Paris Red: A Novel (15 page)

When I try one, it feels like tucking some kind of damp flower up there. I have to use my middle finger to push it all the way up, until I hit the “nose.” That is what Adèle said the tip of it would feel like when I touched it. That is the part to cover.

When the sponge is in I don’t feel anything—just the tickle of the ribbon on my thigh.

It is the ribbon I show him.

“Do you have to use any powders with it?” he asks.

“Druggists sell them. Adèle said she used vinegar and water.”

“So that’s what you did?”

“Does the smell bother you?”

“It doesn’t bother me,” he says.

The whole time we are talking, I have my legs spread open and he pets me there. Smoothing the hair and fingering the ribbon. That is when I understand it is all part of the game to him. Part of the pleasure. I did not have to squat behind the screen to put the sponge in—I know that now.

“What do you do at the end?”

“Wash it out and soak it in vinegar for a while. Vinegar again.”

But he is already starting to move into me when I tell him that. Still dressed in his shirt and blue cravat. Lavallière bleue à pois blancs. He got his pants down and that was all, like some coureur on the street.

“So you have a bit of the sea inside you,” he says to me when we are done, when we lie together, still joined.

“A bit of the sea and a bit of you,” I say.

“What is he
to you?”

That is what Adèle asked when I talked to her about not getting pregnant. It took me a second to answer,
a lover
.

Not
my lover
—a lover. That is all.

When I tried to explain, she said, “So there’s money involved. Il y a toujours de l’argent.”

“Paris is full of whores,” I say. “I know. But it’s not just that.”

“What is it then?”

“True love,” I told her, and we both laughed like we used to at Baudon.

But it is not so simple. He and I are not so simple.

If he wanted a whore he could have paid one, and if he wanted two whores together, he could have paid them both instead of spending all that time on Nise and me. He chose not to. All that is true, but it is still not what I mean.

What I mean is that it is not always so clear what someone wants, or what money can buy, or who exactly pays.

When I was twelve or thirteen, when I sat at home and listened to my mother talk with the women who came to her with sewing, I remember them talking about a whore named Mezeray who had been killed in her bed. The story was in all the papers. It was not one of her customers who killed her but a young gardener named Guichet, from Vaugirard. Someone she had taken a fancy to and brought home to her bed. He made love with her, and then the two of them went to sleep. And sometime during the night he woke up and killed her.

He cut her throat with his pruning hook. Not even a knife—a pruning hook. And after he killed her, he washed his shirt in her basin and took some of her things. He sold them and went back home to Vaugirard. When they found him he was drinking with the money from her things and cleaning his pruning hook.

He told the judge he woke up once in the night wanting to kill her, but he did not do it then because she woke up, too. She woke up and turned to him in the bed and kissed him. So he had to wait.

The person who hurt Mezeray was not someone who paid for her, who thought she was a thing to buy. It was Guichet, whom she took to her bed not for money but for someone to hold and kiss. But he went to her bed not for sex or the illusion of love, but for the money he could get for her things. And in the end it was she who paid, the so-called whore, and not in cash but with her life.

Une bête
, my mother said when she heard the story.
Un vrai sauvage
.

So maybe it is true, maybe Adèle is right that it is always about money—le fric, le blé, le pognon, l’argent. Whatever you call it. I just mean that things are not as clear as they first seem.

H
e tells me he wants
me to wait to put in the sponge.

“If you put it in before, all I can taste is vinegar,” he says.

So we keep the sponge in a little pan of vinegar and water beside the divan. A sea creature in its own shell.

T
he room is on Rue
La Bruyère. It is another climb to the sixth floor, but this place is lighter than the one on Maître-Albert. There is a dormer window you can actually see out, across the courtyard to another building whose whole backside is painted white with
HERBORISTE
in black letters.

I do not know why but I like to see the sign. It is the first thing I check for in the morning and one of the last things I see before I sleep. It is always there.

I put the scarf from the whore on the table underneath the window. Put my sketchbook there, along with the candles.
Veilleuse Astrale, brûlant 10 heures
.

He pays for the room for a month, and the first time he comes to see me there, I tell him he can stay with me whenever he wants.

“I will sometimes.”

“Where do you live?”

“A hotel room,” he says. “Sometimes with the mother of my son.”

“You aren’t married to her?”

“No. I’m not married to her.”

“Do you love her?” I say.

“I care about her and the boy. More than I care about anyone.”

He tells me the boy is ten, that he is a fine boy. Merry and serious at the same time.

“I think it must be the situation,” he says. “The ridiculous lies his mother and I tell. Or maybe it’s my father coming out in him.”

“Was your father merry?”

“Hardly. Severe. Plutôt sévère. He’s still alive.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“A multitude of things,” he says, and I think of the painting he has hanging on the wall of his studio of his mother and father. The misery in the two faces.

“Were you in love with her once?” I ask then. “With the boy’s mother?”

“I met her when I was seventeen. She had a white throat and thighs like columns.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. She’s a wonderful mother. You could sleep on her bosom.”

“All women have bosoms,” I say.

“You don’t.”

“What do I have then?”

“Tits,” he tells me. “Tits that fit in my hands.”

After, we lie
on my bed and I am closest to the wall. I look out over his chest to the window, and I can still see
HERBORISTE
. I think it is seeing that word that makes me ask. After that night at Flicoteaux’s, I kept saying the word
Sallandrouze
in my mind, over and over, so I would not mispronounce it, so I could keep it in my memory.

“What happened at the Sallandrouze?” I say.

He has been moving his hand over my belly, stroking the hair down there, but now his fingers stop moving.

“Why do you ask me that now?”

“Because I’ve been remembering the word.”

“Why?”

“Because you wouldn’t tell the real story that night,” I say. “Because Nise said she didn’t want to hear it.”

“I wouldn’t have told you anyway.”

“But it meant something to you.”

He shifts on the bed, then, turning so he can lie flat on his back. So he can look up at the ceiling. At first I think he is not going to say, that he will refuse to tell me just as he did that night. But then he starts to talk.

“They did things in plain sight. They shot at anyone. Women and children. Not just people on the barricades.”

“That’s what you saw at the Sallandrouze?”

“We saw executions there. Tonin and I. One man was killed because soldiers said his hands smelled of gunpowder.”

He stops talking then, but I do not say anything. I understand it is better not to say anything.

“The next day I went with my class to the cemetery at Montmartre,” he says after the pause. “We went to draw, if you can believe it. And I saw someone I knew. The man I used to buy soap from. He was a merchant. That’s who I drew.”

“He was dead?”

“They’d covered the bodies with straw. Left the heads out in the open so you could see. And I saw him.”

He waits a moment and then he says, “He was probably out running an errand, or just going about his business. It was butchery. All of it. Soldiers were drunk with blood. I don’t talk about it. Not even to Tonin.”

I want to say something more but I do not know what. There is nothing to say. I put my hand on his chest and lie beside him in the narrow bed.

“You’re the last person I would have thought I’d tell,” he says after a while.

“Why did you?”

“Because you asked. Because you’re young and you should know.”

Even though I have not felt young the way he means for a long time, I know I am. So I nod. At first I think I cannot think of anything to say, but then I do think of something.

“What was the man’s name?” I ask. “The one who sold you soap?”

“Monpelas. He was a perfumer on Rue Saint-Martin. I used to buy sandalwood soap from him. Now I can’t stand the smell.”

Both of us are quiet after that. That is when I wonder if I should have carried the word
Sallandrouze
in my mind, if I should have asked him to tell me the story. But I cannot take the question back, and he cannot take the story back.

And because I do not know what else to do, I crawl on top of him. I kiss him hard, bump my teeth against his. When he begins to move inside me, there is nothing soft about it. It is hard and almost hurts.

In that way I take the story from him. I take it inside me, too.