Lawless (12 page)

“Of course I worry.” It was only partially true. In the studio there were long periods when thoughts of the child—or of his vanished neighbor—never entered his mind. He was slightly ashamed of that, but he couldn’t change the fact.

He’d told Dolly everything Strelnik had said that evening at the café. She had immediately started spending as much time as possible with Strelnik’s wife, to ease her through the tense period. “Has Leah still not heard from him?” Matt asked now.

“No, not a word. She’s so upset, she’s almost ill.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. I assume he’s all right, though. If he weren’t, his friends would have contacted us.”

“How very considerate of you to spend a moment expressing that thought!” Dolly’s voice was oddly husky. In the light of the candles by which they were eating cheese and drinking wine for a midnight supper, her lovely eyes glowed with resentment. “I mean to say I know how highly you value your time, Matt. When you give up even one precious second on behalf of others, it’s deeply appreciated by lesser mortals.”

Rage and sadness mingled as he rubbed his forehead. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dolly. Please don’t start again—”

“Start what? It’s true. An expression of human feeling is a rare thing from a man whose only mistress is his work.”

Matt’s eyes grew bleak. “What the hell’s gotten into you tonight?”

Suddenly her hostility melted. “I’m frightened. I’m frightened of having a child. I want the baby but there’s so much to learn about having one—” She bent her head, tears glistening. “I’m just being bloody bitchy. I do apologize.”

“I understand,” he said, though he didn’t, fully.

Softly, she went on. “It is true about your work, though. If you were in love with another woman, I could fight that. I can’t fight a woman like the one you’re thinking about every moment these days.”

She meant the cantina dancer. He’d been trying to solve a problem of arrangement of the painting’s central figure. He’d even been doing some little drawings tonight, before she’d set out the cheese and wine. The pad, charcoal and several discarded anatomical sketches lay at his feet.

For a moment her glance rested on them with unconcealed loathing. He was infuriated by her suggestion that the problem was unimportant. Before he could say so, she glanced up from the sketches and sighed.

“No, I can’t fight that. Come, let’s go to bed. I’m worn-out, too.”

His anger faded. No doubt the pregnancy was upsetting and tiring her. He supposed that was the case when any woman had her first baby. But this pregnancy brought a special burden. She didn’t know whether it would go to its full term.

July was approaching. The deadline she’d set for his decision. There’d been no further discussion of that decision, but obviously it was much in her thoughts.

Fochet hasn’t spoken to her. When he does, she’ll calm down. Maybe July will come and she’ll back off and there’ll be no need for a decision.

He clung to Fochet as a solution to his difficulty almost as tenaciously as he’d clung to the spar that had kept him from drowning in the Gulf—as tenaciously, and with fully as much desperation.

The remainder of the week went by and the underpainting of the Matamoras scene began to emerge. As he saw it in his head, in his sketches, and then in broad outlines swiftly laid on in black, it would be a canvas full of sweeping line and swirling motion. The dominant color would represent a sinister amber lamplight which had flooded the actual café. He only hoped he could successfully transfer that light from his memory to the canvas.

He’d finally solved the technical problem with the dancer. The problems with Dolly persisted. She seemed exhausted even when she woke in the morning and was increasingly prone to snap and quarrel over the smallest imagined slight.

On Saturday he decided to try to do something to make her feel better. That evening he persuaded her to put on her best frock, and they ambled up to the Moulin de la Galette, which had long ago been converted from an actual mill to an open-air restaurant and dance hall.

The spot was one of the most popular in Montmartre. Guests entered through a gate into a deliberately overgrown garden. Then they passed along a narrow hallway in the old house attached to the mill, which some said had first started grinding grain in the thirteenth century. The door at the end of the hall revealed a whole series of pleasing views on the hilltop: beds of daisies and bright morning glories in a broad lawn; an orchard; a vegetable garden. And surrounded by these charmingly rural aspects, there were clusters of white-painted outdoor furniture, a raised dance floor and a small band shell.

To their surprise, they found Paul and Hortense at one table. “Join us, join us!” Paul urged.

Matt and Dolly did so, though not without some unspoken fears about an unpleasant evening. Paul and his mistress had apparently reconciled, however, and both were in quite good spirits. Occasionally Matt had seen Paul completely forget his practiced truculence. Perhaps tonight would turn out to be one of those grand occasions when some curious chemistry took over and released Paul from his need to make people reject him so that he could continue to believe he was special.

The Moulin soon grew crowded. They ordered good, cheap côtes du Rhône in a large pottery carafe with a brown glaze. After consuming two large glasses, Matt all but forgot his difficulties with Dolly.

The lanterns strung in the trees glowed in the summer dusk. The musicians arrived, started exchanging jokes with the guests as they tuned up. Zola dropped in and stayed half an hour, chatting with Paul and the others about plans for his forthcoming wedding. Dolly sent one or two pointed glances Matt’s way, to remind him that some who were involved in the arts didn’t find it prohibited marriage. He just poured more wine and said nothing.

Auguste Renoir arrived and pulled up a chair. An unusual young man in many ways, Matt thought. Renoir’s father had operated a tailoring shop in Limoges, but the business had failed so he’d come up to Paris when his son was quite small. Young Auguste had painted china just as Fochet had, meticulously copying scenes by Fragonard and Watteau in a dingy warehouse on the Rue du Temple. But to finance his education at the Beaux-Arts, he’d done all sorts of commercial jobs of the kind most aspiring artists scorned. He’d painted figures and ornamental designs on fans, decorated the blinds of shop windows, produced endless copies of coats of arms for important families, and created murals for the walls of obscure little taverns. He was still knocking out commissioned portraits to pay for his living expenses.

Matt believed Renoir had ability equal or superior to Paul’s or Edouard’s and that his paintings would one day be famous. But the young man from Limoges unconsciously made light of his talent by frittering it away. He incessantly scribbled cartoons and caricatures on anything from napkins to his own paper cuffs. Tonight he started off by surreptitiously doing a sketch of Zola as a dirty, swag-bellied laborer. Renoir didn’t care for the journalist or his novels. “He thinks that he fully describes human beings merely by saying they smell,” was his comment after the writer had gone.

Auguste Renoir had a tough air sometimes, almost as if he had grown up as a Paris gamin—which in fact he had—and would remain one until the end of his days. Yet mingled with that street-smart cynicism was something pensive and gentle—as now, when he forgot his pique, tore up the nasty cartoon and began another showing some of the Saturday evening celebrants. The Moulin was one of his favorite subjects.

Matt and Dolly waltzed under the lanterns, whirling round and round the raised wooden floor to the melodies of Johann Strauss the younger. The orchestra played the Viennese music with apolitical enthusiasm. At the end of one number, they walked back to the table to find Renoir just completing a cartoon of them pressed close together, as though dancing languidly to some very slow piece. The lines of the drawing were few but eloquent, and there was no mistaking the models he’d chosen.

“Auguste, that’s grand!” Matt exclaimed. “You must sign it!”

Renoir ripped the drawing off his pad. “Why? It’s trivial.” He started to crush the cartoon into a ball. Dolly rescued it from his hand.

“Not to me. It’s splendid. May we have it?”

The young man seemed flattered. He glanced down in a modest way. “Of course, if you like it that much.” He put his signature on it and handed it to her. She gazed at it with obvious pleasure while they rested during the next few dances.

She really is feeling good tonight, Matt thought when they went back to waltz again. She’d actually shown a liking for a piece of work done by one of his artist friends. Usually her approval was limited to a cool word or two—if that. He often thought she was afraid to display enthusiasm for fear it might imply approval of the profession as well.

Around and around the dance floor they spun, Dolly’s eyes sparkling from all the wine and her cheeks pink from the warmth of the summer night. Unexpectedly, he was reminded of the child as he rested his hand on her waist. He seemed to detect a slight thickening there.

Soon the child would begin to change her figure visibly. That would be just the first of many changes in their lives. It was an awesome thing for a man to contemplate the birth of his first offspring. But under the gay lights of the Moulin, it was a happy thing to contemplate, too.

For three short hours, neither he nor Dolly said a cross word. All was right with the world.

Laughing and clinging to one another, they were weaving along the Rue Saint-Vincent as the bell of Saint-Pierre’s chimed midnight. Slowly the last tolling died away between the summer stars and the twinkling lights of Paris below the butte. The thickly shadowed street was silent except for the meow of an unseen cat on the prowl.

Matt’s curiosity was getting the better of him. The wine he’d drunk finally overcame his caution. In a voice just slightly thickened, he said, “You’re in wonderful spirits tonight, Dolly.”

“It was a wonderful evening. You know how much I love to dance. I won’t be able to do it much long—oops.” She slipped on the cobbles. He grabbed her around the waist to keep her from taking a spill.

Giggling, she collapsed against him. Renoir’s cartoon rattled in her hand. Her weight pushed him back against a wall two houses down from the one protecting Madame Rochambeau’s. Inadvertently his fingers came in contact with the cheap ring she wore. The feel of the metal prodded him again.

“What did Fochet have to say when you spoke to him?”

“The Onion? I haven’t set eyes on him since that party at his studio, just before the Salon opened. Was he supposed to be coming to call on me?”

There was something brittle and deceptive in her voice, Matt thought. The ring of pretense.

Or did the wine make him imagine that?

He decided she was telling the truth. Fochet hadn’t gotten around to talking with her as yet. Undoubtedly it had slipped his mind. Many other things did.

For a moment Matt was intensely angry at his teacher. Then he realized he was being childish. He knew Fochet’s erratic ways. The Onion needed a reminder, that was all.

Well, he’d get one. He definitely would. Dolly had to be persuaded to forget marriage—and
without
mistakenly concluding that he didn’t want the child. Only Fochet had the wisdom and experience to make that delicate distinction apparent to her. And if he didn’t do it, Dolly might go to one of those women who—

“God!”
The very thought brought a shudder of horror.

“What did you say, Matt?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Well, I asked you whether Fochet was supposed to be calling on me.”

“Yes,” he said abruptly. “Yes, he was.”

“Why?”

He didn’t dare reveal that. Trapped, he blurted, “He didn’t say. Maybe he’s planning another party.”

“My, you sound positively grumpy all at once!” She squeezed his hand against her side as they stood in the darkness beside the wall. He knew she didn’t believe his explanation. What was he going to say?

Something spared him the need to say anything. He jerked his hand away.

“Matthew Kent, what’s wrong with you?”

Quickly he shushed her.

“But it’s bloody rude of you to—”

He pointed down the dark street to explain the sudden diversion of his attention. She shook her head.

“I honestly don’t understand what you’re so worked up about—”

“Sssh!”
He pressed his mouth against her ear. “Can’t you see? There’s someone standing across from our gate. In the little alcove beside the fountain. You wait here.”

He turned and started walking diagonally across the street toward the spot where he’d spied the pale blur of a face. He was halfway to the alcove—close enough to hear the old fountain trickling—when a figure burst from its deeper darkness. Matt had an impression of a long-skirted overcoat and a floppy hat—curious clothing for a summer night, unless the watcher wanted to disguise his appearance.

The man went racing up the street with one hand clapped to the crown of his hat. “Here, hold on!” Matt shouted. Before the echo died, he broke into a run that would have enabled him to overtake the watcher easily, except that his foot suddenly slipped in the street’s drainage channel. He cursed as he sprawled on hands and knees.

He struggled up just as Dolly reached him, the cartoon still flapping in her hand.

“Are you all right, Matt?”

“Fine,” he snapped.

“What on earth was that man doing?”

“I think it’s pretty plain he was watching the house.”

“Our house? For what reason?”

Everything else was forgotten, even their differences, as he answered, “I can’t guess the exact one. But I don’t think anyone would be interested in the place because Madame Rochambeau lives there. Or because we do, for that matter.” With an ominous feeling, he added, “I suspect they’re watching it because Strelnik lives there.”

He was sober all at once. So was she. They both slept badly.

A
NOTHER WEEK PASSED.
Summer air lay over the city, breathless and sultry.
Le Figaro
printed reports of damage done by violent thunderstorms along the shores of the North Sea. But no storms rolled down to relieve the late June humidity that oppressed Paris.