Luncheon of the Boating Party (14 page)

“Fussbudget.” She clinked down the stairway.

“Merci, ma chérie.”

The
Iris
sped by on a broad reach. Gustave was showing off. He tacked quickly and came back. No one was as smooth a sailor as Gustave. Auguste hurried downstairs to help bring in the boat.

As he stepped onto the dock Gustave tugged at his sleeveless singlet.

“Is this all right?”

“Perfect. It’s naturalness I want.”

They watched a stream of people come across the bridge—bourgeois couples under parasols and top hats, young lovers arm in arm, shopgirls chattering gaily, young men on the prowl.

“Doesn’t it remind you of Watteau’s paintings of Cythera?” Auguste asked.

“Ah, the isle of Venus. A day of love in some secluded glen.”

“Willing
grenouilles
waiting on the bank in bathing costumes or summer dresses ready to jump into action.”

Gustave shook his head. “Cythera’s only a myth.”

“It’s a hope for some. The bushes will be moving in a few hours.”

They both chuckled, somewhat wistfully, Auguste thought.

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“You know what Guy de Maupassant named his new barque?”

Gustave asked.
“L’Envers des Feuilles.”

“The undersides of leaves?”

“What couples see when they’re on the ground.”

“Ah, yes. Frenchmen appreciate
la nature.
” Auguste sat at a table under the maples and drummed his fingers, watching the footbridge.

“Relax. They’ll come.”

The next train arrived and chugged off to the west, belching black smoke. Soon Angèle stepped off the bridge with Antonio Maggiolo, the Italian journalist, jaunty in pin-striped jacket. She looked delicious with a white velvet toque perched on her auburn curls and a red carnation tucked between her breasts. Right behind her, petite Ellen Andrée, wearing a
canotier
with a flower pinned to the side, came with a man she introduced as Émile.

“One more is always welcome,” Auguste said.

Now if Charles and Jeanne didn’t come, he would still have a dozen.

But what if only one of them came? Thirteen. Not knowing was making him sweat.

“I’ll have you know I had a crushing performance last night,” Angèle said, her eyes glinting at Auguste. “I usually sleep till noon after the likes of such a one.”

Antonio made no effort to hide his lusty smile.

“I appreciate you being here. You both look splendid.”

He wondered if Jeanne had given an actual performance last night.

“Would you like a
café?
” Auguste asked.

Angèle sized up Gustave in his singlet. “We’d like a boat ride.”

“I’ll take you for a sail to Bezons and back,” Gustave offered.

They pushed off. He turned back and saw Alphonsine in a dark

blue boating skirt and white middy blouse trimmed in red.

“Oh. I wish I’d seen you in time. You could have gone with them.”

“That’s all right. Is Mademoiselle Samary here yet?” she whispered.

Auguste made a show of looking under the tables, in the arbor, up on the side balcony, in the trees, in the water.

“No, but here comes Jules Laforgue, natty in country tweed and

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mariner’s cap.” He introduced her as
la belle Alphonsine,
the soul of La Maison Fournaise. “You ought to appreciate that, Jules. You write poems about soul, don’t you?”

“Among other things equally elusive.” Jules chuckled. “Equally impossible to express.”

“Right, so I’m glad you’ve come down to earth for a day. You’ll have to excuse him, Alphonsine, if he spouts Shakespeare now and then.

Jules may be quiet, he may be looking off in the distance, but he’s always thinking.”

“I hear, yet say not much, but think the more,”
Jules said with a self-mocking grin.
“This breast of mine hath worthy cogitations.”

“Then cogitate on that a moment.” Auguste gestured toward the

river.

Baron Raoul Barbier was arriving under sail at a dangerous speed, just as he’d said at Madame Charpentier’s salon. A brave fellow. Alphonse leapt down from the bank and cushioned the hull from crashing into the dock. Raoul tossed him the bowline, lurching sideways on his stiff leg. “
Nana
is as frisky as a filly in her first race,” he said apologeti-cally. “Are the ladies here yet?”

Right at that moment, Auguste saw her. Not Jeanne. Cécile-Louise, the woman with too much name. On the top step of the bridge. Her dress! Shimmery blue and white stripes. He didn’t know if he could love
her,
but he could love the dress. Composed, expectant, twirling a coral-colored parasol with ruffled edge, packaged and sent by Madame Charpentier. A porcelain fi gurine of a Watteau lady already posing so that at any moment a nobleman would bow and escort her to Cythera.

He felt himself moving toward her, unconscious of the grass and gravel beneath his feet, the luminous skin of her face and décolletage unmistakably coming closer, and he arriving somehow, in time to take her hand as she stepped daintily onto the ground. Her hand was

warm—this was no myth.

“I’ve been breathless, waiting for this day,” she purred through a dazzling smile and the overpowering scent of cheap perfume.

“You look ravishing. A striped dress is every painter’s dream.”

Her nose poked at the sky. “A bird told me so.”

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“One who answers to the name of Madame Charpentier, no doubt.”

A calculated coup. He forgave Madame her manipulation in anticipation of what he could do with those stripes falling in folds.

The
canotiers
climbed out of the boats and Alphonse declared Paul the victor. Paul did a celebratory dance step on the slanted dock, an oar on his shoulder.

“You won’t feel like dancing if this dock collapses,” Pierre said.

Paul grinned at a young girl on the promenade, turned to follow her, and whacked Pierre on the back of the head with the oar.

“Zut!”
Pierre cried and chased him up the bank. “Give me that before you brain someone prettier than me.”

“Who are they?” Cécile-Louise asked.

“The one in the bowler with the bushy red beard is Pierre Lestringuèz. He works for the Department of the Interior. A good sort, but ever since he began studying the occult, he’s become a bit of a calamity howler, always foreseeing the worst.”

“And the winner?” Alphonsine asked.

“Paul Lhôte. A loose screw. Hungry for experiences. Reckless. A writer of articles and an amateur painter. He escapes his deadly conventional post at a shipping company by collecting unconventional adventures.”

“Such as?”

“Stowing away to South America on a packet ship. He lost his post for that escapade, so he immediately stowed away to Asia. On the isle of Jersey once he dared me to dive from a high cliff out over the rocks into furious waves. I thought he was crazy, but he did it, bare-assed, and came up laughing.”

“He would make a good
canotier,
” Alphonsine said. “He’s not afraid of getting wet.”

“What Paul lacks in caution, Pierre supplies in fretfulness.”

When Gustave’s boatload arrived they were singing a
canotier
song about feeling good on Sundays:

Mais le dimanche, mais le dimanche,

Moi, je me sens bien, bien, bien,

Car je ne fais rien, rien, rien.

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As they went upstairs, Auguste sang loudest.

Louise came up to set out the uncut bread. A pretext only. He knew she couldn’t contain her curiosity. “Why, Auguste, I never knew you could sing.”

“When I was a boy, Gounod said I should be an opera singer. I can dance too.” He grabbed her around the waist and twirled her under his left arm.

“Oh, là là,”
she cried, took one look at the models, and hurried downstairs.

The moment lacked only Jeanne and Charles to make it perfect. Not one, but both of them.

Auguste made sure that Cécile-Louise sat so that she’d be in the foreground of the painting and her dress would spill over the side of her chair in a cascade of stripes. She was as decorative as a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette on one of his china plates. He was dying to start painting right then, but there was the meal to get through.

Fournaise brought up a bottle of white wine and another of
crème de
cassis
to combine as an
apéritif.
He held the cassis up to the light. The black currant liqueur would be a gorgeous deep red in the glasses.

Angèle tapped her cordial glass. “Be a good man and pour me a

schnick.”

“Did you know this was invented by monks in the sixteenth cen-

tury?” Fournaise asked. “As a cure for snakebite, jaundice, and wretch-edness.”

Angèle winked at Antonio. “
Alors,
I do believe a snake bit me just last night, come to think of it, so don’t be afraid to be generous.”

Paul raised his glass. “A toast honoring Auguste’s painting-to-come.

A toast to
la vie moderne,
which allows us the freedom to row where we please and eat at the table of life. Let us spend our wealth and time gaily, preserve our liberty, and enjoy life whatever happens.
À votre santé!
”

Whatever happens, Auguste thought. It sounded ominous.

The itch under his cast was tormenting him. He needed to get started painting so he could be absorbed, body, mind, and instinct, so the itch would disappear.

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“Liberté, egalité, fraternité, et gaîté,”
Raoul said.

Pierre sang a Béranger drinking song urging people to avoid drunkenness by taking small sips, but plenty of them.

“Vive la bohème!”
Angèle sang out, and all chorused the toast.

Louise and Alphonsine served the entrées. “A family effort,” Louise said. “Alphonse caught the eels in Marly, Alphonsine caught the arti-chokes at the market last month, and I conserved them in jars.”

Someone downstairs at the piano was playing a medley of Béranger’s ballads of Lisette, the
grisette
from the country living on bread and diluted wine, as faithful as her poverty allowed. Pierre sang some lines and Jules made up a verse about Lisette as a
canotière.
People were getting to know each other. The toast was working. Or maybe it was the cassis-and-wine.

The main course was
canard à la paysanne,
braised duck garnished with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, bacon, and fried potatoes. Auguste didn’t know how he could sit still and eat. He was conscious only of the painting moving before his eyes. Conversations separated, blended, jumped from one topic to another. He didn’t follow them.

Alphonsine brought out two large raspberry tarts. The light on her raised cheeks issued from within. She cut generous pieces, and lingered by the railing watching intently as each person took a bite.

“Did you make these?” Auguste asked.

“With a little help from the sun and rain.”

When Père Fournaise set out a small wooden cask of brandy, all Auguste could think about was how much everything was going to cost.

“You have no Menuet Hors d’Age?” the baron asked.

“This is the brandy
de la maison.
”

Raoul gave Fournaise a condescending look. “What I like about

Menuet Hors d’Age is that the quality is always the same. You can depend on it.”

“What a good definition of nothingness,” Fournaise said. “Isn’t vari-ety one of the pleasures of life?”

“With ladies, yes,” Raoul said with a silly grin.

“With brandy too. You have country brandy once in a while, woody

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and nutty in flavor, and when you return to your expensive cognacs, they’re downright boring. You’ll see.”

Fournaise pressed the spigot over a glass and held it aloft to show its deep copper color, then held it to Raoul’s nose. “Rich,
non?
”

Raoul sniffed twice and then sipped. “Earthy.”

“That’s the roasted sugar and spices.” He filled glasses all around.

Auguste set his aside. The time was approaching. Anne, one of the servers, removed the plates and delivered a compote of figs and golden pears and purple grapes with burnished grape leaves still on the stems.

Perfect.

Alphonse
fi ls
came upstairs. “Where do you want me?”

“Over here by the railing. Lean up against it. Look at Ellen.”

Ellen raised her hand and wiggled her fi ngers. “Me.”

Alphonse held out his arms awkwardly, not knowing what to do

with them.

“Put your hands on the railing.”

Maggiolo stood up to stretch, leaned over Angèle to speak to her, and tried to take advantage of a bird’s-eye view down the front of her dress. He couldn’t see much. For all her raucous talk, Angèle was a modest dresser.

Jules stepped back from the table at the far end with Paul and Pierre and lit his small white pipe.
“All the world’s a terrace, and all the men and
women merely models,”
he said, obviously amusing himself. He turned to Pierre and Paul and pointed back and forth to each one. “And so,
my
excellent good friends, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern, or is it Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz?
Let us pose with panache.”

Pierre chuckled, got in one last gulp of wine and one good scratch of his beard, and then stood still. Gustave lit a cigarette. Raoul stood next to Alphonsine who was bending forward with her elbow on the railing. It was a natural pose for her, but standing so long might be hard on Raoul’s leg.

“Raoul, please, sit.”

Veronese situated his figures symmetrically at a U-shaped table in
The Marriage Feast at Cana.
Today, the models themselves made an asymmetrical U around an array of bottles, glasses, a heel of bread, the