Luncheon of the Boating Party (17 page)

“Madame Charpentier thrust her on me.”

Jules cleared his throat.
“She the primrose path of dalliance treads.”

“Conscious of her every move,” Gustave said. “Calculated to entice.”

Auguste wondered if she’d be that calculating horizontal as well as vertical.

Jules relit his pipe and looked at the canvas. “You see the whole, don’t you? We see only marks.”

“In a haze I see it. I know that what I’ll see later is there now, but I don’t see it yet. I’ll keep making discoveries until the very end. Sometimes the most important things come out last.”

Jules nodded. “You sound like a writer.”

He tossed his paint rag onto the table. “Now I remember how hard
Moulin
was. You’d think I would have learned. What I’m trying to do is absurd.”

Gustave gave him a censuring look.

“Don’t mention that I said that. They’ve got to have faith that I’ll finish the thing or I’ll lose them. It’ll be a long ordeal for all of us.”

“Why is it absurd?” Jules asked.

“To capture a fleeting instant with so many figures? My brush can’t move across the canvas that fast. I need to be an octopus with eight brushes going at once to paint all these people and bottles and glasses, the tablecloth and fruit, the foliage, the river, the boats, the opposite

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bank. Separate perceptible touches of the brush to give the impression that all million of them were laid on in one instant.”

“An intriguing approach, one that lies at the core of Impressionism, the attempt to catch an instant in time. Would you mind if I used that in an essay I’m writing?”

“Just so long as you don’t make me out as a theorist. I detest painters prattling about theories. They should paint, not talk it to death.”

Jules gave him a teasing look, and he realized he’d come close to theoretical babble himself. He tipped his head for them to go downstairs.

“Wait a moment,” Pierre said, scratching his beard. “Am I right that there were fourteen people today?”

“Yes, but I’m not going to use Jeanne’s beau.”

“Then you’re on dangerous ground. Thirteen figures around a dining table makes reference to the Last Supper.”

“I know. It’s impossible for a painter not to know that.”

“The thirteenth is Judas. The number brings ill to one of them. He’ll die within the year.”

“A superstition, Pierre. You fret too much.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. There’s truth to omens and this one goes back to ancient times. The number is deadly. There are thirteen witches in a coven.”

Auguste laughed. “I’m not painting witches. I’m painting goddesses.”

“There’s a reason no house in Paris bears the number thirteen. And why prudent hostesses, having invited fourteen, always arrange for a last-minute substitute, a
quatorzième,
in case a guest does not arrive. It’s a hex.”

“No, it’s a hoax perpetrated by cranks and fanatics,” Auguste said.

But he knew the gravity of the issue. He would appeal to Charles Ephrussi.

Downstairs, Auguste drew Raoul aside to pay him.

“Don’t be stupid, Renoir. Don’t you think I had a fi ne time?”

The pianist was playing a quadrille. Without the required eight

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dancers, Paul and Pierre shared Angèle as a partner in the
chahut,
a prelude to the cancan with bent knees, lower kicks, and animal imitations. “Shaking out the kinks,” Raoul said, joining them despite his bad leg. Circe, too highbrow for such displays, stood off to the side under her opened parasol. At the end of the dance, Raoul headed for the nearest chair and a glass of seltzer water.

Angèle tugged on Auguste’s cast and he followed her. She spoke in a low voice, out of breath. “I hate to ask, but I’m in trouble for fi fty francs for my rent. I must pay it by nine in the morning and I only have eight. If you could advance me my earnings, I’d turn a spin or two in your honor, else, you know, I’ll have to . . . And modeling is more respectable, you have to agree.”

Her veins ran with bohemian blood, equal parts insouciance, vitality, and risk. Auguste dug into his wallet and produced forty in addition to her ten for posing.

Angèle asked the pianist for “Habanera” from
Carmen,
and raised one arm over her head like a Spanish dancer, snapped her fi ngers, and slid into Carmen’s bewitching dance, the rage at cabarets. She swung her skirt to the pulsing rhythm and sang, building intensity in her sul-try voice:

When will I love you?

In faith, I do not know,

Maybe never, maybe tomorrow,

But not today, that’s certain.

Love is a rebellious bird

That nothing can tame.

All eyes were on the temptress, even the crowd of regulars under the arbor, as she sashayed among the men, grabbing her skirt in her fi sts and raising it to her knees, flirting voluptuously—a sensuous touch under Raoul’s chin, lingering strokes along Paul’s shoulders, snaking down his spine and around his waist. She pulled the carnation from between her breasts and drew it along Pierre’s throat. She lifted her

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skirt and straddled a chair in front of Gustave just like his pose in the painting, and tickled his ear with the flower. Oozing sensuality, she backed up against Antonio, swiveling her shoulder into his chest, then whirled away, leaving him gaping. With her eyes fi xed seductively on Antonio, she stood on a chair and went on singing:

Love is the child of the bohemian.

It has never, never known any law.

If you don’t love me, I love you;

If I love you, keep guard on yourself !

She hopped down and flung the carnation at Antonio’s chest. Be-

witched and speechless, he picked it up and everyone on the lower terrace clapped.

“Beware, Antonio,” Pierre teased. “Stay on guard.”

“Bizet is applauding from his grave,” Père Fournaise said. “You know, he lived just downstream near Bougival. Is that where you found this brazen gypsy, Auguste?”

“No. Montmartre, the Bohemia of
la vie moderne.
”

Circe was standing by herself with one arm around the maple trunk, a position of petulance. Auguste walked over to her.

“Madame Charpentier said I mustn’t ask you for more than you

paid the others, these Montmartre
gypsies.
”

“Then you shall have ten francs, the same to a centime.” He placed a coin into her palm. Her fingers folded over his.

“Do you ever go out in a yole?” she asked.

“Not as much as I’d like to. I love boats, every kind. I’ve never been able to afford one, so I have to take my pleasure by watching others.”

“You’re dreadfully honest.”

“I don’t know how to be any other way.”

He did own a boat once, not one that would count in her eyes. When he was a little boy his father took him to see the pretty toy sailboats in a pond in the Tuileries Garden. The next week, he tried to make one out of a carpenter’s scrap, scraping it against a stone wall to make a prow,

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but when he set it in the pond, a breeze blew it out of reach and the fountain in the center pelted it with water and it got trapped there, looking only like a stray piece of wood.

“Might you like to go rowing, after a day of painting?” she asked.

He held up his cast. “It will be a little while yet before I row anything but a brush across a canvas.”

“How long before that comes off?”

“A week more.”

“I can wait a week.”

But after another session like the one today, he knew he’d be too exhausted to row. “Will a short promenade suffi ce?”

“Nicely.”

They ambled down the lane. It was something to promenade along-

side a rustling dress. They remarked about the people lounging on the banks, eating, drinking, playing cards, yawning, content to do little more than breathe the languor in the air. The eyes of the men and women in boats close to the bank subtly taunted the picnickers on the grass, and the picnickers eyed the boaters with envy. He understood that look, but doubted that she did.

Circe launched a tedious account of a soirée, describing every count and countess in attendance as if they were intimate friends. He wished she’d be more like Ellen when she performed her mimes at the Folies.

Silent. Holding up his half of the conversation required more energy than he had left. Finally, they turned back and he walked her across the bridge to the station.

He came back feeling elated until he remembered the problem of

thirteen. And the perspective. And anchoring the terrace. He shook out his shoulders to release the tension of the day. Even if they were available to pose day after day, managing so many people would be too much.

How did Veronese do it with forty figures around the table, plus the ones on the upper level? He must have posed small groups at a time. He would ask a few to come on weekdays. Only now did he realize the complexity of positioning so many interacting figures, and it made him weak in the knees as he stepped off the bridge.

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He went inside to find Fournaise in the dining room and took out his wallet, depleted now by the francs he’d given to Angèle. “I won’t be able to pay you the whole bill now, but take this and keep a record.”

Alphonsine stood behind her father next to a sideboard, watching.

Fournaise raised his hand against the money. “It’s been taken care of.”

“By whom?”

“You don’t need to know.”

Alphonsine picked up a bowl and held it over her head upside down.

Trying to keep a straight face, she took a few lurching steps.

A lump formed in his throat. He fumbled putting his money away.

From the kitchen doorway, Louise asked, “Did the glasses have soul enough for you?”

He kissed her on the forehead. “Everything did.”

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Cork in the Stream

In the morning, Alphonsine slipped through the upstairs corridor that led from the family’s rooms to the three rental rooms on that floor and to the terrace. The painting was there just as she’d hoped.

Dabs, patches, curves like crescent moons produced a scattered calligraphy of colors. What would they become? she wondered. What has he glimpsed in us to lay over that vast white land? Us.
Nous.
She said the word aloud, dropping off the
s,
a kind of lowing. The exhilaration she had felt yesterday surged again. She was part of something.

“Nous?”
she heard and turned around. Auguste was coming up the top step. “What do you mean,
nous?
”

She wanted him to know her, but this might make her seem lonely.

“Just something silly.”

He sat and tipped back the chair. “What do you see on the canvas?”

“I can’t imagine it as a picture yet the way you probably can, but I know it will become a fi ne painting.”

“Either that or a colossal failure.”

“It’s not good to start out thinking that way.” She couldn’t resist asking, “Is this smear me?” She pointed above the brown diagonal.

“Yes. The beautiful one. Light salmon pink beneath the yellow. Exquisite, the color of your skin. Like the inside of a shell.”

She didn’t speak for a moment in order to prolong his thinking.

“It’s a brave thing to start such a big canvas. Is it the largest size?”

“The largest width. It was given to me by a man who could ill afford to. A good man, Père Tanguy. I’ll pay him for it someday.”

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“I’m sure you will, in one way or another.”

Right then, to her this good man, this Père Tanguy, became part of
nous.

“How many people were in the painting yesterday?” she asked.

“Thirteen. That’s a big problem. Jesus was betrayed by the thirteenth person at the Last Supper. The painting’s cursed until I find a fourteenth.”

“It’s a curse only if you count the face dabs. You can count Monsieur Tanguy too.”

A shallow spurt of a laugh came from his throat, but she’d meant it half seriously.

“I wonder what will happen to the rest of the cloth from that roll.”

“Another painter with big dreams will buy it for another monstrous painting. That size, probably some classical or historic subject.”

“The same origin yet entirely different, like brothers separated at birth.”

“You have an interesting way of looking at things.”

“You’re the one who can look at a grease spot and see a face.”

Between them she sensed a growing accord, a
rapprochement,
the possibility of partnership in the painting. When he was painting, she felt that some things were understood between them, tacit in a look or a gesture. She wondered if he felt it too. What was he made of, this man who came and went so blithely? What made him banter with everyone and say funny, ironic things sometimes, and other times sit all balled up in himself?

“But I can’t do anything with those grease spots without models.”

“What about the tablecloth and bottles?”

“Not without more built up around them.” He stood up and leaned on the railing. “If I had another canvas I’d go down to the piling of the railroad bridge. Some tamarisk trees are in bloom there. I hate being idle.”

“Do you want to go for a row?”

He held up his cast as an answer.

“I can row a yole. You can work the rudder cords, can’t you?”

He extended his arm as far forward as the bent-arm cast would allow.

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“Good enough,” she said. “I’ll show you some places I know upriver.”

When they got in the boat, his long legs tangled with hers. She had to put hers between his in order to row, so he spread his wide. She was embarrassed, but he wasn’t. She liked that about him. She caught him looking at her ankles, which amused her. They were only ankles.