Paris Red: A Novel, page 9
The divan is not a bed, but still.
I know I liked it when my soldier held me on the cushion of his thighs and made the wall behind us a room. But it is a different kind of pleasure to be able to stretch out beside someone. To take time with his body, and come to know it.
And if I could draw him, this is what I would draw:
When he sits on the divan, there is one place on the side of his hip that curves in. I know it is just from him sitting, just the way the muscles of his hip come together with the muscles of his leg, but that curve inward, that small indentation with its shadow, bewitches me, and I like to press my mouth there.
Veins in his forearms track over the muscle like vines. The vein-vines are soft when I trace them, first with my finger and then with my tongue. He has the same kind of veins that show over his cock.
I trace those, too.
That is what I would show in a drawing. Just shadows and lines.
The sponges are the size of walnuts or small apples. Golden brown. Dry, I cannot believe they can be used for that purpose, but when I wet one, it makes sense. The sponge comes alive in the water. The surface silky, like hair underwater. When it is wet I can imagine it going inside me, I can imagine it fitting exactly where it needs to fit. Nestling up there. Each one has a long silk ribbon threaded through it. That is how you get them out.
When I try one, it feels like tucking some kind of damp flower up there. I have to use my middle finger to push it all the way up, until I hit the “nose.” That is what Adèle said the tip of it would feel like when I touched it. That is the part to cover.
When the sponge is in I don’t feel anything—just the tickle of the ribbon on my thigh.
It is the ribbon I show him.
“Do you have to use any powders with it?” he asks.
“Druggists sell them. Adèle said she used vinegar and water.”
“So that’s what you did?”
“Does the smell bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” he says.
The whole time we are talking, I have my legs spread open and he pets me there. Smoothing the hair and fingering the ribbon. That is when I understand it is all part of the game to him. Part of the pleasure. I did not have to squat behind the screen to put the sponge in—I know that now.
“What do you do at the end?”
“Wash it out and soak it in vinegar for a while. Vinegar again.”
But he is already starting to move into me when I tell him that. Still dressed in his shirt and blue cravat. Lavallière bleue à pois blancs. He got his pants down and that was all, like some coureur on the street.
“So you have a bit of the sea inside you,” he says to me when we are done, when we lie together, still joined.
“A bit of the sea and a bit of you,” I say.
“What is he to you?”
That is what Adèle asked when I talked to her about not getting pregnant. It took me a second to answer, a lover.
Not my lover—a lover. That is all.
When I tried to explain, she said, “So there’s money involved. Il y a toujours de l’argent.”
“Paris is full of whores,” I say. “I know. But it’s not just that.”
“What is it then?”
“True love,” I told her, and we both laughed like we used to at Baudon.
But it is not so simple. He and I are not so simple.
If he wanted a whore he could have paid one, and if he wanted two whores together, he could have paid them both instead of spending all that time on Nise and me. He chose not to. All that is true, but it is still not what I mean.
What I mean is that it is not always so clear what someone wants, or what money can buy, or who exactly pays.
When I was twelve or thirteen, when I sat at home and listened to my mother talk with the women who came to her with sewing, I remember them talking about a whore named Mezeray who had been killed in her bed. The story was in all the papers. It was not one of her customers who killed her but a young gardener named Guichet, from Vaugirard. Someone she had taken a fancy to and brought home to her bed. He made love with her, and then the two of them went to sleep. And sometime during the night he woke up and killed her.
He cut her throat with his pruning hook. Not even a knife—a pruning hook. And after he killed her, he washed his shirt in her basin and took some of her things. He sold them and went back home to Vaugirard. When they found him he was drinking with the money from her things and cleaning his pruning hook.
He told the judge he woke up once in the night wanting to kill her, but he did not do it then because she woke up, too. She woke up and turned to him in the bed and kissed him. So he had to wait.
The person who hurt Mezeray was not someone who paid for her, who thought she was a thing to buy. It was Guichet, whom she took to her bed not for money but for someone to hold and kiss. But he went to her bed not for sex or the illusion of love, but for the money he could get for her things. And in the end it was she who paid, the so-called whore, and not in cash but with her life.
Une bête, my mother said when she heard the story. Un vrai sauvage.
So maybe it is true, maybe Adèle is right that it is always about money—le fric, le blé, le pognon, l’argent. Whatever you call it. I just mean that things are not as clear as they first seem.
He tells me he wants me to wait to put in the sponge.
“If you put it in before, all I can taste is vinegar,” he says.
So we keep the sponge in a little pan of vinegar and water beside the divan. A sea creature in its own shell.
The room is on Rue La Bruyère. It is another climb to the sixth floor, but this place is lighter than the one on Maître-Albert. There is a dormer window you can actually see out, across the courtyard to another building whose whole backside is painted white with HERBORISTE in black letters.
I do not know why but I like to see the sign. It is the first thing I check for in the morning and one of the last things I see before I sleep. It is always there.
I put the scarf from the whore on the table underneath the window. Put my sketchbook there, along with the candles. Veilleuse Astrale, brûlant 10 heures.
He pays for the room for a month, and the first time he comes to see me there, I tell him he can stay with me whenever he wants.
“I will sometimes.”
“Where do you live?”
“A hotel room,” he says. “Sometimes with the mother of my son.”
“You aren’t married to her?”
“No. I’m not married to her.”
“Do you love her?” I say.
“I care about her and the boy. More than I care about anyone.”
He tells me the boy is ten, that he is a fine boy. Merry and serious at the same time.
“I think it must be the situation,” he says. “The ridiculous lies his mother and I tell. Or maybe it’s my father coming out in him.”
“Was your father merry?”
“Hardly. Severe. Plutôt sévère. He’s still alive.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“A multitude of things,” he says, and I think of the painting he has hanging on the wall of his studio of his mother and father. The misery in the two faces.
“Were you in love with her once?” I ask then. “With the boy’s mother?”
“I met her when I was seventeen. She had a white throat and thighs like columns.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. She’s a wonderful mother. You could sleep on her bosom.”
“All women have bosoms,” I say.
“You don’t.”
“What do I have then?”
“Tits,” he tells me. “Tits that fit in my hands.”
After, we lie on my bed and I am closest to the wall. I look out over his chest to the window, and I can still see HERBORISTE. I think it is seeing that word that makes me ask. After that night at Flicoteaux’s, I kept saying the word Sallandrouze in my mind, over and over, so I would not mispronounce it, so I could keep it in my memory.
“What happened at the Sallandrouze?” I say.
He has been moving his hand over my belly, stroking the hair down there, but now his fingers stop moving.
“Why do you ask me that now?”
“Because I’ve been remembering the word.”
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t tell the real story that night,” I say. “Because Nise said she didn’t want to hear it.”
“I wouldn’t have told you anyway.”
“But it meant something to you.”
He shifts on the bed, then, turning so he can lie flat on his back. So he can look up at the ceiling. At first I think he is not going to say, that he will refuse to tell me just as he did that night. But then he starts to talk.
“They did things in plain sight. They shot at anyone. Women and children. Not just people on the barricades.”
“That’s what you saw at the Sallandrouze?”
“We saw executions there. Tonin and I. One man was killed because soldiers said his hands smelled of gunpowder.”
He stops talking then, but I do not say anything. I understand it is better not to say anything.
“The next day I went with my class to the cemetery at Montmartre,” he says after the pause. “We went to draw, if you can believe it. And I saw someone I knew. The man I used to buy soap from. He was a merchant. That’s who I drew.”
“He was dead?”
“They’d covered the bodies with straw. Left the heads out in the open so you could see. And I saw him.”
He waits a moment and then he says, “He was probably out running an errand, or just going about his business. It was butchery. All of it. Soldiers were drunk with blood. I don’t talk about it. Not even to Tonin.”
I want to say something more but I do not know what. There is nothing to say. I put my hand on his chest and lie beside him in the narrow bed.
“You’re the last person I would have thought I’d tell,” he says after a while.
“Why did you?”
“Because you asked. Because you’re young and you should know.”
Even though I have not felt young the way he means for a long time, I know I am. So I nod. At first I think I cannot think of anything to say, but then I do think of something.
“What was the man’s name?” I ask. “The one who sold you soap?”
“Monpelas. He was a perfumer on Rue Saint-Martin. I used to buy sandalwood soap from him. Now I can’t stand the smell.”
Both of us are quiet after that. That is when I wonder if I should have carried the word Sallandrouze in my mind, if I should have asked him to tell me the story. But I cannot take the question back, and he cannot take the story back.
And because I do not know what else to do, I crawl on top of him. I kiss him hard, bump my teeth against his. When he begins to move inside me, there is nothing soft about it. It is hard and almost hurts.
In that way I take the story from him. I take it inside me, too.
Tonight we go walking down Boulevard Saint-Martin and over to Boule du Temple to see the street performers. I wanted to come walking here one night when it was still him and Nise and me. We would have been part of the spectacle, the three of us, with him in his ugly-fine coat and the two of us on his arms. But we never did. As it is, he and I fit in like any of the other lovers, soldiers and maids, workers together, but it is come now or not at all—almost the whole of the Boulevard du Crime is to be torn down, he says.
“Just like la Petite-Pologne,” he says. “We could have gotten you a bed there for two sous a night.”
“A bed and bedmates,” I say, and pretend to pick a louse or two from his jacket, but he grabs my hand.
We stop in front of some jugglers and a sword swallower, and he stands behind me, the crowd an excuse to press close. I feel him there behind me, and that sensation mixes in with watching the sword swallower’s throat work behind a white kerchief.
After the sword swallower finishes with his blade, we move further down the street and find a strongman. The strongman stands there, shirtless, and that itself is a surprise, but even more surprising is how ordinary he looks. He has a thick neck and is barrel-chested, but he looks no different from many of the men in the crowd. And yet he is different somehow, too. He seems to roll on his feet as he walks, and when he talks it is as if he knows every single one of us in the crowd.
We watch as he slips a wooden yoke over his shoulders. On each end of the yoke, a circle of wood hangs from three ropes, making two small seats. He tells the crowd he needs two helpers to help him show his strength.
“Two men,” he says. “Or girls if you like,” and when he says that the crowd laughs and calls.
“Non, non, messieurs-dames,” he says, and extends his arm to a worker in a blue smock. “I have my first. This voyageur.”
The man in the smock steps forward and stands beside the strongman. And once the worker in the smock is part of what is to take place, he looks over the crowd too, a kind of performer himself.
“I’ll know him when I see him,” the strongman says, eyes moving over the bodies in the crowd, judging their willingness and their weights. When the man looks our way and makes his face a question, I’m sure he will shake his head no and tell the strongman to move on without a word.
But he does not. Instead he nods and then he moves from the warm place at my back. Steps forward to stand on the other side of the yoke, opposite the worker in his smock.
And that is the trick: a man on each seat of the yoke, suspended from the strongman’s shoulders.
It begins with the seats up on two low blocks and the strongman in between. Each man takes his spot on the small wooden circles, but the ropes are slack. The strongman waits until the volunteers settle in, until each feels secure on the wood circlet, then he says, “Eh bien, hold on.”
And he squats down, right between the two seats, and settles the wooden yoke on his shoulders. He tests the yoke one time against his neck and then begins to stand. It is a strain—clearly it is a strain—but there is no real hesitation. Just a slow movement upward as the strongman steadies the weight of the men on his shoulders and holds the top of the ropes where they knot in the yoke.
When he is upright, standing firmly, he looks out at the crowd, and we all holler and clap. The two men on the seats look outward, too, but they sit still, feet off the ground, not willing to move or break the balance. The crowd is shouting and clapping, and the strongman’s face triumphs, but the two on the roped seats keep their serious expressions.
And then the strongman sets them down.
When we clap that time, it is for the strongman but it is also for them, the willing voyageurs, the perfect accomplices who did not even risk changing the weight of their faces with a smile. And as he makes his way back to me, I can feel the crowd turning to look at me, to look at my face as he walks toward me. Whatever we are to each other, something shows on my face and on his face, and the crowd sees it, and knows.
And I feel the crowd watching as he walks toward me, so I put my arms out to welcome him back from the daring feat and his time on the wooden circle but mostly so I can be close to him again. And when I kiss him on the mouth people shout and clap, and he and I are part of the spectacle on the street.
I think that feeling stays with us the rest of the night because whenever we stand watching something, he stands behind me, his arms linked up close under my breasts, like all the other sweethearts, like all the soldiers and their girls, and the workers and their women. He is my petit ami and I am his chérie, and I feel him against me all night.
By the time we get home, to my room on La Bruyère, we have been touching all night, and there is no modesty. He strips and lies down on my bed. When I ask him to help me with the damp flower of the sponge, he takes it from my hand and works it up expertly inside me. There is the vinegar sharp smell between us but it is all part of the whole, now. And then I am ready and he moves into me and it is slick, slick, slick.
That night he stays with me.
At some point I feel him move away from me. I watch as he gets up, and I think he is about to dress, about to pull on his clothes and make his apology. Instead he goes and stands at the window.
“It’s raining,” he tells me.
“I hear it.”
When he comes back to the narrow bed, he says, “It’s good to be someplace when it’s raining.”
He lies back down beside me and we sleep until the morning, until I take him to Raynal’s Café for breakfast. Fifty centimes for the two of us.
The next time I come to sit for him, I wear the dress I used to wear to Baudon, and I fix my hair the way I did for work, which is to say I leave it dirty and pull it back from my face. When I get there I know I have done it right because he nods at me.
“I want to get that working girl,” he says.
I stand in the spot he shows me and turn my head just a little to the left, but he tells me not to look in that direction.
“Look back at me,” he says. When I do, he nods and does not talk again.
So it is a glance he is painting. A sidelong glance. At least that is the way it feels.
And that is the thing that ends up aching about the pose—not my neck or shoulders but my eyes. The muscles in my eyes get sore and my eyes themselves start to dry. I can feel the air on the tissues. So I blink but each time I do, I look back to the exact same spot on the wall, just beyond his shoulder.
And just like the other time, in a little while my mind finds somewhere to go. I start off thinking about the strongman and the crowd, the serious way he and the worker in his blue smock looked when they took their perches on the circlets of wood hanging from the strongman’s yoke. And then I fall into thinking about Nise, and how she always liked seeing the birds that did tricks on the boulevard, and then I am thinking about Toucy and her kid, and the flowers her mother had growing up strings next to her kitchen window. The flowers I drew in my carnet de poche. Now that I have seen his paintings and heard him talk about color, how one color needs another, color is all I can see. It is why the purplish blue of delphiniums looks good with their green leaves.
