Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  “I withdraw my agreement. I know nothing of these journals. Who can tell what he may have written?”

  A deep and affectionate sigh. “Oh, Luna. Still so suspicious?”

  “Not suspicious. Wise. The little American, she is of Edouard’s blood and also Edouard’s soul. I have seen him in her eyes.”

  Theresa set down the decanter and came back into the lamplight. “Wait a minute. I don’t understand. Of course I have the right to use the journals. M. Tanguy promised me full access to all Beauvoisin’s papers. And he didn’t say anything about you. Where is he anyway?”

  Mme Beauvoisin’s dark, faded eyes held hers for a moment. “Please, do not discommode yourself,” she said. “Sit and tell us what you have found.”

  Hesitant under Luna’s hot and disapproving gaze, Theresa perched herself on the edge of a chair and did as she was told.

  “I’d no idea he was so passionate,” she said at last. “In his letters, although he speaks of passion, he’s always so moderate about expressing it.”

  “Moderate!” Luna’s laugh was a scornful snort. “Hear the girl! Madre de Dios!”

  “Hush, Luna. Please continue.”

  “That’s all. I didn’t really learn much, except that he knew in June that he was dying. One interesting thing was his references to an Arrangement—that’s with a capital A—and how he’d never told his maman about it.” Excitement rose in her again. “I have to find the rest of the journals!”

  Mme Beauvoisin smiled at her. “Tomorrow. You will find them, I’m sure of it.”

  “Céleste,” said Luna warningly.

  “Hush, my dear.”

  Theresa retired, as always, before her elderly companions. As polite as Mme Beauvoisin was, she always felt uncomfortable in the parlor, as if her presence there were an intrusion, a threat, a necessary evil. Which, she told herself firmly, in a way, it was. The two women had been living here alone for Heaven only knew how long. It was only natural that they’d feel put out by her being there. It was silly of her to resent her exclusion from their charmed circle. And yet, tonight especially, she did.

  Theresa curled up in a chair by the window, tucked the duvet around her legs, and considered the problem of Edouard’s notebooks. A full moon washed the pale roses and the white paths with silver. In her mind, Theresa followed Edouard down one of those luminous paths to the studio, sitting at his desk, pulling his current notebook from the right-hand drawer and re-reading his last entry only to discover that he’d barely one page left. He shook his head, rose, went to the cabinet, opened one of the long drawers where he kept his paints and pigments neatly arranged in shallow wooden trays. Carefully, he lifted one tray, slipped a new marbled cahier from under it, returned to his desk, and began to write.

  When Theresa opened her eyes, the garden was cool in a pale golden dawn. Her neck was in agony, her legs were hopelessly cramped, but she was elated. The notebooks were in the cabinet under the paint trays—they just had to be!

  Twenty minutes later, she was in the studio herself, with the paint trays stacked on the floor, gloating over layers of black-and-white marbled cahiers.

  There were more than a hundred of them, she discovered, distributed over four drawers and forty-two years, from Beauvoisin’s first trip to Paris in 1856 to his death in 1898. Theresa took out five or six of them at random and paged through them as she had paged through books as a child, stopping to read passages that caught her eye. Not entirely professional, perhaps. But thoroughly satisfying.

  April 20, 1875

  Paris is so full of bad paintings, I can’t begin to describe them. I know C.’s would enjoy some modest success, but she will not agree. One of Mlle Morisot’s canvases has sold for a thousand francs—a seascape not so half as pretty as the one C. painted at La Roseraie last month. I compliment her often on her work, and am somewhat distressed that she does not return the courtesy, from love of the artist if not from admiration of his work. But then C. has never understood my theory of light and evanescence, and will not agree with my principles of composition.

  Theresa closed the notebook with a snap, unreasonably disappointed with Beauvoisin for his blindness to the structures of his society. Surely he must have known, as Céleste obviously knew, that men were professionals and women were amateurs, unless they were honorary men like Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt? Poor Céleste, Theresa thought, and poor Edouard. What had they seen in one another?

  Over the next few days, Theresa chased the answer to that question through the pages of Edouard’s journals, skipping from one C. to the next, composing a sketch-portrait of a very strange marriage. That Beauvoisin had loved Céleste was clear. That he had loved her as a wife was less so. He spoke of her as a travelling companion, a hostess, a housekeeper. A sister, Theresa thought suddenly, reading how Céleste had arranged the details of their trip to Spain in the winter of 1877. She’s like the maiden sister keeping house for her brilliant brother. And Edouard, he was a man who saved all his passion for his art, at any rate until he went to Spain and met Luz Gascó.

  I have made some sketches of a woman we met in the Prado—a respectable woman and tolerably educated, although fallen on evil times. She has quite the most beautiful skin I have seen—white as new cream and so fine that she seems to glow of her own light, like a lamp draped with heavy silk. Such bones! And her hair and eyes, like black marble polished and by some miracle brought to life and made supple. C. saw her first, and effected an introduction. She is a joy to paint, and not expensive . . . .

  Eagerly, Theresa skimmed through the next months for further references to the beautiful señorita. Had Edouard fallen in love at last? He certainly wrote as if he had—long, poetic descriptions of her skin, her hair, her form, her luminous, living presence. At the same time, he spoke fearfully of her temper, her unaccountable moods, her uncontrollable “gypsy nature.” In the end, however, simple painterly covetousness won out and he invited Gascó to spend the summer at La Roseraie.

  May 6, 1878

  Luz Gascó expected tomorrow. C., having vacated the blue chamber for her, complains of having nowhere to paint. Perhaps I’ll build an extension to my studio. Gascó is a great deal to ask of a wife, after all, even though C. knows better than any other how unlikely my admiration is to overstep propriety. As a model, Gascó is perfection. As a woman, she is like a wild cat, ready to hiss and scratch for no reason. Yet that skin! Those eyes! I despair of capturing them and ache to make the attempt.

  Fishing Boats not going well. The boats are wooden and the water also. I shall try Gascó in the foreground to unbalance the composition. . . .

  How violently the presence of Luz Gascó unbalanced the nicely calculated composition of Edouard Beauvoisin’s life became clearer to Theresa the more she read. She hardly felt excluded now from her hostesses’ circle, eager as she was to get back to the studio and to Edouard, for whom she was feeling more and more sympathy. Pre-Gascó, his days had unfolded methodically: work, walks with Céleste, drives to the village, letter-writing, notebook-keeping, sketching—each allotted its proper time and space, regular as mealtimes. G. rises at noon, he mourned a week into her visit. She breaks pose because she has seen a bird in the garden or wants to smell a flower. She is utterly impossible. Yet she transforms the world around her.

  Imperceptibly, the summer visit extended into autumn and the autumn into winter as Beauvoisin planned and painted canvas after canvas, experimenting with composition, technique, pigment. By the spring of 1879, there was talk of Gascó’s staying. By summer, she was a fixture, and Beauvoisin was beside himself with huge, indefinite emotions and ambitions, all of them arranged, like his canvases, around the dynamic figure of Luz Gascó. Then came July, and a page blank save for one line:

  July 6, 1879

  Luz in the parlor. Ah, Céleste!

  A puzzling entry, marked as if for easy reference with a scrap of cheap paper folded in four. Theresa picked it up and carefully smoothed it open—not carefully enough, however, to keep
the brittle paper from tearing along its creases. She saw dark lines—a charcoal sketch—and her heart went cold in panic. What have I done? she thought. What have I destroyed?

  With a trembling hand, she arranged the four pieces on the table. The image was a reclining woman, her face turned away under an upflung arm, her bodice unbuttoned to the waist and her chemise loosened and folded open. A scarf of dark curls draped her throat and breast, veiling and exposing her nakedness. The sketch was intimate, more tender than erotic, a lover’s mirror.

  Theresa put her hands over her eyes. She’d torn the sketch; she didn’t need to cry over it too. Spilt milk, she told herself severely. M. Rouart would know how to restore it. And she should be happy she’d found it, overjoyed to have such dramatic proof of Beauvoisin’s carnal passion for his Spanish model. So why did she feel regretful, sad, disappointed and so terribly, overwhelmingly angry?

  A shadow fell across the page. A gnarled, nail-bitten forefinger traced the charcoaled line of the subject’s hair.

  “Ah,” said Luna softly. “I wondered what had become of this.”

  Theresa clenched her own hands in her lap, appalled by the emotion that rose in her at the sound of that hoarse, slightly lisping voice. Luna was certainly irritating. But this was not irritation Theresa felt. It was rage.

  “A beautiful piece, is it not?” The four torn pieces were not perfectly aligned: the woman seemed broken at the waist; her left arm, lying across her hips, was dismembered at the elbow. Luna coaxed her back together with delicate touches. “A pity that my own beauty may not be so easily repaired.”

  Surprised, Theresa looked up at Luna’s turtle face. She’d never imagined Luna young, let alone beautiful. Yet now she saw that her bones were finely turned under her leathery skin and her eyes were unfaded and bright black as a mouse’s. A vaguely familiar face, and an interesting one, now that Theresa came to study it. Something might be made of it, against a background of flowers, or the garden wall.

  Luna straightened, regarding Theresa with profound disgust. “You’re his to the bone,” she said. “You see what you need to see, not what is there. I told her a stranger would have been better.”

  Theresa’s fury had subsided, leaving only bewilderment behind. She rubbed her eyes wearily. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand. Do you know something about this sketch?”

  The old woman’s mouth quirked angrily. “What I know of this sketch,” she spat, “is that it was not meant for your eyes.” And with a haughty lift of her chin, she turned and left the studio.

  Was Mlle Gascó crazy, or senile, or just incredibly mean? Theresa wondered, watching her hobble across the bright prospect of the garden like an arthritic crow. Surely she couldn’t actually know anything about that sketch—why, it had been hidden for over a hundred years. For a moment, the garden dimmed, as though a cloud had come over the sun, and then Theresa’s eyes strayed to the notebook open before her. A sunbeam dazzled the single sentence to blankness. She moved the notebook out of the glare and turned the page.

  The next entry was dated the 14th of July and spoke of Bastille Day celebrations in Lorient and a family outing with Céleste and Gascó, all very ordinary except that Beauvoisin’s prose was less colorful than usual. Something was going on. But Theresa had already known that. Beauvoisin had grown immensely as a painter over the summer of 1879, and had also cut himself off from the men who had been his closest friends. She was already familiar with the sharp note he’d written Manet denying that he had grown reclusive, only very hard at work and somewhat distracted, he hinted, by domestic tension: “For two women to reside under one roof is far from restful,” he had written, and “Céleste and I have both begun paintings of Gascó—not, alas, the same pose.”

  Theresa flipped back to July 6. Luz in the parlor. Ah, Céleste! Such melodrama was not like Beauvoisin, nor was a week’s silence, nor the brief, lifeless chronicles of daily events that occupied him during the month of August. Theresa sighed. Real life is often melodramatic, and extreme emotion mute. Something had happened on July 6, something that had changed Beauvoisin’s life and art.

  In any case, late in 1879 Beauvoisin had begun to develop a new style, a lighter, more brilliant palette, a more painterly technique that broke definitively from the line-obsessed training of his youth. Reading the entries for the fall of ’79 and the winter of ’80, Theresa learned that he had developed his prose style as well, in long disquisitions on light and composition, life and art. He gave up all accounts of ordinary events in favor of long essays on the beauty of the ephemeral: a young girl, a budding flower, a spring morning, a perfect understanding between man and woman. He became obsessed with a need to capture even the most abstract of emotions on canvas: betrayal, joy, contentment, estrangement.

  I have set G. a pose I flatter myself expresses most perfectly that moment of suspension between betrayal and remorse. She is to the left of the central plane, a little higher than is comfortable, crowded into a box defined by the straight back of her chair and the arm of the sofa. Her body twists left, her face is without expression, her eyes are fixed on the viewer. The conceit pleases G. more than C., of course, G. being the greater cynic. But C. agrees that the composition is out of the ordinary way and we all have great hopes of it at the next Salon. Our Arrangement will answer very well, I think.

  Reading such entries—which often ran to ten or fifteen closely-written pages—Theresa began to wonder when Beauvoisin found time to paint the pictures he had so lovingly and thoughtfully planned. It was no wonder, she thought, that Interior and Woman at a Window seemed so theoretical, so contrived. She was not surprised to read that they had not brought as much as Young Woman in a Garden or Reclining Nude, painted two years later and described briefly as a figure study of G. on the parlor sofa, oddly lighted. Pure whim, and not an idea anywhere in it. C. likes it, though, and so does G.; have allowed myself to be overborne.

  June had laid out its palette in days of Prussian blue, clear green, and yellow. In the early part of the month, when Theresa had been reading the letters, the clouds flooded the sky with a gray and white wash that suppressed shadow and compressed perspective like a Japanese print. After she found the notebooks, however, all the days seemed saturated with light and static as a still life.

  Theresa spent her time reading Beauvoisin’s journals, leaving the studio only to eat a silent meal alone in the kitchen, to wander through the garden or, in the evenings, to go down to the seawall where she would watch the sun set in Turneresque glories of carmine and gold. Once, seeing the light, like Danae’s shower, spilling its golden seed into the sea, Theresa felt her hand twitch with the desire to paint the scene, to capture the evanescent moment in oil and make it immortal.

  What am I thinking of? she wondered briefly. I can’t paint. It must be Edouard rubbing off on me. Or the isolation. I need to get out of here for a couple days, go back to Paris, see M. Rouart about the sketch, maybe let him take me out to dinner, talk to someone real for a change. But the next day found her in the studio and the next evening by the seawall, weeping with the beauty of the light and her own inadequate abilities.

  As June shaded into July, Theresa abandoned the notebooks and began to sketch the pictures she saw around her in the studio and garden. Insensible of sacrilege, she took up Beauvoisin’s pastel chalks and charcoal pencils and applied herself to the problem of reproducing her impressions of the way the flowers shimmered under the noonday sun and how the filtered light reflected from the studio’s whitewashed walls.

  At first, she’d look at the untrained scrawls and blotches she’d produced and tear them to confetti in an ecstasy of disgust. But as the clear still days unfolded, she paid less and less attention to what she’d done, focusing only on the need of the moment, to balance mass and shape, light and shade. She hardly saw Mme Beauvoisin and Luna, though she was dimly aware that they were about—in the parlor, in the garden, walking arm in arm across her field of vision: figures in the landscape, motifs in the
composition. Day bled into day with scarcely a signpost to mark the end of one or the beginning of the next, so that she sketched and read in a timeless, seamless present, without past, without future, without real purpose.

  So it was with no clear sense of time or place that Theresa walked into the studio one day and realized that she had left her sketchbook in the parlor. Tiresome, she thought to herself. But there was that study she’d been working on, the one of the stone wall. She’d just have to go back to the house and get it.

  The transition from hall to parlor was always blinding, particularly in the afternoon, when the sun slanted through the French doors straight into entering eyes. That is perhaps why Theresa thought at first that the room was empty, and then that someone had left a large canvas propped against the sofa, a painting of two women in an interior.

  It was an interesting composition, the details blurred by the bright backlight, the white dress of the figure on the sofa glimmering against the deep burgundy cushions, the full black skirts of the figure curled on the floor beside her like a pool of ink spilled on the flowery carpet. Both figures were intent on a paper the woman on the sofa held on her up-drawn knees. Her companion’s torso was turned into the sofa, her arms wreathed loosely around her waist.

  What a lovely picture they make together, Theresa thought. I wonder I never thought of posing them so. It’s a pity Céleste will not let me paint her.

  Céleste laid the sketch aside, took Gascó’s hand, and carried it to her lips. Her gaze met Theresa’s.