Paris Red: A Novel (24 page)

I know because this time I do not go anywhere in my head. I stay right there on the divan with his voice. And once I look at Moulin’s camera, I do not turn away.

That night when
I go home to La Bruyère, I think again about how I felt when I saw the lace throw on Moulin’s divan. How what immediately came to mind was all the other girls with dirty feet who had lain upon it. Shown their asses and breasts or splayed their legs.

They were probably like girls I grew up with, or girls at Baudon.

Girls like me.

A
fter Moulin’s, something new begins
to happen when I take off my clothes and lie down on the divan in his studio.

When I first started posing naked in front of him, it was still about pretending, just the way it was at Moulin’s. I pretended that none of it bothered me, and soon enough it did not. Soon enough I became the thing I saw in his eyes. But now another thing begins to happen.

I get bigger. In the space I take up, in the way I feel in the air of the studio. I let myself fill the room.

And if I do it right, I become someone else. Not just the thing I see in his eyes. Someone bolder, more experienced.

And that is what I always craved—experience. With the boy I stayed out with all night when I was fifteen, with the man I left home for, with the long-lashed soldier who held me on his thighs, who made my tongue sore. Because even as a girl I never believed older people when they said things to warn me. I wanted to be taken out of my level of experience. My depth. Sometimes things happened and they were shocking. Or painful. But that is how I became accustomed. And some things I never became accustomed to. That was the price I had to pay for experience.

There is the body he sees and what I am. I know they are two different things. I understand that. But more and more, I can be anything he likes. Anything I like. A matador, a street singer, a society woman in a pink silk robe. And it is not just costumes and clothing I can change—I can even alter the way my face looks by changing what I think about.

Sometimes I remember his story about the soldiers and seeing the body of the man who sold him sandalwood soap, and my face changes. Or I think about what muguet des bois smells like, or peonies, or even my mother’s metal shears, because metal has a smell, too. And my face changes again.

Sometimes I think about how it feels when he is behind me on the divan, how it is deeper than when we lie face to face. I do not know what shows on my face when I think of that, but I know something does. I can feel it.

I can give anything he wants me to give. And anything he wants to take, he can have, because I have more. I always have more.

W
hen he shows me Moulin’s
photos days later, it takes a while to recognize my face.

But why would I recognize myself. I do not know what my face looks like when I am with a man, and that is what Moulin captured. Me with him. Even though he was not part of the photos, even though we did not touch at all, he is there all the same.

In one photo I have my head turned to the side a little but I am still looking toward the camera. My eyes are heavy-lidded, and I look knowing and patient.

In another photo, I see the beginning of a lazy smile but not the smile itself.

But it turns out he is not interested in my face.

“I’ll work from life for your expression,” he tells me. “It’s the shadow and light I want.”

In the photos I do not look at all like the serious girl in the portrait he painted of me in my work dress. The only photo that looks anything like that portrait is one that Moulin took of me standing. My back is to the camera and I look sideways over my shoulder, so the photograph shows my face is in profile—the plane of my cheek and my eye from the side. I do not know why a profile should look most like the portrait he painted, but it does. There is something similar about the seriousness of my face in both. And that is the only thing linking the photographs and his painting. They might as well be depictions of different girls.

And yet even as I think that I know it is not right. Of course the photos are me. All of them. Just as the portrait with the blue ribbon and the red chalk sketches are me. Faces change all the time. I am different now, standing there with him at the table in his studio, than I was this morning when I woke up in my room and stared at my blue box of candles.

Different phases of the same person.

Different accounts of me.

S
ometimes he works right after
we lie together. Sometimes he stands naked, too, working. His cock still slick with me.

On those days the studio feels like the freest place in the world. The whole room is filled with us. With him, with me.

A
fter a few days, when
he shows me the ink washes beside the photographs, I understand why he wanted me to go to Moulin’s.

When he sketched with red chalk, he pared everything down to shape and line. Now, working from photos, he distills everything down to light and dark. Images made of sepia ink and white paper. Sometimes a bit of charcoal pencil.

In two, he uses a thinner wash of ink to show shadows. Mostly, though, it is the deep brown of the ink versus the white of the paper, and that is all. Dark and light. On those sketches, if I pull back and look a certain way, the ink shapes do not even look like a body. But then my eye takes over and makes a picture of them again. Makes them into me again.

So there I am: a swath of dark ink along one side and under the other arm, a crescent moon of ink for a breast, a line of ink to show the up-and-down indentation of my belly. Ink for hair.

Looking at the new washes I do not know which I like better: the airy, red chalk drawings that I thought were perfect, or the bold inks.

When I tell him that, when I ask him how he will choose which one to use as a guide, he says, “I don’t choose. I need it all.”

The thing is, as soon as he begins to say it, I know what he is going to say. And understand it without him explaining.

“You never did so many sketches before.”

“I think it will be an important painting,” he tells me. Then he says, “What else would I be doing with my time anyway?”

And from the sound of that I know he is pleased with the inks. Pleased with himself, and with me.

When the knock
comes at the studio door, I am lying on the divan, and he is getting ready to begin a new ink sketch. I take my clothing and slip behind the screen he has at the back of the studio, but there is no time for him to tuck away the new work or stow the chalk sketches he has spread over the table and clothespinned to a length of cord strung along the wall on the side of the studio.

“You’re not still working, are you?” I hear a man’s voice say. I know the voice—I heard it the night he introduced me to his friends—and in a moment I am sure it is the one he calls Astruc.

“I certainly can stop by later,” the voice says.

“No, it’s fine. I was finishing for the day.”

I can tell by the way the voices sound that the two of them are standing in the side entryway, a narrow nook of a room, and yet even when he brings Astruc into the studio itself, he keeps him there at the front, where there are wooden chairs and a small table. Still, Astruc must see the state of things, because again he says, “Really. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back later.”

“Have a glass of wine with Mademoiselle Meurent and me,” he says then. “We’ve both worked hard enough for the day.”

And he must gesture to the screen at the back of the room because I hear the voices turn, as if both men had turned their backs to my direction. Not that there is anything to see—the screen blocks off a small recess, which is its own room really. I am changing back where he keeps painting supplies and canvases.