Lisette's List (40 page)

“Where are you off to first?” she asked.

“To breakfast in place Saint-Germain, then to pop into the galleries of rue de Seine until the Jeu de Paume opens.”

“I can walk there,” I said, pointing one toe forward in my new shoes.

“No,
chérie
. You’ll be on your feet all day,” Héloïse said. “Take the
métro.
”

We three left the apartment together and walked to the Opéra, where Héloïse went in through a side door, to work, and Maxime and I descended into the
métro
. We came out at Saint-Germain.

“What’s your pleasure? Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots?”

“Café de Flore. Maybe we can eavesdrop on an argument of existentialists.” I laughed at myself. “Let’s get an outer table on the terrace so I can see the spectacle across the street at Les Deux.”

I spent a few enthralled moments watching the corner live and move and have its vibrant being
encore et toujours
. Again and always, it would be so.

“In Paris, one’s home is in cafés, in squares, on bridges, don’t you think? They allow us to lay claim to the city,” I said, utterly happy.

“Truly, my erudite one.”

“You call me that here, where intellectuals toss philosophy over their coffee cups? No, no. I’m just trying to get over being a provincial by wearing a Parisian suit.”

“You were never a provincial, Lisette.”

“You haven’t seen me milk a goat. I got pretty good at it.”

“Yes, I have. You’ve forgotten.”

The memory sent a tiny bleat of sadness through me. Maxime rested his hand over mine as it lay in a shaft of sunlight slanting in under the scalloped awning. Despite my urgency to find
The Card Players
and to meet Monsieur Laforgue, we lingered in the warmth of the sun and of each other. Beneath our casual conversation lay the deeper issues—what we both thought about in solitary moments, and how revealing we ought to be.

I ventured an opening question. “Are you doing better? Are you more at peace?”

“Most of the time. When I’m busy with people in the gallery or
poring over documents of provenance, yes. But when I see something unexpected that reminds me, like an amputee, I’m thrown into despair about man’s hunger to hurt.”

“It’s not right that it lasts this long.”

“Monsieur Laforgue still remembers things from the Great War.”

“You are not Monsieur Laforgue.”

“True, but I am also not the same man you knew years ago.”

I placed my hand on top of his, which was on top of mine, a lumpy tower of knuckles. “Yes, you are. You showed me that this morning when I came into the parlor. If a man is pushed and falls into a mud puddle and is covered with muck, he is still the same man.”

He thought about that for some minutes.

“On second thought, you’re a
better
man. We have to acknowledge that those waiting years have served to ripen in us the qualities we need to go forward.”

“Us? You also? Are you at peace?”

“Of course I miss him, especially during long evenings with little to do other than think where to search next. At other times, I’m quite content. I have Maurice and Louise and Odette and her little grandson, Théo. We make a family out of odds and ends.”

“And the constable? No more throwing shit on his boots, Lisette.” Maxime’s crassness made me chuckle. It was so unlike him. “Not that you have to make him a friend.”

“He wants to be. In fact, more than a friend. He invited me to go to Paris with him. I said no, of course.”

“Were you tempted to say yes?”

I remembered the wreath, his venturing a truce, his revelation of his sorrow, the fleeting mutuality of our griefs. “For a fraction of a second, when I thought of Paris. But I wanted to be here with you.”

“Lucky for me.”

“Let’s go.” I set my napkin on the table.

T
HE ART IN THE
galleries between the secondhand bookshops of the rue de Seine was widely varied. I was seeing work new to me, and I began developing opinions. I liked Matisse better than Léger or Duchamp.

Outside Galerie Laforgue, as aware of my unpreparedness as of the odds against me, as hopeful as I was doubtful, I strode across the threshold, knowing that I had a trump card in my handbag.

An older man, his thick, silver-white hair swept back from his forehead in a perfect wave, was talking on the telephone. While we waited, I was drawn to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Bonnard’s paintings of the life of the streets and cafés made me feel a part of the grand sweep of Paris again. Maxime explained that Bonnard was a transition between Impressionism and abstract art. I tried to see it, but I didn’t know enough. Vuillard’s depiction of claustrophobic parlors and bedchambers and bathrooms—Parisian private life—piqued my curiosity but did not move me as much as Bonnard’s streets and intimate domestic scenes.

When Monsieur Laforgue was free, Maxime introduced me as his good friend. “Remember before the war we spoke about the possibility of Madame Roux training to be an assistant?”

He thought awhile, as though it were an effort to remember such a little thing after all the catastrophes that had taken place. There was a mistiness in his eyes that suggested the losses he had suffered. He was on the razor’s edge of saying no, he didn’t remember, so I leapt in and said, “Just being in this room is a dream and a pleasure, monsieur.”

“Ah. You like the Nabis and the Symbolists? How about the Intimists?” His eyes opened wide. “I saw you looking at them.”

Did he notice my embarrassment at my ignorance? Those terms were as foreign to me as Arabic and Swahili.

“I … They’re beautiful. I especially like the colors and the patterns of the fabrics.”

I liked the nudes too but was embarrassed to say so. Despite my blank look and inane answer, Monsieur Laforgue treated me with the graciousness he would show to a wealthy client. That must be what Héloïse meant by the power of couture. His refined manners emboldened me to say, “If you will permit me, I would like to show you something that might interest you.” I laid Pascal’s pages of the wives’ conversation on the broad desk in front of him.

He read for a few moments. “How is it that you have this, madame?”

I explained, then gave him time to read the rest.

“You say your grandfather wrote this?”

“My husband’s grandfather. Yes. He knew both of the artists and their wives. He traded the frames he made for paintings.”

Monsieur Laforgue cast a glance at Maxime. “Extraordinary. If this can be documented, it may be worth something. Did he keep records of his encounters with them?”

“Only a few notes. He was a simple man. He just told me what he could remember.”

“So you know more of his conversations with Pissarro?”

“I know what he told me.”

“And Cézanne?”

“Yes.”

“Write it down, madame, as much as you can remember. Maxime, make sure that she does this. Firsthand recollections of these two great painters are of inestimable value.”

He put the pages in a large, stiff envelope and handed them back to me. “Keep this safe.”

“I may be able to find more of his notes.”

“Excellent. Keep them all together and bring them when you come again.”

Maxime tapped his index finger on Monsieur Laforgue’s chest
and said, “Another day, when I bring her back, ask her about Chagall. She knew him during the war, and she knows his work.”

I thanked Maxime with my eyes for supporting me.

“Formidable!”
Monsieur Laforgue declared.

“Do you happen to know, monsieur, whether he and Bella are safe? I’ve had no way to find out,” I said.

“They made it to America safely.”

“Oh, thank you, monsieur. I’ve been so worried.”

“In fact, there was a large exposition of forty years of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

“How wonderful for him.”

A scowl of thought passed across Monsieur Laforgue’s forehead. His penetrating gaze rested on me for a long moment, which made me uneasy. What did he know that he wasn’t telling me? He added, “I may have kept a clipping. I will look in my files.”

“Yes, please do. Marc—I mean Monsieur Chagall—gave me a painting that I believe he painted expressly for me.”

“Astonishing! Is it signed?”

“Yes, with the words
May it be a blessing to you.
”

“
Merveilleux, madame!
I must see it someday.”

Monsieur Laforgue came to the door with us, and Maxime went back to the gallery owner’s desk to write something down. Monsieur Laforgue said, just to me, quietly, “Maxime is a great help to me. I rely on his spirit to keep me from discouragement.”

“I’m glad to know that. It’s my deepest wish to help you too,” I said, “even if it’s just dusting the frames.”

He gave me the kind of gentle smile an uncle might give a niece, and on the strength of that, I swung my skirt and stepped out the door with Maxime following, my new shoes hardly touching the sidewalk.

C
ROSSING THE
S
EINE ON
Pont des Arts, the iron footbridge linking the École des Beaux Arts to the Louvre, we observed its damage
from an aerial bombardment. Despite this reminder of war, I was heartened by Monsieur Laforgue’s report about the Chagalls. Maybe some wonderful day, I would see them again. I tossed a leaf off the upstream rail, and we hurried to the other rail in time to see it emerge. “See? That’s a sign. When the Seine is flowing, life is flowing,” I said.

We walked along the quay to place de la Concorde and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. It had been open for only a few months, Maxime said.

“You’ve been in it?”

“Of course.”

The ground floor displayed the precursors of Impressionism. Of them, I liked best Corot’s fishermen’s cottages at Sainte-Adresse. On the floor above, Maxime took me a roundabout way through the Impressionist galleries.

“I’m saving what you want to see most for last.”

The way his eyes sparkled playfully made me hopeful that
The Card Players
would be just around the corner.

It didn’t take much to sweep me up in the parade of color and inviting locales. In the Monet gallery, watery reflections quivered, regattas gave the Seine over to pleasure and sport, clouds of steam puffed out from Gare Saint-Lazare, and a black-and-white magpie sitting on the rail of a gate reigned benevolently over the tranquillity of a snowy field.

“It’s the one you thought of in my courtyard, isn’t it?”

He nodded, rapt. “It gives me peace.”

In the ballet school scenes of Degas, slim dancers in frothy skirts held their raised legs in arabesques at the practice barre. In Caillebotte’s snow-covered roofs of Paris, quietness and somberness prevailed, and in a scene of an empty room, floor scrapers prepared the wooden floor for refinishing. An unusual perspective, I remarked, and Maxime seemed pleased.

In front of Pissarro’s Louveciennes cottages there stood the
washerwomen and farmwives who had used his precious canvases as aprons. Still outraged, I told Maxime about it, feeling proud that I knew something he didn’t.

“Do you understand now, Lisette? Even though you don’t have an academic education, you have information and insights that trained dealers and critics don’t necessarily have.”

“Only of three painters.”

“But that can build. You have deep feelings. And you have curiosity. I can help you. We can make contacts with painters. Here. In Paris.”

“After I find my paintings.”

I turned, and there were red roofs behind trees, looking very much like Pissarro’s orchard and red roofs.

“Truly, Maxime. It looks like the same place as in Pascal’s
Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Winter
. He loved it for its warm colors.”

“Do you see now what an important painting you have?”

“
Will
have, if I ever find it.”

I
GRASPED
M
AXIME
’
S ARM
in excitement as we entered the large Cézanne gallery and strolled along Cézanne’s rocky cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea at L’Estaque, through the upward reach of a grove of poplar trees, and in the countryside of the desolate
House of the Hanged Man
. With Maxime’s guidance, I was seeing more—the wideness of Cézanne’s brushstrokes, thickly painted passages alternating with thinly covered areas, vigorous reworkings, hesitations, corrections.

Two walls displayed still lifes. Apples, pears, peaches, oranges, even onions. A flowered pitcher. A figurine. The same white compote. The same green olive jar.

“Look at the spread of the paintings’ dates. They show that he studied his whole life to give shape by color gradations,” Maxime said.

I turned around, and there it was.
“Les Joueurs de Cartes!”
I burst out in a voice too loud for a gallery. “You knew it was here all along!”

He grinned. “You said you wanted to find it yourself.”

Two players in profile seated at a small table faced each other and studied their cards in absorption. I could see that the bottle of wine between them on the table divided the scene into symmetrical halves.