Paris Red: A Novel (19 page)

But instead of climbing on top of him on the divan, I say, “Where do you want me?”

“Here,” he says, and shows me. And positions the cheval mirror so the light from the window catches my side.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Anything.”

“Take down my hair?”

“Yes.”

So that is what I do: I stand in front of him and uncoil the bun I have my hair wrapped in. I hold a couple of pins in my hands and then I do what I always do—I put some of the pins in my mouth until I loosen the knot of hair. Then I take all the pins from my mouth and let my hair fall down on my shoulders. No, not fall—hair does not fall. I let my hair slip over my shoulders.

I want to ask him if it is what he wants, but I do not. He would tell me if he did not like the pose, and part of me knows it does not matter what I do. He wants to see me, that is all. I am doing something private and I am letting him watch. It is enough.

My hair feels soft and warm on my neck, but the rest of me feels the air of the studio. That is the thing I notice more than anything: the air on my skin.

“Now put it back up,” he tells me after he sketches for a while.

“I need a mirror.”

“Do it by feel.”

So I reverse the process. I put the pins in my mouth and hold the center of the twist with my left hand and wrap the length of my hair once around with my right. Then I switch hands and hold the twist with my right and wrap with my left. That is how I coil my hair, hand over hand, and when I get the ends tucked under, I slip the first pin in and then the others. At the end I reach around to check the coil, middle fingers and thumbs touching. He cannot see any of it because I am still facing him, but my arms must make a frame for my face because that is when he tells me to stop.

“Just stay like that.”

And I wonder what it looks like to him.

I have been thinking about the coil and the pins in my mouth, but with my arms bent like wings behind my head, I think about how my body must look to him now that he is drawing me and not touching me.

“Look at me,” he says.

So I do. With my hands still touching my coiled hair, I look toward him and I let every single thing inside me show on my face, on my breasts and belly and legs.

When his eyes meet mine, I feel light-headed and dizzy, and my body starts to heat up the way it did when Nise and I were at Moulin’s. But I keep on looking at him, and he must know what I am feeling because just then his whole expression softens. I do not know how else to say it. His eyes change and along with that, his whole face grows kinder.

He does not say anything but he does not have to say anything, and the worst of light-headedness passes. He goes on looking at me, watching me. Making light marks on the page but mostly just watching me. Wanting to make sure.

After a few long moments in the silent room, he begins working steadily again. Turns his full attention to the sketch. Only then does he say, “Ça va?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m here.”

When I go
to get the francs from the table by the window, I watch him begin to write in his notebook the way he always does, Victorine Meurent, and the amount he has stacked neatly for me.

“I should use your real name, you know,” he says. “For my records.”

“That is my real name. Victorine.”

“I thought that was made-up. I thought that was your joke.”

“It’s on my birth certificate,” I say.

“Why did you tell me it was made-up?”

“Nobody was telling the truth then,” I tell him.

“But I heard Denise call you Louise,” he says. “I know I did.”

“That’s my middle name.”

Finally he nods. So there it is, in his notebook:
8 septembre 1862, Victorine Louise Meurent, 25 francs.

One week’s work.

I
am walking home from his
studio, looking in shopwindows, looking at the people, daydreaming, when I smell her.

I mean that seconds before I see someone standing in front of a store window, before I realize the scent comes from her, I smell jasmine. It is heavy enough to waft out into the air behind her. When I realize the perfume comes from her, I pause as I am passing to see what kind of woman would wear such a heavy fragrance. I can only see her from behind, and that is when I notice the sharply cut jacket with the velvet piping, the hat pinned to her hair at just the right angle to show off the massed curls and long earrings.

Only after I take in all that—the jasmine and the velvet and the jet earrings—only then do I see the rash on her neck.

Fingers of red reach down from her hairline and disappear into her collar. When I first see them I think they are birthmarks, taches de vin. But they are not. The rash is raised. Weeping in places.

I look for another long second and then I turn away from the smell of jasmine and the weeping skin. Turn completely away.

Yet even after I move off down the street and go blocks away, I still feel as though I can smell her perfume.

The pieces do not go together. To pin up her hair tightly under a hat instead of keeping it low on her nape, to choose earrings that draw even more attention to the neck. To take that level of care—and then the offended skin. And yet what choice is there? To hide?

Sometimes I saw people with it at Baudon. One of the engravers had a bad case. He was young and good-looking, handsome even. He looked fine until he lifted his hair out of his eyes and then you could see the ulcers on his forehead. Circles and disks. Every day at work people asked him, “How are your ‘buttons’?” and they would laugh. He took it, took the constant ribbing and insults, but when he healed, he quit. Moved on.

And why wouldn’t he. Why not go someplace where people did not know his business? It is easy enough to disappear in this city.

The engraver was not the worst. Once, when I was about eight years old, I saw a woman with a veil on the street. It was not the airy netting they put on women’s hats—I do not mean that. She had the lower half of her face wrapped in a scarf even though it was not cold. When I asked my mother why the woman had a scarf on, she said, “Not now.” So when we were a little further down the street, I asked why again.

“She probably doesn’t have a nose,” my mother said.

Of course I turned around when she said that, to see if I could still see the woman in her veil. I thought I could make out the back of the woman, but I could not see her face. When I tried to recall what I had just seen, I realized I did not remember seeing any lift in the scarf where a nose would have been. That is when I understood what my mother meant. The scarf fell straight from right beneath the woman’s eyes.

“She could have got it from her husband,” my mother said then, even though I had not asked anything more.

I did not understand what my mother meant, how someone could lose her nose because of her husband, but something about the comment made sense. Because that is what the woman looked like. Ordinary. In a dark dress with a whitish collar. Like my mother. Except she did not look at all like my mother because she had a scarf covering her face. And because above the scarf, her eyebrows were knitted together, as if she were in pain.

Plombée. Poivrée. La grande vérole. La baude. People call it all kinds of things.

I get nearly all the way home before I think about how I did not see the jasmine woman’s face.

I
do not think it is
a coincidence that it happens after I start posing naked for him. My nakedness makes everything that much sharper between us. That much keener. Sometimes the air in the studio seems as though it is water, as if I could swim in it. Other times it feels like the air after a rainstorm.

We are coiled together on the divan when it happens, my mouth on him, his mouth on me. I pull away from him so I can make the sound that comes up out of me.

“Is that the first time?” he says when I am done.

“With you, yes,” I say. But as soon as the words are out, I hear how they sound, and I say, “I mean it’s the first time with a man. There was never time before when I was with someone. It was always rushed.”

“But you felt it before,” he says.

“By myself. When I touched myself.”

Of course he wants to see me touch myself then. He moves the big cheval mirror to the foot of the divan and tilts it a little, and when I look into it, I can see my face, but also my hand on my sex.

He comes to lie beside me then. I can see myself and I can see him, too. I can watch his face as he watches me.

“Now show me,” he says. And slips a finger inside to help.

After, when I
wake up from napping with him, I look around the studio and then at him sleeping, and something feels different between us. Maybe because of what happened today, maybe because of the posing. I close my eyes, but when I look back at his face again, he is awake. Watching me.

When we begin to touch each other—when I touch him there and have my hand around his cock—I let my one fingertip go to the rough scar at the base. It is not a big spot but the skin is thicker there, paler than the rest. I keep my fingertip there and I look at him.

“Ma cicatrice,” he says. “I wondered when you would ask.”

“What’s it from?”

“A malady. A bad story. When did you notice it?”

“The first time we were together,” I say.

“You don’t have to worry. It healed long ago. I got it from a very nice woman.”

“Nice?”

“Yes,” he says. “Let’s leave it at that.”

I do not tell him the scar frightened me when I first felt it. That I did not feel it until he was about to move into me. That I stayed frightened until after, when I saw the healed skin.

“Did it hurt?” I say instead.

“Like the devil. Along with the treatment.”

I want to ask him more about the woman, but I do not. It is his story to tell or not to tell. Still, I cannot help remembering the perfumed woman I saw walking on the street. Whether she was nice or not I cannot say, but she had money and it did not matter. The rash still snaked over her neck.

But it is one thing to have weeping skin and another to have a scar.

So I keep touching him and running my hand over him until he gets hard. I make a point to include the scar. Not to be afraid to touch him there, too.