Paris Red: A Novel (27 page)

He stays with
me that night in the room on La Bruyère and the next morning, I say, “So what are his paintings like?”

“Whose paintings?”

“Your friend. Stevens.”

“They’re like him. Kind. Romantic.”

“It sounds as though you don’t like him.”

“I like him very much. He’s a true person. And a true friend.”

“But you don’t like his paintings.”

“He pleases people,” he says. “It’s a trick I can’t learn.”

“I don’t think it’s so bad to please people,” I say.

“If it happens, it’s fine. If you set out to do it, it becomes another thing.”

“Does he try to make people like his work?”

“Not always. But his paintings have a preciousness. I can’t fathom it. The painting they gave the medal to last year was of a dewy-eyed mother and son.”

“Now I want to see for myself,” I say.

“You have his card. Go and see him.”

“I will sometime.”

“You’re entirely free.”

“Aren’t you jealous at all?”

“Why should I be?” he says. “I’m the one who had your hair over my thighs last night. Not him.”

He pulls me to him then, and I must be just as crude as he is because whatever he says, I say it back.

Le joujou, le chat, d’un côté.

Le vit, la lance, de l’autre.

I
am in my room the
next day, putting up my hair, when someone knocks on my door. It is a boy I don’t know but feel as though I should.

“Monsieur asked me to bring this to you,” he says, and he hands me a letter.

Of course it is from him—he is the only one who knows I am here, the only one who would send a boy, the only one who would write a letter.

It is just a short note, and in it he tells me that his father died, that he may be some time dealing with family business, that he will send for me when he can. An apology for his haste. There is no real signature, just an
E
and a squiggle.

“Thank Monsieur for me,” I tell the boy. “Please give him my condolences.”

“He’s already gone,” the boy says. “He left as I was leaving.”

“When you see him,” I say.

After the boy goes and I hear his footsteps disappear down the stairs, I wonder about what it all means for him. I do not know much about his family, but from what he has said about his father, I know whatever relationship existed was strained. But it is still his father, and it is still a loss.

I think about writing a note myself, but I do not know where to send it. Then I think about taking it to the studio, but I doubt he would be there to get it. I also know that part of his reason for sending me word is so that I do not come to the studio.

So that I do not intrude on the other portion of his life.

Any sympathy I have to express will have to wait, it is clear, and as I sit there mulling it all over, feeling for him and feeling at a loss to do anything, a tiny part of my mind goes to one particular detail. One I hate even admitting.

He would have paid me tomorrow for the past week, and while I have money for this week, that is all I have.

I tell myself I have lived on less. I tell myself the room is paid through the end of the month so there is not that fear.

Still. It makes me understand how unsure it all is, and how everything my life now rests on depends on him. And now I have the whole day to think about it. To fret about it.

So I tuck his note back in its envelope and finish doing my hair. I know I have to go out, even if it is just to go walking. Just to get out of the room and away from the envelope addressed to
Mlle Meurent
. His handwriting.

Because a walk is free.

It does not
take me long to get there—out the door, up Rue de La Rochefoucauld and Rue Pigalle, and then into the square. Everyone mills around and from a distance, it looks as if it were some kind of street party. Except it is not a party but a market. Instead of flowers or birds or horses, artists can take their pick of women.

He told me about the place that first day he hired me. Told me he would be just as glad to hire me as to come here.

I see whores, but I also see girls like the ones I worked with at Baudon. Would-be brunisseuses, paper flower makers, laundresses, waitresses, servants, assistants to hairdressers, clerks and seamstresses. At times the crowd sounds just as rowdy as the workroom at Baudon sounded, but other times everyone seems to go quiet. Waiting. Wanting to be chosen.

I stand not too far from the café Nouvelle Athènes but not so close to it as to be mistaken for a customer at one of the outside tables. Even though I am away from the throng, I can still overhear bits of conversation. I hear one woman tell another that if she does not get a job today, she will run the streets.

I walk away as quickly as I can without drawing attention. I try to walk as if I am just a person on the sidewalk, someone walking to a destination. I try to make my face look as if I have a place in mind and a time to be there.

And though I do not mean to do it, I head up in the direction of his studio. Not to Rue Guyot directly—I know better than to go there. Instead I walk up by Parc de Monceau. It is not until I get there that I understand where I have been coming.

To the cedar tree he likes.

He and I walk this way sometimes, up from the old boulevard Malesherbes, into the new district they are carving. They have taken out old buildings, garden walls, and rises in the land in order to make streets with no houses on them. But for whatever reason they keep the cedar.

“It was in the middle of a ruined garden when I first saw it,” he told me the first time he brought me here. “The branches reached out among the ruined flowers and made purple shadows.”

The tree is part of what will be a city block, but nothing is built yet. So I just stand there on the dirt for a long while, looking at its blue-green needles.

I think,
I still have money in my pocket
.

I think,
I still have my bloodstone burnisher
.

I think,
I am not adrift
.

And I let myself think of him. Of his grief. Because whatever his father was to him, it is still a death.

And then I go on walking.

T
his time when I go
to Baudon, I do not wait down the block and across the street, past where the soup seller stands. I wait directly opposite the side courtyard, the one where the door to the workshop slides open on a pulley. When all the workers start to flow out of the courtyard and into the street, it takes me only a moment to spot Nise. It takes her a longer time to see me, and in that bit of time I wonder how her face will change when she sees me, whether in anger or something softer and sadder, like when we said goodbye.

But when she does see me, all she does is watch. Take me in. Nothing changes in her face. The only thing that changes is her eyes, and the change is so small that anyone else would miss it. So I am the one who waves, who begins to walk toward her. Because it is what I came to do. Still, when we are within talking distance, she is the one who speaks first.

“Eh, frangine,” she says. “Did you come back looking for your old job?”

I don’t say anything, just shake my head and go on letting her look at me. But in a moment, I see her lift her chin a fraction, and I know she is waiting for me to answer.

So I say, “Ça va, Nise?” Make my voice as warm as I can.

“It goes.”

“Working hard as always, right?”

“Hardly working,” she tells me.

It is our old routine, and we look at each other for just a moment longer before falling in with the ribbon of workers making their way down the street to lunch. And it is not until we are walking that I realize there was another emotion I saw in her face just now. Not just anger and impatience, not just a challenge.

Puzzlement. And as soon as I have the word I know it is the only real response to my presence.
Why?

“I wanted to see how you were,” I say. “Let’s get soup.”

“Suit yourself,” she tells me, but she drifts in a little closer to me, the way we used to walk together, shoulders almost touching.

The seller has potato soup today. And even though I do not know when I will get paid again, I do the only thing to do: I stand my friend to a bowl.

We sit on
the stoop we always used to sit on. We have the bowls in our hands and do not look at each other, and for a moment it feels the way it used to. For a moment, weeks have not passed since I saw her last. But weeks have passed, nearly two months since I last tried to see her. So after a little bit, I say, “Are you still on Maître-Albert?”

“No.”

And when that is all she says, I think it might be all she is going to say, but then I hear her take a breath.

“I’m at Toinette’s now.”

“Did you go in on a room together?”

“I stay with her at her parents’. With her parents and little brother.”

“Is it all right?”

“It’s not bad. It’s almost like having a family. The grandmother lives there, too. She sleeps in an alcove by the stove.”

She waits a second, spooning soup from the bowl, and then she says, “Except it’s easier than having a family because I’m not related to any of them.”

We both laugh. And even as I am laughing, it hurts me. He and I laugh, we do, but I do not laugh with him the way I did with her. The way I do with her, even now. Even now.

“What’s really going on with you?” she asks then, straight out into the air above her bowl, still not looking at me. “Why the hell are you even here?”

I think about different things to say, different ways to say them. “I wanted to see how you are,” I tell her in the end. “I miss you.”

Yet even as I am saying the words, though they are the truest thing I can say, I know they are also a lie. Because if I could be, I would be in his studio on Rue Guyot. I would be there with him instead of sitting here with her.

I look at the side of her face, which I know almost as well as I know my own. When she turns toward me, though, I do not see the anger I saw before, or impatience, or even puzzlement. I just see tiredness around her eyes.