I Always Loved You (9 page)

“As in poetry,” Mallarmé said, but neither Zola nor Degas paid him any attention, and Mallarmé sank into his chair, usurped.

“
My
medium is words,” Zola continued, pressing his point. “Yours is paint. Your medium is more limited than mine.”

“
My
media are paint and pastel, clay and copper, ink and press, a far more extensive arsenal than yours,” Degas said. “I look. I observe. I create. Opinion and mirror, both, about any subject I should wish to expose. What is my painting
In a Café
if not an opinion about the same people you write about in
L'Assommoir?
Or Édouard's
Nana
, named after your character? The downtrodden workers, seduced by absinthe? But if you claim yourself a savant, I therefore declare
In a Café
a critique of
L'Assommoir
.”

“That's absurd. You painted that picture first. And I'll have you know I think a great deal of that picture. Truth incarnate.”

Degas leapt up and made a sweeping motion with his hands. “
Messieurs et mesdames
, may I present Émile Zola, the most intelligent art critic in France,” he said, bowing as laughter filled the parlor, pleased with himself for having extracted a compliment that Zola had had no intention of bestowing, and even more pleased that he had confounded Mallarmé, whom he liked very much, but who could bore.

So this, Mary thought, was what it was to be a woman at a party in Paris. One either fed the men or was consulted about the time, but was not expected to speak beyond pleasantries. And now she was a
stray
.

She rose. “Messieurs Degas and Zola. I pose a question.”

Silk and spring wool rippled in the room as everyone turned to stare at Mary. Berthe touched Mary's hand, but Mary folded her hands in a deliberate parody of acquiescing womanhood.

“Isn't it true that to parse mediums like this is to claim territory? How different is your argument than the one the Salon uses to exclude my art or Monsieur Monet's or even Monsieur Manet's? If you examine what you think are your moral positions, you will see that they are probably no different from what goes on in the Salon hanging committee.”

Degas said, “I only said that Zola claims the impossible when he says he is sovereign of both writing and art.”

“Monsieur Zola has achieved fame for his novel
L'Assommoir
, while you, Monsieur Degas, were reviled by the critics for your
In a
Café
, even though both novel and picture addressed the same subject. Each was accepted differently by the public. In my opinion, Monsieur Degas, your portrayal of the drunkenness of the despoiled and downtrodden is so evocative that the public, horrified, has to look away, while Monsieur Zola's medium, words, is less vivid, and therefore more acceptable.”

Zola sputtered from the piano bench. “My novel? Not vivid?”

Mary turned to the author, who had snubbed her earlier. His wine-flushed face blushed an even deeper shade of vermillion, suggesting the blood orange of sunset. “I am using conjecture, Monsieur Zola, about what appeals to the masses. For the sake of argument. Using your medium. Words. But I have read your novel and quite like it,” she said.

“
Quite like it?
She quite likes it? She is American, isn't she?” Zola said, turning to the group, seeking accord.

Berthe waited to see whether or not Eugène or Édouard or Suzanne would manage Monsieur Zola, and when they did not, she rose from the loveseat and glided across the room. “Please forgive me, if you can, Monsieur Zola, but earlier I misread what time it was. Don't let my error keep you from your guests. We've all been selfish to delay you. No doubt they are knocking at your door at this very moment, wondering where their dear Monsieur Zola is, hoping they won't be deprived of your company.”

As Berthe nimbly guided Zola to the door and into the night, Degas came to Mary's side and said, “Adroitly done, Mademoiselle Cassatt. Monsieur Zola will spend the rest of the night trying to understand what just happened to him, a prospect that gives me great pleasure.”

“Berthe implied I had to prove myself.”

“We are all wondering what we did without you now,” Degas said. “Even Claude, though he'll never tell you.” He smiled with pride and interest, but Mary felt exhausted, though she had to admit that the interlude had exhilarated her. Not one of her American friends was as alive as these people gathered here tonight. Abigail Alcott was as dear to her as Lydia, and darling Louisine was more sister than friend, but they were neither of them as provocative as this group
.

“Do you always test people in this way, Monsieur Degas?”

“Test? I don't know what you mean.”

“Don't be coy,” Mary said. It was warm in the room, especially near the kitchen, and she could hear the maid banging pots and pans in the sink. “Will you tell me what Monsieur Manet meant earlier? About the Salon?”

Degas reddened. “He's a scoundrel. Don't listen to him.”

“But his joke angered you. It must mean something. Berthe said everyone is angry with you because you bring in strays. Am I your latest stray?”

Degas took her by the hand and pulled her into the far corner behind the dining table, near the serving dishes of the drowning fish and wilted asparagus. “Édouard was referring to the opening day of the Salon. I saw you in the crowds. I tried to reach you to introduce myself, but I lost you. I didn't know who you were. When Monsieur Tourny introduced us, I hid my surprise. And all this nonsense seems to have amused Édouard very much. I did warn you, didn't I, that you might repent your decision to join us?”

“You did,” she said.

“Well, then?”

After a time, she said, “The fish really was awful wasn't it?”

A smile played on Degas's lips. “Yes it was,” he said.

Suzanne Manet, having overheard the comment about the fish, breezed past them with a disapproving air, her hair irretrievably wilted. With an insulted flick of her wrist, she cleared a path through her guests, mounted the piano bench, and opened a piano score, flipping pages one after the other until she found the music she wanted. At the first notes, Degas steered Mary back to a gilded armchair to listen to the exquisite tones of the Handel sonata, played by Suzanne with skill and feeling. Berthe settled into a wing chair, her husband standing guard beside her. Édouard, restless, hovered nearby, dividing his attentions between Berthe and his wife until he drifted away, slipping quietly backward.

The mellifluous tones filled the parlor, and Mary closed her eyes, sinking into the soft cushion of the chair, thinking how much she loved Handel. She thought she felt Degas's hand, its dry fissures stained with ink and graphite, graze her shoulder lightly. She opened her eyes, surprised, but it was only Berthe Morisot passing, tracing Édouard's path into the depths of the flat.

T
he Manets' maid, Eloise, gaped as Édouard dragged Berthe through the back doorway of the kitchen and into the stairway that led to the maid's quarters. When the door closed behind them, Eloise shook her head and whispered to herself, “But the bedrooms are down the hall.”

Halfway up the stairs, Édouard leaned in, smelling of wet wool and the failed fish. Berthe still couldn't get used to the smells of rich food. The excess seemed obscene. During the siege of Paris, when the Prussians had strangled the city and rat had been on every restaurant's menu in town, she'd lost perhaps twenty pounds, and now she believed that the stringent asceticism had affected her forever. She'd dreamed then of food, but now, when she could have anything at all she wanted to eat, she measured it out spoonful by spoonful, a daily ration, just as she had measured out increments of Édouard, each hour an uncertain, suspect gift, because it always ended in his leaving and going back to Suzanne. Her mother would have said that her abhorrence of food had come before the siege, just about the time that Berthe had lost her mind, the moment she fell in love with the married Édouard.

“You let him love you.” Édouard's voice caught in his throat.

“You think Eugène is my consolation prize.”

“He lacks imagination. He has always wanted what I have. To paint, to live like I live.”

“But you don't have me. Not anymore.”

Édouard hooked a finger under her chin and inserted his knee between her legs with a gentle pressure, as nonchalantly as if he were saying, “
Ça va?
” Her knees parted to let his in. It had started this way, in small gestures, a long time ago.

“You don't have to love him,” Édouard said.

“What am I supposed to do? Cry every night?”

“Suzanne likes her willful ignorance.”

“But I do not. I want a child, Édouard.”

Struck, he said, “That is low.”

“None of us is an idiot, Édouard. We know Léon is not Suzanne's younger brother. You should tell the boy.”

“I would rather have a child with you.”

“You would ruin me rather than let me try for even a chimera of happiness.”

“We could run. Italy. Spain. My mother would help—”

“You are spoiled, Édouard, by your looks and your charm. You believe people will love you no matter what, that you will have infinite second chances. But everyone is not me. They have much better sense than I have.”

“We don't speak Italian. No one would know who we are.”

“Europe is a small town, Édouard. An artery runs from Paris to the rest of the world. Exile is not a private place. It is a state of mind. And you are too weak to endure it.”

“He isn't worthy of you, Berthe.” Édouard toyed with the tiny black bow where the bodice of her dress closed in a series of buttons, his other hand pressed against the wall above her head. “Why do you stay with someone as weak as he is? As prideless?”

“You revile me for wanting a semblance of normalcy.”

“There is nothing normal about having my brother as your husband.”

“
He
asked
me
.”

“Every male asks for you every second of every hour of his life.”

“You told me to marry him. And besides, my father was dead, Édouard. I had no other choice. I was already old and tired. No one else wanted me. These are practical considerations you have no understanding of.” Though he did. What was more practical than marrying your piano teacher eleven years after you'd impregnated her, as Édouard had?

Édouard released her hand and twined her jet-black curls around his fingers. “Some days I think I will die without you.”

“We are brother and sister, closer than ever.”

“Don't say such a hateful thing.”

“Let me go, Édouard.”

“To hell. I will let you go to hell.”

Why had she followed him? She was a fool. She laid her hand on his chest. It took only the smallest pressure to push him away. “Go back to Méry Laurent. Rile her keeper again and get your head handed to you. Or make Eva Gonzalès your lover. There was a time when you couldn't keep your hands off her.” By hands she meant paintbrush. But he couldn't paint Eva. It had tortured Berthe to hear that Édouard scraped the paint off the canvas at the end of each session, believing that he did it only so that he could call her back again to prolong their intimacy, but harboring hope that he couldn't paint Eva because he was thinking of her. “Or seduce anyone on the street. One of your models. You can take her behind the screen in your studio, once, twice a day, as much as you like. You can call it making a study.”

He slapped her across the cheek. Once. Very hard. Then he bounded out of the stairwell and into the steamy confines of the kitchen, the wedge of vapor and light blotting out when he slammed the door.

Berthe bent over, her hand to her cheek. Flesh upon flesh, this time in anger, though the better times came back to her as they always did, his hand grazing her cheek, tugging her hair, caressing the curve of her waist, the hard pull of his hand at her shoulder blades, drawing him to her.

Her mother had once said to her, “Your beauty does you no good.”

At the corner of her lip, Berthe could taste salt and blood. She wiped it with the back of her hand, but only a small vermillion teardrop appeared. She stood upright to steady herself. No mirror to ascertain the state of her dress, her hair, or her cheek, but with Édouard, reflections lied. In his eyes the world was remade, and she had once believed in his ability to change anything into what he wanted it to be: love, his marriage. But no longer. No matter the state of her appearance, immaculate or disarrayed, everyone would know she'd been with Édouard again. She might as well tear her clothes off or kiss him in front of everyone. Eugène, however, would not see. Berthe sighed. He would fail all his life because he did not know that nothing was ever as it seemed.

She would say she had run into a door. That she'd been careless. But only if someone asked, and they wouldn't, not after seeing Édouard emerge from the same door, even if it was only Eloise, who knew more about them than anyone in Paris, and would pass the gossip along to Madame Manet the next morning.

D
egas called for Mary the next week, on a Wednesday, inviting her to accompany him to the Musée d'Artillerie to solve, he said, a problem of light. He wore a black silk top hat, wrinkled linen coat, and lavender pince-nez that Mary had not seen before. He had sent no note, arriving just after she had finished her breakfast.

“You wish to solve a painting problem at a museum of war?” she said, standing in her studio, her apron tied around her dress, her palette in her hands. She had been just about to squeeze out her paint.

“You'll see,” he said. “Unless you wish to work, in which case I am sorry to have interrupted you.”

“Do you often take outings in the middle of the week?” she said.

“Never.”

Outside, she picked up her skirts as they walked toward the omnibus; the backstreets that led to the Place Pigalle had evaded Haussmann's cleansing pick and shovel and today the gutters were running foul. They rode
imperiale
—on the top deck of the omnibus—in the row of open seats, changing conveyances at the Arc de Triomphe for the slow parade down the Champs-Élysées under the horse chestnut trees, their white blossoms fluttering in the late spring breeze. At the Avenue d'Antin, they disembarked to stroll toward the Pont des Invalides, past the gardens of the Palais de l'Industrie. Degas's top hat occasionally bumped the tips of her parasol as he walked hunched forward, his gaze roving as they approached the river teeming with steamboats, omnibus boats, coalers, barters, and rowboats jockeying in the narrow channel. The river ran fast and muddy, buffeting an ugly island of floating baths anchored on the right bank. Mary thought they must have opened the locks upstream to accommodate the spring runoff.

“Tell me,” Degas said, “why do all you Americans come here to study? Don't they allow artists to live in the United States?”

“The history of art in America is only a second long, whereas here it is the whole of time.”

“I've visited your country. The light was horrid.”

“New Orleans,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Your
Portraits in an Office
,” she said.

“You know that painting?”

“I know most of your paintings.”

They walked along the left bank, toward the gold dome of Les Invalides. Open fiacres rumbled along the quay, their passengers decked in summer finery. A laundress hurried past with her delivery basket, bluing staining her arms. Degas turned to watch her, then said, “Aren't you the least bit worried about what people might say?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“About being seen out together. The two of us.”

He had caught her off guard. “People will talk?”

“My dear, this is Paris.”

She looked down the street toward the direction of the abattoir, from which a breeze was bringing the metallic scent of blood. “We will tell them we are forging better Franco-American relations. To improve your opinion of the light in America.”

“Ah, yes. You are Benjamin Franklin, a diplomat, but for art's sake, not war.”

“And you are whoever he persuaded to arm us,” Mary said.

“Revolution! Though I shouldn't say that too loudly or someone will build a barricade. It takes very little provocation around here for people to build barricades. After all, this is Paris.”

They resumed walking and in a moment the esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides opened before them, and with it the great gold dome of the chapel floating above the hulking stone edifice. The sun was at its height, and a glare shone off the square.
Paris is shining
, Mary thought as Degas advanced across the cobblestones. She had to hurry to keep up with him on the uneven stones, and only when they entered the dim confines of the first
salle
, where suits of armor glimmered in the diffuse light, did he slow his pace. He removed his glasses and placed them in his jacket pocket.

“And what problem of light are we going to solve?” Mary said.

“I'm painting a picture of bathers for Monsieur Faure, the singer Manet painted for the Salon. The light, you see, for the copper basins?”

The armor, curved and smooth, seemed to make something strange of the luster filtering from the high windows; one could imagine men wandering through these dungeon rooms in these suits of armor.

Degas said, “It's like touching time, isn't it?”

“And you ask why Americans come here.”

“I'm thinking of using gold paint over pastel,” he said. “I've been badgering my colorist to see if he can grind a paint that imitates the Italians.”

“Gold paint, to capture the light,” Mary said. “Of course.” Yes, that would be the answer. How brilliant. The shimmer would be implied, the surface at once matte and luminous. Mary had never before tried to paint metal; differences in cloth were difficult enough to render. She tried to imagine the technique, how the paint would need to be applied so as to brighten the pastel and reflect the metal's smooth curve, intimating its metal-ness while catching the light, though she imagined the hue would have to be subdued, for in a bathhouse the light would be ambient, arising only from a candle or muted sunlight filtering through the slatted wallboards.

“The light could work thematically, too, couldn't it? Intimating a lack of privacy, mirroring the viewer's voyeurism?” Mary said.

“Just so. It isn't really just about the light alone. It's the context of the entire picture,” Degas said. “The classicists eschewed the viewer, shying away from the implication of intimacy, but I want to expose our natural curiosity.”

“It's a question of how one sees life, isn't it?” Mary said, turning, but in that instant Degas had disappeared.

She found him outside, leaning in shadow against a pillar in the damp arcade, his head bowed, his hat tipped low over his forehead, its brim shading his glassed eyes from the scatter of the bright May afternoon.

“Did I say something?” Mary said.

Degas sighed and straightened, readjusting the glasses on his nose. “Nothing to do with you, Mademoiselle Cassatt. A failed experiment on my part, I'm afraid. I apologize. It was rude of me to leave you alone. It's these eyes of mine.”

“Your eyes?”

“Some damage during the siege. Berthe Morisot stayed too, you know, during the war, when most men fled. She can hardly eat, poor girl. She nearly starved to death. She and her family stayed in Passy and the bombardment there was horrific.”

Mary hardly knew how to respond. His eyes? God, what terror. “Hence the glasses?” she said.

“My doctor tells me not to worry.”

“But you still do.”

“A little,” he said. “More than a little. A black hole appears as if from nowhere. I don't know why. I cannot tell what brings it on or what makes it go away. I capture light for a living, and now it is sabotaging me.”

He did not want to go back in. They walked out of the courtyards onto the esplanade and the shimmering cobbles. He cupped his palm as if to scoop up and measure the weight of the ungoverned light, calculating, it seemed, how much harm this vital component of his work could do to him. And then the light dulled, the incursion of a cloud, perhaps, or the rotation of the earth away from the sun. Degas let his hand drop. “It's gone.”

“What is?”

“The black hole.” He blinked once, twice. “Yes, gone completely.” He turned in a circle, taking in the square, the gardens, the plane trees. “I'm going to switch oculists,” he said.

“Yes, perhaps that would help. A different color glass.”

“I fear I am in line for a rainbow of eyeglasses, none of which, I'm certain, will change anything.”

“Perhaps. But you might find an answer.”

“It's a question of time, too, you see. How much time I have left to paint.”

“The hope of the eternal,” Mary said. “Of what will survive.”

“Yes,” he said. “The immortal.”

Mary looked away and then back again. “You keep your promises, don't you, Monsieur Degas? Because I decided to stay in Paris because of you. Not you precisely,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “But you meant it, though, didn't you?” She sounded more earnest than she wanted to, but he had said nothing about the exhibition.

“I rarely make promises,” he said, “because I find them so difficult to keep. But I made you no promise that I recall. I did, however, make you an invitation to exhibit with us. And I would never withdraw an invitation.”

He reached for her hand and held it for a moment before he let it go. Each barely registered the physical touch, but felt instead the way the light loosened something inside them, their twin reserve dissolving in the lambent glow of the newly benign esplanade. Degas offered Mary his elbow and they walked out of the square toward the river. They were each aware of the other in a way they hadn't been when they walked this way an hour before. Even the tawdry traffic on the Seine seemed beautiful now, an aberrancy that even Degas celebrated, for the day had turned out very fine indeed, the light an ever resplendent halo, now so beneficent and shimmering, so pale and beautiful, that Mary and Degas both longed for a brush to record it before it slipped away.