I Always Loved You (12 page)

T
hat night, Degas waited in the wings at the Opéra, biding his time until his chosen
petit rat
, his dancer in training, Marie van Goethem, changed out of her costume. He had recently been awarded a backstage pass, which he guarded in his pocket as if it were gold. Tonight he was joined in the wings by a dozen other men, all dodging the scene shifters removing the wooden tavern and
balcons
that had made up the background for tonight's last performance of
Coppélia
. All the men were waiting for the young dancers to finish changing from performance tutus to street clothes. But unlike the
abonnés
striking poses of aloof indifference, hoping to conceal their pedophilic intentions, Degas was fingering the wing's curtains. How many times had he painted this heavy velvet without ever once having the chance to observe the play of limelight up close? Not yet snuffed after the night's performance, the greenish light still flared in the bank of footlights, the flickering shadows undulating on the folds of the velvet like an articulating flock of birds. He was instantly dismayed as he thought of all the canvases on which he had painted the falling light wrong. It was nerve-wracking, discovering one's mistakes; exposure at every turn. To approximate reality necessitated reality, and though he usually remembered his way through his work, he liked his imagination grounded. Like, he supposed, the
petits rats
, the scampering girls vying for a place in the ballet corps, their mothers peering over their shoulders and sitting through rehearsals, pushing them to succeed so that their families could eat, ignoring the desires of the men who in the evening took the girls home with them, and perhaps fed them before consuming them, and who, if things worked out, might one day fall in love with them and take the girls off their parents' hands.

Giddy, the girls emerged in a swarm from an iron balustraded stairway from the cellars, having navigated the tortuous passages from the crowded dressing rooms they all shared, face paint still smeared on their soft cheeks, their overextended limbs twisted and gawky in the ghostly half-light of the wings. One by one, they sheered off from the group to be taken up by the waiting men. Marie ran to Degas and he embraced her, full of affection and praise for her performance, though she had stood in the back row and her only task had been to keep her hands raised in an artful
V
as the
étoiles
, the stars, danced a pas de deux.

“You are not too tired?” Degas asked, emptying into her waiting hands the sweets he always carried in his coat pockets when he visited the Opéra.

“Only a little.” She had spent the day in class, then rehearsal, then performance, but she showed no fatigue as she trotted alongside him past the other male patrons to the stage door, where he engaged a fiacre to carry them the brief distance to Montmartre. Marie was young, fourteen, and her breath came in little gasps, though he had not yet said or done a thing even remotely seductive, had merely touched his hand to the small of her back as he guided her to his studio from the blare and clamor of Pigalle's cafés, where he'd directed the driver to stop. He supposed he could ascribe her breathlessness to the exhaustion of her night, but it was clear that the young thing was simpering. He didn't know what the girls said to one another, or what the mother had said to the girl, though all the girls knew what the
abonnés
were after. He wondered what she expected, what she had heard.
When a monsieur takes you home.
Marie could not have asked her mother; she had long since left the Opéra house, having negotiated a good price for her daughter's services, the nature of which she had not questioned.

Sweeping into his studio on a dizzy cloud of euphoria—sweets and a fiacre ride!—the girl kicked off her street boots and flopped onto the velvet divan, throwing her arms above her head in anticipatory surrender. Degas took his time removing his overcoat and top hat, hanging them with his black scarf on the coat tree by the door. He shuttered the windows, then fumbled with a match and lit a single candle, which he set on a table far from his tins of flammable turpentine. He considered lighting the sperm oil, but tonight he did not want its bright glare. It would set the wrong mood and thankfully tonight his eye was cooperating, no floating, blurred cloud to confound his vision.

After stoking the stove and kindling its flame until the room began to warm, Degas leaned against the curved arm of the divan, taking stock of his latest acquisition. She was indeed a specimen. A fringe of long lashes smothered her inexpertly kohled eyes, and her cheekbones sliced up and away from a pouting mouth. Her bare arms, while still plump, exhibited the tight muscles born of her punishing daily exercise. The candle's soft shadows sharpened them, lending her the look of an overworked peasant. The rest of her was buried in her froth of an evening gown, no doubt sewn by her ambitious mother, who wanted everything and more for her daughter.

“
Ma chère fille,
” he said, making a dusting motion at the hem of her evening gown. “Shall we begin?”

He swept the white foam of her petticoats up to her knees, then pushed them higher, to the middle of her thighs, where garters secured her black stockings. He unsnapped the garters and inched the smooth silk from her taut thighs and calves to the ends of her callused feet. Then, after slipping his hands inside her thighs, he pushed them apart. He did not look at her face because it was not her pleasure he was after, a fact she would discover soon enough. Her skin was luminous. In this low light, her flesh reflected every color: pink, yellow, and, surprisingly, cerulean, though he also detected a hint of olive and orange.

On their way home in the carriage from her first visit to the Manets', Mary Cassatt had confessed to him her disappointment that they had not talked about painting. He wanted to please her and so he confessed that for him flesh was the most difficult thing to paint, that it remained his ever-present challenge.

Like God. Like trying to create life,
Mary said.

Yes. Each time,
he had said, surprised again, as he had been at the party, by her astute observations.

Degas wondered now what Mary would make of this scene. She had no basis upon which to mount an objection, unlike any of Édouard Manet's paramours, all of whom had sound cause to burst in on him. Degas had been careful, though it was possible that the letters he had composed this summer to amuse Mary may have been a tad affectionate, but that was because he had been surprised by how much he had missed her. Words had flown from his pen, just as they had begun to flow before he had left for his extended summer away from Paris. It became his habit to stop by her studio on his way to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in the evenings. Of course, she knew that her studio was out of his way, but she never mentioned that indelicate fact. In the late afternoon, around four- thirty or five, she welcomed him with a pot of tea at a small round table she had placed next to her open window—their private café—and he told her all the little odd bits that he had thought of throughout the day. These interludes reduced the stock of bon mots and incisions that he usually unleashed on his colleagues, all of whom had begun to remark on his later arrivals and relative silences, but this did not trouble him. Mary was an alert audience, penetrating and witty.

It was on one of those afternoons that she had told him that her family was moving to Paris. The shock had been significant. He had come to think of her as his and could not imagine her with other loyalties. It felt then as if time was short, and he had taken leave of her with some apprehension. In his letters, he had responded with sympathy to her complaints of rents and the unreasonable demand of her father that she give up her studio. He had signed his letters
Yours
. He had, he believed, perhaps revealed too much. Upon his return, she had been distracted, busy with the arrangements for her family's arrival, and he had not been able to see her. He did not like that now she lived so far from Montmartre.

Sighing, he lifted the girl's right leg, studying the colors and the reflection of the candlelight. As if she were onstage, Marie extended the leg and pointed her toes. He grasped her heel, then ran his hands from her extended ankle along the knotted calf over the knob of her knee to the sinew of her thigh, probing with his fingers. He had been thrilled when he had first learned that it was the lesser muscles that levered the leg upward, the strength coming from the hamstring and not from the quadriceps. It changed the way he drew the girls, though the alteration was subtle, perhaps noticed only by him. He turned out her right leg, rotating it in her hip socket, into a side battement, observing the stretch and contraction of the complementary muscles, quantifying the ratio of ankle to knee to hip. Finally, he pushed the legs together and laid them side by side on the divan.

“Point your toes again,” he said, and she articulated first her ankles, then the balls of her feet, then the toes, until her legs were one single limb, as firm as iron. He pressed down on the tops of her feet, feeling once again with his right hand along her thighs, for the way the muscles separated as she pushed against his hand.

“Stand.”

She stumbled to her feet.

“Take off your dress.”

She turned. Expertly, he undid the buttons and the dress fell to her feet.

“Your corset next.”

She nodded, mute, as he unloosed the ties, but he made her draw the garment away from her body herself.

“Turn around.”

She did, slowly.

“Remove your garter and panties.”

Silent, she slipped her thumbs under the silk garments and worked them down her muscled legs.

His gaze traveled up and down her body. “Rise to your toes.”

She turned out her feet to first position and pressed the floor away from her.

“Now perform a port de bras.”

Her back muscles engaged, causing her arms to float upward. Degas circled her, inspecting her buttocks, her back, her flat stomach, the tiny floating orbs of her young breasts, the way her neck elongated as her shoulders settled and anchored her in space. She had such a gnarled body, limbs like poles, as gawky as a boy's. When her hands met a half inch apart, he asked, “Can you hold that position?”

Wordlessly, Marie nodded.

He retrieved the distant candle, lit a dozen more, arranged them before her on the floor to imitate the flare of limelight, pulled his latest tablet from its pile, and began to draw.

“Do it again,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Lower yourself, then rise to your toes and perform the port de bras. Over and over again, until I ask you to stop.”

He drew her from behind, from the side, from the front, observing the musculature as she raised her hands above her head. He drew her thighs as they pressed together, tried for the curve of her shoulders as her arms rose, all sinew and muscle, the grace of the hands as she floated them upward. He believed art was an exaggeration and a distillation both, but when he was working, he doubted everything. My God, it was just an arm. Why couldn't he get it right? His hand flew over the paper, his eyes on the girl. He would stay here a hundred hours if he had to.

Marie complained of pain. She lowered herself from en pointe, stretched, entwined her hands behind her, thrust her jaw forward as she arched her back, and placed her feet in fourth position. There was something so bestial about the move, so ugly, that Degas was enthralled. A gift of sudden sight. He didn't understand how the elusive sometimes came from his hands; he only knew that if he was stubborn enough, if he stayed at his work, something sometimes condescended to flow through them.

Banker's hours. Perhaps it was his father's influence. The single paternal gift.

He tore off the last drawing from his tablet and said, “Don't move,” as he retrieved another.

At three or four in the morning, he steered the exhausted girl up the steep Rue Lepic to her laundress mother, who was on guard outside the door of their hovel, her chapped hands cupped around a mug of coffee long gone cold. He handed the girl's mother two francs, the standard modeling fee, and she grunted and slipped the money into her coat pocket. What the mother thought he'd done with her, he didn't know, though he'd been very clear. She asked neither him nor the girl, who yawned and stumbled through the door in anticipation of a few hours' sleep before returning to the Opéra for class. Degas knew that ultimately the mother wanted her daughter to be taken care of, something he could not offer her, unlike an
abonné
with money to spend. Degas hoped that the evening's combination of surprise and disappointment would keep Marie silent, as it had kept all the girls silent before her. He hoped that she would one day understand that he had spared her.

The studies had poured out of him, and though he should sleep, he would go back now and pin them on the walls and look at them, the dawn light offering a cleansing clarity that the night had not. The fever was on him now, and nothing, not even a lack of sleep, would keep him from it.

I
s this what it means to be an artist in Paris? You can be late to dinner parties?” Robert Cassatt snapped the black-and-white pages of
Le Figaro
and continued trying to read the newspaper by candlelight, having eschewed the complicated problem of lighting the gas jets by lighting a match instead. “Have you begun to indulge such terrible habits too, Mame? Is this what has become of manners in Paris?”

Mary attributed her father's vile mood to his campaign to improve his French. After two weeks in Paris, he was feeling incompetent next to his fluent wife and daughters, whose facility outshone his. To repair this, he had begun reading the French newspaper instead of
Galignani's Messenger
, the English-language newspaper published for the benefit of the American colony. Tonight, President Grant, his term recently ended, was in town and Robert wanted the details of the visit, but he was having trouble deciphering the longer sentences, and his exasperation was trying everyone.

“You know you love Paris, Father, and you yourself said that Haussmann made a jewel out of a stone.” Mary set her glass of sherry on the marble table at his side and sat next to him, hoping to mollify him. His raised voice would carry his surly impatience into the hall, which would reach Degas even before he stepped through the door into the foyer.

“You exaggerate, Mame,” Robert said. “I can't imagine having lived through the city's destruction. I don't know how you did it, dodging piles of debris everywhere.”

The family had moved from Paris to Germany, then back to Philadelphia just before Haussmann had begun to transform the city, and Mary could not help but wish that the work had been finished when she'd returned to the city the first time to live on her own, in 1865. But all the upheaval had been worth it. When her family arrived two weeks ago, riding in from the Gare du Nord, they had traveled down the Boulevard des Italiens, their many bags trailing behind them in a luggage cart, its driver standing against the dash so that he wouldn't lose them in the evening traffic. It had been out of the way to go by the Boulevard des Italiens, but Mary had wanted to show her father the city's newest showpiece. Even Lydia, her most recent visitor, gasped as they rounded the Place de l'Opéra, where the Opéra Garnier glimmered ivory in the gloaming, the arched and colonnaded facade set ablaze by the newly installed electric lights lining the place and the boulevard.

“Paris is shining,” she said. “Isn't it glorious?”

Even her father couldn't hold out against such magnificence. He wrapped her hand in his and said that it was glorious, indeed.

Paris, no matter its inconveniences, could charm anyone, and she was pleased that it had charmed her father all over again, but it wasn't long—two days, to be exact—before the unreliable water pipes in their new apartment made her father lament their move, failing to appreciate that they had indoor plumbing, tricky as it was, while eighty percent of Paris still filled buckets at the public fountains. The apartment kitchens even had gas stoves, which meant that no coal smoke seeped through the floors and walls to choke the flat with fumes, and yet this improvement was somehow not enough to render her father happy. Even though the whole family had exhausted themselves in helping to arrange the apartment more to their father's liking, shifting rugs and tables and rehanging curtains, he had remained cross. And now he was furious with Degas before having even met him.

The evening was not beginning well on any account. Anna, as yet inexpert on the lighting and timing of the gas oven, had been resuscitating the roast chickens for half an hour now, basting and putting them in and pulling them out of the oven at intervals to try to keep them warm, while the roasted potatoes shriveled and the last of the season's kale grew more bitter with every passing moment. Lydia still had not recovered from the voyage and had dressed today only for dinner. Their mother, Katherine, had spent the day trying to pry from Mary details about just who Edgar Degas was.

“Tell me again,” she said to Mary now, “about this new friend?”

“Is he an actual person, Mame?” Robert looked at her over the top of his newspaper, his glasses slipping to the end of his nose, his forehead furrowing in anticipation of an answer that would appease him. “You didn't make him up, did you, to play a continental joke on your poor old father? To see how far you could push him? To further convince him that to have moved to Paris was a foolhardy choice? Because we haven't gone over your finances yet, and I'm beginning to think that you're making everything up. Your studio, your work, your friends.”

“Oh, Father,” Lydia said. “You're being unkind. We're going to see Mary's studio tomorrow.” Lydia sat breathless and pale at the far end of the divan, but she couldn't be persuaded to rest throughout dinner. She had informed Mary that she was going to meet Degas because Mary had hardly spoken of anyone else since their arrival.

“That isn't true, is it, Lyddy?” Mary had said that afternoon, bringing Lydia tea as she rested.

“I remember you admiring him before. And now you are his friend?” Lydia had said, taking the teacup and smiling at Mary. “I'm not going to miss this dinner for anything.”

“Well, if the man doesn't show in the next five minutes, I'm going to eat that chicken before it tastes like death,” Robert said now.

“He has moved, Father, and is just now settling in,” Mary said. Recently, Degas had fled the alley life of the Rue Frochot for a new apartment on the Rue Lepic, at number 50. He had sent out an announcement to all his friends, with the words “Belle Journée” inscribed on them. “Something must have happened. He is never late.” Which wasn't quite true.

“Never late? Then we're special. How wonderful.”

“Father, this is Paris. The traffic is always difficult, but in the rain it is a nightmare. You know this.”

The rain had begun lightly at first, in the afternoon, but now water was coursing down the gutter in the center of the street. Even from high up in the apartment, she could hear the tributaries slipping across the cobbles to join the river raging down the trough. Or perhaps she was imagining the violence of the deluge, making excuses for Degas's absence. She hadn't seen him in months, not since July, when he had left for his extended exile in the country. Though his letters had grown intimate as time passed, full of gentle teasing and amusing confidences about his hosts, she imagined now that they could have been written to anyone. Perhaps it had not been the best idea to invite him to meet her family, though propriety—her parents' expectations—demanded the introduction.

The knock at the door startled them all.

Mary rose to answer, and her mother said, “Please let Anna get that.”

“Anna can't hear every knock when she has to cook dinner, too, Mother. It's nothing to answer a door,” Mary said.

Rivulets ran from Degas's umbrella, and his coat was drenched. Mary took his top hat, beaded with rain, and handed it to Anna, who had run from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her soiled apron. The coat they let drip on the rack and the umbrella they opened and left on the landing.

“Thank you for this,” Mary said to Degas.

His eyes, even shielded by the lavender glasses—he had taken to wearing them even at night—radiated that inquiring gentleness that she had missed in his absence. No one but Degas looked at her like that. No one in her life had ever looked at her like that.

“I'd forgotten how lovely your face is,” he whispered, leaning in to kiss Mary's cheek.

“Come in before my father shoots you,” she said.

“How pleasant,” Degas said. “Does he own a firearm?”

He had had to wait a long while for an available seat on the omnibus, as all of them had arrived at his stop fully occupied. This explanation hardly mollified Robert, who sniffed as he stood to shake the artist's hand. Degas carried a velvet bag, inside which several small gifts were wrapped in colored tissue paper and bright ribbons. Nor did the gifts appease Robert in any way, even when his wife and Lydia gasped as they opened two exquisite silk fans that Degas had painted for them, he said, as soon as he'd learned Mary's family was coming. He handed Robert a similar package, and he opened it to find a cravat of silk paisley “for the Opéra.” Robert wondered what such intimate gifts could possibly mean. No man in America would ever give another man such a personal item, nor would anyone but a close male relative give a woman such a romantic present as a fan.

Partaking of sherry and preliminary talk was abandoned to speed them to the dinner table and the roasted fowl, but not even the good wine could disguise the culinary disaster. The poultry had that twice-cooked rubbery taste and the potatoes had withered into hard pellets. Anna whisked the dismal meal on and off the table within the space of fifteen minutes, producing in its place a dessert tart of Normandy pears. She poured cream over each generous portion and served walnuts, too, with a pot of fresh coffee to finish, then withdrew into the kitchen.

“Are your paintings selling, Monsieur Degas?” Robert asked, after the polite talk of their ocean voyage and the stress of their move had been dissected while they devoured the exquisite tart, the pastry crust so flaky that not even the heavy cream drowned out its buttery lightness. Occasionally, Mary had to translate Degas's rapid French for her father, but he was able to negotiate the conversation if no one strayed too far into the irregular verbs or conditional tense. But her father could be, with his limited capacity, just as rude in French as he was in English. Mary set her fork on the table, a drop of cream falling onto the white linen tablecloth, newly unpacked from its trunk that morning.

“Father, you cannot ask Monsieur Degas such a personal question.”

Degas, seated across the table from Mary, shrugged and said mildly, “How does a man live as an artist? An important question, indeed,” but he said nothing more as the grandfather clock, adjusted this morning by the clockmaker, ticked in the ensuing silence.

Robert, used to being heeded and obeyed, waited for a longer explanation that did not come. Mary knew that a question like that from anyone else would have earned a resounding storm of mockery from Degas. She turned a pleading gaze on her mother to take up the mantle of conversation before her father could untangle the evasion and realize that he'd just been handled by a guest in his own home.

With a barely perceptible nod toward Mary, Katherine said, “Monsieur Degas, why don't you tell us about your family? I'm sure we'd love to meet them.”

“Madame, my parents have died. I have four siblings, one of whom lives in New Orleans and has a family there. I went to see them several years ago. I very much liked visiting your country. Have you been to New Orleans?”

“We haven't been to the South,” Katherine said. “We travel to Europe instead. No decent Northerner can abide the South after the war, but I suppose our quarrels didn't affect a Frenchman on tour.”

“You are here in Paris as many years after our war with Prussia. Have our recent troubles affected you in any way?”

“I suppose not,” Katherine said. “Though I do miss the glorious Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries Palace. So lovely, those buildings.”

“I thought the Communards here had some basis, you understand, for their fury, perhaps as your Southerners had basis. After all, you did destroy their way of life.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The war changed everything for your Southerners, did it not?”

“You cannot tell me you condone slavery?”

“Not at all. You mistake me,” Degas said, avoiding looking at Mary. “It must be the language difficulties.”

“I've lost no French,” Katherine said, bringing a napkin to her lips and appealing to Mary.

“I should have warned you that Monsieur Degas says things he doesn't mean just to roil the conversation,” Mary said, fixing Degas with an imploring gaze, which he returned with a blank stare of innocence.

“Then he should hardly have any difficulty answering my question,” Robert said, his French suddenly more fluent than it had been all night. “On average, Monsieur Degas, what do you think you sell—how many paintings a year?”

“Why don't you just pull out your ledger and show him our finances, Father?” Mary said rapidly in English. “Or better yet, empty your pockets and let him count your coins, and then he can do the same so you'll be satisfied as to his economic circumstances.” She switched to French and turned to Degas. “I'm sorry, Monsieur Degas. My father's interests in art, as they are in anything, are mercenary, not aesthetic. He doesn't believe in buying art, so I don't know why he is asking.”

“I like a good argument, mademoiselle, just as it seems your father does,” Degas said. He addressed Robert: “I don't keep records, Monsieur Cassatt, if that is what you are asking, so I cannot fulfill your request. To keep me eating, I do portraits in the afternoon. Tell me, didn't Mary say you were in railroads? What will you do in Paris now that you are
retraité
?”

Mary flashed Degas a grateful smile for the expert diversion.

“Mary's brother Aleck is the one in railroads. I'm in stocks. Or was.” Robert took a sip of coffee. “Maybe I'll take up painting in my spare time. I'll have nothing else to do.”

Degas's smile turned brittle. “My dear Monsieur Cassatt, you will find that painting is not very difficult when you don't know how, but that it's very difficult when you do. But, you're right, take it up, as you might horse racing. It's a pleasant enough pastime. Anyone with a brush can do it. Or perhaps we could exchange occupations. I could go into stocks,” Degas said. “Would an hour of instruction from you suffice to prepare me? That seems plenty for such a straightforward endeavor.”

The evening was threatening to end in outright war. Mary was grateful when Anna carried in a bowl of cut apples doused with brandy, a smattering of pecans and figs, and the morning's leftover brioches on a tray. She set the brandy ablaze, then smothered it with a cloth and spooned the caramelized fruit over the stale brioche. Mary watched the girl march away with the tureen, astonished at her timing and resourcefulness.