Paris Red: A Novel, page 7
While I’m on the bridge, a flock of starlings flies overhead, and I stop to watch. The flock turns this way and that, here and there, and if one bird strays from the edges of the group, it quickly comes back. I keep looking up in the sky even after they fly on.
Whatever it is in me that wants and wants—it is as big as the sky and keeps going.
He said just a little farther north is the Plaine de Monceaux, and that it still feels like a village there—allées lined by trees, farmland, goat paths. But to me even his studio seems like it should be in a village. A window with sixteen tiny panes of glass tops the door, and the door itself is made of rough, wood planks. Ivy overgrows it, and the entire place looks a little tumbled down. I noticed the other day, but now I see it even more clearly. And yet I can also understand why he picked this place. If you wanted to try to get something done, away from other people, this is the sort of spot you would want. I am trying hard to understand what it all means to him because I know that it does mean something.
Maybe that is how my face looks when he answers the door, as though I am still trying to take things in. Or maybe I just look as unsure as I feel. All I know is that he seems surprised to see me. Surprised, puzzled—something. But he should not be surprised, I think.
“Where is Denise?” he says when he shuts the door behind me. “Où est ta copine?”
“I didn’t tell her I was coming.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I was going to see my mother. To do some sewing.”
He looks at me after I say that, and he seems solemn. Serious. Maybe because I came on my own and it is no longer his fantasy of the brunette and the redhead. And yet I came on my own last night in the street, too, and he was glad. More than glad—I felt it from him.
I am not sure how to get back to the place we were on the street last night, when I ran to him and he was pleased to see me, but I know it has to do with acting as if everything is as it should be. So I walk further into his studio and then I know what to do.
I go to the divan and I lie down. Then I let myself look at him the same way I looked at everything I saw today when I walked up here—the streets, the birds, the sky. I let my eyes move over him as if I were looking at a plain or a river.
That is how we get back to the place we were last night on the street, when I ran beyond the dogleg of Maître-Albert, when he was a stranger from far away and not a stranger once I touched him.
He half sits, half lies on the divan and I am on top of him, my knees on either side. It feels odd at first to kiss him because no one else is here. I keep stopping because that is what I have always done, and then I realize I do not have to.
“What if she had come after you in the street last night and not me,” I say. I do not want to say Nise’s name, and I wonder if he will.
“She didn’t come.”
“If she had.”
“I don’t think you would have let her come alone,” he says. “I don’t think you would have ever let her come back down the street without you.”
“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t have let her come.”
“It counts more than you know.”
“What does?” I say.
“To be wanted like that.”
He kisses my breasts. First one and then the other. He holds each one in both hands, as if they were bottles he could tip back into his mouth.
After he tugs and sucks, he says, “I like how they feel in my mouth.”
I’m the one who unbuttons his shirt.
“I want to see,” I say. “I want to feel.”
“Feel away,” he tells me.
The forearms that I have held on to as we walked—they are covered with golden brown hair. His chest is like that, too. The hair is soft and silky, and again I smell the clove and orange scent I smelled the one night when we walked.
He must use cologne. This time the smell does not remind me of my mother.
He takes off my boots for me. He takes them off so I can take off my stockings, so I can be bare-legged on his lap.
“Those are my whore boots,” I tell him. “A whore gave them to me.”
“Who was she?”
“Someone my mother sewed for. La Belle Normande.”
“Was she grand?”
“I thought so,” I say.
“Lift up,” he says then.
He keeps one arm around me and undoes his trousers with the other hand. Frees himself.
When I sit back down it is just my petticoat between us.
There is a place at the base of his throat where the skin is very pale. It is a tiny indentation just above the breastbone and between the collarbones, a little scooped-out place that looks vulnerable.
Men look more vulnerable than women do when they are naked, I think. Or maybe I just think that because I know what my own body looks like.
When I look between his legs he does not look vulnerable. Does not look like anything but himself.
I would have shared him with Nise. And if she wanted it, I would have touched her, too. It could have been the three of us, just like he always said.
But in the end he feeds the one whose mouth is open widest, who gets there first. That is what I tell myself.
He picks the hungriest one.
We stay together, the two of us on that narrow divan, until one or two in the morning, until he says, “I hate to, but I have to go.”
He does not say the word home, but I know that is what he means.
“Stay here,” he says. “I’d like to think of you staying here.”
When I do not answer, he asks, “What is it?”
“I have to work tomorrow.”
“Don’t go.”
“And then what,” I say.
“There are other ways to earn money.”
Before I would have said, What would you know about it? But I do not say that now. Instead I just tell him, “It’s not that easy.”
“I’ll help you. Decide tomorrow. I’ll come first thing.”
I shake my head no, but I know I do not mean it because I do not stand up. I lie back on the divan, curl up under the blanket.
“Will you be all right here?”
“Yes. If you come back in the morning,” I say.
“I’ll be back before it’s light.”
He kisses me and then he is gone.
The whole time I am deciding to stay, it feels wrong, as if it is a foolish decision. I could have stood up, pulled on my dress and boots. Could have asked him for money to get home—he would have given it to me. But I did not do any of those things. Instead I let him decide for me.
The room seems cavernous with him gone. I feel some kind of fear flash through me for a moment—but there is no running after him this time. No running to find him because I’m half-dressed and I don’t know which way he went.
So instead of doing anything, I just go still. I go on lying on the divan, letting my eyes move over everything in the room. I did not rush to pull on my dress and boots because I wanted to keep lying here. I thought I wanted him to stay, I thought it was just wanting the moment to go on, but now that he is gone, I see it is also something about being in this room and not going back to Maître-Albert. About breaking that life in two. I needed a place to be and he saw that.
Even without him in it, the room is him. I can be close to him without being with him. When that thought comes to me, I let myself close my eyes. If he were here I would never be able to think over things, but now I can. At first I think about the room on Maître-Albert and how I do not want there to be any hurt feelings, but I know there will be. I almost cannot stand to think of Nise there, alone. But she will come up with a way to explain it to herself. She will worry and then she will come up with the truth or a made-up story, and it will have to do.
I decide that and then I make myself let the thoughts go.
Instead I think about the ways he touched me, going back through each moment in my mind, playing it over and over. It is how I make sense of my feelings, of what just happened, but it works the way it always does: if I remember things right, it is almost as if I can feel the touch again. As if I have the feelings all over again.
I keep doing that until I remember the way he looked up at me from between my legs. His mouth was soft and scratchy at the same time because of the beard. I think of that, and of things he said. I think of it until I get sleepy, and then I let myself sleep.
When I wake up things are not even gray—they are still black with only lighter black coming through the window. So I wrap myself up in the blanket, light a candle and walk around, looking at the paintings he has hanging. What I see is:
A painting of a boy in a red hat with a bunch of cherries on a ledge. The cherries are wrapped in green paper, and some are falling off the edge. Even in the dim light I can see the boy’s hat is a different color than the cherries. The hat is so brilliant it looks like a sun, or maybe I think that because the boy is fair and blonde, and his whole face is pale and shining.
The next painting is a man in a top hat with a glass beside him. He is wrapped in a cloak, and a bottle lies on its side at his feet. The man extends one leg, as if he were some kind of dancer, but that cannot be true. The man is not a dancer. That is not the feeling of the picture at all. But I do not know what the feeling of the painting is. The last painting was sunny, filled with gold and red, but this painting is dark. Just dark.
The next painting shows two old people, the man seated and the woman standing alongside. She keeps one hand in a basket of yarn, and he keeps one hand tucked inside his coat and the other clenched tight on the arm of the chair. The woman’s eyes are downcast, not seeing. Yet you can tell from her face she is suffering. He looks out and seems strict. Disapproving.
The painting beside the one of the old people is much bigger. A man sits sideways, head wrapped in a white scarf, playing a guitar. He must be singing because his mouth is open. From its size, I know it must be important, but I do not know why.
The painting I look at next is probably half the size of the last, and yet it shows a crowd of people, some seated, some standing, all under trees in a park. The men are in top hats and the women in fancy dresses. This painting is dark, too, but here and there are patches of color: the pale gray of men’s pants, the pink-gold ladies’ gowns, a blue ribbon holding a bonnet. I look and I look, but hardly anything about the painting seems real. Only one woman has a complete face with eyes and eyebrows, a nose and a mouth—most of the rest have just hints of faces. And though the men’s faces are more precise, only one man looks friendly in the entire sea of faces.
I look around the studio and think I have seen everything he has displayed, but then I see a couple of canvases he has sitting on a cupboard at the back, leaning and facing the wall. When I turn them around, I see both are paintings of women, but there is nothing similar about them. One shows a woman in an enormous white dress with gray stripes on it. The woman holds a black fan, and it seems she is sitting on the divan in the back of the studio. But there is something wrong with the picture, or with the woman herself. Her one hand is too big, her foot sticks out from her skirt, and her face seems flat and unmoving. She looks like a frightening doll. Her dark, flat eyes bother me, so I turn the painting back to face the wall.
So maybe it is just the relief when I look at the other painting, but I know as soon as I see it that it is my favorite of all. A woman in a white and gold blouse stands, resting her head against one hand, the other hand at her hip. Her skin is a darker gold than her blouse, and she has brownish-black hair and a white cigarette in her mouth. A white horse stands behind her, looking on, and he is patient-looking, the way the horse with the checkered sacks on Rue des Marmousets always is. And even though I like the white horse, of course I know it is the woman who makes the painting beautiful. I like the gold of her skin and blouse, and the deep red of her skirt, but what I like especially is her dark, messy hair and her face. I look at her face for a long time, and I think it is a little like looking at the faces of women at Baudon. It is a face I feel like I almost could know. And I think this is the painting he should have showed to Nise if he wanted her to understand how he felt about us, if he wanted the three of us to stay together.
It takes me a long time to look at just those seven paintings, and by the last I cannot look anymore. It is hard to take them in and to try to see whatever it is he wanted someone to see. I want to understand the paintings because he made them, but also because I do not understand how anyone can make daubs of color look like something other than what they are. How can you put paint on a canvas and make it look like a person’s face or a fold of cloth or a piece of fruit? How can one person’s face look like the face of a friend and another like an ugly doll?
I understood the funny little drawings of cats he showed us the first day because they were simple, lines and patches of shadow. But these paintings are not simple, and I do not know what he wants me to feel about the people in the pictures. The little boy with the cherries is pleasant and the old people seem sad, but I do not have any kind of feeling about the man with the bottle or the singer or any of the people in the park, under the trees. And yet I know there is something I should feel.
I am walking around the room, still wrapped in the blanket, trying to decide if I should lie down again, when I pass by the table by the front door and see the coins. He must have put the coins on the table as he left. Twenty francs. Not much to him but a ransom to me. No, not a ransom—but two weeks’ wages.
And that is when I know he left the coins for me. I know he left them for me, or at least meant for me to see them. And I know I will not take them.
But seeing them makes me decide. In a couple of minutes I am dressed, and in another couple of minutes I ease the door open and look out at the half-light of the courtyard. I pull the door closed behind me so it latches, so I cannot change my mind. But I would not change my mind because whatever uneasiness I started to feel when I saw the money is now a panic about the time and the quartier and how long it will take me to walk home and get my work apron and my burnisher and make it to Baudon.
Because whatever he meant when he left the coins and whatever possible kindness it sprang from, it has some kind of opposite effect on me. There may be other ways to earn money but I know only one: brunisseuse. And twenty francs are a handsome gift but that is exactly what they are: a gift. Not a wage.
So I hurry into the morning and onto the streets that are perfect and empty and filled with a kind of coolness you never feel except first thing. I do not let myself think about how he touched me or the things he said, I do not let myself think about the way he uses color in the paintings to make everything from a person to an animal to a feeling, and I do not think about the money he left on the table, there for the taking. I just walk as quickly as I can in the cool down Malesherbes and Saint-Honoré and down to the river and then back home.
To my apron and my bloodstone.
I get to Baudon late.
When I see Nise across the room she smiles at me, but it is a wan smile and I feel bad. When I get to go by her table, though, all she says is, “Late night?”
“That depends,” I say.
And she smiles again but she does not say anything else. There is no time anyway.
At lunch she still does not say anything when we go out onto the street to buy bread and cheese. After a little while of the silence, I understand that she knows everything, so I say, “I thought it would be the three of us together. You and me and him.”
“I never did.”
“Didn’t you want to be with him?”
“At first. But not like that. Not with you there.”
I know it is only the truth. But something snaps shut in me when she says it. Because I would have been with him and her. Because of the day she brushed my hair. Because I have always been a little in love with her faraway eyes.
“We don’t need him,” she says. “Don’t you see that? Il nous perturbe.”
I shake my head yes because I know she is right—he is disturbing us. But what exactly do I have that cannot be disturbed? The room on Maître-Albert? A life with no money in my pocket?
I want him to disturb me. That is the thing I want to tell Nise. But when I see her face I do not say anything. She would not be able to hear me anyway.
After lunch Huberty tells me that I will not get paid for the morning.
“I was only half an hour late,” I say.
“That’s the penalty,” he says. “You know that.”
I do know—it was part of why I panicked this morning when I was up on Rue Guyot. But I thought if I just came in, if I came in close to the time, it would somehow work out.
“Why did I bother to come in then?” I say.
“You came in to keep your job.”
When he sees my face, he shakes his head. “It’s not my rule,” he tells me.
Which I know. It is not up to him—it is just the way the shop runs. I try to take it in stride, try to just go back to smoothing out the lines of silver I made with the first pass of the burnisher. I focus on the thing underneath my fingers and when I find myself thinking of anything, I push it away the way I do the silver.
And I calm down. I do. At least it feels that way to me. Except nothing feels right. Women’s voices cascade around me but I cannot really hear them, and something inside me keeps getting bigger. It makes me feel dizzy.
I stop working on a plate. I wrap my burnisher up in its cloth and shove the whole thing in my apron pocket. The front of my apron is wet but I do not take it off—I just keep my hand on the bundle in my pocket and I walk toward the side pulley-door.
