Paris Red: A Novel (12 page)

“I’ll be back before it’s light.”

He kisses me and then he is gone.

The whole time I am deciding to stay, it feels wrong, as if it is a foolish decision. I could have stood up, pulled on my dress and boots. Could have asked him for money to get home—he would have given it to me. But I did not do any of those things. Instead I let him decide for me.

The room seems cavernous with him gone. I feel some kind of fear flash through me for a moment—but there is no running after him this time. No running to find him because I’m half-dressed and I don’t know which way he went.

So instead of doing anything, I just go still. I go on lying on the divan, letting my eyes move over everything in the room. I did not rush to pull on my dress and boots because I wanted to keep lying here. I thought I wanted him to stay, I thought it was just wanting the moment to go on, but now that he is gone, I see it is also something about being in this room and not going back to Maître-Albert. About breaking that life in two. I needed a place to be and he saw that.

Even without him in it, the room is him. I can be close to him without being with him. When that thought comes to me, I let myself close my eyes. If he were here I would never be able to think over things, but now I can. At first I think about the room on Maître-Albert and how I do not want there to be any hurt feelings, but I know there will be. I almost cannot stand to think of Nise there, alone. But she will come up with a way to explain it to herself. She will worry and then she will come up with the truth or a made-up story, and it will have to do.

I decide that and then I make myself let the thoughts go.

Instead I think about the ways he touched me, going back through each moment in my mind, playing it over and over. It is how I make sense of my feelings, of what just happened, but it works the way it always does: if I remember things right, it is almost as if I can feel the touch again. As if I have the feelings all over again.

I keep doing that until I remember the way he looked up at me from between my legs. His mouth was soft and scratchy at the same time because of the beard. I think of that, and of things he said. I think of it until I get sleepy, and then I let myself sleep.

When I wake
up things are not even gray—they are still black with only lighter black coming through the window. So I wrap myself up in the blanket, light a candle and walk around, looking at the paintings he has hanging. What I see is:

A painting of a boy in a red hat with a bunch of cherries on a ledge. The cherries are wrapped in green paper, and some are falling off the edge. Even in the dim light I can see the boy’s hat is a different color than the cherries. The hat is so brilliant it looks like a sun, or maybe I think that because the boy is fair and blonde, and his whole face is pale and shining.

The next painting is a man in a top hat with a glass beside him. He is wrapped in a cloak, and a bottle lies on its side at his feet. The man extends one leg, as if he were some kind of dancer, but that cannot be true. The man is not a dancer. That is not the feeling of the picture at all. But I do not know what the feeling of the painting is. The last painting was sunny, filled with gold and red, but this painting is dark. Just dark.

The next painting shows two old people, the man seated and the woman standing alongside. She keeps one hand in a basket of yarn, and he keeps one hand tucked inside his coat and the other clenched tight on the arm of the chair. The woman’s eyes are downcast, not seeing. Yet you can tell from her face she is suffering. He looks out and seems strict. Disapproving.

The painting beside the one of the old people is much bigger. A man sits sideways, head wrapped in a white scarf, playing a guitar. He must be singing because his mouth is open. From its size, I know it must be important, but I do not know why.

The painting I look at next is probably half the size of the last, and yet it shows a crowd of people, some seated, some standing, all under trees in a park. The men are in top hats and the women in fancy dresses. This painting is dark, too, but here and there are patches of color: the pale gray of men’s pants, the pink-gold ladies’ gowns, a blue ribbon holding a bonnet. I look and I look, but hardly anything about the painting seems real. Only one woman has a complete face with eyes and eyebrows, a nose and a mouth—most of the rest have just hints of faces. And though the men’s faces are more precise, only one man looks friendly in the entire sea of faces.

I look around the studio and think I have seen everything he has displayed, but then I see a couple of canvases he has sitting on a cupboard at the back, leaning and facing the wall. When I turn them around, I see both are paintings of women, but there is nothing similar about them. One shows a woman in an enormous white dress with gray stripes on it. The woman holds a black fan, and it seems she is sitting on the divan in the back of the studio. But there is something wrong with the picture, or with the woman herself. Her one hand is too big, her foot sticks out from her skirt, and her face seems flat and unmoving. She looks like a frightening doll. Her dark, flat eyes bother me, so I turn the painting back to face the wall.

So maybe it is just the relief when I look at the other painting, but I know as soon as I see it that it is my favorite of all. A woman in a white and gold blouse stands, resting her head against one hand, the other hand at her hip. Her skin is a darker gold than her blouse, and she has brownish-black hair and a white cigarette in her mouth. A white horse stands behind her, looking on, and he is patient-looking, the way the horse with the checkered sacks on Rue des Marmousets always is. And even though I like the white horse, of course I know it is the woman who makes the painting beautiful. I like the gold of her skin and blouse, and the deep red of her skirt, but what I like especially is her dark, messy hair and her face. I look at her face for a long time, and I think it is a little like looking at the faces of women at Baudon. It is a face I feel like I almost could know. And I think this is the painting he should have showed to Nise if he wanted her to understand how he felt about us, if he wanted the three of us to stay together.

It takes me a long time to look at just those seven paintings, and by the last I cannot look anymore. It is hard to take them in and to try to see whatever it is he wanted someone to see. I want to understand the paintings because he made them, but also because I do not understand how anyone can make daubs of color look like something other than what they are. How can you put paint on a canvas and make it look like a person’s face or a fold of cloth or a piece of fruit? How can one person’s face look like the face of a friend and another like an ugly doll?

I understood the funny little drawings of cats he showed us the first day because they were simple, lines and patches of shadow. But these paintings are not simple, and I do not know what he wants me to feel about the people in the pictures. The little boy with the cherries is pleasant and the old people seem sad, but I do not have any kind of feeling about the man with the bottle or the singer or any of the people in the park, under the trees. And yet I know there is something I should feel.

I am walking around the room, still wrapped in the blanket, trying to decide if I should lie down again, when I pass by the table by the front door and see the coins. He must have put the coins on the table as he left. Twenty francs. Not much to him but a ransom to me. No, not a ransom—but two weeks’ wages.

And that is when I know he left the coins for me. I know he left them for me, or at least meant for me to see them. And I know I will not take them.

But seeing them makes me decide. In a couple of minutes I am dressed, and in another couple of minutes I ease the door open and look out at the half-light of the courtyard. I pull the door closed behind me so it latches, so I cannot change my mind. But I would not change my mind because whatever uneasiness I started to feel when I saw the money is now a panic about the time and the quartier and how long it will take me to walk home and get my work apron and my burnisher and make it to Baudon.

Because whatever he meant when he left the coins and whatever possible kindness it sprang from, it has some kind of opposite effect on me. There may be other ways to earn money but I know only one:
brunisseuse
. And twenty francs are a handsome gift but that is exactly what they are: a gift. Not a wage.

So I hurry into the morning and onto the streets that are perfect and empty and filled with a kind of coolness you never feel except first thing. I do not let myself think about how he touched me or the things he said, I do not let myself think about the way he uses color in the paintings to make everything from a person to an animal to a feeling, and I do not think about the money he left on the table, there for the taking. I just walk as quickly as I can in the cool down Malesherbes and Saint-Honoré and down to the river and then back home.

To my apron and my bloodstone.

I
get to Baudon late.

When I see Nise across the room she smiles at me, but it is a wan smile and I feel bad. When I get to go by her table, though, all she says is, “Late night?”

“That depends,” I say.

And she smiles again but she does not say anything else. There is no time anyway.

At lunch she still does not say anything when we go out onto the street to buy bread and cheese. After a little while of the silence, I understand that she knows everything, so I say, “I thought it would be the three of us together. You and me and him.”

“I never did.”

“Didn’t you want to be with him?”

“At first. But not like that. Not with you there.”

I know it is only the truth. But something snaps shut in me when she says it. Because I would have been with him and her. Because of the day she brushed my hair. Because I have always been a little in love with her faraway eyes.

“We don’t need him,” she says. “Don’t you see that? Il nous perturbe.”

I shake my head yes because I know she is right—he is disturbing us. But what exactly do I have that cannot be disturbed? The room on Maître-Albert? A life with no money in my pocket?

I want him to disturb me. That is the thing I want to tell Nise. But when I see her face I do not say anything. She would not be able to hear me anyway.

After lunch Huberty
tells me that I will not get paid for the morning.

“I was only half an hour late,” I say.

“That’s the penalty,” he says. “You know that.”

I do know—it was part of why I panicked this morning when I was up on Rue Guyot. But I thought if I just came in, if I came in close to the time, it would somehow work out.

“Why did I bother to come in then?” I say.

“You came in to keep your job.”

When he sees my face, he shakes his head. “It’s not my rule,” he tells me.

Which I know. It is not up to him—it is just the way the shop runs. I try to take it in stride, try to just go back to smoothing out the lines of silver I made with the first pass of the burnisher. I focus on the thing underneath my fingers and when I find myself thinking of anything, I push it away the way I do the silver.