The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  He wanted her so, so bad—even if she were the most perplexing person he’d ever encountered.

  To think, just an hour ago, Germaine was eyeing Pajaresco like she could gobble him up. Then it was Pablo whom she’d enthralled. And now, it was as if she were Carles’s real mistress, as if the piano bass line had rattled the cork from her heart. Perhaps she was his. He should never have suspected that Pablo might betray him.

  “Says she thinks she could be a painter,” Germaine said, translating to Pablo and Pajaresco as Antoinette—who’d abandoned her limited Catalan—compared their métier with decorating desserts. “Something about spreading the paint over the canvas she would enjoy.”

  It was clear to all now how Pajaresco was transfixed by her.

  “When she was a girl,” Germaine continued, “her mother would make tortes, and she would mix the butter, the sugar, and the pink dye to make—how do you say?—frosting, which she’d spread with a spoon.”

  “Magique!” Antoinette said.

  “Lucky spoon,” Pajaresco added.

  “We’ve told her she should become a pastry chef,” Germaine said.

  “If I gave you a canvas, what would you paint?” Pablo asked her.

  “Tortes!”

  Even Carles laughed, and Germaine was pleased with this. She firmly believed there was no melancholy that music, libations, and a pretty face couldn’t cure. In Antoinette, she saw the naïf she’d once been, and it agitated both memories of her past and a maternal tenderness. Sometimes, this is what she felt toward Carles, too, in a way she’d never been compelled to feel so acutely before. It’s funny—she’d always been convinced that having children was a trap, and now here she was, mother to a grown man who wanted her as a lover.

  Germaine had watched Carles brooding all night. She knew he probably thought she was trying to torture him. That’s what men always think when you’re having fun, isn’t it? But it’s just the opposite—to be free is hardly an affront against anyone. It’s what we do so that we don’t have to always suffer the thumbscrews. Whatever Pablo thought, that can’t be helped, either. If these Spaniards want to rut and lock horns over her, that’s their own damn fault. They’re the ones who barged into her life and made a feathery mess. Days ago, she’d decided the only thing to brighten the situation was being herself.

  “We have known Antoinette since she was little,” Germaine said, leaning into Carles, which she saw startled him. “She’s like porcelain, so smooth.”

  “They’re both your sisters, those two?” Carles asked.

  “Closer, closer than sisters. Odette has learned the art of refinement, though she still may lack tact sometimes, especially when she’s drinking, which is always. She’s a complicated creature happiest with simple distractions: Perfume. Champagne. Cigarettes tightly rolled for a lady’s mouth. Bathing in luxury or something that feels like it. A man who fucks like a demon.”

  “Antoinette,” she added, “practically is a child, but then she’ll surprise you. Earnest. Talks to everyone. Says whatever she’s thinking. But everything moves around her, like water.”

  Carles replied, “Nothing wrong with honest hearts.”

  “Until they get you into trouble.”

  The flood of music flowed, and so did the beer. The gypsy guitar’s thumping solo and the singer’s wild arabesques eventually appeared to carry away Carles’s moodiness. Germaine felt his posture loosen, his body inch closer. She walked them arm in arm through the crowd to dance, but she was aghast as he let the other couples moving onto the floor just pass in front of them. “You can’t do that here,” Germaine said. “We in France have to impose.”

  “On whom?”

  “Me, to start.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, I may push you away. Or may take you in. For me to decide. But I want to see what you’re made of. That is French. See how I take as I please? Do as I please. Give as I please. I always know what I want, even if it’s only to play. I will not hesitate.”

  Carles appeared thrown.

  “The people, look at them,” Germaine said. “They don’t care. ‘Get out of my way,’ they say. ‘I’m dancing. This space on the floor, I want it. I need it.’”

  “You sound like a dedicated Nietzsche acolyte.”

  “Is that how the Spanish try to sound smart, or just you?”

  “What you’re telling me is the French are bad people but know how to get what they want, for their own good or the good?”

  “All people are bad; all are good. But the math is a lie. Ten times good is less than one part bad.”

  “How are you divided?”

  “Moi? I don’t worry about such ridiculous things. I see good in everyone. But, then, what’s the use? The bad ends up weighing more. So it’s better to not worry, have fun, let someone else debate the right and wrong. There are no rules to this game.”

  “Are you old enough to be cynical?”

  “You see a face you think is young, but inside I am a hundred-year-old woman.”

  “Even more stunning, then.”

  “And what I’m telling you, it’s not cynicism. Just the antidote.”

  Germaine noticed Pablo and Odette and Antoinette and Pajaresco doing something like the quadrille—even if it was in the wrong time to the wrong music—and she couldn’t help pointing at them gleefully. She saw Carles beside her was still clinging to his beer glass. She grabbed it from his hand and set it on a table off the dance floor. “You’re a lush, you know that? One day it will catch up with you.”

  “Is that you being good?”

  “I never said I didn’t care.”

  Before Germaine even realized it, they were turning, slowly. Her hands were clasped around Carles’s waist, and he cradled the low part of her back. She brushed the ends of her fingernails up his side and felt him shiver. He clutched her tighter, the way she wanted him to, moving his palms against her hips, harvesting handfuls of her corset. He put his cheek next to hers as they spiraled around, and she pushed her face beside his until their lips docked. He pressed slowly forward, and she parted her mouth, letting him inside. Germaine was aware she very much wanted to be made love to. She tickled his tongue with hers while they revolved like an empty carousel at the fairground. She pulled with her mouth and tried to unravel his flesh beneath her palate. Then, she suddenly stopped to say, “Why aren’t you kissing me?”

  “Am I not?” Carles asked, looking befuddled. “Teach me, will you?”

  But Germaine pushed him away by the collarbone with both hands. “I won’t teach a Spaniard how to kiss, if he doesn’t know.”

  “Tell me, how does a French woman want to be kissed?”

  “Why don’t you read about it in a book?” she said, tearing back to the table and downing her beer. In that moment, she saw the truth for what it was: she’d fallen for a man who was determined to resist her and hooked another who had no idea how to have her.

  How was it that she—who’d sworn away guilt, promised to live belonging to no one, pledged to have no obligation other than her own satisfaction—had not freed herself from this entanglement? She didn’t need the money this badly. She kept a roof over her head, even if it were not ideal.

  The power of infatuation had puzzled her before, but she detected now an array of arcane forces acting upon her. Why, for one, could she not smother this nonsense motherliness? Not only this, she could hear echoes of a previous situation that had pinned down her free spirit. The safeguards she’d put into place had not functioned right. She was not only bound by the present but also the past.

  Germaine sat alone amid the piano music during a slow tune, rummaging through her thoughts, opening locked boxes deep within her and dusting off the contents to stare at them. Did she really know herself?

  VI

  The magnetism that pulls human bodies together is greater than the moon on the tides, Pablo was learning. It draws weary heads onto strong shoulders, hardened hands through satin hair—always seeks to shed layers of costume sepa
rating flesh. Fighting it is fencing the wind.

  The trouble is, attraction may not begin for two people in the same way, nor is it required to bear upon them simultaneously or at an equal rate, so that lust may burn for only one. In Carles, Pablo saw firsthand how this leads to the saddest of states. His friend was at the studio less and less and out of sorts when he was around.

  Pablo and Germaine, on the other hand, felt the same force of desire during each modeling session and whenever they were under the same roof. Every day, Pablo couldn’t help his yearning. He avoided being alone with Germaine, lest glances bloom into another traitorous, dangerous night.

  When Pablo invited Carles to join him at the Louvre one afternoon to browse the Franco-Flemish collection, then, it was both to flee Germaine and to selfishly keep Carles from her. Except that while they strolled through the museum, Pablo could not stop thinking about Germaine, her disarming humor and consuming stares. Of the way when her lips curled into a silent smile Pablo could almost hear the sly thought crossing her mind. He was dead certain Carles could think of nothing else, either.

  After walking past so many paintings of flowers, beggars, and Lady Madonnas, Carles finally said, “I’m in love.”

  “With Bruegel?”

  “To hell with him. With Germaine. It’s a flood, and I’m drowning.”

  “And what will you do?” Pablo asked, feeling his stomach sink. He thought to gently remind Carles of how a hopeless romance had nearly been his undoing before. “Don’t forget, love can hurt.”

  “With my niece, you mean? That was ages ago. Who can say what was going through my mind then? I was a kid, a dolt.”

  Pablo wanted to ask, And now?

  But Carles was already rattling on. “Germaine must feel it. I know that. It flows from me to her.”

  In fact, Pablo could see she was starting to absorb instead Carles’s disquietude, the way a nurse might catch the cold of a patient in her care. She was drinking more, slept late, didn’t seem herself. She was losing that blush of activity, the rapture in her eyes. Her nose no longer stood at attention quite so much.

  Pajaresco’s arrival a couple weeks ago hadn’t helped. The studio had become a mad place. He frolicked in bed with Antoinette day and night, devouring her from top to bottom like a croquembouche. She seemed happy to oblige, as if the repetitive act of loving were a process of sloughing off girlhood.

  Needing to show off his own virility, though, Pablo nearly kept pace. He and Pajaresco often made love to their mistresses at the same time, sometimes a few feet apart. This shared ritual affirmed them as intermediaries of divine womanhood and provided the household with its music, even though to Carles and Germaine it must have been an agony, Pablo conceded. From their bed in the other room, he never heard shrieks of joy.

  If nothing else, sex was a comforting distraction for Pablo from the two people who’d become his obsessions.

  More and more, though, he was concerned about Germaine. A few times, he’d woken in the night to find her outline haunting a window frame. His greatest hope and fear was that she stayed for him.

  “Have you told her?” Pablo asked Carles.

  “She thinks I’m joking. That I don’t know what I want, when that’s all I know.”

  Pablo paused them in their steps. “And have you . . . how close have you got?”

  Carles wouldn’t answer.

  Jealousy overcame Pablo. How could Carles waste the opportunity to lie in such a bed? He had no right to fumble what Pablo wanted so badly. “That hair,” he said, “her nose, those eyes, those breasts, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Of course! More than anything, I want it all, but the flesh, it no longer responds.”

  Pablo speculated that this problem must stem from what Carles was ingesting: the booze and the evil genie in that little vial. Carles had become as much a slave to his analgesics as he was to Germaine. To add to the chaos at 49 Rue Gabrielle, Carles had found that Odette, a natural and perpetual tippler of Champagne, was always a reliable companion on the road to inebriation.

  “Just take care,” Pablo said to Carles as they left the museum.

  For everyone’s sake, he thought.

  A week later, Carles stopped Pablo in the hall outside the studio. “All I’ve had is a cordial today—no morphine. Sober as a monk,” he said, reaching for encouragement.

  “Morphine?” Pablo barely knew what this was, only that Germaine had referred to the stuff as if it were laudanum’s ogreish cousin.

  “Soon, I will be like a bull.”

  “Very well, friend. I wish you the victor in this love sport of blood.”

  “You mean blood sport of love, don’t you?”

  “No. I got it right.”

  But Pablo doubted Carles would stay sober any more than he’d cease his devotion to Germaine.

  Listlessness was spreading in the household like a contagion. Germaine and Odette spent their afternoons drunk, with Carles passed out on the chaise. Pajaresco and Antoinette were seemingly the only people fit enough to stand, and they were most often horizontal.

  Even that pairing, though, Pablo envisioned heading for a dark turn. Pajaresco had begun seeking out other French morsels in the bordellos off the boulevard, exploits that he detailed to Pablo as if recounting a boxing match.

  “You sure Antoinette’s not going to be in for a rude awakening?”

  “That’s what learning is, isn’t it?”

  Arcadia, Pablo was coming to realize, shares a thin border with hell.

  VII

  As weeks went by and 49 Rue Gabrielle became an icy morgue, the city itself remained coquettishly fascinating to Pablo, meticulously unraveling its charms. Each time he set out to paint, there was more to admire. The nursemaids hurrying dawdling girls in white cotton bonnets by the hand in the Sixth Arrondissement. The mustached coachmen in high hats with dangling pom-poms swinging back and forth as their dappled gray horses trotted along cobblestone. Society women in feathered toques leading little poufy dogs who decorated Avenue Montaigne with almost cute filbert-sized crottes de chien. How was it possible that the midinettes balanced huge wicker baskets of batiste and brocaded fabrics on one hip in the narrow, crammed lanes? Or that intimately tangled lovers who would have required drawn curtains in Spain were on display as commonly as soft cheese?

  Other times, Pablo ventured past the perfumed paths of Le Jardin du Luxembourg to join Manolo for a café Turc and plates of honey-dripped sweets bejeweled with jade-colored pistachios. They sipped and nibbled, sucking peppermint smoke from an oriental water pipe.

  Some afternoons, they convened at the cafés along the boulevards with an array of influential Paris consorts who gesticulated with cigarettes and traded gossip, secrets, and witty insults. The chief of these gatherings was always Manyac, the dandyish art dealer whom Pablo warmed to since the man always lavished his works with enthusiasm, complimenting him for having such a penetrating eye. Finally free of Don José’s shadow, Pablo saw his prospects growing like never before. He knew now exactly how Casas had come to Paris and returned to Barcelona a self-assured artist.

  Pablo began to avoid the studio in the same way he’d once kept away from his parents’ home back in Barcelona. Germaine and Odette and Antoinette were barely part-time tenants now, attending only when their other means of making a living in Montmartre came under pressure or if it was cold; they always returned when it was very cold. Whatever separate accommodations they had, Pablo surmised, must be insufficiently heated or else very drafty. Even when the fire in the studio was out, at least the walls were thick. This, if nothing else, kept them tethered. Come spring, he doubted they’d ever see the girls again. While he was still lovestruck with Germaine, something told him this would be best.

  As for Pajaresco, his carousing had become a frenzied, full-time campaign to earn the adoration of every adulteress and prostitute in Paris so his name should forever be recorded in the city’s scandalous lore, a Don Juan for the Gilded Age.

  Carles also
disappeared often and at odd hours to places that only the devil knew. If asked about his whereabouts, he’d reply that he’d gone to the Théâtre Montmartre. But Pablo knew this was a lie because he frequently set up his easel across from this scruffy company that performed melodramas, and he never saw his friend coming or going. When Carles was around the studio, he nodded off midsentence. Pablo alternated between guilt and resignation over this.

  With winter bearing down, Pablo likewise felt both anticipation and anxiety, for he understood that the studio would become filled again. He’d walk home, noticing his breath in the air, knowing that Odette would be waiting for him. Maybe, he hoped, along with Germaine.

  But each frost that brought the models back to the studio meant friction. Once, Carles fell chin-first into a bowl of Provençal soup that Antoinette had fashioned with care. Odette laughed, said it looked like Carles had been scraping the bottom of the bidet with his teeth.

  “You’re a dirty little dishrag, you are,” Carles muttered, the broth dripping from his beard and eyebrows.

  Even though the modeling agreement between painter, poet, and hired muses had eroded over time, what was not forgotten was the money—Pablo and Carles still owed the second installment, as Odette continuously reminded them.

  Carles came home one afternoon badly bloodied. He’d been robbed by a phalanx of apaches, the gangs who struck out from their base in the Maquis, he said—lost his wallet while escaping with his life. It stalled talk of debts for a while. But how much more could they hold out? Pablo’s and Carles’s savings had been worn to nil. And Pajaresco already pitched in his share, long spent.

  There would be a reckoning, Pablo sensed.

  December removed the last leaves from the chestnut trees, and a slick enamel covered the pavement and left the hills of Montmartre like toboggan chutes. Cruel Atlantic gusts swept up from the Bay of Biscay, making sleet pellets sting like horseflies and blowing dogs off ledges. On a Thursday during Advent, the snow began in earnest. It didn’t let up.

  Germaine, Odette, and Antoinette hunkered down. Being at the studio must have been favorable to frostbite, even if not by much.