Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “You are dazzling.”

  He took a moment to suck pleasure from the sight of her. Her skin translucent, like mother-of-pearl in the light, a few curls of chestnut hair peeking out from under her hat, the crisp white cuffs, the black gloves with the pearl buttons—all these elements together released a tumble of feelings.

  “When you didn’t show up yesterday, I thought you were trying to tell me something I didn’t need to be told.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I put you in the painting, repositioned two men to adore you, and then you didn’t show up.”

  “I was hoping to be able to.”

  “No letter. No telegram. I would have understood. A fit of pique because you’re in the back?”

  She glared down that notion.

  “I would have positioned you more prominently if you had come on time.”

  “It couldn’t be helped.” She placed the packet on the table. “From my mother.”

  A calculated change of subject. He peeked inside the paper wrapper and felt his mood softening. “Chocolat. She remembers well. Tell her merci.”

  Jeanne studied Angèle and Antonio, the only faces painted so far. She tipped her head at the vague shapes of Pierre and Paul, and examined the few dabs he had made for the colors of her dress and hat and gloves.

  “It was mighty hard for them to pose with no one to look at.”

  She ignored that. Her hand went up to her mouth, tapping it, pointing to Circe blocked in with no detail. “What’s her name?”

  “Cécile-Louise Valtesse…de la Bigne.” A flush of embarrassment swept over him at so pompous a name.

  “From the loges at the Opéra or the promenoir at the Folies?” The fall in her voice charged him with the latter, less respectable possibility.

  “From Madame Charpentier’s salon,” he said, clipping off each word separately. “I was hoping I’d find you there.”

  “I’ve been occupied lately.”

  “So I hear. Shall we begin? You did come to pose, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I have a fitting at four,” she said.

  He felt awkward and formal with her, directing her where to stand, as though she were chaste, every muscle taut, and it was her first time, their first time, on the divan in his studio. He positioned her shoulders, lifted her chin, and felt that delicate hollow behind the bone. “Impossible to know the correct angle of your head without Paul and Pierre here.”

  “I wasn’t looking at them.”

  “Then where were you looking?”

  “At that woman leaning on the railing as if she owned the place.”

  “Be careful. She has every right.”

  “Oh, my! Such protectiveness. Your new muse?”

  He turned away from her and stepped back to the canvas. How was he to answer that? He didn’t have to. “Now your hands, to your ears.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear as she always did, even in bed after they had taken raucous fill of each other. With that common little gesture, she still had the power to overwhelm him.

  He took time to clean his brushes in order to get control of his voice. “Who is painting you now?” he asked.

  “No one at the moment. Did you know that Louise Abbéma’s painting of me as a soubrette was hung in the same room as Bastien-Lepage’s Sarah Bernhardt?”

  “Yes. I saw it. The bow was too big.”

  “It was my costume. For Lisette in Jeux de l’amour,” she said, a defensive edge to her voice.

  “No one will know that when they look at it years from now. It looked ridiculous, stretching shoulder to shoulder like a clown.”

  Her lips tightened. He had hurt her feelings.

  “She did a nice job on your face, though.”

  In order to get as much done as possible in case she didn’t come back, he mixed ultramarine, cobalt, and rose madder right on the canvas for the gradations in the fabric of her dress. He added vermilion to brown it for shadows. At one angle the iridescent feathers on her hat were maroon. At another they were a brown-black, like serrated obsidian, with the fluff a deep red-orange. How richly they gave back the light.

  “What have you been painting?”

  He noticed she didn’t ask whom he was painting. “In Normandy. I’ve been painting in Normandy. I was curtailed awhile with a broken arm.”

  “I didn’t know.” She let a long moment pass before she asked, “Whatever happened to your painting of me? The full-length one in the white gown?”

  “Durand-Ruel bought it for eighteen hundred francs. And that was at a time when he was buying very little from anyone.”

  She murmured approval.

  “You have to admit, we enhanced each other’s reputation,” he said.

  It was awkward, and he hated it. Their hesitation was as though they were speaking in a foreign language and had to work out each sentence first before stammering it.

  “You rarely came to see me perform. You don’t come at all now.”

  “I appreciated the real woman more. The one I could touch.”

  “I went to your exhibits,” she said, a countermove.

  He pretended absorption in his painting for a few minutes. “What have you been doing since I saw you last?”

  “I’ve been to London with the company.” Moments later she said, “They don’t laugh as easily there.”

  They were the necessary questions, to ascertain how each of them had gotten along without the other, asked and answered in a guarded way.

  Her creamy skin glowed from within, like a lit candle in a dim church, and her green eyes flashed with specks of gold. Alight with what? Love? Perhaps, but not for him. For that sullen-faced dandy. His hand tensed. No, he must have no ill feeling. Not a dot. It would bleed through the opalescence of her face.

  He loaded one brush with light tones for her skin, another dark for her gloves—those gloves revealing that little opening of naked skin, the calculated allure of what is partly hidden. And those buttons announcing that they can be undone to get at her, that she could be undone. He painted the pearl rounds, the sliver of wrist below them, painted the memory of the smoothness of her skin, and of his love for her.

  Not that he had ever expected them to have the conventional culmination of marriage. No, he couldn’t quite have conceived of himself as married, even to her. He just wanted it to go on as it had been. What was wrong with that?

  “You know, it was a supreme folly to sacrifice love because you didn’t like a painting.” Reducing it to that might make it seem to her not only damned foolish but dead wrong.

  A small sound came out of her mouth as if from a baby bird.

  He was vaguely, then acutely conscious of his hand hurting. Maybe he’d been holding the brush too tensely. For a cold instant he couldn’t release the position, couldn’t voluntarily arch his fingers to pick up paint from his palette. The ache was different than a twinge of fatigue he sometimes felt at the end of a full day of work. He’d only been painting a couple of hours. He could not let that spoil this brief pleasure.

  “Such skin,” he murmured.

  “You’re not doing dabby strokes, are you? Remember the critic. ‘Putrefaction.’”

  She’d been hurt, poor thing, and now it hurt him that she saw so clearly what was taking him anguished months to recognize, that visible Impressionist strokes didn’t allow him to do what he wanted with figures, what Ingres had done with invisible strokes early in the century. A shock ran through him. Carried to the extreme, choppy strokes and feathery touches could destroy figure painting. Where did that leave him?

  “Non, chérie. I’m leaving no record of my brush on your face. You’ll love it.”

  If he had painted her a year ago not as an Impressionist, without visible, discrete trailings of his brush, and without the green tinge to her skin that truly was reflected from her surroundings, if he had painted her as Ingres would have, with subtle shadings to model her form without the slightest demarcation of a stroke, as he had painted Lise as Diana
the Huntress a dozen years ago—if he had done so with Jeanne, would she still be his? A hard price for artistic experiment, for a style that may vanish someday, a style that may have already reached its apogee, at least with him. If he had painted her in her white ball gown as he had painted Marie Antoinette on thousands of plates…

  He didn’t ask her. She might not know any more than he did, and it would spoil this intimacy of silence, the oneness of their endeavor.

  He had to satisfy himself in knowing that he would always have that, the act of painting her in that white gown. He would always have the remembrance of her standing there in perfect accord with him as he laid his doomed love on the canvas. He would refuse to let that slip from him. He could continue to love her and it would be none of her business.

  Her quietness while modeling was unusual. Maybe she was doing the same thing he was, taking moments off a shelf, playing out the roles again, a reprise before the final curtain. It was the prerogative of former lovers, a sort of morbid delight. Words, moments, their laughter at forgotten little things, her kindness to adorers when he met her at the stage door after a performance, his impatience when she signed every program that was thrust at her, the smooth firmness of her inner thigh.

  That one time she introduced him at a party of theater people, “This is Auguste Renoir, my painter,” as if to say, my wallpaper hanger, my shoeblack boy. “How about saying next time, this is Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my good friend? Or Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my lover?” he’d suggested later. She had flown into a rage. “I thought I was helping your career,” she’d said. And he’d said, “How would you like it if I said, ‘This is Jeanne Samary, my model’?” That was the beginning of the end. His words had been prophetic. Here she was, his model.

  He tried to locate the source of the little pain that announced itself again, traveling the length of his finger. With horror, he realized it was where that hard lump was beginning to grow on his middle finger where the brush rested. At least he could say the pain had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with anything except himself.

  “That small painting you did of me at the last? The very last. The small one of just my face, done like the ball gown painting?”

  “The painting of remembrance of times past? The one you didn’t want?”

  “Yes. Do you still have it?”

  He could tell her no, and she would be hurt, if he wanted to hurt her. He paused long enough for her to have a pang of anxiety. He set down his brush and rubbed the hard, swollen joint.

  “Yes. It’s in my studio.”

  “Could I…I mean, would you?”

  “Give it to you?”

  She could only nod. A change had come over her, something of which she was unwilling to speak, but nonetheless palpable between them.

  “You would like it now?”

  She nodded again, not looking at him, keeping her pose.

  “More than a nod, and it’s yours.”

  “I would like it, as a remembrance of the happy hours in your studio on the rue Saint-Georges.”

  “The rue Saint-Georges is only a few blocks from avenue Frochot.”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes moistening. “L’avenue Frochot.”

  The happy hours in your studio. The way she said that lifted him and placed him down in an afternoon more than a year ago when, painting her in his studio, he’d had such an urge, the exquisite, torturous conflict of two pleasures, that he had set down his brush and had rushed to her and she’d laughed in a wonderfully abandoned way. Open your dress, he’d said in a husky whisper as he was unbuttoning his trousers. They had just enough time before Paul or Pierre would burst into his studio at five o’clock as happened more days than not. We have time, he’d said, and indeed they had, and were buttoned up and at work when his friends came in, only both of them were giddy and flushed, and she laughed softly at little nothings until she went home to avenue Frochot and he caught up with his friends at Café Nouvelle-Athènes, buoyant.

  “Why did you come today?”

  “Because I care for you.” Her voice came out in a lower register, that voice that could mold an audience to her will. “I care about your painting.”

  Well, now, that was something else entirely. Or was it?

  She blinked a few times in rapid succession, holding her pose. “You were always so good to me, so liberal.”

  “Liberal in my affection for you? Of course.”

  He knew she had broken the pose even though he was looking at his painting. When he turned to her, she quickly resumed the position and gazed over the railing to the river. In that split second turning toward him, what had been in her eyes?

  “I meant in not constraining me. You took an interest to show me you cared for me, and that was all.”

  “Constraining you?”

  Turning from the painted image to the woman, he saw a tear grow on her bottom lid and tumble. The feathers on her hat trembled. A consummate professional, she kept her pose.

  He ignored the great solid shift their relationship had taken, set down his brush and stepped toward her. Holding her by both hands, he backed into a chair and pulled her onto his lap, the feathers tickling his ear. She went limp, her body melding familiarly to his, as he hardened. There might be a chance. He burned to carry her into his room, not twenty footsteps away, and on the bed remind her of the happiness they had enjoyed.

  He whispered, “My little quail.” A new tear swelled when she heard that endearment. Then the earlier tear had not been for him. His urge slackened even while he held her to his chest, crooning to her, “Ne pleure pas Jeannette.”

  “Is that a song?”

  “A very old ballad.”

  He sang in a hushed voice the words, “Don’t cry, Jeannette. We will marry you to the son of a prince or a baron. I don’t want a prince or a baron. I want my friend, Pierre, who is in prison.”

  She shifted in his arms. “What’s the rest of it?”

  “It’s silly.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You will not have your Pierre because we will hang him. If you hang Pierre, hang me with him,” he sang softly.

  “And? Sing the rest.”

  “Et l’on pendouilla Pierre, et sa Jeannette avec lui.”

  “And they hanged Pierre and his Jeannette with him? No!”

  “It’s only a song.”

  She looked down at his hands and touched an enlarged knuckle as though she remembered it. He felt a sharp grain rubbing between bones.

  “Do you want to keep working?” she asked.

  “No. That’s all I can do today. It would be helpful to have you here sometime with Paul and Pierre, though.”

  “I’ll try.”

  It was a long moment before she stood up. He offered her thirty francs, fifteen for each session, the amount she would have required if she’d been a major figure.

  “To keep it professional,” she said, “but only today’s.” She took fifteen francs and left fifteen in his palm.

  The final curtain.

  “Don’t forget to eat the cake,” she said, dropping the coins into her drawstring bag.

  He walked her to the middle of the bridge. “Think of me,” she said. Two brief kisses at each cheek, in the air really, and then she walked away, down the path leading to the station in Rueil, stretching the thread of love until it broke as she went around the corner of the boulangerie.

  Think of her. What a thing to say. A parting shot. She wanted everything. She was in love with mere adoration.

  The river glistened with silver highlights riding on the ripples between blue-green furrows, the colors distinct, then blending, then separating as the water moved relentlessly under the bridge. He realized he’d let her go without explaining to her the Impressionist vision of broken strokes, perfectly visible from here. She had eluded him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Convocation of Flâneurs

  Looking down the length of the terrace on the third Sunday, seeing the dozen people posing befor
e him, Auguste was filled with joy. They had gone boating, eaten Louise’s delicious rabbit stew, had drunk Pierre’s favorite petit vin made at a small château that didn’t produce much, but what it did was very fine. They’d sung a few songs while eating the Charlotte Malakoff, a mold of strawberries, ladyfingers soaked in rum, and almond cream, and now they were ready to take their poses. He squeezed luscious, shiny smears of color onto his palette, and filled his nose with their sweet oily smells.

  This Circe had perfect posture, too perfect. But the dress and the jewel hanging from her blue velvet ribbon like a shard of pale blue ice were exquisite. Her skin was too white. Easy enough to rosy her up a bit. Pale coloring was a sign of a nervous temperament, and he didn’t want to suggest that.

  “Circe, I need you to face the table. Not so stiff, so posed.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing, posing?”

  He caught Alphonsine rolling her eyes.

  “Pretend we’re not.” He bent her hand back and forth at the wrist. It went limp. There was hope. “Pretend we’re just sitting here talking.” He put a glass of wine in her hand. The sheer white ruffle draped down over her blue sleeve like a veil. “Take a drink now and then. See how Angèle is leaning toward Gustave? Look at Alphonsine standing there like she does any other day, relaxed and natural.”

  Circe looked and then leaned forward, hinged like the lid of a wooden color box, still rigid. Alphonsine couldn’t stifle her giggle.

  “What she needs is a good rambunctious lay,” Angèle said. “That’ll get her to loosen up.”

  Pierre scratched his beard. “I’m sure someone can accommodate her. For the sake of art.”

  “And there are plenty of secluded sites on the island,” Paul added.

  “It’s too hot,” Circe said. “My shoulders hurt.”

  “Let me be the first to offer my services as a masseur,” Pierre said.

  Auguste ignored their banter. If he were in love with her, he would find a way to work with her, but he wasn’t. Yet. Maybe if he gave her something to do, she would cooperate.

  “Didn’t you agree to be flâneurs last week and make observations on la vie moderne?” he asked. “Well, what did you observe? Circe, you preside.”