Paris Red: A Novel (25 page)

Except I left my boots in the room, there beside the divan, and when I come out a moment later, I am dressed but my hair is down and I am just in my stockings.

He turns first, and only when he nods does Astruc turn.

“I didn’t know I was interrupting a working day,” he says. “But it’s a pleasure to see you, mademoiselle.”

“And a pleasure to see you,” I say. Then I sit down on the divan and begin to pull on my boots.

Astruc walks over to the chalks hanging from the clothespins and looks for a long time, standing up close, not saying anything. Walks from sketch to sketch and then back again.

“But these are astonishing,” I hear him say.

And even though all of the sketches are of me, even though I am naked in each one, and even though I am sitting in the same room as the sketches, not ten meters from him—the comment is not directed at me.

“Ils sont naïfs,” Astruc says then. “That’s their strength. They’re plain and bold.”

“I draw what I see.”

“Are they studies?”

“Of a sort,” he says, shrugging, and that is when I understand he wants to get Astruc away from the sketches. That he is not ready for anyone else to see them, or to talk about the painting he is planning.

“Even I only know what I need to know,” I say from the divan, where I am buttoning my boots with the buttonhook he keeps there in the studio.

And I do not know if it is the drawings, or the sound of my voice, or the fact that I am buttoning my boots in front of him, but Astruc seems surprised and then embarrassed. As if he realizes in that moment that I have just been naked in this room, or that I am still getting dressed. And maybe it is something else altogether—I cannot tell. All I know is how he looks.

And he begins apologizing for interrupting. Says he should have known better than to call so early in the day. That if we will forgive him he will be on his way.

“Goodbye, mademoiselle,” he tells me, but he is already heading toward the side room and the door.

I am still sitting on the divan, still buttoning my boots, when he and Astruc go out onto the street. And when they are gone for a while, clearly having some kind of conversation, I know it was me who made Astruc nervous. My stockinged-feet presence on the divan, or my chalked- and inked-presence in the sketches—I do not know which.

“What was all of that?” I say when he comes back in.

“Where do I start?” he says, shaking his head. “He thinks I’m doing something groundbreaking. He fears it won’t be understood. He thinks you are the most natural woman. He thinks the sketches show that naturalness. He wants to write a poem about you.”

I wait a moment and then I say, “How can he write a poem about me? He doesn’t know me.”

“It doesn’t matter. He feels he knows you.”

And I sit there. At first I do not know what to think, and then it seems funny to me.

“I think my stockings frightened him,” I say.

“I think they went to his head,” he tells me. “But I am supposed to give you a message from him.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Please tell her Zacharie Astruc said,
Never cut your
hair
.’ So now you know.”

“I think he loves you very much as a friend,” I say. “I think he loves you and admires you.”

“I think he admires and loves,” he says. “But I’m not sure I’m the target.”

“All he saw were my feet.”

“And the rest,” he says, and looks over at the red chalk drawings that are on display.

I do not know if it is jealousy or righteousness or just being egged on by Astruc’s words, but he keeps me on the divan a long time after that. Showing me just how well he knows me, pleasing me. Pleasing himself.

H
e gives me the bracelet
after I am already on the divan, naked, and when he is about to start work on another set of sketches—the final ones before he paints, he tells me.

“So this is what you want me to wear?” I say.

“Yes, I’m giving it to you.”

“To wear for the painting.”

“It’s for you and I want you to wear it for the painting,” he tells me. Only then do I think I understand.

“So it’s a gift,” I say.

“I’m not very gracious.”

“It’s not that. I just wasn’t sure.”

A small oval locket dangles from the bracelet chain. Of course when I open it, I see it’s empty.

“My mother had a locket similar to that,” he tells me. “She kept a lock of baby hair in it.”

“Yours?”

“Mine or my brother’s,” he says. “By the time we were older she couldn’t remember.”

“But this isn’t her bracelet,” I say.

“The mother of my son has that locket.”

“With a lock of his hair?”

“With a lock of his hair,” he says.

He seems embarrassed then, as if he knew the whole topic was wrong, as if he knew he handled it badly.

So I tell him, “I like it. I think it’s pretty.”

But when I go to put it on, he stops me.

“Can you wear it on the other arm?”

“Like the girl in your painting? The one without any bones?”

“The copy of Titian?”

“The one with the dog at her feet.”

If he is surprised that I remember the detail, he only lets it show for a second.

“Like that,” he says.

“You have to help me then,” I say. “I can’t do the clasp with this hand.”

After he closes it for me, he brings my hand up to his mouth and kisses it. I do not tell him that is the hand he kissed the night I fed him cherries, the night he turned my palm into a mouth and kissed the nest of veins in my wrist.

Instead I say, “Do you know that’s the first thing someone’s given me? Besides my parents and my grandmother and the whore?”

And I can tell that now he is the one who does not know what to say. I did not mean to be sad about it, or make him feel like the bracelet had too much meaning—I just wanted him to know the truth.

After a little while, he tells me, “I’m glad, then.”

He tells me
the mother of his son was his piano teacher.

At first I do not understand why he is saying it and then I guess: he tells me as he sketches the locket on my wrist, which is like the family locket that the mother of his son has.

“I was seventeen and she was twenty-one when I began the affair,” he says. “Isn’t that rich? She got pregnant when I was nineteen. I wanted her because she was nearby. Because she was there.”

“You don’t mean that. You told me she had a beautiful neck.”

“That’s how it is when you’re seventeen,” he tells me. “Maybe it’s different for girls.”

“It’s not so different,” I say.

“I didn’t think about anything else.”

“That you might get her pregnant?”

“That. Or how we were two different kinds of people.”

“So that’s why you didn’t marry her.”

“No. I would marry her. I feel obligated to her.”

“Then why?”

“It’s complicated.”

I nod a little but I do not say anything. I want to say,
No, if someone like me has a baby at nineteen, that is complicated. For you it was an inconvenience.
But I do not. I know he means something else.

“People aren’t what they appear to be,” he says then. “Especially the ones who are supposed to be something. Who think they are something.”

“You mean people in society.”

“Yes.”

“Men like you.”

He waits and then says, “Yes, men like me.”

I do not know what he thinks I will say next, but I tell him, “Plenty of people aren’t what they appear to be. Some women leave their children. They have turning doors at some hospitals.
Les tours
.”

He looks up from the canvas then but I do not tell him anything else. I don’t say that was the story Nise told me. That when she found out she was pregnant, she thought she would have the child and leave it. That she walked by La Maternité, practicing what to do.

“So I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” he says.

“You were telling me a story.”

But the story he tells is like a fable: at seventeen he falls in love with a woman, a piano teacher with a white throat. When he gets her pregnant, he feels bound to her and his infant son. Nise’s story was not like that at all. No one felt bound to her. And the day that I bled into my boots, the day that Nise helped me, she was the only one bound to me.

I know one thing. I do not really like any of the stories.

He does not say anything else then, not about the woman who is so different from him, or about his son, or about lockets with scraps of baby hair.

All that is
still working in me when I walk home that day along Rue de Londres and Berlin and Clichy and Pigalle, when I buy carrot fritters for my dinner, when I stand washing at the basin in my room on La Bruyère, where he shows up often enough that people think he is, if not my boyfriend at least my protector. It is still in me when I lie down to sleep, but it is only when I lie down to sleep that I let myself think of it.

The mother of his son holds a place in his life, and it is a surer one than mine. I understand that. But if he loved her still, I doubt he would talk to me about her. I think it is why I do not feel jealous. In some odd way I feel safe with her. She gets some of his time and I get the rest. I envy her place in his life, the space she takes up in it, but she paid something to get it. She had his son, which is a price I am not willing to pay.

Suzanne. That is her name. He said it once without meaning to and then never said it again. She has her role and I have mine. We are our own family. Suzanne and the son and him and me. Because I am sure she is not stupid. She has to know about me, too. Maybe he has said my name to her, or maybe she just wonders where he is many evenings. A person cannot paint all of the time.

What I do not let myself think about until I am lying down in bed, until I have thought about all the other pieces of this puzzle, is the question I do not yet have the answer to.

What price will I have to pay to stay in his life? And what will I pay it with? The only things I have of any value are one good dress and the locket he gave me.

But as soon as I think that I know it is not true.

The night I ran to catch him at La Maube, the night I made him kiss me, he told me I did not know what it meant.
To be wanted like that
, he said. Which is the way I have always been. I want and want, and I never stop for caution. Never could stop. Not when I stayed out all night when I was fifteen, not when I walked with my soldier until I liked him well enough to sit on the cushion of his thighs, not when I ran to La Maube to catch up to him. It is the only real thing I have to give. When he looks into my face, he must see it there. All hunger, all ache.

Yet it is not just for him. Whatever my body wants, I give her. Bitter things as well as sweet.