Luncheon of the Boating Party (16 page)

She aimed a guarded smile at him, then looked back at the stairwell.

More footsteps. A top hat emerged, then a black frock coat, white silk cravat, and ivory-tipped walking stick. The dandy he’d seen in her dressing room. Condescension oozed from his face like grease. Au-

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guste’s hand cramped, resisting a handshake. How dare she rub salt into the wound! A sour taste rose in his mouth. Was she insinuating that he should put his own replacement in the painting? He’d rather heave the thing in the river.

Jeanne glided toward the far table. Pierre thrust a glass of wine in her hand. A pictorial instant. A possibility.

Auguste went to work whitewashing the position marks for Pierre and Paul in order to move them to the right and have them face Jeanne.

Paul assumed his characteristic stance bending forward to see better.

My God, was he going to lick her? That left Jules leaning against the back railing alone. Now he needed Charles all the more, to fill the space, to have Jules engaged, and to be the fourteenth. Ephrussi’s top hat right there would show the group to be a mix of classes. Here was a substitute, top-hatted and tall. Her companion, lover, gigolo, whatever he was, placed his hand on her waist and smirked in his direction, claiming her for all to see.

No, he would not use this cocksure fop. Not in the center of his painting. That would be a bad omen too. He’d hold out for Charles.

“Ah,” Paul said, squinting at the man. “So this is the lucky Monsieur Joseph-Paul Lagarde whom
Le Temps
reports as frequenting the Samary house on avenue Frochot.
Un habitué?
Let me tell you what people are saying.”

“Oh, no, I refuse to listen.” She covered her ears with her fi ngers.

“Are you wearing a ring beneath those pert black gloves?” Pierre asked. “A ring from this gentleman, perhaps?”

“Take them off and let us see whether we must go drown ourselves out of despair,” Paul said.

She let loose her shrill, infectious laugh climbing up the harmonic scale. Audiences loved it, but it had always grated on his ears. She touched her gloved index finger to Paul’s nose. “Drown yourself in wine?”

“No. In the river.”

“Oh!
Mon Dieu!
” she cried in that exaggerated, high-pitched comic way of hers and set down her glass to take them off.

“Leave them on,” Auguste commanded. He didn’t want to see a

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shattering truth at this crucial moment. “I want your white sleeve next to the black.”

“It won’t even be seen way back here,” she said petulantly.

“It will if you put your hands to your ears like you just did.”

Her haughty bourgeois lover kept shifting his weight, probably ambivalent about being in a painting with men in undershirts. Ha! Let him think he would be. Let him stand still for an hour hovering over her for nothing. Then he’d know what Pierre-Auguste Renoir thought of him. Or he might use his hand and a slice of his hat to suggest a person cut off at the edge like Manet and Degas sometimes did. A faceless, anonymous nothing of a person. A cipher. A nonentity. Not even enough of him to count as a fourteenth.

Cécile-Louise had turned in order to look at Jeanne. It was closer to what he really wanted, her interacting with the others, but she’d turned too far. “Your chin a little to the right, please, Cécile.”

She turned back toward him too far now. “I insist on you calling me Circe. If you don’t I shall have to box your ears. Gently, of course.” The tip of her rosy tongue came out and made a dainty circuit of her lips.

He pretended he hadn’t noticed.

Just when everyone had settled, Jeanne said, “Don’t paint me with those patchy dabs. You made my skin look like fi sh scales in that portrait.” Ellen tittered. “You laugh now, Ellen, but fishy arms won’t do your reputation any good.”

Gustave cleared his throat as if to make a point. “Are you referring to Auguste’s half-figure portrait of you that hung in the
place of honor
at our
Impressionist
show three years ago? The one in a green dress that critics praised? The very one Zola called the success of the show?”

“Then why was Auguste’s full-length portrait of me hung above the toilet in the next Salon?”

“Because the graybeard jurors are subject to infl uence,” Auguste said. “Because Sarah Bernhardt—”

“Filled the place of honor. It isn’t enough that she gets all the best roles at the Comédie-Française. She has to get the best spots in the Salon too. Anyone wanting to look at me got a crick in his neck.”

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“I’ve got a crick in my neck
now,
” Circe whined.

Ah, was that jealousy speaking? He could play that game too.

“Such a beautiful neck,” he said. “It’s made of white satin, isn’t it?”

“How much longer?” Circe asked.

“Soon. Just a little more.”

“Just a little more,” she mimicked. “A little more, and a little more.

Usually I want a little more, but—”

“If you don’t button up that pretty mouth of yours, I’ll be forced to—”

“Kiss it?” Circe puckered up her lips.

“Now, there’s a tempting pose,” Jules said. Alphonsine snickered and the angles of some heads changed slightly.

He was losing them. “Give me half an hour more.”

“But I’m sooo tired. Haven’t you done enough to imagine the rest?”

“Out of the question.”

“Some painters do that. Madame Charpentier told me.”

“I’m not one of them. It’s one of my personal principles which I’ve rarely broken. Paint only from the motif.”

“I commend any man who sticks to his principles,” Jules said.

“Can’t you make an exception just this once? My arm hurts.” Circe’s voice was tinged with a childish whine.

“Pain passes, but beauty lasts. Think of that and you’ll forget the pain. Any beautiful thought will do.”

“You’ll have a devil of a time getting him to bend his rule,” Gustave said.

“But think of me. I’ll have a devil of a time getting my elbow to
unbend.
”

He tried not to listen and just let his instinct take over. Mentally, he walked around the table to remind himself of what he wanted out of each person. Circe, the porcelain doll. Alphonse, the lordly observer.

Alphonsine, enchanting, alert, her eyes roving, not missing a thing as she lounged on the rail. Raoul facing Alphonsine, murmuring to her, calling her
lady,
the English way. In the right foreground, Gustave in his flat-topped boater looking younger than he really was. Angèle pro-vocative, with her arm familiarly behind Gustave. Antonio Maggiolo

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looking down at Angèle. A good model. Antonio adoring Angèle who was adoring Gustave—the three of them could be substance enough for a painting all their own. Ellen, elusive behind her glass, piquant and charming. Maybe it was a bit unkind to hide her face, but the painting needed someone in the act of drinking. Émile facing her, captivated.

Paul and Pierre talking to Jeanne.

Jeanne. The hot glistening skin of her cheek, her throat, her inner thigh flew through his mind. Her lips moist against his. If it weren’t for Lagarde touching her, he could indulge himself by imagining a mutual love, for the sake of the painting, to give it his best.

He went around again letting his brush extend the comma strokes into sweeps to suggest the placement of large areas of color, like the strong dark triangle of Gustave’s thigh, Angèle’s skirt repeating the triangle set upright, and now a slimmer triangle of Jeanne’s skirt. He held the spread of bristles vertically and rotated it to make a widening swath as he went down the bottom right of the canvas, ignoring his worries in the act of painting.

“You’re not using green for our skin, are you? We’re not lizards,”

Jeanne said, always the entertainer. “Don’t forget what that critic Al-bert Wolff said in
Le Figaro
about your
Nude in the Sunlight. A pile of
flesh in the process of decomposition and needing immediate burial.
”

“Ugh.” Circe stretched out the sound in a funny way. Competing.

“There’s hardly any skin showing,” Auguste said.

“Would that it were otherwise,” Pierre said.

“But not green. We don’t want green faces,” Jeanne said.

“No, darling. Your lovely face is a secret mixture of chrome yellow, rose madder, white, and ultramarine.”

He took great satisfaction when Joseph-Paul shot him a sharp look at the word
darling.

“What’s ultramarine?” Circe asked. “Deep sea sludge?”

“Blue.”

“I don’t want blue circles under my eyes.”

Circe sensing a rival was amusing. Jeanne knew that he’d do whatever he wanted. Circe’s demands were made out of ignorance, but be-

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cause she was so beautiful, because her dress had those luscious, Prussian blue stripes, he paid her no mind. If he’d been forced to use ultramarine, in a few years the sulfur in it would yellow the edges of the white stripes. At least that was one disaster he avoided, thanks to Fionie.

“But you want red lips, don’t you? When the time comes to paint them, I’m going to use vermilion. Don’t worry. It’s not like the carmine you use on your lips, which is made from dead bugs from South America. Red ones. Females.”

Circe pretended to faint.

Everyone laughed.

“All right. Remember your positions. We can take a break.”

“Finally!” Circe sprang up and shook out her shoulders which made her breasts jiggle. “I thought I was going to turn to stone.”

“Like Lot’s wife?” came a voice from the far table. Aha! The quiet poet had noticed her.

“No, like Venus,” Auguste said.

“I played Venus once in
Orpheus and the Underworld,
” Angèle said to Antonio.

“And she’s been playing it ever since,” Jeanne said in a husky stage voice.

Pierre poured another round of wine. “Then let’s drink to Venus!”

Angèle sliced a pear into wedges and speared one wedge on the end of her knife. “One for you,” she said, her wet mouth opening, her tongue flicking as she aimed the pear wedge at Gustave’s opening lips. “And one for you,” she said to Antonio. “Don’t move or I might stab you.”

Auguste drank a glass of seltzer water and inserted his longest brush handle up his cast, trying to scratch an itch. The light would change soon. He couldn’t give them too much of a break. He hadn’t fi nished setting the values. He didn’t want to go over and talk to Jeanne, not with this Joseph-Paul standing there smug and proprietary. Let Pierre and Paul entertain her.

Piano music came up from downstairs, “Le Toréador” from
Carmen.
Pierre sang a few lines in his rich baritone until Auguste stood up, a signal. He’d lose them on the chorus if he didn’t call them back into

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position. “Two minutes,” he said above their talk. Antonio rolled his shoulders and stretched. His forward lean was an excruciating position.

Ellen faced forward and waited before raising her glass. Alphonse smiled at her. Was he smitten already? “One minute.” Gustave assumed his position. The talking stopped.

“A little more to the left,” Auguste said to Pierre.

He lost himself to his unconscious instincts of composition. Circe hummed loudly, dancing her fingernails on the table, then on the edge of a plate so the tink, tink drew attention to her. Jules stood alone now, drifting in his own mental world, probably composing lines of verse.

Pierre swayed, struggling to hold his position. He’d had too much to drink. Gustave was as still as a statue. He knew what was necessary and, by example, was trying to teach the others.

Auguste made another circuit of the canvas, positioning smaller areas of color. Circe let out a long, loud sigh. He’d lost track of how much time had passed. The light had changed. He’d gotten the bones of the painting.

“Enough for today.”

Alphonse bolted downstairs to relieve his father at the dock.

Auguste raised his shoulders to stretch and began to clean his

brushes. With only a nod to him, Jeanne and her new man slipped out.

He’d pay her privately the next time she posed—without her beau, he hoped. Jeanne, the most famous, would demand the most, even though she was only a smaller figure in the rear. He paid Ellen first, so she could be off. Dance music lured some of them downstairs.

Alphonsine seemed reluctant to leave. She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, “This is one of the loveliest things that has ever happened to me.”

He dipped a brush in turpentine and worked out the pigment onto a rag. Loveliest? For him it was the riskiest.

Jules lit his pipe and came around to the front of the canvas. “Painted with a feather on a sunbeam. Intriguing before one even knows what it is.

I can’t wait to see what tints you’ll show us vibrating against each other.”

“Vibrating? That would make me swoon,” Circe said.

“Then you’ll have to retrain your eye,” Jules said. “Normally we

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recognize objects by outline, but we’d see more if we noticed the vibrations between contrasting colors.”

Circe squinted at the painting. “We suffered aching muscles all afternoon and we’re only smears. Is it because of your broken arm?”

“He has intentions for those smears,” Jules said. “It’s a rare thing to see a painting so complex emerge step by step. You ought to feel privileged.”

“Step by step sounds like dancing.” She did a waltz step, thrusting her hip forward, holding her skirt out, and turned her head slowly from Auguste to Jules to Gustave to Pierre and back again. In a measured way, she waltzed to the stairs, gave them a backward glance, and descended.

Pierre blew air out his mouth. “Quite the dish. Where in the world did you fi nd her?”