Luncheon of the Boating Party (25 page)

The shutters were open in number eight, Gustave Moreau’s reddish stone house. Peering through one of the pointed arched windows, she saw him standing before an enormous canvas on his easel.

There was Eva Gonzalès in her garden at number four, painting to Papa’s rhythm. She was surrounded by orange puffs of marigolds, and behind her, yellow honeysuckle trailed down the garden wall like a veil.

“You look like a painting yourself,” Jeanne said.

“A glory of a day. I couldn’t stand to work inside.”

At the base of the crescent, near the iron gate separating avenue Frochot from rue Laval, she listened awhile to a soprano voice pouring out of Victor Massé’s window at number one, auditioning, perhaps, for a new opera. She thought how she had grown up singing the “Song of the Nightingale” from his opera
The Marriage of Jeannette.

The tapping of the playwright’s writing machine made her go back to Madame Galantière’s bench in front of her ivy-covered cottage and open the script, Molière’s
Le bourgeois gentilhomme.
She underlined all of Nicole’s lines. Papa played the same three bars, adding the bird’s tum, ta-ta, twee, tripping deftly up the scale. Then he switched instruments and tried it out on the violin. How dear he was, working so methodi-

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cally. Avenue Frochot beat with creative life more passionately, it seemed, knowing it would soon lose its actress. By Christmas, she would be gone.

That made her grip the bench where she’d fallen in love for the fi rst time, with Molière when she’d read her first play, and had said some of the lines aloud. It was his
School for Wives,
a silly play, she’d thought at the time, yet she’d loved how that old fool, Arnolfe, had gotten his just deserts for imprisoning his would-be wife, body and soul, and the girl, Agnès, had outwitted him in spite of his attempts to keep her ignorant.

A simple comedy targeted at the stuffy, rigid bourgeoisie. She was only fifteen when she’d read it, and Madame had said in astonishment, “My dear, you ought to be an actress.” And three years later, she played Do-rine in
Tartuffe
at the Comédie-Française. Audacious for one so young, the reviewers said.

She felt a pang, thinking that on this bench Madame had opened to her a future. She would have to leave this street she loved in order to live in an apartment above a grand boulevard and go to parties with stockbrokers and bankers and their boring wives.

And leave theater too? Unthinkable. Unspeakable. This would re-

quire all the artfulness of Agnès. To Joseph-Paul, esteem was the higher aim. To her, it was admiration for creation. He had to assert himself over a woman more popular and better known than he was, for the sake of esteem. She had to find a way to work around his assertions.

There was that bird again, peeping out his four notes. She tried to whistle it. It came out too breathy, but identifiable. She could whistle it in her new role at inappropriate moments. Better yet, she could try to whistle it and just blow air, even blow air in a coarse way, but concen-trate so hard on it, so innocently, and screw up her face so comically. She practiced it now until she burst out laughing at herself. Yes, it did sound like a particular, unfeminine thing. She hoped no one heard it. She could get a laugh that way as Nicole, earnestly trying, only to have it sound like something unmentionable. Amusing, that one little bird could have an influence on music and theater.

“A wife in our social position needs to exhibit a certain level of deco-

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rum,” Joseph-Paul had said, sounding for all the world like the character Arnolfe delivering one of his pedantic maxims for good wives. “She should have Wednesday afternoon salons, not Wednesday afternoon rehearsals.”

And certainly not Monday morning practices of unmentionable

sounds.

What about modeling? Would he try to curtail that too?

She had to plant her feet in what she knew to be her being, and learn to say no, cleverly, fi rmly.
I love you, Joseph, I can’t live separate from you,
but no.
She had set a bad precedent yesterday by bending to his demands and not showing up for Auguste. She practiced a line.
In all other
ways I will honor you, Joseph, but not in this. I must have theater and I must
have art.

She went inside, changed into her dark blue dress, and took the script to memorize on the train. In the foyer, Maman waved her arms to Papa’s music. “He hasn’t told me, but I think that will be your wedding waltz.”

Jeanne went into the music room and circled around Papa with his bow raised, waited an instant so she wouldn’t be impaled by it, and aimed a kiss on his temple. “I love it, Papa. It’s lovelier than birdsong.”

“I’m going out,” she told her mother, putting on her gloves.

“Black gloves on a summer day? To the theater or to lunch with

Joseph-Paul?”

“To pose.” Looking in the hall mirror, she positioned her felt bonnet with the maroon feathers. “For Auguste.”

Maman’s hands flew up. “Ah, wait a minute.” She hurried into the kitchen and cut an enormous piece of cake. “Chocolate, just like he likes.” Maman grasped her wrist. “If it had been him instead of Joseph-Paul, I would have been just as happy.”

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Remembrance of Times Past

The still life was coming along, the bottles, the footed white compote of grapes, figs, and pears, the glasses with a sip of cassis left in some, wine in others. His table would be as rich and sparkling as the one in
The Marriage Feast at Cana.
Prussian blue with rose madder for the wine in bottles. A touch of cobalt with white for the lit side of the bottles and the grapes. The last of the season, Louise had said, so he had to finish them today. A change of brushes, a thick daub of white at the bottom of the empty glasses. He reveled in the gooeyness of it. Only a preliminary laying in of the whites. When these were dry and the painting was finished, he would build up another layer of them so they would protrude and catch the light and send it back brilliantly. Let them see in that the workings of his hand. If viewers saw only the things depicted and not the act of painting, they were missing half the pleasure.

Feet stomped up the stairs, fast as a drumroll.

“Auguste,” Alphonsine said. “She’s here. Mademoiselle Samary.”

He shot up and his chair tipped backward with a clatter.

She came up the stairs and Alphonsine disappeared down the

hallway.

The slight opening of her lips announced,
I’m here.
Simply that. An expectant curtain call on a stage.

“You are dazzling.”

He took a moment to suck pleasure from the sight of her. Her skin translucent, like mother-of-pearl in the light, a few curls of chestnut

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hair peeking out from under her hat, the crisp white cuffs, the black gloves with the pearl buttons—all these elements together released a tumble of feelings.

“When you didn’t show up yesterday, I thought you were trying to tell me something I didn’t need to be told.”

“Not at all.”

“I put you in the painting, repositioned two men to adore you, and then you didn’t show up.”

“I was hoping to be able to.”

“No letter. No telegram. I would have understood. A fit of pique because you’re in the back?”

She glared down that notion.

“I would have positioned you more prominently if you had come

on time.”

“It couldn’t be helped.” She placed the packet on the table. “From my mother.”

A calculated change of subject. He peeked inside the paper wrapper and felt his mood softening. “
Chocolat.
She remembers well. Tell her
merci.
”

Jeanne studied Angèle and Antonio, the only faces painted so far.

She tipped her head at the vague shapes of Pierre and Paul, and examined the few dabs he had made for the colors of her dress and hat and gloves.

“It was mighty hard for them to pose with no one to look at.”

She ignored that. Her hand went up to her mouth, tapping it, pointing to Circe blocked in with no detail. “What’s her name?”

“Cécile-Louise Valtesse . . . de la Bigne.” A flush of embarrassment swept over him at so pompous a name.

“From the loges at the Opéra or the
promenoir
at the Folies?” The fall in her voice charged him with the latter, less respectable possibility.

“From Madame Charpentier’s salon,” he said, clipping off each word separately. “I was hoping I’d find you there.”

“I’ve been occupied lately.”

“So I hear. Shall we begin? You did come to pose, didn’t you?”

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“Yes, but I have a fitting at four,” she said.

He felt awkward and formal with her, directing her where to stand, as though she were chaste, every muscle taut, and it was her fi rst time, their first time, on the divan in his studio. He positioned her shoulders, lifted her chin, and felt that delicate hollow behind the bone. “Impossible to know the correct angle of your head without Paul and Pierre here.”

“I wasn’t looking at them.”

“Then where were you looking?”

“At that woman leaning on the railing as if she owned the place.”

“Be careful. She has every right.”

“Oh, my! Such protectiveness. Your new muse?”

He turned away from her and stepped back to the canvas. How was he to answer that? He didn’t have to. “Now your hands, to your ears.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear as she always did, even in bed after they had taken raucous fill of each other. With that common little gesture, she still had the power to overwhelm him.

He took time to clean his brushes in order to get control of his voice.

“Who is painting you now?” he asked.

“No one at the moment. Did you know that Louise Abbéma’s paint-

ing of me as a soubrette was hung in the same room as Bastien-Lepage’s Sarah Bernhardt?”

“Yes. I saw it. The bow was too big.”

“It was my costume. For Lisette in
Jeux de l’amour,
” she said, a defensive edge to her voice.

“No one will know that when they look at it years from now. It

looked ridiculous, stretching shoulder to shoulder like a clown.”

Her lips tightened. He had hurt her feelings.

“She did a nice job on your face, though.”

In order to get as much done as possible in case she didn’t come back, he mixed ultramarine, cobalt, and rose madder right on the canvas for the gradations in the fabric of her dress. He added vermilion to brown it for shadows. At one angle the iridescent feathers on her hat were maroon. At another they were a brown-black, like serrated obsidian, with the fluff a deep red-orange. How richly they gave back the light.

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“What have you been painting?”

He noticed she didn’t ask whom he was painting. “In Normandy. I’ve been painting in Normandy. I was curtailed awhile with a broken arm.”

“I didn’t know.” She let a long moment pass before she asked,

“Whatever happened to your painting of me? The full-length one in the white gown?”

“Durand-Ruel bought it for eighteen hundred francs. And that was at a time when he was buying very little from anyone.”

She murmured approval.

“You have to admit, we enhanced each other’s reputation,” he said.

It was awkward, and he hated it. Their hesitation was as though they were speaking in a foreign language and had to work out each sentence first before stammering it.

“You rarely came to see me perform. You don’t come at all now.”

“I appreciated the real woman more. The one I could touch.”

“I went to your exhibits,” she said, a countermove.

He pretended absorption in his painting for a few minutes. “What have you been doing since I saw you last?”

“I’ve been to London with the company.” Moments later she said,

“They don’t laugh as easily there.”

They were the necessary questions, to ascertain how each of them had gotten along without the other, asked and answered in a guarded way.

Her creamy skin glowed from within, like a lit candle in a dim

church, and her green eyes flashed with specks of gold. Alight with what? Love? Perhaps, but not for him. For that sullen-faced dandy. His hand tensed. No, he must have no ill feeling. Not a dot. It would bleed through the opalescence of her face.

He loaded one brush with light tones for her skin, another dark for her gloves—those gloves revealing that little opening of naked skin, the calculated allure of what is partly hidden. And those buttons announcing that they can be undone to get at her, that she could be undone. He painted the pearl rounds, the sliver of wrist below them, painted the memory of the smoothness of her skin, and of his love for her.

Not that he had ever expected them to have the conventional culmi-

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nation of marriage. No, he couldn’t quite have conceived of himself as married, even to her. He just wanted it to go on as it had been. What was wrong with that?

“You know, it was a supreme folly to sacrifice love because you didn’t like a painting.” Reducing it to that might make it seem to her not only damned foolish but dead wrong.

A small sound came out of her mouth as if from a baby bird.

He was vaguely, then acutely conscious of his hand hurting. Maybe he’d been holding the brush too tensely. For a cold instant he couldn’t release the position, couldn’t voluntarily arch his fingers to pick up paint from his palette. The ache was different than a twinge of fatigue he sometimes felt at the end of a full day of work. He’d only been painting a couple of hours. He could not let that spoil this brief pleasure.

“Such skin,” he murmured.