The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (7 page)

My traveling companion had shed his clothes and wrapped himself in a robe the color of wine, as familiar to him as my old goose-dress was to me. He shrugged it off in an easy movement, its folds puddling to the floor. A precarious laugh bubbled up in my throat—alarm, excitement, giddy disbelief. I dared not look, but did see in the shadows a lean and muscled whiteness there; then dark . . . He laughed and stepped over the tub's edge. I knew then, but not before, that I was to drown.

Oh
—my arms around his waist on horseback, so close. And on board the coach, inside a locked box that smelled of cologne and leather and horsehair.

“Climb in,” he said.

I inhaled the water's wild perfume; sucked in my breath and stepped over. My chemise floated up (pantaloons were unknown to me then), and the water went in up to my calves, knees, thighs—then tickling warmth reached all the way inside me and the careening laugh came again. Stephan stood, firm as a flagpole, raining droplets of bath water. I screwed my eyes tight and plunged. (
Allumette—bistoquette—colonne—goujon!
A match, a cue, a pillar, a pin, a worm, a wooden leg—street argot that I had yet to learn. How did I know there were so many of them in the world—male members—and how they liked to behave?)

“Lift your arms—you're not bathing in your chemise.” Stephan turned me and undid my laces, plundered the soggy garment. Candlelight flickered over my flesh, and I gasped and pulled up my knees. Some girls my age had never seen their own navel, but I was not one of those. Still, I had to gasp for breath in these unfamiliar waters. My breasts floated, rosy with the warmth. Stephan reached around me and cupped a palm around each, softly pulling me to him; both of us awkward; he was not as sure as he seemed. I might have shivered and drawn away, but the warmth pulled like a string from the nether regions to my heart, and I leaned back, and rested.

“You've brought along half the mud clods of Gascony, I see,” he murmured. Then with a cloth like a lion's rough tongue he scrubbed my back and belly. His palms, with the cloth, followed the curves of my body—breasts, waist, softness of belly . . . lips, then—warm and steamy, traveled where hands had never been, turning me at last toward his mouth.

“I'm hungry! Is there anything to eat?”

“
Foie d'oie
from your village and some very old champagne. Not a crumb of anything else until tomorrow, when we can send Léonie to market.” He rose and stepped out of the bath, lifted me out in turn; settled us both on rugs in front of the fire. Lips buried in my neck; damp curls twisted between my fingers; we touched, kissed, leaned into each other for a very long time until our skin was warm and moist and waiting. The dark posts on each corner of the bed spiked up like trees and the filmy bed curtains surrounded us like fog. One could get lost in a bed like that, or fall from the height.

“You'll stay with me, then, little goose?”

What else, where else—in the world?

 

We broke into our stock of
foie d'oie,
what Stephan had held back from the shipment. The rosy brown
bloc
was flecked with gold, nearly melting in the warmth. Stephan cut into it with a penknife, raised the blade to my lips, but teasingly, pulling it a little distance away as though it might scald.

I took the blade from his hand and licked it, allowing the rosy morsel to grow moist on my tongue. The stuff tasted like salt tears, like the dusky flavor of rain on earth, or morning light slanting, dustily, through the forest. Sun on the fields, purple clouds over the Pyrenees. Something so terrible and familiar like my own bones and skin, the milk from my own breast—the stuff that made me, had made us all, in that rough corner of the world. I tasted, and tasted again, tears rising. I had hardly ever tasted it. He took the knife and dropped it to the floor, moving his body closer, seeking my mouth with his.

“The candles are burning, we mustn't fall asleep”—I slipped from bed to blow on the tapers, then licked my fingertips and extinguished an orange-glowing wick. The taste of smoke and tallow on my tongue, as I wet my fingers to put out each tip, joining the bouquet of salt and rain and goose fat.

“Don't worry so,
come
—”

We slipped between linens softer than spring grass, the heaven of our bodies pressed together: musk, licking flames, tangled sheets. Made love half-dreaming amid the damp linens until I fell into the void between flesh and nothingness, a refuge of sweat and perfume, where the certainty of flesh answered a surge of breath and blood and heart. It was a shimmering field, a breeze rippling across golden stalks.

And so that night I began to shed, hardly knowing it, the fur-matted, pond-bathed, forest-floor earthy roughness in which I had lived all my life. The old things I'd thrown off were like animal skins, dark and coarse, thrust down in a corner; a gentle humid ferment of the fields. While below, more deeply, but sunlike too; a pulsing arose, sure and steady, pressing from within . . . A window flung open; perfume of late summer roses, the last blooms of the year. Beneath him, I burst like a September rain cloud.

 

The pool, the trees, and the cold, voluptuous marble of the Luxembourg—it was all as it had been moments before. Too chilly now, too dark; time to go. A turning, then; a quickening deep inside me. Not hunger . . . not fear or cold, but something warm, fluttering, tingling, a touch like a sigh. Feathery, winging pulse.

***

Back at the Tivoli, no Stephan and no word of him, not that day or the next, nor the one after that.
No word
 . . . When did I realize that there would never be a letter? That my erstwhile lover would not gallop through the Passage, or alight from a cab, nor would any of the other hundred imagined scenarios unfold?

The fairy eye has closed,
my aunt used to say, when the forest fountains ceased granting our wishes. When luck ran out, or went rotten. There was a familiarity to it, this sense of loss. I searched my memory for omens of betrayal missed, ignored, shoved aside by an urgent heart, but the candles guttered out before I found any answers.

And in some sense, it did not matter, the whys and hows of it. But of course, love does not believe or understand that; love simply weeps; it is bereft. A deep current of movement, and from below, from some uncertain interior part of me, rose a question, an unsteadiness. For the barest moment, the wisp of a desire to reverse the course of events, those of the present moment but perhaps others as well; events from long ago. A crumbling wall, the music of glass shattering, falling onto a stone floor in a million tiny fragments. The tearing of old silk, blue and ivory; patterned crystal; the beating wings of a large bird; a man's body stretched full upon mine, his lips on my breast; a caress, melting away.
Such a long road. So tired.
Then uncertainty, and I fell a long, dark way.

 

Above the rooftops, the air was thin. Another day, one more sitting. One in which the coals that offered the atelier scant warmth burned down more than they were lit; and Chasseloup stared out at the buttes and smoked, a scarf wrapped round his neck. The studio's expansiveness had narrowed to a foggy, helpless anxiety; a state of arrest. From my position, standing on the wooden slats, I watched the progress of the day's light: dawn slowly grazing the wide surrounding sky, clouds wisping past windows. In some distant part of me, a bell clanged an alarmed tocsin, and yet I did not move.

Chasseloup accused me of standing as though all of my blood had drained from my veins. No position pleased him. “What do you think it is, this game, to work when you feel like it?” He retreated to the windows. I wrapped myself in a dusty length of cashmere from the rental rack and sat down on the box.

He rolled another cigarette, the twentieth of the day. Stared out through the north exposure, toward Montmartre, invisible behind the flat, sleeting sky. He flexed his fingers and sighed. “I'm sorry. It's not your fault.”

I began to cry. Chasseloup swore at the falling sleet.

On the easel was a line, rough and dark, but graceful. The contour of a shoulder, stretch of leg, curve at the waist. A girl half-turned, looking over her shoulder. Brief reprieve; shaft of light in the dark tunnel of self-recrimination.

“That is a good line,” I said, wiping my eyes with a handkerchief from the bins. “Berthe—my mother—taught me a strong line from a weak one.”

Chasseloup flipped through the pages on the easel. He shook his head. “She studied?”

Tears, and the ghost of an emotion tightened my throat.

“Her teacher was an old painter.
Very
old.” I smiled through my tears. “He hated Paris; he also thought there were too many railways here.” Pierre's smoke curled upward; his eyelashes were so long, they lay against the curve of his cheek like a child's. That I was his
present cure,
like wormwood, and he mine, had pulled us together through the hours.

“You must be cold,” he murmured. “Dress if you'd like. I am sorry to keep you.” He let out a breath and leaned back. He was tired. More tired, today, than I. It would not be so difficult to slip my arms around his shoulders and feel his warmth; be of comfort if not of use. I drew in a breath.

“You just need to go on,” I said. “I'll stay if you'd like.”

The painter turned abruptly, looked at me where I stood, the length of cloth draped around my shoulders and falling. He adjusted the shades.

Was it just then, or a bit later . . . after the gaslights twinkled bluish on the street below us, that he turned. Pressed his face into the barely curved area of my belly, against the dusty pink shawl, folded me into him as though he had been doing so all along. And perhaps we had been holding each other, on a sightline across the studio, and it was not what was on the easel that had been important.

His scent of earth; of linseed oil and iron. Two hundred stairsteps into the sky I shed my shattered self, breathed in moments, one to the next. My present cure, the coiling, bone-melting green; his arms now around my body, ever warmer in a room full of windows, seven winding stories above the street. And so on a pile of rental dresses and Sunday suits, I made love to that part of him that wanted release; found the way to him with my lips, my hands, my belly and thighs. Amid all the draperies and boxes and columns and props, the smoke and days of futile effort, I passed the deadness, the empty spaces, what the green bottle forgot for him; what the white tablet could not remember; where he went when the work did not come. I understood that, in some part of me. And in his arms there—and later, in his bed, I let myself be comforted, a little, for all that had been lost.

D
OWN ONE FLIGHT
from the atelier, in wedge-shaped maid's quarters off one end of the hall, was the place Chasseloup slept, hung his trousers, and heated a tiny stove. A window overlooked the balconies of other apartments; plants in pots and cloths hanging out to dry. Occasionally from the window you saw someone coming or going, a glimpse of skirt or a sleeve. The two rooms were so cramped that the door to the hall ran into the kitchen cupboard, which contained a bottle of vinegar, a soft potato, scraps of canvas, a bulging paper packet of sugar, and bits of drawing chalk. Coffee was dust at the bottom of a can; coal, silt at the bottom of the bin. The main room held a balding, velvet-upholstered divan for a bed; a writing desk; and a giant map of Paris tacked to the wall. It didn't matter; we spent every available hour in the atelier.

My key to number 12 had disappeared behind the Tivoli's desk for the last time, after I had bumped my small luggage down the stairs and flashed my eyes at Madame with the giddiness of a prisoner freed. She grimaced as though her joints were hurting her; as if the season had changed before she was ready for it.
She'd seen the likes of me a thousand times before,
she might have said. But still I sensed that I had made a narrow escape—so maybe Stephan's luck was with me still.

Chasseloup asked no questions. We lived from day to day, as was customary in such circumstances; that is, when Art rules, and crowds out everything else. After a week's effort, we sat across the table from each other, a bottle uncorked between us, half a loaf and a sausage. During that day's sitting Chasseloup had had me up on and down from the crate; altered the light—gone so far as to let me try on costumes from the photographer's racks, none of which ended up pleasing him. Vollard had stopped by to shake his head.

“So? What is the matter?” I took a blunt knife to our
saucisson.

He hunched forward in his chair. Poured.

“I cannot—solve this problem in time for the Salon.”

“But I have been absolutely obedient,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood.

“Or maybe it is just”—he reached over with a lingering caress—“that I am distracted.”

I leaned back and felt his words trickle down, ominously.

“I will have to do a fish, a cheese, maybe a green bottle on a cool stretch of zinc—”

Chasseloup rocked back on his chair, folded his good arm around his thin frame. Those hungry, too-soft, full-moon eyes.

“Do you want me to leave, then?”

“No! I mean—”

He meant that it might be appropriate to study me, at rest and in the course of daily life. And besides, I took out the laundry and gave him courage; without the feminine influence life became primitive . . . Could we drink to that ? We did.

So the model-for-small-wages became a full-time
grisette,
maiden of the bed, hearth, and table; last of a vanishing breed. A feminine soul to believe in and serve the greater cause of Art, with a gay night or two thrown in. We went to little dark cafés where there was music and a bottle or two, and Pierre and his friends talked into the small hours.

Twenty years earlier, even ten, we might have seen a few more of these nights, talking philosophy until dawn; coffee from workman's carts—as on my first mornings in Paris—but laughing with the cart sellers now; in a small herd of artists and young people, bubbles in our noses at sunrise and then blissfully, dizzily to bed just as the shops were opening, the cries of street merchants breaking the morning's calm. But it was late in the day for that. Pierre's friends didn't discuss “art for art's sake,” or even argue its merits. Art was all for the judges now, because someone would be pushed forward and his work sold for a fortune, enough for flats and studios in the new Paris.