Luncheon of the Boating Party (33 page)

Keeping her pose, Angèle began to sing softly,
“De ses vertus ne par-lons pas.”
It was one of the Béranger tunes about Lisette, the unfaithful lover. Of her virtues we nevermore speak. It was good advice.

He worked doggedly, trying to ignore and focus, but he couldn’t get out of his head Zola’s mocking voice chanting,
The Impressionists remain
inferior to what they undertake, inferior to what they undertake, inferior . . .

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The burden of the chant, the fate of the movement, weighed on his shoulders. The whole endeavor was a mistake, a reckless, overambi-tious decision in Madame Charpentier’s salon. All the same, he couldn’t let the abyss of his doubt show. That would negate all of their efforts.

They refused a break and he kept working until the light faded.

Downstairs, no one was inclined to stay to drink and dance.

Charles lay his hand on his shoulder. “Your painting is going to be too fine a thing to have any woman of her stripe in it.”

Jules said, “Ulysses overcame Circe’s enchantment by means of a magic herb. Maybe a glass of absinthe would do you some good tonight.”

Auguste nodded. Jules followed Charles out the door. Gustave lingered at a table and talked quietly to Fournaise. Alphonsine and Raoul joined them.

Auguste drew Angèle aside. “How about a little walk?”

“I can’t think of anything better.”

They escaped up the path. “Will you trust me for your modeling fee today? I need to buy more paint if I’m to go on.”

“If?
If ?
You let that chit with a broomstick up her arse kick up a fuss and make you quit, then it will be you I’ll have to slap some sense into.

I should have cocked a snook at her, standing there on that bridge pitiful as a Maquis cat waiting for you to come crawling after her. She weren’t no
fl eur-de-Marie
pure as the Virgin’s piss.” She snapped her knuckles against his chest. “Now cheer up. You want I should do a boulevard for you?”

To Circe, that would mean walking down rue Saint Honoré on a binge of buying hats, gloves, dresses, jewelry, and mirrors. Then he realized.

“No, I could never ask you—”

“You’re not asking. I’m telling. You’ll have your money for paints sure as I’m standing here. And to keep things straight, I owe you my rent money back too.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“Oh, don’t get your tit in a wringer. It’s not like it would be my fi rst time.”

“Please, Angèle. Don’t do this.”

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“You can’t stop me. Don’t worry you none. I have my scruples, and here they is. Fornication’s a full-article sin when it’s done to injure. It’s half-half when done out of mere pleasure. It’s only tinged with sin when it’s done by necessity. It’s no sin at all when it’s done out of love. And this lands somewhere between a necessity and love. No tinges ever scared me off.”

Here was the spirit of Montmartre, alive and beating, sensuality as a fully generous act.

“You saint of a hussy. Or should I say hussy of a saint?”

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C h a p t e r T w e n t y - t w o

Moonlight and Dawn

It was too hot to sleep. Alphonsine kicked off the sheet. Moonlight cast a glow through the window. She turned away from it. Still, the ache of compassion kept her awake.

The strain of the day persisted even though she’d drunk an absinthe with Papa and Raoul. She had been desperate for Circe to stop whining and turn the way he wanted her to. All the same, she was glad when Circe took those first humiliating steps down the stairs. Auguste seemed dazed after Angèle left. Gustave brought him an absinthe and they had sat on the bank watching the river turn copper-colored as the sun set.

She had wanted to be right there with them, but had left them alone. It was a man’s moment with his friend.

She didn’t know what he felt after her outburst in the boat. From the dock, she had just run into her room, and had kept her distance since. She’d been edgy, watching him. If she hadn’t said that
x
equals
y
equals
z,
he would not have said that she was a poet. Instead, he might have given her what she needed. She’d ruined her own telling.

Someone stirred, a door opened, the hallway fl oor creaked.

She had told Auguste the facts, and that had relieved her somewhat, even though he didn’t say he understood. But she hadn’t told him her feelings. She hadn’t said that in that crippled city where the cabaret singers belted out “La Marseillaise” while explosions torched the Left Bank, she was making her separate peace. She hadn’t said that for a long time afterward she resented the Emperor and his ministers for

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starting a war that had taken her husband, had forced everyone on both sides of the Rhine to suffer, and had brought humiliation and trauma to the nation for a decade. And she hadn’t said that the reason she had told him was that he was the first man after Alexander whom she wanted to know her deeply. That was still true.

She loosened her nightdress where it stuck to her damp skin.

She wondered if Paul or Gustave or Raoul would have understood.

Maybe understanding was too much to ask of a man who fought. She wondered if the Prussian had a limp like Raoul’s—that is, if he got through the barricades. She liked to think that he was saying
liebe
to someone, and that someday he would dance at a daughter’s wedding.

She could almost see him in a waistcoat and tails and top hat, like Papa at her wedding, like any
Frenchman
at a daughter’s wedding.

She turned over her pillow to get its coolness. If anyone wasn’t able to sleep tonight, it should be Auguste. She slung on her summer dressing gown, and stepped barefoot into the corridor and out to the terrace.

He was sitting by the railing looking out in his usual way with his knees pulled up, his heels on the chair. She approached and he jerked to his feet. He was bare to the waist. The surprise of his body made her tense.

In a low voice he asked, “Couldn’t you sleep?”

“Too hot.”

She held on tightly to herself, waiting for a sign.

He lifted her wide, filmy sleeves. “Angel’s wings.”

He looked like a marble statue—his shoulders, the subtle curvature of his chest, his ribs, his narrow waist—whitish in the moonlight.

“It’s pleasurable to be the one looked at instead of the one looking.”

The instant he said that, she felt flushed, and turned to look at the river.

The moon cast a steady shimmer on the water, and a wide, frilled bar of silver reached down through its glassy surface. A nightingale sang. Crickets chirped their mating rituals. A bullfrog’s moan made her giggle.

“He’s lonely for someone,” Auguste said. “Like me. When I’m awake in a place where everyone else is asleep, I feel all alone in the world.”

“Even when it’s so lovely out here?”

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He threaded his fingers through her hair. “You’ve got moonlight in your hair. Your skin is creamy white like a gardenia. The moonlight makes everything insubstantial. What you bring to the river, the river transforms. Do you feel it?”

“Yes. I often do. It’s something indescribable. The river has a soul, I think, and sometimes I can touch it with my thoughts, when I pause long enough to see the things of the river as ideas.”

“Such as?”

She hesitated. This wasn’t something she told to just anybody. “Birds in flight are aspirations soaring. Birds in nests tell of safety and family. A tree is stability. Leaves clapping together are the tree’s appreciation for a breeze, and the breeze itself coming down the river is refreshment.”

“See? You are a river spirit.”

They spoke softly so as not to disturb anyone, and it lent an atmosphere of intimacy.

“What brought you out here?” she asked.

“I couldn’t sleep so close to my wretched painting. The smell of the linseed oil kept reminding me of the hideous smear.”

“Don’t call it wretched.”

“It is tonight. I wheeled it out here so I wouldn’t smell it, but I still couldn’t sleep, so I’m waiting for dawn. Not too long now. First light will tell me whether it’s worth the canvas it’s painted on.”

“That’s nonsense.” Even though the figures were dim and ghostly, she could see the empty place. “Do you regret forcing the issue?”

“No. I regret losing the striped dress.”

“Do you know how you’re going to fill the space?”

“I don’t know if I am.”

“Don’t even whisper that. Tell me, who do you want?”

Auguste looked away. A long moment passed.

“Margot.”

She took a few breaths before she said, “I certainly hope she’s modeled for you before.”

One side of his face smiled, but his forehead wrinkled. “Many times.

Once standing on a swing in a Montmartre garden.”

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“If she still lives there, you could ask her.”

“She’s dead.”

The unexpectedness disoriented her. The dead were living with

him too. She leaned toward him to encourage him to say more, if he wanted to.

“The winter before last. Smallpox. She was so young. I begged two doctors to go to her, friends of mine. One gave her something to ease her in the last days, but we knew there was no hope.”

“Did she have family?”

A moment passed. “Did she have family. A simple question.” He

cleared his throat. “I don’t know. I never asked.” His voice wavered.

“She sent me letters pleading for me to come to her. I was afraid.”

“Of contagion?”

“Yes, that, but also I didn’t want to remember forever what she must have looked like. I stood outside her building looking up at her window for two weeks. I didn’t paint a brushstroke. What I did was inexcusable.”

His chest heaved as though he was gathering all his strength.

“I loved her, but I let her die alone.”

She struggled not to reel. What kind of man was he, that he could stay away from a dying lover?

One who puts himself first. Was that the kind of man for her?

He stood before her naked. Waiting. Remorse furrowed his face.

His eyes asked for understanding. It had cost him much to tell her. She knew that anguish.

To hide her horror, as much as to dress his wound, she said, “I think she knew you were there. There are other ways of seeing than with your eyes, Auguste.”

She was willing to say it was his passion for life that made him stay down on that sidewalk, the shuddering abhorrence of life stopping, his fervent, all-absorbing need to do more with it. The world needed him to do more with it. Would she have wished him to die in order to prove himself an ardent lover?

“I forgive you,” she whispered.

How self-important that sounded. It wasn’t a thing for
her
to forgive.

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The contrition in his voice suggested that he had already been forgiven.

He only needed to feel it. Whatever she thought was irrelevant.

“If you would have gone to her and caught smallpox, this painting would never come to be.”

“You didn’t let that Prussian die alone in the street,” he said.

She caught her breath.

“And I forgive you,” Auguste said softly. “You listened to your instinct, the best guide.”

Out with her breath came a rush of relief. He had only needed time.

She felt that hard knot in her chest, as familiar as her own knuckles, softening and shrinking.

“You must never regret it,” he said.

“I don’t. It’s not guilt that I feel. I just regret the effect it’s had on me.”

“What effect?”

“How it’s made me afraid that if I told someone I cared for, it would make him reject me. Once, I held myself back with a man because of it.

That’s what I regret.”

“May I ask who it was?”

“Do you remember I mentioned a Russian, Alexander Demouy, the

engineer who designed the repair of the railroad bridge after the war?”

She swept her hand along the railing. “And the iron supports of the terrace, and this railing.”

“Yes.”

“We used to go rowing together, and to the Bal des Canotiers. He danced like a Cossack to the cancan. One day I showed him where I found the lovers tied together after the flood, and told him I thought there was some appalling beauty in what they had done out of love. I should never have said that.

“He began to love me, and I was beginning to feel the same for him.

It was seven years after Louis died. I thought that was a respectable amount of time. We took a walk that evening to the point of the island and he tried to kiss me. Stupidly, I pushed him away.”

“Like you did to me?”

“Worse. I actually pushed on his chest. I didn’t want to let myself fall

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in love unless I told him what I had done during the Siege and was assured that he still loved me, that he wouldn’t cast me away as unfaithful. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him right then. I went to bed determined to tell him the next day. Early in the morning, we heard a shot. On the bank, under the railroad bridge, he had killed himself.”

He murmured a low sound, not words, stepped back to a chair and drew her onto his lap, rocking her, letting her nestle against him.

“Alphonse found him. Papa told me. Do you think it evens out? If I saved a life and caused a life to end?”

“It wasn’t your fault. He must have been despondent about other things too. A man doesn’t kill himself that easily.”

He kept stroking her cheek as if he were painting it.

“All month, I’ve made you pose along the man’s railing.”

She felt his chest rise and fall in a soothing rhythm.

“Once when Alexander and I were in a yole under the west arch of the railroad bridge, the arch he had worked on, he asked me to imagine the bridge set on end, into the sky. He thought the same method to build a bridge with steel and bolts and rivets could be used to build a tower. Not solid like a stone tower, but airy and curved, the tallest in the world. What he had in his mind must have been a marvel because he became so excited that he began speaking in Russian by mistake. He and another bridge engineer, a Frenchman, were talking about it, drawing it. Now it will never happen.”