The Painted Girls (6 page)

“Coddling them isn’t helpful, Antoinette. They’re better off learning to fend for themselves.”

I shrug, and he strokes my thigh, and I feel a yearning and shut my eyes. “That lonely old chaise,” he says. “I want to see you lying back on that lonely old chaise.”

“Don’t know.”

His hand pats my thigh, leaves it for his own, and I feel a longing for that hand back upon my thigh, also patience wearing thin.

“And if someone comes upon us?” I say. Marie is always reading aloud from the newspapers, the gossip about the ballet girls and their love affairs or the bits and pieces about
L’Assommoir.
They are covering the finest of points—how Mademoiselle Hélène Petit is studying for her role of Gervaise in a real washhouse; how loads of theaters, thinking they were too decent, said no to running the play; how every costume and every set is exactly like Monsieur Zola described in his book. And all the fuss makes me think, indecent or not,
L’Assommoir
is going to be playing at the Ambigu for a very long time. It holds me back from the chaise, knowing I have more than nothing to lose if I get myself sacked. I have sisters counting on me at home.

Émile pulls a key out of his pocket, touches the pointy end to that sunken place at the base of my neck where a hundred of his kisses been put. “I’ll be locking the door,” he says.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Took it out of the lock. It was just waiting there for me.”

I peek from under my eyelashes into his eyes and give a sugary smile. There is not much I would like more, and I want him to know, want him gripped by the idea of me lying back on that lonely old chaise.

“Not a soul’s been in there for a hundred years,” he says. “It’s all cobwebby and full of dust.”

“Tomorrow,” I say. Another day of dreaming for him. And, for me, I’ve got to wash, to mend my drawers. Maybe it is even a chance to pinch something with lace from the basket of Maman. A bit of luck and she will come in from the washhouse carting linens for delivery.

Marie

I
sit at our little table, wishing for Antoinette to come waltzing through the door, brightening up the room with her dancing eyes and bits of barley sugar popped into our mouths or stories of the authentic actors at the Ambigu, dead drunk and falling off the stage or pissing in the wings. Something is aflame inside the girl, glowing like she is. Just yesterday, as Charlotte and I grew fed up with waiting and sat down without her to a late supper of hard bread and broth, she poked her head around the door. “Going ahead without me?” she said, holding up a sack. “I should eat all these custard tarts from the pastry cook by myself?”

While I wait, Maman huddles on a mattress, sewing the torn neckline of her best dress, not bothering about me. “Bastard,” she says. “Pawing and tearing like I got me a sewing maid at home.” When she showed up in the torn dress a few nights ago, bellowing loud enough that she woke up even Charlotte, Antoinette said, “Don’t know why you expect any different, slumped in a café, drooling absinthe.” Maman stabs her needle now, catching her finger. Her work shoved aside, she collapses onto the muddled dress.

I stare down at Monsieur Degas’s card, flat on the table in front of me, looking like a ticket to cross the river Styx. The nail of my forefinger tugs at the frayed skin alongside the nail of my thumb, and I lick away blood. Antoinette is overdue by an hour, which is getting to be usual for her, and tomorrow is the day Monsieur Degas expects me after class. I can wait no longer to seek a bit of advice and crouch beside Maman on the mattress, arms cradling my knees. “There is a painter,” I say. “Madame Dominique lets him watch our class.”

Maman looks up at me with woolly eyes.

“He said my face is interesting.”

“You got the mark of my dearest.” She rolls onto her back.

“He wants me to model,” I say, cutting her off from starting in on my dear, dead sister. “Josephine’s mother says to stay away from him.”

With a clumsy flick of her wrist, she brushes the warning of Josephine’s mother from the air. “Tell him you aren’t undressing until he’s got the fire good and stoked.”

My surprise would not have been more if she spit up a hundred-franc gold coin. “Naked?”

Her chin dips a little, and she hiccups. “Good and stoked.”

I picture myself shivering, Monsieur Degas’s burning eyes roving over bare, gooseflesh skin. I lean my face in close to Maman’s, wanting her to see me—a fearful girl, sucking on her lip. And I could swat her for the smug smirk on her face, her pride in such a useful bit of advice doled out.

“What’s he paying?” she says.

I give her the coldest of glares; and, dull as a bag of hammers, she lifts up her eyebrows, waiting. “Six francs for four hours,” I say.

She pats my thigh, like I am a dog done performing a fine trick. “You stick to the modeling,” she says. “Nothing else.”

A harsh wind licks at our tatty shutters, fills up the room. I leave Maman to wrapping herself in bedclothes and go back to waiting at the table for Antoinette. I know what is keeping her—the boy she brought around the other day. I did not like the look of him, all swarthy and shifty eyed. How had such a lowly creature brought merriment to Antoinette? What was the lure that kept her staying out with him instead of coming home to supper with Charlotte and me?

At first he kept his hands in his pockets and acted like meeting Charlotte and me was nothing at all. Antoinette told him our names, and he gave each of us a piece of barley sugar, twisted, exactly like the ones she had given us the last couple of weeks, and I realized she had pocketed them from those he handed over to her. It was how I knew he was her sweetheart, that and the way he started poking her in the ribs, causing her to laugh and swat at his hands and act like she never before had so much fun. I watched his fingers trace the neckline of her blouse, and then Antoinette not minding in the least how he pulled her up against him, a hand groping her backside. No, she threw her head back and laughed again. She puckered up her mouth and kissed the air, and he drew her closer and kissed her on the mouth. It was like we were not even there, and I knew he saw us only as a bother, the little sisters Antoinette went home to at the end of the day. He ignored Maman, too, which did not seem right, even if she hardly looked up from the linens she was sorting for delivery.

I
perk up at the noise of Antoinette on the stairs. She is hurrying because she is late; and in the scuttle of her feet I hear sisters to look after, a mother getting in the way, a sweetheart promising her a few laughs if only she was not always rushing off to the rue de Douai. I meet her at the door, and, seeing me there, lip between my teeth, she says, “What is it, Marie? You aren’t looking well.”

“Nothing,” I say, wishing I had stayed waiting at the table. “I only wanted to see who was chasing you.”

She closes the door. Puts her hands on her hips.

My stomach rumbles and, wanting to keep the complaint from her ears, I take a step back, but too late. Already she is sliding fingers along the ridge of her brow, the way she tends to with a headache coming on. “I got nothing more than a piece of barley sugar,” she says, holding out a honey-yellow twist that surely came from Émile Abadie’s pocket, and I think how Monsieur Degas’s six francs would buy crackling for a week.

I take the twist, bite it in half, holding the sheared end out to her.

“Save it for Charlotte,” she says. “I saw her on the pavement, running up and down with a hoop and a stick and two dogs nipping at her heels. The pork butcher and the fruiterer were slapping at their thighs and calling out ‘Charlotte, you’re faster than a fox’ and ‘Keep it up and those two dogs are dropping down dead.’”

When she mimics the pork butcher, she puffs herself up, making her cheeks round, her belly full enough that she has to prop it up from beneath. For the fruiterer she is nervous and twitching, eyes darting like there is a flock of howling specters flitting around the room. And with her aping so exactly right, I forget about Monsieur Degas, until she says, “Now tell me why you’re in the doorway, all nervous like a hen?”

“Monsieur Degas wants me to model tomorrow.”

She waits, ducking her head a little, like I should tell the rest.

“Maybe naked.” I say it lightly, like I am not fearful of Monsieur Degas’s burning eyes on my bare skin, but she appears no more concerned than Maman.

“You agreed to a price up front?”

“Six francs for four hours.”

“More than fair.” She nods.

“Maman said to stick to the modeling. Nothing else.”

“That woman don’t got the sense of a flea.” She huffs like a blustering horse, turns her attention back to me. “Flesh don’t mean nothing to him. Already he’s seen a hundred naked girls.”

But she does not roll her eyes and say Maman spoke drivel fit for the gutter like the rest of her slop, and it keeps me from curling up in words meant as balm. I let out a tiny sigh.

She goes back to stroking her brow, stopping only when she looks up and says, “I’ll go with you tomorrow, just this one time.”

“But he expects me early, at one o’clock.”

“You’ll go to the Ambigu after the Opéra and tell Monsieur Busnach I got a fever, a sickness running through the rue de Douai. Tell him no one’s been struck down more than a day so he will not think of giving away my part.”

“I don’t know.” I picture a man in a frock coat turning as I clear my throat, looking down his nose as I stutter through what I had practiced a hundred times, and I feel what some call butterflies but is really more like a hive of buzzing bees.

“Makes perfect sense,” she says. “I get docked three francs. You make six with a chance of Monsieur Degas asking you back.”

“What if he wants more than modeling?” I blurt it out, knowing I have two seconds before Antoinette turns away, tired to death of indulging a girl of thirteen.

“Then I’ll snap his arm in two.” With that she is off, opening the drawers of the sideboard, looking for a bit of cloth not too badly soiled, or a cup not too badly chipped, something to pawn, something worth the price of a small loaf.

T
he next afternoon I am marched down the rue de Douai and around the corner into the rue Fontaine. I was taking my time in our own stairwell, stopping to adjust the laces of my boots, when Antoinette tugged my arm and set me tripping and stumbling and working to free myself. “Enough with the dawdling,” she said.

Charlotte is with us, too, looking miserable at being dragged along. When we get to the heavy doors of Monsieur Degas’s building, Antoinette says, “Such sulking, Marie. Eugénie Fiocre herself wasn’t too high and mighty to pose for Monsieur Degas,” and Charlotte lets out a huff.

“Such nonsense,” Antoinette says, scowling at the ridiculousness of one sister aching that she is not the girl upon whom Monsieur Degas’s burning gaze fell and the other panic-struck that she is.

Inside Antoinette claps the knocker on a door with a small plaque:
Edgar Degas, Painter.
A stout woman with a broad, honest face and the apron of a housekeeper peeks around the door, and taking in the three of us—with our three shawls to take away and fetch and three sets of tracks to sweep up—makes a little tut. “Marie?” she says. “One of you lot is Marie?”

I poke up my hand, gingerly as a lamb, and she puts out an arm, awaiting the heap of shawls. “Over there,” she says, pointing toward Monsieur Degas, looking off into nothingness with his chin held up by his palm. But the fierceness of his pondering keeps my feet glued to the floor, standing ever so still, and it is no different for Antoinette and Charlotte.

It is my first time inside a painter’s workshop, and what hits me right away is the strong smell of turpentine and the clutter covering every speck of level surface, every crumb of open wall. The room is vast with sheets of sunlight coming through bare windows and a plain, sturdy table and long bench, both buried under a jumble of brushes and sponges and candlesticks and crockery and saucers of paint and bowls of water and ends of charcoal and boxes of pastels. There are a half dozen rickety chairs—two propping up canvases; another hung with a paint-smeared smock; another holding a rosewood box spilling over with tubes of color; another, with a splintered leg, toppled over on its side; the last, standing empty. The walls are painted with grey distemper and hung floor to ceiling with pictures, so many that if I was called away now I would not be able to describe a single one. There are more, leaning up against the walls, one edge on the floor, turned so the back of the canvas faces into the room.

“Don’t blame me,” the housekeeper says. “He doesn’t want me touching a thing, and I’m not to sweep up, not with the possibility of dust settling in fresh paint.”

She goes over to the table, heaps our shawls onto the single empty chair, and stands there, hands on her hips, eyes roving over the mess until they come upon a palette and two brushes. Holding them up, she says, “I’ll clean these, no?” and Monsieur Degas leaves whatever thoughts he was thinking up and nods.

Eyes settling upon the three of us standing there, he lets out a great sigh, wishing we were not spoiling the tranquility of his afternoon. “Your back,” he says to me. “I’ll start with your back.” He points to a screen in the corner of the room. “You can undress there.”

Standing light-headed behind the screen, fingers fumbling with the drawstring of my blouse, I hear Monsieur Degas hollering for the housekeeper—Sabine, he calls her—to tidy up a couple of chairs for the sisters I brought along. But the thought of stepping out from behind the screen, hands struggling to hide the two little mounds budding on my chest and the crop of black hair appearing between my legs, with my sisters watching—one wincing and the other with eyes wide—is not something I have the guts to do.

Holding my gaping blouse shut, my eyes sweep the corner of the room hidden behind the screen. I take in the washstand, the tiny iron bedstead, the rumpled sheets, the spirit lamp on the floor, the scrap of paper tucked beneath it with a drawing of a ballet girl sitting slumped on a bench. There is no more to the picture than a few lines of charcoal, a few dashes of pastel, but the exhaustion of the girl is there, in the ribs heaving with each breath, the late night and bellowing father of the evening before, also the long hours at the barre, striving to balance a second longer or land a little softer, the aching thighs rolling open even at rest. I step out from behind the flimsy screen. “You should go,” I say to Antoinette, to Charlotte, holding her neck long, her arms en repos, waiting for Monsieur Degas to look up from the table, the rubble he is picking through.

Antoinette takes a long breath. “You’re sure?”

“But we’re here now,” Charlotte says, her voice telling how close she is to stamping her feet, with Monsieur Degas not yet having noticed her grace and Antoinette already standing up from her chair to leave.

So as not to change my mind, I undress in a hurry, eyes glued to the exhausted girl, to the thinness of her limbs, to the softness of the pastel highlighting the ridge of her collarbone. I inch out from behind the screen, clutching at my nakedness.