Sacre Bleu (16 page)

“Frightened?” She kicked off a shoe and sat back on the divan with a sigh.

He nodded, looking at the ground, looking very simian and ashamed, as if he were the bad monkey confessing to eating the sacred banana. Again.

“You didn’t try to fuck her, did you?”

“No. No. No. Making color. She came in.”

“And she saw you?”

“An accident.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”

She grinned at him as she unbuttoned her blouse.
“ ‘Couldn’t be helped’
—you like it, don’t you?”

“She had cooked supper already.” Again the shrug. “It’s on the stove. There’s hot water.”

The girl called Juliette shrugged off her blouse and pulled her chemise over her head. The Colorman scrutinized her breasts as she stood, unbuttoned her skirt, and let it fall.

“I like this body,” he said, looking her up and down. “The skin so white, almost blue, yes? Hair black and shiny. I like. Where did you find her?”

“This one? This one is mine.” She walked away in only her pantaloons and black stockings, leaving her clothes behind in a heap. “I guess I’ll be drawing my own bath.”

“Can I watch?” asked the Colorman. He slid out of his chair.

She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. “Why?”

“Pretty skin. Nothing to read.”

“You
like
scaring them, don’t you?”

“Supper smells good, huh? Veal stew. Maybe she’ll come back. She didn’t seem that scared.”

She turned abruptly to face him and he skipped to a stop, his face almost bumping into her belly, a near collision of the sacred and profane.

“You like scaring them more than you like fucking them, don’t you?”

The shrug. “I’m old.” He looked around the room, as if trying to remember something that was anywhere but where she was. “And scaring them is free.”

She turned on a heel and with three long dancer’s strides was in the bedroom, where there was a high-backed, enameled tub. “Oh for fuck’s sake. Come on.”

“Merci,
Bleu,” he said. Bleu was what he called her, how he thought of her, because it fit, no matter who she was, no matter
what
she was. He limped in behind her.

“Get us a new maid tomorrow, though,” she said. “And don’t scare this one.”

A
substance’s color is generated by the absorption of light hitting it and the material’s resonant frequencies. That is, when a material’s molecules resonate with a certain frequency of light, the light rays are absorbed. When they do not resonate, the rays are either reflected or pass right through it. Only the reflected rays reach our eye and determine color. Natural pigments, like lapis lazuli, from which the Sacré Bleu is made, show their color by the absorption of light. Absorption of light literally transforms the orbit of the electrons in the atoms of the pigment. In short, the color doesn’t actually exist, physically, as we experience it, until it is exposed to light waves. Light makes it appear, changes the surface physically.

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.

Paris, 1890

L
UCIEN 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.”