Paris Red: A Novel, page 8
That is how I leave.
I am out in the courtyard, ready to walk out onto Rue Pastourelle, when I hear her behind me.
“Where are you going?” Nise calls.
So I stop. Turn around.
“To his studio,” I say.
“What are you going to do?”
“Something. Anything.”
I have four francs and twenty sous in my pocket. My money, not his. I give the francs to her. “Take it for the room,” I say.
It is not enough to help—it is just my half of the week’s rent on the room. But it is what I have.
“What will you do?”
“He’ll help me,” I say. “He said he would.”
“Why would you trust him? We were just a game to him. Don’t you see that?”
“It’s not like that,” I say. “It’s not like Moulin’s.”
We watch each other then. And I feel the thing I always feel when she looks at me. I feel the space her eyes create. I feel the air around my body.
“It would have been the way it always is,” I tell. “Except he would have been there with us. He would have loved us both.”
“You’re a fool,” she says, and she shakes her head at me. She shakes her head and shakes her head, and I know she is so angry with me she cannot speak. But when I go to hug her, she lets me. And that is how we say goodbye. Just two girls in aprons, hugging on the street.
Nothing anyone would want a picture of.
I change out of my work dress and then pack my things, if you can call it that. I get my other dress, my two chemises, my underthings, my washcloth and towel, pillow, and the rags for my curse. My sketchpad and green boots. I take the scarf from the whore and the two pillowcases out of my trunk but I leave the trunk. Maybe Nise can sell it. I know I cannot carry it. I put everything in the pillowcases.
It takes me about as long to pack as it takes to climb the stairs to our room. That is how light I travel.
He is working when I get there. This time he is not surprised to see me, but I can see him taking all of it in: the bundles I am carrying, the breathless way I know I must look. I watch it all pass over his face. It makes me nervous but in a second I see he is not angry. Concerned. Annoyed, even. But not really angry.
“Did you and Nise have a falling-out?” is what he says.
I want to tell him, no, you were wrong, she and I are still friends. But I do not know if we are. I do know it is private, between Nise and me. So I just say, “I need to find a place to stay. Will you help me?”
“I came here to help you this morning.”
When he says that I understand he is not upset with me because I showed up with my things, breathless—he is upset because I left.
“I saw your money,” I say.
“I thought it would help you stay.”
“But you didn’t stay. So I told myself, Go to work. Just go to work.”
And though I don’t intend to, I end up telling him about Huberty and getting docked for the morning. About walking out of the shop. The whole day comes out.
“It’s still there,” he says when I am done. “Take it.”
I go to the table and see the same thing I saw this morning. The coins still in the same place, just where I left them. Where he left them for me. But this time I do not hesitate. I pick up the money with both hands.
“I need this,” I say.
And I think of the francs I gave to Nise and the room on Maître-Albert, and Huberty telling me I would not get paid for the morning, and I think I may just break down. But I do not. And I do not say anything else. I just stand there with his money in my hands.
He does not say anything and he does not come close. He stands still. I think he knows if he came close I would break.
I take the money from him just like I took his tongue on mine that one night. I take what he gives.
We’re lying on the divan. He touches me, fingers me, and I touch him, too. I keep my hand around him.
“Can I tell you the truth about something?” he asks. He keeps his fingers in me as he says it, so I go on touching him, too.
“Yes.”
“I already have one son I don’t claim. I don’t want to impregnate you.”
I do not say anything but I do not have to. He can feel everything in me.
“Do you know things you can do?”
“Yes.”
And I do know. Julie told me, and women talked about it all the time in the shop. Single girls and married women—it did not matter. Everyone knew some kind of method.
“I’ll do something,” I say.
“Can I go back here now?” he asks, and moves one of his fingers.
“Yes.”
He touches the tight knot of me and slips his finger inside. And that is how it is for a while: I do not know where his fingers will go next, so I close my eyes. Let him play.
But he has only my wetness on him when he moves into me, and he goes in all at once. It hurts so much I yell for him to stop. I use the polite form. That is what comes out—Arrêtez.
So he does. He does not pull out of me—he just stops moving. I can feel everything beating in that place between us.
He kisses my shoulder blades, touches the sides of my breasts. I try to let everything go slack. Then I am more used to it. More used to the fullness there.
“Now,” I say. “Now you can.”
And he begins to move again.
After, I am lying on the divan and he stands beside me. I see one tiny piece of shit clinging to him, clinging to his cock, right at the head. It embarrasses me, though what do I expect. He looks down and sees it, too. Which shames me more.
But he calmly picks it off and then walks to the basin to wash.
“C’est pas grave,” he tells me. “Men think their cocks are swords anyway. It’s part of doing battle.”
Modèle de profession—that is what he says I am. Or that is what we are going to call me as I stand there, putting on my garter.
“It saves me the trouble of going to Pigalle for a model,” he says. “Or to Couture with his cast of characters.”
“What do you want me to do?” I say.
“Nothing. Do what you usually do.”
“Like this?”
“You don’t have to look at me,” he says.
So I look down and fiddle with the metal clip and the band. I keep my head lowered and when I get tired of pushing at my stocking, I let my fingers relax and just keep them there, the tips tucked under the band above my knee.
I know the tops of my breasts are showing, pushed up by my stays, but when I go to tuck my nipple behind the edge of the fabric, he tells me not to.
“I need that bit,” he says.
It all takes longer than the photographs at Moulin’s, and that is the hardest part. How long it takes, and keeping still, especially my neck. Every once in a while I push my shoulders down in such a way that I do not change position—I just push with my muscles and then relax again. It must not change anything because he does not tell me to stop.
At first my mind keeps wandering but after a while, everything in me goes blank. I stand there with my head down and my hands at my knee, fingers tucked in the band of the garter. It is not comfortable, really, but it is somehow peaceful. When do you ever stand somewhere, not doing anything? Even when you wait for a train, you never stand totally still—you pace, you check, you look around.
Now I stand perfectly still except for pushing down my shoulder muscles and blinking. And it calms me.
I do not know how much time goes by. He does not talk and neither do I. I go off into my own self, and with my head down, I cannot even see him. It is like being away from him. As if I have left him somewhere. Yesterday there was so much give-and-take between us, and now that stops. Or it stops in one way, and in another way it goes on. Because of course I can feel him there, looking at me. Studying me.
“All right,” he says then, and his voice sounds so peaceful I think he must have felt it, too. The relief at being silent, at not having to fill the air with words.
When he shows the pastel to me, I do not say anything. Maybe it is the not speaking, or maybe it is that I am still coming back from wherever I went in my head. But then I think no, it is seeing what he has drawn that does it. Even though the drawing does not show all of my face, it is clearly me. But it is also different from what I thought it would be. I have never seen my head bent, or the part in my hair, but even that is not what I mean. Somehow the drawing changes my picture of who I am.
“Is that really what I look like?”
“At this moment,” he says. “To me.”
I do not know how to talk about what I see, so I say, “Why did you make my stocking blue?”
“Because your hair is russet. Because the wall is yellow,” he says. “Because white has blue in it anyway.”
I am not sure I understand what he means, but it makes me think back to the day he added the reflection in the window on my drawing. That day he turned white paper into glass with gray pencil strokes. Still, all I really know is the blue stocking is maybe the prettiest thing in the drawing. Almost as pretty as the rounded tops of my breasts.
“Will you do anything else to it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you do anything to finish it?”
“Add a background to it.”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all. It’s right from the start or it’s shit.”
“And my stocking is blue because my nipple’s pink.”
“The stocking is blue because your nipple is peach,” he says, and then he puts the drawing down.
Peach, pink—I take off my stays so he can touch me. So I can feel his mouth on the color.
In the daylight, I notice something about him I did not see before.
Here and there on his cheeks, at the edge of his beard, I can see small scars—small pitted places. I cannot tell if the scarring gets worse because further down his beard is too thick.
He sees me looking so I say, “It’s not bad. I don’t know why you cover it up.”
I tell him the tiny places remind me of a girl from Baudon. Everyone called her La Grêlée, the pockmarked one.
“She had a tiny patch on each cheek that looked as if it had been struck by hail. But it added something to her face.”
“The name,” he says. “Didn’t she mind it?”
“She didn’t seem to. She was still pretty.”
“Even with the pocks?”
“You noticed the marks,” I say. “But once you noticed, you realized you still thought she was pretty.”
He looks at me when I say that, but I cannot explain it any better. I do not compare it to Nise’s eyes, but to me it is the same. The flaw in what is pretty makes it more interesting.
Still, I think he would understand. After all, he fell a little in love with Nise, too.
After I dress for the second time that day, I ask him about the paintings he has hanging on the walls of the studio.
“That was my assistant,” he said, looking at the painting of the blond boy with the cherries. “And those are my parents,” he says of the old couple.
“Is your mother sad?”
“I would say. In some ways her life hasn’t been easy,” he tells me.
I want to ask him why, but he goes on to the next paintings, the man with the bottle at his feet and the one playing the guitar, singing.
“Here is a failure,” he says of the man in a cape with the bottle at his feet. “And this is a success,” he says of the singer with the guitar.
“Why is one a failure and one a success?”
“Because this one is doused in the brown sauce I learned to paint with. Because I was too stupid to leave it behind.”
He stands looking at the man with the cape and the bottle, studying the dark canvas, and then he says, “It’s like seeing into a tomb, isn’t it?”
I do not want to agree too much, but I also know I should not lie. Not about his paintings.
“It’s very dark,” I say, and nod at the painting.
“What else?”
“His foot seems odd,” I say. “I don’t know what to make of him.”
“He’s not a type you’ve seen in the street?”
“No.”
“This one was at least a success,” he says, and nods at the painting of the singer. “Everyone saw the influence of the Spaniards in it.”
“Is he Spanish then?” I say. “The guitar player?”
“If Montmartre were in Spain,” he tells me.
I want to ask him about the paintings of the two women on the table, the ones turned to face the wall, but I do not know if I should admit I turned them right way around. I think I should—I think I should just tell him the truth—but then I remember the strange doll’s face of the woman in the white dress, and I do not know what I would say about her. So I walk over and stand in front of the painting of the crowd of people under the trees.
“Who are they?”
“The satin crowd at the Tuileries.”
Of course it is easier to see more in the daylight, and now I know I was wrong about some of the things I thought I saw when I looked at the painting by candlelight. I did not even really notice the two little girls playing at the very bottom of the painting, though they are not so much real children as they are wisps of paint in the shape of children. But I was right about some things, too.
“Is that you?” I say, and point to one of the figures on the left.
“More or less.”
“And is this man your friend?” I ask, pointing to the man that I thought looked like a friend the first night I saw him in the sea of faces.
“Fantin-Latour? Yes, he’s a friend. But everyone in the painting is a friend or an acquaintance.”
“So the painting’s like a puzzle?”
“It didn’t start that way,” he says. “But it became that. An exercise.”
“Well it’s clear you like him. And it’s clear you admire her,” I say, and look directly at the only woman who has real features. “She’s the only woman whose face you haven’t covered.”
“Madame Lejosne. Her husband is an officer.”
He watches my face after he says that, and I can see from his eyes that I got it right: he does admire her.
“But you’re partly wrong,” he tells me then. “My mother is in that painting and I both love and respect her.”
“She’s your mother. You have to say that.”
We go on looking, and he says the name of one fine man after another: Champfleury and Balleroy, Astruc and Scholl, and someone he calls mon cher Baudelaire. He does not identify a single one of the women except La Dame Lejosne and his mother, who is so heavily veiled you cannot see a single of her features.
“Is that who you’re closest to?” I ask when he is done naming people. “Fantin-Latour?”
“He’s a close friend but not the closest.”
“If he’s like he looks, he’s the kindest one of all.”
“He’s young and handsome. You picked out the young romantic, that’s all.”
“But he is kind, isn’t he?”
“I’m sure he would be kind to you,” he says.
“Is Madame Lejosne kind?”
“Always. I visit her once a month in her home and I kiss her soft hand.”
We stand together, watching each other. Regarding each other. The teasing has changed the air between us.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the two paintings on the table?” he asks me then. “I know you looked at those as well.”
For a moment I am embarrassed. And then I decide not to be. He was the one who left me here that night, who trusted me. He must have known I would look.
“I liked the one,” I tell him. “The gold woman with the white horse. The other woman frightens me.”
“Why does she frighten you?”
“Her face looks like a doll’s face. An ugly doll’s face.”
He looks at me for a long time before he speaks, and then he says, “She’s the mistress of a friend. She was once very beautiful, I think. Now I think she’s miserable.”
“Because of him?”
“He can be cruel. But she’s miserable because she’s sick. And because they never have enough money.”
“Does your friend like the painting?”
He does not answer at first and then he shakes his head no. Tells me, “I would have given it to him if he had.”
“Why did you paint it if you don’t care for her?”
“Because he asked. And then she came here and sat, and I couldn’t do anything but paint what I saw.”
“With him looking on?”
“With him looking on,” he says.
He walks over to the table then, and I think for a moment he will turn around the painting of the woman in the white dress, but he does not. Instead he turns the painting of the woman in the gold blouse. In the light I can see what I did not see by candle: that the gold blouse is both gold and flame orange, that the white at the front of the blouse is not the white of the horse but is the white of the cigarette, that the blue of the sky is gray in places and purple in others.
“Why would you turn this to face the wall?”
“Because I can’t bear to hear what people say about it. About the brushstrokes and the composition. About the girl herself. You can’t paint people like that, people at the edges, or if you do you can’t show the beauty in them. They have to be caricatures, like Daumier’s.”
I do not understand what he is getting at—the ideas go beyond me. But I say, “Is she someone special then?”
“She was just a girl I saw at Porte de Clignancourt. Probably a gypsy.”
When he says it—that is when I know he loves the painting. And that is when I know that if he loves something, he hides it.
Even though I am dressed and thought I was leaving, I let him pull me back to the divan at the back of the studio, the same divan where he and Nise and I sat kissing, the same divan where the white doll of a mistress sat for him. And I undress for the third time that day.
