Paris Red: A Novel (16 page)

T
onight we go walking down
Boulevard Saint-Martin and over to Boule du Temple to see the street performers. I wanted to come walking here one night when it was still him and Nise and me. We would have been part of the spectacle, the three of us, with him in his ugly-fine coat and the two of us on his arms. But we never did. As it is, he and I fit in like any of the other lovers, soldiers and maids, workers together, but it is come now or not at all—almost the whole of the Boulevard du Crime is to be torn down, he says.

“Just like la Petite-Pologne,” he says. “We could have gotten you a bed there for two sous a night.”

“A bed and bedmates,” I say, and pretend to pick a louse or two from his jacket, but he grabs my hand.

We stop in front of some jugglers and a sword swallower, and he stands behind me, the crowd an excuse to press close. I feel him there behind me, and that sensation mixes in with watching the sword swallower’s throat work behind a white kerchief.

After the sword swallower finishes with his blade, we move further down the street and find a strongman. The strongman stands there, shirtless, and that itself is a surprise, but even more surprising is how ordinary he looks. He has a thick neck and is barrel-chested, but he looks no different from many of the men in the crowd. And yet he is different somehow, too. He seems to roll on his feet as he walks, and when he talks it is as if he knows every single one of us in the crowd.

We watch as he slips a wooden yoke over his shoulders. On each end of the yoke, a circle of wood hangs from three ropes, making two small seats. He tells the crowd he needs two helpers to help him show his strength.

“Two men,” he says. “Or girls if you like,” and when he says that the crowd laughs and calls.

“Non, non, messieurs-dames,” he says, and extends his arm to a worker in a blue smock. “I have my first. This voyageur.”

The man in the smock steps forward and stands beside the strongman. And once the worker in the smock is part of what is to take place, he looks over the crowd too, a kind of performer himself.

“I’ll know him when I see him,” the strongman says, eyes moving over the bodies in the crowd, judging their willingness and their weights. When the man looks our way and makes his face a question, I’m sure he will shake his head no and tell the strongman to move on without a word.

But he does not. Instead he nods and then he moves from the warm place at my back. Steps forward to stand on the other side of the yoke, opposite the worker in his smock.

And that is the trick: a man on each seat of the yoke, suspended from the strongman’s shoulders.

It begins with the seats up on two low blocks and the strongman in between. Each man takes his spot on the small wooden circles, but the ropes are slack. The strongman waits until the volunteers settle in, until each feels secure on the wood circlet, then he says, “Eh bien, hold on.”

And he squats down, right between the two seats, and settles the wooden yoke on his shoulders. He tests the yoke one time against his neck and then begins to stand. It is a strain—clearly it is a strain—but there is no real hesitation. Just a slow movement upward as the strongman steadies the weight of the men on his shoulders and holds the top of the ropes where they knot in the yoke.

When he is upright, standing firmly, he looks out at the crowd, and we all holler and clap. The two men on the seats look outward, too, but they sit still, feet off the ground, not willing to move or break the balance. The crowd is shouting and clapping, and the strongman’s face triumphs, but the two on the roped seats keep their serious expressions.

And then the strongman sets them down.

When we clap that time, it is for the strongman but it is also for them, the willing voyageurs, the perfect accomplices who did not even risk changing the weight of their faces with a smile. And as he makes his way back to me, I can feel the crowd turning to look at me, to look at my face as he walks toward me. Whatever we are to each other, something shows on my face and on his face, and the crowd sees it, and knows.

And I feel the crowd watching as he walks toward me, so I put my arms out to welcome him back from the daring feat and his time on the wooden circle but mostly so I can be close to him again. And when I kiss him on the mouth people shout and clap, and he and I are part of the spectacle on the street.

I think that feeling stays with us the rest of the night because whenever we stand watching something, he stands behind me, his arms linked up close under my breasts, like all the other sweethearts, like all the soldiers and their girls, and the workers and their women. He is my petit ami and I am his chérie, and I feel him against me all night.

By the time we get home, to my room on La Bruyère, we have been touching all night, and there is no modesty. He strips and lies down on my bed. When I ask him to help me with the damp flower of the sponge, he takes it from my hand and works it up expertly inside me. There is the vinegar sharp smell between us but it is all part of the whole, now. And then I am ready and he moves into me and it is slick, slick, slick.

That night he
stays with me.

At some point I feel him move away from me. I watch as he gets up, and I think he is about to dress, about to pull on his clothes and make his apology. Instead he goes and stands at the window.

“It’s raining,” he tells me.

“I hear it.”

When he comes back to the narrow bed, he says, “It’s good to be someplace when it’s raining.”

He lies back down beside me and we sleep until the morning, until I take him to Raynal’s Café for breakfast. Fifty centimes for the two of us.

T
he next time I come
to sit for him, I wear the dress I used to wear to Baudon, and I fix my hair the way I did for work, which is to say I leave it dirty and pull it back from my face. When I get there I know I have done it right because he nods at me.

“I want to get that working girl,” he says.

I stand in the spot he shows me and turn my head just a little to the left, but he tells me not to look in that direction.

“Look back at me,” he says. When I do, he nods and does not talk again.

So it is a glance he is painting. A sidelong glance. At least that is the way it feels.

And that is the thing that ends up aching about the pose—not my neck or shoulders but my eyes. The muscles in my eyes get sore and my eyes themselves start to dry. I can feel the air on the tissues. So I blink but each time I do, I look back to the exact same spot on the wall, just beyond his shoulder.

And just like the other time, in a little while my mind finds somewhere to go. I start off thinking about the strongman and the crowd, the serious way he and the worker in his blue smock looked when they took their perches on the circlets of wood hanging from the strongman’s yoke. And then I fall into thinking about Nise, and how she always liked seeing the birds that did tricks on the boulevard, and then I am thinking about Toucy and her kid, and the flowers her mother had growing up strings next to her kitchen window. The flowers I drew in my carnet de poche. Now that I have seen his paintings and heard him talk about color, how one color needs another, color is all I can see. It is why the purplish blue of delphiniums looks good with their green leaves.

Once I start thinking of that, I think of every flower I can: lilacs, hyacinths, oeillets, honeysuckle, alyssum, coquelicots, nasturtiums, bluets, violets, pansies, lily of the valley, morning glories, roses and peonies—peonies which sometimes smell more like roses than roses do. But that still is not enough, so I go through the alphabet and try to think of flowers for different letters, and that way I pick up acacia, anemone, aster, camellia, chamomile, chicory, cinquefoil, clematis, clover, columbine, daffodil, daisy, dogsbane, flax, foxglove, gentian, gillyflower, goldenrod, heliotrope, jasmine, jonquil, lavender, lily, linden, lobelia, love-in-a-mist, love-lies-bleeding, lupine, madder, marigold, mignonette, nightshade, orchid, primrose, soapwort, sweetpea, tansy, valerian, veronica, viola, and wisteria. It takes a long time to come up with the list, and to come up with a picture of each of the flowers in my mind, and where I was the last time I saw it, and in that way hours go by. And when I get all the way through the alphabet, I think about the Marché aux Fleurs on the Île, and how tomorrow is Sunday and the bird sellers and rabbit sellers will be there with their wooden cages—

“Ça y est,” he says, breaking me out of my thoughts. And when I hear his voice I close my eyes and keep them closed a long time, and what I see is not his studio or him but the marché with its small cages and flowers, all of it there on the quai, there in my mind’s eye.

When I look at the painting—when he brings me around to see what he has done of it so far—I know everything I was thinking about is there in my eyes. The strongman is there, and Nise, and flowers, and the flower market, but also the quietness of the studio and the air between us.

It is all in the paint. It is all in the expression on my face.

“I like my eyes the best,” I say, and he nods.

The blue bow in my hair, the fancy blouse, the black ribbon around my neck—all that gets added in after I sit for a while, resting, after we both eat bread and cheese back by the cupboard at the rear of the studio and drink one glass of wine. A blue bow because my hair is reddish orange. A black ribbon around the neck to contrast with the cream of my skin.

Still, when I am putting those things on, even though I partway know the answer, I say, “Why didn’t you just have me wear this from the start?”

“Because you would have been different.”

I understand, I do—the frippery would have made me feel different, or stand differently, and if he had told me he wanted me to wear a bow, I might have washed my hair and fussed with it.

But now that I understand, it isn’t necessary. Now I understand that what matters is honesty. What matters is where I go in my head.

So in a little while I say, “Just ask for what you want. I’ll give it to you.”

He looks at me for a long while after I say that, and I think he will say something. But he does not. He just goes back to placing paint.

When the painting
is done, we look at it together the way we did with the pastel drawing. This time I can see the focus is not my breasts or a blue stocking but my face.

Just my face.

I look plain. Not ugly, but not pretty, either. My lips are pale, my eyelashes light, and I can even make out the faint dimple in my chin. I look at all those things, I do, but I keep going back to my eyes. He has made them gray-green, and as I go on looking at them, I think I have never seen that color. And I think that must be why he made the rest of the painting so simple. Why he would not let me do my hair, why he kept my face naked. Yes, I am wearing a bow in my hair and a ribbon on my neck, but for some reason I hardly notice those things.

There is nowhere to look in the painting except my eyes.

And this time I know it is really how I look, not because I have seen my face that way but because I know what it feels like to look that way.