I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  He slapped her across the cheek. Once. Very hard. Then he bounded out of the stairwell and into the steamy confines of the kitchen, the wedge of vapor and light blotting out when he slammed the door.

  Berthe bent over, her hand to her cheek. Flesh upon flesh, this time in anger, though the better times came back to her as they always did, his hand grazing her cheek, tugging her hair, caressing the curve of her waist, the hard pull of his hand at her shoulder blades, drawing him to her.

  Her mother had once said to her, “Your beauty does you no good.”

  At the corner of her lip, Berthe could taste salt and blood. She wiped it with the back of her hand, but only a small vermillion teardrop appeared. She stood upright to steady herself. No mirror to ascertain the state of her dress, her hair, or her cheek, but with Édouard, reflections lied. In his eyes the world was remade, and she had once believed in his ability to change anything into what he wanted it to be: love, his marriage. But no longer. No matter the state of her appearance, immaculate or disarrayed, everyone would know she’d been with Édouard again. She might as well tear her clothes off or kiss him in front of everyone. Eugène, however, would not see. Berthe sighed. He would fail all his life because he did not know that nothing was ever as it seemed.

  She would say she had run into a door. That she’d been careless. But only if someone asked, and they wouldn’t, not after seeing Édouard emerge from the same door, even if it was only Eloise, who knew more about them than anyone in Paris, and would pass the gossip along to Madame Manet the next morning.

  Chapter Twelve

  Degas called for Mary the next week, on a Wednesday, inviting her to accompany him to the Musée d’Artillerie to solve, he said, a problem of light. He wore a black silk top hat, wrinkled linen coat, and lavender pince-nez that Mary had not seen before. He had sent no note, arriving just after she had finished her breakfast.

  “You wish to solve a painting problem at a museum of war?” she said, standing in her studio, her apron tied around her dress, her palette in her hands. She had been just about to squeeze out her paint.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “Unless you wish to work, in which case I am sorry to have interrupted you.”

  “Do you often take outings in the middle of the week?” she said.

  “Never.”

  Outside, she picked up her skirts as they walked toward the omnibus; the backstreets that led to the Place Pigalle had evaded Haussmann’s cleansing pick and shovel and today the gutters were running foul. They rode imperiale—on the top deck of the omnibus—in the row of open seats, changing conveyances at the Arc de Triomphe for the slow parade down the Champs-Élysées under the horse chestnut trees, their white blossoms fluttering in the late spring breeze. At the Avenue d’Antin, they disembarked to stroll toward the Pont des Invalides, past the gardens of the Palais de l’Industrie. Degas’s top hat occasionally bumped the tips of her parasol as he walked hunched forward, his gaze roving as they approached the river teeming with steamboats, omnibus boats, coalers, barters, and rowboats jockeying in the narrow channel. The river ran fast and muddy, buffeting an ugly island of floating baths anchored on the right bank. Mary thought they must have opened the locks upstream to accommodate the spring runoff.

  “Tell me,” Degas said, “why do all you Americans come here to study? Don’t they allow artists to live in the United States?”

  “The history of art in America is only a second long, whereas here it is the whole of time.”

  “I’ve visited your country. The light was horrid.”

  “New Orleans,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Your Portraits in an Office,” she said.

  “You know that painting?”

  “I know most of your paintings.”

  They walked along the left bank, toward the gold dome of Les Invalides. Open fiacres rumbled along the quay, their passengers decked in summer finery. A laundress hurried past with her delivery basket, bluing staining her arms. Degas turned to watch her, then said, “Aren’t you the least bit worried about what people might say?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “About being seen out together. The two of us.”

  He had caught her off guard. “People will talk?”

  “My dear, this is Paris.”

  She looked down the street toward the direction of the abattoir, from which a breeze was bringing the metallic scent of blood. “We will tell them we are forging better Franco-American relations. To improve your opinion of the light in America.”

  “Ah, yes. You are Benjamin Franklin, a diplomat, but for art’s sake, not war.”

  “And you are whoever he persuaded to arm us,” Mary said.

  “Revolution! Though I shouldn’t say that too loudly or someone will build a barricade. It takes very little provocation around here for people to build barricades. After all, this is Paris.”

  They resumed walking and in a moment the esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides opened before them, and with it the great gold dome of the chapel floating above the hulking stone edifice. The sun was at its height, and a glare shone off the square. Paris is shining, Mary thought as Degas advanced across the cobblestones. She had to hurry to keep up with him on the uneven stones, and only when they entered the dim confines of the first salle, where suits of armor glimmered in the diffuse light, did he slow his pace. He removed his glasses and placed them in his jacket pocket.

  “And what problem of light are we going to solve?” Mary said.

  “I’m painting a picture of bathers for Monsieur Faure, the singer Manet painted for the Salon. The light, you see, for the copper basins?”

  The armor, curved and smooth, seemed to make something strange of the luster filtering from the high windows; one could imagine men wandering through these dungeon rooms in these suits of armor.

  Degas said, “It’s like touching time, isn’t it?”

  “And you ask why Americans come here.”

  “I’m thinking of using gold paint over pastel,” he said. “I’ve been badgering my colorist to see if he can grind a paint that imitates the Italians.”

  “Gold paint, to capture the light,” Mary said. “Of course.” Yes, that would be the answer. How brilliant. The shimmer would be implied, the surface at once matte and luminous. Mary had never before tried to paint metal; differences in cloth were difficult enough to render. She tried to imagine the technique, how the paint would need to be applied so as to brighten the pastel and reflect the metal’s smooth curve, intimating its metal-ness while catching the light, though she imagined the hue would have to be subdued, for in a bathhouse the light would be ambient, arising only from a candle or muted sunlight filtering through the slatted wallboards.

  “The light could work thematically, too, couldn’t it? Intimating a lack of privacy, mirroring the viewer’s voyeurism?” Mary said.

  “Just so. It isn’t really just about the light alone. It’s the context of the entire picture,” Degas said. “The classicists eschewed the viewer, shying away from the implication of intimacy, but I want to expose our natural curiosity.”

  “It’s a question of how one sees life, isn’t it?” Mary said, turning, but in that instant Degas had disappeared.

  She found him outside, leaning in shadow against a pillar in the damp arcade, his head bowed, his hat tipped low over his forehead, its brim shading his glassed eyes from the scatter of the bright May afternoon.

  “Did I say something?” Mary said.

  Degas sighed and straightened, readjusting the glasses on his nose. “Nothing to do with you, Mademoiselle Cassatt. A failed experiment on my part, I’m afraid. I apologize. It was rude of me to leave you alone. It’s these eyes of mine.”

  “Your eyes?”

  “Some damage during the siege. Berthe Morisot stayed too, you know, during the war, when most men fled. She can hardly eat, poor girl. She nearly starved to death. She and her family stayed in Passy and the bombardment there was horrific.”


  Mary hardly knew how to respond. His eyes? God, what terror. “Hence the glasses?” she said.

  “My doctor tells me not to worry.”

  “But you still do.”

  “A little,” he said. “More than a little. A black hole appears as if from nowhere. I don’t know why. I cannot tell what brings it on or what makes it go away. I capture light for a living, and now it is sabotaging me.”

  He did not want to go back in. They walked out of the courtyards onto the esplanade and the shimmering cobbles. He cupped his palm as if to scoop up and measure the weight of the ungoverned light, calculating, it seemed, how much harm this vital component of his work could do to him. And then the light dulled, the incursion of a cloud, perhaps, or the rotation of the earth away from the sun. Degas let his hand drop. “It’s gone.”

  “What is?”

  “The black hole.” He blinked once, twice. “Yes, gone completely.” He turned in a circle, taking in the square, the gardens, the plane trees. “I’m going to switch oculists,” he said.

  “Yes, perhaps that would help. A different color glass.”

  “I fear I am in line for a rainbow of eyeglasses, none of which, I’m certain, will change anything.”

  “Perhaps. But you might find an answer.”

  “It’s a question of time, too, you see. How much time I have left to paint.”

  “The hope of the eternal,” Mary said. “Of what will survive.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The immortal.”

  Mary looked away and then back again. “You keep your promises, don’t you, Monsieur Degas? Because I decided to stay in Paris because of you. Not you precisely,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “But you meant it, though, didn’t you?” She sounded more earnest than she wanted to, but he had said nothing about the exhibition.

  “I rarely make promises,” he said, “because I find them so difficult to keep. But I made you no promise that I recall. I did, however, make you an invitation to exhibit with us. And I would never withdraw an invitation.”

  He reached for her hand and held it for a moment before he let it go. Each barely registered the physical touch, but felt instead the way the light loosened something inside them, their twin reserve dissolving in the lambent glow of the newly benign esplanade. Degas offered Mary his elbow and they walked out of the square toward the river. They were each aware of the other in a way they hadn’t been when they walked this way an hour before. Even the tawdry traffic on the Seine seemed beautiful now, an aberrancy that even Degas celebrated, for the day had turned out very fine indeed, the light an ever resplendent halo, now so beneficent and shimmering, so pale and beautiful, that Mary and Degas both longed for a brush to record it before it slipped away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Berthe Morisot’s studio occupied a back room of her apartment, bordering an interior courtyard with views of the building’s maids gossiping amid a tangle of water pipes and clotheslines. Paintings, many of which Mary had already seen at the Rue le Peletier, hung one on top of the other on her studio walls, which were flooded with light. Whether landscape, interior, or portrait, the paintings vibrated with femininity, in feeling as in color, the brushstroke so loose and lively that even when the palette included black, applied not as shadow but as color, the pictures radiated an ethereal aspect unmatched by anyone else. Mary thought them glorious. She was especially fond of The Cheval Glass, a portrait of a woman dressed in a slip and black neck ribbon, regarding herself in a mirror.

  “Did Monsieur Manet influence you?” Mary said. “About the black, I mean?”

  Berthe was standing by the windows. It had been two weeks since the salon at the Manets’. This morning, Berthe had sent Mary a note to ask her to please come to see her at her home on the Avenue d’Eylau. Mary had hesitated, then acquiesced. She still carried with her the hurt of Berthe’s stray comment, with its implied declaration if not of war, at least of its threat. Now the soft light from the windows fell on Berthe in such a way that the deep black of her raven hair glimmered with indigo and ivory. She stood very still in her white lace dress. A red sash was tied in a large bow around her waist.

  “Yes,” Berthe said, “though Édouard uses it far more than I. I don’t know why. It’s as if he courts death with that color.”

  Mary turned back to the canvases. “The Cheval Glass reminds me of his Nana. Do you ever collaborate with him?” Mary again turned to her hostess, whose face, in the light, so beautiful a moment before, had taken on a pained expression.

  Instead of answering, Berthe sat on the long couch under the wall of paintings, indicating that Mary, too, should sit. Above Berthe’s head, a sweet pastel of her in blue and ink was signed “É. Manet.” She rang for tea. The maid, who must have been hovering outside the door, hurried in with a tray. Berthe poured and handed Mary a porcelain teacup, its thin edges nearly transparent.

  “Mademoiselle Cassatt, I invited you here not to talk about my paintings, though I am grateful for your careful observations.” Her face was unsmiling as she poured milk into her own teacup. The heightened bon vivant, the coquette, the sociable hostess from the salon had disappeared. “I invited you here because I wish to warn you, with respect, that Monsieur Degas can be mercurial. You haven’t known him long enough to know that his regard can easily be withdrawn. You must understand, he is not fickle as much as he is paradoxical. One really never knows what he intends when he says or does anything.”

  “Are you saying his offer to exhibit is insincere?”

  “What I am saying is that you must be careful. I do adore him,” Berthe continued, appearing to erase all her life’s earlier adores, all the truth of that perilous word. “But he can be terrible.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Mary said, in as even a tone as possible, unwilling to commit to betrayal on so little evidence.

  “What I mean is that you should own yourself. Don’t rely on Monsieur Degas. And besides, he is French, and he is a man, and on that basis alone, a woman should take care.”

  It was impossible to discern Berthe’s motive. It seemed that one moment she was attacking, and the next merely trying to be of some help, as if she believed that an American woman afoot in Paris could benefit from this kind of cryptic guidance.

  “I am not enamored of him,” Mary said. “I merely admire his art.”

  “Well, he admires you. He could speak of little else the last time I spoke with him.”

  “Is that true?” Mary said. She held herself very still.

  Berthe nodded. “I hope you’ll forgive my intrusion. I think women owe one another this, rather than condemnation.”

  A furtive confession, Mary thought, or perhaps an inquiry to see whether or not she suspected anything. She wouldn’t have, not at all, but for Berthe and Édouard having disappeared during Suzanne’s performance.

  “It is always wrong when women judge one another in situations where they, too, might slip, given the chance,” Mary said. She meant the sentiment, but not that she would ever be in that kind of danger herself. Berthe’s dark hair, spilling over her shoulders, was caught in a loose ribbon tied at her neck. Mary thought she now knew why Édouard Manet loved black.

  “I don’t know why I said anything,” Berthe said. “A woman who can stand toe-to-toe with Degas, a man whose withering wit exhausts even the most caustic man in the room, is due a kind of reverence.”

  “Is she?”

  “I mean the concern kindly, Mademoiselle Cassatt. I get carried away when the men are sparring. They are so cruel to one another. It can change the way I behave. Forgive me?”

  “Only if you explain to me how you keep your brushstroke so light and yet communicate so much.”

  • • •

  Later, from the parlor window, Berthe watched Mademoiselle Cassatt stride toward the Place de l’Étoile, feeling certain that she had not done her new acquaintance a service at all by falling into the oblique. But what could she have asked that the woman would have answered with any amount of t
ruth, especially after she herself had been so careless as to reveal herself? What could anyone have asked her about Édouard that she would have answered, oh so many years ago, when she had been too young to know the consequences? In the end, it was you who suffered anyway. You, who had to keep on living.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The single vellum envelope in her mother’s hand arrived on a Thursday at the end of June in the early morning post as the street sweepers and night soil carters trudged toward the outskirts of Paris, lugging the city’s refuse and litter with them toward their new slums, having been excommunicated from their old ones by Haussmann’s scythe. Mary was often up as the city shed its nighttime identity, greeting the postman, awaiting her maid Anna’s stumble down the stairs from her room in the building’s eaves, marking the pink light of dawn as she drank a first pot of tea.

  June 15, 1877

  Darling Mary,

  Your father has ended his dithering and decided once and for all that we are to give up our home here and move to Paris. He says that if you won’t come to us, we will come to you. That we are leaving behind our grandchildren, your father does not seem to consider an impediment. (I believe he longs to be closer to your brother Robert’s grave, in Germany. His death is so long past, twenty-two years now, that I think of him only as an angel who visited us once.) I know it is a lot to ask to take time from your painting, but could you please find a suitable apartment for us all, including our darling Lydia, of course, preferably near the Champs-Élysées, in the new American quarter, if you can possibly manage it for a decent rent? We would do best, I think, with five rooms, considering how you have crowded yourself into that tiny studio where you work, too. The turpentine! We should faint if we had to suffer such smells all day long. Your father is pressing me now to tell you that in our newly reduced circumstances we cannot possibly pay for the rent on your studio in addition to an apartment, and since your father has decided that we will continue to pay your living expenses—a not unwelcome burden, my darling—it is imperative that you alone pay the lease on a studio from your earnings.