Paris Red: A Novel (18 page)

At first I thought it was just a regular period, but my head and whole body ached, and I bled so much it ran down my legs and into my boots. When I told Nise what was happening, she told me to lie down and press on my belly. So I did. She got me some rags and tucked them under me, and I lay on the bed and pressed with my fists, right above my mound.

In a little while the worst of the bleeding stopped, but not before I passed a blood clot the size of my fist. It came out onto the rag I had wedged under my hips on the bed. I saw it and it was the size of my palm.

Nise wrapped up the clot and carried it out in our slop bucket. I do not know if she took it to the trash or to the toilet in the hall, and she did not say.

“Je pense que tu fais une fausse couche,” she told me when she came back.

I nodded when she said it, but it still did not make sense. I had been sleeping with someone, but I had not even missed a period. Had not seen anything except the clot.

When I said that to her, she said, “Maybe that’s all it is when it’s early. Just blood.”

Then it did make sense. I did not have other words for what poured out of me except the ones she gave me, and I did not have another person to help me. And I do not just mean a person to help me understand. She got me a basin of clean water so I could wash, and she helped me scrub the blood from my skirt and wipe the blood out of my boots.

I said we were like sisters, but we were closer than that because sisters often fight, and she and I never did. We just loved each other and helped each other. We did not fight until the end, about him.

I walk and
walk. More slowly now that my mind is not swirling, but I know enough not to stop altogether. As long as I keep walking, the streets keep me company. And I go on walking until I get to the Rue de L’Essai, there by the Marché aux Chevaux.

I remember the place from coming here with my father, and I look for the strange trees that grow just past the wall, there in the aisle of the marché. They look different now because they have leaves on them, but I still recognize them: branches on one side only, growing away from the building, with knobs of twigs reaching upward. When I was little and saw the trees in winter, I thought the branches looked like knuckles with fingers.

I walk up and down l’Essai and Poliveau, Duméril and Cendrier. Find the building that has the crane and the rooster on it. When I find that I feel better, and part of me wishes I had my carnet de poche along. I would not be able to draw the building or the plaque with the crane or the trees the way I really see them, but a drawing would be a record of the day. No matter what the drawing looked like, it would mean something.

But I have nothing with me, so all I can do is stand and look. I do that for a long time.

And when I finally walk away to begin to make my way home, something inside me does not ache so much. So it must be enough just to see things sometimes. Just to look and see.

W
hen I go back to
the studio the next day, he is done with sketches and wants to begin working on the painting where I have a guitar over my shoulder and eat from a paper cone of cherries. Except there is a problem. For the sketches we made do with a crumpled piece of paper, but now he really wants fruit, and that is where things become complicated. Cherry season is over.

“We’ll have to improvise,” he says.

So he sends me out to buy grapes instead. And when I come back, that is what he has me stand and hold and pretend to eat. A bunch of grapes.

“What did you do yesterday?” he asks after he has been working for a little while.

“I walked.”

“Where to?”

I do not tell him I went to Baudon or that I saw Nise. “The Marché aux Chevaux,” I say.

“All the way there?”

“Once I started I kept going.”

“No wonder you look tired today,” he says. “I think you wore yourself out.”

“Well, once I got there I had to come home.”

He laughs when I say that. It is a relief to hear him. To be standing in front of him, there in the quiet room.

A relief to have him see me.

When he is
done for the day he steps away from the canvas, and that is when I can come and look.

Even though he made the sketches the other day, he did the painting today. That is how he works: sketch after sketch to prepare, and then the painting all at once, or as much as he can. So it stays fresh, he says. And though he painted me today, what I mostly see in my face is yesterday. The hand holding the cherry-grapes hides my mouth, but my face, at least what you can see of it, looks a little tired. Yet it suits the painting.

I do not want to talk about the day before to him, so I say, “The cherries in this painting are different.”

“Too much like grapes?”

“No, I mean they’re different from the cherries you painted for the boy in the red hat. The ones falling off the ledge.”

When he looks at me, I realize he does not know I think about his paintings all the time. Mostly the gypsy girl, but all of them, including the blond boy with the cherries.

So he gets that painting and carries it back to the easel to compare.

The cherries in front of the boy and falling off the ledge are bright red. Tomato red. The ones I am holding are more subdued. Blackish red, like a real cherry would be—except I have been holding grapes.

“You’re right,” he says. “I knew they were different but I didn’t know how different.”

To me it almost looks as though he painted two different moods. The painting of the boy is light and cheerful, and the painting of me is serious. Subdued. But all I say is, “His cherries match his hat.”

We stand there a while longer, looking at the paintings, and it feels nice. Standing together and looking at color.

“My cherries are the color of your pin,” I say.

“What pin?”

I point. “Your cravat pin.”

He looks at the painting of me and down at his chest and back to the painting. Says, “You have a good eye.”

The words are kind—a compliment. But that is not all they are. Because right now, he looks the way I think Nise and I must have looked the first day he showed up at Baudon. Caught out. I caught him at something, and it takes me just a moment to understand what it is.

For the first time I think he realizes I notice small things. For the first time I think he understands that I have been studying him, too.

“I want to
tell you an ugly thing about that boy,” he tells me after I dress, after I change out of the cloak and hat I was wearing for the painting and am back in my street clothes.

“The cherry boy?” I say. “He wasn’t just a model?”

“He was my helper at the last studio. A boy from the neighborhood who ran errands for me. I took a liking to him and I thought I might influence him. He wasn’t bad, really, but he often told lies. Anyway, one day when I came back to the studio I found him. He’d hanged himself. Just a thin cord—he was small. I’m the one who cut him down.”

When he finishes, I wait a while before I say anything. Then I ask, “Why did he do it?”

“I don’t know. He always seemed to be daring. Always pulling pranks.”

“Maybe all his pranks were him trying to get noticed,” I say.

He looks at me then, but he does not say anything, and it seems as though he wants me to go on. To tell him something more.

So I say, “Maybe he got tired of trying to be noticed. Maybe he decided he couldn’t try anymore.”

“Why couldn’t he try anymore?”

“Maybe he wished for something and one day realized it couldn’t be,” I say.

“I don’t know what he would have wished for that would be so dire.”

“Maybe he wished he could be your boy,” I say.

“Maybe,” he says, and looks away. “Anyway, that’s why I changed studios. That’s why I moved up here.”

He does not look back at me but stares out the window instead. And I know that, without meaning to, I somehow hurt him with my words.

“Don’t listen to me,” I say. “Who knows what people wish for.”

He finally looks back at me when I say that, and sees that I am watching him.

“No,” he says. “I think you know a great deal.”

He holds his hand out to me then and I take it. And we stand there for a long time. Just holding hands.

W
hen he finally asks me
to pose that way I am not surprised. It is the place we always have been going. But I am glad he waited—I feel more at ease in front of him now than I did the first time he did the pastel drawing of me fastening my garter, which was me putting on clothes instead of taking them off.

“You can go behind the screen to get undressed if you want,” he tells me.

“Why bother?” I say.

So I sit on a chair in front of him and roll down my stockings, and then stand up to take off my dress and stays, my chemise and petticoat. I turn away from him a little, but not much—a quarter turn. In my mind I tell myself it is not so different from taking off my clothes so we can lie down together. We did away with all the romantic fumbling weeks ago, and now we each undress separately, quickly. That is the kind of lovers we are. So that is what I have on my mind when I stand draping my things over the back of the chair: how we are together.