Parrot and Olivier in America (19 page)

To flatter her subject the she-artist invented a jacket with epaulettes--a court coat, or a misunderstanding of a court coat--a luminous pink with trim of gold, which might have you imagining the subject a noble of the sword. In a nod toward the truth, she gave to poor Peek a startled half-finished expression, as if he had just woken and was frightened to see what he had assumed. Of course one could not know what the artist had intended other than--this was blatant--to have us all believe that Peek was
what he was not
.

Was this so-called
likeness
not my nightmare of democracy--the fishwife taken to be a great lady, the banker strutting as a noble lord? Was this not the red-clawed creature I had fled? Was I now rushing to its open arms? To a place where I was instructed to share my cabin with my servant?

Standing in the main cabin, just behind the artist, where I could see the lovely loose hair that had escaped its pins and the luscious white neck and very pretty ears, I reflected that my unease with most of the arts might be not only the product of my myopia but a moral scruple, an unease in beholding
that which is not
. This painting, if one could accept the amateurish approximations, was a dangerous lie.

As a child I would get an asthma to witness my parents act on the little stage at the Chateau de Barfleur, to see my mother be that which she was not, and on more than one occasion I wept and screeched until she removed her makeup so I should know her for who she really was.

My feelings were the same with Hugo, even Moliere--this great unease with what is not. Then how should I explain my passion to be done in oils? I was hardly
persuaded
(although I pretended otherwise) by Peek who declared his mucky portrait the best
bargain
he had ever made. The ability to judge value, he told me, was really the great business of being a farmer, and this was why, he said, he had made such a success of being a banker in America. How dear Blacqueville would have laughed and marveled and
puzzled
, not only at this notion of the bargain, but at the mercurial world of the Americans who have more stages in their lives than caterpillars.

To make my portrait it was decided that my cabin should be
dressed
. Whether this lifted my spirits or no, I cannot honestly say, but it permitted me to
act
a great excitement. My cause was taken up by all the cabin passengers and with their assistance various oriental rugs and silks were produced, and then, with a great deal of jollity, draped. To achieve this set there was no question the servant must be evicted, a course of action applauded by the
majority
. I was then persuaded to the captain's chair where I was to pose.

For the benefit of the artist I wore my court jacket, ultramarine with gold embroidery. This was not the last time I wore this jacket, but it was certainly the happiest occasion, for although it was most admired by the Americans at sea, it would prove an offense to their democratic sensibilities on land. On this highly unstable matter more anon, but for now it is enough to note that Mr. Peek had a card with a crest and Latin motto which Blacqueville would have agreed was a peculiar affectation for a farmer's youngest son.

I cannot hazard whether the reader has been
done
himself but for those of you who have never
sat
, I would liken the experience to the barber's visits to the Chateau de Barfleur where I often fell asleep whilst enjoying the most intimate yet innocent attentions of the comb and scissors.

Doubtless an artist of the male sex would provide a different sensation. Blacqueville told me of being painted by Proudhon and described debates so lively and engaging that the subject quite forgot the business of the day.

It was very tight inside the cabin with the artiste, the space between the narrow bunks no more than between two pews. The painter did not speak or even look at me a great deal but she was all I could think about: the rustling of her skirt, her high forehead corrugated with a frown, her breasts tightly contained in a blouse the long sleeves of which she rolled up before--suddenly--producing her palette. She was, needs be, very close to me. She made a sound not quite like humming. Her voice, when she finally spoke, occupied deeper registers, a velvety arena which doubtless vibrated in her lover's ears.

Past and future were blessedly lost to me. I inquired if everything was to her satisfaction.

Frowning, she declared herself as someone who
should
, as if by the rules of a guild, never be satisfied, and certainly not with these coarse paints. She did not know how one could paint with them. They deserved to be flung into the ocean, but still she would persist and I was reminded of those characters you see at country fairs who affect to have no interest in selling what they have.

She smelled of jasmine, very light. I told her so. She reached to touch my hair, moving the curl on my forehead a little to one side, and then, still frowning, she dipped the tip of her brush into the different pigments, not just one or another as you might expect, but moving from one to the next, light as a bee gathering pollen on its hind legs, circling rapidly. She looked as if she could not decide what color she required but was a modern sensualist who must have a sip of every one.

I can only guess what happened--the three or four fast strokes making a glaze of blue to admit the free air to play around my hair, the hot satin sheen to my cheek, the deep shadow beneath my brimming eyes wherein she blended brown-red with burnt ocher. I swear I felt the real brush beneath my lids.

What occurred on the canvas was a thing I would not waste my time with. What occurred with my other senses made me drunk. As the hours passed deliciously, the beads of sweat gathered upon her forehead and in that place between her breasts. She worked with an unearthly glitter in her eyes, making small convulsive movements and then abating, pouring herself into long slow undulating strokes.

Out of respect for the puritan strains among my new friends I had left the cabin door ajar and now I found myself regretting my sensitivities. I felt her, as if the very brush itself were
making
Adam's sinful skin and she, although for the most part silent, and somewhat lowering in her countenance, was very charming in her concentration on my person, and I was in no sense offended to have my hair touched by her own hand, or my chin taken and lowered slightly. Why should I not enjoy the lovely small noises of approval?

Only when the sun lay low on the horizon did I realize I had not dined all day. Instead I had fed on her smell, my own desire, the brush now stroking so insistently at my stockings that my animal nature could not have been invisible to her eye. The air was suddenly drunk with turpentine, and she unfolded a cloth and laid it across the canvas. She caught my eye and held it.

I asked her price, and if that was a
double entente
it was for her alone to see.

She laughed suddenly, then held one paint-soiled hand across her mouth. And next, with what intention I did not understand, she gave a small curtsy and produced a folded piece of paper which I was disappointed to discover was an
instrument
--that is, a draft upon a bank. It was only then, as I looked up to catch the picklish twinkle in her eye, that a thought arrived in such a gust that my ardor was violently extinguished.

Lord help me, I thought, I had been a total fool. In the great haste of leaving Paris I had permitted my
parents
to arrange the financial instruments. Where were they now? What were they? I had woken on board ship without a single coin.

Parrot

I

SOME VENAL CLOCK was hidden in his lordship's vest or pants and now it struck the midnight hour. What made it chime I did not know, but I have seen English gentlemen perform the same. They are in deep mourning in their home estates but put them below the equator and they are dancing the jig like Jews at a wedding, lifting their knees, shaking their hands, rattling bangles they do not have. So it was with Lord Migraine on the boat, shooting guns at floating barrels. The Americans did not make things any calmer. They saw what it meant for the nobleman to win, and so politely ensured him his victory. When, after an eternity, the barrel was splintered flotsam on the sea, he bought them all champagne to celebrate.

Toward me he played the icy master, perhaps not understanding that while I owed Monsieur de Tilbot my life, I had not sold myself in slavery. I was a free man, more American than any of these bankers and merchants who took their cue from Migraine and treated me like scum. The only two passengers I found humane were Mr. Eckerd and his singer. They neither spoke the other's language, so I had much to do in that department.

At first I had some idle hours to play whist with my new friends, but soon it was Jack be nimble Jack be quick. Migraine suddenly shouted he would write an
entire book
about Americans. He loudly declared them the most interesting creatures he had ever seen. It was difficult to guess what he really thought but he began to interview them one by one as if it was an agricultural occasion and he must check their weight and teeth and breeding and know who the sire and who the dame and all this he recorded in his notebook and it was my great privilege, when he was done, to transcribe his scrawl into the journal and in all cases have a carbon copy which would be sent as safety back to France. I doubt his prying mother ever found anything to make her fear for her baby's safety. Indeed, I wondered if she had the fortitude to read the tedious stuff. Was she even
curious
enough, I wonder, to endure that very long conversation--some of which later found its way into the famous book--wherein the pious manufacturer of nails asks the French commissioner to imagine France in its natural state: that is, one in which any piece of land is available to whoever is man enough to work it?

"When there is enough for all," the nail maker said, "there is no need for government."

"But what of the poor?"

"No man who will work can be poor."

The great man peed beside my ear in the middle of the night. I did not complain. He preened and postured. I played my part. But when I saw how he had his eye on Mathilde, I thought, I will sit on his chest and stuff his mouth with dirt.

She was a clever little thing, my Tildy. She painted the Peek daughter without anyone paying her very much attention. By the time she was doing Mr. Peek, she had a following. Foremost among her admirers was Lord Migraine, and it was a horror for a man who loves a woman to see this flirtation acted out before his eyes. It did not matter how often I fled or how hard I pulled my pillow across my ears, they were now always in conversation, the pair of them, and when, at last, the dance was done, when he had reluctantly assented to the portrait, when they set up shop inside my own bloody cabin, I was on the rack.

I would leave them alone. I would play cards. But for Christ's sake, they would then insist I attend upon them.

"Garcon,"
cried he.

At this command I must enter my own cabin and inhale the oil and turpentine, the perfume of our love, our nights, our days. Mathilde stood at the far end of the cabin and affected to wash her brush. I could not look at her.

Lord Migraine twisted his skinny body in his chair and asked me had I packed his bloody purse. Well frig you for a Dutchman, I thought.

"No sir," I said, "no purse sir." And this was true.

"No coins, monsieur? No specie?" He was acting the cool master but he was all atwitter. I twisted the knife, asking him what arrangements he had made with the American banks.

"Arrangements?" His cheeks reddened as he held my murderous gaze. "It was the Comtesse de Garmont who made arrangements. You heard her. She insisted on it."

"I do believe she wished to, yes. I never saw her do it."

I held his gaze and did not tell him it was I, monsieur's
secretaire
, who had written the letters of introduction to the Bank of New York, and of course I knew exactly where they were.

If I were to search for some
instrument
among his trunks, I told him, the cabin must be evacuated. They must leave, the pair of them. Or not, I said. I could search another day.

"Now," he demanded.

Mathilde was thus evicted. In being forced to pass me she gave a savage bump with her formerly familiar behind.

I removed the paints and rugs and drapery one by one. It was a pleasure, almost. I closed the door. I sat alone. I breathed the smell of her and found so little solace that I produced his bloody instruments within the hour.

I then was given the task of preparing a bank draft of twenty dollars for Mathilde Christian. When that was done he tipped me a tot and I took it to drink with the Jew and his chanteuse, dividing it, sip by sip, between the three of us. It was at this exchange that Mr. Eckerd, by dint of my slow translation, finally discovered that Miss Desclee was not a singer. He had relied on the recommendation of an associate from Nimes, a draper it seemed, and it was only as I translated their conversation that it became clear that Miss Desclee was a tragedienne.

"Not a singer?"

"No, monsieur," she said gravely, and demonstrated most convincingly that this was so.

Another man might have gone stark raving mad to hear of this mistake, but Eckerd combed his strange hair and thought a moment and, before I had delivered the next three tots, he had decided on an entirely new production, a drama of the Revolution which he swore the people of New York would come to like flies to honey. This story he told me--and I translated to Miss Desclee, who listened gravely, her pale still eyes holding me with an intensity that was doubtless a benefit to her fellow actors on the boards but was completely unnerving on the deck.

I don't know what the story was exactly--you are lucky I have forgot--but it concerned, at that stage, Charlotte Corday and a certain comtesse. Miss Desclee inquired if she might play both characters.