Paris Red: A Novel (32 page)

Still, when I get home to my room, I feel so tired the only thing I can think to do is lie down on the bed.

So I do. I lie down and stare out the window at the
HERBORISTE
sign. And I remember the day Nise stood outside Baudon and said to me,
Il nous perturbe
. At the time I did not understand, not fully, but now I think I do.

And even when I tell myself
he
is not the one who disturbed me—that it was the day with Steven that disturbed me, and my own decision to unbutton my dress that disturbed me—I know those things are not the extent of the truth.

Because though I was the one who chose to go to Rue Taitbout, he was the one who gave me the choice, who opened the door.

Because it was from his photos that I knew how other girls posed.

Because from those photos I know what a person may buy.

Because it was his friend I went to see.

Because he was the reason I wanted to do something that hurt.

Because in the end, even though it was my choice, it was him that I wanted to please. Not Stevens. Not myself.

I think about all of that, and then I think about sitting for Stevens in his fancy studio, on a red velvet chair that was not old or worn but bright red and tight and rich. About how even the air in the studio felt different on my shoulders and neck. Softer. About how it was Stevens who was drawing me but it was him I was thinking of. Him. About his face and him touching me, kissing me between my legs and then drawing me.

It all runs together in my mind, and I feel adrift, as if the whole world is tilting away. I do not know what else to do, so I close my eyes to stop the spinning.

And when I open my eyes again, I look around. I look around and then I stand up and begin to touch things: my dresses hanging, the copper scarf from the whore that I keep spread on the table, the small watercolors I painted where my hair is green and my skin is blue. I touch the ribbon I stole from him, and the locket he gave. Last I touch the sketch he sent me and the envelope with my name on the front.
Mlle Victorine Louise Meurent, 32 Rue La Bruyère
. The sketch of the two of us together. The sketch of his cock rising into me.

I look around at everything until I cannot look anymore, and then I lie down on the bed again, and I let myself sleep.

Hours later, I
wake up and take myself out to Raynal’s for something to eat. Only when I have hot soup in my mouth and bread in my hand do I realize how much it took to allow Stevens to look at me. To allow myself to be seen by anyone except him.

W
hen I get to Rue
Guyot the next day, he is standing outside, across the street from the studio, smoking. Waiting and watching for me, the way he used to stand outside Baudon. At first I feel a rush of panic because he has never done it before, waited for me out in the street like that, and for a moment I think he must be angry. Angry somehow about yesterday. But when I get close and see the expression on his face, I understand it is nothing like that. Nothing at all like that.

He is standing outside because the work is done. The work on the scraped-away painting is done. For the moment, he has nothing more to do except wait for me.

When I get close to where he stands on the street, he draws one last time on the cigarette and then tosses it. Twists once with the toe of his shoe. The toss and the twist and reaching for me so he can kiss me on each cheek all happen in one motion, smoothly, like moves in a dance, even though we are there on the street.

“Did it pass your test?” I say. “The painting?”

“It did. And you, Trine? Ça va?”

So before I can decide not to, I say, “I went to see your friend yesterday.”

“He told me. I saw him last night at Tortoni’s.”

He just stands there, looking at me, and when I see there is nothing to fear in his face, I can feel my shoulders go down. And even when I look away, I can feel him watching me.

“Was it hard then?” he asks. “To sit for him?”

“A little,” I say. “Different from you.”

I do not say it was nothing like being seen by him, that I felt lost afterward. À la dérive. But I think he must be able to tell. He must be able to tell from my face.

Still, all he says is, “I guess it would be.”

We stand there for a moment, feeling the air in the street, and then he tells me, “You don’t have to please people, you know.”

I do not say anything—I just look at his face, which is not kind the way Stevens’s face is, and is not a pool I can step into. His face is lean, and the plum shadows underneath his eyes are darker than ever.

“Make people please you,” he tells me.

And when he says that, I know Stevens said something to him. Maybe not all of it, but something.

“Make them please you,” he says again. “Make them work for it.”

And I think about the way he kneels on the floor beside the divan. The way he insists that I go before he does so he can feel it. So he can watch it. I think about the sign we saw one of the first nights we were together.
Demandez du Plaisir.

“The way you work for it,” I say.

“The way I work for it.”

We look at each other then and do not turn away, either of us. I can feel the whole world tilting again. Can feel myself being pulled out of my level again. But I want it. I want to be taken out of my level. And I want him. And for him to know how much.

“Come on,” he says. And he takes my hand, there in the street. And we walk into his studio together.

When I see
the painting, everything from yesterday drops away. The feeling of tilting, the way I felt when I came back to my room—it all falls away.

There is only the painting. Only it.

I am almost life-size. That is the first thing I am not expecting. I do not know why—I saw the scraped canvas the first day, and the back of the canvas every day I lay on the divan. I knew he was working on something large. But seeing the back did not help me understand the effect of the painting itself. Its presence, or how it seems to fill the room.

“It’s huge,” I say. When it comes out, I realize how rude it sounds, so I say, “I’m sorry. It’s different from what I thought it would be.”

“What did you think it would be?”

“I didn’t think I would fill the space,” I say. Because I take up almost the entire painting. My body takes up the canvas. The sketches and ink washes were all smaller, but even that does not get at what I want to say. When I saw the scraped-down canvas, the body did not fill the space. How could it?

“It’s almost as if you can touch me,” I tell him. “I’m right there, all of me.”

When I look at the hand that he agonized over, it looks exactly right to me. I don’t know how a hand can look as if it wants to move, but that is how my hand looks in his painting. As if it wants to seek out the soft cleft between my legs again.

It is only after I make sense of the hand that I can look closely at the face in the painting. The face that looks directly out. That challenges. That shows the impatience of the hand.

My face.

Except the face in this painting does not look anything like the face in the portrait he painted of me, the one where my hair was pulled back and dirty. It does not look like that portrait of the drawing he did of me squatting in front of him. It does not even look like my face in Moulin’s photographs.

Yet it is me.

I recognize myself.

I know the painting is me because I was here every day with him. But it is the first time I understand that what he puts in the paint is not only something different from what I am, but also something different from what he sees in me.

The painting has a life of its own.

“It’s me but it’s more than I am,” I say.

“It’s what it needs to be.”

“You made it different from the other ones, too.”

“The Titian?”

“All of them,” I say. “The snake-woman with a curved back. Her face was a long white bone.”

“The face on the Odalisque is a mask.”

“It’s a snob’s face,” I tell him. “This is a working girl’s face. You gave her a working girl’s face.”

When he does not answer, I say, “Can’t you see it? You’re the one who did it. It’s in her chin, in that little shadow under her chin. You made her real. She isn’t me but she’s like me.”

He looks at the painting for a long time then without saying anything. Without looking at me. So I think I must have said the wrong thing.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “It’s just how I see it.”

“No,” he says, and his voice is full of some kind of emotion. That is when I see he feels moved by something.

“You should do it, you know,” he tells me. “You should keep up with your drawing and painting. You have the eye of an artist.”

When he says that, I do not know which one of us is more upset.

So we do the thing we know to do, which is to lie down together. It is what comes next. It is what we really are, anyway.

The root of everything.

When we get
up from the divan, we go and stand in front of the painting again. I think he is still worked up when he tells me the next thing: that when the painting sells, he wants to give me a share.

“You’ve earned it,” he says. “More than earned it. It will help you. You can do what you like with the money.”

“You pay me each week to model,” I say.

“For your work. For your time. This will be at a different level.”

“When it happens we’ll talk about it.”

“Bien. But it’s a contract and I want you to hold me to it.”

I know it is his way, to talk about money and contracts. And I appreciate it, I do. But right now I want to tell him that I have fallen in love with the face he painted. I want to say I love her face the way I loved Nise’s face. That I love whoever it is on the canvas. Me and not-me. But I do not say any of those things. I cannot talk about Nise or about love or about what I feel for him.

So I reach out to the painting, as if I am going to touch it. “I understand her,” I tell him. “I understand who she is.”

“Yes,” he says. “I thought you would.”

Acknowledgments

To my agent Nicole Aragi; editor Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton; and Dominique Bourgois at Christian Bourgois Éditeur—thank you for believing in Victorine and me. Thank you also to Cécile Deniard, my French translator.