Luncheon of the Boating Party (61 page)

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models together. But when the painting would go beyond Chatou, it would become a different thing, a piece of human history, no longer only theirs. She would feel the void. Auguste wouldn’t. His thoughts were already weighty with the next.

The great moment of her life was almost over. Her contribution

would go unrecognized, and she would have the decades ahead to relive the beautiful liquid days when Pierre-Auguste Renoir created a masterpiece on her terrace.

She went upstairs to be with them one last time. Gold and silver lights winked on in Rueil and on boats still on the river. The time for leaving approached. There were sweet words. Embraces. Goodbyes.

She knew the finality of them. Auguste said he would always be indebted to her. Beyond that, his moist, penetrating eyes said what he couldn’t put in words.

Her moment of keenest sorrow sucked the breath out of her—Aline and Auguste walking across the bridge away from Chatou, and Aline, with little understanding of its importance, carrying Auguste’s color box that had once been Bazille’s.

She gripped the railing and felt an arm reach around her and draw her to his side.

Papa.

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Incandescence

Another man is lost to me, the fifth in my life, if I’m to count Louis, Alexander, Gustave, and Maurice. The fifth, most dear, most enduring. Auguste died yesterday.

At his villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the article in
Excelsior
said, the third of December 1919, a year after the armistice. I’ve just read again, here by the river, how three months ago his friends carried him in a chair through the Louvre, opened just for him, to see for the last time Veronese and Watteau and Delacroix, Titian, Boucher, Fragonard, Rubens, and Ingres, his favorites returned safely from their wartime hiding places.

Oh, his last words. Apparently his maid had gathered wild anemones on the hillside above the Mediterranean Sea, and for several hours he lost himself in the mysteries of painting flowers, and forgot his pain.

Then he motioned for someone to take his brush, and murmured, “I think I’m beginning to understand something about it.”

For nearly forty years, knowing that he was in the world painting what he loved had to be enough. Mine was a distant love, not as sensuous as Héloïse longing for Abelard for fifteen years, but as steady. She and I share one thing—the helplessness of desire. Like her, I can send my love
To him who is specially hers, from she who is singularly his,
even though the outward manifestation of it existed only briefl y. Perhaps now that he is beyond the breach, this love stretching into the unknown will be easier for me in the years I have left.

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He’ll be buried in Essoyes, Champagne, alongside her. Aline, I mean.

It had taken him ten years and the birth of two of his three sons before he made his relationship public and married her. Gustave had told me that he’d kept her a secret until he was ready to settle down, and she had been content with that. I have a feeling from the way she applied herself to learning P-A-L-E-T-T-E that she used that time wisely.

I went to Durand-Ruel’s gallery once to try to see the painting, and learned that their sons Pierre and Jean were both seriously wounded in the Great War, another cataclysm of cruelty, and Aline, ill herself, had undertaken the arduous journey from one son’s hospital in the southwest to the other’s in the northeast to plead with the doctors not to amputate Jean’s leg. What she saw must have devastated her. When Jean was out of danger, she went home and collapsed, passing away a few days later with three more years of war to go.

As soon as the armistice was signed and train service began again, I went to Les Collettes, Auguste’s villa in the South, my need to see him pulsing as strong as ever. I won’t say he cried, but his eyes pooled when he saw me. He was more emaciated than ever, the hollows of his cheeks were deeper, and his hands and legs were paralyzed. It was a shock I tried not to show.

He was surrounded by paintings affirming that beauty was still allin-all to him. I recognized Aline in one, gray-haired, motherly, stout under a fl owing dress, her hand cupped under the belly of a newborn puppy. He said only two things about her, that mercifully she had died without knowing it, and that she had given him peace and time to think. I was glad of both. Then he added, almost as an apology to me, that all currents bring a person to a final safe place, and that he was right to rely on what happened naturally.

His nurse and his cook carried him in a wicker armchair across a rough path overhung with bougainvillea to a small studio. “If I had to choose between walking and painting, I would much rather paint,” he said.

Completely made of glass and warmed by an oil stove, the room was surrounded by bare olive trees that storms and age had made into weirdly shaped skeletons.

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In a feeble voice, he said, “I can roast my rheumatism in the sun here, and feel like I am painting
en plein air.
” He let out a long, fl uttering sigh.

“The light here opens my eyes to eternal things. In the spring, the orange trees, roses, and wisteria will all be blooming. My earthly paradise.”

I prayed that he would live to see it.

An unfinished canvas of gold and white chrysanthemums in a green ceramic vase was nailed to a mechanism that could roll it up and down so the part he was working on would be within reach. I watched in agony as his nurse slid a brush between his index and middle fi ngers, and cushioned it with a cotton pad against the hollow of his palm, which was bound to keep down the swelling.

I ached for him, gaunt and crippled as he was, in his gray felt carpet slippers, as intensely as when he was young and wiry. I held his palette, but what I wanted was to touch his hands, the thumbs permanently bent against the palms, the frozen fingers twisted toward his wrist as weirdly as the olive tree branches, the knobs of knuckles stretching the skin. I yearned to cradle them in my palms. I loved his hands, so small and brittle.

He must have guessed. After painting awhile, he let me change the brush his nurse had inserted. His skin was as thin as parchment. I was afraid I would tear it, like the bandaged place on his wrist had torn.

Slowly I slid one brush out between his rigid fingers and worked the other one in.

Once in place, he pointed with the brush to a ladybug resting on a white petal. A high, soft sound, like a bird’s sigh at twilight, issued from the space between his thin lips. “Out of the whole world where he could have flown, he came here so I could paint him. That’s God.”

He reached toward the canvas slowly and placed a red dot on a petal, unerringly, without a support.

“There, now. That little bug belongs to me. You see, one doesn’t need a hand in order to paint.”

He groaned, trying to shift in his chair. “Why did they have to make a thin man’s sit-bones so pointed?”

The heads of the chrysanthemums bent forward, tired, but there

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was adoration for them in his eyes. Each stroke applied with pain-racked fingers showed his intoxication with those blooms, his awe at the miracle of their being. In his desire overcoming pain in the service of beauty, he was radiant.

“A painter should be dead if he can’t paint,” he said.

That led us to speak of Gustave, how he had withdrawn from the

Paris art world after his move to Petit Gennevilliers, how he designed racing yachts and had owned ten boats at one time or another, and how he had won nearly every race he entered at Argenteuil and on the coast at Le Havre and Trouville. I told Auguste that he had become Conseil-leur Municipal of Petit Gennevilliers. Whenever the town needed streetlights, paving, or uniforms for the fire department, he paid out of his own pocket. Easier that way, he had told me.

“That sounds just like him. Awful that he died just before Durand-Ruel’s big show of his work. I think he retreated intentionally from the attention.”

“I went to it,” I was quick to say. “How beautifully he painted
périssoires
on water.”

“He made one important mistake in his life. Undervaluing his own work. He didn’t include a single painting of his own in his legacy to the Louvre. I insisted that one be added.”

“Which one?”

“The one of workmen in bare torsos scraping a parquet fl oor.”

“Ah, yes. I understood then, seeing it, why you had warned me.”

A thought clouded his eyes then. “I had to fight to have his collection accepted by the Louvre. They took barely more than half of it,” he said, something between pain and fury in his voice. Apparently he hadn’t made peace with some things.

Nor had I. “There was a woman who lived in a cottage on his property, a housekeeper, perhaps,” I said. “Maybe he did need a woman after all.”

Auguste lifted a shoulder in a minute shrug.

I didn’t tell him that every year on All Souls’ Day, I laid roses on Gustave’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Roses. An idea. Fidelity.

Like Héloïse after all.

We shared what we knew about the others. Raoul did become a the-

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ater critic. Jules moved to Germany and then to England where he married, returned to Paris and died a few months later, at twenty-seven.

“The obituary said he cast a great influence on some poets outside France—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and an Irishman named Yeats,” I said.

“That’s a kind of immortality.”

He was silent a few moments, and then said, “Angèle came to see me once with a husband. She had become proper. ‘He knows I posed for you,’ she said, and then she added in a whisper, ‘but he doesn’t know that I used to say
merde.
’ ” He chuckled in a tender, bemused way.

“Scratch a bohemian and you find a person yearning to be a bourgeois.

There was hardly a hint of that raw, earthy vitality. A shame. In a way, she had sold herself.”

In a moment his eyes turned serious.

“Jeanne acted for ten years after that summer,” he said, as though the painting marked a division in his life, “and became an officer of the Académie Française. She had finally convinced Guy de Maupassant to let the Comédie-Française produce his story ‘Yvette’ for her to play the lead role, but she died three days after he agreed. Typhoid fever. Two thousand people followed her coffin to the cemetery, I among them.”

“I thought of you when I read the obituary,” I said.

He looked at me a long time, blinking. His mouth opened, closed, and then he asked, softly, “Did you ever have a lover?”

I was pleased that he wanted to know.

“Yes. A painter.”

Auguste’s eyes opened wider and out of his mouth came a rising

“Oh-h.” I took it to mean approval.

“Maurice Réalier-Dumas. He painted me sitting at a table by the riverbank under a maple tree, and created frescoes of the four ages of man on the Maison. In the dining room, his comical murals of story-book characters in a jungle remind me that it was a happy time, those ten years. He was fourteen years younger than I was. His pious parents forced him to give me up as inappropriately old, but the longing to be precious to someone was satisfi ed and lost its hold on me. I have your kiss to thank for that. It freed me from the claims of the past.”

He patted me on the arm with his curled fi st.

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“Loving your neighbor as yourself is a complicated thing,” I said.

“Saving the life of an enemy was easier than decorating a hat and giving it to a rival. What made that difficult was the belief that there wasn’t enough love to go around. But I found there is.”

He nodded. “There always is.”

I still live on the island in the great river that flows through the bosom of France. I kept the Maison open for twenty-five years after the painting. Thousands of reenactments of the pleasure Auguste recorded took place there. It had been a part of the healing of France once. I wish it could be again, after this generation’s calamity.

Two weeks ago, I heard a motorcar stop alongside the Maison. I

went out to the side balcony. The driver opened the rear door, where Auguste sat alone. It took all my self-possession not to leap down the stairs to smother him in an embrace. He would have to make the fi rst move, if only a tiny gesture or a word.

I could say there was yearning in his eyes, but I suspect I was only seeing my own, mirrored in his face. Whenever I’ve tried to enter imag-inatively into another person’s life, Auguste’s or Aline’s, for example, I found connections that lifted me above mere personal perspectives to a higher contemplation. In that instant, as he sat in the motorcar, I saw his life and his life’s work as one great, open-armed cry of love.

Without a word, we only looked. We were linked in a way too pure for words.

Let go. Let him go, I told myself. Eventually he murmured to the driver to close the door.

I’ve come to think that if doing something simple or silly can give a person pleasure, then, by God, do it. So, with the article still in my hand, I came out this evening in the early twilight, sat in the swing on the bank of the Seine, backed up as far as I could, and swung forward, sailing out over the timeless eddies and the ducks in pairs, so I could feel that moment of weightlessness, that suspension of all earthly ties. I pray that’s what Auguste is feeling now, and Gustave, and Louis, and Alexander, and Aline too, all of them enjoying that sweet bodiless fl ight above a river bathed in winter light. A cork may swirl in an eddy or rest

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in a tangle of reeds, but only for a time. It passes on to other, unknown pleasures.

I’m remembering now our last conversation in the South of France.