Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “I don’t know how to be any other way.”

  He did own a boat once, not one that would count in her eyes. When he was a little boy his father took him to see the pretty toy sailboats in a pond in the Tuileries Garden. The next week, he tried to make one out of a carpenter’s scrap, scraping it against a stone wall to make a prow, but when he set it in the pond, a breeze blew it out of reach and the fountain in the center pelted it with water and it got trapped there, looking only like a stray piece of wood.

  “Might you like to go rowing, after a day of painting?” she asked.

  He held up his cast. “It will be a little while yet before I row anything but a brush across a canvas.”

  “How long before that comes off?”

  “A week more.”

  “I can wait a week.”

  But after another session like the one today, he knew he’d be too exhausted to row. “Will a short promenade suffice?”

  “Nicely.”

  They ambled down the lane. It was something to promenade alongside a rustling dress. They remarked about the people lounging on the banks, eating, drinking, playing cards, yawning, content to do little more than breathe the languor in the air. The eyes of the men and women in boats close to the bank subtly taunted the picnickers on the grass, and the picnickers eyed the boaters with envy. He understood that look, but doubted that she did.

  Circe launched a tedious account of a soirée, describing every count and countess in attendance as if they were intimate friends. He wished she’d be more like Ellen when she performed her mimes at the Folies. Silent. Holding up his half of the conversation required more energy than he had left. Finally, they turned back and he walked her across the bridge to the station.

  He came back feeling elated until he remembered the problem of thirteen. And the perspective. And anchoring the terrace. He shook out his shoulders to release the tension of the day. Even if they were available to pose day after day, managing so many people would be too much. How did Veronese do it with forty figures around the table, plus the ones on the upper level? He must have posed small groups at a time. He would ask a few to come on weekdays. Only now did he realize the complexity of positioning so many interacting figures, and it made him weak in the knees as he stepped off the bridge.

  He went inside to find Fournaise in the dining room and took out his wallet, depleted now by the francs he’d given to Angèle. “I won’t be able to pay you the whole bill now, but take this and keep a record.”

  Alphonsine stood behind her father next to a sideboard, watching.

  Fournaise raised his hand against the money. “It’s been taken care of.”

  “By whom?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  Alphonsine picked up a bowl and held it over her head upside down. Trying to keep a straight face, she took a few lurching steps.

  A lump formed in his throat. He fumbled putting his money away.

  From the kitchen doorway, Louise asked, “Did the glasses have soul enough for you?”

  He kissed her on the forehead. “Everything did.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Cork in the Stream

  In the morning, Alphonsine slipped through the upstairs corridor that led from the family’s rooms to the three rental rooms on that floor and to the terrace. The painting was there just as she’d hoped. Dabs, patches, curves like crescent moons produced a scattered calligraphy of colors. What would they become? she wondered. What has he glimpsed in us to lay over that vast white land? Us. Nous. She said the word aloud, dropping off the s, a kind of lowing. The exhilaration she had felt yesterday surged again. She was part of something.

  “Nous?” she heard and turned around. Auguste was coming up the top step. “What do you mean, nous?”

  She wanted him to know her, but this might make her seem lonely.

  “Just something silly.”

  He sat and tipped back the chair. “What do you see on the canvas?”

  “I can’t imagine it as a picture yet the way you probably can, but I know it will become a fine painting.”

  “Either that or a colossal failure.”

  “It’s not good to start out thinking that way.” She couldn’t resist asking, “Is this smear me?” She pointed above the brown diagonal.

  “Yes. The beautiful one. Light salmon pink beneath the yellow. Exquisite, the color of your skin. Like the inside of a shell.”

  She didn’t speak for a moment in order to prolong his thinking.

  “It’s a brave thing to start such a big canvas. Is it the largest size?”

  “The largest width. It was given to me by a man who could ill afford to. A good man, Père Tanguy. I’ll pay him for it someday.”

  “I’m sure you will, in one way or another.”

  Right then, to her this good man, this Père Tanguy, became part of nous.

  “How many people were in the painting yesterday?” she asked.

  “Thirteen. That’s a big problem. Jesus was betrayed by the thirteenth person at the Last Supper. The painting’s cursed until I find a fourteenth.”

  “It’s a curse only if you count the face dabs. You can count Monsieur Tanguy too.”

  A shallow spurt of a laugh came from his throat, but she’d meant it half seriously.

  “I wonder what will happen to the rest of the cloth from that roll.”

  “Another painter with big dreams will buy it for another monstrous painting. That size, probably some classical or historic subject.”

  “The same origin yet entirely different, like brothers separated at birth.”

  “You have an interesting way of looking at things.”

  “You’re the one who can look at a grease spot and see a face.”

  Between them she sensed a growing accord, a rapprochement, the possibility of partnership in the painting. When he was painting, she felt that some things were understood between them, tacit in a look or a gesture. She wondered if he felt it too. What was he made of, this man who came and went so blithely? What made him banter with everyone and say funny, ironic things sometimes, and other times sit all balled up in himself?

  “But I can’t do anything with those grease spots without models.”

  “What about the tablecloth and bottles?”

  “Not without more built up around them.” He stood up and leaned on the railing. “If I had another canvas I’d go down to the piling of the railroad bridge. Some tamarisk trees are in bloom there. I hate being idle.”

  “Do you want to go for a row?”

  He held up his cast as an answer.

  “I can row a yole. You can work the rudder cords, can’t you?”

  He extended his arm as far forward as the bent-arm cast would allow.

  “Good enough,” she said. “I’ll show you some places I know upriver.”

  When they got in the boat, his long legs tangled with hers. She had to put hers between his in order to row, so he spread his wide. She was embarrassed, but he wasn’t. She liked that about him. She caught him looking at her ankles, which amused her. They were only ankles.

  “Do you have a favorite place on the river?” she asked.

  “All the spots I ever painted.”

  “I mean one place.”

  He was quiet for the length of two strokes. “La Grenouillère.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that. It’s so noisy and crowded.”

  “That was the spot where we started Impressionism.”

  “You can say that for certain?”

  “Yes. I can name the day. The first Sunday in July 1869, when Claude Monet and I set up our easels next to each other and experimented to learn how broken strokes show light dancing on the water. Like now. Do you see the yellow?”

  “I see where the sun catches the ripples.”

  “They have color. Right now it’s yellow ocher even though the water’s dominant color is blue, but there’s lavender and green too. We knew we were discovering something revolutionary. We couldn’t wait to g
et back to Paris and tell Bazille. We were living in his studio in the Batignolles. It’s his color box I broke.”

  He seemed to drift away from her. She wanted to call him back, wanted to know all the steps that brought him here, to this painting and to her in this boat.

  “Who is Bazille?”

  “Frédéric. The three of us lived in two rooms—one that overheated when the stove decided to work, where we slept in the buff, and the other unheated where we painted and ate with our overcoats on in winter. Poor Lise, the model for my nude of Diana the Huntress. Every half hour Frédéric ran down the six flights of stairs to buy her a café while Claude and I wrapped her in blankets. When she stopped shivering, we went to work again.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It was wonderful! We were in our twenties and doing what we wanted. When we had no money for models, we painted each other. Or we painted bridges and boulevards. We always went to Le Moulin de la Galette on Sundays because it was free, long before I thought to paint it. But whenever Bazille got some money from his parents, he insisted on taking us on a round of theaters and cabarets and circuses and dance halls, the Folies-Bergère, the café concerts on barges, the horse races at Longchamp, until the money ran out. Then we would have to start the fire in the stove with our watercolors and drawings again. We were brash beyond our means, but Paris, sublime and sordid, was there for the taking, if not in those days then in the future. We were drunk on possibility, intoxicated by the thousand delights yet to be tasted.

  “At night, to keep warm, we went to the Café Guerbois nearby and played dominoes or checkers, sometimes with the writers Duret, Zola, or Durant. They educated us. We met Manet there, and Cézanne and Pissarro and Degas. Every Thursday night without fail there were spirited discussions about a revolution in painting. Before the press labeled us Impressionists, we called ourselves the Batignolles group. Then the war came.”

  “Go back all the way.”

  “More? You want more?”

  “Can you name the day you decided to become a painter?”

  He smiled on one side only.

  “It crept up on me. When I was a child I drew a dog with my father’s tailor’s chalk on the tenement floor, drew a frame around it, and told my family not to walk on it. It was surprising that they respected it enough not to. It made me feel important, so I did more—my sister, my mother, the houses on our street, the Roman well. I ventured farther, to the Fountain of the Innocents in a maze of market stalls, which held me spellbound even then with its sculptures of women. Soon my parents, three brothers, and my sister were all tiptoeing between my pictures of Paris done from memory on the floor.”

  He paused as though he were enjoying the memory.

  “My mother had to do something to keep peace in the house so I was taken out of school and apprenticed to a porcelain manufacturer on rue du Temple when I was thirteen. I loved it, and was able to help my parents buy a house in Louveciennes. It was piecework and I was fast. The older workers called me Monsieur Rubens. I had high hopes to earn six francs a day, which would have provided me a good living eventually.”

  “Does that mean you quit?”

  “When I was seventeen, the workshop was shut down by companies that printed designs on ware by machines. Hundreds of them exactly the same. Progress and science killed off the kind of slow handwork that had made me happy. It was my first disillusionment. I had thought I would be content painting Venuses and Marie Antoinettes forever, but I was born a century too late for that.”

  She kept rowing slowly so he would keep talking.

  “I set up a cooperative and painted my own designs faster than the machines, thinking I could outwit progress, but by that time shopkeepers didn’t want anything made by hand. They wanted uniformity. To me it signaled a decline in taste.”

  “Your second disillusionment? What did you do then?”

  “I got a job copying eighteenth-century paintings on ladies’ fans. It was easy to obtain a card allowing me to paint the Old Masters in the Louvre as a study during my lunchtime. I painted murals in cafés too. Imagine how thrilling it was to cover a whole wall after years of working in miniature. I felt liberated by bigness, by the chance to swing my arm and leave a trail of color. It paid a pittance and wasn’t steady work so I switched to painting window shades. Lucrative, but so repetitious it nearly killed me. Twenty years old and I’d come to a point of decision.”

  “What decision?”

  “My parents agreed to call in someone they thought was an ‘expert’ to determine if I had any talent. The only person we knew was a student at a second-rate drawing school. The whole family was nervous, one moment hoping they wouldn’t be made to feel foolish if the ‘expert’ laughed, the next moment hoping that he would say I was a pathetic dreamer so that I would forget painting and turn to a more dependable trade.”

  “And the expert said you had talent.”

  Without a hint of a smile, he nodded. What a pitiful look—his eyes dark, his cheeks hollowed.

  “The man said I must get a proper art education. There was only somber silence around the dinner table that night. Even my younger brother stared at his plate and wouldn’t eat. My parents were plunged into despair as wrenching as if they’d lost a son.”

  “Weren’t they pleased at all?”

  “It meant giving up steady work and taking on a monstrous risk. It meant the end of my contributions to the family’s well-being.”

  “But what did you feel?”

  “Wronged. Tricked by my own talent. I’ll never forget my mother sobbing into a dish towel. It made me feel as though I’d committed a crime. But the next morning she managed a motherly look as she bravely sent me off to apply at l’École des Beaux-Arts. That was my third disillusionment.”

  “Oh, no. Why?”

  “I got next to nothing out of it. But I met Bazille, Sisley, and Monet there. They were disgusted too, so we left the academy and painted outdoors in the Forest of Fontainebleau. I painted a rustic inn in Mar-lotte, Mère Anthony’s, with Monet, Sisley, and Le Coeur posing around a table. The waitress and Mère Anthony too. That was my first step here, to this painting of people around two tables.”

  That’s what she’d been waiting for. It placed her, somehow, in his life. She realized she had stopped rowing, and began again.

  After a few minutes he pulled himself out of the past and said, “There’s a beautiful maple behind you with an overhanging branch. Just think. There’s no other tree exactly like it.”

  “No two leaves exactly alike either.”

  “Some say a tree is only made of chemicals, but I believe that God created it.” A glint came into his eyes. “And that it’s inhabited by a nymph.”

  She liked that he could be playful. Edgar Degas would never say that.

  “Then I’ll tell you a fairy tale when we get to a place,” she said.

  “Do you have a favorite place?”

  “Two of them.” She looked behind her, and saw the farthest of the Elizabethan cottages of Rueil spreading its garden toward the water. “We’re close to one of them.” She rowed past the rotting trunk that lay diagonally in the river, the hawthorn with berries beginning to redden, the rill that ran down to the river. And there were the two sycamores with their branches intertwined and leaning over the water. She stopped rowing.

  “Do you remember the fairy tale of the yellow dwarf? Two lovers, a prince and a princess, were separated by an evil dwarf who killed the prince?”

  “Vaguely,” he replied.

  “The princess was so grief-stricken that she died too. A wise siren buried their bodies next to each other and they became trees. Their branches became intertwined. She knew they needed that in order to remain faithful. These two big sycamores, this is it.”

  “Because of the tale?”

  “Partly. Louis asked me to marry him here.” She reached up to grab a branch to keep them from drifting. “I was eighteen. He wanted to carve our names into them, but I wouldn’t let him
hurt the trees. Now I wish I had.”

  “Why?”

  “Why are you painting this painting? It’s for the same reason. To let the world know after our time that we were here, and that we loved.”

  “How do you know that for me?”

  “By the way your face came alive when Jeanne Samary came up the stairs.”

  “It’s only that I wanted her in the painting.”

  “Then why didn’t you welcome the man with her like you welcomed Émile?”

  Several minutes passed before he said, “You’re pretty sure of yourself.”

  She started rowing again, sorry she’d made him feel exposed.

  “What’s your other favorite place?”

  “We’re going there.”

  A cork bobbed alongside the boat and Auguste leaned out to grab it, but it eluded him and was drawn into a whorl of grasses.

  “I took the cork of the bottle of cassis yesterday,” she said.

  He tipped his head. “What for?”

  “It was the first bottle of the first day painting the first luncheon of your boating party.”

  A soft look came into his eyes. “No one else there thought to do that. What a petite bundle of big feeling you are.”

  Now it was her turn to feel exposed. “Sometimes more than what’s good for me.”

  For amusement, she rowed toward the cork and tried to wave it within reach with her oar. It plunged and popped up, going this way and that, riding the ripples downstream until it became lost in the glare on the water.

  “There I go,” Auguste said, “just drifting with the current. Not deciding anything for myself. My friend Paul—”

  “The one who smacked his friend with the oar?”

  “Yes. He thinks that in order to have good memories at the end of your life, you have to behave like a cork in a stream, letting yourself go. Who’s to say whether letting things be what they will isn’t the better way?”

  “It’s what brought you here, letting that expert decide.”

  “But it goes beyond that. Some painters think they are creating a world in each painting. I don’t. I think the world is creating my motifs for me. In that way, it’s creating me too, carrying me along like that cork.”