I get to my room.
The letter is from Alfred Stevens.
Who has been asked to come by, who prepared this letter in case I was gone, who has been told I may be short on funds, who is glad to be trusted so much by his friend and, he hopes, by me—and who will, if I permit him, pay me my salary if I will be so kind as to come to his studio the following day.
Who is graciously mine.
The letter is so polite it does not seem real, but it is real, along with the repeated address of his studio on 18 Rue Taitbout, and another of his cards. I am so relieved after reading about the promised money that I feel light-headed. Then I think, no, I am light-headed because all I had to eat today was soup on the street because I thought I would do best to get by on lunch and dinner if it turned out I had to make my money last longer.
The letter banishes all those fears. Even though it is from Stevens, of course it is from him. And after I am done feeling woozy, that is what I think: whatever it is he is going through, he managed to think of me in the midst of it. And that matters as much as the promise of money. Even in my hunger I know that.
I put the letter away and take myself out to Raynal’s. For a second I think about ordering a chop but do not—it is best if I keep close to the seam until I see the money in my hand. Besides, I think I would shock le maître if I ordered anything other than soup.
Shock myself as well.
Stevens’s studio on Rue Taitbout is nothing like Rue Guyot.
For one thing, the studio is clean in a way Rue Guyot is not. There is no old pail beside the back door for trash, no rickety cupboard in the corner for wine, a loaf of bread and mismatched dishes. This studio is a regular place, with real furniture—not only the required divan but also plush sitting chairs, a fancy mirror on the wall, a table beside the door where visitors leave cards.
So Stevens is wealthy. But he is an entirely different kind of man, too.
As soon as I come in, he gives me a sealed envelope with money in it, “to put your mind at ease.” I do not know how much is in the envelope but it is heavy, and it takes me by surprise. I set it on the table beside the door with my shawl, and then he walks me through the room, showing me this thing and that: tiny, pretty knickknacks here and there, and some of the paintings on the walls. I know he would listen to anything I said—does listen when I say, how pretty—but I do not know what to say, so he has to do all the talking, and what he says is so filled with pleasantries I do not know what to latch on to.
And I do not know what to latch on to in his paintings. They are almost all portraits, almost all women, and everyone looks kind and dreamy. Even the one painting that shows some women crying together on a sofa seems pretty. Which does not make sense to me because if someone is weeping it should not be so attractive. So stylish. And if I take a step backwards and consider all the paintings, it seems as though everyone has their heads tilted at an angle. No one looks at you straight on, and if they do, their faces are hopeful, or amused over nothing, or rapt.
No one in the paintings is plain or ugly. No one looks like they work at Baudon.
And I remember what he said about Stevens’s paintings, how he told me Stevens tried to please people. But even the people in the paintings want to please. In just a little while of being in the rich, nice room, I feel odd and out of place.
“Perhaps one day you’ll do me the favor of sitting for a sketch or two,” Stevens tells me now.
“I’m sure I can sometime,” I say, but even as I am saying the words they feel false, as if they are not my words at all.
“Quand vous voulez, où vous voulez,” he says. “Comme vous voulez.”
He walks me to the table by the door then, helps me on with my shawl that I do not need any help with, and hands the envelope with the money in it to me for a second time.
“He was worried about you,” Stevens tells me. “You mean a great deal to him.”
“I worried about him, too,” I say. “He means a great deal to me.”
“I’m sure he’ll be in touch soon. He can’t stay away from his work for long.”
“I hope that’s true,” I say.
He kisses me then, once on each cheek, and in the moment when we are close like that, I kiss him, too. Except I kiss him on the lips. Lightly.
When he steps back, I can see in his eyes that I surprised him, which is what I wanted to do. He cannot help how he talks and how polite he is. But I know—I feel—that whatever kindness he shows me is genuine. Under all the graciousness I sense something real.
“Thank you for being his friend and mine,” I say. At first the words sound odd to me, more like Stevens than me. But they are my words and I mean them.
He bows then. He really does. And then I do not feel odd about the money or what I just said to him or what I think about his paintings. I understand something about him. Exactly what, I cannot say, but something.
We say goodbye.
It is not until I get back to my room on La Bruyère and open the envelope that I see it contains fifty francs, not the usual twenty-five I get each week. I do not know whether the money came from Stevens or him, but I think about the way Stevens said Quand vous voulez, où vous voulez. Comme vous voulez. How his face looked.
I cannot know for certain where the money came from, and it does not matter anyway. The only thing that matters is that I make it last.
Chère Victorine,
I hope you are well and taking care of yourself. Stevens said you came to see him, which is a relief. I have two more days of family business and then I should be free. If it is fine by you, I will come to see you in your little room. I want to rest on your bed.
