Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 10

  Theoretically, if all of the light passed through a substance, an object could be invisible to the eye.

  Strangely enough, truly blue pigment exists in no vertebrate creature on Earth. The fish scales, butterfly wings, peacock feathers that appear to our eye to be blue are what is called structural color, where surfaces are composed of microstructures that scatter very short wavelengths of blue light—refraction—the reason the sky appears blue without blue pigment.

  There are, however, unconfirmed reports of a blue tree frog in the Amazon river basin. The frog has been spotted on three occasions by Western biologists, but when any attempt was made to capture or photograph the creature, it appeared to the scientists to vanish.

  Native legends tell of a shaman who found one of the blue frogs dead and made an arrow poison with its skin. When he shot a monkey with the poisoned arrow, it disappeared, or so he said. But a boy from the shaman’s village remembered finding a dead monkey at the edge of the village the month before, slain with an arrow exactly like the one the shaman had used, even though the shaman had not been hunting that earlier time. Somehow, the blue arrow poison had transported the animal across time.

  Many Indians report that they have seen the blue frog of the Amazon vanish before their eyes, and even with a thorough search of the area have never gotten a second glimpse of the same frog. What they neglected to consider was not where to search, but when.

  Eight

  APHRODITE WAVING LIKE A LUNATIC

  Paris, 1890

  LUCIEN WORKED IN THE BAKERY BY HIMSELF UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O’CLOCK before his sister Régine came down and found him at the front counter. There had been no sign of Mère Lessard, who was usually bustling about the shop, sweeping and fretting and arranging the cases and racks in the front well before dawn.

  “Where have you been?” asked Lucien. “Where is Maman? I’ve barely been able to keep up with the customers and not burn the pastries.”

  “Maman is tired. She won’t be working today.”

  Lucien handed a customer a boule, the large round loaf that was their specialty, then took the customer’s coins and thanked her before turning to his sister. He could never remember his mother skipping work except to visit her own mother, or out of retribution for some offense, real or imagined, by his father.

  “Is she sick? Should I send for a doctor?”

  Régine smacked him in the back of the head with a baguette, which he interpreted as, “No, you do not need to send for a doctor.”

  Two old men who had been killing time at one of the small café tables laughed.

  “Ah, Lucien, you don’t need a wife, eh? Not with a sister like that.”

  “Family business conference,” Régine said. She breezed by him in a way that seemed even more menacing than the normal breezing by of their mother (even though Régine was half her size). She caught Lucien’s apron strings and pulled him backward into the kitchen.

  Before Lucien could get fully turned around she was brandishing the baguette like an axe handle, ready to dash his brains out with its delicious, crunchy-chewy crust.

  “How can you use that storeroom, Lucien? How can you paint in there, after what happened to Papa?”

  “Papa always wanted me to be a painter,” Lucien said. He didn’t understand why she was so angry. “And we’ve always used that storeroom.”

  “As a storeroom, you idiot. Not as a studio. We could hear you two in there yesterday. Gilles pounded on the door when he came home from work and you ignored him.”

  Régine had married a carpenter name Gilles, the son of a dance-hall doorman, also from Montmartre. They lived in the apartment upstairs with Madame Lessard. “Where is Gilles? Did he not go to work either?”

  “I sent him down the back stairs.”

  “Régine, this is going to be a great picture. My masterpiece.”

  The baguette came around fast and wrapped around his head. The Lessards had always prided themselves on their light, delicate crust, so Lucien was somewhat surprised at how much it hurt, even now, after all the practice.

  “Ouch. Régine, I am a grown man, this is none of your affair.”

  “There was a woman, Lucien. With Papa.”

  Lucien suddenly forgot about being angry, about having to run the bakery alone or being ashamed about his sister listening to him having sex. “A woman?”

  “Maman was in Louveciennes, visiting Grand-mère. Marie and I saw her, well, just the back of her as she went into the storeroom. Some red-haired slut. Marie went to see what she could. That’s what she was doing up on the roof when she fell.”

  Régine was breathless now, and not from distress she had constructed in order to get her way. Lucien had seen that often enough to know this wasn’t it.

  “Does Maman know?”

  “No.” Régine shook her head. “No one. No one.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t know anything. We just saw a woman, just the back of her, but she had long red hair, the slut. We saw her go in the storeroom with Papa and he locked the door. I didn’t know what happened. Then when Marie fell—I didn’t know what to do. It was too much.”

  Lucien took his sister in his arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He was probably just painting her.”

  “Like you were painting yesterday?”

  Lucien held her and patted her back. “I have to go. I really am painting Juliette today. Painting.”

  Régine nodded and pushed him away. “I know.”

  “We were together, before, Régine. I thought I’d lost her. Yesterday was—was a reunion.”

  “I know, but you’re the baby. It’s sordid. Maman says she has no son now that you’ve ruined that poor girl.”

  “Two days ago she threatened to have a Russian man set Juliette on fire and feed our children to Madame Jacob’s dog.”

  “That was before she heard you two. She won’t come out of her room until lunch or you have gone to confession, whichever comes first.”

  “But I’m twenty-seven years old, did you think that I was never with a woman?”

  “Well, you never bring them home. We thought perhaps someone had taken you to bed out of pity, maybe. And girls now do drink a lot.”

  Lucien brushed the crumbs out of his hair. “I’m not married because I’m a painter, not because I can’t find a woman. I’ve told you, I don’t have time for a wife. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”

  “So you say. I suppose we should be grateful that you’re not chasing boys like that horrible Englishman that came into the bakery.”

  “Oscar? Oscar is brilliant. Speaks French dreadfully, but a brilliant man.”

  “Go,” Régine said. “I will watch the store. Go paint. And don’t tell Maman what I told you. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t be sordid.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t become reclusive like Papa.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And leave the studio door open, so we can see what you’re doing.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Go,” she said, gesturing with her broken baguette. “Go, go, go, little brother. Go to your slut.”

  “I love her.”

  “No one cares. Go!”

  ALL MORNING, WHILE HE WENT ABOUT HIS WORK IN THE BAKERY, LUCIEN HAD been telling himself, Today I am an artist. I will make art. I am not going to throw her on the lounge and boff her senseless, no matter how much she begs. He really hoped she wouldn’t beg, because he wasn’t that sure of his resolve. And even if I throw her on the lounge and boff her senseless, I’m not going to ask her to marry me.

  He found her waiting by the shed door when he came out of the bakery. She wore a festive white dress with blue and pink bows and a tall hat that looked more like a flower arrangement than headwear. The sort of ensemble a girl might wear to dance in the courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon, not an outfit you would put on to wa
lk a dozen blocks so you could take it off for a painter.

  “Don’t you look pretty.”

  “Thank you. I brought you a present.”

  “And you’ve wrapped it beautifully,” he said, putting a hand on her waist.

  “Not that, you goat, something else. I’ll show you inside.”

  As he unlocked the door, she took a hinged wooden box from her bag and opened it. “Look, color! The man assured me it’s the finest quality. ‘Pure pigments,’ he said, whatever that means.”

  There were a dozen tubes of paint, large, 250-milliliter tubes—enough color to easily cover the canvas, unless he used the thick impasto method that van Gogh liked, and he didn’t think that technique suited his subject. Each tube had a small label of paper pasted on it with a dab of the color, but there was no writing, no note on the mixture.

  “But I was going to go buy paint from Père Tanguy this afternoon.”

  “Now you can start painting instead,” she said. She kissed his cheek, set the box onto the table he’d set up for supplies, then she noticed a changing screen had been set up at the far end of the studio. “Oh là là. Is that to preserve my modesty?”

  “It’s proper,” he said.

  Actually, he had fetched the screen from Henri’s studio on rue Caulaincourt in the wee hours, while the bread was baking, so he wouldn’t be able to watch her dress or undress. He thought perhaps he would be able to keep his concentration on the painting that way.

  She emerged from behind the screen wearing a white Japanese silk kimono that Henri kept around the studio for his models, or for himself, as on occasion he liked to dress like a geisha girl and have their friend Maurice Guibert take photos of him. But as far as making Juliette look like the diminutive aristocratic painter, the robe failed miserably.

  “How do you want me?” Juliette asked, letting the kimono fall open.

  Well now she was just trying to be annoying.

  Lucien looked only at the canvas, made a point, in fact, of looking only at the canvas, and waved her toward the lounge as if he didn’t have time to bother with showing her how to pose. “Like yesterday will be fine,” he said.

  “Oh really, shall I lock the door?”

  “The pose,” Lucien said. “Like yesterday, do you remember?”

  She dropped the robe and reclined into the same pose she had been in the day before. Exactly the same pose, he figured, looking at the sketch. It was uncanny for a model to find the pose that quickly without direction.

  He’d decided to set her in an Oriental harem, after the Algerian paintings of Delacroix. Great flowing silks and golden statues in the background. Maybe a slave fanning her. A eunuch, perhaps? He heard his masters, Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet, lecturing him: “Paint what you see. Capture the moment. Paint what is real.” But the whitewashed storeroom would not do as a setting for this beauty, and he didn’t want to paint the background black and bring up the image from darkness as the Italian masters had, as had Goya with his Maja.

  “I’m thinking about painting it in the Florentine style, laying down all the values in grisaille, a gray-green underpainting, then glazing the colors on over it. It will take longer than other methods, but I think it’s the only way I can capture your light. I mean, the light.”

  “Could you do the underpainting in another color, say that pretty blue the man sold me?”

  Lucien looked again at her, the sun filtering in from the skylight on her naked skin, then at the canvas. “Yes, yes, I can do that.”

  And he began to paint.

  After he’d been at it an hour, Juliette said, “My arm is going to sleep. Can I move it?” Without waiting for his permission, she started to swing her arm around in a windmill motion.

  “Sure, I’ll call the painting Aphrodite Waving Like a Lunatic.”

  “No one has done that before, I’ll bet. You would be the first to paint a waving nude. It could start a revolution.”

  Now she was nodding as well as swinging her arm around; the unsynchronized motion put him in mind of one of Professeur Bastard’s bizarre machines.

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Lucien said.

  “Buy me lunch.”

  “I can get you something from the bakery.”

  “I want you to take me out.”

  “But you’re naked.”

  “Not permanently.”

  “Let me finish your thighs, then we’ll go.”

  “Oh, cher, that sounds delicious.”

  “Stop moving your legs, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  It was two hours before he stepped away from the canvas and stretched his back. “That seems like a good place to take a break.”

  “What? What? Is there a voice there? I’m faint from hunger.” She threw her arm over her eyes dramatically and pretended to faint, which on the fainting couch looked terribly appropriate and made Lucien wonder if he might not have chosen the wrong pose for her.

  “Why don’t you get dressed while I clean these brushes?”

  She sat up quickly, pushed her lower lip out in a pout. “You’re bored with me, aren’t you?”

  Lucien shook his head; there really was no winning here, as his father had taught him was often the case when dealing with women.

  “Where do you want to go for lunch?” Lucien asked.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  Before he could fully fathom what she had in mind, they were boarding a train at Gare Saint-Lazare and headed for Chatou, only a few miles northwest of the city.

  “It’s lunch, Juliette. I need to get back to work.”

  “I know. Trust me,” she said.

  From the train station she led him to the banks of the Seine; out on the river he could see people gathered on a small island, connected to the shore by a long wooden dock. Rowers and day sailors had tied their boats to the dock. There was music playing and people on the platform were laughing, dancing, and drinking, the men in bright, striped jackets and straw boaters, the women in brightly colored pastel dresses. All along the shore bathers waded, splashed, and swam, and farther up the river, Lucien could see couples lying together under the willows.

  “I can’t believe there are so many people out here on a weekday,” Lucien said.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” Juliette said, taking his hand. She pulled him down the riverbank.

  Lucien saw two painters working side by side on the near bank, concentrating intensely on their work and laying down color at a mad speed. He stopped to watch and Juliette yanked him away. “Those two are—”

  “Come on, it will be lovely.”

  Finally, he gave himself up to the experience. They ate, and drank, and danced. She flirted with various boaters and the gentlemen slumming among the rowers, who were having a look at all the young girls, and just as she’d get their interest, she would cling to Lucien’s arm and profess to her suitor that the painter was her only and her ever. The resentment from the men was palpable.

  “Juliette, don’t do that. It’s—well, I don’t know what it is, but it makes everyone involved uncomfortable.”

  “I know,” she said, and she planted a wet kiss on his neck, which made him squirm and laugh.

  A fellow in a T-shirt and boater who was rowing by at the time shouted, “Ah, nothing like a Sunday afternoon at La Grenouillère, oui?”

  “Oui,” said Lucien with a smile, tipping his own straw boater, which he didn’t remember putting on, or for that matter owning. He was sure it was Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday.

  “Let’s explore,” said Juliette.

  They walked up the riverbank, talking and laughing, Lucien noting how the light played on the water, Juliette noting how silly everyone looked in their bathing costumes, some of the men still wearing their hats as they swam. They found a spot under a willow tree whose branches hung all the way to the ground, and there, on a blanket, they finished a bottle of wine, teased, kissed, and made love, all of it feeling very exciting and dangerous and naughty.

  After the
y dozed in each other’s arms for what seemed like the whole afternoon, they made their way back to the train station, where the last train of the day was just boarding. They took the train to Gare Saint-Lazare, leaning on one another as they looked out the window, not saying a word, but both grinning like blissful idiots.

  Although he could ill afford it, Lucien paid for a cab to take them from the station back to the bakery, where she assumed her pose on the fainting lounge, and he took his seat, palette in hand, and he resumed his work, without a word, until the light from the skylight went orange.

  “That’s it,” Juliette said.

  “But, ma chère—”

  She stood and began dressing, as if she had suddenly remembered an appointment. “That’s enough for today.”

  “They used to call this the painter’s hour, Juliette,” Lucien said. “There’s a softness to the early evening light, and besides—”

  She put her finger to his lips. “Have you not had a good day?”

  “Well, uh, yes, of course, but—”

  “The day is done,” she said. And in a minute she had dressed and was out the door. “Tomorrow,” she said.

  Lucien sat back on the little stool he’d been sitting on to work on the lower parts of the canvas. It had been a good day. A very good day. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having had such a day before.

  He put down his brushes and palette and moved to the fainting couch, where he could still feel the warmth of Juliette’s body. La Grenouillère: he had always heard about it, about the wonderful times. He’d seen the paintings Monet and Renoir had made there side by side. It was even more magical than he had imagined. He lay back on the couch and covered his eyes with his arm, letting the day play in his head. He wondered why, in all of his life in Paris, he hadn’t spent a glorious Sunday afternoon among the boaters and the “little frogs” at La Grenouillère. Perhaps, he thought, it was because La Grenouillère had burned to the waterline in 1873, when he was ten, and had never been rebuilt. Yes, that was probably why. And for some reason, that didn’t bother him at all.