Luncheon of the Boating Party (20 page)

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“You probably watched how women danced too,” Alphonsine said.

“
Bien sûr!
A woman’s body is as fine an instrument as our Heavenly Father ever created.”

“I agree to that,” Antonio was quick to say. “Auguste, isn’t that why you dedicate yourself to painting it?”

“Just so.”

“Will you tell me your theory of painting?” Antonio asked. “Maybe I’ll do an article on you next.”

“I have no theory. Painting is a craft. If you come to nature with a theory, she’ll knock it fl at.”

“Hm,” Antonio murmured. In a few moments he asked, “Are you

religious about nature?”

“Religion’s everywhere.” He painted a few strokes. “In the mind.”

He loaded his brush. “The heart.” A few more strokes, and then he stopped. “And in the love you put into what you do.”

What was to the left and above Angèle’s hat? He needed to know

because the color of her hat would be affected. He couldn’t remember and his marks on the canvas didn’t tell him. Frustration seized him.

Even if he knew whatever shoulder or face or sleeve was above her hat, he would need what was beyond that, and beyond that too. And how high was Circe’s head against Alphonse’s chest? He couldn’t paint his singlet too far down. Working only from brushstrokes, it was impossible to keep all the relations in his mind.

“Surely you have some techniques, some aesthetic principles.”

“I see something beautiful, I paint it. Just like a child does.”

Like Alphonsine’s short, solid arms, which he was painting now, pale peach with a dusting of pale yellow where the light fell, warming them. He imagined them sawing off his cast. She had none of the practiced flirtations of Angèle, just her genuinely helpful actions. Sometimes, while she was posing, or when he caught her alone a moment lost in her thoughts, her face had an air of gravity. It had come over her in the boat the other day, unexpectedly, and made her unreachable. He shouldn’t have asked when she’d been kissed last. He should have just kissed her.

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“I’ll be quiet again soon, but I want to tell you,” Angèle said. “I saw a newfangled kind of velocipede with three wheels in Jardin du Luxembourg.”

“Auguste owns one,” Alphonse said eagerly. “It’s right here.”

“You’ve been holding out on me? I’ll pose free today for a ride.”

Had she forgotten that he’d given her forty francs? “It’s broken,” he said to close the matter.

“A crying shame, that,” she said.

“Besides,” Auguste said, “women shouldn’t muddle around doing

mechanical things.”

“You think I care a fi g?”

“I can give it a temporary fix,” Alphonse offered.

“I understand it can give a woman quite a tickle.”

“You won’t be able to ride it in a dress,” said Auguste.

Alphonsine piped up, “I’ll lend you my swimming costume.”

Angèle tempted him in a singsong voice. “I’ll pose free on Sun-

day too.”

“Watch out, Auguste,” Gustave said. “She knows right where to

get a man.”

Angèle tipped up her chin. “Hang me if I don’t.”

“All right. You’ll get your ride.”

During their break for lunch, Alphonse went into the boathouse.

They heard clanking on metal, some wrestling and banging, and then swearing.

Alphonse came back wiping grease from his hands. “It’ll do for a trial run.”

“Not until I have my fill of you today,” Auguste said, and started painting Angèle’s dress. A nest of tulle bordered her neckline like froth spilling over her blue flannel. If only he could take her dress all the way today, even to the red edging on the tulle.

“I’ll have you know, Angèle, that I’m using one of the most expensive and cherished pigments for your dress. Ultramarine blue made from the precious stone lapis lazuli. In the Renaissance, it was used exclusively for the Virgin.”

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“And it’s had a coming down ever since,” she said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Antonio said.

“Nor I. Mixed with cobalt and rose madder, it makes a gorgeous

violet shadow on your skirt.”

He was doing too much guessing of hues and sizes in the areas where today’s figures touched the models not present, but eventually he got Angèle’s right hand close to Gustave’s, and her left curling around the empty chair barely touching Antonio’s thumb. He liked the way she encircled Gustave, and Antonio encircled both of them.

A large cloud rolled overhead, darkening the terrace. He had to quit.

“
Y
ou can have your ride now, but for God’s sake be careful,” Auguste said.

Alphonse thumped down the stairs, and Alphonsine crooked her

finger, signaling Angèle to follow her down the hallway to her room.

Auguste saw in his mind’s eye the painting of Angèle as it would be when he’d be finished. “The glint in her eyes, the tilt of her head, and the lean of her body tell you all you need to know about her to love her.”

“I can’t keep my eyes off her,” Antonio murmured.

“Ha! You must be becoming an Impressionist!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you must have had some enjoyable impressions during the posing.” Trying for a deadpan look, he mimicked Antonio’s pose gazing down.

“As any Frenchman would,” Antonio said.

Auguste worked at cleaning his brushes—even that a joy—until he heard the women chattering in the hallway.

Angèle leapt onto the terrace, arms out, in Alphonsine’s red-and-white-striped blouse and blue bloomers. Bare arms, bare calves, bare feet.

Antonio let out a long whistle.
“Madre di Dio! Che bella!”

Auguste chuckled as much at Antonio as at Angèle.

“Skimpy enough to make me cut capers,
oui?
” She kicked her heel out to the side as in the
chahut.

“You need shoes,” Auguste said. “I won’t let you go without shoes.”

“Voilà!”
Alphonsine held up her canvas espadrilles she used for boating.

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Downstairs, Alphonse wheeled out the cycle, steam hissing already.

Angèle turned to Alphonsine. “Will you stand me some redfi re before I mount that thing?”

Alphonsine retreated to the kitchen.

Alphonse and Auguste told her the parts of the steam-cycle she

shouldn’t touch, where to put her hands and feet and where to sit.

“How do I get up there?”

Alphonse lifted her onto the seat as if she were as light as a cat. She squealed in delight. Alphonsine handed her a glass of brandy.

“Upsee down.” She threw back her head and quaffed it in one gulp.

“How do I make it go?”

Alphonse released the brake lever and the cycle lurched forward.

“Ooh, it vibrates!” She kicked her legs out, shapely legs tapering to dainty ankles.

“If anything goes wrong, pull this lever as hard as you can. Ready?”

She blew noisy kisses over her shoulder. “In case I never come

back.”

Alphonse cracked open the valve and trotted alongside with his

arms out ready to catch her.

“Don’t let her stand up,” Auguste called after them.

Mame barked at the sendoff, and Gustave had to restrain her.

Alphonsine brought out a platter of sliced sausages, Roquefort, a baguette, and red wine. Angèle and Alphonse were gone a long time, longer than it would take to ride to the upstream tip of the island and back.

Antonio ground his heel into the gravel. “I should have gone with them.”

“Don’t worry,” Alphonsine said. “My brother will take care of her.”

“Gustave, will you sail up to the point and see if they need help?”

Antonio asked.

“No. Leave them be,” Gustave said.

Eventually they heard the rhythmic scraping of a front wheel against the frame and Angèle’s whoop of triumph. Mame barked at their approach.

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“What a bone-rattler that thing is! It shook the eggs right out of me.” Alphonse helped her down. She winked at him, flushed, her hair unpinned and loose. “Not to worry. There’s plenty more berries in the basket.”

“She did fine,” Alphonse said, out of breath. “She took to it like a jockey. I had to run to keep up.”

“I’ll bet you did.” Auguste folded his left arm over his cast.

“Natural balance, she has.”

“Hm, no doubt.”

“And so quick to respond.”

“Indeed, very responsive.”

Alphonse was more talkative than he’d ever seen him. Alphonsine stared at her brother in disbelief. As for Antonio, he was notably silent, his eyebrows pinched together.

“A few more adjustments and it will be as good as new,” Al-

phonse said.

Auguste would never have guessed that Alphonse could wear an

expression of rapture, but he definitely did now. Good for him, then.

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Paris Encore

Auguste stepped out of Dr. Guilbert’s office on rue Notre Dame de Lorette and swung both his arms. By God, that felt fine and free.

He straightened and bent his elbow to get rid of the stiffness. Having his arm again was like a chance meeting with an old friend after a long absence, both of them so happy in the encounter that they couldn’t stop looking at each other. An urge to work pulsed down his arm to his fi ngertips. He would take some small canvases back to Chatou.

What should he do next? Walk around Paris waving at people with his right arm like a perfect idiot? Hail a hackney cab just so he could show off how he could stretch out his arm? Take a train to Louveciennes to show his mother? No. He would do that tomorrow. Today he needed to get Charles Ephrussi.

He passed the church where so many young working girls lived.

Lorettes,
they were called, as if the proximity of Notre Dame de Lorette lent them a dose of morality. The truth was that the church was named after the
lorettes
of the last century, women kept by wealthy aristocrats in the quarter. One
lorette
was coming toward him now, her saucy rose-colored hat and veil lending its color to her cheeks. She was carrying two hatboxes as though she were delivering them for a milliner. It was only a ruse. The blithe way she swung the empty paper drums gave her away. So did her deft, practiced motion of lifting her skirt higher than necessary to step onto the curb. A middling prostitute. He could put his right arm around her waist as she passed. Was that philandering? No.

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He chuckled to himself. It was only celebrating the use of his arm again.

He turned onto rue Lafitte, street of the big banks, and the view changed as he headed toward boulevard Haussmann—from the nubile
petits rats
of the Opéra slinging their ribboned toe shoes over their thin shoulders, to illiterate
lorettes
hurrying to dressmakers’ lofts to earn their three francs a day, to their tailor-made clients in silk shantung, cinched-in women careful how they stepped out of carriages, the backs of their skirts layered with flounces, their rings flashing on their way to the private jewelry salons on rue de la Paix. Heavens, how he loved the women of Paris!

It was partially his parents’ doing. If his father hadn’t been a tailor and his mother a dressmaker, he wouldn’t have learned to pay as much attention to fashion and fabric. His earliest memory was sitting on the floor of the parlor, which served as the fitting room, and learning the names of colors from the dresses that women had his mother make. It would have been a shame if he hadn’t had that start. A man unconscious of such things was depriving himself of the erotic force of color, texture, and even the sound of taffeta rustling—all those delights a man must content himself with until the fabric falls to the floor in a heap around two bare legs. He felt incapable of ever satisfying himself with enough beautiful women—both painting them and touching them. It wasn’t lechery. It was devotion. How could he squeeze his broad appreciation into one woman acceptable to Madame Charpentier and her portrait-buying friends?

On rue Favart alongside the Opéra Comique, a woman in an emer-

ald green dress coming toward him cast a quick look backward at Ephrussi’s window across the courtyard and turned in at the stage door.

Now, wasn’t that curious?

He slowed his pace as he approached the gray-shuttered building that housed the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
A seed of doubt lodged in his throat. Charles hadn’t bought anything from him for more than a year and it wasn’t because his bank was doing poorly. It was symptomatic of what he knew to be true, namely that his buyers were seeking him out

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less. As yet, the slide was publicly imperceptible, but he feared it would soon be talked about in the cafés. Charles had been good about introducing him to upper-class buyers like the banker Louis Cahen d’Anvers, who had commissioned a portrait of his wife, the Comtesse Cahen d’Anvers, who also happened to be Ephrussi’s mistress. Charles had a gift for convincing men that they would make a handsome profi t by investing in Impressionist paintings. His aesthetic preferences were always governed by an eye to profit. If Charles thought the fi nancial gain might shrink, would his willingness to put him in touch with wealthy clients dry up?

The Chatou painting had to reverse the slide. It was for that reason exactly that he needed Charles in top hat standing in the center rear—

Charles, the Renaissance scholar, art collector, financier, man of fashion,
fl âneur
of high culture, and above all, principal contributor to the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
Then Paris would have to take notice.

Even Ephrussi’s outer office was redolent with sandalwood incense, the exotic aroma of his past as the heir of a corn-exporting dynasty in Odessa. Although Japanese prints adorned the anteroom, Auguste knew he’d find paintings by his friends in Ephrussi’s private office. Some by Degas, at least. Whether Edgar was still a friend remained in doubt.