“Maybe you could write down what you’re thinking about all this art you’re seeing.”
“Write in this book?” She flipped through the blank pages. She could hardly imagine making marks on them; in her house, paper wasn’t used frivolously, just for stray thoughts, hen scratches.
“Yes. It’s yours to write in. It’s your book to make. I want you to write down what you think,” said Thomas.
A book. Her mother had made her read at night, even after she’d left school and started to work for the Lloyds at Blaketon, but usually she just pretended and then jumped ahead so she could answer her mother’s questions about what was happening in the story. But she’d never been given a blank book and told to write in it. She flipped through the pages, empty lines waiting for what? Her thoughts?
“Oh, Thomas,” she said, glancing up at him with dismay. “What am I supposed to say about art? I don’t know anything about it.”
Thomas came over and sat beside her on the threadbare love seat. He’d said that at the Retreat he had seen enough threadbare upholstery to last several lifetimes, but the two of them liked this little couch facing the fireplace; they liked that it had been there so long that its feet sat in their own dimples on the parquet floor, like the hollowed-out marble steps at Notre-Dame and La Conciergerie. They sat on this love seat often, all entwined.
“Just write down what you say to me every night.”
“That’s just talk. That isn’t writing.”
“It’s writing to me. I don’t know how you know all the things you tell me.”
Thomas had come with her to the Louvre a few times so she could show him things she liked, and yes, Beal had to admit to herself that she had loved trying to explain it to him, not the art—she knew nothing about the art—but about what the pictures made her think of.
“It’ll just be stupid things.”
“No one is going to read it but you. Besides, I don’t think they’re stupid when you tell me. Am I stupid?”
“Of course I don’t think that. You love me. That makes it different.”
The next day, still dubious, she packed her notebook and pen along with her lunch, and when the painters all began to set up, she found a stone bench, pulled out her notebook, and wrote her name in the center of the first page. “Beal Terrell,” she wrote without thinking, because the whole exercise made her feel like a schoolgirl again, but then she added “Bayly,” hoping it didn’t look crammed in like an afterthought. She held the book out to see how she had done with these first hen scratchings and was suddenly astonished by what she saw. Beal Terrell Bayly. Three names. She’d noticed that both Colleen and Hilary used three names when they signed things, but she didn’t know why. Beal Terrell Bayly. Who was this person? Her pen seemed to have discovered a person she had never dreamed existed, somebody between Beal Terrell, which was who she was on the Retreat, the girl, and Mrs. Thomas Bayly, a name she could not get used to and honestly didn’t believe in at all. That person in the middle was in this notebook—only in this notebook, perhaps—and when her arms got tired holding it out to admire the name, she dropped it to her lap and hugged it against her breast, like a gift.
As January went by, Beal continued to spend a few days a week at the Louvre, working through its vast spaces room by room, collection by collection. Some days she had lots to scribble about, not just about the paintings, but about the people, the artists she knew and the museum visitors wandering from painting to painting, and sometimes even about herself and Thomas. Sometimes she wrote down thoughts she had about home, as many of the paintings depicted farm scenes, a life that seemed recognizable the world over. Other days she had nothing to say and felt stupid. She tried to put down a few thoughts in the mornings when Thomas was off to his French lessons with Céleste, but it didn’t feel the same at home. Beal Terrell Bayly seemed to be present only in the Louvre, which was fine with her.
On one of those days when her pen seemed to have no mind of its own and the sheets of paper offered no insights or delights, she looked up at a person lurking nearby and saw that it was Diallo Touré. She jumped a little, let her pen fall, where it splashed a blot of blue ink on the white marble floor. As usual, he was dressed formally, but his long body seemed more filled out, more muscular than she remembered. He was not pretending that this was delightful serendipity to run into her. He was not smiling.
“What are you doing here?” said Beal.
“You did not come again to the Café Saly.”
“I told you I didn’t want to see you.”
“Then why did you go there? Why did you bring your white husband when you knew I would be there?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Of course you know. You came to see me.”
“Okay. I saw you, and I knew that was the end of it.” She closed her notebook with a snap, as if to emphasize the word end.
Touré looked at the notebook with contempt. “What are you writing in that book? You’re not a schoolgirl. Why do you keep coming to this place with all this decadent art?” He beckoned around to the immense tableaux in the room, the myths, The Raft of the Medusa, with its lone Negro crewman off in the corner, where in the portraits of American families, the black servant would be. “This is off the coast of Senegal. This is what the French think of my country. This can teach you nothing.”
As unnerved as Beal was at being confronted, she noticed that his tone seemed to have changed; perhaps all was not going well for him here in Paris. “I thought you wanted your country to be part of France,” she said. “Why would you want that if there is nothing here to learn?”
“My country and all the other provinces of France will meet as equals. I will show them how little they know about our world, about Africa. It is they who have much to learn, to understand their place. When they cease to be colonial occupiers, they will realize that they have no idea what the world really is.”
The whole thing seemed unlikely to Beal, a sort of madman’s delusion. There were people at home who talked like this from time to time, talked about the Eastern Shore of Maryland becoming a black state. But there was no argument to be had here. “Africa is not my world,” she answered.
“You are wrong. You have Africa’s blood and Africa’s skin, and you can never escape it. And why should you try? You came here on that boat because there is no place for you in America. This husband of yours can give you no life in France; otherwise why would you be here scribbling like a schoolchild with all these spoiled white Americans?”
Beal could see through the archway into the next gallery that a couple of the students at their easels had noticed her talking to this man. No one would have thought this was a casual chat between strangers; anyone would have observed her distress. “I don’t want to talk to you here,” she said.
He looked over his shoulder through the archway; he seemed to know everything on her mind almost before she did. “Then meet me at the café. Or I will announce myself on the avenue Bosquet.”
She might have been surprised that he knew where she lived, but she was not. She cast another nervous look toward the painters at work, and nodded. “I’ll come in half an hour.”
Touré left, and Beal tried to go back to her notebook, to make a show of it, anyway. Fred Shippen and Donald Makepeace were in the next room, but she did not think they could have seen her talking to Touré. She did not know why she was so certain that any of these people would assume more than the simple, innocent truth here, that she was being harassed by an acquaintance. Yet from that first instant on the boat Touré had been more than an acquaintance; any time he was in her presence, she immediately believed she had something to hide. She did not know why she felt guilty, why as soon as Touré even entered her thoughts, unbidden, her first response was to ask herself, What about Thomas? There could be no sort of rivalry between Touré and Thomas unless she herself contrived it—which she knew, in fact, she had done. She looked down at her notebook and wrote one word under the day’s date, Jan
uary 27, 1893: “Why?” Why what? she asked herself. Why did he appear so certain that she would give in to him? Was he right that she and Thomas could never really be joined—because she was black and he was white?
He was full of charm when she found him at his corner table, his petulance and bad temper banished. He stood up, seated her as he had done in the dining salon, and ordered tea for her. She didn’t like tea—it gave her headaches—but she said nothing.
He asked her what she had been doing when she was not at the Louvre, and she refused to answer him. “You seem to have been following me anyway,” she added. “You tell me.”
“Going to the market. Playing with two little girls. Going for walks with that husband of yours. Shopping in the stores. All comme il faut for a rich American tourist.”
“But not the proper life for a wife.”
“Ah.” He wagged his eyebrows at her, a supremely unattractive male gesture: he knew everything there was to know about her. He might have to endure some of her resistance, but in the end it was decreed that he would be her master. “I see your husband has been spending time with a young woman at your old hotel.”
“She’s teaching him French. He’s paying her. Our friend Madame Bernault is often there.”
“And, of course, there is that red-haired fille at Galignani’s. So much more suitable for him. Their skin is the color of—” He stopped, realizing that she knew nothing about this woman. “Oh yes,” he picked up, suggesting that her distress was a trivial by-product of wisdom. “An Irish woman. They have had tea on the rue de Rivoli, just as we are now doing in less fashionable surroundings.” All was in order, he suggested; just as I predicted, he might have added.
The waiter brought her tea and said something to Touré in a language that was not French. Beal took a hot sip and immediately her head pounded; she’d sucked the tea in with a huge inrush of air. She coughed, and he waited.
“Why are you doing this?” she demanded, finally.
“Doing what, Mademoiselle Beal?”
“The avenue Bosquet. Following me. Following Thomas. Don’t you have anything better to do? Selling your peanuts, or whatever it was. Making a whole new world. Or is that not going as well as you hoped?”
He ignored this dig. He knew that he had caught her unawares, and did not mind at all that she lashed out in anger. He waited for the petulance to clear, like a wise parent. “I am only asking that you allow me to introduce you to the part of your life the Americans have stolen from you. They have stolen it so shrewdly that you don’t even know it is missing. Have you not felt the difference here in France?”
“Of course I have, but it’s not like the French are perfect.”
“Exactly. We may visit here in some comfort, but sooner or later, we go home.”
“My home is in America.”
The eyebrows again: We both know that isn’t true. And, of course, it wasn’t true.
“I have to go.” She glanced at her cup of tea; she was pleased to leave it practically untouched.
“Then you will meet me here again? Next week at this time? I have so much I need to teach you.”
* * *
In the Louvre, Arthur had been standing a hundred paces away when that tall African came up to Beal, but from the way they were gesturing, the imperious way the man loomed over her, it was as if Arthur were listening to them through a voice tube. The man was imposing himself on her; she remained sitting, resisting, sort of. If she’d really been confronting him, she would have stood up. At least that’s what a man would do. At one point, first she, then the African, looked right into the gallery where Arthur was working, but they didn’t seem to notice that he was staring at them, one set of eyes in the clutter. The African left, and she pretended to be working, writing in her little notebook; then she left, and Arthur was up and out of his stool in a second.
She was walking upstream along the quai, toward the towers of Notre-Dame. She reached the Pont Neuf, did not pause to admire the view, as so many did, but kept walking. Arthur had not expected anything like this, this kind of intrigue. Whatever else you might say about the girl, she was as virginal as they come, a prude, like most country people he’d ever met—good, God-fearing, decent folk. Arthur didn’t mind being indecent. Instead of turning right, back toward the Quarter, a path that had been worn into the stone by the footsteps of thousands of art students, she veered left toward the markets of Les Halles. This was not a part of the city Arthur knew anything about; he didn’t cook, after all. Halfway up the block she hesitated outside a café, glanced around nervously, folded a tight lock of her hair under her hat—a pretty charming gesture, thought Arthur—and went in.
Arthur rested where he was for several minutes, smoked a cigarette while he decided whether to wait until she came out or to risk being exposed by looking into the café. A look was all he needed; when she came out, she’d be headed straight for home, that was clear. Nothing to be learned there. So he dumped his cigarette and ambled past the café. The windows were completely misted over, as he expected, just an occasional brush of clarity where someone might have backed onto the glass or run a hand through the moisture to get a better view of something on the street. Through one of these little portholes he might have seen the African in the back, in a corner, but it really didn’t matter; this was what, back home, even in Newark, would be called a “colored” establishment, and it all fit too well to need further confirmation.
Arthur continued up the street, went around the block, and in fifteen minutes was back on his stool at the Louvre. The whole thing left him deflated, disappointed, depressed. He wasn’t sure why. He could not care less about the husband, this little fairy-tale romance, but it seemed so frail, all of it. What was the point? He looked around at all the paintings on the wall and at the assemblage of students peering up so intently, then so desperately back at their own canvases, their mouths drawn in such fierce purpose and desire. Despite his unkind thoughts, he didn’t feel ill will toward any of these people, he really didn’t. He wanted every one of them to find whatever it was they came to Paris to find, even if they all knew that only a fraction of them would succeed at anything close to the levels to which they aspired: paintings in an exposition or at the Salon, a medal, a buzz of comment here and notice in the right circles back home, a return voyage to New York transformed. Most of them would go home broke, without prospects; their mothers would applaud their efforts and their fathers would either beat them—as Arthur’s father would—or just write a check for God knows what new fluffy pastime: a saddle horse, ballet lessons, a sailboat.
He looked down at his palette, on which his paints, so carefully dispensed a sou at a time, were hardening. The life force of defeat, the familiar miasma of despair was now presenting itself to him, had taken on a visible vaporous form, like a cloud of color, the same cloud that had seemed to trail behind the girl as she made her way to this assignation, whatever it was. With supreme effort he reached up and gave his brushes a good swirl; he couldn’t afford to ruin them. He didn’t want failure for himself or for any of them; he wanted to, well, denote. He just wanted a painting to denote, and at that moment, full of disappointment and anger and sorrow, he was sure only that a portrait of her was it. It was worth anything he had to pay in order to make it happen, to avoid failure. That was his future, but for now, he knew he was heading into one of his black moods and he had to get out of there fast and into his room, where, if he was lucky and he didn’t starve to death first and he didn’t freeze, he could wait it out.
A few weeks later, thinner, still wobbly, Arthur found the girl sitting on a bench in the salle d’ethnographie, writing in her notebook. A new notebook, in fact. Scribble, scribble. Arthur “found” her there, in its remotest possible corner, because he knew she often went there to sit among the indifferently displayed Indian headdresses, African masks and totems, and Polynesian grass garments. He’d seen less of her these past weeks, which didn’t surprise him. For one thing, he’d lost that last week
in January, when all he did was hide in his room and draw self-portraits, each one more frightening, more frightened, than the last. Whether this was out of self-love or self-loathing Arthur could not tell. Makepeace was gone, back to Chicago to work in a bank; Hilary Devereux was also gone, taken to Italy by her mother and sister; and as far as Arthur could tell, the girl had not formed friendships to replace those. Was Arthur the only person who understood why she had withdrawn somewhat, why, indeed, to this collection? Was he the only one who could see the confusion and fear roiling in those opal eyes?
“I would like to ask you a question,” he said.
She looked up, startled that he was speaking to her, and not particularly pleased about it.
“I would like to ask if you would sit for me.” There, couldn’t get more indirect than that, but still, she recoiled a bit at this, pulled her hands and notebook deep into her lap. Arthur was not daunted. “I know others have asked you.”
“I really don’t know why.”
Arthur gave a shrug, as if he didn’t know why either.
“What difference does it make to all of you who you paint?”
“It makes all the difference. Painters don’t invent, even when they are imagining the scene. They don’t create. They look. They see. They record. We don’t doodle around with things in our heads, like you writers.”
She dropped her eyes to her notebook, seemed to read the last few lines of her current entry. Here in this gallery of curiosities, no one could argue with what he had said. She’d probably just finished saying something like that to herself.
“I promised Stanley I would sit for him.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“I want you to sit for me. I think you should. It would be a favor, in return for a favor.”
“What favor?”
“I know about your African boyfriend. I’m not the only one who has asked questions, but I put an end to that. They listen to me. So I’m asking for something in return.”
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 11
