“What’s your poison?” she asked.
“Besides turpentine fumes?”
“Would you give it up?”
“Painting? I’m bound to it, I suppose.”
“And bound to Carles?”
Pablo told her how he’d once known no one at Els Gats, and Carles was the only soul who bothered to talk to him. He spoke of the studio in Barcelona he’d painted and they shared, of the sisters they both had lost.
“I am sorry for your mothers,” Germaine said. “It’s terrible to watch that happen.”
“Carles is a good friend,” Pablo said.
She asked, “But how loyal are you to him?”
“Thick and thin.”
“You haven’t ever seen thin, have you? Really down—really out? Where you’ll do anything to make another day, sell your paints, your brushes, yourself?”
“Myself? Are you kidding? I’m trying to find buyers right now,” Pablo said. “What else could selling one’s art possibly be?”
Carles groaned. They worried over whether he might retch in the night and choke.
“You’ve got to get him on his side, at least,” said Germaine. She slid her fingers beneath Carles’s limp chest. “Go on. You push from below, and we’ll turn him.”
Pablo grabbed Carles by the knees.
“No, no. From where his weight is,” she said.
Pablo hesitated.
“What is it with you men? You can be so stupid,” said Germaine, grabbing Carles from under his hip at the pelvis. Pablo joined in, and they managed to flip him over onto his back. Germaine was close enough for Pablo to feel her breath.
Sitting on the bed beside Carles, who was out cold, Germaine solemnly undid her hair and raked her nails against her scalp. She blew out the candle and straightened to lie down without touching him.
Pablo crossed the room and lit a cigarette as Odette emerged from the bathroom and glissaded to the window to retrieve the sparkling wine from the ledge. She slipped onto the chaise, popped open the bottle, and drank straight from its mouth. After a moment, Odette’s shadow moved again, her arm reaching in the dark toward the orange of Pablo’s cigarette. He placed it between her fingertips and noticed how she was holding the blanket open like a cape. The outlines of the voluptuousness he had painted were like soft etchings in the night. He crept beneath the wing, and it closed around him, along with her wetness and body heat. He took the cigarette from Odette’s lips and held it as far away as he could, leaned in, and found her face with his lips. She pulled his tongue inside.
Odette made no effort to keep their lovemaking quiet. More than once, Pablo caught her looking at Germaine across the room to see if her eyes were open, if she were watching them couple beneath the rustling covers. Pablo wondered what would happen if he sent Germaine just one glance of invitation. Would she come to them? Carles would never even have to know. After all, if Pablo were honest with himself, wasn’t this his plan, why he’d allowed Carles to become so far gone at the Exposition?
But as much as he wanted it, Pablo just couldn’t do this to his friend. He didn’t dare fail a test of loyalty again, as he had as a child in La Coruña.
IV
Germaine woke in the morning with a headache. She’d drank too much, and throughout the night, Carles had tried to cradle her neck. At some point, she resolved to let him. It had felt nice to be held. One of those comforts she shouldn’t allow herself, she knew, like napping when it was time to work or peeling a scab before new skin formed. At first, she’d only been playing a game with Carles, but by the time she sensed a simmering attraction for him, he was already head over heels for her. And now what? This was one of those boys, she decided, who may well become a full-throated grown man one day, a sumptuous lover far into his years, like a young wine so acidic that drinking it is like biting into a thornbush but which will mellow exquisitely given enough time.
Or else he might never mature. Quickly decline into something best poured down the drain.
One way or the other, Carles wasn’t ready to be consumed.
Still, she couldn’t deny certain moments when she felt a stirring. He was very handsome, or at least, again, had the foundations to become so. Carved cheeks. Eyes full of mysterious intentions. Tall. Taut.
And she did not doubt, when he was even half sober, Carles could be brilliant, a true poet who spoke what others wished to say. It’s strange, she thought, how men, who aren’t created all that different from one another, really, have such a range of faculties. Two, stood opposite, might look the same build—wiry and fit—but only the acrobat soars through the air. The other is ordinary. So, too, how’s it some men make love to you so your loins are the fault line where an earthquake begins, and another is just a nuisance, the invasion of a bug? Tickles when it crawls on you. Leaves a mess to clean after you’ve swatted it.
There was something attractive, it must be said, about Carles’s air of culture and sophistication. His upbringing had been so unlike her own. Yet he showed it off too much. Even when he quoted revolutionary literature and poetry or called to abolish laws and government and force the rich to the galleys to row, all this confirmed Carles’s class and status rather than revoking it. An odd tension in him, she saw, one he had not worked out himself. In everything about him, Germaine felt tension. Or many tensions. Like many strings tied to many stitches that were still being pulled this way and that way till they become fabric.
Might she not allow Carles to love her and help him become complete? Perhaps, one day, would he be the sort of man she’d never had before—passionate, astute, charming, well-bred, able to provide for her? She was sure her ability to polish was equal to her capacity to corrupt.
By the same token, this whole line of questioning, she reminded herself, was so unlike her. This man did not exhibit what she prized.
Would he someday?
What did it matter if he didn’t today?
No. She was not one to let herself be caught. She must be chased down and won. A fox has its wits, and it has pride.
The sun was just climbing in the window. Germaine suspected that after last night, Carles would rouse very late. But she couldn’t go on lying there, thinking such thoughts. She grew restless. She craned her neck in bed and noticed the camel beneath the covers on the chaise had one hump, not two.
Where had Pablo gone? Sprawled out on the bed, everyone else asleep around her, Germaine was able to admit to herself, as she practically had to Pablo at the Exposition, that she felt something overwhelmingly bodily for him—something she didn’t feel for Carles. She conjured his fragrance of turpentine and salt. The way he painted in great sweeps and powerful turns as if trailing a kite—motions his hands had become so accustomed to that they sometimes performed them even when not holding a brush. Germaine could peer inside him and see fertility, the magic bean that would grow and grow.
Yes, the surface allure was not traditional. Pablo was not tall, and he could barely articulate himself in his native tongue, let alone organize a sentence in French. But he exuded rawness. He really was a peasant from the Peninsula, as her father had been. The coarseness was genuine, that Spanish sultriness one dreams when imagining majas rendezvousing with secret caballeros and making love on the rugged plain with strange, swarthy travelers. It was there in his eyes, those big black orbs like the talons of an eagle that swoops down into the valley of your being and carries you, alive, away to some towering nest.
Yes, she wanted him.
And yet, Germaine could not tell if she had denied herself last night or if it was he who’d not given in. Perhaps both. But why? Did they fear they were courting disaster? That hadn’t made her shy away before. Maybe he didn’t really desire her. It was unlike her to be so uncertain about something like this.
Germaine noticed Odette turning beneath the covers, her shoulder jutting out and blooming goose bumps from the window draft. She poked her head into the open air.
“Have a good time?” Germaine asked.
“Oh là là!” Od
ette cried, stretching her arms above her head, before adding another “là là, là là!”
Germaine asked where Pablo was. Odette had no idea. She hoped he would return with breakfast. They got up and looked around. His paint box was gone. And the easel. Propped against the wall was the canvas he had been working on—the Moulin de la Galette, exactly as they remembered it from the other night: the hanging gaslights rouging the faces of the pretty girls in crushed velvet hats with iridescent feathers, their nicest jackets cutting sharp figures. Men in gleaming top hats undressing them with their eyes, twirling them around the parquet floor to the waltzing band. Germaine recognized herself, too, leaning into the frame of the painting from the side, grinning gamely.
It was downright mind-boggling! If Pablo did covet her, hadn’t she opened the door at the exhibition and then again when they got home? Wide as day! She would have had him, with or without Odette. N’importe quoi. Think of how they could have played all night, like three snakes in a pillow slip, jostling and coupling—tripling, even! He seemed like someone who knew how to impose his will. Why had he restrained himself? Here was this painting he created only days after arriving in Paris. This was a man who could realize what he wished for. And if he wanted this, why not make it so?
But she knew. It was because of Carles. The two of them were too close. She had asked Pablo, “How loyal are you?” Loyal enough to not have done what he desired, what she desired—what Odette desired, for sure. (Although Germaine was becoming less apt to share.)
Carles rose and shambled to the water closet. A retching sound came from inside. It was horrible, like the possessed coughing up the devil. Then came gargling, a spit, toothbrushing, and face scrubbing. Carles exited, looking like a raised corpse. The mingling of his sickness and the ambergris of the cologne he wore made the queasiness almost contagious. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and removed a cigarette case.
The three smoked in silence, like strangers watching the waves from a ship gallery, not knowing what to say or if they should bother to speak.
Eventually, Carles said, “Can I talk to you, Germaine?”
Odette wrapped a blanket around herself and withdrew from the room, bringing with her a book Carles had left open. It was in German, which Germaine knew Odette didn’t understand a word of.
“About last night,” he began.
“Yes?”
“I didn’t mean to . . .”
“What?”
“No, I mean, I meant to . . .”
“Yes?”
“I’m having a hard time saying what I want to say.”
“Well, I can’t read your mind,” she practically screamed, furious at him and Pablo and every bumbling, confused man she’d spent her life dealing with.
“Precisely why I write,” Carles said, shutting his eyes and reciting from memory. “My heart is clouded. My brain is muddled. My blood beats in fearful, rhythmic thrusts. Everything is you.” Carles’s pupils moved back and forth beneath his eyelids, as though he were searching for something from within a trance. “The fault is yours for looking at me, for allowing yourself to be seen. Ever since, all I see is you. As I close my eyes, you come to life in a glorious vision of green and orange circles. My heart is heavy with clouds of lead and marble, threatening a storm, a storm that may yet come or may have broken out already within me.”
In all Germaine’s years, no one had ever spoken poetry to her before, and now once more she felt a softening toward this man. She might not want to kiss him—well, not at the moment, anyway—but she did feel warmth. There was something very beautiful inside Carles’s poet soul.
“Are those words yours?” she asked.
“They are,” Carles said.
Germaine put her hand on his.
Pablo became fixated on the question Carles had posed: What do you feel when you paint?
He began experimenting by interrupting his process to become aware of the sensation. Painting made him feel powerful, he found, like a matador whose face is wet from the breath of the bull’s last charge but who is without fear, thanks to practice and superior skill. Pablo believed he, too, would someday hear the crowds roar. Even then, he wouldn’t cease.
After long spells of staying up all night working, Pablo found he liked to walk the riverbank to come down from the high and watch the old men angle catfish. If he was feeling particularly edgy, he’d carry a portable easel to give himself the chance to do a quick outdoor scene on the way home that could be added to the stock of work he’d sell in the afternoon, following a nap.
It was during one of these early morning strolls that he stopped at a row of green wooden bookstalls lining the water. The vendors sat on folding chairs, paging old novels and smoking dark tobacco, apparently unbothered by potential customers. Pablo idly thumbed through a few titles, wondering if Carles’s own work might someday land here. Pablo had long marveled at how Carles fought to transfer his loneliness onto the page through the bit of a pen. He had enough talent to be successful, for sure.
But what struck Pablo—who was still meditating on his own relationship with art—was how Carles’s passion never seemed to render him strong.
Rather, poetry and prose were means he’d found to siphon off his suffering, lest he drown in it.
Did Carles envy him because of this?
Pablo reflected, too, about how his friend’s ennui might be faring since arriving to Paris and becoming infatuated with Germaine. He’d even heard Carles reciting the very same poems to her that were written for his niece only months ago. In fact, Pablo reckoned it was these verses that won Germaine over. Still, he struggled to conjure the simplest of compassions for him. If Carles chose to grapple with his manufactured melancholy, then so be it.
A fissure had opened up in his friendship with Carles, and Pablo hated the feeling. He wished things between them would be like old times, that he could just content himself with Odette and the gentle pawing of sweet orange accompanying her.
But the image of Germaine lurked, keeping him from ever being satisfied.
Everyone was emerging from midafternoon naps a few days after the Exposition when Pablo entered the studio, arms full of Beaujolais, bread, and a strangled duck.
“Where have you gone?” Carles groaned.
“This is Paris. So I paint,” Pablo said.
“Qui?” Odette called out from her chaise.
“You are my lone model, luscious,” Pablo said, blowing a kiss, adding theatrically, “Today, I paint only the beastly things in my brain—toreadors, picadors, the final moment of the bull.”
Pablo made a fire and boiled coffee, and the air began to fill with pleasantness. They drank cup after cup until they felt warm and alive and began talking, laughing. Carles told of when his father came home from a diplomatic congress with a modus vivendi and a gift from the heir to the throne of the Two Sicilies—a black mastiff, big as a sofa. It was the night Carles’s mother was hosting Barcelona’s wealthiest family and, not knowing what to do with the gargantuan beast, she locked it in the coat closet, where the dog attacked her guests’ mink- and marten-fur stoles. Carles’s mother howled and wailed. His father had to carry the animal all the way back to Naples to defuse a crisis between him and his wife.
Germaine translated line by line to Odette, and they all cracked up. They spiked their coffee with fruit brandy and smoked. Pablo patted the duck with salt and pepper and hung it by a string above the roaring fireplace. He twisted it round and round, then let it slowly unwind to roast evenly, as he’d seen hunters in Horta do. When evening came, they tore the bird apart and pulled up the fat from their plates with pinches of baguette, later nipping at mirabelle plums Pablo had hidden from them.
They sat on the rug and told each other of their childhoods in France, Barcelona, and Málaga. Of family, schools, first loves, broken hearts.
Pablo explained that his earliest infatuation was with a pencil and related how his initial kiss came from a girl who immediately raced away, her opera h
eels click-clacking down the spiral staircase of the Tower of Hercules.
“Why are girls always running off?” Carles joked.
“Did she ever go for you?” Germaine asked Pablo.
“Acted like I didn’t exist,” Pablo said. “But the memory, it’s still there.”
“The first streaking meteor you ever see vanishes, like all those to follow,” Carles said. “But that’s the one seared forever in the mind, evidence of other worlds.”
Odette mused whether she’d ever seen a meteor. What’s the difference between it and a falling rock? she asked. As a teenager, she’d begun singing to keep a roof over six siblings and contended that men at the nightclub had been dumb as boulders. If anyone were a shooting star, she was. But twinkling on stage turned to more behind closed doors. She recounted and burst out laughing as Germaine struggled to translate each sex act or body part that none but the French describe so well—how “one makes the madeleine cry” or what noteworthy detail might be placed in la parenthèse d’amour. Germaine scoured the studio for a map to use as a visual aid when Odette referred to a gentleman’s testicles as Alsace and Lorraine. Determining what a man wanted, this was the hardest thing, Odette postulated. He wouldn’t say and just expected you to know. And then it was awkward and difficult, and everyone might lose interest. Just imagine, she said, what would happen if a man walked up to a vegetable stand without knowing whether he wished for a plum or a leek and expected the seller to guess.
“So what does one do in that position, exactly?” Carles asked.
Odette told them, and Germaine translated: “When he couldn’t make up his mind, she learned to do whatever she desired and found both parties always left happy.” In the end, Odette changed over to modeling because it involved less drama. But Germaine said the same was true there. “For a few francs we’re supposed to, what, compose the picture, too?”
As Pablo listened, he thought back to the first brothel Pajaresco had taken him to in Barcelona. He knew exactly what he was there for and yet had no idea. He’d felt not like a swimmer but someone towed away by the tide of arousal, tossed at sea and brought near to something resembling both euphoria and drowning before being suddenly and violently slammed into a sandy shore. All sex since had ended with a thud. Long ago, he’d imagined making love as in Renaissance painting, something transcendent instead of terrene. Pere had even suggested that in Paris, this could be so. How Pablo wished it. With Odette, he’d come close but not quite.
The Blue Period Page 13
