Luncheon of the Boating Party (51 page)

With Aline, he felt he was getting close to the best of his capacity. He could paint her forever, until twenty years would shrink to a pinprick of time. Aline was Margot and Lise and Nini and Isabelle and Anna and Henriette and, yes, even Jeanne. All of them in her, and then he came to Alphonsine, who was not funneled into Aline. She was distinct and individual. None like her was ever fashioned.

Now here was Aline, posing for him. Her lips, narrow but full, even fuller when she puckered up to kiss Jacques. The waste of a
dog
being that close to them. It should be him.

Where should he place a first kiss? Right cheek or left? Temple?

No, too avuncular. Chin? No, too odd. Ear? No, too precious. Hand?

No, too courtly. There was no other place but where his desire demanded. Full on the mouth. And if he could wait, it would be a time and place where she would welcome it and might even press back, and all desire, all thirst would make her forgetful of the twenty years, and exquisite touch would meld them. He pictured it, he would paint it, and thus he would possess it.

Jacques whined. That was the difference between the man and

the dog.

“Set him down. I’ve got him.”

“What will you paint now?” she asked.

“Sh. Let me enjoy this.”

With his brush loaded and juicy, he pushed the wet tip gently into the hidden folds of her skirt, deep blue-violet folds such as had never seen the light of day, and stroked again and again, pushing farther, gent ly, wet into the wet already there, a rhythm faint at first, then intensifying, an expectation, a tightening, a rush. He knew he was loading his darks

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as well as his lights, and that was going against the Académie training that all the Salon jurists upheld like the catechism. He was tempting fate, but he was powerless to resist stroking over and over the dark furrows of her skirt, caressing her hidden secrets with the thick, oily paint a lubricant, violet and dark and moist, building up and up as he went down and down into the folds. This would have consequences. It could mean a Salon rejection, and what dealer would take a painting stamped with the Salon’s big red
R
on the back?
Refusée
. Refused, as refuse.

Trash. It could mean that he was, after all, painting only for his own pleasure as he had told Gleyre at the Académie as a young man. Down and down he went.

He could play like this till dark. With a jolt and a tremor, he pulled himself back. Now was his last chance to paint her surroundings with her. His brush flew, hunting for places to touch down. These very important moments to see it all together. Everything popping out now.

Her sleeve seen through the tall goblet. Dragging the red of her velvet trim over the wet blue to blend the edges. A hunk of ruby in a glass.

The rhythm building now in the repeats of colors. The poppies the same red as on Alphonsine’s sleeve, the bow at her waist, the band on Paul’s hat, the edge of Angèle’s collar, the red of her lips, of Alphonsine’s, and of Aline’s new earring which hinted at some complicity—all red enough to sing out like a bell.

Aline’s brilliant white ruffle, white sweeps around her saucer. Scrubbing off a narrow trail of her blue sleeve behind her goblet to make the edge a more luminous white. Streaking it on. Globs of white in the base of glasses to create protrusions to catch light and send it back. More later when these globs dried. The white of the silver spigot on the cask, and of Ellen’s silver ring and bracelets. And the white of Angèle’s pearl earring. A nod of gratitude to Vermeer. Angèle, his own girl with a pearl earring, with her face and throat as smooth in its blending of hues as any Vermeer.

And tinted whites. Lavender- and green-white on the tablecloth

rendered in distinct Impressionist strokes revealing reflected hues in the shadows, not just in gray as the traditionalists painted shadows.

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This was his own individuality, this combination of styles on one canvas. It pleased him to the marrow of his bones.

Onward with more tinted whites, blue-white on Angèle’s frilled

chiffon collar, frothy, as though her neck and head were emerging from some whipped dessert. Brilliant white for the front of Gustave’s shoulder, lavender-white for the back of his shoulder in the shadow of his hat. And the white of Raoul’s collar, of Antonio’s, and of Jeanne’s cuffs, bright enough to take the viewer’s eye deeper into the picture.

And a white highlight in the dog’s eye. “Hold him up again.” She did, and he caught it with his smallest brush. A rush of air poured out his mouth and he felt for a chair behind him.

He was satiated by this feast for his eyes, and needed to refl ect on every morsel of the painting when he was calmer, and alone.

What was left besides the fourteenth face? The deepening of shadows, more and thicker white highlights, more red touches, a balancing, an accent here and there, and especially a brightening if indoor light failed to bring out the colors as he saw them now—he still had that to do, and that made him strangely happy, not to be finished. But the gnawing problem that could kill the whole thing still shouted at him.

The problem that had kept him from painting this three years ago when Fournaise had put up the terrace. How to allude to the building. He would be a target for ridicule if he didn’t solve it. He felt the attack coming in his joints.

“I have to finish later, in the studio. It will be viewed inside, so it has to work inside.”

“Then you’re through with us?” Alphonsine straightened up. Her

mouth tightened to an ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, and her forehead became a torture of grooves, every part conveying something different.

In her face he realized what finishing the painting might mean to her.

He felt himself break in two.

He hated to answer. “Let’s just say we’re finished working as a group.”

Angèle shouted,
“Youpi!”
Pierre swung his hat. Jacques barked. Paul raised both his arms and shouted. “And I was here to see it!”

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Mère and Père Fournaise rushed upstairs. Everyone stood up to look.

“
Oh, là là!
Beautiful, Auguste. Just beautiful,” Louise said with a quaver in her voice, her hands palm to palm against her mouth.

“That’s us,” Aline cried. She held up the puppy. “Look, Jacques Valentin Aristide d’Essoyes sur l’Ource. That’s you!”

“It
is
different than Manet’s scenes,” Ellen murmured. “He only shows separate people in cafés. This looks like I was talking and just took a sip.”

“Our man Renoir leaves the disintegration of society to Manet and Degas and Raffaëlli,” Gustave said. “Here we have genuine sociability.”

“My children. My beautiful children.” Louise was getting sloppy.

She raised her apron to fan herself and wipe her eyes.

Fournaise went downstairs and came up with two bottles of cham-

pagne. He poured. They raised their glasses. “To Auguste,” Fournaise said.

“To Auguste,” everyone said, more seriously than their usual toasts.

“There’s a poem I’ve been trying to remember,” Jules said. “For you, Ellen, since you said the painting is lovelier than the reality.”

We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.

“Beautiful words, Jules. Thank you,” Ellen said.

“Isn’t that dandy,” said Angèle. “We’re
la crème de la crème
to have a poet in the house. You made that up right now just for us?”

“I didn’t make it up at all. An English poet did. Robert Browning.”

“Aw. You could have lied and I would have drunk another glass

to you.”

“I have one question,” Aline said. “May I have my mother see it?”

Hardly the most important person to show it to. “Yes, but not in Camille’s
crémerie.
”

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Paul peered at the painting. “This catboat here, let’s call it the
Inès.

And this sloop coming in to dock, let’s call that . . . What are you sailing in the regatta, Raoul?”

“
Le Capitaine.
”

“Then that one is
Le Capitaine.
And this narrow little racing
périssoire,
this’ll be Guy de Maupassant’s.” He chuckled. “Now we’ve got all the Maison Fournaise participants represented by their boats except Alphonse.”

“Right,” Alphonse said. “Where’s my jousting barque?”

“Tied to the dock waiting for you to practice, so get at it,” Paul said.

“You know, you have some Venus quality in Angèle,” Gustave said.

Auguste snickered. “That old Titian, he’s always pinching my

tricks.”

Louise patted her heart. “You paint what you love, don’t you?”

“A man always does his best work out of love, madame.”

Dear, droll Louise. She had glimpsed the truth. Art was love made visible.

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C h a p t e r T h i r t y - f o u r

À
La Grenouillère

Auguste sat staring at the painting, heavy with the problem of giving the terrace a context. His mood had plummeted.

Aline came up the stairs. “Are you going to sit there forever folded up like a grasshopper? Everyone’s out on the barge putting up glass lanterns.”

“The critics will crucify me if I don’t come up with a solution.”

“To what? What will they say?”

“Another vagary of an insurrectionist painter attempting to present modern life but giving us a fantasy instead. Once upon a time a party of happy people was riding on a magic carpet over the countryside and they came to a river and landed in some trees.” He closed his color box.

“All this work may come to nothing. Worse than nothing. A setback.

And the most important dealer already knows about it.”

Aline sat down close to him. “Didn’t you have a fine time working on it today?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then let that be enough for now,” she said softly, a different way of addressing him. “Hold on to that and let’s go for a walk. Or a swim.

Will you teach me?”

He popped up from his chair. “Yes. Right now.”

“I don’t have a boating costume.”

He could ask Alphonsine. . . . No. “We’ll rent one at La Gre-

nouillère.”

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They walked the narrow spit from the isle of Chatou to the isle of Croissy. Aline picked a sycamore sprig with broad leaves and used it as a fan.

“After a rain we had that same dank smell by the stream near our vineyard,” she said. “I should think there would be mushrooms here in the spring, and soon, the yellow chanterelles that smell like apricots. I used to find them at home. Oh, I do miss the Aube. In summer the cuckoos roosted in our trees. They’re so clumsy. When I was little I tried to scare them so that instead of calling, ‘goo-koo,’ they would call with three sounds. ‘Goo-koo-koo.’ ”

He felt himself becoming bewitched. His mother spoke like this of her country origins outside Limoges. “Tell me more.”

“Oh, it’s so pretty when the red poppies come out, and the wild roses and columbines on the slopes and the grapes growing on chalky hillsides near where the Ource meets the Seine. The waterwheels cranking in a rhythm and the ducks quacking in their gullets and water reeds rustling. You’d like it.”

“I suspect I would.”

Shouts from La Grenouillère made Jacques bark. Swimmers

splashed and dove in the roped-off area. Rowers in the green rental rowboats with red stripes yelled the boaters’ greeting,
cric,
to other boats answering
crac.
Not another person could fit on the little island called the Flower Pot.

“I hope they know how to swim,” Aline said, “because someone’s

going to be knocked off.”

Two
grenouilles
in bathing bloomers sat on the bank with their knees up, spread widely, chatting to each other, waiting for male attention—

loulous
of the suburbs making La Grenouillère a modern Cythera.

He paid for a bathing costume for Aline and she went to the ladies’

dressing cottage among the trees while he changed in the men’s. When she came out, she took small, hesitant steps. She was rounder than he had imagined. Apparently she couldn’t resist a dish of white beans and lard.

She tied Jacques Valentin’s leash to a tree and walked two steps into the water. “The mud squishes between my toes. Like grapes in the vat.”

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Several more steps put her knee deep. Three more and she cried,

“Oh!” as the water reached the top of her inner thighs. She giggled in embarrassment at the new sensation. “I’m used to bathing in a pan.”

In deeper water, her bathing costume filled with air. “Oh, no! I’m a balloon!” She beat down the billowing blouse. “It’s a mighty strange feeling, water all around me at once.”

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. My father took me to the source of the Seine once. It’s only a trickle coming out of a crack in a hill. He said that once there was an old, old temple to the river goddess Sequana. That was the first name of the river, he said. It goes underground and gurgles up again in a narrow stream. I jumped back and forth across it. And here I am, right
in
it!”

She soon began mimicking the young people playing around her,

cupping her hands together and splashing him.

“Some day I will paint you, just like that, splashing someone.”

Nude, like an Ingres nude. Not choppy strokes, but smooth gradations. He glimpsed a painting direction arriving unbidden.

“Only if you can catch me.” She ran away in the waist-deep water, and he caught her. In the instant between two heartbeats, he could kiss her before she knew what was happening, but he was afraid she would think him a nervy old man.