I Always Loved You (26 page)

E
dgar's disconsolate “Come in” trickled through the locked door, and Mary let herself in with her key as the encroaching darkness strangled the last gasp of light from the sky. A single candle burned in the gloom, revealing the familiar disarray of Edgar's studio. Mary unpinned her sodden hat and hung it on the rack with her coat and dripping umbrella. Next to the door, narrow crates, presumably holding Edgar's canvases bound for the show, awaited the arrival of the carter.

She found Edgar in the back room, sitting on one of his paint-spattered chairs, his hands resting on his knees, staring at his little dancer, who was barely illuminated in the waning light of another candle. Beyond him stood the press, pushed into a corner and smothered with a dust sheet, forgotten. Edgar offered not even the slightest evidence that he had heard Mary come in. His eyes stayed on the girl, as if he were afraid she was going to pirouette away. Even in the deep gloaming, Mary could see that the statuette was a marvel. For weeks, she had wondered whether Edgar had finished her, but he had revealed nothing; knowing what it was to be in the middle of something, she didn't inquire. But here the girl was: finished, gorgeous, a triumph. What had once been a crude skeleton was now a
petit rat.
Nearly four feet high, she was neither doll- nor life-size, diminutive, but not miniature, stunningly rendered in the malleable and fickle medium of beeswax. Outfitted in bodice and dancing shoes, cloth stockings warming her legs, a skein of cascading hair falling down her back, she stood defiant and proud before her maker, arms twisted behind, fingers entwined, chin thrust forward, every detail, from her marvelously rendered fingers to her knobby knees, crafted in convincing particularity.

“Caillebotte must be livid,” Degas said, his voice flat. “Has he sent you to tar and feather me?”

“He did, but he wouldn't have if you hadn't placed the vitrine before you brought her in. The critics were thrilled to find a way to skewer you. I can only imagine what they'll write. Of course you'll deserve it.”

“Is this why you've come?” Degas said. “To scold me?”

“Don't your promises mean anything?” she said.

“About what? The journal? I tell you, it's nothing.”

“Nothing? Everything to you is nothing. Why didn't you tell me? Why let me be embarrassed by hearing it in the
bois
, at the horse troughs, of all places, from Gustave? I was humiliated. I don't understand why you pulled out. Everything was set.”

The fluttering candle magnified the sunken hollows of Edgar's eyes as he turned to look at her. He seemed far away, as if he had heard nothing of her outburst. She had rarely seen him so distracted, and certainly never in his studio, where he was always the master. She began to wonder whether he was ill, whether some disease of the mind had suddenly rendered him simple.

“I couldn't publish those prints.”

“Why not?”

“Because they weren't good enough.” He was speaking distractedly, studying the sculpture as he spoke.

“Whose? Yours or mine? Be honest,” Mary said. “You owe me that. Did you not publish
Le Jour et la Nuit
because my work was inferior?”

He turned, finally, and fixed his gaze on her. “You are wrong about your work,” he said.

“But not about my failure.”

“Look around, Mary. Nearly every single one of my canvases for the exhibition is still here. I am late for everything. What was the journal anyway? Just an idea that didn't work out. Nothing else. It means nothing. It's not a failure.”

She threw up her hands. “I've gone backwards. I want to pull all my work off the wall. I'm embarrassed that anyone has seen it.”

“Then do it!” His raised voice echoed off the walls. “What are you whining at me for? What do I have to do with your work? It's your work, not mine.”

Mary turned and sat down, the glimmer of the candle fading now, and with it all her vague dreams of a life lived beside this man, strange and indistinct as they had been. The flame trembled in its puddle of molten wax and went out, rendering the studio a place of shadows and depth. Edgar, at once reticent and irreverent, generous and selfish, careless and careful, was a terrible man to want, as terrible a man as Édouard Manet was for Berthe. What was it about genius that sabotaged happiness? What was it about desire that betrayed?

“My God,” Mary said. “We aren't good together, you and I. You have a masterpiece but I have so little to show for the year that I am ashamed of my work. I lost something working with you. Something of myself. Something essential. Something I cannot abandon.”

“You lost yourself.”

“The trouble with you is that you care more about art than you do about love.”

“So do you.”

“But I don't abandon anyone.”

“You abandoned yourself.” Degas wrenched himself around to face her. “Besides, I have no masterpiece.”

“She is standing there in all her glory.”

“She is a failure.” He fumbled with matches and relit the candle. “Look at her, Mary. Really look at her. Renoir was here this afternoon, the bastard, wanting to argue with me about something or other. He took one look at her and said her proportions were off. It would be like him to undercut me out of spite, but I think this time he meant well. I was about to take her to the Rue des Pyramides, but now . . .” Edgar's voice trailed off in despair. All the anger was gone. He was near tears. Mary had never seen him this raw. He was like a father who had lost his only child. Distractedly, he knelt down beside a large dress box that was hiding at his feet in the shadows. He pulled from it two green ribbons, one narrow and short, the other wide and long. He tied the narrow one in a bow around the girl's braid, and the second, wider sash around her waist, taking time to tighten the knots and fluff out the bows as fastidiously as any costumer at the Opéra. Then he lifted from the box a billowing, layered froth of a tutu, which he pinned into place under her newly beribboned waist. The skirt fell to her knees in a spume of tarlatan and tulle that Mary was certain he must have stolen from the dressing rooms backstage at the Garnier. With these unlikely additions his genius revealed itself. The stockings sagging on her legs that Mary had thought were cloth were not cloth but wax; the shoes and bodice that she thought were wax were not wax, but canvas and satin smeared with wax; neither was the girl's hair wax but instead a waxed fall of real hair. Only the tutu and ribbons were what they appeared to be: arresting flourishes on a breathtaking apparition. All else was illusion.

When he was done straightening the many layers of the marvelous skirt, he stood and fixed his gaze on Mary. “Look at her. I mean really look at her.”

Mary could not speak, the dressed statue was so remarkable.

The rain had stopped now, and in the courtyard the echoing clatter of dinner plates and conversation from the other apartments swelled the night with domesticity. Edgar began to shout, his face haggard and pained. “For God's sake, Mary, with her clothes on, what do you think? Is Renoir right or when she is dressed does she appear in proportion?”

In the three years since she had known him, he had never once asked her to critique him. “You want my opinion?”

“My God, Mary, don't torture me.” He sank onto his chair once again.

Fending off apoplectic admiration and an avalanche of envy, Mary circled the statue, attempting to see what Edgar said he couldn't see, a notion that seemed to her a great apostasy. It was almost impossible to look past the intricate details, the astonishing surprise of the ribbon and tutu, the brilliance of Edgar's extravagant conceit, to see the dancer as a structure, for essentially, this was what sculpture was, even one as unorthodox as this. Form was a matter of precise measurement. Without the underpinning of accurate scaffolding, no piece of artwork succeeded. But for all of that, art was instinct, too. One
felt
the balance or imbalance. The revelation was something akin to a religious experience: You didn't know the truth and then you suddenly knew it, and because of it everything was transformed. In the dim light, the little dancer was a silhouette. It was this trick of the light that aided Mary.

“Monsieur Renoir may be right.” It was almost gratifying to be able to point out his misstep, but she couched it slightly to spare him. “Her head is too small. Not by too much, but off, slightly, at the crown, and here, at the forehead, where it slopes too steeply.”

Degas crumpled forward, his hands to his knees. “My damn eyes. I didn't see it. Why didn't I see it? Both you and Renoir. Dear God. She is flawed.”

“It was only the shadow that revealed it. I still think she is gorgeous. Perhaps no one else will notice.”

“I can't bear to let anyone see her.” He was echoing her words, all her worries about failure, but he was not aware that he was. He eyed a large crate that loomed in the corner, awaiting the blemished girl he would not now send.

He shifted his gaze and studied Mary. “You see? I have no masterpiece. We are equally bad for one another.”

In the swelter of the moist heat, sweat beaded on her forehead. Mary realized now that as she had studied the girl, she had unconsciously opened the top buttons of her shirtwaist to the angle of her collarbones. Degas's gaze drifted there now.

“Do you know that this is the first time you treated me as your equal? The first time you didn't yield to me?” he said.

“I was furious with you.”

“I want to draw you.” His raw voice crackled through the heat, his desire clear: He did not wish to draw her as he had before, chastely—the curves of her clothing, her head and hands, the line of her long neck, her corseted, clothed waist. He wished to draw her in the most intimate way, to trace the unclothed rise of her breast, the curves of her thighs, the circles of her buttocks. “You are to me what no other creature is. We are the same mind, Mary. We are the same soul, occupying two different bodies.”

“We are not,” she said.

“You are the only woman I can tolerate in the world.”

“That is not praise.”

“Why would I flatter you? I respect you too much.”

“This is how you show your respect?”

He rose from his chair and padded to the window. He lifted an open box of pastels from the sill, where he had placed them to let the sun blunt their color, but he seemed to think better of it and set aside the deadened chalk for a new box. Of course. For this, he would want the noise of color, the punctuation of high pigment, to set this drawing apart from any other, this carnal drawing of intimacy. It was no secret that he was unkind to his models, but Mary knew he would draw her differently, with something akin to reverence.

The little dancer stood impassive, inscrutable, imperfect, her eyes hooded, blind. An indifferent witness. Certainly she would tell no one. His little dancer had become to him something beloved, wept over, treasured. Mary studied Degas's hands, fallen to his sides. These were hands deft enough to create an airy confection from the lowly medium of wax, perceptive enough to fashion a curious thing of strange beauty, and inventive enough to create what no one had ever dreamed of creating before and might never create again. He would never betray this girl, would surely never part with her, wouldn't expose her to a world when he thought her less than perfect. Mary felt herself yielding, or wanting to yield. She wondered whether this would be the way that Edgar would finally, truly see her. And what was virtue in a warm studio on a rainy night in Paris, when possibility seduced and intimacy beckoned? Over the years she had believed there had been no one else for him, at least no one he had ever revealed, and certainly no one else for her.

She went to him, her footsteps slow and measured. He had never seemed more essential to her. He was stripped of his defenses, his armor, his mocking wit; his need, naked and pure, beguiled. But more than his mind, here was his soul, asking for her. She would need help with her buttons; he would need to unlace her corset, help free her of her bustle. These were skills he no doubt had perfected in his life, though she didn't know for certain, didn't know what happened behind his doors when models visited.

He kissed her. He put his hand to her cheek and kissed her for a very long time, affection transforming to need, then to hunger, then beyond, to a place where she had no will. She did not resist, though she thought she ought to because she was not a woman to let herself be seduced. She was not a woman who made undisciplined choices. She was none of these things, yet here she was, being all those things and more. His hands began unbuttoning her shirtwaist. He pulled it off, unhooked the sash at her waist, unbuttoned her skirt. It fell to the floor. He did not stop kissing her. He asked her to turn. She did. He unhooked her corset. She held it to herself while he disrobed, first his smock, then his shirt and pants. He untied her petticoats and they, too, dropped to the floor. He pulled over the tarp that had covered the girl and spread it on the floor, and in that moment she thought she should stop, but she didn't. She kneeled on the floor with him and then she lay down beside him and he took her corset from her.

“Are you certain?” he said.

She could not bring herself to answer, but she meant no just as much as she meant yes, and in that noisy silence he kissed her again and then there was no more no. There was no drawing, either. There was only clumsy touch and willing surrender, timeless discovery and shocked astonishment, and when it was over, the fear that she had been enticed forever into the tangle of him.

I
n the first days after their encounter, Degas chose not to see Mary. He wrote to her that he was much taken up with getting his canvases to the exhibition but that he would come to see her soon. He then spread the task over several days, hoping that Mary would understand that he did not yet wish to see her, and that his note was not an invitation to come and help him with the hanging. Because the exhibition was now open, he had to hang his paintings while visitors strolled among the rooms, and the startling sight of an artist with a hammer bewildered many of them.

“Who do you think hangs them?” Degas spat, after a man made a disagreeable number of comments of increasing stupidity. The inquirer gaped and then hurried away, grumbling to the woman on his arm about the arrogance of artists. Degas turned back to his task but was interrupted again when someone else said, “Could you tell me how you get your ideas? Because I'm trying to paint, and I don't know where to start.”

Degas turned in a rage, only to find Édouard Manet leaning on his cane, mocking hilarity enlivening his haggard face.

“You are trying to get yourself killed is what you are trying to do. I nearly threw this thing at you,” Degas said.

“I'm here to kidnap you. Where the hell have you been? Why didn't you come to my opening party?”

He had forgotten all about Édouard's party. That was the night he had been with Mary. “I took ill. How did you know I'd be here?”

“When you weren't home, I went looking for you at Mademoiselle Cassatt's. She said you would be here.”

“Why didn't you ask Sabine?”

Édouard shrugged “Oh, Sabine told me. I'm just very fond of Mademoiselle Cassatt. As are you, I might point out. That one is crooked,” he said, pointing with his cane at a canvas that Degas had just hung and which was perfectly straight. He made a dozen other comments of questionable helpfulness until Degas finished hanging the last of his canvases, gave the ticket seller the hammer, and announced that he was done.

“And what about the dancer?” the girl asked.

“She won't be coming,” Degas said.

“Caillebotte must be thrilled,” Édouard said.

“Caillebotte is no longer speaking to me.”

“You must be more careful with your friends, Degas. We've just lost Duranty.” They had gotten the news only yesterday, when it rippled through Montmartre like a gunshot: Duranty, dead.

It took Édouard an enormous amount of effort to descend the stairs. Outside, he navigated the cobbles of the sidewalk, stumbling every once in a while and wincing from the pain. They had not gone fifteen feet before Édouard said, “I'm afraid we'll have to use the carriage.”

In the past, Édouard would have scoffed at taking a carriage for a walk of less than two miles; he loved walking as much as he loved women, and Degas felt this loss for his friend as keenly as he felt all the others. They climbed into the carriage, which he had kept waiting on the corner in case, for the brief trip to the Charpentiers' gallery, La Vie Moderne.

There, Degas fell into rapture. “My God, Édouard, you will never paint an untrue painting in your life.” The vibrancy of the oils and pastels, all of them newly done in the past year, belied Édouard's condition. Degas was relieved that no siege of illness could ever dim this man's facility with a brush, no matter that he was falling into the hell of an illness he still would not acknowledge. “You are the incarnation of modernity. You are one of us, Édouard. I don't know why you've refused to exhibit with us all these years. Everything about your work is a revelation.”

“Your paltry little exhibition is a cloister, effectively separating new art from the Salon,” Édouard said. “I wish to force the Salon to acknowledge us. I've sent in two pieces this year and I have every belief they'll be accepted.”

Degas rather doubted the Salon would take them; he feared his friend was far too optimistic. The Salon jury enjoyed nothing more than belittling him at every chance.

Édouard's admirers delayed them, emitting congenial laughter and gasps of praise when they greeted him, a joyful clamor that resonated in the small gallery, where the number of visitors, Degas was not surprised to see, exceeded theirs by too many to count. While Édouard was gathering compliments, Degas fielded jibes about his empty vitrine from not a few attendees and managed to fend off more with an icy stare. When Édouard finally exhausted his need to hear how wonderful he was, he went with Degas for luncheon to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. Ensconced at a small table far from the window so no passing friends could find them, Édouard lolled on the bench that lined the long wall of the café, one elbow hung nonchalantly over the lip of its back, his despised cane forgotten on the bench beside him. The dreamy wash of too much wine soon gave him the appearance of loosened serenity. During the meal, they discussed his canvases. Édouard's pastel of Zola's wife had been a favorite of Degas's.

“I have to say, Zola gushed over it. I delivered it myself to Medon when it was finished,” Édouard said. “You should have seen him argue with me when I asked him to lend it back for the show. He adores it.”

“Zola will never return to us,” Degas said. He was glad for this time with Édouard alone, not only because his sociable friend usually preferred to wallow in a scrum of sociability but because he was rarely given to tête-à-têtes. Also, this time with Édouard helped him to avoid thinking any more about Mary. “Zola won't, in a spasm of appreciation, join our circle again. He has his own now. He and Maupassant meet at Café de la Paix. Don't try to woo a writer with your talent, Manet, despite how much you think your poet friend Mallarmé loves you. Writers despise us, and none too secretly. You'll never get Albert Wolff to write you a good review. Leave the writers be. Art is one thing, literature another.”

“Maupassant doesn't despise me,” Édouard said, smiling and taking another sip of wine. “It's you he can't stand.”

“You are the worst kind of bourgeois, Édouard,” Degas said. “You are an artist who wants to be loved. You love to be loved, even more than you love art. Why do you chase glory? Don't you understand how fickle the world is? How little declared love means? Not only does the world not care about you, but those who you think care about you do not care. You are alone. We are born alone and we die alone and in between any dalliance or declaration that is made is a temporary respite from the damnable truth. You dream of love, but there is no love. It doesn't exist.” By the end of his speech, Degas was aware his voice had risen, but he could not help himself; Édouard could infuriate him.

Unoffended, Édouard reared up from the bench, leaning over the marble table and the scattered remnants of their meal. “Dalliance? What is this? Edgar Degas, speaking of love? What has happened? A man who doesn't believe that love exists is a man wounded. Has someone broken your heart?”

Degas fiddled with the stem of his wineglass, furious. It was maddening how one's secrets always made themselves manifest. And the relentless Édouard would delight in sniffing out the cause of his rant. “What do you know of broken hearts?” he said.

“Everything.”

Édouard's gaze slipped away, and Degas wished he had thought of another way to best Édouard. The poor man would never be free of his obsession with Berthe. After the birth of Julie, Berthe had made a religion of her marriage. The others, Isabelle Lemonnier and Méry Laurent, were nothing to Édouard but feeble variances of Berthe.

“Ah, I know,” Édouard said, coming to himself. “You cannot seduce the brilliant Mademoiselle Cassatt.”

Degas endeavored not to change his expression or tone. He hearkened back to that moment when he and Édouard had first seen Mary at the Salon. Now he would have to imply that he had taken Mary in order to convince Édouard that he had not. “You are dreaming.”

“Well, I suggest that you stop dreaming and make love to her or any other woman as often as you can. Death puts an end to all that, you know. Start now. If you cannot persuade her, and I doubt that you can, I see plenty of women here who will cost you a franc, but what is that when there is such pleasure to be had?”

Degas ventured a comment that any other human being would think was cruel, but that he knew Édouard would find funny. “Really, Édouard, do you want me to end up like you?”

“Yes. Then I wouldn't be the only man in Paris suffering such embarrassments.”

“For God's sake, just say it. It's syphilis, isn't it?”

“If I don't say its name, then it doesn't exist.”

The two things that didn't exist in their world: syphilis in Édouard's, and love in Degas's. But of course they were both deluded, something they toasted with the kind of enthusiasm that only old friends could muster.

•   •   •

In the two hours they had lingered inside the café, the sky had grown a dull purpled blue and verged now on yet another spring rainstorm. Before summer came, it was conceivable that Paris would drown. Degas put the exhausted Édouard in his carriage and watched it trundle down the avenue in the direction of Pigalle. Not until the carriage was out of sight did Degas pull off his glasses and wipe his eyes. More than his sorrow, he was furious at the ingratitude of Paris officialdom, all the imbeciles who had made Édouard suffer over the years, for the man felt every slight in his bones, despite the unending adoration of the public. Édouard was greater than any of them knew, and the world would not come to its senses before they lost him. They would never understand the enormity of their privation until after he was gone; only then would they mourn all the paintings he would never paint after the syphilis worked its grim end.

He had declined a lift in Édouard's carriage because he had put off dealing with Mary for far too long. If Édouard loved to be loved more than he loved art, then what did it mean that Degas loved art more than he loved love, as Mary had accused? In their relationship of three years, he and Mary had affected a certain restraint of commentary that he had relied on to define things. Now that there was no restraint of any kind, Degas worried that he would not be able to keep himself hidden. He would have to define his desire in a more precise way, one that might render him more vulnerable than he wished. To make Mademoiselle Cassatt a more intimate participant in his life would be to make himself subject to the pathologies of humanity, to which he was already more than prey. Subject to love, whose exact nature he questioned, he would be as incapacitated as Manet, who was besotted with Berthe and enfeebled by the myriad afflictions of love, not merely the deterioration the physical act had visited on him, but the other confusing and obligating connections that stole one's independence. And wasn't he already troubled enough? In the stormy gloaming, the muted colors of the city were blending into one another, becoming the color of evening, though it was only three or four in the afternoon. Someday this washed darkness would be all that he would see. Wasn't that frailty enough? Why love a woman and therefore risk losing her when the world was such a fickle place?

Just go and ask her
, he thought.
Just go and say, Do you think we should?
But his language was not the language of love, as he had once tried to tell her. His language was the language of incision, and if he dared to go to her home, dared to knock and ask for an audience, dared to declare what he thought she might want him to declare, he would fumble the words. He would say,
I can marry you, but I have no confidence
. He would say,
I fear love as I fear art
. He would say,
You cannot hold my nature against me
.

No gaslight yet lit the streets and only a few passing carts with their swinging lanterns brightened the deepening gloom. Practice for his dark future. He shuffled forward, one uncertain foot in front of the other, toward home.

•   •   •

In her studio, Mary watched the afternoon light dim on the Boulevard de Clichy. That morning, when Édouard Manet had come looking for Edgar, she had worried, suddenly, that Edgar had been indiscreet, that Manet's visit had been a foray to discover whether or not Mary displayed any sign of her compromise. But Manet had been nothing but charming, as always. He sent his driver up to the studio to ask her to come down to the carriage because, he said to her when she climbed in, stairs were now too much for him, a fact he shrugged off as if he had said that it was a shame that the weather was threatening. Where was she keeping Degas, he wanted to know. He needed to see Edgar now. When she told him where she suspected he was, Manet asked her to come too, as he was planning to force Degas to go with him to see his exhibition, but Mary told him she was working, that she planned to go soon with Berthe, and that she was very happy for him.

After Manet had gone, Mary returned to her studio. Aside from the terror that she might become pregnant, the other worries of entanglement with Edgar had bubbled to the surface almost as soon as he had left her at her door. He had walked her home, but they had had little to say to one another, and he had let her climb the five flights of stairs to her family's flat on her own, unwilling, she was certain, to face her family. Since then, she had heard nothing from him except his note that he would be too busy hanging pictures to come by, a feeble excuse of such transparent panic that she had torn it up.

What had she been thinking? How had she allowed it to happen? What odd creature had taken over her body? In the past few days, there had been moments when she had nearly buckled remembering the unexpected pleasure of his touch. Once she caught her image in a mirror and discovered that she was blushing. The embarrassment was too acute. She couldn't dismiss the fear that she had disappointed him, that her body had dissatisfied, her inexperience had alarmed, her bashfulness had annoyed. Each day that passed without a note or a visit worked a paralyzing fury in her. She could not erase what had happened and wasn't sure she wanted to. The days passed at a glacial pace, and his silence chilled any wonder that remained. Edgar? The man who could hurt her with just a look? The man who would lift her up and then just as swiftly cut her down? The man who made promises he never kept? He was maddening: generous at one moment, self-serving the next, incapable, it seemed, of any sustained devotion.