The Painted Girls (28 page)

It was awful turning into the rue de Douai and seeing Alphonse in his baker’s apron and cap on the stoop of his father’s shop. “Ah, the ballet girl,” he called out, even if my head hung, my back slumped. I waved, low, halfhearted. It might have looked like I brushed my skirt. “An orange Madeleine for you,” he called out, holding up the sweet. I kept my line to our lodging house straight as I could, and his hand fell, like the orange Madeleine was heavier than lead. Behind the closed door of our lodging house, I thought about the way his voice went meek and not so sure anymore before he even finished calling out, and I leaned my forehead against the wall.

It was not easier two weeks later, coming into our lodging room, beaten down from six evening performances of
Le Tribut de Zamora
, from not a single decent sleep. In the grey light I saw an overturned chair, Maman’s shawl on the floor, our little table cluttered with a candlestick, two cups, the greasy wrappings of the evening meal. Maman pushed herself up from her mattress, and next thing she was upon me, slapping my face and raising her arm to slap again. “More than half a bottle,” she yelled. “You took more than half a bottle from me.” I crossed my arms in front of my face, and she snatched up the candlestick and bashed the side of my head. I dropped onto my knees, and she bashed me again. “You don’t take what isn’t yours.” I was crying and then Charlotte, too, and then Maman, because there was a lot of blood and she was used to a girl fighting back. She bandaged me up with an old stocking, and I thought how I would have to haul a bucket of water up the stairs in the morning, how the wood bin was empty, how wearying rinsing away the blood would be. I bawled even more when Charlotte said she was going out to collect the wood, the water needed to get me cleaned up. Maman tipped a bottle of absinthe against my bottom lip, and finally I stopped. “Take as much as you want,” she said.

Worst of all was the loge of the second set of the quadrille, the quick silence when I came into the room. Each evening I pinned the beaded head scarf of a slave into place. My attention on the looking glass, I saw beneath the greasepaint and rice powder to what was really there, to what the girls all knew. Blanche glared. Perot whispered, covering up her mouth. A tiny swallow at the Opéra’s back gate, not so much that I would stumble, kept me from crumpling under the weight of that head scarf I never did earn.

I
knock a single hard knock at Monsieur Lefebvre’s door. It is our usual time, but I did not call the last two weeks and am only guessing he still makes a habit of visiting his apartment Tuesday mornings. After a long wait I hear footsteps approaching and then he opens up the door a crack and leaves it ajar while his eyes take in the length of me. He will not send me away. No. He is like Monsieur Degas, who continues to draw when his head aches, when the sunshine is gone, like Monsieur Mérante, who pleads with Monsieur Vaucorbeil for another hour with the orchestra when already we have been rehearsing eight hours, like Monsieur LeBlanc, who licks the greasy paper when the sausage is done and his belly stuffed full. “Marie van Goethem,” Monsieur Lefebvre says, like I am someone come to collect the rent. “Are you drunk today?”

I look to his shoes, gleaming black without even the beginnings of a crease across the toe. “No,” I say. “I am not drunk.”

“I didn’t send for you.”

I lower my lashes, a timid girl. I make a tiny smile, careful not to show my teeth.

“You were told to stay away.”

“Still,” I say, combing loose a strand of hair, twirling it through my fingers. “With the expense of the extra lessons for the slave dance, it wouldn’t be right not to call.” It comes to me that I hate Monsieur Lefebvre, his fleshless face, his smell like a room closed up too long, the tiny flicker of his tongue as I fiddle with my hair.

He opens up the door the tiniest bit, and I slip through the gap, pushing the door shut behind my back. His fingers fold into his palms, and so I put a hand upon his chest, upon his starched shirt, at the spot over his heart. It is not even difficult, which maybe is the way things get to be when you are not striving, when your sole ambition is collecting thirty francs. Was it the same for Gervaise when she called out to the men in the streets, when she wanted nothing more than a glass of wine tilted to her lips? Or maybe it is only that Marie the First has taken over, knowing what is best, how to beguile, lifting my arm, placing my palm. He looks down, up. Then he bats my hand away. “A bit of modeling,” I say, treading quick to the screen. I undress, holding my breath, hearing the noise of shoes clapping hardwood, drawers opening, slamming shut. Then I make out the shuffling of paper. Drawing paper? It has to be. The habit of all the old visits is coming back to him.

I find him standing over the sideboard with the drawer holding my thirty francs. His arms are spread wide, his fingers open, the tips pressing against the gleaming wood of the top and bearing his weight. His face tilts forward, his eyes on the heap of folded newspapers lying between his hands. But he does not see the pages before him, the blocks of words singled out, boxed in heavy ink. No, his attention is inside his mind.

He clears his throat, and without looking up, he picks up the first newspaper from the stack, says, “From
Le Figaro
,” and begins to read:

The realism of Degas’s statuette makes the public distinctly uneasy. All their notions about sculpture—its cold, lifeless whiteness; its methods copied again and again for centuries—are here overturned. The fact is that with this, his first blow, Degas has knocked over the traditions of sculpture, in the same way that he some time ago shook up the traditions of painting. This statuette is the only truly modern attempt I know in sculpture.

He looks up, and I make a half smile. “Modern” is good. Something new instead of “cold and lifeless” is all right. He holds up a hand, says, “Let me finish,” and picks up the next newspaper from the stack. “From
Le Courrier du soir.
”

With her vulgarly upturned nose, her protruding mouth, her little half-closed eyes, the child is ugly. But let the artist be reassured. In the presence of this statuette, I have experienced the most violent artistic impression of my life. The work will one day be in a museum, looked upon with respect as the first formulation of a new art.

“I know I’m not pretty,” I say, almost a whisper. “I knew it before.” I put an arm across my bare breast. I want my shawl. It is like an ache, the way I want my shawl.

He fishes among the newspapers, until he finds what he wants. His lip curls. His nose shrivels with the stink of reading to me.

Her chin upturned, her complexion sallow, sickly, lined and faded before its time, her hands clasped behind her back, her flat chest crammed into a wax-clogged singlet, her legs set for struggle, her fine thighs which exercise has made nervous and sinewy surmounted by a tarlatan skirt, her neck stiff, her hair real, this dancer comes alive and seems about to step down from her pedestal.

Monsieur Degas must be rejoicing, unfolding the same newspapers, lapping up the words—“modern,” “new,” “alive.” Has he wondered about me, about the same words that build him up beating me down? Has it stopped him fiddling with his pastels and brushes long enough to tap a curled finger against his lips? Does a man such as he think nothing of plucking from the depths of the Opéra a girl capable of baring a boy’s neck to a falling blade and putting her on display for all the world to judge?

He paid up. He paid his six francs.

Monsieur Lefebvre’s attention is back on the newspapers, and I use the chance to take a tiny step backward, in the direction of the screen and my shawl hanging there. “Modest, all of a sudden?” he says.

I bite my lip, blink, fluttery blinks meant to clear my eyes.

He snatches up another of the newspapers, reads:

The vicious muzzle of this young, scarcely adolescent girl, this little flower of the gutter, imprints her face with the detestable promise of every vice.

“Your humility is a sham,” he says. “The way you taunt. No one knows better than I.”

I saw the promise of every vice in the pastel of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch. It was there in the brutal muzzles, the dead eyes, the cruel flesh. I had seen the viciousness before, in my own face reflected back to me. “My shawl.” Like a chirped plea. Tears now, hot on my cheeks, stinging my eyes.

“Brazen,” he says, his chin jutting up as he chucks the word from his throat. “Brazen enough to stand on my doorstep, pouting and twirling your hair, after I told you to stay away.”

My fingernail finds a frayed edge of skin. I dig, hard. Skin lifts, tears, a comfort. My flesh weeps. Sticky, wet. Blood on my hands.

“It isn’t just the one that saw it,” he says. “From
Le Temps.
”

With bestial impudence she thrusts her face forward. Why is her forehead, half hidden by her bangs, already bearing the signs, like her mouth, of a profoundly heinous nature? Perhaps Degas knows of the dancer’s future things we do not. He has picked, from the hothouse of the theater, a sapling of precocious depravity, and he shows her to us withered before her time.

He brushes past me, clipping my arm. Then he snatches my shawl from the screen, hurls it at my feet.

The quiet tears of before are gone. My shoulders heave, my stomach lurching between slack and taut. I bawl, gasping, whimpering, wiping at my eyes, smearing across my face a stew of tears and snot and blood. Against the trembling shin of one leg is the heaviness of the shawl balled at my feet. But I leave it untouched.

“My thirty francs.” The words come out in Maman’s pleading voice, the one she uses to ask can I spare a few sous when she has drained a bottle to empty the evening before. I step over the shawl, grab the front of Monsieur Lefebvre’s shirt. With one hand I pull him tight against my naked skin. The other, I move to the front of his trousers, to the buttons of his fly, the waking up beneath. “Come on, Monsieur Lefebvre,” I say. “A bit of fun.” But it is not me at all. It is a different voice. It is not the sound of Charlotte whining or Maman begging. It is pretty and tinkling, the voice of a wicked angel no more lying in wait.

There is a moment with his hand hovering over the small of my back, the small hairs growing there feeling the weight of it, before he shoves me away.

He straightens his collar, yells for me to get out.

Little Dancer

Dance, winged scamp, dance upon the wooden lawn,

Love that alone—let dancing be your life.

Your skinny arm in its chosen place

Balancing, holding your weight in flight.

Taglioni, come, princess of Arcady!

Nymphs, Graces, come you souls of yore,

Ennoble and endow, approving my choice,

This new little being with impudent face.

May she for my pleasure know her worth

And keep, in the golden hall, the gutter’s breed.

—EDGAR DEGAS

Antoinette

T
he Superioress glances at the watch strung from her hip, peers through the gate to the pavement out front of Saint-Lazare, looking left, looking right.

“No one’s coming,” I say.

She turns back to me, strokes my arm, meaning to console that I am going to be set loose without so much as a mother at the gate.

“Maman sent a message she was expected at the washhouse,” I say, but the minute the words leave my mouth, I know my mistake and swallow hard, which is what I have to do with all those lies marching to my lips, except earlier, before the lie gets out. It is harder than I thought, this telling no more lies. I blundered a handful of times in the weeks since blubbering before the Superioress, nothing of importance, only claptrap like claiming to the mistress doling out the red beans that I did not get my share or saying to one or another of the fallen girls that I reached the rank of coryphée or that the story of being the sweetheart of Émile was not true. Still, it is what I’ve got to do, quit the lying, all except the single lie I have left to tell. I’ve got to do it for Marie.

I shrink a little smaller, like a bellows with the air squeezed out. “Maman didn’t send word,” I say. “She isn’t the kind of mother to think of that.”

The Superioress gives my arm a little squeeze, like we are friends, and I make a bobbing little nod, awkward as a hen.

She hands me a drawstring pouch, the same one I brought to Saint-Lazare three months ago. What I want is to open it up. I know the money I robbed from the wallet of Jean Luc Simard to be long gone, but what about the payments handed over of his own free will? I roll the worn-out leather of the drawstring between my fingers, thinking how I once would’ve blurted something about expecting the sisters helped themselves. I tuck the pouch into the pocket of my mauve silk, a frock I would not choose for going back out into the world but I did not have a say, not when Mole scurried into my cell early morning with it hanging over her arm and then back out again with my homespun prison gown.

“One hundred ninety-eight francs,” says the Superioress. “The money you came to us with.”

I will get something nice for Marie and Charlotte, trinkets, maybe combs, strung with blossoms of silk. Maman, I will send off to the Nouvelle Athènes up in the place Pigalle for a meal, maybe with Paulette from the washhouse. It might mean a few words on my behalf when I show up, tail tucked between my legs and promising Monsieur Guiot I grew handy with a needle and thread at Saint-Lazare. He sends the mending at the washhouse out, and what I have to do is convince him to send it to me.

M
ole arrives, scuttling, carrying the same bundle I brought with me to Saint-Lazare—an old skirt as carrying sling for two blouses, two pairs of stockings, three pairs of drawers, a second skirt—my belongings in the world. I take the bundle, touching the wool of the old skirt, faded to a weary yellow grey. I remember streaming sunshine, lapping blue, a needle and thread, a pair of trousers patched on the knee with a square cut from the skirt. A mind playing tricks.

“Stay for soup, vegetable today,” the Superioress says. “We’ll send word, a reminder of your release.” She turns, mouth half-open with instructions for Mole to get a message to the rue de Douai.

“Got to go. Got to see about Marie.” I been waiting and waiting, itching to get out, to find Marie, to pull her tight against my heart.

The Superioress spreads her arms wide, her sleeves falling open like wings, and wraps me in a thicket of black wool. Girls leave bawling, stroking their rosaries, wondering how with their new devoutness, they are to get themselves sent back. For a moment I want to linger, warm, held tight. But I have a plan for nudging Marie back through the door, over to the side where she belongs. I’ve got to go before it is too late. If already it isn’t too late. I send a little wish up to the clouds, which is maybe a prayer, and pull away, soft enough not to insult the Superioress with her beaming, jowly face, her wolf-sharp eyes. She reaches for the great ring of keys hung on a ribbon from her neck and slips the largest into the lock of the gate. Click.

“God bless,” she calls out. “Say your prayers.”

Her voice and Saint-Lazare fade as I run.