Paris Red: A Novel (29 page)

For one thing, the studio is clean in a way Rue Guyot is not. There is no old pail beside the back door for trash, no rickety cupboard in the corner for wine, a loaf of bread and mismatched dishes. This studio is a regular
place
, with real furniture—not only the required divan but also plush sitting chairs, a fancy mirror on the wall, a table beside the door where visitors leave cards.

So Stevens is wealthy. But he is an entirely different kind of man, too.

As soon as I come in, he gives me a sealed envelope with money in it, “to put your mind at ease.” I do not know how much is in the envelope but it is heavy, and it takes me by surprise. I set it on the table beside the door with my shawl, and then he walks me through the room, showing me this thing and that: tiny, pretty knickknacks here and there, and some of the paintings on the walls. I know he would listen to anything I said—does listen when I say,
how pretty
—but I do not know what to say, so he has to do all the talking, and what he says is so filled with pleasantries I do not know what to latch on to.

And I do not know what to latch on to in his paintings. They are almost all portraits, almost all women, and everyone looks kind and dreamy. Even the one painting that shows some women crying together on a sofa seems pretty. Which does not make sense to me because if someone is weeping it should not be so attractive. So stylish. And if I take a step backwards and consider all the paintings, it seems as though everyone has their heads tilted at an angle. No one looks at you straight on, and if they do, their faces are hopeful, or amused over nothing, or rapt.

No one in the paintings is plain or ugly. No one looks like they work at Baudon.

And I remember what he said about Stevens’s paintings, how he told me Stevens tried to please people. But even the people in the paintings want to please. In just a little while of being in the rich, nice room, I feel odd and out of place.

“Perhaps one day you’ll do me the favor of sitting for a sketch or two,” Stevens tells me now.

“I’m sure I can sometime,” I say, but even as I am saying the words they feel false, as if they are not my words at all.

“Quand vous voulez, où vous voulez,” he says. “Comme vous voulez.”

He walks me to the table by the door then, helps me on with my shawl that I do not need any help with, and hands the envelope with the money in it to me for a second time.

“He was worried about you,” Stevens tells me. “You mean a great deal to him.”

“I worried about him, too,” I say. “He means a great deal to me.”

“I’m sure he’ll be in touch soon. He can’t stay away from his work for long.”

“I hope that’s true,” I say.

He kisses me then, once on each cheek, and in the moment when we are close like that, I kiss him, too. Except I kiss him on the lips. Lightly.

When he steps back, I can see in his eyes that I surprised him, which is what I wanted to do. He cannot help how he talks and how polite he is. But I know—I feel—that whatever kindness he shows me is genuine. Under all the graciousness I sense something real.

“Thank you for being his friend and mine,” I say. At first the words sound odd to me, more like Stevens than me. But they are my words and I mean them.

He bows then. He really does. And then I do not feel odd about the money or what I just said to him or what I think about his paintings. I understand something about him. Exactly what, I cannot say, but something.

We say goodbye.

It is not until I get back to my room on La Bruyère and open the envelope that I see it contains fifty francs, not the usual twenty-five I get each week. I do not know whether the money came from Stevens or him, but I think about the way Stevens said
Quand vous voulez, où vous voulez. Comme vous voulez
. How his face looked.

I cannot know for certain where the money came from, and it does not matter anyway. The only thing that matters is that I make it last.

That is the note he sends. Not a word about his father’s death, not a word about his loss. But it is not even the words that matter so much but what he draws on the page, which is a sheet of paper out of his carnet.

On the bottom, beneath his initial, he has drawn two figures, a man and a woman on a divan. You can only see her from behind, her back and ass. She is on top, on her knees, leaning over a little, riding the man. He has his hands on her ass cheeks, and because she is leaning forward a little, you can see where he goes up into her. The base of his cock rises up into her.

Her hair is coiled the way mine is, and you can see a bit of his beard as he lies back on the divan. But I really know it is the two of us because he has made the bottom of my feet dirty and placed a crosshatched little scar on his cock as it rises up into me.

W
hen he comes to my
room he does exactly what he said he would do: he lies down in his shirt and pants on my bed.

“I need to sleep,” he says.

“Sleep,” I say.

“Lie down in your chemise next to me.”

So I get undressed and lie beside him. I think I will not sleep but I do. And I do not know how long we sleep, but I wake up when I hear him shifting on the bed.

“Can you go and get us something to eat?” he says.

So I get up and put on my stays and my dress. When I am putting on my boots he gestures to the pile of coins he pulled from his pockets before he lay down. “Take some money,” he says.

“I don’t need it,” I say. “You paid me.”

“Don’t be silly. Take it.”

So I take his money, and I go out and buy bread and cheese and wine and an apple tart.

But when I get back, he is not lying on my bed, resting. He stands at the table, my watercolor pictures spread out in front of him. The messy morning glories and the blobs of lilacs. My blue-skinned portrait.

He has to look back over his shoulder to see me, and he stays like that for a long time. Bare-chested, in just his pants, holding the portrait and looking at me.

Which I let him do for a moment, and then I come all the way into the room with the basket of food.

“Would you ever have shown these to me?” he asks.

“Why would I?”

“Where did the colors come from?”

“They were old tubes,” I say. “You already had them in the trash.”

“No. Where did you get the idea for the colors?”

And I know what he means, I do, but the answer is too simple, so at first I think I should keep it to myself.

But I am tired of keeping things to myself.

“They were the colors I had,” I say. “So I used them. And I painted the thing I could see. Which was me. In the mirror.”

“That?” he says, and nods at the small mirror I still have propped on the table.

I nod. But he does not say anything. Just goes on looking at the paper, at my blue skin and green hair. And in another moment he touches something on the paper.

“How did you know to do this?”

When I go and stand beside him, I see what his finger is touching. My blue shoulder, which is a circle on top of the cylinder that is my arm, a circle at the end of the cross of my collarbone. My breasts are two more circles, my belly an egg.

“Because some of your sketches are like that,” I say. “People’s heads are circles and their arms are tubes. That’s what it looks like to me.”

He holds the portrait a moment longer, and then he props it with the others against the wall, there on the tabletop. Then he takes the basket from my hand and puts it on the table.

“I’ll get you real watercolor paints,” he says. “If you want them.”

And the whole thing is so kind I cannot stand it. He is so kind I cannot stand it.

So I do not answer. Instead I start taking the food out of the basket and setting the table. But when I pull the tart out of the basket, I look at him and say, “I don’t want new tubes. Just half-used ones. I want to be able to ruin them. I want things you don’t want any more. But maybe the right kind of paper.”

And then I look away. Because even to me my voice sounds funny, tight and tinny.

But it is not just the offer of the paint that upsets me. It is everything. The past days of him being away, of not having a place to go. The worrying over money. All of it.

I give him credit: he does not say anything else. Does not make me say anything else about my blue and green paintings. Does not ask me what I want.

He just sits down on the bed and I sit on the chair. And we begin to eat.

Only when we
are done with nearly all of the bread do I finally get to tell him I am sorry his father died.

“He had a stroke years ago. He was partially paralyzed,” he says. “It was a blessing.”

“Still.”

“Yes, still,” he says.

There is something in his voice that lets me know he does not want me to say anything else about it. Or maybe the two of us are just better at being silent together in a room than talking. It is what we are used to. But in a little while, he tells me, “I’m glad you went to see Stevens. I worried about you.”

“It was fine,” I say.

“He asked me again if you’d sit for him.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe after you finish what you’re working on.”

“You won’t be free then, either. I have plans for something new. Another nude.”

“Like this one?”

“Different. Seated, with other figures. Two women, two men. Une partie carrée.”

“We’re all nude? The four of us?”

“Just you.”

I want to say it sounds a little like him and Nise and me, but I do not want to talk about who the second man might be. Before I can say anything, though, he says, “Now, tell me if you liked the drawing I sent you.”

“I liked it.”

He brushes the crumbs from his beard and then reaches for me. Pulls me to him.

“Good,” he says, and then he asks me what I want done, and how, and where.

The words are so similar to what Stevens said the other day in his studio that I wonder if they have talked. I wonder and then decide I do not care.

And I tell him what I want.