The Painted Girls (9 page)

He stays another half hour, looking at pictures, writing a little in his small leather book. But the mood in the workshop has shifted to jittery, and it is nothing more than good manners keeping him there. Twice, Monsieur Degas shows a painting and then changes his mind, turning it around so that the two of them are left looking at the empty side of a canvas stretched over a frame. “Not finished,” he says. The second time Monsieur Lefebvre reaches to restore a flipped-over canvas, Monsieur Degas barks, “No. Just leave it,” and then, more gently, “It requires more work.”

After that the workshop grows quiet, with the two of them speaking few words, their voices snappish when they do, their arms folded over their ribs. Before leaving, Monsieur Lefebvre comes over to the table and, even if he is older than my own father, bothers to say good-bye. I scramble to my feet. He makes a tiny bow, and I catch his scent of a room closed up too long. “Until next time,” he says.

Until next time? What does he mean? That he expects to come upon me at the Opéra when never before have I laid eyes on the man? That he will seek me out? No. He only wanted to appear noble, to let me think for a minute the great divide between the two of us did not exist, like there was the possibility of friendship between a man wearing the Legion of Honor rosette and a girl with a protuberance of the muscle running the length of her thigh.

“Such an unpleasant man,” says Monsieur Degas once Sabine has closed the door behind Monsieur Lefebvre’s back.

She scowls, says, “You aren’t polite.”

Monsieur Degas points a finger in my direction and waves it to the spot in front of his easel, whisking me back to work.

Antoinette

I
t being a Monday, the Ambigu is closed, and Émile’s been saying for a week about the fun we are going to have at the Brasserie des Martyrs, with a dozen of us authentic actors meeting there at nine o’clock. Already I polished up my boots and gave myself a good lathering in our tiny tub and took from the satchel of Marie those silk flowers I pinched, back when she was first meeting old Pluque, and yesterday I pleaded with Maman to take my best skirt to the washhouse and launder it with the care she does the best of silks. And I have a new blouse, filched from her delivery basket, wrapped in a sheet of brown paper, stashed on the highest-up shelf of the larder where no one would go searching, expecting to find a crust of bread.

Soon as I turn onto the rue des Martyrs, I make out Émile, leaning up against the wall of the brasserie, having a smoke and laughing with Colette. She puts her hand upon his chest, only for a second, before trailing it across the fleshy plumpness on her own. I hold my breath that Émile don’t reach out. But no, he only pulls on his smoke, and a lungful of air rushes from my nose.

With me nearly upon them, Émile steps out from the wall. Hand upon my cheek, he says, “Well, look at you,” and I feel a smugness rising that Colette heard his words. She leans in, makes a show of kissing me, like we are long-lost friends. Tilting her head toward the door, she says, “Suppose the others are inside.” Then, leaving, she gives a little wink. “Come on in when you start missing me.”

“Don’t like that girl,” I say to Émile.

He puffs out a ring of smoke, and then he is leaning in and nuzzling at my neck and saying, “Aren’t you smelling extra sweet.”

Inside the gas lamps are flaring, but with so much smoke the room is cast grey. All the divans are velvet with carved legs, and the oak of the long tables and benches is gleaming away. And never before did I see anything like the jumble of the prints and looking glasses, the statues holding up the doorway lintels, the gilt moldings covering up every speck of wall. It makes my head swim, so much to see, all at once, plus it smells a mishmash of tobacco and beer, kitchen grease and onions, damp mop and boots.

We pick our way over to the table crowded with a dozen boys I know from the Ambigu. Colette is wedged between Paul Kirail, his trimmed hair stiff with pomade, and Michel Knobloch, his dim face dull as gutter water. Five times that boy stood in the prisoners’ box of the court. Five times he’s been sent off to prison, convicted of some petty crime—vagrancy, assault, theft. To hear him tell it is to wonder if he don’t know the difference between a verdict of guilty and President Grévy himself threading the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor through the buttonhole of his lapel. No matter the look of boredom upon the faces all around, he blathers on, recounting the cherries he stole, the trail of pits the gendarmes followed to the alleyway where he was gorging himself behind a cart. Émile saying, “You’re thick as two planks,” don’t stop him. No, he carries on, about those cherries not being ripe and his belly seizing after getting locked up in a cell. Pierre Gille is there, too, wearing a cravat and a silk waistcoat over a pressed white shirt. “You’re looking a dandy,” Émile says.

Pierre Gille lifts his eyes from his glass of beer. “Can’t say the same for you. Not in the least.”

Émile juts his chin. “That shirt of yours still hot from the irons?”

Pierre Gille smirks, looks me in the face. “I see you brought your mattress.”

Émile puffs a breath out through his nose. “I see you are all alone.”

Pierre Gille picks up his glass, swallows the last of his beer. “Not for long.”

“Another?” It is the way it is with the two of them, all insults and drinks bought.

“Course.”

“And the rest of you?” Émile says.

With that, seven of the boys are lifting up their glasses, draining them dry while the offer lasts.

Émile and I settle onto the bench, filling the gap beside Michel Knobloch that those arriving earlier were wise enough to leave. None of us have seen Paul Kirail in months, locked up as he was for pickpocketing a gentleman who bothered to chase him down the Champs-Élysées for a measly five francs. He takes the smallest of sips, wipes a speck of the froth from his mustache, with a handkerchief, no less. “I’m reformed,” he says when Émile mentions about him finishing up his time. “Prison is no place I ever want to see again.”

Peering over the lip of his sweating glass of beer, Pierre Gille says, “Too many fellows want you as a wife?”

The others laugh, and Paul Kirail starts picking at the cuffs of his shirt. “I enlisted,” he says. “Be living the life of a soldier at the garrison over in Saint-Malo soon enough.”

“Saint-Malo?” Michel Knobloch says. “I believe Papa was in his youth one of those thieving pirates of Saint-Malo—a corsair.”

Émile sets down his glass, pulls his fingers tight into his fists and says, “That, Knobloch, I doubt very much.”

“You calling me a liar?” It is what everyone’s been calling him for a hundred years. That boy, he don’t have sense enough to make up a lie a single soul would mistake as true.

“You lie like you breathe.” Émile returns his attention to his beer.

“It’s nothing new,” says Pierre Gille.

The eyes of Michel Knobloch gallop from face to face. Some turn away, sheepish. Others stare back with chins bobbing up and down.

After a long gap, Pierre Gille swirls his beer, says, “The king of France protected those corsairs. He kept them from being hanged, so long as they sent a portion of their haul his way.”

“Imagine that,” Émile says. “Plundering and no chance of waking up a guest of La Roquette.”

“No chance of trading the stink of Paris for the salty breezes of New Caledonia,” Pierre Gille says.

I know where the talk is going—to the luck of all those convicts transported to New Caledonia, a far-off island colony of France, to carry out the hard labor of cutting down forests, building roads and harvesting sugarcane. More than once I heard Émile discussing the life there with Pierre Gille, who claims to know all about it from the cousin of a friend. An inmate keeps his head down and mouth shut for two years, or so says Pierre Gille, and next thing he knows, he is doing the light work of sewing prison garments or cooking up the sizable portions of meat the prisoners get served three times a week. He said, too, about the labor there being paid with a cut of the wages held back until an inmate gets himself released. Then he is handed over the nest egg, large enough to buy a patch of land for planting and harvesting himself. The government, he said, wanted only to establish a foothold in the land.

Pierre Gille lights himself a smoke and, speaking loud enough for all the table to hear, says, “The cousin of my friend got the guards there liking him well enough that he ended up as gardener to the warden. When his time was done, that warden, he gave him his own patch of land. He got to use his prison wages for a pair a mules and a cart.” He swallows a mouthful of beer. “And the guards, none of them are above selling on the outside what the inmates arrange to steal. That cousin of my friend, before he was a gardener, he was a cook. He made himself a fortune pilfering the rum the inmates get four times a week. The bookkeeper was happy enough to take his cut and cover the whole business up.”

“The guards are merciless with thumbscrews and whips. That’s what I heard,” Paul Kirail says. “They punish the inmates by sticking them in a pit without a speck of light.”

Pierre Gille blows a puff of smoke into the face of Paul Kirail. “You only got to stay on the good side of the guards.”

Émile opens up his mouth and, with him always backing up Pierre Gille, it is no surprise when he says, “Serving time in New Caledonia is nothing more than an apprenticeship for settling the land.” I hate when he talks such gibberish, like leaving me behind while he went off to some place neither of us could point to on a map would not bother him in the least. I know it is not true. But still.

Pierre Gille tilts his glass to that of Émile, and then the two of them clink rims. Michel Knobloch lifts his beer, reaching to join the toast. “Better than being shut up alone to pace the narrow limits of a cell,” he says. “A fellow likes companionship.”

Pierre Gille scowls. “About the corsairs,” he says, ducking his glass away from that of Michel Knobloch, “they disappeared from France more than sixty years ago, well before your papa was even wiping his own ass.”

Then all the boys, like wolves, are laughing, reaching, clinking beers, choosing the pack over the runt. Michel Knobloch looks caught between fleeing the brasserie and forcing a crack of laughter to his throat. Émile snuffs out the stub of his smoke, plucks that of Michel Knobloch from between his fingers and then Émile moves that smoke to his own lips. It gives Michel Knobloch the jolt he needs to push himself up from the bench, fists clenched at his sides. I put a hand upon the tensing thigh of Émile, and then—stroke of luck—the tavern keeper climbs to standing upon a chair, cups his hand around his mouth and calls out, “My lords, this is the moment when people who have been well brought up call for more drink.”

Michel Knobloch turns away from the table, stomps off toward the door, and Émile says, “Well, then,” and raises up his hand, beckoning the tavern maid.

A dozen glasses of beer he orders. And then he hands over a five-franc note, waves away the change. Always, when we are in the cafés, he is pushing away my few coins and saying, “You got rent to pay.” Mostly it works to remind me that he don’t. No, he’s been lodging amid artificial flowers in the storage shed belonging to the father of Pierre Gille, and even so, he don’t appear to be putting anything aside for setting up house, like he said. I say nothing, not with those boys from the Ambigu gathered all around, just feel a hotness creeping into my cheeks. The tavern maid makes a show of blowing him a kiss, but she don’t get so much as a dipped chin back. Pierre Gille rolls his eyes and calls out after her, “I got a squeeze for that lovely rump of yours even if my friend here don’t.”

“You’re a pig,” I say.

“Weren’t you saying you wanted to suck on a bit of pork crackling the other day?”

“Must’ve been old Paul here,” I say, even if it is not right, picking the boy least inclined to answer back.

Pierre Gille looks down that pretty nose of his a good while. Then he shrugs and says, “I see the beer is making you brave, Mademoiselle Antoinette.”

After another glass of beer for me and two more for each of the others, I stop thinking about what cutting thing I should’ve said back, and I feel a growing warmth, like a circle of light shining upon these friends of mine and Émile. The boys start forgetting themselves, turning right around in their chairs and leering at the few girls in the brasserie. Colette is giddy, making a fuss over the silk waistcoat of Pierre Gille, going on to Paul Kirail about how plenty of women like their men in uniform, even bothering to admire my hair, which I have arranged in a puffed-up chignon with a black ribbon running around the edge and the silk flowers of Marie tucked in at the back.

Émile is laughing, making a habit of touching my hand, clinking glasses, and we are having such a lovely time. But then Émile orders another round of twelve, when between the two of us, we drunk no more than seven glasses of beer. “Émile,” I say, quiet. “It isn’t your turn.” Always he is spending instead of saving up.

“Isn’t your business.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out another five-franc note.

The tavern maid brings the beers. The beers are drunk up, and then Émile is calling the tavern maid over and ordering cassis all around. I swallow the cassis, twist sideways on the bench, away from Émile, who is slapping the table at the hilarity of every other word that comes out of the mouth of Pierre Gille and calling out for the tavern maid yet again.

Colette gets up from our table, makes her way across the room to a lively party of slumming gentlemen, judging by their polished shoes. The rue des Martyrs is one of those places that has people calling Paris the city of love, and the ladies sharing the table of those men—flesh escaping their necklines, lace of their underclothes in plain view—don’t come as a surprise. But I gape at Colette, so chummy with all those boulevard tarts, so cool when a gentleman twice her age puts his hand upon the stocking her skirt is arranged to show off. Of course they are slinking off together before I even get used to the idea of her being a coquette.

At first I ignore the hand of Émile, beneath the table, secretly upon my thigh. But it starts creeping higher, and I bat it away.

“What?” he says.

“How much you got saved up, Émile?” I blurt it out.

He looks at me, blank.

“Not a sou. Isn’t that right, Émile? Not a single sou. You going to offer me a home holed up with you and Pierre Gille in a storage shed? Is that it, Émile?”

Pierre Gille, he puts down his glass with enough of a thud to draw the attention of the boys from the Ambigu, even those already entirely soused. “Already harping, is she?”

“Certainly is,” Émile says.

I grab at my shawl, feel the wetness of the corner left dangling in the swill of the floor, and get up from the bench, bothering to brush my breast against his arm as I turn away.

But outside Émile is not upon my heels. Of course not, not with all those boys gawking inside. It takes less than a count of three to remember about all those plates of mussels with parsley sauce I took from him, those glasses of cassis, those bits of barley sugar. Never once did I say no. The sniffles come, then the swallowing, the hot tears.

When I look up, Colette is not a stone’s throw away with her back up against the wall of the brasserie and her arms around the neck of her gentleman. With me sniffing, both their faces turn to gawk. “Antoinette?” Colette says.

How I wish for a handkerchief. With a handkerchief I could blow my nose. And why don’t I have a single one when they are there for the taking, by the handful, in the delivery basket of Maman? Then Colette is close, her gentleman calling out for her to come back. She gives me a handkerchief, and I see the
C
embroidered into the corner, proof of a girl making plenty more than the Ambigu pays.