Luncheon of the Boating Party (52 page)

“Do you want me to teach you to swim, or do you want to splash me till I drown?”

“I want you to teach me to swim.”

“Then you’ll have to come out deeper.”

The bottom fell away, she lost her footing, and her hands grabbed for his neck. Holding her by her waist, he walked backward into deeper water until she couldn’t touch bottom. She cried out and giggled, fl ailing.

“I’ve got you.” Now she was dependent on him. “Relax. Lean for-

ward.”

His hands were under her, supporting the mound of her belly and her ribs, a bold indiscretion any other time. Her buoyant breasts grazed his arm. He whirled her in a circle. Her hair floated in patterns like golden sea grass, like filaments of silk moving in graceful unison.

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“I should have tried this long ago,” she said.

“No, you shouldn’t have. Today is the right time.”

He showed her how to take a stroke and flutter-kick. She learned quickly, which was disappointing because she didn’t hold on to him as tightly.

“You have strong arms,” he said.

“That comes of hoisting buckets as soon as I could work the pump.”

“I’ll bet you can wring a chicken’s neck too.”

When she became tired, he brought her back so she could stand, and showed her how to fl oat face-up, with his hand supporting her shoulders and the small of her back. The thin cotton of her bathing costume clung to her breasts, and her nipples stood firm and perky in the cool water.

At what moment would she know that he wasn’t merely perform-

ing an avuncular duty by teaching her to swim so that if she ever got bounced off the Flower Pot she could save herself? At what moment would she know that those pouty lips drove him crazy?

Now. He drew her to him and kissed her wet mouth, succulent as a berry, kissing from her mouth down her neck. He took a deep breath and went underwater to nuzzle her belly, holding her by her hips. Her hands pushed him away and then relaxed. He held his breath until he had to thrust himself upward for air. Lowering himself, he blew bubbles that lodged between her breasts.

“You sure can swim like a fish. Wait till I tell Géraldine.”

“Then Camille will know, and that means your mother will too.”

“Oh, no. That can’t be.”

When he saw her shiver, they went back to the bank. Her costume stuck to her in folds. A nude. Yes. Someday. They lay down in a sunny patch of grass.

“Do you know why I like La Grenouillère so much?”

“Because you’re a fi sh.”

“Because it’s the Moulin de la Galette of the suburbs and the very spot where Impressionism was born. It didn’t have a name then, but we knew we were discovering new ways to paint. It’s hallowed ground for

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me here. We had a jolly time that summer even though we didn’t eat every day.”

“How do you do it? Paint, I mean.”

“I look at something. It makes me happy. I paint it. It’s a handicraft.”

“Like woodworking?”

“Yes, I’d say so.”

“My father made things of wood. A table and chairs.”

“You take a man who makes something himself, start to fi nish, from idea to the last sweep of his hand across it, now, that’s a happy man. He can look at it, use it, pass it on to his children. He’s happy.”

“I don’t think my father was.”

“A factory worker making only chair legs never gets that satisfaction. He’s the unhappy one.”

“Finishing chairs wasn’t enough. My father was unhappy.”

“How do you know?”

“In the country, when people have black thoughts they go to a barn to dance the
ronde
or to a
veillée
on winter evenings where the women sew and the men repair tools. My parents went often, but it didn’t help.”

He wasn’t going to make the mistake he did with Margot, not taking an interest in her background. “Tell me about them.”

“Once my father picked me up, set me on his horse, and climbed on behind me. We rode to the top of a hill. He asked me if I could see the sea. I laughed and told him I only saw rows of grapevines and the house and the hills. Then I asked what he saw. ‘The sea, another coast, other hills, mountains, other cities,’ he said. I thought he was playing a game with me, but no. He was preparing me.

“The next day when I woke up, he wasn’t in the house, wasn’t in the vineyard or the pressing house. His horse was gone. He never came home.”

“I never imagined.” He took her hand and stroked the back of it.

“Maman thought he left because she nagged him about bringing in mud on his shoes one too many times.”

Auguste had done the same thing, to the infinite displeasure of Madame Bérard. He sympathized with the man.

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“You’ve never heard from him?”

“We waited through several winters and tried to keep the vineyard going with my cousins’ help. Then Maman thought we’d find him in Bercy, where the wine comes into Paris from the east. So five years ago we moved here to look for him. I cried all day when we left. It cleft my life in two parts, before and after, like a cleaver going through a melon.

Whack. I wobbled for a long time after that.”

“You didn’t like Paris?”

“The bigness made me feel small. I couldn’t sleep for the noise at night. Maman got a post as a seamstress and put me out to work as a laundress. After work every day she dragged me around looking for him. We rode omnibuses on the upper level so we could search better.

People gave us mean looks. We didn’t know women weren’t supposed to climb up there. At the slaughtering yards in La Villette, Maman asked, ‘Have you seen a man named Pascal Charigot, middling tall if he weren’t so bent, eyes spaced wide like a Dutchman’s, a large brown mole beneath the left one?’ It was so embarrassing. I hated it.

“But whenever I’m in a café, I sit so I can look out the window, just in case he might walk by. I have dreams of walking down a street or buying fruit in the Marché de Saint Pierre, and there he would be, coming right toward me.”

“You never found him?”

“A letter came to the vineyard and my aunt sent it to my mother. He was in America. In a place called North Dakota.”

He glimpsed the vacancy her father left in her life. Until now, he had only seen her cheerfulness, just as he had with Alphonsine at fi rst.

“I wonder if he ever wakes up thinking he might have made a mistake. If he had died instead, it would have been easier on Maman.

There’s something natural about death. There’s nothing natural about a father leaving a vineyard his great-great-grandfather planted and a family he loves.”

Auguste couldn’t blame the man for having the wanderlust. He had the courage to make a clean break from a carping wife. Would the daughter slip into the mother’s nagging nature?

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He could never take her to Madame Charpentier’s salon, to any of the other
hôtels particuliers
where he had commissions, to the Salon or to Durand-Ruel’s gallery. She might blurt out some rustic impropriety fi t for a barn. He would be leading a double life.

She was too young. He too old, too unstable in money matters. He had visions of Monet unable to feed his pregnant Camille, forced to beg from Charpentier and Zola, and of Sisley’s wife packing up in the night, time after time to avoid landlords. He was far from ready to settle down.

Maybe, by a stroke of luck, the painting would earn enough for him to travel. Nearly forty years old, and he had not seen the frescoes of Raphael. He had not expanded his
oeuvre
beyond Paris, the Forest of Fontaine bleau, the Seine. Now was the time, when he was unattached.

He was going to chase the light. He would experiment. He would be his own man.

Another man might snatch her up in the interim. She was ripe as a grape at picking time. It was all moot anyway if he couldn’t solve the last problems of the painting and his career shriveled because of it.

“Do you see differently than normal people?” she asked.

He laughed solemnly at himself. “Maybe. Look at that skiff under that tree. Don’t think of objects. Think of colors and shapes. What do you see?”

“A green boat, a green river, a green tree. Like that?”

He shook his head. Never to a dinner where art would be discussed.

But what dinners did he attend where art was not discussed?

“Not quite.”

“Then, what?”

“An elongated shape pointed and curved up slightly at one end, the shape revealed as gradations of different greens. Behind it, shifting patches of deep green and blue and yellow-green and white, with a shimmering red line repeating the solid one on the long green shape. A vertical column of brown edged in ocher on one side, reaching upward and dividing, angling up to a textured fullness of greens and yellows touched in places by ocher and gold.”

“Doesn’t all that seeing wear you out?”

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“Try again.”

She squinted. “I see some great old maple trees that have been here longer than anyone. Honorable trees, as honorable as old grapevines.”

Yes, differently.

Their spot of sun had gone. Shadows of trees stretched fi ngerlike across the water. Gooseflesh rose on her arm. It was time to get dressed.

He paced at a respectable distance from the ladies’ changing cabin. The sun was sinking. Already a few clouds bloomed in shades of rose and soft orange and cast violet shadows on the river in spots. It would be a dazzling color show.

“Aline, hurry,” he said outside the cabin. When she came out, he grabbed her hand. “It’ll be over in a few minutes.”

She untied Jacques and he hurried her through the little wood to the western bank of the island. The incandescent globe rested momentarily on the poplars across the channel, then winked between their branches, shooting shafts of orange light right through the translucent blue-green surface of the river.

“The sun is rolling toward America,” she mused.

Solemn, he would call her expression at that moment if he had to fi nd a word. When he looked skyward again, the pale orange had become rose and he had missed a stage in the color change.

“Don’t move.” He crawled away from her and lay on his stomach at a little distance. “Now I can see you against the changing colors.”

She was quiet and still, for him, he thought. The sky cast a ravishing rosy light over her shoulders and turned her deep golden hair to bronze.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to watch her go about her domestic tasks, and to have this display of double beauty at the end of every day.

He crawled back and lay on his side facing her. He could press himself against her, if the yappy terrier would let him. Anticipation pulsed.

He never experienced anything deeply unless he was able to touch it.

He made a move. Jacques growled.

“I won’t hurt your mistress. I promise.”

Jacques countered with a bark. Aline scooped him up and he quieted.

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Auguste passed his fingers over the grass. “See, Jacques? What I want to do isn’t anything more than this. She’ll hardly feel it.” He would go through a long, slow dance, building a history before he touched her sexually.

What Madame Charpentier and Camille saw in him was a need to

give himself to a living, breathing being, someone real, not colors on a canvas. To give himself in a way he’d never done, in this case, by with-holding himself for the sake of the woman. He was beginning to grasp the difference between pleasure and happiness. It was another plane, beyond adoration and sensuousness, a country new to him. At this stage of life, he’d better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.

“I want to paint you again. Let me name the ways. On the bank

about to get into a yole with someone, let’s say Gustave. Dancing at Bal des Canotiers.”

“With the baron?”

“No, waltzing with Paul. In a garden, reading.” Her face turned pink at that. “As a nude in the sunlight, your hair streaming over your shoulders like the great Renaissance paintings of goddesses. Someday.

When you’re ready.”

“You mean when my mother is ready.”

“Then begin getting her ready now.”

“She doesn’t want me to run with a painter.”

“We won’t run. We’ll stroll, and enjoy every step.”

He brushed his hand across her ankle, the outer bone and the inner, fixing the shape in his mind. Jacques perforated him with his beady black eyes. His hand moved slowly upward to where her ankle became calf.

Jacques barked and she drew her leg away. “I have to go home. Maman is expecting me before dark.”

“Ah, yes,
la mère
whose affection I must win. I could begin tonight.”

“No.” She stood and picked up her dog.

“Might I accompany you to the station?”

She nodded, already walking.

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He would do more than that. He would ride the train with her to Paris, and hope that she wouldn’t lose her willingness when they left the mystique of the river world and entered the gaslit streets fanning out from Gare Saint-Lazare before arriving at his atelier. Instead of walking back through the Maison Fournaise, they took the steam ferry from La Grenouillère to Rueil. On the water he looked south beyond Bougival to Louveciennes. Twilight softened the edges of everything.

“From the bridge at Bougival, you can see the aqueduct on the hill.

Whenever I see its row of arches, I think of Italy. I need to go there someday, to see the art of the Renaissance, and to paint.”

“You won’t know how to talk to them.” Her words were clipped

and fi nal.

“Sometimes I feel so restless I can’t stand myself. I want to go to Algeria too, to find that southern light that Delacroix painted.”