Paris Red: A Novel, page 17
E~
That is the note he sends. Not a word about his father’s death, not a word about his loss. But it is not even the words that matter so much but what he draws on the page, which is a sheet of paper out of his carnet.
On the bottom, beneath his initial, he has drawn two figures, a man and a woman on a divan. You can only see her from behind, her back and ass. She is on top, on her knees, leaning over a little, riding the man. He has his hands on her ass cheeks, and because she is leaning forward a little, you can see where he goes up into her. The base of his cock rises up into her.
Her hair is coiled the way mine is, and you can see a bit of his beard as he lies back on the divan. But I really know it is the two of us because he has made the bottom of my feet dirty and placed a crosshatched little scar on his cock as it rises up into me.
When he comes to my room he does exactly what he said he would do: he lies down in his shirt and pants on my bed.
“I need to sleep,” he says.
“Sleep,” I say.
“Lie down in your chemise next to me.”
So I get undressed and lie beside him. I think I will not sleep but I do. And I do not know how long we sleep, but I wake up when I hear him shifting on the bed.
“Can you go and get us something to eat?” he says.
So I get up and put on my stays and my dress. When I am putting on my boots he gestures to the pile of coins he pulled from his pockets before he lay down. “Take some money,” he says.
“I don’t need it,” I say. “You paid me.”
“Don’t be silly. Take it.”
So I take his money, and I go out and buy bread and cheese and wine and an apple tart.
But when I get back, he is not lying on my bed, resting. He stands at the table, my watercolor pictures spread out in front of him. The messy morning glories and the blobs of lilacs. My blue-skinned portrait.
He has to look back over his shoulder to see me, and he stays like that for a long time. Bare-chested, in just his pants, holding the portrait and looking at me.
Which I let him do for a moment, and then I come all the way into the room with the basket of food.
“Would you ever have shown these to me?” he asks.
“Why would I?”
“Where did the colors come from?”
“They were old tubes,” I say. “You already had them in the trash.”
“No. Where did you get the idea for the colors?”
And I know what he means, I do, but the answer is too simple, so at first I think I should keep it to myself.
But I am tired of keeping things to myself.
“They were the colors I had,” I say. “So I used them. And I painted the thing I could see. Which was me. In the mirror.”
“That?” he says, and nods at the small mirror I still have propped on the table.
I nod. But he does not say anything. Just goes on looking at the paper, at my blue skin and green hair. And in another moment he touches something on the paper.
“How did you know to do this?”
When I go and stand beside him, I see what his finger is touching. My blue shoulder, which is a circle on top of the cylinder that is my arm, a circle at the end of the cross of my collarbone. My breasts are two more circles, my belly an egg.
“Because some of your sketches are like that,” I say. “People’s heads are circles and their arms are tubes. That’s what it looks like to me.”
He holds the portrait a moment longer, and then he props it with the others against the wall, there on the tabletop. Then he takes the basket from my hand and puts it on the table.
“I’ll get you real watercolor paints,” he says. “If you want them.”
And the whole thing is so kind I cannot stand it. He is so kind I cannot stand it.
So I do not answer. Instead I start taking the food out of the basket and setting the table. But when I pull the tart out of the basket, I look at him and say, “I don’t want new tubes. Just half-used ones. I want to be able to ruin them. I want things you don’t want any more. But maybe the right kind of paper.”
And then I look away. Because even to me my voice sounds funny, tight and tinny.
But it is not just the offer of the paint that upsets me. It is everything. The past days of him being away, of not having a place to go. The worrying over money. All of it.
I give him credit: he does not say anything else. Does not make me say anything else about my blue and green paintings. Does not ask me what I want.
He just sits down on the bed and I sit on the chair. And we begin to eat.
Only when we are done with nearly all of the bread do I finally get to tell him I am sorry his father died.
“He had a stroke years ago. He was partially paralyzed,” he says. “It was a blessing.”
“Still.”
“Yes, still,” he says.
There is something in his voice that lets me know he does not want me to say anything else about it. Or maybe the two of us are just better at being silent together in a room than talking. It is what we are used to. But in a little while, he tells me, “I’m glad you went to see Stevens. I worried about you.”
“It was fine,” I say.
“He asked me again if you’d sit for him.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe after you finish what you’re working on.”
“You won’t be free then, either. I have plans for something new. Another nude.”
“Like this one?”
“Different. Seated, with other figures. Two women, two men. Une partie carrée.”
“We’re all nude? The four of us?”
“Just you.”
I want to say it sounds a little like him and Nise and me, but I do not want to talk about who the second man might be. Before I can say anything, though, he says, “Now, tell me if you liked the drawing I sent you.”
“I liked it.”
He brushes the crumbs from his beard and then reaches for me. Pulls me to him.
“Good,” he says, and then he asks me what I want done, and how, and where.
The words are so similar to what Stevens said the other day in his studio that I wonder if they have talked. I wonder and then decide I do not care.
And I tell him what I want.
In the end he decides my knee has to come down.
All the sketches he has done so far feature a reclining woman with one leg bent at the knee.
Now he says it is wrong.
“It’s too coy,” he tells me. “Either it’s a nude or it’s not.”
So he has me extend both legs straight out on the divan. Cross the back ankle over the front. And without even thinking, I slip my one hand over the V between my thighs.
“No,” he tells me. “You can’t make a shield of your hand. Let me see each of your fingers.”
“Aren’t I supposed to be hiding it?” I say.
“No. As soon as you put your hand there it calls attention.”
“And that’s what you want? To call attention?”
“That’s what I want. As if you’re about to touch yourself.”
So I move my hand again. But because I know if he wants it to look real, I need to go to that place. I slip my fingers down and touch myself, but I never stop looking at him, and he never stops looking at me.
In a little while I say, “Now someone interrupts me. Someone stops me.”
And I move my hand the last time. Away from the wetness but my hand still there. I do not know what kind of shape my fingers take against my thigh, but at least it is real. At least the real thing shows on my face.
“Ça y est,” he says.
And I hold the pose.
I am nearly dressed when he tells me the thing is finished.
“It’s time to walk away,” he says, and stands back, looking. “Not a single brushstroke more.”
When I hear that, I think I will get to see it. I think I will finish buttoning my boots and will walk over to the canvas and see it from the other side, the side that has been hidden from me.
And even though I do not say anything, he must feel it from me because he tells me, “The next time you come, I’ll show it to you. Je te promets.”
I know there is no point asking then.
“And I won’t need you tomorrow,” he says. “I’m sure you’ll be glad for a day to yourself.”
It is the polite thing, I know, to tell me how I will benefit from a day off. But polite or not, he is still the one who decides if I can look or not, who can send me away for a day.
So I say, “You’re the one who looks tired. Are you going to rest?”
“Maybe. I wish I could sleep. But I can’t turn off my mind right now.”
And that is when I know that tomorrow he will not be at home sleeping or resting, or even having lunch with his son and the mother of his son. He will be here, studying the canvas, walking away from it and walking back to it. Which he often does even when I am here. But tomorrow he will be free to do it as much as he pleases with no one watching.
Yet why shouldn’t he? The painting is his. It is of me, but it belongs to him. Not just because the whole studio belongs to him—because it is his work. He is the one who agonizes over it, who cannot sleep because of it. And while I am still thinking that, thinking of what all of it means to him, he says the next thing, which breaks me out of my thoughts.
“You can go and see Stevens if you like,” he tells me. “You could sit for him. He’d be grateful.”
I wait a moment and then I say, “Why? Why would he be grateful?”
“I think he needs something to jolt him.”
“Why does he need to be jolted?”
“You could bring him down from that shelf of politeness where he lives.”
I look at him but he does not see. He is cleaning up for the day and does not see me looking, and he does not see me shake my head.
“C’est drôle,” I say. And when he still does not look up at me, I say, “Tu sais? C’est drôle.”
“What’s funny?”
“All of it.”
“All of what?”
“He’s your friend but you talk about him like he’s a corpse,” I say. “You tell me I have the day off, but you also fill it for me. C’est drôle.”
I look at him for a moment to make sure he is watching me, and when I see that he is, I look away. He can be the one to read my face this time. He can look for subtle changes, hidden signs. Or maybe I look away because I do not want to read his face. I do not know why he wants to send me to sit for Stevens, or what he thinks I could do for his friend.
“You can go see Stevens or not,” he says. “It’s entirely your choice.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is.”
I wonder then if he feels responsible for me. Maybe he knows I am sometimes at loose ends when I do not come to sit for him. Maybe he does not want to be the only one responsible for me. Perhaps that is why he wants to send me to his friend: so he is not the only one I depend on.
All I know is his words make me feel odd. I do not know if they are a suggestion or a request. Or more.
“Just for the day, though,” he tells me. “You know I have plans for you.”
When he says that I search his face for other clues, but I see nothing—nothing except affection and tiredness. So I push my thoughts away. Do my best to take his words at their face value. I can go and see Stevens. I am free to go if I like.
Still, when we kiss goodbye, there is the slight veil between us that is sometimes there. It disappears when we lie together, or when he is drawing or painting me, or when we are in my room together or out walking on the boulevards. It was gone just this afternoon when I lay with my hand spanning my sex, my fingers damp with my own wetness.
But it is here now between us, and it is like the filmy panels Moulin had on the roof panes in his studio that let light through but blocked it, too. The veil is here between us because of the talk about Stevens, but also because we are saying goodbye. Because he has already moved on to the next part of his day. Because he is lost in thought about the painting and other pieces of his life I do not know about.
Yet I know there is a part of me that I keep separate from him, too. And just now when he told me, You could go and see Stevens, I closed off a part of myself. Because I did not understand what his words meant. Because it seemed he wanted to loan me to his friend. And I shut myself down. I shut a part of myself down.
So the veil is there because of me, too.
When I walk home I turn all of it over in my mind, and then I tell myself to stop. I can decide tomorrow about going to see Stevens. I do not have to decide today what his words meant, or what I am willing for them to mean.
Instead I tell myself to think about how I do not know what it means to care about a thing as much as he cares about what he does in his studio. I know what it is to love people, but I do not know what it means to love a thing that way.
He has told me I am his best model, son modèle de prédilection, but I know he says it because I am the thing he wants to paint, not because he cares about me. If he painted only what he cared about, he would paint the mother of his son, to whom he feels bound, or his son, whom he loves. And maybe he does paint them. But if care is measured in time, he cares as much about what happens in his studio as he cares about the mother of his son and his son. And that is the thing that I cannot get inside: what it must be like to love something—a thing—so much.
I did not love what I did at Baudon. I liked parts of it, and I was good enough at it, but that was all. And my father, a ciseleur with his own tools, was always content to be at home with my mother, or drinking with his friends. He did not go around thinking about his job when he was away from it. And my mother sewed because she could, because it was the one thing she knew she could earn money doing.
It is not until I turn onto Rue de Clichy and see the sky-blue Imprimerie sign painted on the side of the building that I realize there is one thing that I love. Not a person but a thing.
I love colors.
The blue of my dress, the green of my boots, the purple and greens of flowers and leaves—even the black of the ribbon I stole from his studio.
Maybe I do not know what it is like to care about something as much as he does, but I do know something. When I fall in love with a color, I see it everywhere, and I cannot stop thinking about it. I think about the color so much that not only can I see it almost everywhere I look, but I also carry the idea of the color in my mind and think about it even when I do not see it anywhere.
Right now I am in love with the deep pinkish-red of beets, which is also the color of raspberries but not the red of strawberries.
It is the color of some jams, the stone in his tie pin, and the sign for Maison Idoux, Magasin de Vins, on Rue Blanche.
It is violet fuchsia at Maison du Pastel, the deepest color of that family of bâtonnets.
And for a moment I think it is another thing he has given me, this love of color. He talks about it so much—the importance of one color next to another, or how a painting can need a certain hue, and it does not matter if it comes in the form of a glove or a shawl, as long as it is there.
And then I think no, that is all wrong. He did not give me colors or the love of color. They were part of me before I ever met him.
In the scraps of fabrics and ribbons my mother had lying about from her sewing. In the dresses and coats of La Belle Normande. In the morning glories Nise’s mother grew up strings outside her kitchen window. Even in the labels of boxes of candles when Nise and I lived in our tiny room on Maître-Albert. In my green boots and copper scarf from the whore, which I loved because they were gifts, and no one had ever given me any before, but which I mostly loved because they were colors. Verte émeraude et cuivré.
Maybe he gave me the words for colors and the reasons for the importance of colors, and maybe he even made me aware of my love. But he was not the first to give me colors. They were in me all along.
When I wake up in the morning, I think for a moment about taking my carnet and going somewhere to sketch. But I do take my carnet with me because of course I know where I am going.
To Rue Taitbout.
When I get there, though, I do not go directly up to the door of number 18—I walk past.
The truth is it was just a short walk down here from my room on La Bruyère. The truth is I get here so quickly I do not have enough time to think or get ready in my mind. So I walk all the way down to Boulevard des Italiens and then up Rue Laffitte and over Rue de la Victoire.
Because even though he told me to go and see Stevens, something about it confuses me. It seems wrong. Disloyal somehow. But as I am walking on Rue de la Victoire, something comes to me.
I am a modèle de profession, and that is my profession: to pose for artists.
I do not know exactly why he sent me to his friend, or what he thinks I can do to jolt Stevens, but it does not matter. He told me I could go and see Stevens if I liked, and I am free to choose to do so.
So I walk back to Rue Taitbout because I choose to. I choose to go to the studio of the painter Alfred Stevens.
I do not know who is more nervous, Stevens or me.
He greets me graciously, even warmly, but I can see from his face he has no idea why I am there. And that is when I realize he did not talk to Stevens about it beforehand, that it really was just an idea he proposed yesterday. Not a request at all.
When it comes time to tell Stevens why I am there, all the words I think of seem awkward. So I just decide to say things plainly.
“He told me I might come and see you today,” I say. “I have the day free.”
“That’s kind of both you and him.”
“I’d be happy to sit for you if you like.”
“Right now?”
“If you’d like,” I say. “Or maybe some other day.”
