“I like the vigor and your loose suggestion of detail around the cottage.” She switched to rub the other foot. “You use color well to give shape to that church.”
Then she was getting it. And this woman with the ponderous cheeks was capable of saying something that wasn’t brusque.
Frances uncovered Chief Wakias’s Raven beak. “Gracious!” She stopped massaging her foot and pulled the string to light the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She spread out more redone paintings of poles, and scrutinized each one. “Bizarre.”
“That may be, but they’re carved with great sincerity.”
“Don’t apologize. Apologies are for milksops. I love these. Wait a minute.” She moved some dishes and sketchbooks aside, dug through a stack of her own watercolors, and pulled out several of natives sitting on the ground wrapped in plaid blankets and wearing heavy beaded necklaces. “They’re Maoris.”
Green eyelids. Blue-white lips. “Surprising color handling, and interesting faces,” Emily said. But no native context. Nothing to suggest their culture. Done from the outside.
“I did them on my last trip home. My father hates them. He runs an art school in Dunedin.” The confession sparked a scampish smile.
“Hates the subject or the style?”
“Everything about them. It isn’t just him. The more different I become, the more my country rejects me.”
That sent a pall through her. What about her own country?
Frances studied the totems again. “You know, it’s probably condescending of us, this attraction to the primitive. Do you think it’s substituting for something in us?”
“It’s not a substitute for me. And I don’t feel it to be condescending,” Emily said.
Frances gave her a sidelong look. “Never mind. What is it that you want in these paintings?”
“I thought I wanted to make an accurate record of the totem poles in their village or forest settings, before they’re destroyed. They deserve a record.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s bigger than that. It’s that, but also to express their spirit, or my response to them. To make them send the drumbeats I hear when I’m standing in front of them.”
“Ah. And you can’t do both. Express yourself and record them accurately. You need to decide which is more important—you or them.” Frances’s face softened in a smile. “We could paint together tomorrow if you’d like.”
“I’d like that very much.” Her fingers gripped the table.
“I saw them mending red fishing nets across the drawbridge on the Ville Close, that island in the harbor. You can meet me there at nine.”
“I’ll be there!”
• • •
Crossing the bridge, Emily felt the low-angled morning sun warm the base of her skull clear down her spine. Light brightened the yellow ochre houses edging the water and the scarlet geraniums in window boxes. Terns gave their vibrating chirpy calls, brown sails flapped, and the sea rippled in patches of aquamarine, sap green, even manganese violet. The brine of pickled herring wafted from market stalls. Stooping fishermen, their boats and the wharf piled with shipping bales and draped nets, begged to be painted. It was going to be a cracker of a day.
She spotted Frances on the quay, red jacket with magenta neck scarf blowing under a black fedora. She loved that slapdash way of dressing. Standing, Frances leaned forward and lashed out at her easel in long, decisive sweeps, working from her shoulder with her whole arm. She leaned back to take a quick look, her hip thrust out, then forward again to lay on more paint, all in one continuous, confident action, her gored skirt swaying. Every pore of her body painted. She worked with reckless grace. It was astonishing to watch. That’s what she wanted—to paint just that freely, that exuberantly.
Frances noticed her but took a couple more strokes. “I’m beginning to see the point of Matisse instead of Monet. The joy he must have felt from his long, flowing brush strokes instead of broken marks.”
“And here I’ve worked all spring to learn broken strokes!”
On top of that, Frances was painting in watercolor, exactly what she’d come here not to do.
“You work so fast. Like you’re painting in a storm.”
“It frees the passion. Try it. Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.”
Emily set up her easel and opened her folding stool.
“Don’t sit down. Move within it and don’t stop. Like a dance. Don’t intellectualize. Let your instincts direct you.”
“I did that once when I had a mad going against a teacher.”
“Harry?” She snickered. “Do it now when you’re not. Load up your brush and get a lot out of each stroke.”
Emily looked and thought and composed a subject. Deliberately and easily, she slipped into a consciousness which reduced the scene before her to geometric shapes and planes. Standing, she slashed a diagonal green curve for the left gunwale of a fishing boat. It was strong and true. She slashed again for the right edge. She made a mess on her oil palette mixing red and deep violet, and swept it on in one long luscious stroke for the shadow beneath the gunwale. She outlined the prow in black and it popped off the page. She leaned back to look for an instant, then leaned into the canvas for another stroke, getting into a rhythm, speeding up.
“It’s like I’m careening into the painting,” Emily said.
They painted for she didn’t know how long, murmuring to each other when either of them noticed the light shift or the colors change. The sense of another woman swaying with her, here on this quay, painting together—it was like a dance. Not a waltz, a mad joy dance.
She caught Frances scrutinizing her work. “You don’t need a teacher. You just need to paint.”
“I need to catch my breath is what I need.”
“I’m famished. And my feet can’t stand it for another minute,” Frances said. They moved to a stone bench. Frances wiped her hands and opened a lunch hamper and offered Emily bread and a bunch of grapes. “Where did you study in Paris?”
“Colarossi and l’Atelier Blanche.”
“Colarossi! I taught there until May of last year.”
“I came in July.”
They looked at each other, momentarily dumbstruck.
“If only . . . No critiques in English. No books or prints to give me a clue. The instructors ignoring me.”
Frances held up her hand to stop her. “I know. Impossible. I was the first woman they ever hired. Concession or experiment, I don’t know. There really aren’t any women in the inner circle of the avant garde painters today. Not a one. I’m only peripheral.”
Information she didn’t want to hear.
“Right where boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail come together the big forces of the new art meet at Café de la Rotonde and Le Dôme,” Frances said.
“I know, but I didn’t have the gumption to go there on my own.”
“Harry Gibb sold Matisse’s first painting. He could have introduced you.”
“I think I saw Matisse there, but I don’t speak French.”
“That’s not the whole problem. We’re colonials, and women, and that makes us timid.”
“I’m not sure which is worse. For our art, I mean.”
“It’s not being a colonial. Here everyone’s a foreigner. Besides, they think we’re English.”
“A couple times Gibb said I’d be a fine woman painter, but he never dropped the word woman. What was he afraid of?”
Frances laid her hand over Emily’s arm. “It’s an uphill tug all the way. I know. But here, women have a better chance of being considered serious artists, not just—”
“Hobbyists.”
• • •
They painted together every day, trading off choosing subjects—boats beached on stilts, sail makers in open lofts, vendors in wooden shoes selling pears or mackerel from pushcarts. Standing to paint all day, staggering back to a quay-side restaurant where they had their slow supper, and then to their pensions, they lived in a world
of just the two of them. Emily tried Frances’s heavy sweeping line. She adapted Post-Impressionist styles to watercolor, and strove for the luminosity of Frances’s colors. She felt them both letting down their guards.
One afternoon a surprise thunderstorm brought them into town from the countryside drenched to the skin.
“It’s been a perfectly plummy day, but I’ve had enough wheat fields and cows and hollyhocks. I’m getting too European.”
“Never. You belong here. France is emancipating. Come in and dry off,” Frances said at her doorway on the lane. “You’ll catch a cold.”
Inside, Frances took off her wet clothes, down to her slip, and hung them over the steam heater to dry. “Don’t be a prude. You’re as soaked as I am.” Frances kicked off her shoes and massaged her foot.
“Too hot to work? The Indians rest. Too wet? The painters rest.” Emily took off her jacket and skirt and sat on the bed to spread out her day’s work.
“Just think of what we’re doing, painting all day, spending our last centimes on a tube of paint or a single print, moving from place to place, living in rented rooms,” Frances said.
“Not giving a bean about anything else but painting.”
Frances snickered. “Thumbing our noses at stifled married women longing to be us. Creating ourselves to suit us, Fanny and Millie, artistes.”
“Don’t you think—Do you think creating yourself is a spiritual act?”
“Definitely not. It’s a practical enterprise. It has to do with food and rent versus passion and self. Everything, everything must be secondary to self-fulfillment. I broke an engagement once. My parents were horrified, afraid I’d starve, but I’d never felt freer.”
“Broke it for art?”
“Of course. I didn’t see how I could divide myself.” She changed feet. “So I came here to embrace bohemian itinerancy.”
“I never came that close, but I said no to a proposal ages ago. He followed me to London promising that I could still paint. Then he said, ‘We could have children and you could teach them to paint.’ ”
Frances guffawed.
“That one sentence of his toughened me enough to squash the guilt for hurting him. Oh, but he would have bored the zing right out of me. My sisters couldn’t understand it—how I could reject the very thing that all of them had been praying for on their knees since girlhood.”
“Being lonely toughens us too,” Frances said. “Toughens us to decide what we can do without. But men? No one would expect men to give up what we have to. They have families, wives, lovers, and art.”
Frances flopped her foot down onto the floor. “Ah, that’s better. Here, let me do yours.” She pulled the wicker chair up to the bed.
Emily drew her foot back.
“Yours must be aching too.”
“No. It’s all right.”
“Then why’ve you been limping? You always have this hitch.”
“Only when I’m tired. I usually paint sitting.”
“Here.” Frances reached down for Emily’s ankle, and wiggled her fingers impatiently.
Emily felt the flush and urge of a rosy nakedness she’d never known before.
“You can be as stubborn as a stone.”
“I’m missing a big toe.” She heard Fanny’s quick intake of breath.
“How?”
“Amputated when I was in London. My own fault. I ignored a fracture and dislocation from a carriage accident until too late and I was insane with pain.”
“And here I’ve been complaining for weeks about fallen arches.” Frances leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. “Let me,” she whispered.
“It’s ugly.”
“Better an ugly foot than an ugly face like mine.” Frances wiggled her fingers again.
“Don’t be shocked when you see it.”
Frances shook her head and closed her eyes. Emily raised her leg and rested her ankle in Fanny’s palm. Fanny untied Emily’s laces and slipped off her shoes and stockings. She started right in on the foot without the toe. Her hands were firm, massaging her crusty heel first, then working up her arch in long strokes with her thumb, relieving the tension of it having to do the work of a big toe to keep her balance.
“No one, ever, did this for me.”
“You were too closed up to ask. Like a walnut.”
“And that from a woman who preaches independence.”
“Sh. Lie back. Close your eyes.”
She moved her watercolors out of the way and lay back. Rain settled into a lulling drone. Her eyes closed of their own accord. Fanny’s hands, gentle on the ball of her foot, pressing out the ache, gentler still, squeezing the base of her four toes. She surrendered to the tenderness of Fanny’s fingers stroking the puckered stub. She felt warm and whole, unlike any other time in her life, needing nothing but more of the same.
• • •
Summer cooled to fall, their time growing short. It had been six glorious weeks. One evening over fish soup and green beans, Fanny’s face caught the glimmer from the oil lamp. Her eyes shone. Emily felt as though something unacknowledged in both of them was unfurling, laying itself out on the table between them, waiting for the other person to touch with the pad of an index finger. A new aliveness made everything lovely.
The rigging of boats clanked against masts as if the boats were settling in for the night. A couple on the quay, both wearing the yellow wooden shoes of Brittany, leaned into each other, broke apart, and laughed softly. “Sweet,” Emily said.
“Illicit lovers?” Frances asked.
“No. There’s nothing furtive about them.”
“Have you ever experienced passion, Millie? Not for art. For a person.”
“Life’s been a little skimpy to me in the doling out of that kind of passion. For a long time, my father paralyzed my romantic longings.”
“Paralyzed? How?”
Fanny’s eyes were the blue one sees when looking across an ocean for a safe harbor. The slight lifting of her cheeks offered encouragement.
“He was vulgar with me, talking about thrust. I thought he was going to touch me where he shouldn’t have. His words made sex seem disgusting. I was fourteen, innocent, and horror-stricken.”
Frances patted Emily’s hand, and murmured sympathetically.
“He spoiled all the anticipated loveliness and joy of union. I loved him, intensely, before that, but never after.”
“I’m so sorry for you.”
It surprised her, how easy it was to say this, finally, like tossing a weight onto foreign soil where she’d never encounter it again, and feeling lighter afterward.
“I suppose it was an attempt to make me fearful so I would be wary. It was after an argument when he wouldn’t let me go to the park alone as I’d done regularly when I was younger.” She ran her thumb across a rough cuticle. “Chastity guaranteed by panic. It made me cynical. Or maybe it’s just handy to blame it on him and I was born cynical.”
“It’s not cynicism, Millie. It’s priorities.”
“If I had the chance to live the last thirty-odd years over again without my father’s influence, if he had died on my seventh birthday after he’d given me my first watercolor set, what then? I probably would have made the same choices.”
“Maybe he saved you from the longing.”
“No. Not entirely.”
“Oh?”
“There was a Frenchman.”
“Here?”
“No. A fur trader at home. I was naïve and afraid and lost my chance. It was all tied up in a foolish hope to go north with him.” She lit a cigarette and inhaled. “But it was enough to show me what loving feels like.”
Frances met her steady gaze. “Are you religious?”
“Yes. Not that I go to church. I’m the rebel in a family inflamed with piety. Those scowls glowering down from the pulpit used to wilt me like boiled spinach, and then some clergyman in a London pew slithered his hand onto my thigh. Disgusting, liver-spotted old sexpot. This country’s cramm
ed with cathedrals and I’ve hardly gone into a single one.”
“But you say you’re religious.”
“God breathes in the forests. Oh, Fanny, I wish you could see them. The boughs so far above, like the vaulting of Notre Dame, and that same sacred stillness except for the sighing of wind through pines, like a sustained organ chord. If there’s any kind of prayer in my life, it’s that if I seek Him enough, He’ll breathe His Spirit into my work.”
“You’ll breathe His Spirit into your work.”
• • •
On the last night before Emily’s return to Paris to collect her canvases and winter clothes, she and Frances lingered at the restaurant on the quay, sharing a tureen of mussels and a carafe of red wine. Emily gazed at the harbor. Lights winked on anchored boats and the moon cast a column of dancing silver on the water.
“You saved me from a lonely summer,” Frances said.
“You saved me from a wasted one.”
“It’s the loneliness of what we’ve chosen that . . .”
“Cuts into the joy?”
“Like a claw in my chest.” Frances leaned on her elbows on both sides of her cheese plate with sudden urgency. “Why don’t you stay here, Millie? Paint with me in Paris this winter. We can share a studio. Live there together. I’ll introduce you to the painters at La Rotonde. And dealers.”
“And never paint another cedar or totem face to face? Give up the one relationship that has fed me for years—with a place? How many poles have been sold or destroyed since I’ve been gone?”
“In New Zealand women painters band together for support.” Frances’s words rushed out. “They go on painting trips together. We could do that.”
Together in BC? No. She didn’t want that responsibility.
“An army of two,” Frances went on. “We’re free as field mice to live the way we want to here.”
“I need to get home, Fanny, to use what I’ve learned here on what I love. Paris isn’t where I belong. I’m not myself here.”
“You don’t know that for sure. I tried to go home once, but I was too radical after Paris. So they said.” She laughed. “Me radical! They haven’t seen the Cubists.”
“So you’re never going back?”