I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  Suzanne Manet, strands of loosened hair straggling about her reddened cheeks, toured the room, saying, “Oh, do come and get your plates, everyone, before the fish is hopeless.”

  The fish was hopeless. Gustave Manet quietly slipped out as people queued for plates, thereby avoiding the fish entirely. Degas endured the buffet line twice to bring Mary a plate and another for himself. He sighed and said, “At least it’s not swimming in butter like the asparagus.” The collective sighed too. It was awkward standing about with china and cutlery, a glass of champagne balancing on the nearest ledge, subject to thievery and spillage. Mary Cassatt set down her plate, her half-eaten food congealing on the china, while Berthe didn’t even touch hers.

  • • •

  Soon after, all the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

  Stéphane Mallarmé brought the tips of his fingers together and leaned forward into the ring of men, a serious but quizzical smile on his face. “Monsieur Zola,” he said. “Do you think your book L’Assommoir deserves its success when your prose, usually so evocative, is lazy at the oddest junctures? Sometimes I think you are getting careless.”

  Mallarmé’s voice betrayed no mockery as he lobbed this bombshell, but instead affected an urgency of inquiry, as if he’d been worrying about this regrettable flaw of Zola’s for a long while and was happy to finally have the chance to discuss it.

  “Zola has been dodging him forever,” Berthe whispered to Mary. “Stéphane wants a literary duel, albeit a civilized one, but Zola won’t give him one.”

  Mary whispered back, “This is what you call a party?”

  “No,” Berthe said. “This is Paris.”

  This is Paris. People were always explaining things to her by invoking the city, just as she was always declaring that Paris was shining or raining. One couldn’t help it, she supposed, if Paris held a magnetic spell over all its inhabitants.

  “If I may, Mademoiselle Cassatt,” Berthe said, “I think that some of this posturing has to do with you. Forgive me, but no matter how welcoming everyone was, you should know that you are at a disadvantage. Monsieur Degas is always dragging in strays.”

  “Strays?”

  “New painters,” Berthe said. “I don’t want to be unkind, but Degas seems to think that anyone he discovers is wonderful, and we don’t always agree with him.”

  Mary tried to forgive Berthe the cruelty of the word stray, though she was finding it hard to reconcile the suddenly unsympathetic woman beside her with the extravagantly feminine paintings she had exhibited at the Rue le Peletier.

  “I see. And how did you prove yourself?” Mary said.

  “I’m married to Eugène. And I paint.”

  “As do I,” Mary said.

  “They will exclude you until they approve of your work, and maybe not even then.” They will exclude, as if Berthe were including her now. And maybe she was. Maybe this was the way French women made friends. They warned you of the hurdles ahead and then sat back to see how you fared.

  “How did you meet Monsieur Degas?” Berthe said.

  “He begged the introduction; he apparently has admired my work for some time.”

  Berthe looked away, but Mary felt her small victory.

  In the corner, Zola had commandeered the end of the piano, the place of power, his bulk leaning against the instrument. He had emitted only a low growl of a sigh in response to Mallarmé’s taunt. Degas, seated beside him, eagerly took up the gauntlet. “Unfair, Stéphane, when Zola imitates life in art so clearly that he defines realism. The triumph of his mimesis trumps whatever lazy prose you accuse him of.”

  “You realists band together,” Mallarmé said. “I agree Monsieur Zola is the definition of modern, as are you. And Émile knows I admire him. But excellence is a responsibility. It’s fine to describe a sky, and you do it well,” he said, turning to Zola, “but the character’s contemplation of it has to have some connection to the narrative. Some reason why it exists in the novel. Nothing can be superfluous.”

  “Excuse me, Stéphane, but a novel is not a poem,” Zola said. “You are mistaking the two genres as one.”

  “Nothing is superfluous in a poem,” Mallarmé said.

  “Watch,” Berthe whispered. “Now Monsieur Zola will insult Monsieur Mallarmé.”

  “All poetry is superfluous,” Zola said.

  “See?” Berthe mouthed.

  “You mistook my meaning, Émile,” Mallarmé said. “And you lack curiosity.”

  “I will mistake your meaning every time you tell me how to write a novel when you are capable of composing only twenty or thirty lines. You write neat little rhymes, but nothing of scope,” Zola said. “And besides, nobody understands what your poems mean anyway.”

  “Density is not a fault,” Mallarmé said.

  “But clarity is a virtue,” Zola said. “And besides, everyone looks at the sky, so why not include a little description of it? It hardly ruins the narrative.”

  Degas, feverishly rolling his empty glass between his palms, said, “Let’s apply your argument to you, Émile. If what you say is true, that Stéphane is unqualified to critique you, then how are you qualified to critique art when you have never painted a picture?”

  Zola made a show of pulling his pocket watch from his vest. He always left the Manets’ Thursdays early so he could attend his own Thursday salon, which everyone knew didn’t begin until ten o’clock, after his friends had left the theater or the café chantants and were in need of a watering hole and companionship until two or three in the morning. Several guests here would migrate there this evening, after Suzanne finished her first two piano pieces, drifting out with nods and apologies and spilling with relief onto the street, where they would shake off the pall of Suzanne’s need and head to the Gare Saint Lazare, where they could easily find a hack to whisk them to the more convivial Zola’s.

  “Oh no you don’t, Émile!” Degas roared. He turned to Berthe. “What time is it, Madame Morisot?”

  “Nine o'clock,” she said, consulting the clock on the table that Degas could just as easily have consulted, but hadn’t, to make his point.

  Degas raised his eyebrows at Zola.

  Zola feigned nonchalance and secreted his watch back inside his vest pocket. “One must eat, as you well know, Degas, and they pay me for those articles, and in my defense, and to my visionary credit, I insist you admit that I have defended this group when everyone else has attacked you. Where is your gratitude? Besides, have you never decorated a fan, say, to feed yourself?”

  “You know I have, but I don’t paint a critique of your writing to make money.”

  “Here is the difference between writers and painters. You are handicapped by your medium, paint, whereas a writer is a savant of sorts, using our more facile medium of words to inquire about and observe any subject. In fiction, we present a mirror; in critique, an opinion. The medium is the same: words. Just try to use paint to present an opinion. Our medium encompasses everything. Words reign.”

  “As in poetry,” Mallarmé said, but neither Zola nor Degas paid him any attention, and Mallarmé sank into his chair, usurped.

  “My medium is words,” Zola continued, pressing his point. “Yours is paint. Your medium is more limited than mine.”

  “My media are paint and pastel, clay and copper, ink and press, a far more extensive arsenal than yours,” Degas said. “I look. I observe. I create. Opinion and mirror, both, about any subject I should wish to expose. What is my painting In a Café if not an opinion about the same people you write ab
out in L’Assommoir? Or Édouard’s Nana, named after your character? The downtrodden workers, seduced by absinthe? But if you claim yourself a savant, I therefore declare In a Café a critique of L’Assommoir.”

  “That’s absurd. You painted that picture first. And I’ll have you know I think a great deal of that picture. Truth incarnate.”

  Degas leapt up and made a sweeping motion with his hands. “Messieurs et mesdames, may I present Émile Zola, the most intelligent art critic in France,” he said, bowing as laughter filled the parlor, pleased with himself for having extracted a compliment that Zola had had no intention of bestowing, and even more pleased that he had confounded Mallarmé, whom he liked very much, but who could bore.

  So this, Mary thought, was what it was to be a woman at a party in Paris. One either fed the men or was consulted about the time, but was not expected to speak beyond pleasantries. And now she was a stray.

  She rose. “Messieurs Degas and Zola. I pose a question.”

  Silk and spring wool rippled in the room as everyone turned to stare at Mary. Berthe touched Mary’s hand, but Mary folded her hands in a deliberate parody of acquiescing womanhood.

  “Isn’t it true that to parse mediums like this is to claim territory? How different is your argument than the one the Salon uses to exclude my art or Monsieur Monet’s or even Monsieur Manet’s? If you examine what you think are your moral positions, you will see that they are probably no different from what goes on in the Salon hanging committee.”

  Degas said, “I only said that Zola claims the impossible when he says he is sovereign of both writing and art.”

  “Monsieur Zola has achieved fame for his novel L’Assommoir, while you, Monsieur Degas, were reviled by the critics for your In a Café, even though both novel and picture addressed the same subject. Each was accepted differently by the public. In my opinion, Monsieur Degas, your portrayal of the drunkenness of the despoiled and downtrodden is so evocative that the public, horrified, has to look away, while Monsieur Zola’s medium, words, is less vivid, and therefore more acceptable.”

  Zola sputtered from the piano bench. “My novel? Not vivid?”

  Mary turned to the author, who had snubbed her earlier. His wine-flushed face blushed an even deeper shade of vermillion, suggesting the blood orange of sunset. “I am using conjecture, Monsieur Zola, about what appeals to the masses. For the sake of argument. Using your medium. Words. But I have read your novel and quite like it,” she said.

  “Quite like it? She quite likes it? She is American, isn’t she?” Zola said, turning to the group, seeking accord.

  Berthe waited to see whether or not Eugène or Édouard or Suzanne would manage Monsieur Zola, and when they did not, she rose from the loveseat and glided across the room. “Please forgive me, if you can, Monsieur Zola, but earlier I misread what time it was. Don’t let my error keep you from your guests. We’ve all been selfish to delay you. No doubt they are knocking at your door at this very moment, wondering where their dear Monsieur Zola is, hoping they won’t be deprived of your company.”

  As Berthe nimbly guided Zola to the door and into the night, Degas came to Mary’s side and said, “Adroitly done, Mademoiselle Cassatt. Monsieur Zola will spend the rest of the night trying to understand what just happened to him, a prospect that gives me great pleasure.”

  “Berthe implied I had to prove myself.”

  “We are all wondering what we did without you now,” Degas said. “Even Claude, though he’ll never tell you.” He smiled with pride and interest, but Mary felt exhausted, though she had to admit that the interlude had exhilarated her. Not one of her American friends was as alive as these people gathered here tonight. Abigail Alcott was as dear to her as Lydia, and darling Louisine was more sister than friend, but they were neither of them as provocative as this group.

  “Do you always test people in this way, Monsieur Degas?”

  “Test? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t be coy,” Mary said. It was warm in the room, especially near the kitchen, and she could hear the maid banging pots and pans in the sink. “Will you tell me what Monsieur Manet meant earlier? About the Salon?”

  Degas reddened. “He’s a scoundrel. Don’t listen to him.”

  “But his joke angered you. It must mean something. Berthe said everyone is angry with you because you bring in strays. Am I your latest stray?”

  Degas took her by the hand and pulled her into the far corner behind the dining table, near the serving dishes of the drowning fish and wilted asparagus. “Édouard was referring to the opening day of the Salon. I saw you in the crowds. I tried to reach you to introduce myself, but I lost you. I didn’t know who you were. When Monsieur Tourny introduced us, I hid my surprise. And all this nonsense seems to have amused Édouard very much. I did warn you, didn’t I, that you might repent your decision to join us?”

  “You did,” she said.

  “Well, then?”

  After a time, she said, “The fish really was awful wasn’t it?”

  A smile played on Degas’s lips. “Yes it was,” he said.

  Suzanne Manet, having overheard the comment about the fish, breezed past them with a disapproving air, her hair irretrievably wilted. With an insulted flick of her wrist, she cleared a path through her guests, mounted the piano bench, and opened a piano score, flipping pages one after the other until she found the music she wanted. At the first notes, Degas steered Mary back to a gilded armchair to listen to the exquisite tones of the Handel sonata, played by Suzanne with skill and feeling. Berthe settled into a wing chair, her husband standing guard beside her. Édouard, restless, hovered nearby, dividing his attentions between Berthe and his wife until he drifted away, slipping quietly backward.

  The mellifluous tones filled the parlor, and Mary closed her eyes, sinking into the soft cushion of the chair, thinking how much she loved Handel. She thought she felt Degas’s hand, its dry fissures stained with ink and graphite, graze her shoulder lightly. She opened her eyes, surprised, but it was only Berthe Morisot passing, tracing Édouard’s path into the depths of the flat.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Manets’ maid, Eloise, gaped as Édouard dragged Berthe through the back doorway of the kitchen and into the stairway that led to the maid’s quarters. When the door closed behind them, Eloise shook her head and whispered to herself, “But the bedrooms are down the hall.”

  Halfway up the stairs, Édouard leaned in, smelling of wet wool and the failed fish. Berthe still couldn’t get used to the smells of rich food. The excess seemed obscene. During the siege of Paris, when the Prussians had strangled the city and rat had been on every restaurant’s menu in town, she’d lost perhaps twenty pounds, and now she believed that the stringent asceticism had affected her forever. She’d dreamed then of food, but now, when she could have anything at all she wanted to eat, she measured it out spoonful by spoonful, a daily ration, just as she had measured out increments of Édouard, each hour an uncertain, suspect gift, because it always ended in his leaving and going back to Suzanne. Her mother would have said that her abhorrence of food had come before the siege, just about the time that Berthe had lost her mind, the moment she fell in love with the married Édouard.

  “You let him love you.” Édouard’s voice caught in his throat.

  “You think Eugène is my consolation prize.”

  “He lacks imagination. He has always wanted what I have. To paint, to live like I live.”

  “But you don’t have me. Not anymore.”

  Édouard hooked a finger under her chin and inserted his knee between her legs with a gentle pressure, as nonchalantly as if he were saying, “Ça va?” Her knees parted to let his in. It had started this way, in small gestures, a long time ago.

  “You don’t have to love him,” Édouard said.

  “What am I supposed to do? Cry every night?”

  “Suzanne likes her willful ignorance.”

  “But I do not. I want a child, Édouard.”

&n
bsp; Struck, he said, “That is low.”

  “None of us is an idiot, Édouard. We know Léon is not Suzanne’s younger brother. You should tell the boy.”

  “I would rather have a child with you.”

  “You would ruin me rather than let me try for even a chimera of happiness.”

  “We could run. Italy. Spain. My mother would help—”

  “You are spoiled, Édouard, by your looks and your charm. You believe people will love you no matter what, that you will have infinite second chances. But everyone is not me. They have much better sense than I have.”

  “We don’t speak Italian. No one would know who we are.”

  “Europe is a small town, Édouard. An artery runs from Paris to the rest of the world. Exile is not a private place. It is a state of mind. And you are too weak to endure it.”

  “He isn’t worthy of you, Berthe.” Édouard toyed with the tiny black bow where the bodice of her dress closed in a series of buttons, his other hand pressed against the wall above her head. “Why do you stay with someone as weak as he is? As prideless?”

  “You revile me for wanting a semblance of normalcy.”

  “There is nothing normal about having my brother as your husband.”

  “He asked me.”

  “Every male asks for you every second of every hour of his life.”

  “You told me to marry him. And besides, my father was dead, Édouard. I had no other choice. I was already old and tired. No one else wanted me. These are practical considerations you have no understanding of.” Though he did. What was more practical than marrying your piano teacher eleven years after you’d impregnated her, as Édouard had?

  Édouard released her hand and twined her jet-black curls around his fingers. “Some days I think I will die without you.”

  “We are brother and sister, closer than ever.”

  “Don’t say such a hateful thing.”

  “Let me go, Édouard.”

  “To hell. I will let you go to hell.”

  Why had she followed him? She was a fool. She laid her hand on his chest. It took only the smallest pressure to push him away. “Go back to Méry Laurent. Rile her keeper again and get your head handed to you. Or make Eva Gonzalès your lover. There was a time when you couldn’t keep your hands off her.” By hands she meant paintbrush. But he couldn’t paint Eva. It had tortured Berthe to hear that Édouard scraped the paint off the canvas at the end of each session, believing that he did it only so that he could call her back again to prolong their intimacy, but harboring hope that he couldn’t paint Eva because he was thinking of her. “Or seduce anyone on the street. One of your models. You can take her behind the screen in your studio, once, twice a day, as much as you like. You can call it making a study.”