The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 6

  “You just need to go on,” I said. “I’ll stay if you’d like.”

  The painter turned abruptly, looked at me where I stood, the length of cloth draped around my shoulders and falling. He adjusted the shades.

  Was it just then, or a bit later . . . after the gaslights twinkled bluish on the street below us, that he turned. Pressed his face into the barely curved area of my belly, against the dusty pink shawl, folded me into him as though he had been doing so all along. And perhaps we had been holding each other, on a sightline across the studio, and it was not what was on the easel that had been important.

  His scent of earth; of linseed oil and iron. Two hundred stairsteps into the sky I shed my shattered self, breathed in moments, one to the next. My present cure, the coiling, bone-melting green; his arms now around my body, ever warmer in a room full of windows, seven winding stories above the street. And so on a pile of rental dresses and Sunday suits, I made love to that part of him that wanted release; found the way to him with my lips, my hands, my belly and thighs. Amid all the draperies and boxes and columns and props, the smoke and days of futile effort, I passed the deadness, the empty spaces, what the green bottle forgot for him; what the white tablet could not remember; where he went when the work did not come. I understood that, in some part of me. And in his arms there—and later, in his bed, I let myself be comforted, a little, for all that had been lost.

  5. La Lune

  DOWN ONE FLIGHT from the atelier, in wedge-shaped maid’s quarters off one end of the hall, was the place Chasseloup slept, hung his trousers, and heated a tiny stove. A window overlooked the balconies of other apartments; plants in pots and cloths hanging out to dry. Occasionally from the window you saw someone coming or going, a glimpse of skirt or a sleeve. The two rooms were so cramped that the door to the hall ran into the kitchen cupboard, which contained a bottle of vinegar, a soft potato, scraps of canvas, a bulging paper packet of sugar, and bits of drawing chalk. Coffee was dust at the bottom of a can; coal, silt at the bottom of the bin. The main room held a balding, velvet-upholstered divan for a bed; a writing desk; and a giant map of Paris tacked to the wall. It didn’t matter; we spent every available hour in the atelier.

  My key to number 12 had disappeared behind the Tivoli’s desk for the last time, after I had bumped my small luggage down the stairs and flashed my eyes at Madame with the giddiness of a prisoner freed. She grimaced as though her joints were hurting her; as if the season had changed before she was ready for it. She’d seen the likes of me a thousand times before, she might have said. But still I sensed that I had made a narrow escape—so maybe Stephan’s luck was with me still.

  Chasseloup asked no questions. We lived from day to day, as was customary in such circumstances; that is, when Art rules, and crowds out everything else. After a week’s effort, we sat across the table from each other, a bottle uncorked between us, half a loaf and a sausage. During that day’s sitting Chasseloup had had me up on and down from the crate; altered the light—gone so far as to let me try on costumes from the photographer’s racks, none of which ended up pleasing him. Vollard had stopped by to shake his head.

  “So? What is the matter?” I took a blunt knife to our saucisson.

  He hunched forward in his chair. Poured.

  “I cannot—solve this problem in time for the Salon.”

  “But I have been absolutely obedient,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood.

  “Or maybe it is just”—he reached over with a lingering caress—“that I am distracted.”

  I leaned back and felt his words trickle down, ominously.

  “I will have to do a fish, a cheese, maybe a green bottle on a cool stretch of zinc—”

  Chasseloup rocked back on his chair, folded his good arm around his thin frame. Those hungry, too-soft, full-moon eyes.

  “Do you want me to leave, then?”

  “No! I mean—”

  He meant that it might be appropriate to study me, at rest and in the course of daily life. And besides, I took out the laundry and gave him courage; without the feminine influence life became primitive . . . Could we drink to that ? We did.

  So the model-for-small-wages became a full-time grisette, maiden of the bed, hearth, and table; last of a vanishing breed. A feminine soul to believe in and serve the greater cause of Art, with a gay night or two thrown in. We went to little dark cafés where there was music and a bottle or two, and Pierre and his friends talked into the small hours.

  Twenty years earlier, even ten, we might have seen a few more of these nights, talking philosophy until dawn; coffee from workman’s carts—as on my first mornings in Paris—but laughing with the cart sellers now; in a small herd of artists and young people, bubbles in our noses at sunrise and then blissfully, dizzily to bed just as the shops were opening, the cries of street merchants breaking the morning’s calm. But it was late in the day for that. Pierre’s friends didn’t discuss “art for art’s sake,” or even argue its merits. Art was all for the judges now, because someone would be pushed forward and his work sold for a fortune, enough for flats and studios in the new Paris.

  Rents were high and rising. Deal making was brisk. “And women are expensive,” muttered one of Chasseloup’s painter-friends under his breath, to general laughter, although Pierre, stiffly standing on his principles, pretended not to understand.

  “Ah, it was better when there was no money in it!” pleaded the grizzled elders. Awkward silences fell; dinner companions excused themselves and ducked out to go back to the studio. Salon competition was commerce and winning was the work; deadlines and schedules and the lineup and the choice. Artists were hated for their medals now—envied, and then copied.

  Sometimes amid the swirl of conversation I thought about my mother: her naiveté, her shocking disadvantage. But it was the usual thing, one way of living slipping and slithering into the next; edges blurred and before you knew it, you were in another picture, another kind of story . . . I cared for him a little, Chasseloup, in all my besieged innocence. If I did not let thoughts stray too far; and did not think where we were heading—hurtling at a sober but gasping gallop, all of us together, and Paris too.

  His moods set the pace of our days. I contoured myself to them, becoming the hands, the leg or the arm, the body studied or curled next to his on the divan. Went out for sausages and packets of coffee, accomplished tea or soup as the hour required; kept soaps and trouser buttons, paintbrushes and bed linens, what few there were. I listened; but did not ask how the work was going. Laid the fire, boiled water for coffee, and waited for the sound of boots clomping down the stairs from the studio; each movement an act of staunch belief in my role on our tiny stage. Sometimes he brought a newspaper or a long-necked green bottle, with some sketch or scrap of canvas flapping around him like a sail. My arms went up around his neck, stretching the length of his long body, all the way to his lips. When he napped, I fished for change in his pockets for a soup bone, a bunch of carrots, a few pieces of coal. Clattered as quietly as possible around our tiny plot of living.

  We ate bites of things for meals. Sipped at the cup of la fée verte, or usually (since absinthe was a luxury beverage for a household unable to fill its coal bin) Chasseloup drank for inspiration and I soaked in his licorice-and-linseed-scented wake. Overall, the arrangement seemed an improvement for us both. As the girl who had not yet understood the breath of the future at her neck—one who, until she woke up with frost on her nose and a basin full of ice, never dreamed of winter’s cold, much less how today’s steps were the footpath to tomorrow’s road—I was content.

  He began again to paint at night. This was lucky, for I was often sick in the early mornings and had time alone in the hall privy.

  One afternoon we climbed aboard an omnibus and rode to the Bois de Boulogne, returning from half-frozen lakes and curving landscapes, pathways along which we threw breadcrumbs to the birds. The lakes and cascades had been carved from the earth by giants and filled like titanic bathing tubs,
and as the sun lowered, the traffic procession thickened even though it was the middle of winter. Big barouches, light fiacres, medallion-crusted tilburies, all flagged with color, mottoes, crests, and flowers, arrived for the hour of wealth on parade. Chasseloup picked up a handful of pebbles, tossed them into the water. A clutch of birds scattered, scudding off in all directions.

  “God, this city is suffocation. It’s a stinking cesspool. ‘Qui paye y va.’ He who pays has his way. Oh, and why not.”

  Chasseloup fell silent; I slipped my hand into his. We walked.

  The streets of Paris were wide gutters sluicing mud and refuse; urchins darted through the alleyways, and carriages spewed filth on anyone on foot. Icy puddles lay in awkward places, along with mountains of earth and rubble. One building had been a lodging for medical students, but had been sold to some partners who knew the street was to be demolished. They raised the rents, stuck up some plaster, and opened a pleasure garden. When it was time for the city to tear it down, the tax men would assess it (a tax man was one of the partners) and they all walked away rich. Pierre said that the middle classes had been bought off with a cascade in the Bois, a few francs in the bank, and some thick drapes to pull across the windows, and this was why he was meant to paint for the Salon judges and no one else.

  “I’m a hostage, one way or another,” he said. I squeezed his hand, felt the callus where he held his brush, on the second finger.

  “I don’t mind eating a potato for supper,” I said firmly.

  “Hmmpf!” Chasseloup dropped my hand, headed into the tobacconist’s; came out tucking a fat packet into his coat. “We can drink our dinner tonight. Tomorrow I’ll go to the Mont de Piété, that great engine of Parisian commerce.”

  “Where?”

  “The poor man’s bank. The city pawnshop.”

  We shuffled up six flights in silence with no grocer’s bags to weigh us down. Pierre said that bread cost too much in this district; forget about vin ordinaire. He rattled the key; inside the little pie-shaped room we were like birds stranded in the treetops, the untaught ones who let straw fall from their beaks as they flutter about, and there was the rent envelope underneath the door. Chasseloup scuffed it aside; opened the door to the cupboard and weighed the potato on his palm. His eyes were huge and liquid, his hair looked soft, like the brush between a cow’s ears before you touched it and realized it was stiff. He weighed the potato and stared, then placed it on the narrow sideboard counter. Retrieved the remaining item in the larder, and broke the bottle’s seal.

  “I need some air. Need to breathe without Vollard bursting in, paint without photographer’s tripods and cartes de visite on strings.” (There was talk among Chasseloup’s friends that painting would soon be obsolete; the business of art would all go to the photographers.) Chasseloup took down the sugar, poured the green; set out the water pitcher, his “lucky” spoon, a battered filigree.

  My back ached and I put my hand there, feeling the desperate undulation of these moods; the hunger of the man for what he wanted; his furious need varnished over by an adherence to a strict set of principles, a labyrinth for which there was no Plan de Paris. His was a ranging, ferocious appetite and at the same time, its despair. His claim upon me was dimly familiar. Different in its expression, perhaps, but with no less urgency, or more . . . Had it come round again, then, to this? The alarm at my center began to ring. I glanced at the green bottle, nearly full. It could be a long night.

  Chasseloup rolled a cigarette and folded his lean, tall self onto the floor. Hustled a trunk from under the divan, flipped its brass locks. The scent of camphor preceded a tossing up of trousers and coats, well-cut and of good material; vests, cravats, and gloves; starched and folded linens, a silk-faced overcoat, all very different from Chasseloup’s usual wardrobe.

  “I didn’t know you had these,” I murmured, looking over his shoulder.

  “Like them, do you?”

  “I don’t care.” It irritated me when Pierre pretended I had “aspirations,” especially when I didn’t utter a murmur about his strange economies: our suppers of absinthe and potatoes. I slipped on my cloak, made for the door. We had passed a butcher shop where I might find a piece of bacon. A vegetable seller, maybe willing to part with his beet tops.

  That night I dreamed of a lady with a feather-plumed hat and a man who wore a long dark coat. We stood together, the three of us, before the doors of the lying-in hospital, that peaked-roof place of gables and windows; it looked like La Maternité on the rue d’Enfer, where poor women gave birth. The baby had survived; but she was ill and fragile. Then the dream changed, the man was someone else. The cord of misery, wrapped around the infant’s neck, was cut; the poison had come out of her. In the dream, I was crying, and when I awoke, my cheeks were wet.

  Chasseloup hadn’t needed to say that he didn’t want to be seen at the Mont de Piété the next morning, queuing with his trousers. He was still twisted under the sheets as I splashed my face, stirred up the coals, shook dust from the coffee tin into water from the pump—six flights down, and up again with the bucket. I bent and touched him, a tentative caress. Pressed my hand to his cheek, which was feverishly warm.

  “I want to work today,” he mumbled into my hair.

  “I’ll go, and bring home a soup bone.”

  “More than that, I hope. For all of that monkey suit.”

  “I won’t take the coat. It’s cold, you might need it.” He pulled himself up, a mess of ruffled hair, his chest bare and full of creases.

  “I will not wear a coat with silk facings and a collar.”

  “You are vain, aren’t you,” I said, sharper than usual. “You should wear it, and not care what they say.” Too much woman in him, Chasseloup, whispered a voice behind my ear.

  He groaned and sank his head back onto the pillow. “The madames will cluck like hens—a pretty-someone with an armful of gentleman’s rags.” I was so ignorant, still, that I didn’t catch his meaning. But the way he looked at me, too close, made me catch my breath. Chasseloup always knew what he didn’t know he knew. It was that, and his storms and calms, that shook me, brought me flying back.

  “Make a good day of it. Please?” I said, bending down for a kiss. Then he pulled me back toward him, wrapped his long body around mine. The pale coffee water bubbled down to nothing, using all the fire we had.

  Then, a bit later, it was cold, outside the narrow warmth of that bed.

  “You’ll need proof of Paris residence.” Chasseloup scrabbled in a pile of dusty papers, and extracted a rent receipt—not a current one, as it wasn’t paid up.

  Then I had to be quick about it, for any luck with the queue.

  The sky was still February-hard, not yet giving in to March, and I hurried, bag bumping against my knees. The Mont de Piété was across the city. On the rue de Rivoli, a shop window was hung with thick, jewel-colored fabrics. Russet and emerald, ruby and gold; striped silks. Two solid respectable figures in flaring woolen coats and sharp-heeled boots emerged with their packages. They left behind a cold whiff of perfume; stepped from the curb into a carriage.

  The Mont was a crowded hubbub, the line snaking around the stone courtyard. The wait would not be short; by the look of it, several hours—with people carrying bundles and baggage like passengers boarding a train, only this time returning home with less than they’d had before. Characters of every sort were here—well-dressed and modest, ragged and tailored; doctor, sailor, seamstress, thief—I inched forward, first through the courtyard, then through the narrow door.

  Inside, in a vast room hung with green-shaded lamps, a market in full sway. But this selling ground smelled of mildew, tarnish, and dust. The shelves behind the counters held tangles of white tags and strings: silver tea sets and stacks of cutlery, serving trays, candlesticks, violins, silver-backed hairbrushes, toilette sets, knob-topped claret and brandy bottles; and racks and racks of clothing. Toward the back was a horrible stack of mattresses, the stuffing falling out. Those in the line passed ove
r watches, pulled wedding bands from their fingers, drew from their bags nested spoons tied with string. The clerk was brisk; barely glancing up before tying the tickets around the objects extracted from satchels and pockets, pulled from canvas bags and handed across the counter. The Mont, it seemed, was where everyone went who was in need of ready cash.

  In my bag was Chasseloup’s wardrobe and a few things of my own, as was only fair: a pair of cinnamon gloves, a jet hatpin, and that fine millinery product with its spotted veil that had become a joke, for the artistic set went defiantly hatless or wore scrappy, jaunty little things. The clerk counted out notes and coins, and I watched the hat, which had once lived in a bandbox in Stephan’s sister’s armoire, tagged and shoved down the line. Well—it would not be missed, not by me! So went my bravado. Just behind me, a woman reluctantly unclasped a small silver watch from her bodice. It was lovely, attached to a brooch with an enameled fleur-de-lis. She stared at it, as if by doing so she could stop time from running out.

  Chasseloup was in his shirtsleeves and a frayed pair of trousers, staring out at the buttes, smoking.

  “You don’t have to worry,” I said, words pouring too fast downstream. “I have paid the arrears—enough to put them off.” I brandished a long crusty baguette over my head like a sword. “The concierge nearly banged down the door this morning. You were asleep.”

  “You didn’t. I hope you didn’t.”

  “What else—why else did I go to the Mont?”

  “For God’s sake. And now what will they think?”

  “What will who think? You are always full of people thinking.” The words sounded more childish than I’d intended.

  “Never mind. I’m working.” Chasseloup stubbed out his cigarette and returned to his easel, arms folded.

  Later our soup materialized like loaves and fishes, once there was coal, and heat, and my hands cutting every scrap from every bone, chopping and simmering. It was fragrant and steaming, and it was about time; we both needed some nourishment. Pierre’s mood had not improved by the time his footfalls reached the door.