Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  “It’s about capturing,” he said.

  “Are you trying to be cruel to me?” she asked.

  He appreciated the fact that as she asked this freighted question, she made every effort not to disturb her pose.

  “No. I’m trying to answer your question. It’s about subjecting life to the least possible shrinkage even while shrinking it.”

  She didn’t respond to this concept, which Arthur had come upon quite some time ago but had never had the opportunity to express. Odd, he thought, that it would feel so easy, so natural, to say such a thing to her. It set a pattern. She often didn’t respond; exchanges between them ended in silence, without the usual empty mopping up, which was fine for Arthur, as he had only half his mind on talk anyway, and evidently fine for her, because she liked to reflect on things, try them out, ponder. She never started speaking before she knew what she was going to say; she was almost always after something, and when she got it, she stopped. This was something he began to understand about her, a style of learning. Arthur had not had a whole lot more formal schooling than she had—he gathered that she had some opportunities but no interest—but her style of conversing, like her many hours in the Louvre, had the nature of the autodidact, as if the function of conversation was to fill the voids of knowledge. Over the hours he spent with her he found himself choosing his words more and more carefully: he knew he’d get only one chance. He began to feel a bit intimidated. He wasn’t sure where to put her intelligence in the mythos he had created for her, but he liked it. A couple of times during intervening days he found himself storing up an aperçu or two to run by her. It was worth the bother and effort to express things to her because she was on his level, she thought concretely, as he did; she thought with a purpose, the only way he had survived.

  She sat for him four times, and he had yet to pick up a paintbrush. He had a deal with her, and he knew it wasn’t open-ended. Whether she was still seeing the African, he did not know, but if so, she had a fair amount of absence to explain to her husband. Of course, one occasion for absence could be explained away by another, more benign occasion. Thomas was a mystery to Arthur—in some ways, he didn’t exist; he was a concept, part of the mythos, but not part of the scene. Arthur began to think that his first impulse, to paint them together, was probably right, and in any event, he couldn’t paint her unless he knew something about her husband. Arthur was losing ground; his drawings were dull. The more he became aware of her intelligence, the stupider she made him feel and the stupider he made her look. He had bludgeoned her into this, and now all he was doing was wasting her time. Somehow he had lost a power over her, and he realized that without this upper hand, the portrait painter is just playing catch-up. He could see that Beal was getting tired of this; in fact, she did not seem totally well, even as April passed, when everyone is supposed to sparkle. He could hardly express concern; he, after all, was one jaw of the vise that must be closing around her. He was ready to thank her, tell her the favor had been repaid in full measure, and quit, go back to Newark, a mode of painterly failure he’d never imagined existed: defeated by his model.

  But then one day she arrived alone. “Where’s Céleste?” he asked with some alarm. The studious girl, sitting on his cot devouring Zola, had become a consoling fixture: at least someone was accomplishing something.

  “She’s busy helping her father.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “Because this is getting nowhere. You’re just sketching.” She was taking off her hat, one hand holding the brim, the other pulling out the pins.

  Right enough, thought Arthur. Nowhere.

  “At this rate, I’ll never be done with you.” As she said this, she was unbuttoning her collar, and she kept going, working down her front. “I’ll never be done with any of you.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked stupidly.

  She pulled her shirttails out of her skirt, reached behind to unbutton the waist, and let the skirt fall in a circle around her feet, looking at him the whole time. “This is what you want me to do, isn’t it?” She dropped her petticoat, then loosed the stays on her corset and let it drop too. No pleasure in any of this, and no flirtation either, just shedding the unnecessary layers. She was now in her drawers and her chemise, and Arthur was thinking, Okay, her in her toilette, underthings draped on her torso, that knee peeking out of the petticoat, this was really what he had in mind all along.

  “You don’t have to do this. I never asked you for this.”

  “I’m not afraid of my body, but you’re afraid of it, aren’t you? You’re afraid of my skin. That’s why you can’t paint me.”

  “I’m not afraid of your body. You don’t have to bare yourself to me to prove it.”

  “What difference does it make whether you see me naked?” she asked. “Why does everyone care so much about my body? Believe me, I got used to the sight of my body a long time ago. So here. I give it to you.” She held out both hands, as if handing him a folded blanket. She was attempting to project defiance and was doing a pretty good job of it, but now something else was going on: she had started to cry. She was still in her underthings; Arthur hoped she was going to stop there. “Everyone else wants to have my body, why not you?”

  “Hey,” he said. He should have used her name, but he had never used it before; he didn’t think he had earned the right. “Hey. Forget the painting. Maybe I can help you.”

  “That’s what you said when you blackmailed me into this. You said your painting would help me. Well, paint me. Paint my body.” With that she turned away from him, shrugged off her drawers and hiked off her chemise, and stood with her back to him, naked. “How do you want me to stand?” she asked.

  A beautiful back, but a back in pain; her shoulders rose and fell with the deep, miserable breaths she was drawing in. In the silence, in her nakedness, she seemed to appreciate this moment to compose herself; Arthur had never played a part in a drama of such complexity. Fully recovered but still facing away, still preserving her frontal modesty, she put her right hand on her left shoulder and turned to face him. He could see the fingertips of her hand on her shoulder, holding this slightly uncomfortable pose in tension. She looked at him without warmth, yet, for all her nakedness, without alarm, as if she were leading him into another room, but not because she wanted anything to do with him. He thought, This is about sex and it is not about sex, at the same time. He wondered whether it was what he had been missing all these months with all those naked models at the Académie. He didn’t know what to do except what he had done growing up, when life was too mean or sad to bear: he picked up his pencil.

  “Just like that,” he said. “But turn your head a little farther to the left? Okay?”

  The next time she came, Céleste was with her once again, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to do any more nudes of her. By the same token, what she wore was meaningless. They agreed that the clothes she wore that day—the same clothes she had shed two days earlier—would be the costume for the painting. He now knew what he was painting, knew that her body was not like everybody else’s. Her waist was high, her hips quite square, her buttocks and breasts full, even if a little heavy for Arthur’s taste, but not fatty. For the past few weeks he had been copulating—well, yes, that was the right word, as he was paying her for the privilege—with his skinny model, and the brittleness of her body, the way he could feel her sharp pubic bone jabbing into his lower abdomen, that was what Arthur liked. Except for the fact that she had these narrow, birdlike shoulders. Mrs. Thomas Bayly’s shoulders? Oh, a provincial seamstress given such shoulders to adorn could dress a queen. You could hang the crown jewels across those shoulders. You could build a civilization on those shoulders.

  It was almost May now. The brutally short Paris winter days were spreading out into the long light of summer, and the cafés were full. On the promenades were old soldiers and their wives arm in arm, secretly bankrupt counts with their courtisanes, all there on the streets of Paris. Teenagers gi
ggling in love; one could not be very serious when one was seventeen and bathed in this light.

  In recent weeks Arthur had actually spent some time at the café with Thomas Bayly, who seemed to be taking a greater interest in this society his wife had passed a good bit of the winter with, which seemed to Arthur a wise if overdue move. Arthur found to his surprise that he liked Bayly, found him quiet and thoughtful, but not bland. Maybe it took getting to know him through his wife; Arthur could see now how alike the two of them were. He pictured their quiet evenings at home, with not much chatter, and he could feel something very private about them, a history shared right down to the core of their beings. He couldn’t imagine anyone intruding, being able to insert himself into an organism so self-absorbed. Arthur didn’t know how much Thomas knew about his wife sitting for him, and neither of them brought it up at first. It seemed an odd though workable discretion, but now things were tightening around the girl, and something had to give. Really, Arthur owed her something. One thing he could do would be to remove at least some of the subterfuge.

  “So,” he said to Thomas one afternoon. “I think the painting is almost done. I’ll work on it for a while, but she doesn’t need to sit for much of that.”

  Thomas looked at him with the same unrevealing equanimity Arthur had gotten used to from his wife, except for the afternoon of the nude drawings. For all the reaction Thomas showed, this might have been either the first time he’d heard of the project or the oldest news on the Continent. “Good,” he said. “She says it’s tiring.”

  “I’m sure it is.” The topic seemed to be exhausted with these stray remarks, and in the silence Thomas ordered beer for both of them. Arthur was impressed by and envious of Thomas’s French, and as that thought passed through his mind, he recalled that the girl Céleste had been Thomas’s teacher. If the nun had come along one day, that would have completed his sweep of Thomas’s world. At times during the previous weeks, Arthur had believed that he was invading this private man’s life; he realized now, with shock but also with some relief, that he had been subsumed by it.

  After their beers were delivered, Thomas resumed the topic. “I was surprised when she said she was going to sit for you. As far as I knew, she had an arrangement with Stanley.”

  “I know,” said Arthur. “Maybe I pushed her too hard. I feel bad about it. It was probably unfair of me, but I thought I could do something Stanley couldn’t. That’s what I told her.”

  “You thought?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. But your wife—” He coughed; he still couldn’t use her name. “She is a remarkable person and has done everything and more than I could have asked for. I hope I’ve done her justice. Her beauty, but more than that.”

  “What’s the ‘more’?”

  “I really couldn’t say. I guess if I could say it, I wouldn’t try to paint it. I don’t think I’ve done a very good job, either way. This is hard for me to say, to you of all people.” Arthur said that honestly; by now he knew not to expect Thomas to offer flatteries and encouragement.

  “Interesting,” said Thomas. This was what Arthur expected. Thomas Bayly glided through life on the wings of every manner and politesse ever devised, but he was a person of fact, not nuance. He would think that if this was what an expert said about his own work, he was probably right. But then Thomas added something Arthur did not expect. “I’m glad she worked with you.”

  Arthur had to light a new cigarette on that. This man would not be glad if he knew the truth. He wouldn’t be glad about any of it, and he was owed the truth. The truth felt like a bucket of water balancing on edge, ready to tip, ready to release a flood. “I’m not sure why,” he said finally.

  “Because you’re tough. You’re not a very nice person, Arthur. In case you didn’t know that. I mean, your manners stink.” Thomas said this with good cheer.

  “You should get to know the people I grew up with. Compared to them I’m the most courtly son of a bitch you ever met.” Arthur let this sit for a minute before asking exactly why the fact that he was ill-mannered made him a good person to paint Thomas’s wife.

  “Beal hasn’t been around too much toughness. She’s been pretty sheltered. I’m sure my saying that seems crazy to you.”

  “Believe me. It doesn’t seem crazy. It had occurred to me.”

  “Considering?” said Thomas.

  “Considering what? I don’t know enough about your lives to consider. Considering that her brother was murdered?”

  Here Thomas did show a slight discomfort; Arthur wasn’t sure exactly how he had learned of it.

  “No,” Thomas said. “That made everyone shelter her even more. If that hadn’t happened, I’m not sure either of our families would have been willing to let us have what we wanted. To help us escape.”

  “Huh,” said Arthur.

  “She’s never known anything but love and kindness.”

  “And you?”

  “I have had nothing but privilege. You know that.”

  Arthur spent the next few moments mulling that over, wondering if Thomas, who seemed among the least self-pitying people he knew, really meant what he said, that he had been given privilege and nothing else. Arthur had never, in his life or any life that had touched his, imagined that such a statement might contain a tiny packet of sorrow. Privilege had its consolations: this café, Paris. Arthur had spent a considerable amount of time this winter envying everything that privilege allowed Thomas to afford. But nothing else from anyone but this girl he grew up with? What a pair. They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, each piece alone just an awkward and intricate muddle of needs waiting to be filled, arms waiting to grasp; once joined, they were seamless. If she was sheltered, that made them both stronger; if he had spent his childhood more alone than not, that made them better prepared for loneliness and solitude. This, Arthur reflected, was the unique power that allowed them to reach across the divides between them.

  “I wanted to ask you a slight favor,” said Thomas.

  “Sure,” said Arthur.

  “I’m going away on business for a few weeks, and I wanted to ask you to keep an eye on Beal. Make sure she’s doing okay. Maybe check in with M. Richard and Céleste to see if she seems okay. It would mean a lot to me.”

  Arthur didn’t hear much of this last bit, not that it would have surprised him. He was still wondering about that phrase keep an eye on. Painting a portrait of someone was about looking at her, but he still felt like rubbish about the way he’d behaved; he regarded this as a “bad time” in his life. Lately he wished he did know more about Beal, and about this African, and whether there was anything going on, and if so, what was the nature of his hold over her. He wished he knew why she cried when she was getting undressed; in the absence of knowledge only one supposition made sense. And as all this was going on, her husband had seemed to be seeking him out, as if he too had something he needed. From the beginning Arthur had thought of himself as the barbarian outside their gates, and now he discovered that he was in the middle, in the heart of it. How, he asked himself, had that happened?

  But he could say none of that, of course. “Business? I know you’ve been up to something in Galignani’s. Your wife says you did a lot of research there in the winter. I’m not sure she said what sort of research.”

  “She didn’t say because she doesn’t know.”

  “That doesn’t seem entirely like you. You seem incapable of answering any question without all too much candor.” Arthur thought for a second about that word, candor. Before becoming friendly with Thomas, he could hardly have imagined why such a word had ever been invented.

  “She didn’t ask.”

  “And you wouldn’t”—he paused again, about to use another strange word when speaking about family discourse—“volunteer anything?”

  “It’s for a kind of an odd reason.”

  “Well. What is it? What’s the plan?”

  “Wine.”

  “No. I’ll just have another beer,” said Arthur.
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br />   Thomas laughed, beckoned to the waiter, and ordered two more beers. “Actually, I’m thinking about grapes. I’ve been reading about wine and grapes. A fair amount of it in English. Some of the texts are in Latin, which I know pretty well, but most of them are in French. Some in Italian. It’s been slow going for me.”

  “You mean you’re thinking about growing grapes. A winery? Something like that?”

  “Yes. In the South, in the Midi. A region called Languedoc.”

  “Huh,” said Arthur. He could play this game of monosyllables too, not that it came naturally to him. Having mastered the way Beal conversed, he was now getting acquainted with Thomas: first this ritualized little dance, a kind of throat clearing, waiting to be asked the right question. Unattractively coy, really. Back in Newark, you might as well cut your tongue out if that’s the way you expected to be given the floor.

  “Do you know anything about phylloxera?” Thomas asked.

  Arthur did not. Never heard of it. No idea what it was. A kind of flower? He tipped his head forward encouragingly, impatiently.

  “Phylloxera is an aphid that kills grapevines. It attacks the roots and kills the plant. It’s native to America, and it’s the reason that for two centuries every attempt to grow European wine grapes in America has failed. Now it’s gotten over here. In the past twenty-five years it has pretty much destroyed the French wine industry. In many regions there isn’t a vine left.”