Under the Wide and Starry Sky (11 page)

That this brilliant, warm, funny Scotsman said he loved her spirit was enough for the moment. She didn't want to think about his unfitness as a marriage prospect, his lack of money, or his youth. Good Lord, he was closer to Belle's age than her own.
You are thirty-six, Fanny. You've lived long enough to know better. He's no solution to your problems.

Someday years from now, she imagined she would read in a newspaper about Louis's important new book or his latest lighthouse and would then feel a twinge of regret for their ill-starred timing. But for now, before she had to get up and go to her own room, she savored the comfort of his dear head on the pillow next to hers.

1877

It was the green hour in Paris, when people drinking emerald-colored absinthe filled the cafes. As he hurried along the snowy streets of Montmartre, Louis glimpsed couples inside bars sipping the elixir, their arms draped lazily around each other. The absinthe lovers flooded his mind with memories of Mentone three years earlier, when he had gone south to recuperate from lung troubles. Alone, free from his parents, he'd drunk absinthe and smoked opium into blissful stupefaction. It hadn't helped his health one whit, but he briefly felt as untroubled as these people looked.

When he turned now onto Rue de Douai and spotted Fanny's stone apartment building, a vein in his neck began to thud like a steam hammer. He looked up, hoping to spot her in one of the tall windows, leaning over the black iron balcony and waving at him, but he caught no glimpse of her. She knew he was coming. Was her heart galloping the way his was right now?

By their last day at Grez, they had nearly stopped talking. It seemed anything of importance had already been spoken or didn't need to be. He could read in her eyes what she was feeling. The night before she left, he'd written a farewell poem for her.

She had cast those brooding eyes of hers over the paper, smiled knowingly, and put it into one of her pouches. Then she'd boosted Sammy into the old donkey cart headed to Bourron, climbed up, and waved goodbye.

Louis realized his nerves were wrecked from the fear that their separation over the past few weeks might have rubbed the bloom off the rose. He shook away the thought and bounded up the four flights of stairs to Fanny's flat.

“Louis!” Fanny shouted when she flung open the door of her apartment. Her kisses—unabashed, even loud—settled the matter. He lifted her tiny body and whirled her around like a doll. When a woman next door poked her head out into the gritty-looking hallway, Fanny slipped from his grip and straightened her dress.

“Margaret,” Fanny said. “You remember Louis Stevenson.”

The woman nodded, greeted Louis, and retreated.

“She was in Grez for a bit, wasn't she?” he asked.

“Yes. She's a writer,” Fanny said. “We met in art class, and now we're neighbors.” She pulled Louis into the parlor, a bare little room with a ragged sofa and an ancient pair of chairs with punctured caning.

Louis put his hand through a hole in one seat. “You could get your bum caught in there and never get out,” he said. He loved watching her laugh at his paltry jokes.

She leaned back and clasped her hands together, her round eyes half-mooning with glee. “Flea-market treasures,” she said. “I'm going to make cushions for those chairs.”

“Aren't you a clever girl. And where might Sammy be?”

“With Belle at the circus for another hour or two. They went to see the trapeze men.”

Louis looked toward the open door to her bedroom.

“What is it you have in mind, sir?” she teased.

“You,” he said gently. “Us.” He withheld what was next on his tongue.
French acrobatics
.

With a measure of awkwardness, they went in. The last of the day's light was fading through the sheer curtains as Fanny removed her dress. He was struck by the white lace of her chemise, how it appeared to glow against her skin. He wound his arms around to her back to dispatch the corset, then pulled the chemise over her head. He tried to keep his eyes on hers as he undressed her, but it was a complicated set of moves that he managed with limited grace. Once she was naked, he couldn't help gawking at the splendor of her full breasts. “Bless my eyes,” he muttered.

Fanny pulled back the sheets and lay down, stretching one arm slowly across the far pillow. Her small hand, the color of old ivory, sank into the white down. He put his cheek on her neck, felt the warm pulse of her. His mouth went down to the marvelous breasts, around and into the moist spot between them. Soon she was moving in rhythm with him, and he thought,
What else matters but this
?

After their lovemaking, she rose from the bed and kept her back to him as she dressed. When she was covered, she turned. “I don't want Belle and Sam to … ”

“Of course not,” he said.

“The neighbors here … “ she warned.

“I'll see you in the parlor.”

Fanny. Fanny. Fanny
. How quickly she could shift. She was the most passionate woman he had ever slept with—leading, following, losing herself in trancelike forgetfulness. How then could she suddenly become modest?

Louis reached down to his trousers on the floor to remove a pencil and notebook from a pocket.
On Falling in Love,
he wrote, and underlined the words.
And so we go, step for step, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room—with both pleasure and embarrassment.

Later, when they went out to walk, he told her, “I am French.”

“And the Scotch accent?”

“Well, I
feel
French, anyway.” He pulled up his collar to cover his ears. “A while ago I changed my middle name to the French spelling. It was L-E-W-I-S before. I took terrible ribbing from Henley for doing that. He still writes to me and uses the old spelling. I don't care. It was my soul made the choice.

“God, how I love Paris! I love every hair on its head. The street names alone are fit to open a novel. Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête—Street of the Headless Woman. Street of the Bad Boys. Street of the Bridge of Cabbages. When I was a child visiting Paris with my parents, my father used to make a game of finding street names like that. We used to go over to a crèmerie in St. Germain. It was amazing, not only for its tarts but because the owner kept the napkins of his regular customers locked up in a drawer behind the register. How I wanted to have my own napkin stashed there!”

He remembered one of those early visits, when he had spied a boy of about sixteen wearing a black velvet jacket and a beret. The moment had been spiritual. In that glimpse, he had found his style. How old was he then? Eleven?

Even then when he came to Paris, his senses went on high alert, like those of a bird dog in the field. In those days, it was swords and military paraphenalia displayed in a shopwindow that could stop him in his tracks. Now he was a collector of characters. When he happened upon a big personality in a café, and he often did, he moved in close to watch and listen. He scribbled down the remarks of quieter types, too, like the dipsomaniacal bartender who adored discussing Flaubert. “I love books,” the man said, his eyes growing misty, as if he were talking of his mistress. He lifted his shoulders in resignation. “And I love gin.”

Other days, Louis was satisfied with smaller hints of character: ambiguous smiles, arrogant nostrils, elegant diction emerging through bad teeth. He saw venality and courage played out on Paris's streets, and he filled up notepads with the details: a cheese merchant furtively sweeping the day's detritus from his sidewalk over to the chocolatier's doorstep; a woman with a port-wine stain over half of her face, singing “Vive la Rose” on a street corner; a well-tailored old man with a telltale red nose whipping off sad little watercolors of hens and chicks for drinks in a café.

During the years when Louis was ailing and needed a sunny climate, his parents had bundled him off with them to the South of France, but they always scheduled in a visit to Paris. It occurred to him that they had come here because they needed to fill their own lungs with a little freedom from everything back in Edinburgh. His mother and father always seemed more relaxed in France.

French was sweet and liquid on his tongue. Sentences, paragraphs, coherent ideas flowed naturally, and he found himself in many a charming exchange. He read the great French classics with a dictionary at hand, but he gathered his spoken French from butchers, waiters, and landladies.

The French could be brilliant conversationalists, honest and free from hypocrisy. But they kept a distance; he didn't know if he would ever share a close friendship with a French person. He felt deep affection for Parisians nevertheless, because in their city, more than any other place, a man could devote his life to art—and be taken seriously.

Fanny admitted that she did not love the city as he did.

“I'm going to show you
my
Paris,” he told her. He did not have to say, “So you will fall in love with the things I love.” She understood that, and he could see she wanted to.

He took her to his favorite booksellers near Pont des Saints-Pères on the left bank, where he bought Victor Hugo's
Les Travailleurs,
and from the slim offerings of English-language volumes, Fanny chose a book she loved,
Middlemarch,
and a children's book for Sammy. In a public square, they warmed themselves near a blazing brazier, along with a circle of ragged women and men with whom he commiserated about the cold. On they went in the chill

air, stopping often at shops and cafés where he knew the proprietors.

Following the advice of Will Low, they went to hear his friend Emma Albani sing the title role in
Lucia di Lammermoor
at the Théâtre des Italiens. Later, they paid a visit to Will's studio, where he was painting a portrait of the Canadian soprano. At the doorway of the building, two battered stone lions straddled the entrance wearing painted-on mustaches, courtesy of art students who lived there. Upstairs, they found the raven-haired Albani, dressed in her silk Lucia costume, standing erect with folded hands in front of Will and his canvas. The air smelled of mineral spirits; dust particles from ground pigments floated through streaks of afternoon sunlight. Louis and Franny quietly made their presence known, crept up to view the painting, then slid back

into the shadows where he could still see, even in the dim light, the look of pure joy on her face.

Every park or café became their own private place. They made up stories about the people around them. “That villainous fellow over there,” Louis would begin, glancing at a portly gentleman drinking his morning coffee at a nearby table. “Do you see his walking stick resting on that chair? Look at the top of it.”

Fanny glanced surreptitiously at the handle, a carved ivory Turk's head. “A courier, obviously,” she said, picking up the bait. “The shaft of the cane is hollow. He's carrying rolled up sheets of paper inside …”

“Antique erotic prints from Japan?”

“Your mind does run in a certain direction, my love,” she teased. “They are priceless drawings, stolen, of course, and intended for that woman over there. The two of them are in cahoots.”

Louis eyed the potential co-conspirator, a plain freckled girl eating a croissant at the next table. “She does not know what she is to intercept. She has come from Marseilles at the request of her lover,” he said, “a deserter from the Legion who has hired on as a spy for …”

The games lasted as long as their own coffee and rolls, and then they were out on the streets, where the rhythm of life swept them along past flower stalls and boulangeries, past display windows full of glinting paperweights, gloves, Japanese silks and fans, past doorways where baking bread or perfume or chocolate sent fragrant fingers out to the sidewalk to fetch them in by the nose.

Sometimes remembered buildings were gone. They wandered around the blackened stone remains of the Tuileries Palace that had been burned nearly to the ground during the suppression of the Paris Commune. “I was here when it was intact,” he said with wonder. “How changed Paris is in just fifteen years.” Elsewhere, he discovered that the mazes of crooked little streets he remembered from that early visit had been leveled by Baron Haussmann, the formidable mind behind the reshaping of the city. Now in their place were wide, arrow-straight boulevards lined with streetlights that imbued nighttime in Paris with a theatrical air. They walked along the lit streets as if they, and every other person on the pavement, were players in a grand, romantic drama.

“I have good news,” Louis said when he visited her apartment a few days later. “You remember Henley, of course. He's starting a publication called London. And he's going to publish the story I read to you.”

“‘The Suicide Club?'”

“As soon as I polish it up. I think the length will be good for the magazine. I want to do a series of these shorter stories for him. Then, if luck holds, put them together as a collection for publication.”

“That's grand, Louis.”

“I don't know if publishing in
London
will mean much money, but it's one more foray in the right direction. He's going to need a lot of help. I was thinking you could do some work for him to get the thing off the ground—find writers, do some editing, perhaps. He could pay you a little something.”

“Yes!” Fanny sat up wide-eyed on the sofa. “Say yes to him. I will absolutely help. It's perfect timing, Louis. Sam can't pay me next month. And I
want
to do it.”

“Then I will pay.”

“But you haven't got any money for—”

“We'll find a way,” he said.

Walking back to Will Low's studio for the night, Louis tried to figure how much was left of the thousand pounds his father had given him upon graduation from law school. It had seemed like a solid amount when he got it. He hadn't been a spendthrift, exactly, but he'd picked up the bill for a group dinner now and then, loaned friends money, and pitched in for this or that. The biggest chunk of it, he'd given to Colvin when someone stole a set of valuable prints in his keeping. Louis loaned him 250 pounds, lest Colvin be sued. Poor old Colvin probably would be paying that loan back for a good long time. Louis had given a fair amount to Bob and his sister as their money ran out. None of his generosity, he thought, was out of the ordinary. His friends had done the same for him when he was short of funds; it was how all of them lived.

He could sleep and work at Will's place and toss a few francs his way. At least he'd had the sense not to accept the invitation to stay in Bob's flat. The place was crawling with bohemian friends and hangers-on. One fellow was sleeping in a closet. They were drunk by afternoon and up until dawn. Louis had pledged himself to work every morning until dinner, and he knew he could do it in this city.

The next afternoon, when he walked over to the Montmartre apartment, he found Belle in the parlor entertaining Bob. One look at his cousin confirmed what Bob had already admitted: He was smitten. Louis burst out laughing at his stupefied cousin watching the American girl, whose excited, free-limbed storytelling had Bob gazing at her as if she were an exotic bird.

“Luly!” Sammy shouted when he saw his friend. Louis and the boy bear-hugged.

Fanny's eyes met his in the round of chatter that followed. They went out into the hallway together.

“I wish we had our own parlor, just for you and me,” he said.

She pecked his cheek, then drew back and crossed her arms. “Did you know your eyes are red?”

“I went back to Will's last night and wrote until three or four in the morning.”

“The canoe essays?”

“
Inland Voyage
. That's the name I came up with last night. I have two hundred pages so far. Added about fifteen last night.”

Her smile was coquettish. “Have I told you today that you are amazing?”

“That's all I want to hear. Ever.” He put the back of her hand to his cold cheek. “Who was your model at the studio today?”

“A man dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Louis tittered. “And your foot?” he asked.

“Still achy,” she said. “The price of canoe wars. I probably shouldn't have been out there in the first place. I can't swim, you know.”

“Fanny!”

She shrugged. “I wasn't going to miss the fun.”

“I love you because you're game,” he said, and he put his lips on her neck. “I love you because you have the heart of a man inside the body of a luscious—”

“No,” she said. “Not here.”

“Fanny … “

“A woman's reputation is a fragile thing. Even in Paris.” Her eyes darted toward the parlor. “Speaking of which, Bob has added a whole new wrinkle to my daughter's life.”

Louis reluctantly drew back. “Where does Frank O'Meara stand?”

Fanny shook her head. “She's in a complete dither about which one she loves better. She can hardly concentrate in art classes. Frankly, she's driving me mad with her chatter about them.”

“It's so beautiful outside. Let's round up everybody and go to the crèmerie to get a bite to eat,” he said.

They walked out into the street, and Belle took Louis's arm. Just ahead, Fanny linked arms with Bob, while Sammy scampered around making snowballs.

“Do you love snow, Belle?” Louis asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“That's good. Because we couldn't be friends otherwise. “

“You have strong opinions about the oddest things,” Belle said.

“Some people look at snow and think about catching their death of a cold or how a person could get lost in it and meet his end. What could be better than to be wrapped up warm in a coat and to see the soft flakes coming down?” He nodded toward Fanny and Bob up ahead. “Come to think of it, I believe I love my friends better when snow is falling on them.”

Belle, who had been ambivalent about Louis's presence in their lives, allowed a grin. Her enormous eyes peered at him from beneath her fur-lined hood. “You have made my mother laugh again. I haven't heard her sound so happy since Hervey was a baby.”