Paris Red: A Novel (20 page)

O
n Friday we finish for
the day and I am in my petticoat, pulling on my boots, when he says, “Are you up for a challenge? This evening?”

I think he means something sexual because he is lying on the divan as he says it, shirt still unbuttoned, watching me dress the way he always does. So I walk over to the divan in my boots and chemise and put my hand flat on his chest.

“What kind of challenge?” I say.

“Come and meet my friends. They say I’m keeping you secret.”

“How do your friends even know about me?”

“Tonin has known about you almost from the start. Astruc came the other day and saw the paintings.”

“And you told them I’m your new model?”

“I also showed Astruc the pastel of you in your garter. I think he liked your breasts.”

So he is not hiding anything from them, which surprises me.

“Do I have to do anything special?”

“Be yourself,” he says. “That’s all.”

He tells me then the café is on Rue des Batignolles, just north of the Place de Clichy. Tells me there is a front room and a back, and that they will all be in the back room sometime after dinner.

I guess I look hesitant because then he says, “I’ll be on the lookout for you.”

“What do they want exactly?” I say. Because that is how I think of things. People always want something, even when they do not say.

He waits a while before answering. Takes the time to search my face.

“They just want to meet you,” he tells me.

And in a little while I nod.

I do not tell him that I am flattered by the invitation, and confused by it.

Not flattered by his friends’ request—I do not know them and do not know what they want, really. I mean I am flattered by his willingness to let different parts of his life cross. Yet I also know he hides what he loves, the way he hides the painting of the gypsy girl.

I do not know if it is better to go on being a secret or not. Which is safer for him, and for me.

When I get
to Café Guerbois, I almost do not go in.

There are tables and chairs in the streets, and I do not mind walking among those, but when I look through the glass window, I stop. The front room is almost all white: white counters, white tables, white walls. Gold accents here and there. Even though I put on my new blue dress, I feel funny about walking in.

It is not a place for someone like me.

And I am turning away from the glass front of the café when I see him walking toward me from across the street. He kisses me lightly on each cheek.

“I thought you’d be inside,” I say.

“I came out to look for you.”

I do not want to tell him that it took me longer to get ready than I planned because I decided to wash my hair, that it is still damp at the back. That even though I have on my best dress I still feel all wrong. It is not just that I want to hide those things from him.

I want to hide them from myself.

But now that he is standing there beside me—now that he has kissed me lightly on my cheeks so I can feel his mustache and smell his cologne—I can feel some of the panic in me subsiding. I glance at one of the café tables there on the street, one where there is a carafe of water so cool that water beads on the outside of it, and in that instant I want nothing more than to go inside and sit with him at a table and drink a glass of cool water. So I do the thing I learned to do when I stand in front of him, naked, or when he asks me to put on one of his silly costumes.

I pretend.

I pretend that it is just the two of us, the way it was on Boule du Temple when we were sweethearts like anyone else. And because I am seventeen and wearing the green boots of a whore, and because I know what passes between him and me when we are alone on the divan or in my room, it becomes real. It becomes real because I believe in it.

I tell myself the inside of me feels as cool and clear as the water in the carafe, and I take that coolness with me when we walk through the doors and into the back room at the Café Guerbois.

When we walk
toward one table, two men stand up. They each nod and take my hand, and he tells me each of their names.

“We’re pleased you came, mademoiselle,” the one closest to me says, the one he called Tonin.

“You didn’t see Duranty out there, did you?” the one named Astruc asks him.

“No, but I’m sure he’ll be by,” he says. “You know he lives here.”

“It’s his turf, isn’t it?”

The three of them fall into talking about whatever it was they were saying before, and it is a kindness, I think, when they do that. It makes me relax a little, and even though I listen and nod, I also look around—at the room itself, and at the faces of his friends.

This back room could not be more different from the front. The walls are wood at the bottom and painted brown at the top so that the whole room feels like a warm cave. I can see green-topped billiard tables at the back of the room, and a door opening to a garden. There is enough smoke in the room that the air seems filmy with it in places.

Of his two friends, it is easier to look at the one named Tonin. He is the only one who does not have a beard, and I like being able to see more of his face. Astruc is dark-haired and more energetic, and when I catch his eye, he looks at me directly and intently. Not unkindly—I do not mean that—but almost as if he wants to take me apart and see if I match the girl he saw in the paintings and the pastel.

And yet Astruc is not the only one studying and observing me. Each time my eyes fall on Tonin, he seems to be watching me, but he smiles a little, as if he wanted to encourage me, not examine me. And after a few minutes, I realize I have heard the name before: the night he brought Nise and me the copy of
Journal Pour Tous
with the “Langage des Cheveux” in it, it was his friend Tonin he was going to meet. So then I feel like I know this friend of his, and I smile back a little.

The three of them are talking about a book they read, something about the life of Christ, and I cannot follow all the conversation, but in a little while he says, “I’ll give them a Christ if they want a Christ. But it will be a Christ of the people, with dirty feet and a cut in his side. A real Christ.”

“No one at the Salon is ready for Christ to be real,” Astruc tells him.

“There’s only beauty in what’s real,” he says.

The conversation goes on and I follow as much as I can, but at a pause, his friend Tonin turns to me with his brown eyes and kind mouth.

“Mademoiselle, where did you meet this one? When we ask him, he won’t ever say.”

For a moment I wonder what answer he wants me to give, and then I remember what he said when I asked him if he wanted me to do anything special:
Be yourself.

So I say, “We met in the street. In front of a shop of knives.”

No one says anything, and for a moment I think I got it wrong. I think I should have lied and said something more elegant. But then I see Tonin glance over at him, so I do, too.

“She’s right,” he says. “I found her on the street. Un porte-bonheur.”

“A redheaded lucky charm,” his friend Astruc says, nodding. “It’s rich.”

I look at Tonin, and something about his eyes tells me to speak, to say whatever it is I have inside me.

So I look from Tonin to Astruc and then at him.

“But I found him, too,” I say.

For just a moment no one else is at the table. For a moment it is just him and me. Two lovers. It takes just another moment, and then I see his eyes flash and then go liquid and dark.

Which I know is his pleasure. Because sometimes words are like touch with the pleasure they bring.

I do not
know how or why, but I end up telling Tonin all about Baudon and what it takes to burnish silver, and how now sometimes when I am posing, I feel like my hands do not know what to do with themselves. I think I probably would have gone on talking and confiding in him, but then a fourth man approaches the table, and everything stops.

The fourth man greets the others and then takes a chair. He hardly glances at me.

At first I think it must be the Duranty they spoke about before, the one who comes to the Guerbois every day after lunch and after dinner. But something about this man’s face does not match the stories they have been telling, and then I hear his greeting to the man:
Cher Baudelaire
.

“We thought you were in the North,” Tonin says.

“I was, but you know I can’t stay away. Yet when I get back I see nothing has changed in my absence.”

And I can tell that he meant to introduce me, that he means to do it, but the man immediately begins talking, and there is no space to make the introduction.

There is something dramatic about the way the new man talks, and something impatient. I keep watching his face to understand more, but while he looks from face to face at the table, he makes a point of not looking at me.

He talks at length about a place called Honfleur, and in a little while I understand it is a place on La Manche. And yet I feel that he does not mean for me to hear any of what he is saying, so I do not know what to do exactly. I do not feel I can go on talking with Tonin privately, the way we were before. So instead I listen to the new man, to
cher Baudelaire
as he holds forth. I listen and find a place on the wall opposite the table to study. When I look over to the green billiard tables, I see Tonin glance at me, and I think I can read something in his eyes, but I keep my face flat.

In the end, he has to break in. Tonin cannot do it, nor Astruc. It is not their place. Only he can do it.

“Baudelaire, I’d like you to meet my new model,” he says finally, simply, interrupting the stream of the man’s words. “Mademoiselle Victorine Meurent.”

And only then does the other one look at me.

He tilts his head down slightly, ever so slightly, and studies me from beneath his brows. And though I know it does not make any sense, the look reminds me of nothing so much as the way my mother would sometimes look at me. With disapproval and curt words ready on her tongue.

Yet the one they call Baudelaire does not say anything. He just looks at me with some kind of challenge. And in that moment I realize he thought I was just some girl working the café, someone one of his friends picked up for the evening as entertainment. That he is annoyed he has to somehow include me.