The Forest Lover (18 page)

“Ah. No parrots.”

She thought of Joseph. “No. Ravens, though. Big ravens in big forests, not jungles. Cedar trees sixty meters high. Native people carve them into stacks of animals. They're called totem poles. That's one reason why I'm here—to learn how to paint boldly and expressively enough to do them justice.”

He drifted away, listening to the conversation at the Italian man's table. Her explanation was wasted. It might as well have been about parrots in jungles.

“Tell me what Monsieur Laffont said at my easel.”

“He said you have to use color to communicate structure.”

She puffed out a breath. “I thought I was!”

“We all think we are. He says we're not.”

“Then what does he want? He could at least show us some examples.”

“
‘Chiaroscuro,'
he says. ‘Blend the colors to show curvature. Learn to see.' ”

“See how?”

“The Fauves don't blend. Their colors are flat.” He took a gulp of coffee. “I don't know. I've been at Colarossi a year and I'm more confused now than when I started.”

He was young, but his gray eyes seemed opaque and worn. His admission shaved a chip off her hope.

More people gathered at the table of the Italian, who tipped his chair back behind stacks of saucers.

“The one on the left is Henri Matisse. L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière. I've met him. He doesn't blend. He outlines.”

Paul kept glancing hungrily in their direction. Now that his acquaintance had arrived, he was itching to join them, would have if it weren't for her, an encumbrance to him.

She laid her centimes for the
café
on the table. “I have to go.” She stood up. “Thanks. I'll bring you a new rag tomorrow.”

• • •

Over the next weeks, she struggled with embarrassment and the French impatience with her attempts to understand. Few books had color reproductions to study, and color handling was vital. Oil paint tugged against her brush in a way that watercolor never did.
Paul stopped coming to class. Laffont gave her little attention. She tried to glean from others' work and their reaction to hers whether she was improving, but that was guesswork. Claude's Mademoiselle Courageuse did not exist here. Where was her spirit song?

Alice loved everything. She took French and history classes at the American Student Hostel, did all the communicating with waiters and shopkeepers, went on long walks, and noted everything in a journal. Paris seemed to wake her up. She laughed more. She forgot and fluttered her left hand with the shortened finger when trying to think of a word in French.

One hot September Saturday, Alice packed a cheese, a baguette, and two peaches, and insisted they have a picnic in the shade of the cemetery near their pension. They followed the spiked iron railing past raised tombs frilled with Gothic tracery. Cats slept on the granite slabs, and lovers lounged on the grass. Emily and Alice sat on a bench opposite a limestone angel.

“Stone. Paris is stone. We left the world of wood when we left home,” Emily said.

“Just think how old some of these stones are, and the stone buildings. They laid the foundation of Notre Dame in the twelfth century. Doesn't that make you shiver?”

“As old as some cedars.” Emily pulled the piece of cedar bark out of her bag.

“You brought that thing halfway around the world?” Alice tossed crumbs from the baguette to some sparrows.

Emily held it to her nose. “It reminds me why I'm here.” She tipped her head back to see patches of tin-colored sky among the leaves. “At least they left some trees in Paris. I like this spot.”

“I knew you would. That's why we came.”

“You're good to me, Alice. Thanks.”

They watched sparrows snatch up crumbs in jerky movements. Timid ones picked up the leavings the more aggressive ones left.

“Crumbs. I'm only getting crumbs of instruction.”

“Maybe you expect too much. Of yourself, I mean.” Alice clapped her hands together once. “Why don't you take the afternoon off and we could go to some galleries? They're free.”

“Gibb said galleries don't show what's really new.”

“Then we could go to Luxembourg Gardens. It's not far.”

“Pictures don't get painted wandering through parks.”

“It's a weekend, Millie. This is Paris. We'll probably never be here again.”

“We definitely won't if I don't improve faster. I need to work on weekends too.”

Alice tossed her last crumbs to a sparrow too skittish to join the fray. He bounced toward the stone angel to snatch them.

“Alice, look! That stone angel.” She grabbed Alice's arm and spoke fast. “Amazing! Does it look bluish white on top and pale charcoal brown on its undersides to you?”

“No.”

“Well, it does to me. You see its shape, don't you?”

“Generally.”

“Those hue changes are what gives it shape. I see it now. It's what Laffont meant!”

Alice tipped her head and squinted.

Emily studied the angel more intensely, afraid to let it go. Yes. Definitely. The difference wasn't in the lightness or darkness of the stone but in its actual hue.

“If this is an optical principle, I'll see it everywhere, see how it's shown in paintings. All right, Alice. Tomorrow we'll go to Salon d'Automne. You'll have to find it. Just tow me on a leash.”

• • •

They took the
métro
to the Champs-Élysées and walked past a puppet show under chestnut trees and roundabouts for children. Emily watched for hue changes in geometrically hedged courtyards and Neoclassical stone façades. Under a striped café umbrella advertising an apéritif, a woman dressed in fluid emerald crepe posed while sipping an opaline green drink. Emily slowed.

“Absinthe,” Alice whispered, as if it were dangerous even to say it out loud. “They say it's made from wormwood.”

“The dress, Alice. I'm looking at her dress.”

Above the woman's bosom, the hue of her dress was yellower, and where it fell in folds from her lap, the shadows were bluer. New eyes, she thought. She was seeing with new eyes!

Fluted columns announced the Grand Palais, roofed in curved glass, the entrance topped by marble muses.

“Now that's a building built to tell you something,” Emily said, feeling spirited as they started up the broad stairway to its monumental porch and arched door.

The main gallery was a madhouse of noise. Passions rendered in pigment exploded in hundreds of paintings. Sulphur yellow, crimson lake, cerulean blue sprang out of their frames hung edge-to-edge up to the ceiling.

“It's garish and unnatural,” Alice said, “the colors they use. A red sky? A green and orange bridge? Blue horses?”

“They're expressive all the same. It's what that article meant. Sensations of color.”

She began to glimpse things as they walked from room to room. The brushwork left visible. Ridges of paint following the direction of the stroke which followed the object's shape. Figures and objects outlined in black. The viewpoint never quite fixed. The essential exaggerated and the unimportant vague.

As if from a dream, Alice's thin voice reached her. “Do you really want to paint like this?”

“Like what? Which? They're all different.”

Alice touched her temples. “The colors don't go together. I'm sorry, Millie. It gives me a headache.”

Alice slumped on a bench while Emily went through the exhibit again. At closing time, she found Alice hunched over her French grammar book, her nose inches from the page, her posture just like Emily felt—overwhelmed. What technique should she try first? Images battered at her on the way home. As they crossed the pont Alexandre with its ornate lampposts, square stone towers, and gilded angels, everything, all of Paris, seemed too heavy.

“Of all the names, I don't know who are the rising stars.”

“Do you have to?”

“I don't know that either.”

She fell into bed exhausted.

A violin student one floor below squeaked the same four notes until they drove her mad. She closed her eyes to shut out the noise and to envision what she had seen. Vibrant, saturated color streaked across the window shade. The violin sounds became visible in orange, red, violet, and with the deep opacity of oil. She saw herself
floating out the window. Above the pont Alexandre, she saw the Seine in yellow and purple. Unmixed daubs of pigment swam before her—Prussian blue trees, screaming orange faces, smeared vermilion skies. Was she asleep or awake?

Monstrous Madame Bagot shook oil brushes at her in one hand, blue leeks in the other, and Laffont shouted at her as if volume would make her understand. She felt herself sink under the bridge, plunge down like a whale to inky depths. She couldn't breathe, and woke up coughing and crying, flailing at the colored water until she noticed Alice stroking her face.

“It's all right, Millie. It was only a dream.”

She shivered in sweat and clutched the blanket. She was in bed. She was safe.

“Talk to me,” Alice said.

“A grown woman, nearly forty years old, crying because I'm so ignorant. I've progressed so little.” She slid down and pulled the covers up to her chin. “We come from such a backwater.”

Alice put her cheek against Emily's. “You've got to forgive our origins.”

“Forgive the province I love for making me provincial?” She turned onto her side. “I don't know if I'm improving at all.”

“Why don't you come with me to French class?”

“I need every tick of the clock for art.”

“Then go back to Gibb and ask where you can get critiques in English. Only do
something.
”

“All right. All right.”

• • •

She went to his studio and spilled it all out.

“Don't you ever teach?” she asked in exasperation, plunking herself down where he directed her, on the model's chaise longue.

A softness came into his eyes. “Spring and summer only.”

“Then where can I go? I only have enough money for a year, so you better tell me where I can learn fast.”

He tapped his lips with his fingers all bunched together, thinking, and left a magenta paint smear on his mustache. “Go to John Duncan Fergusson at L'Atelier Blanche. A Scotsman known for
Post-Impressionist styles. He'll get you to ignore what isn't right for you, and teach you in English what is. Tell him I sent you. Then in the spring, come see me again.”

• • •

Fergusson put on his red wool neck scarf and tucked it under his tweed jacket. It was late afternoon, time for him to leave. A big man with big hands and a big voice, he filled the spacious studio when he was there, and it seemed empty when he wasn't, even if other students were there. He drew up a stool next to her.

“You're working too hard on small things, lass.”

She snickered, the term so inappropriate for her.

“Simplify your forms and you'll see repetitions within that composition,” he said.

She studied her canvas of a figure. “What if there isn't any repetition?”

“Oh but there is, sure. See the roundness of her shoulder and the edge of the circular table? Stretch both of them until they follow the same curve. That will give you rhythm,” he said. “Rhythm, that's the thing.”

“To see it on my own seems beyond my reach.”

Dede's words taunted her.
Who do you think you are that you deserve to study art in Paris?

Fergusson smiled at her in a fatherly way even though he was younger than she. “It's coming. You don't see it yet. Art isn't just something a person does. It's something he is. And you are. Let go your worries a mite.”

His encouragement drove her, and she exhausted herself with overwork. A headache that lasted for a week made her so nauseous she couldn't hold a brush, couldn't eat, couldn't get out of bed. Alice telegraphed home her alarm, and called for a motor taxi to take her to the infirmary of the American Student Hostel.

“What seems to be the problem?” the admitting nurse asked.

“I feel beaten and skinned alive.”

The doctor prescribed bed rest. She stared at the tan blanket, cream-colored walls, white curtains hanging between beds, white uniforms. There was nothing to urge her to keep her eyes open. She slept fitfully, lost track of time, drifted.

“The nurses took my petticoat,” she grumbled to Alice. “Color would at least remind me of why I'm here. I demanded it back. They threw it out. ‘Unsanitary, Mademoiselle.' What cheek!”

Alice gave her a stern look. “What was that you told me in Alaska about your Indian friend going right on after she lost a child? And you only lost a dirty slip.”