These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  Sister would approve of my resourcefulness. Waste not, want not. Putting aside my pilgrim’s progress report, I wrote, I don’t mean to complain, or to criticize. All is well, but things can be difficult here. I immediately regretted my tone and in a burst of guilty chumminess described things I’d neglected to on my last postcard: the train ride, the treatments, Novice, Head and Mademoiselle. In a quick postscript, I mentioned the Jewish patient, Simone, asking all too piously that the sisters pray for her. For once, just once, I wished Sister were here to dole out her brusque advice to keep calm and “E.T.B.” — expect the best — or to quote the pigeon-loving St. Francis, who said it’s better to be the consoler than the consoled.

  Before signing off, I enquired whether she knew anything about statues, secular ones of course — or about finding needles in haystacks, needles that likely didn’t exist, and even if they did, few couldn’t care less about.

  I sealed the envelope graciously provided by the secretary and dozed off with it in my hand, waking just long enough to finish this journal off. A comfort, as it turns out, given the stuff flitting through my head, dreams, in fits and starts, about arcing electrodes. Lights out.

  I2

  LUNATIC ASYLUM

  ?? AUTUMN ??

  DEAREST C,

  You know me best. My playful heart — my country heart, fickle yet true. As I know yours, a trickster’s. Was it you who egged me on? No. Simply the flirt in me, and the urge most women have to gain, then keep, the upper hand. Who doesn’t want that? Nothing like competition to sharpen desire. A mere whiff of it, even. If Monsieur had his lonely hausfrau and I our long-suffering Maman, we could share our pain.

  Ah, Villeneuve-sur-Fère in summer! Impossible to think of it without thinking of you. The smell of hay in the fields around the village. Grasses shifting in an unbroken breeze.

  Cook spent a full morning preparing the lunch. Coq au vin and a pommes purée so creamy that to Maman’s disgust I double-dipped Cook’s spoon. She had me lay the table with her mother’s china. Papa was there. He and I had returned from a walk, were sitting in the cool of the garden, behind the wall latticed with vines, when, fashionably late, our guests arrived from the train.

  The housekeeper, introduced as Rose, floated in on Monsieur’s arm wearing a flowery concoction more suited to someone half her age, a debutante. Once upon a time, before pushing a broom and darning socks had taken their toll, perhaps she had been pretty. But with one look at her face, my faith in Monsieur (oh, I hear your laugh) was restored — faith that flourished as the wine flowed. The housekeeper, who pursed her lips at each large sip, had crooked teeth and a crooked nose, a coarseness that made Maman, for all her prudery, seem refined. The woman yap, yap, yapped in her bad grammar, barely looking at Monsieur as she complimented Maman on our country home and shared sewing tips. He, bent on ignoring her, drained his glass faster than Papa could fill it. Still, he seemed pleased, and as grateful as I, when Maman clapped her hands at the housekeeper’s wit. No surprise that they hit it off. Like Maman, the woman had a flair for the obvious. “Madame,” Maman kept calling her.

  Our dear brother stayed away till the food was served. Seated across from me, he barely spoke, answering “yes” or “no” to Monsieur’s polite queries. His eyes burned with distaste when he passed the butter to the housekeeper, who helped herself to more as she slurped up her pommes purée. After dessert, the last crumbs of Cook’s prune tart devoured, Paul excused himself and disappeared while the rest of us repaired to the parlour.

  It wasn’t easy to sit in that dark little room making small talk, with the sun breaching the ivy at the windows. How many times can you coo over a crust’s flakiness? I longed to be out in the fields, fields that I missed in the city, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries no match for the rolling hills and open spaces here.

  Villeneuve, summer ’88. Even then our small valley and village had a starkness that sang. The straightforwardness of bare slopes, the river winding between muddy banks. Wind bending the hay, the only sound. As surely as Sakountala described love, this place described freedom, unlike in Paris where every square inch bore the mark of someone’s aspirations, good or bad.

  “Why don’t you show Monsieur the fountain?” said Maman, eager to have Madame to herself and show off her petit point. As if Monsieur cared to see this quaint fixture in the square outside. But it allowed our escape.

  Behind the trunk of an ancient pine he covered me with kisses. “Stop!” I said, laughing. But a craving welled up inside. Of all things I’d have liked to lie with him in the garden, just us, to bend my ear to the dirt and the worms’ tunnelling. I longed to share with him your ease, the ease possessed by children, the candour that his liberties led me to expect. But such ease was not to be with the family nearby. Slipping back into the sitting room, where Maman fielded Madame’s gushings about her needlework and Papa hid behind his ledgers, I felt something shift, as if the vines at the window cast a deeper shade. The housekeeper lapsed into silence, signalling time to go.

  Monsieur kissed Maman’s hand and shook Papa’s. “So nice to meet you,” Maman told the housekeeper who, wincing a smile at me, thanked her coolly for lunch. I noticed how Maman looked askance, managing a bow. I noticed too the wispy curls at Madame’s wrinkled nape, and it hit me again how, once, she might’ve been like me, vivacious if not nearly as pretty.

  “Well that was an amusement,” said Maman when they left, as she helped Cook tidy up, “an afternoon I’ll never have back.” Yet she seemed satisfied somehow, spooning up the last of the purplish gravy and picking thyme from her tongue. “It’s a soft life, isn’t it just, for those lucky enough to choose it,” she clucked.

  Funny she should say soft. That Sunday hinted at a shift in her softening towards me. So much for my gifts from Samaritaine, and the sculpture I was doing, albeit unbeknownst to Maman, to please her.

  Our brother was waiting in the garden, writing in the shade of the cup-and-saucer vine. He dropped his pen, setting aside the play he was drafting, and made no bones of his hatred. “The man’s a swine,” he started in. “Don’t you get it? Think with your head! Your Monsieur is no better than a snake crawling on its belly — the nerve of him coming here with that whore, and her making up to Maman like a chum. And who gets hurt?” he railed before I could unlatch the gate — remember the gate? — and flee. “The woman, always the woman,” he shouted with pigheaded assurance.

  “What makes you so certain, a boy your age?” I shouted back.

  If it were not so pitiful, his look would’ve been amusing. “Do what you want, then, but don’t come crying when he tires of you.”

  Such nonsense! I wish you’d been there to tell him, though I didn’t really need you to stick up for me. “If anyone tires of anyone, it will be me growing sick of him, mon petit. Monsieur adores me! No artist tires of his muse.”

  “The muse between your legs. Don’t think I haven’t heard.”

  “Maman will hear — don’t be crude,” I hissed, a mistake because it baited the boy that was holier-than-thou. “If you acted your age you might understand.”

  “I only want to save you,” he said.

  “Me, and the rest of the world. You and your Church, a mission as big as your pride.”

  “Don’t be mad,” he spat, gathering up his work. But, seeing I was right, he kicked a stone, stormed inside without apology.

  “Believing in God is mad,” I yelled after him. A mad response to the world’s evil, I’d have explained to you. But what would you know of madness or evil, besides the evil of our brother’s arrogance?

  ***

  TO HIS CREDIT, Paul had avoided the word slut. But others had ways of saying it for him, in company more refined but less polite than Maman’s. Take the soirée I attended as Monsieur’s guest, in the apartment of a countess near Parc Monceau. Monsieur bought me a gown for the occasion, red silk embroidered in the Japanese style, flowers of blue to set off my eyes. All the right people will be there, he said, as sol
id as a capstan in his top hat and cape, a figure to set off my litheness. Heads turned. We garnered flickering looks.

  “As good as foie gras, this one — you have to admire his taste,” someone said loudly enough to be heard above the music.

  An old lecher from the Salon addressed my chest. “Ah, the mistress herself, the gifted Mademoiselle, our lady of nudity! My dear,” the goat took it upon himself to say, “your Indian princess would have won first place if she’d been dressed.”

  Monsieur’s elbow in my side, I gave a weak smile. “And who are you, sir?”

  Breezing past him, a posse of tittering matrons waylaid Monsieur with a flurry of air-kisses. Monsieur eyed the edible delicacies being passed around. He never was able to pass up free food. Oysters on ice, terrines and platters of jellied chicken, foie gras, duck confit, coquilles St. Jacques — pâtisseries prettier than haute couture.

  I’d have liked to be you, or a spider watching from a web — I was never one for crowds, crowds of beautiful people hardly an exception. Taking a glass of champagne, I found a spot by the piano. A man with wavy black hair and a very black beard attacked the keys. Eyes closed, fingers flying, had he thought the very night had ears only for his efforts? If you could call them efforts, C, so freely did the melodies mimic sounds of the countryside. Brooks sluicing over stones, wind rustling leaves shot with sunlight. Music with the colour and light of Monsieur Monet’s water lilies.

  Muted applause. The countess hailed the pianist, “the illustrious and soon-to-be-great Monsieur Debussy.” Our Monsieur liked Monet well enough but thought little of this Claude’s efforts, pulling me away as he bowed.

  “Tuneless cacophony. I don’t understand the fuss, do you. Ah, but the countess likes to be in the know, doesn’t she.” And he nodded to one of his friends, a government agent. Guiding me over. Piping, “Have you met my prodigy, the lovely Mademoiselle —?”

  The balding man scrutinized my dress, adjusted his monocle. “I know of her.”

  Monsieur praised Sakountala. “A masterpiece — if I do say so.” He invited the agent to see for himself, recommending that his ministry put a bid on it. The man looked worried.

  “I’m afraid, Monsieur, my superiors frown on such … explorations by the fairer sex,” he said, his small eyes undressing me.

  “But you, my friend, aren’t such a cretin. Tuesday, then? Mademoiselle will receive your visit, then you’ll take me to lunch?” The fellow allowed himself a smile. Monsieur breathed into my ear, “Fait accompli, my dear.”

  Then, all rustling silk and dripping diamonds, a human chandelier, the countess bustled up to introduce us to Debussy. “I’ve heard about you, Mademoiselle,” he said, barely acknowledging Monsieur, “timely, that we finally meet?”

  ***

  THE URGE TO create was a siren call and a wolf at the door. Slowly I worked clay in the image of Maman, the model before me round-shouldered, her female parts sagging. Neither you nor I had a clue, of course, how Maman looked under her clothes — no doubt she’d have been appalled at this facsimile. Shape and bone structure I sought to replicate, less aging’s peccadilloes.

  I saved this work for when Monsieur was absent. My toils on his behalf continued apace, while his schmoozing — his daily toil if not his daily bread — increasingly kept him from his projects. The love of work, the feel of clay between my fingers, distracted me from Monsieur’s comings and goings. He puttered and left, returned, departed.

  I kept myself company by conversing with the fat little man Monsieur hired as one of the dead in his Gate to Hell, a casualty of sin destined to dangle from its tympanum. “Off visiting his concubine, is he,” sneered the grotesque little model, eyes flat with boredom. He deserved to be damned for his presumption.

  “Can’t you read the sign?” I said. Tacked to Monsieur’s office door in his absence was the note, Visiting cathedrals. If you need help, see my assistants. That Monsieur thought of great churches as womanly entities was nothing new or surprising. Neither was his delight in Christian angels and saints, apparent in his homage to John the Baptist — though not enough to win our brother’s heart.

  It was a relief, frankly, when the ugly put their clothes back on, all except for the crone posing as Maman, who bared more than withered dugs. “So, do I get to be in Monsieur’s Gate?” she demanded.

  I lied, saying I didn’t know. I had other ideas, a brilliant plan: I’d use her to model a distaff, a statue representing fate staggering under the burden of its spinning, a nest of tangled hair like worms’ castings. Clotho, I named her, this woman who turned Monsieur’s hankering for womanly beauty on its head — Clotho, the woman who oversaw birth and drew from women’s slaving the threads of life. A concession, maybe, to all the world’s hausfraus, the Roses and Mamans.

  Glorious grotesquerie — was Monsieur’s fascination with gargoyles rubbing off on me?

  Returning, always returning, he promised to take me to Reims to see its cathedral, a squatter, grimier version of Chartres’ not far from our country home. Our family saw it whenever we holidayed there.

  His hands were those of an angel, I let myself think, that strong and graceful. Our strength and a grace — call it what you want — burned into whatever we touched. His devotion took shape in his version of my Sakountala, a statue he called his Eternal Idol, sealing the truth of our romance. Difficult not to see myself in its woman, patient bearer of her worshipper’s love. Its tenderness dripped with lust. What would you have thought of it? That the abandon it showed would feel much better in the arms of a younger man?

  Playing on my good nature, Monsieur deflected the rancour of others. Slings and arrows. Rumours, innuendo. Unbuttoning each other, we took to leaving his note on the door while stealing fast, furtive coïts behind it. What can I say? All that existed was our mingled form.

  “If we could lie like this forever,” he crooned, hastily throwing on his pants, squinting — the way he viewed the closest objects with or without his glasses, not quite believing they were as hoped or expected — to do up his fly. Each evening, despite his longings, he said his tender goodnight out of respect for my obligations. Before heading home to Maman’s, I had the day’s efforts to wrap — as if for burial, it would cross my tired mind, the way women wrapped Christ’s corpse with no thought or inkling of what might follow. Recalling Renan the heretic, I imagined my fingers as theirs, while Monsieur donned his hat and slipped off, his footsteps in the courtyard melding with the river’s twilit sounds. A sharp rain cleansed me of his scent.

  But in the afternoons, taking breaks, we promenaded publicly. Along the rue de Babylone and rue du Bac to Bon Marché, where he bought chocolates and perfume. Oh, the looks on the sales-ladies’ faces when I doused myself from head to toe: “Don’t I smell like a rose?”

  “Doesn’t she smell like a rose?” They scowled, shaking their heads.

  But what a pair we made, May and November strolling arm in arm past walls of tumbling jasmine, kissing under blooming chestnuts. Those days a season all its own, C, blossoms falling like snow. We talked, talked, talked — Monsieur comparing the body to a church, a piece of walking architecture, while I spoke of da Vinci’s sketches of hearts and wombs, chalk the colour of dried blood. Other times, we ventured across the river to stroll the Grands Boulevards and Montmartre’s seediest alleys. For he was always on the lookout for models bearing the features of characters in his head, assuming they existed somewhere, for his use. Such faith was precious. Despite my unbelief I thanked God for his favour. My affection for Monsieur bloomed along certain pathways. How to confine it to the studio’s tattered divan?

  “I’d give up heaven to share your bed each night, Mademoiselle.” A fine pickle, that; you’d have laughed aloud! Oh-la-la, my bed a stone’s throw from Maman’s!

  But he muttered guiltily that in taking me on, he’d marooned me on some island, one with only dreams to look forward to. Clutching my arm like the wing of an uncaged canary, he proposed living together.

  Oh, he�
��d raised it before — marriage, contracts, trips to Italy and Chile, of all places. Now he had a plan, whisking me into a café to divulge it. “Making love is thirsty work,” he said, ordering champagne. “All you have to do is promise me you’ll stay here in Paris, and work with no one else.” My part of the bargain. And his? To take no other models and make his most useful friends mine also; I would have no rivals in the studio or in bed. This is what I asked, and what he promised, wooing me with talk of this commission and that. His latest, a monument to Calais’s antiquated townsmen.

  And, do you know, to prove his devotion, he signed the lease on a love nest! An ancient hôtel in the south of the city, far but not too distant from Maman’s. Lived in once by George Sand and her beautiful, tubercular Chopin, he said. A place to die for, though it needed a bit of work.

  ***

  I SET ASIDE my mother-and-child piece to do a bust of Monsieur, a portrait for which the beloved man was happy to sit. Bourdelle executed one too, to our subject’s vain delight. But it was mine that he and his patrons treasured. Before its bronze was cast, his bust took pride of place in a row of maquettes, flayed crouching men …

  From these he chose the most tortured-looking. You see how even then he relished others’ suffering? An assistant followed his grunted instructions on building the armature for his work. “An artist is only as good as his helpers, Mademoiselle.” If only I’d listened.