Paris Red: A Novel (21 page)

And I do not know how I know what to do next, but I know.

When we first came inside the café from the street, I knew where he had been sitting because he left his gloves on the table. They are his favorites, thin leather, with three tucks stitched on the back, the yellow color of the center of a daisy. Inside they are stamped:
Gants Boucicaut, Médaille d’Or, Paris 1862
. They smell of smoke and his skin and cloves—I know because I have brought them up to my nose many times. And someplace someplace someplace, the gloves must smell a little of me.

His gloves are soft as skin, are skin, and when I reach over to take one, it feels like I am taking his hand in mine. I pull one glove on, and it goes over my hand easily because it is big. And yet it is still like a second skin, like his skin on mine. I let myself feel it for a moment, and then I pull on the other glove.

The whole thing takes seconds. And then I say to the glowering face, to
cher Baudelaire
, “Pleased to meet you.”

And something shifts in his gaze. Something becomes sorrowful in those eyes, and instead of saying something cutting, or just droning on and on,
cher Baudelaire
goes silent.

And then, to break the moment—because it is too much, it is too much to hold his gaze, and to go on being stared at, and it is too much for everyone at the table to watch—Tonin stands to get the waiter to bring another bottle of wine. And in another moment Astruc says, “I thought Duranty would be here by now.”

Quickly, everyone latches on to that, to telling stories of Duranty. Only Baudelaire and I are quiet.

And because I am seventeen and wearing the bottle green boots of a whore and a black ribbon at my neck, and because I reached over and took my lover’s gloves and pulled his skin onto my own—I know what I see when I turn from
cher Baudelaire
and look around.

I see everything at the table has changed. I see everyone at the table has changed.

And when I look to him, to the one whose skin I just pulled over my own, I see he is watching me.

Because he saw the change, too. He saw the whole table change when I pulled on his gloves.

And I feel safe wearing his yellow leather gloves, with his skin on mine.

He and I
do not speak until we are blocks away, and when we do, I am the one who says, “Don’t you want to go back to your friends?”

“I see them all the time.”

“You see me all the time,” I say.

“That’s different.”

“Baudelaire was away, so you can’t have seen him all the time.”

“I thought he was still away.”

“He thought I was a working girl,” I say. “Working the café.”

“I wouldn’t have subjected you to him if I’d known. Sometimes he needs to be the only voice in the room. And he’s cruel about women.”

I think back to the painting of the mistress, the one with the flat face and awkward leg. I wonder if Baudelaire is her lover. I wonder and then I know.

“But he can’t be cruel all the time,” I say. “He loves his broken doll.”

He does not say anything to me then, just looks at me sidelong. But at the corner, when we step down into the street, he takes my hand up to his mouth and kisses my fingers. Because I have given him back his gloves, because I am bare-handed just like I always am.

He kisses my fingers and then pulls me to him, there on the street.

Later, when we
are lying in my bed on La Bruyère, he wraps his hand in my hair and asks, “How did you know to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Put on my gloves like that. It was like watching someone pull on sunlight.”

“I didn’t know.”

“But you did. You did the one thing he couldn’t pretend to ignore. It was a conscious gesture.”

I do not say anything. I do not know why I did what I did with his gloves. I just knew to do it.

In another moment he tells me, “Tonin likes you very much.”

“He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“If a man can have such a thing.”

We go on lying there, watching each other in the dark, touching, talking. But as my eyes are getting heavy, I know the answer to his question. It comes to me.

“I didn’t know to pull on your gloves,” I tell him. “My body knew.”

He looks at me after I say that. He looks at me for a long time and I let him. I let him watch me, and I return his gaze until I cannot, until I have to let my eyes close. His hand still in my hair.

T
he next day after he
leaves, I am out walking. I came out to buy some kind of lunch for myself, even though it is nearly four in the afternoon. That is when I see the little white sign in the shopwindow.

I remember what he said last night to his friends:
I found her on the street. Un porte-bonheur.
And Astruc saying,
A redheaded lucky charm
.

Then I keep the word
porte-bonheur
in mind the whole time I am walking. And in that way the word itself becomes a kind of charm.

T
his time when he tells
me he does not need me for the day, I do not panic. I go to Raynal’s for breakfast but then I come back home. That is the thing, I have a room to come to. I can lie on the bed all day, staring at the ceiling or out the window or at my box of candles.
Veilleuse Universelle, Félix Potin, Paris, Exiger ce Timbre.

But I do not just lie on the bed to nap. For the first time in a long time I take out my notebook and try to figure out what to draw in the room. The creased sheets? The angle of the beam by the mansard? And then I know: I want to draw the window and what is outside the window. The white sign with black letters on the brick red building,
HERBORISTE
.

I try to draw it with my pencils but in a little while I know I can only get at part of what I see. Because the sign is not really white but bluish white, and the brick is not just red but brownish purple. And that makes me think of what he always says, that colors are the only thing. That there are no lines in nature, just one color next to another. Une tache à côté de l’autre.

I need color.

So I get a brush and a couple of old tubes of watercolor paint that I took from his trash once, from the can beside the back door of the studio. The brush is a bit stiff and the tubes are crimped and flattened, hardly anything in them, but I like just seeing the smears of color and the names: vert de cadmium, bleu de cobalt. The colors of leaves and flowers.

I work the ruined brush in my fingers until the bristles soften a bit, and I think that is it, that is what I want to try to paint. Flowers. Morning glories. And I think I remember them, I think I can see them in my mind’s eye, but when I look back at my sketch from the day I went to Toucy with Nise, I see I had it wrong. The flowers are not round but are made up of five triangles, five tiny panels that make a bell.

So that is what I dab on a sheet of paper from my carnet with the gleanings from the paint tubes and a little water from my pitcher: five-sided flowers and still-closed twists of buds, the twirling tendrils of the vines, leaves that are the shape of a
pique
from a deck of cards.

I would like to try painting other flowers but the truth is I do not know the shape of them. Not really. Not delphiniums for certain, but not even lilacs. When I try to paint a sprig of lilac from memory, it just looks like a tree or an odd bunch of grapes. So while there may not be lines in nature, there are shapes, and to paint something, you have to be able to see it.

That is how I decide the next thing.

The mirror hanging above the dresser is small, but if I prop it at the back of the table, I can see my head and shoulders and a tiny bit of my breasts. I cannot paint the right colors but I can at least paint shapes. So I make my braid a green vine on my shoulder and my face a blank, blue oval. Each shoulder is a rounded blue stain where I push the brush flat, and my neck becomes a blue column.

I make myself the color of a flower.

At the end I cannot say the portrait resembles me because it has no features, but there is something right about the angle of the head and how the hair spills over the shoulder—even if the head is blue, even if the hair is green.

It is still me.

And something about all of it pleases me. Maybe just the colors themselves, and thinking about purple and blue flowers, or maybe it is the quiet way I spent the day, adding drops of water to the dried-up tubes to coax out the last bit of paint. The day reminds me of the quiet times with my mother, with her sitting and sewing and me play-sewing, or, when I was older, truly helping her by basting, ripping seams, or just sweeping up.

When I look at the portrait again, it does not seem strange any longer that I gave myself hair the same color as my boots. That green has been inside me nearly my whole life. And when the pages turn dry and crinkly, I stand them up on the table, propped up against the wall. So I can see all the flowers. So I can see myself.

W
hen he first shows me
the canvas he wants to work on, I do not understand. There is already a woman there, already a rough image painted. Someone lies on the divan, propped up on a pillow. Her face is a muddy cloud, and much of her body seems to be an outline. After the first moments of looking, I realize that what I think is an outline is not that at all. It is what is left. There was once paint on the canvas, and it has been taken away.

“What is it?” I say.

“A failed effort. A start with no finish.”

I look more closely at the thing, and in spots I can just make out the weave of the canvas.

When he sees me studying the painting, he says, “It’s scraped almost all the way down.”

But it isn’t scraped all the way. Along with the outline of a body, I can still make out details of a face. The light and dark areas of the eyes, the shape of the nose. And a maw where the mouth should be.

“The face was wrong,” he tells me now. “Some faces are dead. You saw it yourself.”