Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “All right, try to hold that little pup still now.”

  She stood Jacques Valentin on his hind legs.

  “Bring him closer to you. That’s it. Perfect.”

  The dog’s little nose was visible now against the white of Alphonse’s shirt. When the time came for highlights, a white speck in his eye would link them. His rump showed through the short goblet. There were so many colors in the fur, the same colors as Raoul’s coat, but here he wouldn’t blend them. He would let them be distinct. Ha! An Impressionist dog! A tendon in Aline’s hand lifted and caught the light. Also Impressionist, but in a different way.

  The dog rested a paw in that sweet hollow below her velvet neck band. Desire to kiss that tender, vulnerable spot moistened Auguste’s mouth, pulsed in his throat, tingled his hand. With his wet brush he touched her there on the canvas, and left a tuft of fur.

  Ever since he’d painted his first woman on a plate, a face fling on a white sea, a goddess in his thirteen-year-old eyes, he’d set out to find her in the flesh, paint her in the flesh, know her in the flesh even before he knew fully what longings, what surrender, what sensations that would produce. Ever since that first femme idéale he’d been looking, relishing the search. And here she was, bloomed to life. The muse of his youth had come to tease him with a fey look directed at Jacques but meant for him. Was it the twenty years between them that made it crack his heart?

  With Aline, he felt he was getting close to the best of his capacity. He could paint her forever, until twenty years would shrink to a pinprick of time. Aline was Margot and Lise and Nini and Isabelle and Anna and Henriette and, yes, even Jeanne. All of them in her, and then he came to Alphonsine, who was not funneled into Aline. She was distinct and individual. None like her was ever fashioned.

  Now here was Aline, posing for him. Her lips, narrow but full, even fuller when she puckered up to kiss Jacques. The waste of a dog being that close to them. It should be him.

  Where should he place a first kiss? Right cheek or left? Temple? No, too avuncular. Chin? No, too odd. Ear? No, too precious. Hand? No, too courtly. There was no other place but where his desire demanded. Full on the mouth. And if he could wait, it would be a time and place where she would welcome it and might even press back, and all desire, all thirst would make her forgetful of the twenty years, and exquisite touch would meld them. He pictured it, he would paint it, and thus he would possess it.

  Jacques whined. That was the difference between the man and the dog.

  “Set him down. I’ve got him.”

  “What will you paint now?” she asked.

  “Sh. Let me enjoy this.”

  With his brush loaded and juicy, he pushed the wet tip gently into the hidden folds of her skirt, deep blue-violet folds such as had never seen the light of day, and stroked again and again, pushing farther, gently, wet into the wet already there, a rhythm faint at first, then intensifying, an expectation, a tightening, a rush. He knew he was loading his darks as well as his lights, and that was going against the Académie training that all the Salon jurists upheld like the catechism. He was tempting fate, but he was powerless to resist stroking over and over the dark furrows of her skirt, caressing her hidden secrets with the thick, oily paint a lubricant, violet and dark and moist, building up and up as he went down and down into the folds. This would have consequences. It could mean a Salon rejection, and what dealer would take a painting stamped with the Salon’s big red R on the back? Refusée. Refused, as refuse. Trash. It could mean that he was, after all, painting only for his own pleasure as he had told Gleyre at the Académie as a young man. Down and down he went.

  He could play like this till dark. With a jolt and a tremor, he pulled himself back. Now was his last chance to paint her surroundings with her. His brush flew, hunting for places to touch down. These very important moments to see it all together. Everything popping out now. Her sleeve seen through the tall goblet. Dragging the red of her velvet trim over the wet blue to blend the edges. A hunk of ruby in a glass. The rhythm building now in the repeats of colors. The poppies the same red as on Alphonsine’s sleeve, the bow at her waist, the band on Paul’s hat, the edge of Angèle’s collar, the red of her lips, of Alphonsine’s, and of Aline’s new earring which hinted at some complicity—all red enough to sing out like a bell.

  Aline’s brilliant white ruffle, white sweeps around her saucer. Scrubbing off a narrow trail of her blue sleeve behind her goblet to make the edge a more luminous white. Streaking it on. Globs of white in the base of glasses to create protrusions to catch light and send it back. More later when these globs dried. The white of the silver spigot on the cask, and of Ellen’s silver ring and bracelets. And the white of Angèle’s pearl earring. A nod of gratitude to Vermeer. Angèle, his own girl with a pearl earring, with her face and throat as smooth in its blending of hues as any Vermeer.

  And tinted whites. Lavender-and green-white on the tablecloth rendered in distinct Impressionist strokes revealing reflected hues in the shadows, not just in gray as the traditionalists painted shadows. This was his own individuality, this combination of styles on one canvas. It pleased him to the marrow of his bones.

  Onward with more tinted whites, blue-white on Angèle’s frilled chiffon collar, frothy, as though her neck and head were emerging from some whipped dessert. Brilliant white for the front of Gustave’s shoulder, lavender-white for the back of his shoulder in the shadow of his hat. And the white of Raoul’s collar, of Antonio’s, and of Jeanne’s cuffs, bright enough to take the viewer’s eye deeper into the picture.

  And a white highlight in the dog’s eye. “Hold him up again.” She did, and he caught it with his smallest brush. A rush of air poured out his mouth and he felt for a chair behind him.

  He was satiated by this feast for his eyes, and needed to reflect on every morsel of the painting when he was calmer, and alone.

  What was left besides the fourteenth face? The deepening of shadows, more and thicker white highlights, more red touches, a balancing, an accent here and there, and especially a brightening if indoor light failed to bring out the colors as he saw them now—he still had that to do, and that made him strangely happy, not to be finished. But the gnawing problem that could kill the whole thing still shouted at him. The problem that had kept him from painting this three years ago when Fournaise had put up the terrace. How to allude to the building. He would be a target for ridicule if he didn’t solve it. He felt the attack coming in his joints.

  “I have to finish later, in the studio. It will be viewed inside, so it has to work inside.”

  “Then you’re through with us?” Alphonsine straightened up. Her mouth tightened to an ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, and her forehead became a torture of grooves, every part conveying something different. In her face he realized what finishing the painting might mean to her. He felt himself break in two.

  He hated to answer. “Let’s just say we’re finished working as a group.”

  Angèle shouted, “Youpi!” Pierre swung his hat. Jacques barked. Paul raised both his arms and shouted. “And I was here to see it!”

  Mère and Père Fournaise rushed upstairs. Everyone stood up to look.

  “Oh, là là! Beautiful, Auguste. Just beautiful,” Louise said with a quaver in her voice, her hands palm to palm against her mouth.

  “That’s us,” Aline cried. She held up the puppy. “Look, Jacques Valentin Aristide d’Essoyes sur l’Ource. That’s you!”

  “It is different than Manet’s scenes,” Ellen murmured. “He only shows separate people in cafés. This looks like I was talking and just took a sip.”

  “Our man Renoir leaves the disintegration of society to Manet and Degas and Raffaëlli,” Gustave said. “Here we have genuine sociability.”

  “My children. My beautiful children.” Louise was getting sloppy. She raised her apron to fan herself and wipe her eyes.

  Fournaise went downstairs and came up with two bottles of champagne. He poured. They raised their glasses. “To Auguste,” F
ournaise said.

  “To Auguste,” everyone said, more seriously than their usual toasts.

  “There’s a poem I’ve been trying to remember,” Jules said. “For you, Ellen, since you said the painting is lovelier than the reality.”

  We’re made so that we love

  First when we see them painted, things we have passed

  Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

  And so they are better, painted—better to us,

  Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.

  “Beautiful words, Jules. Thank you,” Ellen said.

  “Isn’t that dandy,” said Angèle. “We’re la crème de la crème to have a poet in the house. You made that up right now just for us?”

  “I didn’t make it up at all. An English poet did. Robert Browning.”

  “Aw. You could have lied and I would have drunk another glass to you.”

  “I have one question,” Aline said. “May I have my mother see it?”

  Hardly the most important person to show it to. “Yes, but not in Camille’s crémerie.”

  Paul peered at the painting. “This catboat here, let’s call it the Inès. And this sloop coming in to dock, let’s call that…What are you sailing in the regatta, Raoul?”

  “Le Capitaine.”

  “Then that one is Le Capitaine. And this narrow little racing périssoire, this’ll be Guy de Maupassant’s.” He chuckled. “Now we’ve got all the Maison Fournaise participants represented by their boats except Alphonse.”

  “Right,” Alphonse said. “Where’s my jousting barque?”

  “Tied to the dock waiting for you to practice, so get at it,” Paul said.

  “You know, you have some Venus quality in Angèle,” Gustave said.

  Auguste snickered. “That old Titian, he’s always pinching my tricks.”

  Louise patted her heart. “You paint what you love, don’t you?”

  “A man always does his best work out of love, madame.”

  Dear, droll Louise. She had glimpsed the truth. Art was love made visible.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  À La Grenouillère

  Auguste sat staring at the painting, heavy with the problem of giving the terrace a context. His mood had plummeted.

  Aline came up the stairs. “Are you going to sit there forever folded up like a grasshopper? Everyone’s out on the barge putting up glass lanterns.”

  “The critics will crucify me if I don’t come up with a solution.”

  “To what? What will they say?”

  “Another vagary of an insurrectionist painter attempting to present modern life but giving us a fantasy instead. Once upon a time a party of happy people was riding on a magic carpet over the countryside and they came to a river and landed in some trees.” He closed his color box. “All this work may come to nothing. Worse than nothing. A setback. And the most important dealer already knows about it.”

  Aline sat down close to him. “Didn’t you have a fine time working on it today?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Then let that be enough for now,” she said softly, a different way of addressing him. “Hold on to that and let’s go for a walk. Or a swim. Will you teach me?”

  He popped up from his chair. “Yes. Right now.”

  “I don’t have a boating costume.”

  He could ask Alphonsine…. No. “We’ll rent one at La Grenouillère.”

  They walked the narrow spit from the isle of Chatou to the isle of Croissy. Aline picked a sycamore sprig with broad leaves and used it as a fan.

  “After a rain we had that same dank smell by the stream near our vineyard,” she said. “I should think there would be mushrooms here in the spring, and soon, the yellow chanterelles that smell like apricots. I used to find them at home. Oh, I do miss the Aube. In summer the cuckoos roosted in our trees. They’re so clumsy. When I was little I tried to scare them so that instead of calling, ‘goo-koo,’ they would call with three sounds. ‘Goo-koo-koo.’”

  He felt himself becoming bewitched. His mother spoke like this of her country origins outside Limoges. “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, it’s so pretty when the red poppies come out, and the wild roses and columbines on the slopes and the grapes growing on chalky hillsides near where the Ource meets the Seine. The waterwheels cranking in a rhythm and the ducks quacking in their gullets and water reeds rustling. You’d like it.”

  “I suspect I would.”

  Shouts from La Grenouillère made Jacques bark. Swimmers splashed and dove in the roped-off area. Rowers in the green rental rowboats with red stripes yelled the boaters’ greeting, cric, to other boats answering crac. Not another person could fit on the little island called the Flower Pot.

  “I hope they know how to swim,” Aline said, “because someone’s going to be knocked off.”

  Two grenouilles in bathing bloomers sat on the bank with their knees up, spread widely, chatting to each other, waiting for male attention—loulous of the suburbs making La Grenouillère a modern Cythera.

  He paid for a bathing costume for Aline and she went to the ladies’ dressing cottage among the trees while he changed in the men’s. When she came out, she took small, hesitant steps. She was rounder than he had imagined. Apparently she couldn’t resist a dish of white beans and lard.

  She tied Jacques Valentin’s leash to a tree and walked two steps into the water. “The mud squishes between my toes. Like grapes in the vat.”

  Several more steps put her knee deep. Three more and she cried, “Oh!” as the water reached the top of her inner thighs. She giggled in embarrassment at the new sensation. “I’m used to bathing in a pan.”

  In deeper water, her bathing costume filled with air. “Oh, no! I’m a balloon!” She beat down the billowing blouse. “It’s a mighty strange feeling, water all around me at once.”

  “But you like it, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. My father took me to the source of the Seine once. It’s only a trickle coming out of a crack in a hill. He said that once there was an old, old temple to the river goddess Sequana. That was the first name of the river, he said. It goes underground and gurgles up again in a narrow stream. I jumped back and forth across it. And here I am, right in it!”

  She soon began mimicking the young people playing around her, cupping her hands together and splashing him.

  “Some day I will paint you, just like that, splashing someone.”

  Nude, like an Ingres nude. Not choppy strokes, but smooth gradations. He glimpsed a painting direction arriving unbidden.

  “Only if you can catch me.” She ran away in the waist-deep water, and he caught her. In the instant between two heartbeats, he could kiss her before she knew what was happening, but he was afraid she would think him a nervy old man.

  “Do you want me to teach you to swim, or do you want to splash me till I drown?”

  “I want you to teach me to swim.”

  “Then you’ll have to come out deeper.”

  The bottom fell away, she lost her footing, and her hands grabbed for his neck. Holding her by her waist, he walked backward into deeper water until she couldn’t touch bottom. She cried out and giggled, flailing.

  “I’ve got you.” Now she was dependent on him. “Relax. Lean forward.”

  His hands were under her, supporting the mound of her belly and her ribs, a bold indiscretion any other time. Her buoyant breasts grazed his arm. He whirled her in a circle. Her hair floated in patterns like golden sea grass, like filaments of silk moving in graceful unison.

  “I should have tried this long ago,” she said.

  “No, you shouldn’t have. Today is the right time.”

  He showed her how to take a stroke and flutter-kick. She learned quickly, which was disappointing because she didn’t hold on to him as tightly.

  “You have strong arms,” he said.

  “That comes of hoisting buckets as soon as I could work the pump.”

  “I’ll bet you can wring a chi
cken’s neck too.”

  When she became tired, he brought her back so she could stand, and showed her how to float face-up, with his hand supporting her shoulders and the small of her back. The thin cotton of her bathing costume clung to her breasts, and her nipples stood firm and perky in the cool water.

  At what moment would she know that he wasn’t merely performing an avuncular duty by teaching her to swim so that if she ever got bounced off the Flower Pot she could save herself? At what moment would she know that those pouty lips drove him crazy?

  Now. He drew her to him and kissed her wet mouth, succulent as a berry, kissing from her mouth down her neck. He took a deep breath and went underwater to nuzzle her belly, holding her by her hips. Her hands pushed him away and then relaxed. He held his breath until he had to thrust himself upward for air. Lowering himself, he blew bubbles that lodged between her breasts.

  “You sure can swim like a fish. Wait till I tell Géraldine.”

  “Then Camille will know, and that means your mother will too.”

  “Oh, no. That can’t be.”

  When he saw her shiver, they went back to the bank. Her costume stuck to her in folds. A nude. Yes. Someday. They lay down in a sunny patch of grass.

  “Do you know why I like La Grenouillère so much?”

  “Because you’re a fish.”

  “Because it’s the Moulin de la Galette of the suburbs and the very spot where Impressionism was born. It didn’t have a name then, but we knew we were discovering new ways to paint. It’s hallowed ground for me here. We had a jolly time that summer even though we didn’t eat every day.”

  “How do you do it? Paint, I mean.”

  “I look at something. It makes me happy. I paint it. It’s a handicraft.”

  “Like woodworking?”

  “Yes, I’d say so.”

  “My father made things of wood. A table and chairs.”

  “You take a man who makes something himself, start to finish, from idea to the last sweep of his hand across it, now, that’s a happy man. He can look at it, use it, pass it on to his children. He’s happy.”