Luncheon of the Boating Party (57 page)

On the way back in the train, he said, “I’m going to be content here for the rest of my life.”

“Anyone would be,” she said.

“No. Not anyone. Not Auguste. He’s restless. One thing leads him to another. When he is painting a landscape, he loves water against a bank of trees. He loves a boat and its reflection. He loves what light does. If he’s painting a woman, he loves her. If he is painting a still life, he loves each petal. He may look at it afterward with joy that he and it and the light collaborated to make something that never existed before, something composed of all three, but the moment he finishes it, he goes on to something else.”

“Or someone else? Is that what you mean?”

“He keeps himself alive by the next subject and the next and the next. Any woman who thinks she can command all of his attentions will find herself unhappy.”

She had surmised as much, particularly after Aline arrived on the scene, but to hear it laid out like that was something else.

“I’ve seen what you’ve been doing,” he said in a gentle voice. “Insinuating yourself into his life by assisting with the painting in so many winsome ways.”

His tone wasn’t accusatory, but it held something inauspicious.

“That can get irksome to a man if it’s overly present or heavy.”

The sting.

“I can’t seem to hold back.”

“Not that he’s given any indication of feeling that way. I just thought you should know.”

“Does this have anything to do with Aline?”

“No. I would tell her the same thing.”

“You don’t have to worry. One more session with Guy, and the

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painting will be fi nished. He’ll go back to Paris.” She couldn’t control the pique in her voice. It wasn’t the truth of what he said that pricked, but the fact that he felt he needed to say it.

He laid his hand on her forearm. “I’m learning too that pleasure can be spoiled by expecting too much from it.”

She nodded in acquiescence, not in agreement.

When the train approached Asnières she said, “You don’t have to accompany me the rest of the way. You can go back to Paris on this line.” She stepped onto the platform. Speaking with all the affection she felt for him, she said, “Thank you for showing me your house. It’s perfect for you. Remember, I’ll be cheering for you at the regatta.”

She lingered on the footbridge, numbed by Gustave’s well-intentioned counsel. Still, she was so happy about his new house that she wanted to tell Auguste. She headed downstream. Under Alexander’s metal arches leaping across the river, she thought how tied her family was to the bridge. Alphonse had been in the unit ordered to blow it up so the Prussian army couldn’t use it to enter Paris, her father depended on it for his business, Alexander had designed the repair of it and killed himself right here. A love that fierce, and she hadn’t fully recognized the truth of it, or accepted that it could come to her. She should have known from Louis that love was too precious to waste.

A train passed overhead on its way to Paris. In the quiet that followed she heard Auguste humming on the other side of the stone piling and the thick foliage. She recognized the tune. Béranger’s “Garret.” She sang the words in her mind.

Yes, here’s the old room where I roughed it so long

In the penniless days I ne’er cease to regret,

When a scapegrace of twenty I lived but for song,

A few cheery friends, and the charms of Lisette.

A dart shot through her. Auguste was already thinking of his own garret studio in Paris. She sang the words softly to his humming:

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In the prime of life’s spring-tide, ne’er taking account

Of the world and its ways, or what Fate had in store,

How gaily up six flights of stairs would I mount.

Ah, give me my youth and a garret once more.

The humming stopped.

“Alphonsine?”

“That’s truly your song, you know.”

“Where are you?”

“In a spot I own more than anyone.”

“Come here.”

She squeezed her way between bushes to his easel. On the canvas, beyond a small meadow done in feathery pastel strokes, Alexander’s green ironwork threaded through the upper branches of two fl owering tamarisk trees in front and a third one behind, the blossoms mere smudges of rose and white, with poplars rising in the distance. Under one of the trees, barely discernible, stood a man wearing a fl at-topped
canotier.
She could imagine him to be whomever she wanted.

“A companion painting!” she said. “The terrace painting you did of me looks at the railroad bridge from one side. This from the other. A man in one and a woman in the other. The railroad completes the story.”

Auguste gave her a wary look. “What story?”

“Just Parisians on the train coming out to our island of Cythera, for pleasure.”

“Where did you learn about Cythera?”

“In the Louvre. Watteau’s paintings.”

“You surprise me.”

Good. Aline would never have made the connection.

“More blossoms,” she said. “To make this spot a happy place.”

With a deadpan expression, he came toward her and lifted his brush to her cheek as though he were going to paint it. She backed away. “No, silly. On the canvas.”

He flipped the brush so that the handle was toward her now. “Do it.

Add one more.”

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“Do you mean that?”

His deadpan changed to mock exasperation.

“Why?” she asked.

“For pleasure, of course.” He held his palette toward her and pointed to a smear of rose. “Lick up some of that. Feel the wet gooeyness of it.”

He put his free hand around her waist and drew her toward the

painting.

“Where?”

“Wherever you want. A collaboration.”

That lovely word. She aimed her brush. “Here?”

“D’accord.”

She daubed the paint on a branch that rested against the bridge.

“A blossom for him,” Auguste said. “Perfect.”

She handed back the brush. This was far better than a dance.

That’s just what they had done this summer—danced around Gus -

tave and the Prussian and Alexander and Jeanne and Aline with light, uncertain steps.

“Gustave bought a house in Petit Gennevilliers. Right on the river.”

A scramble of emotions darkened his face. “I thought he might, but not this soon.”

“What’s wrong? You should be happy for him.”

“I am, if that’s what he wants. I’m just concerned about what it might mean. His state of mind.”

“He was over the moon about it. It’s a perfect place for him.”

She told him all about it, and about going up to the studio loft and falling off the ladder.

“The instant he saw I was on the ground, he practically shoved me away as though I were made of hot coals.”

He set down his palette and brushes. “I wouldn’t recommend you to be overly fond of him. For your sake.”

“Why? Is he hiding a model with a quaint Burgundian accent?”

“That’s just it. He isn’t. He never has. His models are mostly men. He has strong feelings for them, and for his sailing crew and boat builders and friends in Paris. His need for intimacy is taken care of by men,
chérie.
”

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“I don’t believe—”

“When have you ever seen him with a woman?”

“I . . .” The reality descended. “Never.”

Air escaped her lungs but would not come back. Her appalling

blindness shamed her, her transparency embarrassed her. “I never thought.”

Auguste drew her against his chest. “I’m sorry.”

She felt his breath coming through her hair on the top of her head.

This moment, enfolded in his tenderness, had to last her a long, long time. He didn’t seem anxious to pull away. She felt his hand stroke the top of her head and his fingers trail through her hair, for the pleasure of it. His doctrine. That big-knuckled hand that created beauty, that was beauty itself, was anointing her with affection.

How does one end a moment like this? It would kill her to feel him pull away. She had to be first. In a moment. One moment more.

Yes. Now.

She drew back. The lines in his forehead contorted, the furrows from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth plowed deeper, and his cheeks were more hollowed. He had aged. Two months and he had aged.

“Thank you for telling me. It saved me from embarrassing myself, and him.” She glanced at the painting. “And for letting me add a blossom for Alexander.”

“Gustave is going to buy it.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a feeling. Your blossom will be in his house.”

As if to say,
But you won’t. You’ll have to be satisfi ed with that.
She felt the tingle that comes just before tears, and mastered it the instant it rose.

“Go back to work. You’ve got to finish the sky before the light goes.

I just wanted to tell you about his new house.”

She drew back and tried to make a graceful exit between the

bushes.

She took a
périssoire
and paddled upstream, splashing herself in a hurry to get away. The willows were weeping yellowed leaves into the eddies.

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The quieter, more reflective season was coming soon, when she would sift through events and try to rein in her imagination from where it was accustomed to roam. Bare to the waist in the moonlight, Auguste had said she shouldn’t regret anything done out of instinct. Despite Gustave’s warning, despite Auguste’s revelation, she felt no regret for hoping, or for loving, regardless of the return.

She stepped out on the bank where the lovers’ bodies had lain. She had called their death beautiful. She had thought Héloïse’s love for Abelard beautiful too. But Héloïse was a martyr. Maybe to be insouci-ant, like Angèle, was a better way to negotiate love.

A wine bottle lay on the bank and a cork was lodged in the reeds.

She picked it apart, dropped the pieces, and ground them into the earth with her heel.

She lay down on the grass near the rill and became absorbed in a silver sheet of water spilling over an exposed root, creating colonies of bubbles that separated into pairs as they traveled across a small pool, so fragile they clung to each other, so brief a pair, and took the plunge together over some rocks to disappear in the river.

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The Awning

Early Thursday morning, Auguste squinted into the sun rising

over the rooftops of Rueil to the east and waited, his patience thin.

Against the sun’s glare on the terrace, the skin under his eye was ticking off the minutes.

Alphonsine sat beside him, pulling apart a croissant. “Another
café
?”

“If it doesn’t mean anything more to him than a niggling obligation, I don’t want him in it,” Auguste said.

Guy hadn’t come on Monday or Tuesday, and Alphonsine had given

the excuse that he was recovering from his bout of drinking and the exhaustion after his rowing exertions. Probably true, but on Wednesday he had come down from his upstairs room bleary-eyed, and saw Auguste waiting to paint him. “Oh, I forgot. Sorry,” Guy had said.

“I can’t do it today. I’m already late for work. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Yes, another cup, if you please,” Auguste said and watched Al-

phonsine descend the stairs, her back straight. If his caution about Gustave had wounded her at all, she didn’t show it.

When she came back with the tray, she looked so lovely in a rose-colored dress that he felt torn in two. A river blossom herself. He wanted to paint her again. Not nude. Never nude. Not a classical fi gure. An Impressionist one, painted with all the tenderness he felt for her. River nymph and Parisienne, she would always remain a part of this Impressionist world. Aline was different. Her deep country origins made her

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belong to all time, or timelessness in the classical sense. Alphonsine was color, whereas Aline was line. Maybe a woman wasn’t too different from a painting direction.

“If he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, will you let me paint you instead? Downstairs in the dining room in soft light in front of the blue wallpaper with an open fan in your hand?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“One painting at a time, Auguste.” She sipped her
café
thoughtfully, her head tipped down to the creamy brown liquid. “How important is it to resolve the problem of thirteen?”

“With thirteen, I may as well cart it back to my studio in the dark of night and never let a soul lay eyes on it except me.”

“Then I have a solution.” Her voice had lost its spirit. “Paint me out.”

He slammed his cup into the saucer. “What? You don’t mean that.”

“Put boats on the river where I am and fill in Émile’s hole with Charles’s jacket. Then you’ll have twelve.”

He puffed air out his mouth. “How can you say such a thing? You’re the soul of this place.”

“So are boats on the river.” Her eyes had a look of resolve. Regardless of how ridiculous it was, she was sincere in offering a heavy sacrifi ce.

“I know you mean what you say, and I appreciate your offer, but that would spoil the painting for me. I can’t consider it.” The tightness in her face softened. “Besides, it wouldn’t solve the problem of Ellen left alone. Without a man there, she’ll end up being the solitary drinker I promised her she wouldn’t be. It would introduce a different mood.”

“Loneliness in the midst of gaiety.” Her voice, coming from some deep place in her, disturbed him.

“Yes. The sort of despair Degas and Manet have painted in cafés.

You know that’s not my intent. But thank you. And thank you for your collaboration through all of this.”