I Always Loved You (22 page)

“Mother?” she said, opening the door to their room. Her father sat by the open window in an armchair, the white lace curtains billowing with the morning breeze. He was reading the English newspaper, his trousers crisp, his hair oiled and combed, his upward glance disinterested and casual.

“You see?” he said, looking up from his paper. “The bloom of health.”

D
egas dangled a screwdriver from his right hand and confronted the structure of lead pipes before him: two would-be legs, one curved by a vise, the other straight as a plumb line; a small crossbar masquerading as a pelvic bone; a backbone driving skyward; and canted clavicles. How to make a girl? At night, unclothed women paraded through his sleeping mind, not the women of Salon masterpieces, marbled and pristine, iconic and untouchable, ideations of sainted, unclad womanhood, but spectral women made of flesh, dirtied and troubled by hard work, eminently touchable, vulnerable, secret. They twisted and turned in their private ablutions, combing their hair, climbing from a tub, inspecting their feet. Or they danced and danced, their muscles knotted, dreading the
abonnés
' arrival. Or they plunged their blued hands into deep sinks of scalding water, the copper pipes banging overhead. No Madonnas, his, just women as he imagined them in their intimate moments or at their work.

He set down his screwdriver, went to his cabinet, and pulled open its doors. From a drawer, he retrieved his private work, work he never showed anyone, excepting Manet or Alexis Rouart, who would not condemn him. The world could hardly stand a picture of a nude woman squatting in a shallow tub, let alone these brutally naked, mercilessly rendered, shamelessly commercial women. Yet these prints were his antidote to insanity. Drawing the starkly etched, vulgar forms soothed him, somehow. Cartoonish, exaggerated, puerile in their clinical accuracy, he rendered prostitutes in no romantic terms: Women selling their naked flesh to clothed men. What he loved about this particular obsession was its emperor's-new-clothes sensibility. There were twenty thousand legal prostitutes in Paris, and yet if exposed, these prints would engender a censorious public rage from which his career would never recover. What was it about the world that it could not face the reality it lived?

He locked the prints away and turned. The frame, unfleshed, iron-boned, sexless, awaited him. Memory. He had made so many drawings of Marie, drawings that would have to revive themselves so he could make her into something so true, so specific, so bestial that her beauty could not be denied. A hundred times the girl had shed her clothes to plant herself in the posture her muscles had memorized, returning again and again to his studio, allowing him to circle her as an animal stalks its prey, to peer at her from every angle, decent and indecent, as she abandoned herself to his rapacious scrutiny. Later, he made small studies of her in wax, anticipating this effort, this terror. He loved the way wax molded and unmolded, the way it taught him how to see. That his obsession had manifested itself in the malleable, the tactile, the dimensional, had come not just from the need for challenge, that vain and lovely ambition in which he so often indulged, but from something much more disquieting. His eyes, the fickle, traitorous, necessary organs of his work, had now begun to steal from him the mass of things, their shape-ness, their roundness, their solidity. Edges wavered and blurred and doubled until forms became hallucinating shape-shifters, liquid impersonators of what had once been reliable, immutable matter. Were it not for his hands, he would no longer see anything clearly, though his vision focused and unfocused of its own accord, a variable that made everyone doubt his affliction. Any moment or day or week, he could see, and the next he couldn't, reinforcing the only blessed truth: that it is the mind that sees, and the vehicle of its perception is not singular. Touch, as much as vision, fashions an image, and in homage and capitulation to this truth, he stood now before his crude iron skeleton surrounded by waiting boxes of wire, wood chips, cotton batting, wax, and clay, materials he hoped his memory would fashion into a confabulation so realistic, so solid, that no canvas could rival it.

He picked up a knife, slit open the boxes piled around the floor, and pulled from one a nest of coiled wire. He dragged a canvas bag from the corner and undid the drawstring, plunging his hands into its depths and scooping out a waterfall of wood chips he let spill to the floor. He donned a pair of gloves and snipped pieces of wire. Then he secured the thick chips of wood to the center pipe with the wire. To keep the wood from slipping, he had to twist the wire ends tightly, and through the gloves he could feel the sharp points pressing against his fingers. It was tedious, clumsy work. He had to bend over to work on her; she was not life-size, nor was she small enough to set on a table. From time to time, he stood up and stretched, his hands linked behind him in an unconscious parody of the figure he was endeavoring to create. It took two dozen wood chips to cover the entire length of the spine, and when he was finished it was past noon.

He uncorked a bottle of wine and poured himself his midday glass to have with his cheese and baguette, liberally buttered by Sabine and wrapped in cheesecloth that morning to keep fresh. Sitting, eating, he thought that he did not mind so much that his mercurial eyes had driven him to this. Only a fool would think he had turned to such an expression out of desperation. He had turned to it because it was a way to replicate life.

It was only now, as a burst of sunlight brightened the studio, that he allowed thoughts of Mary Cassatt to drift in. In these times of intense concentration he stayed away from everyone, eschewing even dinner invitations and salon evenings, an excuse he would use when Mary demanded, as she had every right to, the reason he had not yet responded to her note announcing her return from her trip. The real reason was that she made him nervous, which no other woman did. That he spent much of his time with unclothed models, who did all he asked and more, he did not let figure into his thinking. That he sometimes relieved the ache of his desire in brothels, he ignored too. No intellectual challenge there. Mary was both vulnerable and independent, and that combination proved seductively paralyzing. At the exhibition, surrounded by her paintings, Mary, in her pride and terror, had been irresistible. Her exquisite artistry, her fierce tenacity—he had not lied in that letter. He had finally succumbed to the impulses he generally throttled in her presence. To his surprise she had tasted not like one of the brutal women of his dreams or the resigned women of the brothels, vulgar and fecund, but as familiar as himself, comforting and inviting. The thought that he might one day be physically unable to see her terrified him. To touch her, to feel the mass of her, solidified the lurking desire he had so often suppressed. And then the dressing-down had begun, and all his fears of marriage and entanglements reared before him and he escaped, brutally, using the tool of unkindness.

He had missed her, though, and so he had written that letter, promising to talk. He had to, of course, if they were going to proceed with
Le Jour et la Nuit
. She had seemed eager enough in the exchanges he had purposefully kept public and brief before she left with her father. And now he was going away for October to the house of some friends. But what did he know of talking about love? If he could paint love, he would. If he could sculpt it, he would. If he could sketch it, he would. But talk? Would that he had not written, would that he had instead let silence wring from Mary's memory that moment of sublime intimacy.

Sighing, he rose. He pulled a roll of batting from its box. Eyeing the torso, he measured with his memory the proportions of Marie's body. With scissors he cut the batting into pieces and swaddled the wood-draped piping, using rope to secure each blanket of cotton in place. It took some time to fashion the inside of her. He felt almost foolish, for the work was clumsy, like the discarded mistake of a demented Michelangelo, crafted not of marble but of ignoble wire and stuffing. There was something so subversive about her, something so seditious, Degas thought, that he wished he could, when finished, expose her innards to the world. But her plebian core would be his glorious secret, his own little rebellion against those who believed art existed only in the realm of the pure and sacred.

As the afternoon light fell across his peculiar creation, he wondered how much ingenuity it would take to flesh out his little dancer, his little statue, his little, little girl. He had more boxes: clay and beeswax and filament and cotton and silk and ribbons and paintbrushes and a single pair of a child's ballet shoes. No more exciting challenge or balm existed for him now. She was
of
him; she was his, she was his very soul. Tilting his head to the side, studying the mess of wire and wood and cotton with the sharply angled lenses of his failing eyes, he wished he could intuit Mary the way he hoped to intuit this girl. It was a shame that a woman of flesh was not a made thing, though he did not know what he would change of Mary, given the chance. Perhaps it was the curse of all artists to wish to fashion everything to their will. Perhaps it was the ruination of their lives, the way nothing could be controlled and nothing could be fixed, not even one's own desire. It was this tension that might keep him alone forever. He was master in his studio, even as he was uncertain and afraid, and this comforting thought drove him back to his work, which he would not finish until long after the sun had gone down.

O
ne early November morning, Degas arrived at Mary Cassatt's studio bearing several paper-wrapped packages bound together with a length of knotted twine. He had sent no note to announce his visit. He just appeared, a bearded ghost in a gray coat and top hat, with gifts he wordlessly handed to Mary. She set the packages on the paint-scarred table that held her palette, adorned this morning with fresh dollops of scarlet lake, ultramarine, and lead white.

She would still be in Divonne if Lydia hadn't rallied. When Mary had arrived with her mother on the steamer from Lausanne, Lydia was weaker than Mary had ever seen her. On the hour-long trip over, her mother had explained that Lydia was in trouble, but Mary had not imagined such peril: Lydia's skin had grown waxy and pale; she had to fight for breath after climbing just a few stairs; and her face, hands, and feet were swollen beyond measure. The doctors, in despair, ordered Lydia to stop taking the waters and to merely rest in hopes that immobility might conquer what the famed waters had not. Every day for weeks, she rested in the far corner of the wide veranda overlooking Lake Geneva, the illness again waxing and waning without discernible reason, at least none the doctors could ascertain or explain. While Lydia napped, Mary took up her sketchbook and made studies of the other invalids: their entwined hands folded on their laps, the curve of their enfeebled bodies at rest, the anguished ministrations of their loved ones. Several weeks into their stay, her mother bent over Lydia's reclining figure to adjust her blanket, and Mary sketched them, seeking to capture the closed circle of maternal devotion and love, her mother fighting inchoate dread, her sister attempting to conceal her misery. Upon returning to Paris early in October with the slowly recovering Lydia, Mary had done nothing but paint mothers and their children. Earlier this week she had hired a young model and her infant child and positioned them in a stream of sunlight. She had painted the mother bent over the infant cradled in her lap.

It was this canvas she was finishing now.

Mary did not invite Edgar in, but left the door open, and after a moment's hesitation, he followed her inside, taking care to shut the door behind him. She paid him no attention as she took up her palette and resumed staring at the canvas. After some minutes of consideration, she dipped a hogs hair brush into the scarlet lake and lead white and mixed them together, but not thoroughly; she wanted both colors to show when she laid down the paint, to echo the stripes of the mother's dress. The painting needed only last touches. Mary felt Edgar's presence but fought to ignore him. He remained quiet; she couldn't even hear him breathe. She shut her eyes, remembering the light of southern France, her mother's heartache, the vivid blue of the sky. And in an instant she was on the veranda, once again observing their private moment. With that revival came motion. Mary touched her loaded brush to the curve of the mother's elbow, then to her cheek, then to a splash of sunlight on the floor, attempting to mimic the reflections of true light by balancing the deep rose of the mother's skirt in unexpected places. Mary's movements became flourishes, born of instinct; she made quick decisions with her arm extended and her brush skimming the canvas, her gaze darting as her brush did, the two now one. Stepping back, she dipped her brush into the jar of turpentine, quickly blotted it on a rag, and touched it once again to her palette, swirling the ultramarine and rose until they purpled. This she applied to the mother's cheek, the folds of the baby's arms, a strand of the mother's hair, and finally the underside of the windowsill. She worked on, deepening the values, hoping to achieve that elusive unity of tone so necessary for cohesion. Time evaporated: an hour, a minute; it was impossible to know.

She stepped back and laid down her brush.

Edgar came to stand beside her. He smelled of the ocean and the country whence he had just come, of the autumnal rain that was beginning to gather outside, of the chasm of their separation. On his lavender glasses flickered the gray light of the clouding day.

“My God,” he said. “It's glorious. Perfect. You have found your obsession.”

She looked once again at the canvas, not as the artist but as a viewer, to see the whole of it: the sunlight through the window, the touch of the mother's cheek to the child's, the lazy rapture of their entwined arms and half-closed eyes, their moment of eternity, of future memory, of the present made immutable.

“You've painted love,” Edgar said. “You must always paint love. You must never paint anything else. You have found it. Your obsession is love.”

He was right. Here was love—light and color and affection sprung from her brush, desire and innocence in every stroke, and something more, something real, something absolute.

A moment passed, and then another. “And what of you? What will you paint?” Mary said.

“I will paint what is real.”

“And love is not real?”

“It is when you paint it,” he said.

Mary sidled past him, intent on emptying the turpentine, washing her brush, scraping her palette, all things she would abandon at the slightest encouragement if he would only grasp her wrist or whisper,
I missed you
. It was exhausting to have to constantly be on guard, especially since he changed so often from intimately confiding to a kind of amused diffidence that disarmed her, making her trust him once again. Outside, the skies opened and rain drummed on the Boulevard de Clichy and pedestrians dashed for archways and pressed themselves against doors.

“Aren't you going to look at what I've brought you?” Edgar said, gesturing to the abandoned packages.

Mary took up her palette knife, sawed through the twine, and tore open the paper. Inside lay a stack of ten copper plates, an assortment of burins, and a brush. The tools of the printmaker.

“For the journal,” he said. “Though perhaps you don't want to now, after everything.”

She gathered her things and strode out the door and down the hallway, leaving Edgar behind. She set the turpentine jar in the sink and dropped her brush and palette knife into the liquid, spattering her smock. She scraped the palette under the running water and scrubbed its surface with a sponge soaked in turpentine. When everything was rinsed, she dumped the turpentine and took everything back to the studio. Edgar was standing where she had left him.

“We can work together in my studio,” he said. “I have the press, the acid, everything we will want, everything we will need.”

She threw the empty jar at the wall. It shattered and fell to the floor.

Edgar flinched but went on as if she had not just tried to take off his head. “This is for us, for our future,” he said.

Mary unbuttoned her smock. She would lock him in the studio; she didn't care. She reached for her coat and hat. Outside, the rain continued to fall. She pinned the hat in place, found her umbrella.

Edgar said, “You must understand. Mine is not the language of love.”

He walked toward her and unpinned her hat and handed it to her. He went out into the hall and returned with the broom and dustpan from the
portier
's closet. The glass made a tinkling sound as it tumbled into the receptacle. He shook the broom so the slivers would fall too. He was fastidious. When he finished he returned everything to the closet and then came into the room and took her hand.

She remembered now what had started everything: a careless remark, cruelly made. An avalanche of coldness when she asked him if he was capable of love. The essential question, Mary thought, that one had to ask of anyone. She wasn't certain what Edgar wanted, whether he even thought of happiness. But for far less, far more had been forgiven in the world.