The Painted Girls (8 page)

C
olette huffs, a sneering sort of huff. “You like to watch Émile Abadie.”

“So.”

She shrugs, pulls her washhouse blouse up over her head, exposing me to the full glory of her swelling breasts. “A brute.”

I shrug back.

“Don’t you think?” she says, and I imagine her lip split open, a look of shock upon her face.

“I don’t. Not in the least.”

Her mouth twists a little sideways and her pretty teeth grip her fleshy bottom lip in a look of concern. “He isn’t respectful.”

I give my washhouse dress a good snap, narrowly missing her chin, and toss it onto the pile collecting on the outstretched arms of the wardrobe mistresses. “He don’t care for flesh shoved in his face is all,” I say, before leaving Colette with her skirt pooled at her feet.

Like always, after finishing his tableau, Émile comes out to the house seats, still wearing the trousers of a mason. But he don’t sit down beside me and start with the teasing, the little kisses snuck onto my neck. Today from the aisle at the end of the row, he jerks his head, telling me to come. And then he don’t have the decency to wait up for me. No, I scamper behind, calling out when we are two flights of stairs from the others. But still, he don’t wait.

“Well,” I say, catching up to him at the door of the storeroom, only because he is taking a moment to twist the key in the lock. “You like that bit about the soap?” But he don’t laugh or say I ought to be asking Busnach for credit in the program or a private loge. No, he glances up from the lock, wearing a hard face.

I sit on the chaise, rather than laying back. He steps toward me, and I look away from his cold eyes, and next thing his hands are upon me, yanking at my arm until I am twisted around and hunched over the chaise with my backside facing him.

It is all over in a minute—my skirt lifted, my drawers yanked down, his hardness thrusting inside me from behind, then him buttoning up his fly.

It takes but a second to coax my drawers and skirt back into place, a further second to get myself seated on the chaise. The quiet between us blaring loud, I sit there, knowing I have every right to stand and boot him in the shins, to spit in his face. “What was that?” I finally say.

He runs his fingers through his scrub-brushy hair. “I got needs, Antoinette. I was looking high and low for you yesterday and you were nowhere to be seen. Didn’t get a wink of sleep last night,” he says.

I draw myself up to my full height, put my face close to his. “Don’t you ever try nothing like that again.” Or, what? It will be the end of me? I will scold him, again, and lift up my skirt the very next day? “Isn’t right, Émile. Not in the least.”

“You can’t stand me up,” he says, unable to lift his gaze from the dusty floor. “Can’t bear it, Antoinette.” He peeks out from under his brow. “Where were you, Antoinette?” He reaches toward my cheek, all hesitant, and I do not pull away,

“Spewing into a bucket dawn until dusk,” I say, holding my voice meek. We are made up now, and I will not tell about escorting Marie to a modeling job, not with his badgering about me coddling her and Charlotte. Keeping them babies, he says, when the only thing for the poorest girls of Paris is to grow up faster than fast. Another time I might have said the truth. I might have said how those girls don’t have much of a mother at home, how I want to be, for just a little longer, the shield that keeps them from the harshness of the world. But right now I don’t have the strength of even a tin plate.

1879

Marie

T
urns out, Monsieur Degas is not so bad, maybe a little peculiar, but he would not hurt a flea. Oh, he is grumpy, more so with Sabine than anyone else. He hollers when he cannot find a brush, when he cannot find a clean rag, and then hollers again when he finds his pastels all lined up, back in their box with all the crumbling ends gone.

Today he is happy. I know it the minute I walk into his workshop and see three of his canvases turned around instead of facing the wall. It means that at this moment he is thinking less harshly of his work, also that I have something new to look at while posing hour upon hour.

After half a year of my modeling maybe twice in a month, he has grown obsessed, and now I must come every day. Always he wants me standing upon one of the dozen platforms spread around the workshop. He needs to observe me from above and below, he says. It began on a scorching Tuesday, when I arrived to find him staring for a good quarter hour at a pastel of me holding a fan.

For that drawing he had wanted me posed in fourth position, my right foot ahead of my left and the toes of both feet pointed out to the sides. That part was nothing, easy, with my hips naturally loose and getting more so with all the exercises for training the legs to roll outward in the hip sockets. The hard part was the way he had one of my hands holding up a fan and the other reached around the back of my head like I was massaging my neck. It was the kind of picture he liked to make—a ballet girl hot and tired in the practice room and taking a second to fan herself while awaiting her turn. At first I had to work up a look of exhaustion, but with Monsieur Degas caught up in his sketching and being extra miserly with the breaks, I held the pose for most of three hours and soon my neck genuinely ached and my shoulders truthfully slumped. The more tired I became, the merrier he grew. I slouched a little more. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s it.”

O
n that scorching Tuesday, he just kept pondering the picture, the thumb of his one hand tucked up under his chin and his forefinger curled against his mouth. His eyes were narrowed, and he looked to me like a man on the verge of thinking up his greatest thought. I stood there, dying of thirst and telling myself not to move, not to draw his attention away from that picture, not until Sabine was back from fetching a glass of water.

After I had drunk my fill, he cleared his throat and said, “All right. Mademoiselle van Goethem,” which was his way of saying I would be posing naked, that I was to go behind the screen and get myself undressed. If we were starting with me in practice clothes, he would say, “In your skirt, then, Mademoiselle van Goethem,” and I appreciated the tiny kindness of him not barking out how I should strip bare.

He began a set of drawings—simple drawings, lines of charcoal with a touch of white pastel—with my finger resting on my chin; with my arms spread wide and holding my skirt; with a hand upon the fallen strap of my bodice, as if pulling it up. Sometimes he wanted my hair off my neck, up in a chignon. Sometimes he liked it hanging down my back in a braid or even loose, collected over a shoulder. As often as not, I was naked. The part that never changed was always he wanted my feet in fourth position, and I began to wonder if that was the great idea he was thinking up while he stared at that picture of me with the fan: that I would stand in fourth position and he would draw me a hundred times.

Afterward, I would look and see spindly arms upon the page, jutting hips, a chest hardly different from a boy’s. I would peer deeper, trying to see what Monsieur Degas did. And maybe I looked too hard, because in the scribbled black lines, I saw a girl vulgar in her face. I saw not a chance of grace upon the stage.

T
oday he wants me naked in the same old fourth position but with my hands clasped behind my back and elbows held straight. It is the way he wanted my arms yesterday and the day before that, and I am beginning to think the position is just as cast in stone as that of my legs. “Chin higher,” he says. “Ah, yes!”

He moves to his easel, picks up his charcoal and my skin prickles under his hot gaze. Then I spend an hour getting rebuked for my chin dropping, my back swaying, my elbows relaxing, even the teeniest little bit. Today he makes a habit of moving his easel over a few steps and drawing me from that angle and then moving it over again, always telling me to stay absolutely still, which twice makes my nose twitch at the thought of a sneeze coming on. “If you’ve got to blow your nose …” His voice is threaded through with annoyance. He sweeps an arm toward my satchel, leaning up against the screen, as if I am free to fetch the handkerchief he knows is not inside. When I dare to lick my lips, he hurls a stick of charcoal at my feet, which will later make him yell, accusing Sabine of hiding the charcoal he cannot find. He keeps up with the sighing and moaning and grumbling, but the periods of quiet in between grow.

I dream of sausage rolls for supper and think how Blanche, who has begun walking home with me after class, pretended not to care in the least when I told her how I am wanted at the workshop every day. It makes her jealous, me being singled out, even if it is only Monsieur Degas, when she is used to Madame Dominique always choosing her. I shift my mind to one of the paintings turned around from facing the wall. There is a mass of ballet girls in the back corner, adjusting skirts and stockings and staring down at their feet. At the front are more ballet girls, three, one fiddling with the bow of her sash; two sitting down, with their skirts arranged behind them so as not to crush the tarlatan. I know a ballet girl modeled for each of the figures in the painting, because once Monsieur Degas explained how the drawing of me with the fan was a study for a larger work. The girl reaching around to her sash, with the tipped up nose, might be Lucille, which I am sorry to say would mean Monsieur Degas is not too particular about the girls he picks for modeling. Every day she is scolded for her lazy, shuffling feet. “You are French,” Madame Dominique says, stamping her cane. “Our style is refined.” About the other girls, I cannot say. There are close to a hundred in the dance school and more than that in the corps de ballet.

In the painting, the girl sitting on a bench draws the eye. Her shawl is blaring red, and you can see misery welling up. She is off by herself for one thing, and she is hunched over, maybe even wiping away a tear. Maybe she cannot keep up with the class. Maybe her sister came in late the night before, when already the grey light of morning was slipping through the shutter slats. Maybe she heard her laughing in the stairwell, saying to a boy that, yes, on Sunday afternoon, those few free hours allowed the working girls of Paris, she would go to the Rat-Mort when that woeful girl wanted her sister to spend the time with her. Maybe she woke up to the noise of her mother vomiting up absinthe. Her feet are cut off, which is a habit of Monsieur Degas, something a little planning could fix. And he always leaves swaths of blank floor instead of filling a picture up. Like as not, it is the reason his pictures do not get exhibited with the finest of the artwork at the Salon. It does not help, either, that he makes us ballet girls look common, with our yawning mouths and knobby knees and skinny arms, even though it is what we mostly are.

If I was not afraid of losing out on six francs, if I had a bit of nerve, I would tell him I want to look pretty instead of worn out. I want to be dancing instead of resting my aching bones. I want to be on the stage, like a real ballet girl, instead of in the practice room, even if it is not yet true. Does he not know people want something nice to hang upon their walls?

He calls out for his midday meal, and I expect like every other day Sabine will bring a dish of boiled macaroni and a veal cutlet, and I will wrap myself in my shawl and sit myself down with one of the old newspapers he puts behind the screen for me ever since I worked up the nerve to ask.

Once I am covered up, I say, “That girl in the front, the one in the red shawl, she looks beaten down, like she isn’t at all ready to face the class about to start.”

He nods.

“Maybe her papa died.”

He looks at me then, for a long time, with the softest eyes, and when Sabine finally appears, pushing open the workshop door with the fullness of a hip, he says to me, “You’re fond of veal?”

A warmth swells for Monsieur Degas, who snaps and yells but has the soul of a lamb underneath, who is sorry he hurled the charcoal. “I’m hungry enough to eat my own lips.” And then he smiles from behind his bushy beard.

I sit at the table, upon a long bench, and carve up what has to be the largest piece of meat ever set before me, and savor every bite, except that I see Monsieur Degas glancing up from the morning’s drawings spread before him and holding back from hurrying me along. But then, by a stroke of luck, Sabine comes back into the workshop and using her sternest voice announces a Monsieur Lefebvre is here, that she will show him in.

Monsieur Degas lets out a mighty sigh. “I don’t take callers while I’m working.”

“He came from Monsieur Durand-Ruel’s gallery,” she says, hands firm upon her hips. “He is wearing a fine coat. Cashmere. Legion of Honor rosette in his buttonhole, too.” And plate of veal before me, I make a little wish for her to hold firm to her ground so I will have a chance to finish up the meal.

Monsieur Lefebvre’s fine coat does not hide the boniness of the man underneath. It hangs from his shoulders no different from the way it would fall from a length of doweling. His silk hat shifted to his hands, he makes a little bow. Strands of silver hair fall forward, loose of the heavy pomade meant to keep it in place. He is in the middle of shaking Monsieur Degas’s hand and saying how he admires the pastels, the oils, most particularly the ones of the ballet girls, when his gaze falls upon me, my mouth full of veal. “Mademoiselle van Goethem from Madame Dominique’s class,” he says, and I dip my head, keep my eyes on the floor. Why does he know my name?

“I take an interest in the petits rats,” he says to me and then to Monsieur Degas, “I find myself glimpsing beyond the jutting collarbones and red hands of their awkward age. Nothing pleases me more than smoothing the passage from the school to the quadrille and on through the ranks of the ballet.”

“Ah,” says Monsieur Degas. “When I found her in Madame Dominique’s practice room, I thought her shoulder blades were like sprouting wings.”

He clears the patch of table just beside me and moves a sheet of grey wove paper showing three views of me to the spot. In a few scribbles, I am drawn, once from the back, once from the side, once from the front, always naked, always standing with my feet in fourth position, my hands clasped behind my back. When Papa was alive, I made a habit of undressing behind the square of worn-out linen strung across the corner of our lodging room. And in the last year, with him gone and the square of linen thought to be more useful upon the mattresses and me almost fourteen and the mounds of my chest swelling, I turn my back to Antoinette and Charlotte and Maman, dreading one of them caring to joke.

The drawing I mind most is the one from the front. It is not so much the smudge of grey where my legs meet or the line of charcoal turning, tracing the budding mounds of my chest. It is not so much my nakedness. I hardly mind posing undressed, not for Monsieur Degas, not anymore, and thinking back to the way I quaked the first time, it makes me wonder what a girl can get used to, how the second time is easier than the first and the third time easier still. What I mind is my lifted chin. My comfort with the upward tilt is that of a girl posing in the quiet of a workshop, posing naked, yes, but before a man who has seen her nakedness thirty times before. It shames me, Monsieur Lefebvre looking down at the drawing, never guessing how I cringe even when Sabine comes into the workshop. That face looks to be the face of a girl wearing a proper blouse and a skirt reaching to the floor.

Monsieur Lefebvre’s gaze lingers on the wove paper, lingers long. Eventually he removes his gloves and reaches a long finger toward the drawings. It quivers, hovering over the spine of the one showing me from the rear, then lands, tracing the curve of the charcoal line from between my shoulder blades until it is lost in the fleshiness of the rump. His pink tongue licks the corner of his mouth, and sitting there, upon the bench before the table, my spine arches away, the tiniest amount. “Ah yes, sprouting wings,” he says.

His attention moves from the drawing to me, and I study the veal cutlet on my plate. And then the two of them talk like I am not even there: The way my elbows and knees are too large for such slender limbs. The protuberance of the muscle running from my hip to my knee. The paltriness of my brow. If I was brave like Antoinette, I would make some crack about did they notice the way I had a pair of ears. But me, I wait, holding myself straight because slouching is worse than spitting according to Madame Dominique.

“Let’s see those wings, Mademoiselle van Goethem,” says Monsieur Degas. “Show us that graceful, childish back.”

Does he mean for me to bare my flesh to Monsieur Lefebvre? Does he mean for me to drop the shawl from my shoulders right here, when always in his workshop I undressed behind the screen? I look up, and he turns his palms to the ceiling with impatience upon his face. Six francs for four hours. The pay is good and the four hours not yet up.

My back facing the pair of them, I let my shawl slip from my shoulders, but I hold it pressed tight against my chest in front. There is the sound of breathing and then a finger, this time, on my own flesh-and-blood spine and me, in an instant, much faster than a thought, flinching away from it. Someone lurches closer, a rushed, abrupt step, and I know that finger has been jerked farther away from my back.

“Come,” says Monsieur Degas. “I’ll show you a finished piece.”

They turn, and I pull up my shawl, wrapping it tight. So quick, I had flinched. Quicker than a thought. Like Marie the First knew, before anyone, about the reaching-out finger—Monsieur Lefebvre’s, I am almost sure.