“Are you expecting someone new?”
“Aha! I’ve got him!” Auguste said in a low voice.
“Monsieur Urbanité? Who is he?”
“Charles Ephrussi, only son in a line of wealthy Russian bankers. Self-taught art connoisseur who buys and sells profitably. He’s tapped his ebony walking stick on the marble floors of every bank on rue Lafitte.”
“Hm. Interesting. And nice-looking too.”
“Always razor-sharp creases in his trousers. Always dignified, the true flâneur strolling the boulevards, observing, then retreating to his plush study to write esoteric articles about his observations while snacking on caviar on toasted rye. But here, ha! A fish out of water. Wait till he discovers that he’ll be posing with two sweaty men in singlets, undergarments to him, one with the air of a carefree sailor, the other as brawny as a pirate.”
“Now it’s back to thirteen,” she said.
“Did you think that fact escaped me?”
“Do you want him for his top hat?”
“For his cachet. For what he’s done for painters, this gallant of the rue Monceau.”
“Rue Monceau? In the seventeenth? We had our hat shop in the seventeenth before the war. We lived above it.”
She felt proud because it was in a good neighborhood, until a stabbing memory caught her off guard. Auguste’s eyes seemed deeper at that moment, and the corners of his mouth drooped. Could that be on her behalf?
“Someone else owns it now. I wonder if he bought his top hat there.”
“We can ask,” Auguste offered.
“I’d rather not.”
“See how the sheen on it catches the light and makes a column of deep blue?” Auguste said. “It’s a streak of the river reflected.”
“Clipped beaver fur makes that sheen. It’s the highest quality.”
The top hats had sat in a row on the mahogany shelves, with the price tags she’d written tucked into the hatbands. Louis had always been so genuine in his desire to bestow just the right hat on each gentleman. Better that the memory come back on a summer Sunday when even the air sparkled with gaiety than on a winter Monday when the dull quietness made her feel her widowhood more sharply. She must not think of that now. She made her mind leap a decade and land in the present.
“Charles,” Auguste called. “Up here.”
Just then, Circe stepped off the bridge, swaying her stripes and twirling her parasol like a windmill. She wore a dainty, narrow-brimmed chapeau of white felt trimmed with silk violets, tipped rakishly forward. Auguste hurled himself downstairs to greet her. Circe laughed in a rising melody not entirely pleasant. Alphonsine watched him offer her his arm and guide her to the table under the maple, as though she couldn’t arrive there on her own. She took small, slow steps, to make their time together longer. She was playing the coquette, and making full use of every minute of opportunity.
Jeanne Samary was missing. Would Auguste be crushed if she didn’t come? She would watch to see if his joy in Circe’s company sufficed.
Jules arrived, took off his mariner’s cap, and spread both arms wide toward the river. “Fair Seine, nursery of arts.”
“You borrowed that!”
He spun around, took hold of the iron terrace support under her, and looked up. “I admit I did. It was actually fair Padua, but speaking to a lady on a balcony reminds me more of fair Verona.”
Just then, the Iris and then Nana, Baron Raoul Barbier’s sailboat, came to opposite sides of the dock. Everyone piled into them. They were both going out! She rushed downstairs, but the Iris floated away from the dock just as she got there, so she boarded Nana with Jules and Angèle and Antonio. Angèle insisted on a position in the bow. Fine for a figurehead like Angèle, but she took a spot next to the tiller, where the action happens in a sailing craft. Raoul lurched to one side on his bad leg to trim the sail and the boat shot out to the middle of the channel. Alphonsine asked if she could steer.
“Let’s hold the tiller together,” Raoul said. She grasped it some distance behind his hand. He moved hers next to his, toward the end. “It’s easier here,” he said. Their hands were touching side by side, and then his was covering hers, warm and firm. She could tell he was nervous about letting her take control completely, but when she stayed on course, his grip relaxed and he let go, though he still kept his eye on the sail and on the Iris.
“You wanted to make it a race, not a lesson, didn’t you?” she said.
“Competition is in my blood, lady, with horses and boats.”
“In that case…” she murmured and drew in the tiller to bring the boat closer to the wind. It scudded faster. She loved that tiny tremble of the wooden tiller under her grip that she could control by pulling in or letting off the wind. She wanted Gustave in the other boat to see that she was steering and gaining on him, the boat heeling, slicing sharply through the water which fell away in wavelets.
Antonio and Jules looked at her in astonishment. Raoul merely said, “Nana is as fast as a bullet, isn’t she?”
Nothing about her skill. Not a word about her steady course. Just smugness about his boat.
She knew she had to tack soon. Raoul reached for the tiller.
“Let me,” she said. “You can stand close if you want to, and manage the sheets.”
With Raoul controlling the sails, she worked the tiller, and Nana came about neatly. He gave her an approving look and let her handle each tack until the Iris reversed directions near Bezons. Gustave was faithful to Auguste who wanted to get started painting earlier today than last week. She brought Nana about to windward of the Iris, stole his wind, and shot ahead.
Approaching the Maison, she relinquished the tiller to Raoul, stepped onto the dock first, greeted guests in the restaurant, and made sure all was in order. She wanted to be everywhere at once, unmistakably present. The models came up in high spirits.
“You’re quite the skilled matelote,” Gustave said to her as he sat down. “I’ve never seen a woman handle a sailboat with such finesse. The baron will have to take a lesson or two from you before the regatta.”
“Impossible,” she said. “I told you I’ll be cheering for you.”
“It’s you who should worry,” Raoul said to Gustave. “Although my Nana is a dream to handle, I can trounce you with Le Capitaine.”
All right. Diminish my contribution, she thought. The slight did not escape Gustave, who tipped his head toward her while looking at Raoul.
Raoul turned to her with a slight bow, hand over his heart. “How gauche of me, lady. I welcome you in any of my boats anytime, day or night,” he said with a gleam in his eye.
“Thank you, Baron. I love all types of boating.”
Gustave noticed the roses, turned the vase, admired each one.
“You said flowers are ideas,” she said. “What ideas are these?”
He pointed to the pink one. “Sweetness.” He pointed to a thorn on the deep red one. “Fragility protected. Providence in nature’s plan.” He touched the creamy one and an outer petal fell. “Brevity.”
“There’s a poet’s mind under that yachtsman’s boater,” Jules said.
It was like a door opening, what Gustave got out of three roses.
She was amused by her mother announcing the entrées as she and Maman set the platters on the table. “Pâté maison and asperges d’Argenteuil en conserve. The best quality in France, grown less than five kilometers from here.”
“Pretty as a picture, madame,” Charles said and helped himself to quite a few spears. “I love asparagus so much I had Manet paint them for my dining room, as a hint to my cook to prepare them more often.”
Maman flicked her hand against his shoulder. “You’re teasing me.”
“It’s true. I agreed to pay eight hundred francs for it.”
Maman let out a whistle through her teeth. “Unbelievable.”
“I liked it so well I sent him a thousand. A week later I received a delivery of a small painting of a single stalk of asparagus with
a note: Your bunch was one short.”
With a flinty look in her eye, Maman forked one stalk from the platter and placed it ceremoniously on his plate. She was obviously pleased with herself when everybody laughed, especially Charles. His delight at Maman’s joke was surprising. She’d taken him for an aristocrat unlikely to condescend to gaiety brought on by a country cook.
Later, when she and Anne brought up the roast chicken smelling of Madeira, Auguste and Charles and Gustave were in a heated conversation about some painter named Raffaëlli.
“He’s content with the old academic style,” Gustave said. “All he’s changed is subject matter.”
Circe leaned toward Auguste and asked, “What does he paint?”
“The underside of life. Tramps, thieves, the denizens of the Maquis.”
“How disgusting!” Circe screwed up her nose.
“Careful, that’s touching on territory dear to my heart,” Angèle said.
“They’re sentimental caricatures,” Gustave said. “It’s not just his subjects. It’s that he hasn’t embraced the Impressionist aim of recording fleeting moments.”
“He’s a fine draftsman and observer of character, in the same way that Degas is,” Charles said.
“He’s a Beaux-Arts painter. He doesn’t belong in an Impressionist show,” Gustave retorted. “If we include him and the others then we’re diluting our identity just when it’s beginning to be recognized.”
“Not quite,” Charles said. “True, the Realists don’t translate scrupulously and sincerely the sensations of changeable light or the spontaneous, unedited moment. Then, won’t your work appear more fresh? You ought not to fear the comparisons. You ought to welcome them.”
“If we don’t include Raffaëlli, Degas will pull out, and that’s fine with me,” Gustave blurted.
She had never seen him so agitated.
Auguste was scowling. “No. That’s not fine with me. I know Edgar can be contrary, but he’s an astonishing painter.”
“No one’s arguing that,” Gustave said with an exaggerated sigh.
Auguste continued, “Think what Impressionism would be without him. Only plein-air painting and the juxtaposition of distinct patches of color. But we’re more than that. With Degas, our exhibits show a wider range of subjects and more innovation in composition of near and far, of cropped figures, and of oblique, even eccentric angles of vision. You, of all of us, Gustave, ought to appreciate that. I admit without reservation that his work has influenced me. He’s influenced you, Gustave. You’ve influenced him.”
“But that doesn’t resolve the problem,” Gustave said.
The conversation died out as they ate. At the end of the meal Angèle rang her glass with her fork. “Since this is to be a painting of la vie moderne, I propose that after a week of flânerie on the boulevards or in Montmartre, or in the Bois or the cafés, we, the flâneurs and flâneuses of the Maison Fournaise, each come back with a report of the most outrageously modern thing we saw.”
They raised their glasses in agreement. Then Auguste said it was time to start.
“No! One more toast,” Pierre said. “Here’s to Auguste’s right arm!”
They drank again and made him raise his right arm as though he were a boxing champion.
She cleared the table carefully so it was just as it had been last week, called Alphonse upstairs, and Auguste began to work.
From her position she couldn’t see the front of the painting, but she could see his hands. He held three brushes between the fingers of his left hand, which held the palette too. Despite his enlarged knuckles, his narrow hands had a delicacy to them, and the many ways he held the brush were elegant.
He didn’t do much mixing on the palette. He just squeezed colors out of the tubes, lapped them up with his brush, sometimes more than one color at a time, one edge of the bristles filled from one smear on his palette, the other edge from another smear, moving like he was dancing. He held the palette so naturally, like a tray of colored wafers, so sticky that they didn’t slide if he tilted the tray. Sometimes his tongue poked out of his mouth, as though he were going to lick the paint he loved so much. His hand flew from the canvas to the little tin of linseed oil, to his palette, then to the canvas, back to the oil, canvas, palette. There was something wild about it, like a swallow darting to catch insects.
He turned his wrist often to change the way of applying paint. Sometimes the brush handle was perpendicular to the painting to use the ends of the bristles, sometimes almost parallel to it, dragging the flat side along the canvas. He was like a violinist constantly changing the angle of his bow. She imagined the music he was making, imagined dancing with him, his arm firm on her waist, waltzing together to the music, two as one, two as one, two as one.
He paused and the muscles around his eyes tightened. He took off his bicycle cap and scratched his head. It must have been unconscious because he was never without his cap on. His receding hairline was like the letter M, the two outward triangles just skin, and the middle section coming downward in a point filled with a dark brown shock of hair. She felt she was seeing something private.
Her thoughts of Auguste were interrupted by Circe expelling a melodramatic sigh. Without moving, she could see Circe flutter her eyelashes caked with blue kohl whenever Auguste looked toward her. She was definitely in the methodical process of snagging his affection. He’d be a fool if he fancied that he was her first even though she was young. What else was she fit to do, fashioned as she was for love? She was a courtesan on the hunt for a prosperous keeper. A misplaced aim for her. Circe would drop him like a hot iron if she knew he could ill afford to pay for the meal. Better that she aim for Monsieur Urbanité, but since she’d wanted to face forward she wasn’t positioned so that she could make eyes at him. How shortsighted of her. Charles must have a wife, of course, if for no other reason than for appearance’s sake, but that wouldn’t discourage Circe. Paul and Pierre were too Parisian to settle down so young, but even together, they couldn’t afford her.
Auguste asked Raoul, “Would you mind turning around to face Alphonsine at the railing?”
“Whatever you want,” he said. “For me to look at Lady Alphonsine is no torture, except, of course, I cannot touch.”
A small mustache perched itself on his upper lip which he twitched back and forth, trying to make her break her pose and laugh. She took him to be a few years older than Auguste.
“What do you think about, lady? L’amour, oui? Je t’adore,” he said as though he were speaking French with a husky foreign accent. “Your thoughts are full of longings, oui?”
“No, they’re full of the dishes I have to wash after everyone leaves.”
It wasn’t true, but it made a few people laugh. Circe didn’t laugh. She twittered.
“Listen to me, lady. I come from zee East. No dish to wash. Only fruit to pluck from zee trees. A land of mystery. I tell you stories of caravans and bazaars, rubies, melons beeg as the sun.”
“As beeg as your hat?” she mimicked. “In this country, it’s called a melon.”
“Beegger. A lady who can bring my boat about can bring my heart about too. You come with me to the river. We go in a, what you call it, a yole, with sticks to make go. We get out where no people are. We rest under big tree.”
She could be irritated that he would think her a grenouille, but his voice was so droll, his eyebrows popping up, his antics so entertaining.
He broke his pose to pick up a fig from the fruit compote. “I feed you figs. I peel for you grapes, each one, like they do in Samarkand. Juice drips down your pretty chin. I lick it off. What then? I tell you, lady. We lie down like Persians on rugs of silk.”
“Not on your life, you fancy pants,” Angèle said without moving a muscle. “She gives you a right crook hard enough to rattle your bones, jumps in the boat, and leaves you there.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
En Canot with the Baron
Alphonsine did go with Raoul in a yole after the light dimme
d and Auguste stopped working, but not to lie with him on the bank. She went with him because she felt young, her oldness put away in a hatbox for the afternoon. She went with him because the day, the painting coming along, the exhilaration of steering the sailboat made her inexpressibly happy.
And she went so she could tease him as he’d teased her. Since the lady sitting on the cane-back bench in a yole has the steering cords that operate the rudder, and the man facing her has the oars, she had control of where they went. She pulled one cord so that the boat went in circles as they left the dock. On the bank, Auguste and Alphonse and Gustave laughed uproariously.
“All right, you coquette of canots, I’ll tell you something that happened to me on this river that won’t make you so sure of yourself.”
“Speak on, Baron.” She let him go straight but kept him away from the bank.
“I took out a skiff to fish one afternoon in a pretty little spot where the river bends, not far from Bougival.”
“Your first mistake.”
“Why, lady?”
“No one ever catches a fish there.”
He shrugged. “It was a beautiful sunny afternoon when I started, just like this. The river flowing calmly, a light breeze, just enough to rustle the leaves, birds chirping in the branches. I had no luck in fishing—”
“Naturellement.”
“But I was content to wait and enjoy the river, so I lowered an anchor. I lay down and dozed, lulled by the motion of the boat.”
“It’s nice to do that,” she said.
“A cool breeze made me wake and I discovered shadows stretched like arms across the boat. Since I had no luck, I reached to pull up the anchor. It wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder, but that only served to dig it in deeper to whatever it had hooked itself upon, perhaps a submerged branch. I rowed upstream to try to loosen it, to no avail.”
“Why didn’t you cut the anchor line?”
“It was a chain. Soon fog crept in, and as twilight came, it changed from gray to murky purple. I hallooed for help, but there were no pleasure boats foolhardy enough to venture out in the fog. All I could do was lie down and wait until morning.”