Bridal Chair (34 page)

Pain, fierce and unremitting, invaded her dream. Still half asleep, Ida clutched her abdomen as though to smother the small gnawing animal that assaulted her body, sawing away with devilishly sharp incisors. She would conquer it, outrace it, as for so many years she had outraced the demons that haunted her sleep. She tossed and turned, her fingers biting into her flesh as the invader gathered strength and intensified its grip. The pain became unbearable, and her agonized scream pierced the nocturnal silence.

“Ida, Ida, what is it?” Géa cried.

As she opened her mouth to answer, she gagged and clots of bright red blood spurted out. Her face was blanched of all color. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she lost consciousness.

He dashed to the telephone and summoned an ambulance.

At the hospital, the weary, gray-eyed, gray-haired attending physician emerged from the examining room and stared at him gravely.

“Your wife is very ill, monsieur. Dangerously ill. She is bleeding internally and has already lost a great deal of blood. Every minute, every hour counts. We must operate at once or she will die. We must have your permission as her husband, her next of kin, to proceed.”

Géa stared at the physician in bewilderment and struggled to comprehend his words.
Die
. His Ida, his vibrant, beautiful Ida. She could not die.
Next
of
kin?
They were not kin, only loving lovers.

“But she is not my wife,” he managed to blurt out.

“Who then is her next of kin? Does she have parents, siblings? Perhaps a husband?” he added mischievously.

“A father. Yes, a father,” Géa said. “But he lives in Orgeval.”

“We require his permission,” the doctor repeated. “Sister Ursula will give you a form for him to sign. But hurry. Time is of the essence.”

Géa nodded. He took the form from the nurse and hurried as the hesitant light of a breaking dawn streaked across the sky. The household in Orgeval would still be wrapped in sleep, but he knew that he could not delay. He found a pay phone and dialed the number.

The phone rang repeatedly, and it was Virginia who answered.

“I must speak to Marc,” Géa said.

“Impossible. He is still sleeping.”

“Wake him. This is an emergency. Ida is very ill.”

She gasped, hesitated. She was frightened, Géa knew: not frightened for Ida but frightened of Marc’s anger at being awakened.

He heard her murmur to Marc, heard his angry rebuke and then his voice, harsh with annoyance. But he did not interrupt as Géa explained the danger and how it was imperative that he sign the permission form.

“All right. Bring that form to me,” he said. “I will sign it.”

“But that will take too long,” Géa protested. “I will have to travel to Orgeval and then return to Paris. The doctor said there is no time to waste. You must come to Paris.”

“Impossible. I cannot do that. I will not do that,” Marc replied defiantly and slammed the receiver down.

Géa stared at the newly silent phone in disbelief. He would not call again.

In despair, he returned home and called Michel. There was little that Ida’s ex-husband did not know about Marc. Swiftly, Géa explained the situation.

“Could you prevail upon Marc to come to Paris?” he asked.

“He would not listen to me just as he did not listen to you,” Michel replied. “He is Marc Chagall, king of his own universe. Nothing can persuade him to do anything that he is disinclined to do, damn him.”

“Then what can I do?” Géa asked in desperation.

“Sign the form yourself,” Michel advised. “Sign his name. The hospital will not question the signature, I can assure you of that.” He spoke with the authoritative cynicism of the experienced journalist. “I will meet you at the hospital, Géa.”

“All right. I will sign it,” Géa agreed reluctantly. He was grateful that Michel would be with him. Michel was happy in his new marriage to Marina, but Ida’s imprint was engraved indelibly upon on his heart.

He looked at the form, read it once and then again, then looked up at the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
that hung above Ida’s bed and studied Marc’s signature, scrawled in a corner of the canvas. He copied it again and again onto a piece of scrap paper and then, his hand steady, he signed
Marc
Chagall, Père
on the line indicated and rushed back to the hospital where he handed it to the doctor, who glanced at it and raised his eyebrows.

“Did you fly to Orgeval?” he asked wryly. He did not wait for an answer but instructed diligent Sister Ursula to arrange for an operating room. Michel rushed in. He handed Géa a steaming cup of coffee and a croissant and placed a reassuring arm on his shoulder. The two men sat side by side on a narrow bench and waited anxiously for news of the woman who meant so much to them.

Hours later, Sister Ursula emerged and informed them that the surgery was successful, adding that it was fortunate that they had been able to operate when they did. Ida had lost so much blood because of a bleeding ulcer that the slightest delay might have resulted in death.

“You were very fortunate, mademoiselle,” the gray-eyed doctor told Ida when he visited her days after the surgery. “But ulcers are often caused by stress. You must live a calmer life, avoid tension.”

“Ah, but my life is calm and I feel no tension,
cher
professeur
,” she assured him gaily and presented him with a pencil sketch of his face in profile she had dashed off as he spoke.

Was
she
lying
to
herself
or
to
the
doctor?
Géa wondered as he thought of her exhausting journeys to London, Switzerland, and Berlin to curate exhibitions of Marc’s work. And then there were her endless negotiations with galleries and collectors, her all-too-frequent journeys to Orgeval to deal with his discontents. She was her father’s buffer, his human sponge, charged with the absorption of any irritations that might interfere with his work. Her denial was foolish. There was both stress and tension in her frenetic life. He stared at her but said nothing.

The doctor smiled. Ida had charmed him. She was once again irrepressible, lively, and laughing, aglow with her triumph over pain and death.

She rouged her cheeks and lips, fashioned her hair into a French braid that she flipped playfully at Marc when he at last visited her.

“Ah, my Ida. How good to see you healthy. You must convalesce at L’Aulnette. I will take care of you. I would do anything for my Ida,” he said. He did not look at Géa, who turned away, his face frozen in anger. Marc, who refused to be inconvenienced even to save his daughter’s life, had not uttered a single word of gratitude. Géa’s efforts were simply his due.

* * *

The Orgeval house was serene during Ida’s recuperation. The children no longer troubled Marc. David was cared for in the village and Jean had been sent to live with Virginia’s parents in England.

“I want her to know her grandparents,” Virginia explained, but Ida understood that Jean had been banished to placate Marc. Throughout her own childhood, her mother had cautioned her not to disturb him when he was painting. Bella too had feared his dark moods, his irritation, but nothing would have persuaded her to send Ida away. But Virginia had submitted to his tyranny and sacrificed her daughter on the altar of his discontent. If she had betrayed her daughter, she was surely capable of other betrayals. Ida filed that knowledge away.

Marc was a casual caregiver. Each morning, he asked Ida if she needed anything and hurried to his studio without waiting for an answer. He was absorbed in a painting that he considered to be an artistic breakthrough.

“I call it
The
Red
Sun
,” he told Ida. “It will be my masterpiece. Aimé Maeght, the art dealer, said as much when he visited last week.”

Ida went to his studio.
The
Red
Sun
was, she recognized at once, a stunning effort; the canvas was electric with shimmering primary colors. In daring strokes, Marc had painted a willowy woman in blue flying toward a youth in yellow who scissored his way through a brilliant and blinding red sun. There was great attention to detail—flowers sprouted on the canvas, and roosters and donkeys lurked in corners, enveloped in streams of radiance.

“It is wonderful,
Papochka
,” she said. “More than wonderful.”

“Yes,” he agreed, lifting a brush to add a dab of cadmium yellow to the flying youth’s robe. “That is what Maeght said. Did I tell you that I have agreed to allow him to represent me?”

She stared at him in disbelief, unable for the moment to speak, struggling against a commingling of grief and anger.

“But it is I who represent you,” she said at last. Her voice broke as she grappled for words. “I have always represented you. I have devoted myself to you and your work. Surely you understand that,
Papochka
.”

He did not turn to look at her but continued to study his canvas, centering it on the easel, adding the merest hint of burnt carmine to his exploding sun.

“Papa.”

The desperate plea in her voice arrested him. He sighed and wiped his brush clean.

“I have not given Maeght exclusive rights,
ma
chérie
,” he said. “He will be helpful to both of us. He has contacts that you cannot match. Curators and wealthy collectors seek him out. Matisse himself is his client. And you will simply work with him, learn from him. Your fortunes will not suffer, if that is what concerns you. I believe that I have already made you a very rich young woman.”

“Do you really think that that is all that concerns me?” she asked bitterly. “I have never thought of my fortunes as separate from your own.”

Overcome with weakness, she clutched the back of a chair so that she would not fall. He took her arm, led her to a chaise in the garden. She fell into a deep sleep and awakened, recalling her dream in which a painting that Marc had titled
Double
Portrait
with
Wine-Glass
had come to life. He had depicted Ida as a small girl, flying desperately above him. She realized with sudden clarity that her role in her father’s life was as amorphous as the wind on whose wings she sailed in both the painting and the dream. Her fury and her grief dissipated. The new insight calmed her. She loved her father and he loved her, but she understood the limitations of that love.

* * *

The summer ended. Ida was restored to health and Marc completed his work on
The
Red
Sun
. As always, when a large project ended, he was seized by a restlessness, a need to absorb a new landscape or perhaps revisit half-remembered scenes of his past.

“Let us take a small vacation together,” he suggested to Ida. “The four of us, Virginia and myself, you and Géa.”

Ida was agreeable. Her energy was restored and she too wanted a change of scenery. They discussed destinations.

“Gordes,” Marc decided. “We still own the house there. We should go there and decide whether to rent it or sell it. Virginia and I could never live there. It is too far from Paris, but a visit will be pleasant. Our garden there was so beautiful at this time of the year. Don’t you remember how lovely it was, Ida?”

“I remember it well,” she replied.

Her father, she knew, with his talent for selective memory, recalled only that he and Bella had been together there, their garden beautiful, their home a pleasant refuge. He did not remember the dangers and tension that had haunted them in that former convent school.

She had her own cameos of memory. She would never forget how Michel, returned from the war, had stood in a pool of silver moonlight in the doorway. And Michel had actually laid claim to the name of the village and reinvented himself as Michel Gordey. She sighed. It was time to deal with the landscapes of their past.

The house had been long vacant, but Ida had engaged a caretaker who had seen to its maintenance through the years, and it was still furnished. It would easily accommodate the four of them. She smiled at her father.

“What a good idea, Papa,” she said. “Of course we will all go to Gordes together.”

“I’m sure it will suit us well,” Virginia said.

“Are you?” Ida asked.

“If my father suggested going to hell, Virginia would agree that it would surely suit us,” she muttered to Géa later.

“Be kind, Ida,” Géa said. “Virginia is not having an easy time.”

“None of us are having an easy time,” she retorted.

But Virginia was right. Gordes did suit them well. The house retained its charm; its stone walls were bleached and baked dry by the sun, and rhomboids of light danced off the large windows that Bella had so loved.

Once again, two couples ate their meals at the polished refectory table. Ida wandered restlessly from room to room as though touring a theater where the cast of characters had been altered although the set was unchanged. She paused at one window and stared out at the wild garden where she and her mother had created a whimsical rock garden. Yes, she had once called the Gordes house home, but then she had called so many places home. Too many places.

She and Géa slept in the bed where once Michel had wept as he spoke of the sadness of his war. The picture hook above the bed that had held
The
Bridal
Chair
in place dangled loosely, a sad and rusting reminder of those restless, fear-swept nights. She lay awake in the fragrant darkness, drifting through the presleep wilderness of memories and yearnings, recalling the many places she had stayed through the long years of her wandering. There were three rooms in New York and Paris, in the Loire valley, and on the Long Island shore. How often she had awakened struggling to remember where she was and how she had arrived there.

“
Assez
,” she whispered. “Enough.”