Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “Gustave is going to buy it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a feeling. Your blossom will be in his house.”

  As if to say, But you won’t. You’ll have to be satisfied with that. She felt the tingle that comes just before tears, and mastered it the instant it rose.

  “Go back to work. You’ve got to finish the sky before the light goes. I just wanted to tell you about his new house.”

  She drew back and tried to make a graceful exit between the bushes.

  She took a périssoire and paddled upstream, splashing herself in a hurry to get away. The willows were weeping yellowed leaves into the eddies. The quieter, more reflective season was coming soon, when she would sift through events and try to rein in her imagination from where it was accustomed to roam. Bare to the waist in the moonlight, Auguste had said she shouldn’t regret anything done out of instinct. Despite Gustave’s warning, despite Auguste’s revelation, she felt no regret for hoping, or for loving, regardless of the return.

  She stepped out on the bank where the lovers’ bodies had lain. She had called their death beautiful. She had thought Héloïse’s love for Abelard beautiful too. But Héloïse was a martyr. Maybe to be insouciant, like Angèle, was a better way to negotiate love.

  A wine bottle lay on the bank and a cork was lodged in the reeds. She picked it apart, dropped the pieces, and ground them into the earth with her heel.

  She lay down on the grass near the rill and became absorbed in a silver sheet of water spilling over an exposed root, creating colonies of bubbles that separated into pairs as they traveled across a small pool, so fragile they clung to each other, so brief a pair, and took the plunge together over some rocks to disappear in the river.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Awning

  Early Thursday morning, Auguste squinted into the sun rising over the rooftops of Rueil to the east and waited, his patience thin. Against the sun’s glare on the terrace, the skin under his eye was ticking off the minutes.

  Alphonsine sat beside him, pulling apart a croissant. “Another café?”

  “If it doesn’t mean anything more to him than a niggling obligation, I don’t want him in it,” Auguste said.

  Guy hadn’t come on Monday or Tuesday, and Alphonsine had given the excuse that he was recovering from his bout of drinking and the exhaustion after his rowing exertions. Probably true, but on Wednesday he had come down from his upstairs room bleary-eyed, and saw Auguste waiting to paint him. “Oh, I forgot. Sorry,” Guy had said. “I can’t do it today. I’m already late for work. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Yes, another cup, if you please,” Auguste said and watched Alphonsine descend the stairs, her back straight. If his caution about Gustave had wounded her at all, she didn’t show it.

  When she came back with the tray, she looked so lovely in a rose-colored dress that he felt torn in two. A river blossom herself. He wanted to paint her again. Not nude. Never nude. Not a classical figure. An Impressionist one, painted with all the tenderness he felt for her. River nymph and Parisienne, she would always remain a part of this Impressionist world. Aline was different. Her deep country origins made her belong to all time, or timelessness in the classical sense. Alphonsine was color, whereas Aline was line. Maybe a woman wasn’t too different from a painting direction.

  “If he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, will you let me paint you instead? Downstairs in the dining room in soft light in front of the blue wallpaper with an open fan in your hand?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “One painting at a time, Auguste.” She sipped her café thoughtfully, her head tipped down to the creamy brown liquid. “How important is it to resolve the problem of thirteen?”

  “With thirteen, I may as well cart it back to my studio in the dark of night and never let a soul lay eyes on it except me.”

  “Then I have a solution.” Her voice had lost its spirit. “Paint me out.”

  He slammed his cup into the saucer. “What? You don’t mean that.”

  “Put boats on the river where I am and fill in Émile’s hole with Charles’s jacket. Then you’ll have twelve.”

  He puffed air out his mouth. “How can you say such a thing? You’re the soul of this place.”

  “So are boats on the river.” Her eyes had a look of resolve. Regardless of how ridiculous it was, she was sincere in offering a heavy sacrifice.

  “I know you mean what you say, and I appreciate your offer, but that would spoil the painting for me. I can’t consider it.” The tightness in her face softened. “Besides, it wouldn’t solve the problem of Ellen left alone. Without a man there, she’ll end up being the solitary drinker I promised her she wouldn’t be. It would introduce a different mood.”

  “Loneliness in the midst of gaiety.” Her voice, coming from some deep place in her, disturbed him.

  “Yes. The sort of despair Degas and Manet have painted in cafés. You know that’s not my intent. But thank you. And thank you for your collaboration through all of this.”

  Only when she nodded could he draw his eyes away to the painting and the area of raw canvas. “I like the idea of a face tucked in there. It would be a spicy surprise.”

  “Then if he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, I’m bringing you a mirror and you can paint yourself.”

  “Not a chance. Here I am,” Guy said, coming through the doorway, his arms out to his sides.

  “I had almost given up on you,” Auguste said.

  “I’m good for my word, but I don’t have a lot of time.”

  Then forget it, he felt like saying. He positioned the painting and told him where to sit.

  “Alphonsine, will you sit in Ellen’s position, so he has someone pretty to look at?”

  She gave him a mock stern look and sat down.

  What was he to do about that reddish scrub brush Guy called a mustache? It was so broad and thick that it overpowered his face and made him look like a small walrus. He would fare better with the ladies if he put it on his head and moved that puny tuft beneath his bottom lip to under his nose, for a civilized mustache. He would not have a dragoon leering at Ellen in his painting.

  This early in the morning Guy had to look straight into the sun. It made him squint. This wouldn’t work.

  “This glare will play the devil with my work. Let’s try unrolling the awning,” he said.

  The sun still glared under the scallops at its edge. He waited.

  “The longer you wait, the less time you’ll have,” Guy said.

  “I have no choice.”

  When the sun rose higher, the awning diffused the light so Guy didn’t have to squint.

  This was it! Of course it was. The solution! He had never used the awning because it cast a shadow over the terrace with the sun overhead or to the west, but by inference, the awning was attached to a building. It conveyed that they weren’t floating on a magic carpet.

  “I’ve got it!” he shouted.

  In his excitement, he left off painting Guy, whom he’d hardly started, and mixed ultramarine with white and a touch of the soft greens and rose madder to lay in the awning supports again where he’d painted over them, greener against the foliage, bluer against the river. In the early stages, he’d just considered them as vertical place markers. Now he constructed the horizontal rods too.

  But he didn’t have enough space for all of the awning. Just a suggestion. Right over the sky he’d already painted, he laid in long sweeps of coral for the flat part of the awning, contrasting stripes of yellow where the sun beat directly on it, dulled to a warm mauve gray in parts. And where the scallops hung down, the contrasting stripes flirted with various pastel tints depending on how the breeze moved them and made them catch the light in pale lavender-gray, blue-gray, and pale yellow washes. To catch them as they fluttered, that was the thing, and to make each one a different curve to show them moving, to show that there was a breeze making those sailboats skim across the wa
ter.

  Some of the scallops would cut off the continuous line of the railroad bridge. He would have to sacrifice that. Covering over the riverscape he’d painted was a shame, but this was the only way he knew to resolve the problem. Ho-ho, he had it now. Zola’s claim that the Impressionists remained inferior to what they undertook was bogus.

  “Bogus, Émile! Suck your words!”

  “Who are you talking to?” Alphonsine asked. “Émile isn’t here.”

  “Wrong Émile, ma chérie.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Guy said. “My office is waiting.”

  “D’accord. I’m much obliged,” Auguste said, looking at the awning developing on the canvas. “Much obliged. You solved a problem for me.”

  Guy took a look at the painting. “I don’t see how. You’ve hardly got me there at all.”

  “Enough. I’m much obliged.”

  “See what I mean, Alphonsine?” Guy said. “The man sees through rose-colored glasses.”

  “And why not? He’s the painter of happiness.”

  Auguste let his arm sweep left to right across the canvas even as Guy was leaving. He was conscious of Alphonsine watching but neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. She was with him and his brush was flying.

  Half an hour and he’d overlaid the landscape with stripes. Alphonse’s hat just touched the awning flap. So did a sail. Good. It helped to enclose the group. But now the back looked cramped. He took up his scraping knife.

  “What’s wrong?” Alphonsine asked

  “Nobody’s face. The top hat’s a little too tall.”

  He tried to shave off a couple of centimeters, but it was too dry so he had to paint over it thickly. This was the third position of that hat.

  “Why didn’t I see this earlier? Quel idiot je suis!”

  As soon as he’d redefined the top hat, he saw that he’d have to lower Jules’s hat and head. When he’d done that he saw that Alphonse’s hat was a bit too high. He painted awning stripes above it to lower the crown.

  The higher the sun, the more translucent the awning became, and the more warmly Alphonsine’s skin glowed. That would happen all over the canvas. He asked her to take everyone’s positions, one at a time, and he found more places for a subtle wash of coral—on Alphonse’s face, Raoul’s ear and just under it, Antonio’s cheekbone, Pierre’s nose and cheek, warming up the whole painting.

  “It’s the crowning touch,” Alphonsine said.

  “Not quite. White highlights along the edges of glasses and bottles, and thick white pigment in the bottom of glasses will be the crowning touch.”

  He felt chagrined. The champion rower wasn’t there. The space was blank.

  “Now can I bring a mirror?”

  “Only if you’ll let me scrape a decade off my weathered-wood face.”

  “Your discovery today already did that. Just in time for you to paint yourself there. It’s what I’ve wanted all along.”

  Then he’d been wrong about her. She wouldn’t interfere in his work.

  “It’s a kind of signature. You’ll be in good company,” she said in a lilting voice. “Veronese did the same thing in his feast painting.”

  A surprise, her knowing this.

  She planted a sudden, firm kiss on his mouth, a loud smack like Angèle would do, and darted away to get a mirror.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Last Luncheon

  The regatta would start soon. Auguste paced along the bank. No Aline. No Paul. He peppered Pierre with questions. Pierre knew nothing. Every trainload of people without Paul thickened his misgivings. A fine thing this was, making them imagine another duel.

  Aline’s lateness had to be intentional. It made him doubt himself. He had pushed himself on her too much, she thought he was an old man, she didn’t care for him, he was a fool for thinking she might. Madame Charpentier was right, it was wrong of him to keep chasing after young models, she was only nineteen. He couldn’t stand still. He couldn’t sit.

  He rolled a cigarette. Under a maple tree, Ellen made a comic-tragic face and said, “Our last luncheon.” He caught a glimpse of the more authentic disappointment of Alphonsine. His chest collapsed with heaviness. He didn’t want the end of the painting to mean the end of the delicious closeness they had shared during the making of it. He wouldn’t say he could not have accomplished it without her, but it was a far sight more enjoyable with her. He hoped she knew that. He couldn’t imagine not coming back to paint her again, and to enjoy the family, but he had to be careful. He had to be realistic. He had to be independent, for his painting. There was a moral risk in leading on either one of them.

  Père Fournaise came outside and offered to take everyone to Argenteuil in the steam launch to watch the regatta begin.

  “Give us a little while. We’ve got two more to come,” Auguste said. “In the meantime, I’d like to settle up my account.”

  “You’re leaving us?”

  “This evening, but I’ll be back soon to transport the painting. And I’ll come to paint from time to time. You’ll always be my good friends.”

  He counted out Deudon’s money, knowing that it wouldn’t cover everything.

  Fournaise held up a hand to stop him at three hundred. “I’ll call it even if you let me do one thing. It has to do with the painting.”

  “Sign your name to the thing?”

  “Let me show it to my customers. The place will be packed after the boats come across the finish line here.”

  “It’s still wet. It can’t be moved.”

  “I’ll guard it myself with Alphonse. One on each side, on the platform.”

  He liked to live with a painting privately for a time to make sure of it before he exhibited it. “It’s not finished.”

  “Finished enough. It’ll do my business a great favor.”

  Angèle overheard. “Don’t be a fusspot, Auguste. We deserve to see it.”

  “If it be not now,” Jules said, “yet it will come. The readiness is all.” Jules crossed his arms and smiled smugly. “And we’re ready.”

  “It has two surprises in it now,” Alphonsine said.

  Her reminder of the awning made him agree.

  Pierre flung out his arms. “In one grand moment the world will be astonished.”

  “Oh, is that a welcome for me?” Aline said, brushing past him from nowhere and stepping into Pierre’s outspread arms.

  “You vixen. Don’t tease me coming late all the time,” Auguste said.

  Louise came running out of the restaurant. “Don’t eat a thing in Argenteuil. I want you good and hungry when you come back.”

  “Don’t worry, madame. I’m always hungry. I’m sure the luncheon will be le plus extraordinaire!” Aline said.

  He thought she chose her words just to end her sentences with “rrr.”

  “If we wait any longer, we’ll miss the start,” Fournaise said.

  Auguste checked the bridge again. No Paul. “All right. We’ll go.”

  They passed dozens of yoles jockeying for good viewing positions. Sailboats not in the races tacked back and forth. Accordion music poured out from a floating wash barge turned into a guinguette for the day.

  Fournaise docked the launch along the Petit Gennevilliers bank so they would have the best view from the road bridge. The whole basin, two hundred meters wide, was lively with boats flying the colors of their series. The series one boats with red pennants, seven catboats under two tons, and Guy’s rigged périssoire, were positioning themselves behind the imaginary starting line. Auguste explained to Aline how the boats were classified into five series by weight, with each series having a different start time five minutes apart. The boats competed with the others in their class as well as vying for the grand prize. Aline ignored him.

  The horn blasted and the little boats skimmed along downstream at different points of sail, Guy keeping up with the others.

  “Monsieur Fournaise, why is that blue boat going the wrong way?” Aline asked.

  “It ove
rshot the starting line before the gun and has to go back to start again,” Fournaise explained.

  Why didn’t she ask him? He could have answered as well as Fournaise.

  With the wind coming upriver from the southwest, the boats had to change courses often to go downriver, but they were nimble and the river was at its widest here. It would be more difficult for the bigger boats. Everyone darted to the downstream side of the bridge to see them emerge. One heeled over so far its sail caught water and pulled it over. Guy deftly changed his course to avoid the sail lying in the water.

  “It’s possible Guy could win this championship too,” Auguste said. But Gustave needed it more, to get through the crisis he was suffering. If Guy won, they would both be impossible to live with, for opposite reasons. Sailing meant so much more to Gustave than to Guy.

  Crossing the bridge again, Alphonsine explained to Aline, “Gustave has three boats in the regatta. Two of them are in this blue series, the Iris, his catboat we’ve been using all summer, sailed by his friend, and his new cutter, the Condor, sailed by his brother Martial.”

  “Where’s Gustave?” Aline asked.

  Auguste opened his mouth to answer, but Aline turned to Alphonsine who told her that Gustave was in his biggest boat, the Inès.

  Christ! He had held back with her in his studio, acting the gentleman, and had felt right in holding back, and this was what he was getting for it? Exclusion? What had gone wrong? His talk of Italy? Something her mother said? She was conflicted, poor thing. But, then, so was he.

  The Iris had a good start but lost position going around the far bridge support. “Ohé, ohé, ohé,” he called down to Martial. If Gustave didn’t win in the Inès, it wouldn’t be such a loss as long as one of his other boats did.

  The third series, yellow, had already started, and there, cutting swiftly through the water right toward them close-hauled, was Raoul at the helm of Le Capitaine heeled to leeward, and hiked way out over the water on the windward rail, Paul was waving his cap over his head in wild circles and shouting, “Plus vite, plus vite!”