Luncheon of the Boating Party (2 page)

In the distance, a catboat sailing toward him looked like the
Iris,
one of Gustave’s boats. He rode toward it. Yes, it was! He stood up to his full height on the foot platforms, twisted to hail him with his left arm, and lost his balance. The front wheel jerked sideways, and the cycle tipped and crashed onto its side. His right hip and shoulder struck sand and gravel, his hand and elbow in the cast taking the fall, his face taking the bounce. The broken smokestack landed on his left leg. His right leg was trapped under one rear wheel, while the other rear wheel spun with a tick, tick, tick. Boiling water splashed and oil leaked onto his pant leg. He struggled to disentangle himself before getting burned.

Jesus Christ! He would destroy himself if he didn’t start painting soon.

He spit out sand and lay trembling in a cloud of steam, trying to figure out what had happened and watching the glints of light riding the water. How different the colors from this low angle, the contrast between tips of ripples and valleys between them more pronounced now—a deeper forest green for the furrows, with shifting patches of

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yellow-green and ocher on the humps, and the silver highlights more transparent than he’d ever seen them. My God! To show that to the world!

A throbbing moved up through his legs, hip, shoulder. His right cheek and hand stung. Sand had scoured his palm and left it bloody. He staggered to his feet. Bazille’s dear old color box had suffered too—the corner splintered, one hinge sprung, the other twisted. Tubes and brushes lay scattered in the tall grasses, the canvas face down in a muddy patch. The
Iris,
with Gustave oblivious at the helm, was only a triangle of white sail downriver.

Using his left arm and all his weight, he tried to pull the cycle upright, but it refused to budge. The monster weighed more than he did.

The front wheel was bent. He could never steer it now. He turned off the oil burner and opened the steam release valve. The hissing quieted to a gurgle. Below the trademark, Peugeot, he saw the model name,
La
vie moderne.
Modern life. He chortled. That was the subject matter of the new painting movement, as precarious as the steam-cycle.

He crouched at the river’s edge and cupped some water in his left hand to rinse his mouth. A pain shot up his thigh. He splashed his right hand to loosen the grit embedded in his palm. The cool water stung. He crawled through the weeds to gather his brushes and tubes, but couldn’t find yellow ocher. If he were well off, or at least stable, he could do without it because he could make it from other colors, but those tubes were almost squeezed flat already. A muttering duck glided between reeds toward a tube of paint. He quacked at it in a tone that said,
Leave
it alone.
The duck paddled away. The scent of wild roses assailed him.

Any other time, the sight of them would have excited him, their petal faces pale pink and cream like women’s cheeks. Like Jeanne’s.

At least he’d found his beloved bicycle cap. Now all he needed was to find his way. In painting, in love, in life.

He carried brushes in his right hand and the color box of his dead friend in his left, the lid dangling. He set off limping the ten-minute walk along the wooded strip to the Île de Chatou. Just north of the railroad bridge, he would come to Maison Fournaise, the boaters’
guinguette
—the

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riverside restaurant, hotel, and boat rental frequented by painters and writers where he had thought to try out an idea on the little canvas.

Up ahead, Alphonse Fournaise, the barrel-chested son of the owner, hoisted a narrow-prowed one-man
canot
off carpenter’s sawhorses and over his head as if it were a giant baguette. He ambled to the bank, lowered the boat, and slid it into the water.

“Auguste Renoir, you old fool,” Alphonse called. “You’ve either been in a boxing ring or you fell off your cycle again.”

“The latter, of course. I left it in the path just this side of La Grenouillère. The front wheel is bent. There’s a muddy canvas there too.”

“I’ll go get them. Are you all right?”

“I’ll find out tomorrow when I try to get out of bed.”

Alphonse tied the boat to the dock. “Alphonsine!” he called to his sister who was swimming nearby, and waved her in.

Auguste watched her strong arms propel her through the water.

When she climbed up the bank, her swimming costume of striped

blouse and knee-length bloomers clung to her curves. Water slid down her shapely legs.

“
Mon Dieu,
Auguste! What happened?” Alphonsine dried off with a towel as he explained. He set down his color box on the table under the trellised arbor and lowered himself gingerly onto the wooden chair.

“I’ll get something to wash you.”

He felt blood trickle down his cheek. In a moment she reappeared with two basins—soapy water and clear—and two cloths. Spears of light shone through the vine above her and danced in patches on her small mounded breasts. Her nipples poked out like beads under the thin wet fabric.

“Look at me,” she said.

“I am.”

“I mean look up.”

Dutifully, he raised his face to hers. Her skin shone rosy from the sun.

Exactly what he loved to paint. Like Jeanne’s cheeks, which gave back the light. Jeanne Samary, the darling of the Comédie-Française. She

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made everyone in Paris laugh. Him too, at one time. He should have brought her here to the country away from heady adulation. Out here, he could have shown her a beauty not man-made, the joys of being an adorer, not merely the adored. Lying on the grass, he could have shown her how light on water breaks up in patches of color. She might have understood his painting of her, how skin really does take on the colors of the surroundings, and it might have all turned out differently.

Like Alphonsine’s pink forehead washed with pale green by the vine.

She pressed the warm wet cloth against his face. “You have sand embedded in your cheek. Does it hurt?”

“Only when I look away from you.”

Strange pleasure, to allow himself to be so vulnerable. He hoped this would take a long time. A pretty little scowl formed as she pressed the cloth gently against his face to loosen the grit. He tried to relax in order to control the tic in his cheek.

Alphonsine rinsed the cloth and dabbed, snickering softly.

“What’s so amusing about a man writhing in pain and about to die?”

“You have a peaky face.”

“You have a peachy one.”

“Your cheeks go in like saucers, and your nose—”

“What about my nose?”

“It’s peaky, that’s all. Your face looks weathered.”

“Like old wood cracked by the sun? It’s an occupational hazard. I paint
en plein air.
”

He supposed he did look like an old fence post to her, with his lined forehead and concave cheeks, deeper when he hadn’t eaten well. At least his hair was still brown, though his widow’s peak was becoming more pronounced. Two bare troughs on either side of it were carving their way to the top of his head, the reason for his bicycle cap. His eyelids drooped slightly over hazel eyes. Jeanne had called his narrow, pointed nose aquiline, and had thought him handsome, his pronounced cheekbones especially, and so had Margot.

“You’re not listening. I
said,
your eyes are always watching,” Alphonsine said.

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“Sorry. And my face is always twitching. I care more about my eyes.”

“Your face is kind of solemn. Are you sad?”

He was, of course, whenever he thought of Jeanne or Margot. “Not that I know of.”

“Sit still. Every time you say something, you jerk.”

“I can’t help it. I’m strung together that way. With piano wire.”

Sharp grains scraped across his raw flesh. She began to pick them out with a tweezer. Her face came closer and she worked in one spot, digging with the metal points. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her lips turned in on themselves and her blue eyes shot through with gold fi lmed over with wetness. She stopped, her hand resting on his chin, her eyes fixed on his cheek.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She resumed picking. “They’re like metal bits in a soldier’s wound.”

The tightness in her voice reminded him that she was a war widow.

Ten years alone, but still looking young. In her early thirties, he guessed.

Her mother, Louise Fournaise, came outside drying her hands on

her apron. “Pierre-Auguste, you had no business riding that contraption with a broken arm.”

“Yes I did! It was pure business. It’s time I find out what kind of painter I am.”

“Couldn’t that wait until you walked here like any sensible man?”

He pointed upward with his index finger. “The light, madame.”

“Where have you been?” Louise asked.

“My mother’s house in Louveciennes.” He lifted his cast. “I’ve been staying there.”

“And she let you ride that torture machine? You’re thinner than ever. Wasted, in fact. She doesn’t feed you?”

Wincing, he tried his most winning smile. “Not like you do,

madame.”

“So stay to lunch, you rascal.” Louise marched back to her kitchen.

Alphonsine squinted as she worked on his face. “You were com-

ing here?”

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“Looking for something new to paint.”

“Do you remember painting me and your two friends under this

arbor?”

“Of course. I remember all the paintings I’ve done of you. Each one gave me great pleasure. I make it a rule never to paint except out of pleasure.”

“I know another place to paint that will give you pleasure. You’ve never painted from this high place before.”

“Let me guess. From the railroad bridge? Do you want to get me

killed?”

“No.”

“Then from the footbridge?”

“No-o.” Her voice ascending flutelike lengthened the syllable into birdsong.

“From the pumping station at Marly?”

She teased him with a moment of coy silence. “When I fi nish, I’ll show you. All the times Edgar Degas has come here, I’ve never suggested it to him. Only to you.”

“Ha! It would have been wasted on him. Edgar paints from his

imagination in his stuffy studio and calls it a landscape. It’s supreme arrogance to think that what comes out of his brain is more valuable than what we see around us.”

“Like this place.” She cupped his bloodied hand in hers in the bowl of soapy water. “You have long, thin fi ngers.”

“And you have short, sweet ones.”

“Why do you keep your fi ngernails longish?”

“For protection. I could injure my fingertips and ruin my sense of touch. That would deprive me of a good deal of pleasure in life.” Her hands slid over his like minnows. The sensation made him close his eyes a moment. “It’s worth the stupid accident,” he said.

“What is?”

“Having you do this.”

A pink flush crept up her neck to her cheeks that made him want to caress them. Or paint them, which was the same thing, really.

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“You have sand in your beard.”

“Thank you for calling my measly little fringe a beard.”

She dribbled water over it, threading her fingers through his hair.

“It’s soft. I thought it would be scratchy.”

“I made it that way on purpose, to give you pleasure.”

“It’s nice the way you trim it in a narrow path along your jaw.”

She patted his face and hands dry with a blue plaid dish towel and took him by the left wrist which sent a tremor up his arm. “Follow me.”

He would skip after her like a young swain if he were able to. His hip ached and his thirty-nine years creaked in every joint as he entered the large restaurant and climbed the stairs to the terrace facing the river.

She flung open her arms. “Paint from here. See what you can see?

Both banks, upstream and down.” She turned the crank that rolled away the coral-and-gray-striped awning, and leaned out over the railing. “
The floating exhalations from the grass, mingled with the damp scents
from the river, filled the air with a soft languor, with a happy light, with an
atmosphere of blessing.
Guy de Maupassant wrote that. It’s lovely and true, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A happy light,” he murmured.

Paint from here.
He was more than amused. He had been telling himself the same thing ever since Fournaise extended the balcony into a wider terrace three years ago, but he’d always postponed the idea. The perspective would be too tricky. He hadn’t known how to convey the sense that the terrace was part of a building and wasn’t floating in the sky.

“Someday,” he said.

“Why not now?”

He didn’t want to admit he didn’t know how. “For now, I’m obliged to paint portraits of overbred society women in their fussy parlors.” She tipped her head, expecting a reason. “It pays.” He swept his arm over the tables and river. “This would be painting just for me. It might not pay a bean.”

But what it offered him! Below the terrace, a dozen rowing skiffs tied to bank posts made graceful repeated shapes in the water, and a string of sailboats tied bow to stern formed a caravan from the slanted

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dock to the floating boat garage. On the eastern shore at Rueil, the white stone inn of La Mère Lefranc with its red-tiled roof caught the light in the afternoon, and on Sundays Parisians ate at tables in the small orchard. Downstream, the Giquel yacht works hung out over the water surrounded by boats, and a few scattered houses were nestled behind market gardens. Upriver, the smokestack of the carriage factory cast an ocher reflection and belched charcoal-colored smoke. Claude Monet would position a sail in front of it. Gustave would ignore the bank and paint from the odd perspective of the needle nose of a racing scull with rowers pulling at their oars. Pissarro, that old Communard, he’d make the smokestack central to the painting, symbol of the proletariat.