Paris Red: A Novel (14 page)

I am not sure I understand what he means, but it makes me think back to the day he added the reflection in the window on my drawing. That day he turned white paper into glass with gray pencil strokes. Still, all I really know is the blue stocking is maybe the prettiest thing in the drawing. Almost as pretty as the rounded tops of my breasts.

“Will you do anything else to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you do anything to finish it?”

“Add a background to it.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s all. It’s right from the start or it’s shit.”

“And my stocking is blue because my nipple’s pink.”

“The stocking is blue because your nipple is peach,” he says, and then he puts the drawing down.

Peach, pink—I take off my stays so he can touch me. So I can feel his mouth on the color.

In the daylight
, I notice something about him I did not see before.

Here and there on his cheeks, at the edge of his beard, I can see small scars—small pitted places. I cannot tell if the scarring gets worse because further down his beard is too thick.

He sees me looking so I say, “It’s not bad. I don’t know why you cover it up.”

I tell him the tiny places remind me of a girl from Baudon. Everyone called her La Grêlée, the pockmarked one.

“She had a tiny patch on each cheek that looked as if it had been struck by hail. But it added something to her face.”

“The name,” he says. “Didn’t she mind it?”

“She didn’t seem to. She was still pretty.”

“Even with the pocks?”

“You noticed the marks,” I say. “But once you noticed, you realized you still thought she was pretty.”

He looks at me when I say that, but I cannot explain it any better. I do not compare it to Nise’s eyes, but to me it is the same. The flaw in what is pretty makes it more interesting.

Still, I think he would understand. After all, he fell a little in love with Nise, too.

After I dress
for the second time that day, I ask him about the paintings he has hanging on the walls of the studio.

“That was my assistant,” he said, looking at the painting of the blond boy with the cherries. “And those are my parents,” he says of the old couple.

“Is your mother sad?”

“I would say. In some ways her life hasn’t been easy,” he tells me.

I want to ask him why, but he goes on to the next paintings, the man with the bottle at his feet and the one playing the guitar, singing.

“Here is a failure,” he says of the man in a cape with the bottle at his feet. “And this is a success,” he says of the singer with the guitar.

“Why is one a failure and one a success?”

“Because this one is doused in the brown sauce I learned to paint with. Because I was too stupid to leave it behind.”

He stands looking at the man with the cape and the bottle, studying the dark canvas, and then he says, “It’s like seeing into a tomb, isn’t it?”

I do not want to agree too much, but I also know I should not lie. Not about his paintings.

“It’s very dark,” I say, and nod at the painting.

“What else?”

“His foot seems odd,” I say. “I don’t know what to make of him.”

“He’s not a type you’ve seen in the street?”

“No.”

“This one was at least a success,” he says, and nods at the painting of the singer. “Everyone saw the influence of the Spaniards in it.”

“Is he Spanish then?” I say. “The guitar player?”

“If Montmartre were in Spain,” he tells me.

I want to ask him about the paintings of the two women on the table, the ones turned to face the wall, but I do not know if I should admit I turned them right way around. I think I should—I think I should just tell him the truth—but then I remember the strange doll’s face of the woman in the white dress, and I do not know what I would say about her. So I walk over and stand in front of the painting of the crowd of people under the trees.

“Who are they?”

“The satin crowd at the Tuileries.”

Of course it is easier to see more in the daylight, and now I know I was wrong about some of the things I thought I saw when I looked at the painting by candlelight. I did not even really notice the two little girls playing at the very bottom of the painting, though they are not so much real children as they are wisps of paint in the shape of children. But I was right about some things, too.

“Is that you?” I say, and point to one of the figures on the left.

“More or less.”

“And is this man your friend?” I ask, pointing to the man that I thought looked like a friend the first night I saw him in the sea of faces.

“Fantin-Latour? Yes, he’s a friend. But everyone in the painting is a friend or an acquaintance.”

“So the painting’s like a puzzle?”

“It didn’t start that way,” he says. “But it became that. An exercise.”

“Well it’s clear you like him. And it’s clear you admire her,” I say, and look directly at the only woman who has real features. “She’s the only woman whose face you haven’t covered.”

“Madame Lejosne. Her husband is an officer.”

He watches my face after he says that, and I can see from his eyes that I got it right: he does admire her.

“But you’re partly wrong,” he tells me then. “My mother is in that painting and I both love and respect her.”

“She’s your mother. You have to say that.”

We go on looking, and he says the name of one fine man after another: Champfleury and Balleroy, Astruc and Scholl, and someone he calls
mon cher Baudelaire
. He does not identify a single one of the women except La Dame Lejosne and his mother, who is so heavily veiled you cannot see a single of her features.

“Is that who you’re closest to?” I ask when he is done naming people. “Fantin-Latour?”

“He’s a close friend but not the closest.”

“If he’s like he looks, he’s the kindest one of all.”

“He’s young and handsome. You picked out the young romantic, that’s all.”

“But he is kind, isn’t he?”

“I’m sure he would be kind to you,” he says.

“Is Madame Lejosne kind?”

“Always. I visit her once a month in her home and I kiss her soft hand.”

We stand together, watching each other. Regarding each other. The teasing has changed the air between us.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about the two paintings on the table?” he asks me then. “I know you looked at those as well.”

For a moment I am embarrassed. And then I decide not to be. He was the one who left me here that night, who trusted me. He must have known I would look.

“I liked the one,” I tell him. “The gold woman with the white horse. The other woman frightens me.”

“Why does she frighten you?”

“Her face looks like a doll’s face. An ugly doll’s face.”

He looks at me for a long time before he speaks, and then he says, “She’s the mistress of a friend. She was once very beautiful, I think. Now I think she’s miserable.”

“Because of him?”

“He can be cruel. But she’s miserable because she’s sick. And because they never have enough money.”

“Does your friend like the painting?”

He does not answer at first and then he shakes his head no. Tells me, “I would have given it to him if he had.”

“Why did you paint it if you don’t care for her?”

“Because he asked. And then she came here and sat, and I couldn’t do anything but paint what I saw.”

“With him looking on?”

“With him looking on,” he says.

He walks over to the table then, and I think for a moment he will turn around the painting of the woman in the white dress, but he does not. Instead he turns the painting of the woman in the gold blouse. In the light I can see what I did not see by candle: that the gold blouse is both gold and flame orange, that the white at the front of the blouse is not the white of the horse but is the white of the cigarette, that the blue of the sky is gray in places and purple in others.

“Why would you turn this to face the wall?”

“Because I can’t bear to hear what people say about it. About the brushstrokes and the composition. About the girl herself. You can’t paint people like that, people at the edges, or if you do you can’t show the beauty in them. They have to be caricatures, like Daumier’s.”

I do not understand what he is getting at—the ideas go beyond me. But I say, “Is she someone special then?”

“She was just a girl I saw at Porte de Clignancourt. Probably a gypsy.”

When he says it—that is when I know he loves the painting. And that is when I know that if he loves something, he hides it.

Even though I am dressed and thought I was leaving, I let him pull me back to the divan at the back of the studio, the same divan where he and Nise and I sat kissing, the same divan where the white doll of a mistress sat for him. And I undress for the third time that day.

The divan is not a
bed, but still.

I know I liked it when my soldier held me on the cushion of his thighs and made the wall behind us a room. But it is a different kind of pleasure to be able to stretch out beside someone. To take time with his body, and come to know it.

And if I could draw him, this is what I would draw:

When he sits on the divan, there is one place on the side of his hip that curves in. I know it is just from him sitting, just the way the muscles of his hip come together with the muscles of his leg, but that curve inward, that small indentation with its shadow, bewitches me, and I like to press my mouth there.

Veins in his forearms track over the muscle like vines. The vein-vines are soft when I trace them, first with my finger and then with my tongue. He has the same kind of veins that show over his cock.

I trace those, too.

That is what I would show in a drawing. Just shadows and lines.

T
he sponges are the size
of walnuts or small apples. Golden brown. Dry, I cannot believe they can be used for that purpose, but when I wet one, it makes sense. The sponge comes alive in the water. The surface silky, like hair underwater. When it is wet I can imagine it going inside me, I can imagine it fitting exactly where it needs to fit. Nestling up there. Each one has a long silk ribbon threaded through it. That is how you get them out.