Luncheon of the Boating Party (22 page)

He offered thirty francs.
‘C’est ridicule!’
she said. ‘Won’t you be sorry when I tell you I sold it to a man for fifty!’ ‘Then why is it still here?’ the man asked. ‘The buyer’s coming for it tomorrow,’ she said. She was lying through her teeth, but I let her operate and just watched. She was so pretty with her dark brown hair piled up, and he was looking at her as much as at the painting. In the end, they settled on thirty-fi ve.”

“Bravo!”

Camille sauntered behind the counter in a rolling motion, opened the cash drawer, and clicked the coins together in the air like a Spanish dancer.

“That’s the wife you ought to have. Annette did it once, she can do it again.”

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Just this once, he’d promised himself, as a leg up for his Chatou painting. Never again.

Titters came from the next table—Géraldine and Aline, the girls of the quarter, regulars at the
crémerie.

“She’s got you under her thumb now,
pardi!
” Aline said with her pert little nose in the air.

Pardi.
Interesting that she didn’t say
by God. Pardi
was archaic and countrified. A country girl by choice. He liked that about her. She had a freshness that neither the
lorettes
with the hatboxes nor the
femmes de
la grande bourgeoisie
on the boulevards nor even the actress in emerald green possessed.

“Next thing you know, she’ll want you to paint her daughter,” Aline went on with a lilt to her voice. “That’s how it starts. Then she’ll have Annette deliver
cuisine de campagne
to your studio every night, and that will keep you from going to the Café Nouvelle-Athènes . . .”

“. . . So you won’t meet other women,” Géraldine added.

“And soon you’ll give in, leastways out of gratitude as much as out of the itch of the fl esh, and
hélas!
You’ll find yourself married, and all your bachelor
soirées
will go up in a puff of smoke.”

“How do you know that I’m not married already?”

At this, it was Géraldine who laughed, while Aline fl ushed a

deep rose.

“Oh, she knows,” Géraldine said brightly. “We have our ways.”

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Hats on Sunday

Alphonsine took special care winding her chignon. In the glass, her face was rounder than she wished it, but joyous with the expectation of the day, her face never revealing on Sundays what it sometimes showed on other days.

In the back garden, she clipped three roses, a pink, a dark red, and a floppy cream one, the color of fresh Brie. Flowers are ideas, Gustave had said. Ideas of what? She was going to ask him. She put them in a small vase, and brought them up to the terrace.

Anne, one of the waitresses, was about to whisk off the tablecloth.

“Stop. Don’t do that.”

“But the leaves and twigs—”

“I’ll take care of it. Set all forty tables downstairs today.”

How would she get fresh linen on without disturbing the position of the bottles of wine if he’d already begun to paint them? And the napkins too. Angèle’s was bunched up tightly like a bouquet of lilies. Gustave’s was hanging over the table like a tousled bedsheet after a night of love. She studied the arrangement, then set the bottles one by one in the same relationship on another table and scooped up Gustave’s napkin as though it were something precious and alive. She lifted Angèle’s napkin, changed the cloth, put everything back, and placed the roses in front of Gustave’s seat.

Auguste came up the stairs. “You really think people aren’t going to move those bottles?”

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“I just wanted to have everything how you left it.”

“There’ll be new bottles, but we’ll have to leave the old ones in place.”

“They can use new napkins and leave the others just as they are.”

Guy de Maupassant scurried down from his top floor room and

ducked his head out the door to the terrace. He saw Auguste and they gave each other the briefest of greetings.

“I’ll take my
café
downstairs, if you don’t mind,” Guy said.

“Anne’s there. She can serve you,” Alphonsine said. “But first, tell us which of your boats you are going to take out today.”

“Before it gets too hot, a little exercise in the
as,
my smallest
périssoire, Frère Jan.
Then I have friends coming out for lunch and a promenade on the water. I’ll use
L’Envers des Feuilles
for that because it’s bigger. Later, I’ll practice with my team in my
triplette.
”

“Why do you call it that,
The Undersides of Leaves?
” she asked. “It’s a silly name.”

Guy smoothed his bushy mustache, scrutinizing her. “Haven’t you ever lain with a man on the bank under trees? What do you see when you look up?”

“It doesn’t take lying with a man to see that,” she said.

“But it might be more pleasant with a man,” Auguste said. “I like the name. It’s clever.”

Guy turned to him. “I understand you’re going to do another painting with blinders on, like you did at Moulin de la Galette. You’re out of fashion, Renoir. It’s realism, the grit, that’s current now,
la vie moderne,
not
la vie en rose.
You’re an escapist.”

“Then society is too. How do you account for the whole working

class of Paris escaping to every river town from Asnières to Bougival every Sunday, you included? Is that what you’re writing these days, grit? Like Zola? He thinks he portrayed the people of Paris by saying that they smell.”

“I’m not writing. I’m boating. When the weather turns bad I’ll write.”

“Well, there you have it. Escapism.”

Guy smiled with a touch of chagrin. “Flaubert used to tell me,

‘Young man, you must work more. You spend your life with too much

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exercise, too much
canotage,
too many prostitutes. You were made to write. The rest is vain.’ ”

“Too much gazing up at the undersides of leaves,” Alphonsine said, and dodged Guy’s arm which shot out to grab her.

After Guy left, she asked Auguste, “Why aren’t you and Guy more friendly?”

“Oh, we like each other well enough, but we have nothing in

common.”

“Yes, you do. He loves the river just like you do.”

“Every time I see him, he’s in a different boat, or he’s bragging about owning a small fleet, one of every kind. I’d consider myself fortunate to have just one.”

They watched Guy maneuver the
as,
the narrowest, most precarious style of
canot
on the river.

“He’s a better oarsman than I am,” Auguste said.

“You’re a better painter than he is.”

He dismissed that with a jerk of his arm. “I told him once that he sees everything in black. It has to do with the size of his mustache. It’s a veritable hedge. The weight of the thing pulls down his lower eyelids which affects his vision.”

“You’re being silly.”

“He told me I see everything through rose-tinted spectacles. He keeps it up every time we run into each other, the same as Degas does.

They have a conspiracy,
le misérabilisme.
Guy thinks I’m mad. I think he is. We’ve reached an equilibrium.”

“Well, I don’t like
le misérabilisme
either. Who wants to be in a room with Victor Hugo’s wretches and scoundrels?”

Two short whistles announced the train from Paris at the Rueil station. Soon working girls in pairs or on the arms of their beaus, picnick-ing families with baskets and quilts, fishermen with poles, children with butterfly nets paraded across the bridge.

So many things she loved about summer Sundays on the Île de

Chatou—the red and yellow omnibuses from Rueil taking people to ferry docks, the fl at-bottomed
bachots
with their tinny bells ferrying them to the large
guinguettes
of La Grenouillère, where they could eat

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and swim and rent
canots,
or Le Bal des Canotiers at Bougival, where they could dance. Women in hats decorated with flowers and feathers, men in top hats, the wee ones in cotton bonnets toddling after ducks, their sunburned arms outstretched, dogs frolicking, even a monkey once. Guitar and accordion music at the small
guinguettes
under the trees, the river dotted with swimmers’ heads, the fl apping of sails and rattle of rigging against the masts of the sailboats, the water in the channel cut by
canots
of all types—racing sculls,
périssoires,
rowing yoles, even an
as
occasionally—bringing songs from one bankside café to another—she loved it all, loved her part in it. She, the hostess, mingling with the guests as though she had invited each one to her own party, loved to say: “Look what we’ve got. Enjoy, taste, bask, and go back to Paris refreshed.”

“None of the people arriving know what an important thing is happening here today,” she said.

“What important thing?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Sometimes you act like your head is made of wood.”

“Weathered wood, you mean.”

Ellen arrived, the one who had posed with a glass to her mouth.

Auguste had said she was a mime from the Folies. “Her beau isn’t with her.”

“Maybe it was a mistake to include him. He has no loyalty to me.”

“So now it’s only twelve. Poof. Your problem just vanished.”

She watched her brother move right in and offer to take Ellen out in a yole. How careful he was, one foot anchoring the boat to the dock, extending both of his hands as she stepped in. He was giving up time when he could be renting boats.

Angèle came with Antonio and sat at a table under a maple tree.

The two men who had been in the back of the painting were busy trying to attract the attention of some young women on the promenade.

“Which is which?” she asked.

“The one doffing his hat to that lady is Pierre Prophet-of-doom Lestringuèz. A regular at Café Nouvelle-Athènes suppers along with Paul. Pierre’s mad about that bowler, thinks he looks dashing.”

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“A bowler isn’t dashing. A bowler is merely respectable. A yachtsman’s boater like Gustave’s is dashing.”

“Paul Lhôte is the one wearing glasses. Blind as a bat. He always whispers to Pierre, ‘Which one is prettiest?’ and then goes to work on her. Of course, Pierre never tells him the truth.”

“You shouldn’t have told me. What am I to think now if Paul compliments me?”

Auguste chuckled. She loved it when she could get him to laugh. It wasn’t often enough.

A tall man in a black frock coat and top hat came across the footbridge in a clipped, impatient manner, and paused at the steps down to the bank, as though he wanted to assess the firmness of the ground before he placed his foot down. He looked toward the Maison curiously.

“Are you expecting someone new?”

“Aha! I’ve got him!” Auguste said in a low voice.

“Monsieur Urbanité? Who is he?”

“Charles Ephrussi, only son in a line of wealthy Russian bankers. Self-taught art connoisseur who buys and sells profitably. He’s tapped his ebony walking stick on the marble floors of every bank on rue Lafi tte.”

“Hm. Interesting. And nice-looking too.”

“Always razor-sharp creases in his trousers. Always dignifi ed, the true
fl âneur
strolling the boulevards, observing, then retreating to his plush study to write esoteric articles about his observations while snack-ing on caviar on toasted rye. But here, ha! A fish out of water. Wait till he discovers that he’ll be posing with two sweaty men in singlets, un-dergarments to him, one with the air of a carefree sailor, the other as brawny as a pirate.”

“Now it’s back to thirteen,” she said.

“Did you think that fact escaped me?”

“Do you want him for his top hat?”

“For his cachet. For what he’s done for painters, this gallant of the rue Monceau.”

“Rue Monceau? In the seventeenth? We had our hat shop in the

seventeenth before the war. We lived above it.”

She felt proud because it was in a good neighborhood, until a stab-

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bing memory caught her off guard. Auguste’s eyes seemed deeper at that moment, and the corners of his mouth drooped. Could that be on her behalf?

“Someone else owns it now. I wonder if he bought his top hat

there.”

“We can ask,” Auguste offered.

“I’d rather not.”

“See how the sheen on it catches the light and makes a column of deep blue?” Auguste said. “It’s a streak of the river refl ected.”

“Clipped beaver fur makes that sheen. It’s the highest quality.”

The top hats had sat in a row on the mahogany shelves, with the price tags she’d written tucked into the hatbands. Louis had always been so genuine in his desire to bestow just the right hat on each gentleman.

Better that the memory come back on a summer Sunday when even the air sparkled with gaiety than on a winter Monday when the dull quietness made her feel her widowhood more sharply. She must not think of that now. She made her mind leap a decade and land in the present.

“Charles,” Auguste called. “Up here.”

Just then, Circe stepped off the bridge, swaying her stripes and twirling her parasol like a windmill. She wore a dainty, narrow-brimmed
chapeau
of white felt trimmed with silk violets, tipped rakishly forward.

Auguste hurled himself downstairs to greet her. Circe laughed in a rising melody not entirely pleasant. Alphonsine watched him offer her his arm and guide her to the table under the maple, as though she couldn’t arrive there on her own. She took small, slow steps, to make their time together longer. She was playing the coquette, and making full use of every minute of opportunity.