Paris Red: A Novel (13 page)

And I calm down. I do. At least it feels that way to me. Except nothing feels right. Women’s voices cascade around me but I cannot really hear them, and something inside me keeps getting bigger. It makes me feel dizzy.

I stop working on a plate. I wrap my burnisher up in its cloth and shove the whole thing in my apron pocket. The front of my apron is wet but I do not take it off—I just keep my hand on the bundle in my pocket and I walk toward the side pulley-door.

That is how I leave.

I am out in the courtyard, ready to walk out onto Rue Pastourelle, when I hear her behind me.

“Where are you going?” Nise calls.

So I stop. Turn around.

“To his studio,” I say.

“What are you going to do?”

“Something. Anything.”

I have four francs and twenty sous in my pocket. My money, not his. I give the francs to her. “Take it for the room,” I say.

It is not enough to help—it is just my half of the week’s rent on the room. But it is what I have.

“What will you do?”

“He’ll help me,” I say. “He said he would.”

“Why would you trust him? We were just a game to him. Don’t you see that?”

“It’s not like that,” I say. “It’s not like Moulin’s.”

We watch each other then. And I feel the thing I always feel when she looks at me. I feel the space her eyes create. I feel the air around my body.

“It would have been the way it always is,” I tell. “Except he would have been there with us. He would have loved us both.”

“You’re a fool,” she says, and she shakes her head at me. She shakes her head and shakes her head, and I know she is so angry with me she cannot speak. But when I go to hug her, she lets me. And that is how we say goodbye. Just two girls in aprons, hugging on the street.

Nothing anyone would want a picture of.

I
change out of my work
dress and then pack my things, if you can call it that. I get my other dress, my two chemises, my underthings, my washcloth and towel, pillow, and the rags for my curse. My sketchpad and green boots. I take the scarf from the whore and the two pillowcases out of my trunk but I leave the trunk. Maybe Nise can sell it. I know I cannot carry it. I put everything in the pillowcases.

It takes me about as long to pack as it takes to climb the stairs to our room. That is how light I travel.

H
e is working when I
get there. This time he is not surprised to see me, but I can see him taking all of it in: the bundles I am carrying, the breathless way I know I must look. I watch it all pass over his face. It makes me nervous but in a second I see he is not angry. Concerned. Annoyed, even. But not really angry.

“Did you and Nise have a falling-out?” is what he says.

I want to tell him, no, you were wrong, she and I are still friends. But I do not know if we are. I do know it is private, between Nise and me. So I just say, “I need to find a place to stay. Will you help me?”

“I came here to help you this morning.”

When he says that I understand he is not upset with me because I showed up with my things, breathless—he is upset because I left.

“I saw your money,” I say.

“I thought it would help you stay.”

“But you didn’t stay. So I told myself,
Go to work. Just go to work.
”

And though I don’t intend to, I end up telling him about Huberty and getting docked for the morning. About walking out of the shop. The whole day comes out.

“It’s still there,” he says when I am done. “Take it.”

I go to the table and see the same thing I saw this morning. The coins still in the same place, just where I left them. Where he left them for me. But this time I do not hesitate. I pick up the money with both hands.

“I need this,” I say.

And I think of the francs I gave to Nise and the room on Maître-Albert, and Huberty telling me I would not get paid for the morning, and I think I may just break down. But I do not. And I do not say anything else. I just stand there with his money in my hands.

He does not say anything and he does not come close. He stands still. I think he knows if he came close I would break.

I take the money from him just like I took his tongue on mine that one night. I take what he gives.

W
e’re lying on the divan.
He touches me, fingers me, and I touch him, too. I keep my hand around him.

“Can I tell you the truth about something?” he asks. He keeps his fingers in me as he says it, so I go on touching him, too.

“Yes.”

“I already have one son I don’t claim. I don’t want to impregnate you.”

I do not say anything but I do not have to. He can feel everything in me.

“Do you know things you can do?”

“Yes.”

And I do know. Julie told me, and women talked about it all the time in the shop. Single girls and married women—it did not matter. Everyone knew some kind of method.

“I’ll do something,” I say.

“Can I go back here now?” he asks, and moves one of his fingers.

“Yes.”

He touches the tight knot of me and slips his finger inside. And that is how it is for a while: I do not know where his fingers will go next, so I close my eyes. Let him play.

But he has only my wetness on him when he moves into me, and he goes in all at once. It hurts so much I yell for him to stop. I use the polite form. That is what comes out—
Arrêtez
.

So he does. He does not pull out of me—he just stops moving. I can feel everything beating in that place between us.

He kisses my shoulder blades, touches the sides of my breasts. I try to let everything go slack. Then I am more used to it. More used to the fullness there.

“Now,” I say. “Now you can.”

And he begins to move again.

A
fter, I am lying on
the divan and he stands beside me. I see one tiny piece of shit clinging to him, clinging to his cock, right at the head. It embarrasses me, though what do I expect. He looks down and sees it, too. Which shames me more.

But he calmly picks it off and then walks to the basin to wash.

“C’est pas grave,” he tells me. “Men think their cocks are swords anyway. It’s part of doing battle.”

M
odèle de profession—that is
what he says I am. Or that is what we are going to call me as I stand there, putting on my garter.

“It saves me the trouble of going to Pigalle for a model,” he says. “Or to Couture with his cast of characters.”

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

“Nothing. Do what you usually do.”

“Like this?”

“You don’t have to look at me,” he says.

So I look down and fiddle with the metal clip and the band. I keep my head lowered and when I get tired of pushing at my stocking, I let my fingers relax and just keep them there, the tips tucked under the band above my knee.

I know the tops of my breasts are showing, pushed up by my stays, but when I go to tuck my nipple behind the edge of the fabric, he tells me not to.

“I need that bit,” he says.

It all takes longer than the photographs at Moulin’s, and that is the hardest part. How long it takes, and keeping still, especially my neck. Every once in a while I push my shoulders down in such a way that I do not change position—I just push with my muscles and then relax again. It must not change anything because he does not tell me to stop.

At first my mind keeps wandering but after a while, everything in me goes blank. I stand there with my head down and my hands at my knee, fingers tucked in the band of the garter. It is not comfortable, really, but it is somehow peaceful. When do you ever stand somewhere, not doing anything? Even when you wait for a train, you never stand totally still—you pace, you check, you look around.

Now I stand perfectly still except for pushing down my shoulder muscles and blinking. And it calms me.

I do not know how much time goes by. He does not talk and neither do I. I go off into my own self, and with my head down, I cannot even see him. It is like being away from him. As if I have left him somewhere. Yesterday there was so much give-and-take between us, and now that stops. Or it stops in one way, and in another way it goes on. Because of course I can feel him there, looking at me. Studying me.

“All right,” he says then, and his voice sounds so peaceful I think he must have felt it, too. The relief at being silent, at not having to fill the air with words.

When he shows the pastel to me, I do not say anything. Maybe it is the not speaking, or maybe it is that I am still coming back from wherever I went in my head. But then I think no, it is seeing what he has drawn that does it. Even though the drawing does not show all of my face, it is clearly me. But it is also different from what I thought it would be. I have never seen my head bent, or the part in my hair, but even that is not what I mean. Somehow the drawing changes my picture of who I am.

“Is that really what I look like?”

“At this moment,” he says. “To me.”

I do not know how to talk about what I see, so I say, “Why did you make my stocking blue?”

“Because your hair is russet. Because the wall is yellow,” he says. “Because white has blue in it anyway.”