“Yes. Wax.”
“Ah, that’s it, then. The sculpture melted. That’s why it’s not here.”
“Don’t believe it. He has made this phantom up. Or it is invisible. Or he means to goad us with its absence.”
“This is why they call themselves the ‘independents.’ In addition to being independent of taste, they are independent of the need even to show us their work.”
En masse, the critics abandoned the vitrine and wandered into the room where Mary and Caillebotte tried to appear as if they were engrossed in Berthe’s canvases, hung alongside Gustave’s. In a barely suppressed stage whisper one of the critics glanced their way and said, “Why does anyone ever come to shows like this? Why don’t they just go to the Salon, where they’ll be assured of some quality?”
“Well, as you can see, hardly anyone has come, except for us and those poor souls.”
“Dear God. I have to rub my eyes after looking at these things. This Monsieur Caillebotte is in love with the color blue. All he can paint are green sheep and blue cows.”
Mary glanced at Gustave, but he shook his head, warding off any sympathy. The critics went on discussing his supposed failures, which included timidity and an inability to completely free himself from artistic rules without actually making up new ones, except where they applied to color, which the man obviously felt free to violate at will. After disparaging Gustave a while longer, they drifted to Mary’s display in the same room. She had but one wall this time. Gone was the private room, the special showcase, the profusion of canvases, along with any vestige of her pride. Even to her own eyes, her work looked orphaned. Yesterday, she had gone to the printer to retrieve the originals of her prints to fill out her meager showing of just three oils and one pastel. She quickly framed several of the prints, choosing to show the ones of Lydia in all five states, another of the little girl Degas had called innocent, and several others hung together as a series, but they were lost in this setting. Small, inconspicuous, they hardly drew the eye. Though her oils were few, she did like two, Tea and On a Balcony, but they were not as evocative as her portraits from the year before. The other, a portrait of Madame J, was the least accomplished of all of them. The critics, strutting about the exhibition as if they were the gatekeepers of all that mattered, did not hold back their criticism.
“This portrait is nonsense. There is no dimension to the figure. It’s as if Mademoiselle Cassatt painted a blob on a divan. I daresay she’s copying Manet in his love of black, but her execution is flat.”
“It’s evident why. Look at what else she is showing. So many prints. No wonder she’s lost her sense of dimension. And they’re not very good, are they?”
“As opposed to that dilettante Caillebotte, Mademoiselle Cassatt doesn’t actually break the rules, does she? But she doesn’t execute very well, either.”
Caillebotte put his hand on Mary’s shoulder, but she shook the kindness away, unwilling to draw attention to herself or to be an object of pity to her friend, whom she herself had nonetheless tried to comfort only a moment before.
The critics spent another half hour taking in the rest of the exhibition before they withdrew, complaining of Monet’s absence, since they had wanted to see what the lover of color was going to display, then agreeing that the only way to deal with the disaster of the morning was to repair to a café where they could collectively deconstruct the calamity that was the avant-garde.
“I will never forgive Degas,” Caillebotte said as they watched while the critics, who had not recognized them, took a last look at the untenanted vitrine before they exited. “Why does he push for these exhibitions and then not bring his work?”
“I don’t know,” Mary said.
“He will ruin us with this capricious blindness to deadlines. Did you see how they mocked that vitrine? No one will be able to get past that glass charade. Do you know? Has he even finished it?” Caillebotte said.
“I don’t know. He only showed her to me once, when she was nothing but a skeleton. He kept her hidden from me after that.”
“And the noise. I should have pushed harder about the choice of the site.”
It was as if no one had supervised anything, Mary thought now. Somehow, even the paintings were not hung to best advantage; though they had all taken great care, it looked as if they had hired the construction workers upstairs to do the job for them. As if to solidify this impression, a huge bang from the floor above made them both jump.
“You would have risked another argument with Edgar,” Mary said. “You already incurred his wrath this time about the posters.”
“Why is he such a plebian about things like this? We put names on the posters so that people know who we are. It’s not elitist; it’s a device to draw people in. Otherwise we could be any group of artists who wanted to exhibit. How would people find us? And why does he care when he doesn’t even bring in the cataloged art? No one told him what to bring. He alone decides what to show and then he doesn’t even show it. The man drives me out of my mind. Tell me, did he apologize to you about the journal?” Gustave said.
“No.” She had not seen Edgar since Saturday, when she learned of the demise of Le Jour et la Nuit. This year, there had been no party on the eve of the opening. And Degas had avoided seeing her by not being here to hang what work he had sent in when Mary had been hanging hers.
“It pains me that the man paints so well. Doesn’t it you?” Caillebotte said. “He has talent like no one else.”
“Brilliance incarnate,” Mary said and sighed.
Throughout the morning and afternoon, the crowd remained sparse, ablated by the heavy rain or by indifference. At one in the afternoon, Caillebotte reluctantly left Mary behind to meet someone for luncheon, but she stayed, unable to tear herself from the disaster. It was good to be free of Gustave’s fury, though his anger had been validation, too. Every once in a while one of her fellow artists dropped by to see how things were going, but Berthe and Pissarro stayed away. Berthe had the excellent excuse of Bibi, and Pissarro the unfortunate excuse that a train ticket in from Pontoise was too dear for him. Mary wandered listlessly among the rooms, eavesdropping on the rare visitor, hearing again and again that her work was uninteresting and dull, the prints too small to make an impression, implying that her lack of quantity was somehow an indication of a lack of quality. She feared they were right. Over the past year, her work had paled. In this setting, exposed to the public, the prints appeared amateur. And next to Edgar’s work, her prints were less finely detailed, less dense, less remarkable, a judgment she had been spared today because Edgar hadn’t yet brought his in, but when he did, she was certain everyone would point this out.
Toward evening, Mary left the chilly apartment for the rain-swept streets, uncertain where to go, not wanting to return home and face her family or to go to her studio, grown dusty with disuse. Paris is raining. Since last year’s triumph, everything had changed except for two things: The rain was coming down steadily and she had once again quarreled with Edgar.
She raised her umbrella, crossed the street, and walked a block to the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, where the doorman put her into a covered fiacre.
Chapter Forty-Two
Edgar’s disconsolate “Come in” trickled through the locked door, and Mary let herself in with her key as the encroaching darkness strangled the last gasp of light from the sky. A single candle burned in the gloom, revealing the familiar disarray of Edgar’s studio. Mary unpinned her sodden hat and hung it on the rack with her coat and dripping umbrella. Next to the door, narrow crates, presumably holding Edgar’s canvases bound for the show, awaited the arrival of the carter.
She found Edgar in the back room, sitting on one of his paint-spattered chairs, his hands resting on his knees, staring at his little dancer, who was barely illuminated in the waning light of another candle. Beyond him stood the press, pushed into a corner and smothered with a dust sheet, forgotten. Edgar offered not even the slightest evidence that he had heard Mary come in
. His eyes stayed on the girl, as if he were afraid she was going to pirouette away. Even in the deep gloaming, Mary could see that the statuette was a marvel. For weeks, she had wondered whether Edgar had finished her, but he had revealed nothing; knowing what it was to be in the middle of something, she didn’t inquire. But here the girl was: finished, gorgeous, a triumph. What had once been a crude skeleton was now a petit rat. Nearly four feet high, she was neither doll- nor life-size, diminutive, but not miniature, stunningly rendered in the malleable and fickle medium of beeswax. Outfitted in bodice and dancing shoes, cloth stockings warming her legs, a skein of cascading hair falling down her back, she stood defiant and proud before her maker, arms twisted behind, fingers entwined, chin thrust forward, every detail, from her marvelously rendered fingers to her knobby knees, crafted in convincing particularity.
“Caillebotte must be livid,” Degas said, his voice flat. “Has he sent you to tar and feather me?”
“He did, but he wouldn’t have if you hadn’t placed the vitrine before you brought her in. The critics were thrilled to find a way to skewer you. I can only imagine what they’ll write. Of course you’ll deserve it.”
“Is this why you’ve come?” Degas said. “To scold me?”
“Don’t your promises mean anything?” she said.
“About what? The journal? I tell you, it’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Everything to you is nothing. Why didn’t you tell me? Why let me be embarrassed by hearing it in the bois, at the horse troughs, of all places, from Gustave? I was humiliated. I don’t understand why you pulled out. Everything was set.”
The fluttering candle magnified the sunken hollows of Edgar’s eyes as he turned to look at her. He seemed far away, as if he had heard nothing of her outburst. She had rarely seen him so distracted, and certainly never in his studio, where he was always the master. She began to wonder whether he was ill, whether some disease of the mind had suddenly rendered him simple.
“I couldn’t publish those prints.”
“Why not?”
“Because they weren’t good enough.” He was speaking distractedly, studying the sculpture as he spoke.
“Whose? Yours or mine? Be honest,” Mary said. “You owe me that. Did you not publish Le Jour et la Nuit because my work was inferior?”
He turned, finally, and fixed his gaze on her. “You are wrong about your work,” he said.
“But not about my failure.”
“Look around, Mary. Nearly every single one of my canvases for the exhibition is still here. I am late for everything. What was the journal anyway? Just an idea that didn’t work out. Nothing else. It means nothing. It’s not a failure.”
She threw up her hands. “I’ve gone backwards. I want to pull all my work off the wall. I’m embarrassed that anyone has seen it.”
“Then do it!” His raised voice echoed off the walls. “What are you whining at me for? What do I have to do with your work? It’s your work, not mine.”
Mary turned and sat down, the glimmer of the candle fading now, and with it all her vague dreams of a life lived beside this man, strange and indistinct as they had been. The flame trembled in its puddle of molten wax and went out, rendering the studio a place of shadows and depth. Edgar, at once reticent and irreverent, generous and selfish, careless and careful, was a terrible man to want, as terrible a man as Édouard Manet was for Berthe. What was it about genius that sabotaged happiness? What was it about desire that betrayed?
“My God,” Mary said. “We aren’t good together, you and I. You have a masterpiece but I have so little to show for the year that I am ashamed of my work. I lost something working with you. Something of myself. Something essential. Something I cannot abandon.”
“You lost yourself.”
“The trouble with you is that you care more about art than you do about love.”
“So do you.”
“But I don’t abandon anyone.”
“You abandoned yourself.” Degas wrenched himself around to face her. “Besides, I have no masterpiece.”
“She is standing there in all her glory.”
“She is a failure.” He fumbled with matches and relit the candle. “Look at her, Mary. Really look at her. Renoir was here this afternoon, the bastard, wanting to argue with me about something or other. He took one look at her and said her proportions were off. It would be like him to undercut me out of spite, but I think this time he meant well. I was about to take her to the Rue des Pyramides, but now . . .” Edgar’s voice trailed off in despair. All the anger was gone. He was near tears. Mary had never seen him this raw. He was like a father who had lost his only child. Distractedly, he knelt down beside a large dress box that was hiding at his feet in the shadows. He pulled from it two green ribbons, one narrow and short, the other wide and long. He tied the narrow one in a bow around the girl’s braid, and the second, wider sash around her waist, taking time to tighten the knots and fluff out the bows as fastidiously as any costumer at the Opéra. Then he lifted from the box a billowing, layered froth of a tutu, which he pinned into place under her newly beribboned waist. The skirt fell to her knees in a spume of tarlatan and tulle that Mary was certain he must have stolen from the dressing rooms backstage at the Garnier. With these unlikely additions his genius revealed itself. The stockings sagging on her legs that Mary had thought were cloth were not cloth but wax; the shoes and bodice that she thought were wax were not wax, but canvas and satin smeared with wax; neither was the girl’s hair wax but instead a waxed fall of real hair. Only the tutu and ribbons were what they appeared to be: arresting flourishes on a breathtaking apparition. All else was illusion.
When he was done straightening the many layers of the marvelous skirt, he stood and fixed his gaze on Mary. “Look at her. I mean really look at her.”
Mary could not speak, the dressed statue was so remarkable.
The rain had stopped now, and in the courtyard the echoing clatter of dinner plates and conversation from the other apartments swelled the night with domesticity. Edgar began to shout, his face haggard and pained. “For God’s sake, Mary, with her clothes on, what do you think? Is Renoir right or when she is dressed does she appear in proportion?”
In the three years since she had known him, he had never once asked her to critique him. “You want my opinion?”
“My God, Mary, don’t torture me.” He sank onto his chair once again.
Fending off apoplectic admiration and an avalanche of envy, Mary circled the statue, attempting to see what Edgar said he couldn’t see, a notion that seemed to her a great apostasy. It was almost impossible to look past the intricate details, the astonishing surprise of the ribbon and tutu, the brilliance of Edgar’s extravagant conceit, to see the dancer as a structure, for essentially, this was what sculpture was, even one as unorthodox as this. Form was a matter of precise measurement. Without the underpinning of accurate scaffolding, no piece of artwork succeeded. But for all of that, art was instinct, too. One felt the balance or imbalance. The revelation was something akin to a religious experience: You didn’t know the truth and then you suddenly knew it, and because of it everything was transformed. In the dim light, the little dancer was a silhouette. It was this trick of the light that aided Mary.
“Monsieur Renoir may be right.” It was almost gratifying to be able to point out his misstep, but she couched it slightly to spare him. “Her head is too small. Not by too much, but off, slightly, at the crown, and here, at the forehead, where it slopes too steeply.”
Degas crumpled forward, his hands to his knees. “My damn eyes. I didn’t see it. Why didn’t I see it? Both you and Renoir. Dear God. She is flawed.”
“It was only the shadow that revealed it. I still think she is gorgeous. Perhaps no one else will notice.”
“I can’t bear to let anyone see her.” He was echoing her words, all her worries about failure, but he was not aware that he was. He eyed a large crate that loomed in the corner, awaiting the blemished girl he would not now send.
He shifted his gaze and studied Mary. “You see? I have no masterpiece. We are equally bad for one another.”
In the swelter of the moist heat, sweat beaded on her forehead. Mary realized now that as she had studied the girl, she had unconsciously opened the top buttons of her shirtwaist to the angle of her collarbones. Degas’s gaze drifted there now.
“Do you know that this is the first time you treated me as your equal? The first time you didn’t yield to me?” he said.
“I was furious with you.”
“I want to draw you.” His raw voice crackled through the heat, his desire clear: He did not wish to draw her as he had before, chastely—the curves of her clothing, her head and hands, the line of her long neck, her corseted, clothed waist. He wished to draw her in the most intimate way, to trace the unclothed rise of her breast, the curves of her thighs, the circles of her buttocks. “You are to me what no other creature is. We are the same mind, Mary. We are the same soul, occupying two different bodies.”
“We are not,” she said.
“You are the only woman I can tolerate in the world.”
“That is not praise.”
“Why would I flatter you? I respect you too much.”
“This is how you show your respect?”
He rose from his chair and padded to the window. He lifted an open box of pastels from the sill, where he had placed them to let the sun blunt their color, but he seemed to think better of it and set aside the deadened chalk for a new box. Of course. For this, he would want the noise of color, the punctuation of high pigment, to set this drawing apart from any other, this carnal drawing of intimacy. It was no secret that he was unkind to his models, but Mary knew he would draw her differently, with something akin to reverence.
The little dancer stood impassive, inscrutable, imperfect, her eyes hooded, blind. An indifferent witness. Certainly she would tell no one. His little dancer had become to him something beloved, wept over, treasured. Mary studied Degas’s hands, fallen to his sides. These were hands deft enough to create an airy confection from the lowly medium of wax, perceptive enough to fashion a curious thing of strange beauty, and inventive enough to create what no one had ever dreamed of creating before and might never create again. He would never betray this girl, would surely never part with her, wouldn’t expose her to a world when he thought her less than perfect. Mary felt herself yielding, or wanting to yield. She wondered whether this would be the way that Edgar would finally, truly see her. And what was virtue in a warm studio on a rainy night in Paris, when possibility seduced and intimacy beckoned? Over the years she had believed there had been no one else for him, at least no one he had ever revealed, and certainly no one else for her.
I Always Loved You Page 26
