The Choiring Of The Trees

by Donald Harington

  Willy spent the night. Although I had my own room in the apartment, I could hear them, and I lay awake a long time, ashamed at myself for eavesdropping, shocked at Coco, disgusted by Willy, enthralled, transported, delighted, puzzled, dismayed, offended, and, I have to tell you, aroused, lustful, burning.

  The next afternoon, after Willy had left, I had a brave impulse to ask Coco, “How many times did you and he…copulate?”

  “Copulate?” said Coco, and laughed. “Oh, now, Veereedee, do you mean what Willy calls ‘the game of navels’ or do you mean ‘midnight snack’ or ‘the ride’ or ‘the beast with two backs’ or ‘plucking the rose’ or ‘knitting wings’ or ‘the combat’ or ‘burying the pinecone’ or ‘yodeling’ or something else? There are so many ways. We do them all. I don’t keep tally. You say you are not a virgin. How do you do it?”

  “Carefully,” I said, remembering a joke I had heard about porcupines. Coco laughed, and we two girlfriends, uncomfortable talking about sexual matters, changed the subject.

  But if girls are ill at ease discussing sex, just as I am at this moment with you, men are in their element, and I was always scandalized, or pretended to be, whenever Willy, Pablo, and their friend Max were telling dirty stories or making sexual commentary in our presence. Coco told me that she was glad for them when they became obscene, because it kept them from becoming violent, which is what happened whenever they talked about art.

  Max was not an artist, just a clerk in a department store who wrote occasional strange poetry. Max was madly in love with Pablo, although he was not a homosexual. Pablo kept trying to get Max to take me to the opera. Max said he would if he had clothes to wear, but his clothing was terrible, threadbare and soiled. Pablo asked him why he didn’t steal some decent clothes from the department store he worked in. Because his department didn’t carry men’s clothes. Why didn’t he just take me boating? Or for a Sunday afternoon stroll up at La Grande Jatte? Because he wasn’t fond of the out-of-doors. Why didn’t he just take me to bed?

  Nobody asked me what I would say if Max finally did ask to take me anywhere. I didn’t think I would say yes. Max was, in addition to his awful attire, nearly bald, bespectacled, and shorter than I, which wasn’t so bad, but he also had a chest covered with thick, curly black hair, which he exposed as often as he could, especially when he was doing his skit impersonating “the barefoot dancing girl,” which was hilarious but scandalous. He was also a Jew. I had never known or seen a Jew before (the few in Little Rock were tavernkeepers or merchants I never traded with), but if all Jews were like Max, I was afraid that I might come to dislike all of them. He was loudmouthed, clownish, and crazy, with a malicious streak. When Willy, Pablo, and Max were sitting around scorching their enemies and arguing art, Max could become vocally more vicious than the other two. At these get-togethers, which usually took place at The Wash-Boat, or sometimes at Austen’s, a bar in the rue d’Amsterdam they liked to frequent, the three men would become loud and vehement while we three women watched and listened, or Coco and I would chat and ignore Fernande, whom neither of us liked, and the feeling was mutual.

  I developed a fondness for absinthe, which is a favorite French liqueur, green and bitter and tasting like licorice. But I had to be careful. I knew my mother was an alcoholic, and I didn’t want to be like her. Willy and Coco were not heavy drinkers. Everyone had a bottle of wine at meals, and I had to be careful there too because I became genuinely fond of both white and red, but none of them drank heavily, except that about once a month Willy and Pablo and Max would decide to have one of their binges, which, oddly enough, did not make them more violent or misbehaving but, rather, excessively polite and courteous with one another and with us girls.

  Willy slept at Coco’s apartment about three times a week; Coco went to Willy’s about once a week. Coco didn’t like it at his place, she told me—they always had to make love in an armchair, because his bed was “sacred.” Willy had many strange ideas, which Coco detailed for me.

  Whenever Coco went to spend the night at Willy’s and I was alone, I began to suffer from homesickness: not that my lonely nights in Little Rock had been a bit more enjoyable or even more comfortable than my lonely nights in Paris, but that being alone in Arkansas was a condition you took for granted, a natural state, whereas being alone in Paris was unnatural and hard to bear. I was even tempted to encourage Max. Sleeping with Max might be better than spending the night imagining what Coco and Willy were doing at that moment.

  One Saturday night in the summer of 1909, I was having my usual reverie about Coco and Willy when there was a knock at the door, and I, wondering if it might be Max at last, opened it to find Willy. “Why, Willy!” I exclaimed. “I thought Coco was at your place.”

  “She is,” he said. “May I come in?” Without waiting for a reply he entered the apartment, and as soon as I closed the door he embraced me passionately and attempted to kiss me.

  I turned my head to one side to avoid his kiss and pushed against his large chest. “Willy! What are you doing?!”

  “Ô combien je t’aime!” he breathed directly into my ear. “I adore you! I must have you! Meet my lips with yours!”

  I stared into his eyes, which were hazel, and large, like Coco’s, seeming even larger in contrast to his mouth, which was as tiny as a pimento. I permitted the pimento to mash against my mouth for a moment before I shoved against him again and asked, “Did you and Coco have another fight?”

  “I haven’t seen Madonna tonight,” he explained. “I left her a note saying I had to go out for a while and would soon return and asking her to wait for me. I did that so that I could steal away to this place and be with you.”

  “That was a sneaky trick,” I said. “Coco will be furious with you.”

  “You won’t tell her,” he said. “Come, let me recite for you a poem you have inspired.” He unfolded a sheet a paper from one of his pockets and read it to me. The poem was called “Lundi après mon lundi,” a play upon my name, Monday, and it was written as if he had composed it the next Monday after this weekend we had made love. He described our love-making as if it were a fait accompli and he were remembering it in graphic detail but with flattering sentiments: Cette femme était si belle qu’elle me faisait peur (That woman was so beautiful she frightened me) and Elle balla mimant un rythme de l’existence (As she danced she imitated a rhythm of existence) and Qu’elle les dresse ses mains énamourées devant mon sexe (Have her lift her lovesick hands before my sex), and so forth. I tried to remember if I had heard any of these lines before. I was touched that such a great poet—Pablo had called him the greatest poet of the epoch—would write an original poem for me…if it was original—even if the poem was less concerned with my specific identity as a person than with sex acts we had not yet performed. When he’d finished the poem, he looked with those hazel eyes longingly into my eyes and said, “Quickly, now, let us do it!”

  I said French words which mean, crudely but honestly, “You just came here to fuck.”

  Willy was taken aback. But he was ready for it: “No, of course not,” he said. “I came here because I need to have your opinions of Pablo’s latest paintings, but I think we can talk more freely after we have put the nightingale in his cage.”

  I was ready for that: “I’d rather listen to the nightingale sing first.”

  “He is mute, for now. He wants only his cage. The cage is new, and he has never been there before, but he knows it is made of beautiful, warm red gold.”

  Willy stayed for two hours, longer than Coco should have had to wait for him, and when he saw that his finest blandishments would not work, he even tried solicitation of my intellect, a great effort on his part: “Well, if you can’t open your legs, open your mind and tell me what you think of Pablo’s pictures.”

  I was game. “I haven’t seen his most recent things, what you call his Scientific Cubism. I did not like the Demoiselles.”

  “Hah! Nor did I. What did you find wanting in it, Mademoiselle Monday?
The transformation of Negro sculpture? The mislocated physiognomies?”

  “I think,” I declared, “that Nature admires geometry but improves upon it in all Her creations. The artist should not return to geometry.”

  Willy stared at me, as if he had not been listening but now was ready to. “Would you mind repeating that?”

  I then proceeded to elaborate on this idea—quite a firm conviction of mine, at the time and ever since—that geometry should not be emphasized at the expense of actual appearance. This was more than poor, lecherous Willy had bargained for; as he appeared to be dozing off, I produced an example that woke him up a bit: “It’s as if I drew a skeleton of you and called it your portrait. Not that you wouldn’t look better if you were more skeletal.” I laughed teasingly.

  But he only replied, petulantly, “You’re saying I’m obese.”

  “No, I’m making a point.”

  “If I were thin, would you have sex with me?”

  “No. You are Coco’s.”

  “I am not hers! Nor anybody’s! I’m mine! She doesn’t own me, nor do I own her. We aren’t even married.”

  “‘We are wed in all but fact,’ she said you told her,” I said.

  He tried another tack. “You’re an American,” he said with contempt. “You Americans are all prudes, and you are probably frigid.”

  I had never heard that word in its sexual sense; I interpreted glaciale in the sense of unfeeling, which I was not, or reticent, which I unfortunately was, to my embarrassment. “You French,” I said without reticence, and forgetting that he was not French but Slav, “are all libertines, and you are lecherous.”

  “We appreciate sex as we appreciate wine. Life without it is inconceivable.”

  “But not at every meal.”

  “Why not? You say you are not a virgin, my Viridis, and I believe you, but have you ever indulged to satiety? Have you ever even done it twice in one night? No, I think not. Sex is a thirst, and an appetite. Have you ever been satisfied? Are your orgasmes powerful?”

  I had not heard of orgasmes and could not guess that what he was referring to was…what was that expression you used? “Get over the mountain”? Yes, I did not know that he was referring to getting over the mountain. I was not a virgin, no, not by a long shot, but je n’avais jamais joui comme ça, I had never been satisfaite, I had never been made to go over the mountain. Willy seemed to be waiting for an answer—this man who never wanted answers to his self-answering questions. I said nothing.

  He took a different slant. “Show me your paintings. Let me look at your art. If I cannot admire the beauty of your unadorned body, let me see your most intimate croquis.”

  “All of my pictures,” I told him, “are in my cabinet at the Académie Julian. I have nothing here.”

  He sighed, and seemed about to give up, but tried once more, one last ploy. “Are you ovulating and afraid you’ll get pregnant? Very well, let me try ta neuvième porte.”

  “My ninth door? What is that?”

  “Don’t be naïve. Count your openings. Which is ninth and last?” When I seemed puzzled, he guided me: “Start with your ears, two, your eyes, two, your nostrils, two, your mouth, one, downward.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No,” I said.

  “Ta douce rose. You are still a virgin there, no? I will be gentle. I will take your rose very slowly and with the most delightful sensations. You will love it. You will become addicted to it, so that whenever I ask again, it will be mine, alone. You will even beg me to have it whenever I am able to stiffen my monument.”

  I laughed as an escape from embarrassment. I laughed at those words, faire raidir mon monument, such a conceited conceit. I drew a picture in my mind of his penis as a monument approaching my ninth door, and found it hilarious, and couldn’t stop laughing. Willy’s face began to grow very red, and he gave me a disdainful look and vanished.

  I did not tell Coco of the visit, of course. Whenever I saw Willy after that, always in the company of Coco, I couldn’t suppress a short, quiet giggle, like a spontaneous belch, or a short hike partway up the mountain, and he tried very hard to pretend that I did not exist. But I found myself in private, lonely moments imagining what it would be like if I allowed Willy’s monument to enter my ninth door.

  I ran out of money. The funds that my father had calculated would last me a year in Chicago did not last a year in Paris. I had put off writing home to ask for more. Now I had to. It was a difficult letter, and an apologetic one. I described the Académie Julian and my teachers there, particularly Monsieur Lévy, who was responsible for my having the rating of No. 3 in the school and who had encouraged me in resisting the temptation to become more fauve. I explained, or tried to explain, what Fauvism is, but then I realized that these pages were not going to make any impression whatsoever on my father, so I brought my letter quickly to its conclusion: that I was fulfilling myself, that I wanted very much to stay another year or so in Paris, that I hoped he would understand, and that I hoped he would send the money as expeditiously as possible.

  I mailed the letter but realized that a month or more could pass before it reached him and brought his response back to me, and I could not borrow from my friends, who were no better off than I. I told Monsieur Lévy that I would have to drop out of the Académie Julian because I couldn’t pay the tuition. He suggested that I try to sell some of my paintings, and he arranged with a friend, the director of a small gallery, to give me a showing. I selected, with the help of Coco and the advice of Pablo and Max (Willy abstaining), my best fifteen paintings, including portraits of my friends, views of the Bois de Boulogne, but chiefly interiors of intimate rooms, usually without figures, and Pablo lent me some frames that fit, for the duration of the show. The gallery could give me only one week, and it was not the best season, and I sold only one painting, my portrait of Pablo, to a person who, I suspected, was simply a patron of his.

  The profit from that sale lasted scarcely two weeks, and I was not able to help Coco meet the month’s rent on our appartement in Auteuil. The day I took down my show, the gallery had a last-minute visitor, my wealthy friend Marguerite Thompson. Marguerite admired the paintings although she did not want to buy one. The two of us had a Pernod together at a nearby café, and I learned that Marguerite had left the École de la Grande Chaumière, which had been too conservative for her, and was now at the École la Palette, where she was quickly becoming a little Fauve. Marguerite also wrote a weekly column for her hometown newspaper, the Fresno Morning Republican, a sort of “American in Paris” description of her experiences as an art student, and she wanted to use me and my show as the subject of this week’s column, in which she intended to mention my “famous” friends: Willy, Coco, and especially Pablo.

  “I didn’t know they were so famous,” I said.

  “Close friends are never famous,” Marguerite said, and took out her notebook and began to ask me questions about them.

  “Do they pay you for writing the column?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said Marguerite. “Ten dollars a throw.”

  Without waiting to see if my father was going to answer my letter, I wrote to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette, enclosing a sample of one of Marguerite’s columns and asking if the Gazette might be interested in having me write something similar for them, on a weekly basis, or even daily, if they wanted it.

  Waiting for a reply from the Gazette sustained me through a dark period of poverty that culminated in the arrival of this letter from home:

  Dear Viridis—

  Glad to hear from you at last. Wondered whatever had become of you. Sounds like you are doing okay. Always wanted to see Gay Paree myself but never could. Sounds like there is lots to see there and lots to do. Glad to know the teachers think you are doing okay.

  Wish we could say the same but things are not going too hot here. Problems with your sister. The boys are all doing okay, Matthew got married in June, didn’t know where to send you the invite. Your mother stays over to Hot Springs just a
bout all the time. Doctors don’t seem to know what to do, just keep her happy and reasonable sober.

  Viridis, I am not dictating this to my secretary but writing it out myself. You should have known that Cyrilla could never match up to you. I don’t know why I let you think that. She just plain could not take it, and I didn’t know what to do. I guess I was desperate and tried too hard, and she couldn’t take it, and tried to do away with herself. You don’t want to hear the details, it would make you feel as awful as I did. I am going broke paying for her fancy treatments now on top of your mother’s.

  So if you think I’ve got loads of money laying around loose to keep you in high style in Gay Paree, you got another guess or two coming to you, girl. I think you better just catch the next boat home. I mean this. You do what I tell you, and come right on home. The enclosed draft on Credet Lyonnaize (sp) is to pay for your boat ticket, and your train ticket from NY to LR, and not for anything else, hear me?

  Your poor old father really does love you and miss you something terrible and can’t wait to hold you again and tell you many, many sweet things. See you soon.

  C.J.M.

  The days after that letter came are still a dream, or at least I remember them no better than we remember our dreams. Coco said that I spent many weeks just sitting in my room doing nothing except staring at my useless hands.

  What saved me finally, or restored me, was my first real memory of those days: looking down at my useless hands and discovering that they contained a letter, which I vividly recall reading almost as if it were my salvation, a letter from Thomas Fletcher, the features editor of the Arkansas Gazette, who said that, yes, they would be interested in seeing a column I might wish to write, with a view toward regular publication (weekly, at best, not daily). I roused myself out of my fugue or funk, or whatever depression I was in, and wrote a column, which I titled “An Arkansawyer in Paris,” trying to capture for the homefolks the sights and sounds and smells of Paris. My first column was devoted to the life of the streets: the quay along the Seine, with its many bookstalls where you could buy books and prints very cheap; the street musicians; a barrel organ pulled by a donkey; the strong, gray draught horses with their heavy carts; the colorful, picturesque caps the women wore, and the failure of the caps to cover the sadness in their eyes. For weeks after mailing it off to Thomas Fletcher, I feared that my column had captured the melancholy and suffering of Paris but not its gaiety. Yet finally Thomas Fletcher wrote back to say that the Gazette would be happy to use it and subsequent columns on a regular basis—although style or usage required them to change the title to “An Arkansan in Paris,” and Thomas Fletcher was required to blue-pencil my references to Bohemian free love, drinking, and “abstract” art. The Gazette began to run my column weekly, and in Paris in those days it was possible, though difficult, to live on the $8.50 a week that the Gazette paid me.