Luncheon of the Boating Party (18 page)

“Do you have a favorite place on the river?” she asked.

“All the spots I ever painted.”

“I mean one place.”

He was quiet for the length of two strokes. “La Grenouillère.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed that. It’s so noisy and crowded.”

“That was the spot where we started Impressionism.”

“You can say that for certain?”

“Yes. I can name the day. The first Sunday in July 1869, when Claude Monet and I set up our easels next to each other and experimented to learn how broken strokes show light dancing on the water. Like now.

Do you see the yellow?”

“I see where the sun catches the ripples.”

“They have color. Right now it’s yellow ocher even though the water’s dominant color is blue, but there’s lavender and green too. We knew we were discovering something revolutionary. We couldn’t wait to get back to Paris and tell Bazille. We were living in his studio in the Batignolles. It’s his color box I broke.”

He seemed to drift away from her. She wanted to call him back,

wanted to know all the steps that brought him here, to this painting and to her in this boat.

“Who is Bazille?”

“Frédéric. The three of us lived in two rooms—one that overheated when the stove decided to work, where we slept in the buff, and the other unheated where we painted and ate with our overcoats on in winter. Poor Lise, the model for my nude of
Diana the Huntress.
Every half hour Frédéric ran down the six flights of stairs to buy her a
café
while Claude and I wrapped her in blankets. When she stopped shivering, we went to work again.”

“That sounds awful.”

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“It was wonderful! We were in our twenties and doing what we

wanted. When we had no money for models, we painted each other. Or we painted bridges and boulevards. We always went to Le Moulin de la Galette on Sundays because it was free, long before I thought to paint it.

But whenever Bazille got some money from his parents, he insisted on taking us on a round of theaters and cabarets and circuses and dance halls, the Folies-Bergère, the café concerts on barges, the horse races at Longchamp, until the money ran out. Then we would have to start the fire in the stove with our watercolors and drawings again. We were brash beyond our means, but Paris, sublime and sordid, was there for the taking, if not in those days then in the future. We were drunk on possibility, intoxicated by the thousand delights yet to be tasted.

“At night, to keep warm, we went to the Café Guerbois nearby and played dominoes or checkers, sometimes with the writers Duret, Zola, or Durant. They educated us. We met Manet there, and Cézanne and Pissarro and Degas. Every Thursday night without fail there were spirited discussions about a revolution in painting. Before the press labeled us Impressionists, we called ourselves the Batignolles group. Then the war came.”

“Go back all the way.”

“More? You want more?”

“Can you name the day you decided to become a painter?”

He smiled on one side only.

“It crept up on me. When I was a child I drew a dog with my father’s tailor’s chalk on the tenement floor, drew a frame around it, and told my family not to walk on it. It was surprising that they respected it enough not to. It made me feel important, so I did more—my sister, my mother, the houses on our street, the Roman well. I ventured farther, to the Fountain of the Innocents in a maze of market stalls, which held me spellbound even then with its sculptures of women. Soon my parents, three brothers, and my sister were all tiptoeing between my pictures of Paris done from memory on the fl oor.”

He paused as though he were enjoying the memory.

“My mother had to do something to keep peace in the house so I was

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taken out of school and apprenticed to a porcelain manufacturer on rue du Temple when I was thirteen. I loved it, and was able to help my parents buy a house in Louveciennes. It was piecework and I was fast. The older workers called me Monsieur Rubens. I had high hopes to earn six francs a day, which would have provided me a good living eventually.”

“Does that mean you quit?”

“When I was seventeen, the workshop was shut down by companies

that printed designs on ware by machines. Hundreds of them exactly the same. Progress and science killed off the kind of slow handwork that had made me happy. It was my first disillusionment. I had thought I would be content painting Venuses and Marie Antoinettes forever, but I was born a century too late for that.”

She kept rowing slowly so he would keep talking.

“I set up a cooperative and painted my own designs faster than the machines, thinking I could outwit progress, but by that time shopkeepers didn’t want anything made by hand. They wanted uniformity. To me it signaled a decline in taste.”

“Your second disillusionment? What did you do then?”

“I got a job copying eighteenth-century paintings on ladies’ fans. It was easy to obtain a card allowing me to paint the Old Masters in the Louvre as a study during my lunchtime. I painted murals in cafés too.

Imagine how thrilling it was to cover a whole wall after years of working in miniature. I felt liberated by bigness, by the chance to swing my arm and leave a trail of color. It paid a pittance and wasn’t steady work so I switched to painting window shades. Lucrative, but so repetitious it nearly killed me. Twenty years old and I’d come to a point of decision.”

“What decision?”

“My parents agreed to call in someone they thought was an ‘expert’

to determine if I had any talent. The only person we knew was a student at a second-rate drawing school. The whole family was nervous, one moment hoping they wouldn’t be made to feel foolish if the ‘expert’

laughed, the next moment hoping that he would say I was a pathetic dreamer so that I would forget painting and turn to a more dependable trade.”

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“And the expert said you had talent.”

Without a hint of a smile, he nodded. What a pitiful look—his eyes dark, his cheeks hollowed.

“The man said I must get a proper art education. There was only somber silence around the dinner table that night. Even my younger brother stared at his plate and wouldn’t eat. My parents were plunged into despair as wrenching as if they’d lost a son.”

“Weren’t they pleased at all?”

“It meant giving up steady work and taking on a monstrous risk. It meant the end of my contributions to the family’s well-being.”

“But what did
you
feel?”

“Wronged. Tricked by my own talent. I’ll never forget my mother sobbing into a dish towel. It made me feel as though I’d committed a crime. But the next morning she managed a motherly look as she

bravely sent me off to apply at l’École des Beaux-Arts. That was my third disillusionment.”

“Oh, no. Why?”

“I got next to nothing out of it. But I met Bazille, Sisley, and Monet there. They were disgusted too, so we left the academy and painted outdoors in the Forest of Fontainebleau. I painted a rustic inn in Mar-lotte, Mère Anthony’s, with Monet, Sisley, and Le Coeur posing around a table. The waitress and Mère Anthony too. That was my fi rst step here, to this painting of people around
two
tables.”

That’s what she’d been waiting for. It placed her, somehow, in his life. She realized she had stopped rowing, and began again.

After a few minutes he pulled himself out of the past and said,

“There’s a beautiful maple behind you with an overhanging branch.

Just think. There’s no other tree exactly like it.”

“No two leaves exactly alike either.”

“Some say a tree is only made of chemicals, but I believe that God created it.” A glint came into his eyes. “And that it’s inhabited by a nymph.”

She liked that he could be playful. Edgar Degas would never

say that.

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“Then I’ll tell you a fairy tale when we get to a place,” she said.

“Do you have a favorite place?”

“Two of them.” She looked behind her, and saw the farthest of the Elizabethan cottages of Rueil spreading its garden toward the water.

“We’re close to one of them.” She rowed past the rotting trunk that lay diagonally in the river, the hawthorn with berries beginning to redden, the rill that ran down to the river. And there were the two sycamores with their branches intertwined and leaning over the water. She stopped rowing.

“Do you remember the fairy tale of the yellow dwarf? Two lovers, a prince and a princess, were separated by an evil dwarf who killed the prince?”

“Vaguely,” he replied.

“The princess was so grief-stricken that she died too. A wise siren buried their bodies next to each other and they became trees. Their branches became intertwined. She knew they needed that in order to remain faithful. These two big sycamores, this is it.”

“Because of the tale?”

“Partly. Louis asked me to marry him here.” She reached up to grab a branch to keep them from drifting. “I was eighteen. He wanted to carve our names into them, but I wouldn’t let him hurt the trees. Now I wish I had.”

“Why?”

“Why are you painting this painting? It’s for the same reason. To let the world know after our time that we were here, and that we loved.”

“How do you know that for me?”

“By the way your face came alive when Jeanne Samary came up the stairs.”

“It’s only that I wanted her in the painting.”

“Then why didn’t you welcome the man with her like you welcomed Émile?”

Several minutes passed before he said, “You’re pretty sure of

yourself.”

She started rowing again, sorry she’d made him feel exposed.

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“What’s your other favorite place?”

“We’re going there.”

A cork bobbed alongside the boat and Auguste leaned out to grab it, but it eluded him and was drawn into a whorl of grasses.

“I took the cork of the bottle of cassis yesterday,” she said.

He tipped his head. “What for?”

“It was the first bottle of the first day painting the first luncheon of your boating party.”

A soft look came into his eyes. “No one else there thought to do that.

What a petite bundle of big feeling you are.”

Now it was her turn to feel exposed. “Sometimes more than what’s good for me.”

For amusement, she rowed toward the cork and tried to wave it

within reach with her oar. It plunged and popped up, going this way and that, riding the ripples downstream until it became lost in the glare on the water.

“There I go,” Auguste said, “just drifting with the current. Not deciding anything for myself. My friend Paul—”

“The one who smacked his friend with the oar?”

“Yes. He thinks that in order to have good memories at the end of your life, you have to behave like a cork in a stream, letting yourself go. Who’s to say whether letting things be what they will isn’t the better way?”

“It’s what brought you here, letting that expert decide.”

“But it goes beyond that. Some painters think they are creating a world in each painting. I don’t. I think the world is creating my motifs for me.

In that way, it’s creating me too, carrying me along like that cork.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

“It could lead me down several paths at once, false starts all of them.

That’s the way I feel with my painting styles—a little of this, a little of that. Experimentation is all right for a painter when he’s twenty, even thirty, but I’m almost forty.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

A brief, wry smile came across his face. “Forty and still merely setting down what I see.”

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“Is that an issue of faith?”

“One might see it that way. You can say it’s an issue of responsiveness and appreciation. The world is ravishing, Alphonsine. Just look. The distinct colors of the water quivering like moiré silk, the lattice of shadows made by branches shifting, that mallard with the iridescent head, posing for me so the light catches his white neck ring. You with your hair peeking out from your hat. Life. Ravishing life! If I were to paint what I see right now, it wouldn’t be my invention. It’s just what has been given me—by God, if you will, or by the current of life. Why not think it was made so gorgeous for me?”

She rowed slowly, relishing the moment. He was different than

other painters. Claude spoke of the beauties of nature, but Auguste included her in them.

“Other times, I wonder what I’m missing. Not in the visual world, but with people. What I don’t think to ask. So much slips away. Just drifting can lead a person to a dead end, and he’s stuck going around and around endlessly. How long am I going to keep on not knowing something important?”

“Like what?”

“Like finding my way as a painter.”

He was honest. She appreciated that.

“Or as a human being,” she said, wondering how long that would

take
her.

He gazed across the water. “That too.”

“I believe you’re less of a cork than you realize,” she said. “Don’t you see that you make decisions every day? Small ones, practically imperceptible, but plaited together they make a cord running through your life?”

“That doesn’t make me feel any more anchored. I think I’ll still be unsure of myself on my deathbed.”

“Only zealots aren’t.”

She had nearly passed the row of willows trailing their green curtain of branches in the water. Behind them was the bed of grasses and sweet alyssum.

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“Turn in,” she said. “This is it. Do you remember the fl ood of ’74?

The water overflowed these banks. When it retreated, Alphonse and I were out in the steam launch towing runaway boats back to their owners. On that slope we saw two bodies tangled together with a rope, all purple and bloated, a man and a woman. Alphonse thought they’d been using the rope to haul something from the flood and had gotten swept away. I thought they were lovers who were denied each other and had twined themselves together and leapt off Pont Saint-Louis, the suicide bridge, and the flood had brought them here. They lay with their heads turned toward one another, as if they’d gone down with a kiss.”