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mother, and I felt unexpectedly sad and guilty that the rest of us met in this pleasant group while she was teaching her classes. We had never made an effort to include her. Our own lives were so free--we counted pennies but didn't work for them. But my life did not seem quite as free as my friends', and I wondered how that had happened.
One day that fall, Robert came home almost exhilarated and kissed the top of my head before telling me he'd accepted an invitation to teach up north for a semester--soon, in January. It was a good position, good money, at Barnett College, in striking distance of New York. Barnett had a famous art museum and a guest lectureship for painters--he named some of the great ones who'd preceded him there. He would have to teach only one class, and the rest was essentially a painting retreat. He would be able to paint full-time, more than full-time.
For a minute, I couldn't understand what he meant, although I got the part about being happy for him. I put down the dish towel I was holding. "What about us? It's not going to be easy moving a toddler to a new space for just a few months."
He stared at me as if this hadn't occurred to him. "I guess I thought--," he said slowly.
"What did you think?" Why was I so angry at him for even a look, a crumpling of his eyebrows?
"Well, they didn't say anything about bringing a family. I thought I would go by myself and get some work done."
"You could at least have asked them if they'd mind your bringing along the people you happen to live with." My hands had begun to shake, and I put them behind my back.
"There's no need to be hostile. You don't know what it's like not to be able to paint," he said. As far as I knew he'd been painting for weeks.
"Well, then don't sleep all the time," I suggested. In fact, he hadn't been sleeping during the day. I was actually getting worried again about his staying up at night, staying out at the studio, his
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seeming to sleep so little, although my picture of him now, indelibly, was of a body sprawled horizontal.
"You have no idea how to be supportive." Robert's nose and cheeks were white and pinched. At least he was truly paying attention. "Of course I would miss you and Ingrid a lot. You could come up with her in the middle, for a visit. And we'd be in touch all the time."
"Supportive?" I turned away. I fixed my gaze on the woodwork and asked myself what sort of husband would elect to leave for a semester for the sake of his own work without even consulting me or asking me if I wanted to be alone with a small child. What sort. What sort. The kitchen cupboards were all neatly shut. I wondered if looking at them long enough would keep me from exploding. I wondered if it was possible to live with someone crazy without becoming crazy oneself. Maybe I could become a genius, too, although I wasn't sure I wanted to be one if this was what they were like up close. The truth was that I would have let him go without a murmur if he'd asked me, if he'd checked with me. I pushed down an image of the dark-haired muse--why did she have to be so vivid? Why did he want to be in striking distance of New York? He might well go away and focus and feel accomplishment and finish his big series, and be healed by that.
"You could have asked me," I said, and I heard my own voice as a growl, the nasty nipping to the bone, one member of the pack finally turning on another. "As it is, do whatever you want. Help yourself. I'll see you in May."
"The hell with you," Robert said slowly, and I thought I'd never seen him so enraged, or at least so quietly enraged. "I will." Then he did a strange thing. He got up and turned around slowly two or three times, as if he wanted to leave the room but had lost track of the direction of the kitchen door. It was somehow more frightening to me than anything that had happened yet. Suddenly he found his way out, and I didn't see him again for two days. Whenever I picked up Ingrid, I started to cry and had to hide my
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tears from her. On his return, he never mentioned our conversation, and I didn't ask where he'd been.
Then one morning Robert appeared at breakfast while I was making it--making it for me and for Ingrid, that is. His hair was wet and clean and smelled of shampoo. He put some forks on the table. The next day he got up in time for breakfast again. The third day he kissed me good morning, and when I went into the bedroom for something I found he had made our bed--crookedly, but he had made it. It was October, my favorite month, the trees golden, leaves streaming off them in the wind. He seemed to have come back to us--how or why I didn't know, but I gradually became too happy to ask. That week he came to bed on time--or, rather, when I did--for the first time in longer than I could remember, and we made love. It was astonishing to me that his body had not changed from having a child. It was as handsome as ever: big, warm, sculpted, his hair wild on the pillow. I felt ashamed of my own compromised, baby-gnawed flesh and whispered that to him, and he silenced my doubts with his ardor.
In the weeks that followed this, Robert began to paint after class instead of working at night, and to come down to eat when I called. Sometimes he worked in his studio on campus, especially on larger canvases, and Ingrid and I wandered down with the stroller to pick him up for dinner. That was a blissful moment, when he put away his brushes and walked home with us. I was happy when we passed friends and they saw us together, the three of us, organized and complete and on our way home for the meal I had already left warm under secondhand china covers. After dinner he painted in the attic, but not very late, and sometimes he came to bed and read while I dozed with my head tucked under his chin.
At the studio and in his attic (I checked now and then when he wasn't there), Robert was working on a series of still lifes, beautifully rendered and often with some comical element in them,
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something out of place. The strange brooding portrait and the big painting of the dark-haired woman holding her dead friend stood turned against the attic wall, and I was careful not to ask him about them. The attic ceiling was still festive with her clothes and body parts. The books next to his sofa were again exhibition catalogs, or an occasional biography, but nothing about the Impressionists or Paris. I thought sometimes I had dreamed his chaotic obsession, invented it myself, whatever it meant. Only the too-colorful attic reminded me of its reality. I avoided going up there whenever I felt new doubts.
One morning when Ingrid was already crawling, Robert did not get up until noon, and that night I heard him upstairs pacing around, painting. He painted for two nights without sleeping, and then he took the car and disappeared for a day and a night, returning just after breakfast. While he was gone I did not sleep much either, and I wondered several times with tears in my eyes whether to call the police, but the note he'd left prevented me from doing that. "Dear Kate," it said. "Don't worry about me. I just need to sleep in the fields. It's not too cold. I'm taking my easel. I think I'll go crazy otherwise."
It was true that we'd been having mild weather, one of those occasional gifts of warmth in the late Blue Ridge autumn. He came home with a new landscape, a subtle one showing fields just under the fringe of the mountains, the sunset. Walking in the brown grasses was a figure, a woman in a long white dress. I knew her form so well that I could have felt it under my own hands, the line of her waist, the drape of her skirt, the swell of her breasts below lovely wide shoulders. She was just turning around, so that her face showed, but she was too far away for any expression other than a hint of dark eyes. Robert slept until twilight, missing his morning studio class and an afternoon faculty meeting, and the next day I called the doctor at the campus health center.
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CHAPTER 27 Marlow
I imagined her life.
She is not permitted to go out unchaperoned. Her husband is away all day, but she can't speak with him by telephone--that strange invention won't be installed in most Parisian homes for at least another twenty-five years. From early morning, when her husband leaves home in his black suit and tall hat and overcoat to take a horse-drawn omnibus along Baron Haussmann's wide boulevards to his job directing po
stal operations at a big building in the center of the city, until the time he arrives home, tired and sometimes smelling faintly of spirits, she does not see him and she hears nothing of him.
If he tells her he has worked late, she cannot know where he's been. Her mind sometimes wanders over possibilities that range from hushed meeting rooms, where men in suits, white shirt-fronts, and soft black ties like his gather around a long table, to what she pictures as the pointedly tasteful decorations of a certain kind of club, where a woman dressed only in a silk camisole and stays, ruffled petticoats and high-heeled slippers (but otherwise respectable-looking, with nicely coiffed hair), lets him trail his hand over the top half of her white breasts -- scenes she knows only vaguely from whispers, a hint in a novel or two, hardly part of her upbringing.
She has no proof that her husband visits such establishments, and perhaps he never does. It isn't clear to her why this recurrent
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picture inspires little jealousy in her. Instead it gives her a sense of relief, as if she is sharing a burden. She knows that the genteel alternatives to these extremes are restaurants where men--mainly men--eat their midday dinner, or even their evening meal, and talk together. Occasionally he comes home needing no supper and reports pleasantly that he's had an excellent poulet rôti or canard à l'orange. There are also cafés chantants where both men and women can sit with propriety, and other cafés where he can sit alone with Le Figaro and a late-evening cup of coffee. Or perhaps he simply does work late.
At home he is attentive: he bathes and dresses for their evening meal if they dine together; he puts on his dressing gown and smokes by the fire if she's already eaten and he has dined out, or he reads aloud to her from the newspaper; sometimes he kisses her on the back of the neck with exquisite tenderness when she sits bent over her work, crocheting lace or embroidering dresses for her sister's new baby. He takes her to the opera in the glittering new Palais Gamier and occasionally to the nicer places to hear an orchestra or drink champagne, or to a ball in the heart of the city, for which she dons a new dress in turquoise silk or rose-colored satin. He makes it clear that he is proud to have her on his arm.
Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork in the style she has seen with him at the more radical new exhibitions. He would never call her a radical, of course; he has always told her she is simply a painter and must do as she sees fit. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life, that the light-filled new landscapes move her. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life--nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they
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are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern--a shame, given his obvious talent.
In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those the critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academician, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married. At least she has worked hard.
She wonders sometimes if Yves would understand if she elected to submit a painting to the Salon. He has never said anything slighting about those few paintings at the Salon that are by women, and he applauds whatever she herself puts on canvas. In like fashion, he never complains about the household, which she runs so well, except to say politely once a year that he would like something cooked a little rarer or that he wishes she would put another arrangement on the table in the hall. In the dark now and then, they know each other in a completely different way, with a warmth, even a fierceness, that she cherishes but doesn't dare think about during the day, except to hope that one morning she will wake up realizing she hasn't recently needed to get out those neatly folded clean napkins for her underclothing, the hot-water bottles, the glass of sherry that takes the edge off her monthly cramps.
But it has not yet happened. Perhaps she thinks about it too often, or too seldom, or in the wrong way--she tries to stop thinking about it at all. She will wait instead for a letter, and that letter will be her main diversion for the morning. The post comes twice daily; it is delivered by a young man in a short blue coat. She can hear his ring through the rain, and Esmé answering the
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door. She will not seem eager; she is not, in fact, eager. The letter will appear on a silver tray in her boudoir while she is dressing for her afternoon calls. She will open it before Esmé goes out and then tuck it into her desk, to reread later. She hasn't yet taken to putting the letters inside the bodice of her dress, carrying them on her person.
In the meantime, there are other letters to write and to answer, meals to order, the dressmaker to see, the warm coverlet to finish for her father-in-law's Christmas present. And there is her father-in-law himself, the patient old man: he likes to have his drinks and books brought by her in person after he naps, and she actually looks forward to the moment when he strokes her hand with his transparently veined one and gazes at her with almost empty eyes, thanking her for her care. There are the flowering plants she waters herself instead of leaving them to the servants! and most important of all there is the room next to hers, originally a sun-porch, that contains her easel and paints.
The maid sitting for her these days--not Esmé but the younger Marguerite, whose gentle face and yellow hair she likes--is hardly more than a girl. Béatrice has begun a painting of her sitting by the window with a pile of sewing; since the maid likes to busy her hands while she poses, Béatrice is happy to let her mend collars and petticoats, as long as the girl keeps her drooping golden head sufficiently still.
It is very light in there; even when rain streams down the many panes, they can get a little work done together, Marguerite's hands moving on the delicate white goods, the cotton and lace, and Béatrice's measuring shape or color, reproducing the roundness of the young shoulders bent over the needle, the folds of dress and apron. Neither speaks, but they are united by the peace of women at their tasks. In those moments, Béatrice feels that her work is a part of the household, an extension of the lunch simmering in the kitchen and the flowers she arranges for the dining table. She daydreams about painting the daughter she does not have, instead
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of this silent girl she likes but hardly knows; she imagines that her daughter reads poetry aloud to her as she paints, or chatters about her friends.
In fact, when Béatrice is actually working, she ceases to worry about the significance of her paintings, whether they are good, whether she could ever raise with Yves the notion of submitting one to the Salon--they are not good enough yet for that anyway, and probably never will be. Nor does she worry about whether her life has a wider meaning. She finds it enough for now to contemplate the blue of the girl's dress, perfectly matched at last by a smear on the palette, the curling stroke that gives color to the young cheek, the white that she will add the next morning (it needs more white, and a little gray, to convey that rainy autumn light, but she has run out of time before lunch).
If painting fills her mornings, then the afternoons when she does not feel like painting more, and doesn't make calls or receive them, can be a little empty. The characters in the novel she is reading seem with a certainty dead, so she writes instead a letter she's been gathering in her mind, an answer to the
one now sitting in a pigeonhole of her painted desk. She crosses her feet at the ankles and tucks them under her chair. Yes, her desk sits in the window; she moved it there last spring, to take advantage of the view of the garden.
As she writes, she sees that this is one of those strange days that sometimes come to Paris in autumn, the driving rain turning to sleet, then snow. Effet de neige, effet d'hiver --she saw that phrase at an exhibition last year, where some of the new painters were showing not only sunlight and green fields but snow as well, accomplishing revolutionary things out in the cold. She stood, humbled, in front of those canvases the newspapers reviled. Snow, when it sits on the ground, contains flecks of gray. It contains blue, depending on the light, the time of day, the sky; it contains ocher and even brown or lavender. She has already stopped seeing snow
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as white herself a year ago; she almost remembers the moment when she recognized that, examining her garden.
Now, the first snow of a new winter materializes in an instant before her eyes; the rain has transformed itself without warning. She stops writing and cleans her pen on the flannel pen-wipe at her elbow, keeping the ink away from her sleeve. The wilted garden is already covered with subtle color--indeed, it isn't white. Beige, today? Silver? Colorless, if there is such a thing? She adjusts her paper, dips her pen, and begins to write again. She tells her correspondent about the way the new snow settles on each branch, the way the bushes, some of them green all year, huddle together under their weightless veil of nonwhite, about the bench, bare in the rain one moment and collecting a fine soft cushion the next. She feels him listening, unfolding the letter in his graceful, aging hands. She sees his eyes, with their restrained warmth, absorbing her words.
When the post comes later, there is another letter from him, one that is lost to posterity but that tells her something of himself, or of his own garden not yet covered by snow--he would have written it earlier in the day or the evening before; he lives in the heart of the city. Perhaps he deplores--with humorous charm--the emptiness of his own life: he has been a widower for years, and he is childless. Childless, she remembers sometimes, like her. She herself is young enough to be his daughter, even his granddaughter. She refolds his note with a smile, then unfolds it and reads it again.