But the life he describes is so unlike the man I know, it is impossible to imagine him living it. And then, that company, MBI, moving them from place to place without considering the family, it is difficult to comprehend. How could he have let it happen?
6
I wake late the next morning thoroughly refreshed, anxious to take my morning run. I run harder and faster than usual and don’t seem to feel any tiredness. It’s as if I really have sloughed away at least ten of my forty-nine years. On the way down the rue de Charonne, I stop in and buy a croissant, something I haven’t done in months. I’m going to have a real breakfast. Boy, am I getting spoiled. Having a little extra money is going to turn me into a regular bon vivant.
I fill my basin with water and even heat it a bit on my cooker before I wash up. I have some almost fresh clothes and I slide into them. The jeans are stiff with paint, but that I’m used to.
The coffee with the croissant dipped into it is a delight. I pull out the paintings I’ve done so far and spread them around me. I just stare at them, try to pretend somebody else did them, be my own critic. I wish I had back that one of the Place Furstenberg, but then fifteen hundred francs is fifteen hundred francs. I stretch out on the sleeping bag and look up through my little window at a blue sky. Now and then a wisp of cloud appears and quickly disappears. It must be windy up there.
I think about the painting of Mirabelle, about Mirabelle herself, and about her story. I remember all I told her about myself. I wonder if I should go on. I could always duck some of the hard parts, just tell her the gist of things without going into it too much. I’m not sure I want to tell anybody, not even Mirabelle. I’m not sure I can. I’ve locked it so deeply inside me, I think I’m ashamed, also it was all so painful. At the same time I’m bored with it. It’s over, finished.
I finish my croissant and the last dregs of coffee. I wash the cup and pot in my wash water, rinse and dry them off. I hide the paintings and tuck my sleeping bag up in the rafters. I listen, then go out the door, lock it, put the key in its hiding place, listen at the stairway, and lightly run down the steps. Living invisibly becomes a way of life. I do these things almost without thinking. I almost never come down this late, I’m getting spoiled all right, but it feels wonderful. I don’t feel in such a hurry, rushed in my mind. The concierge still has her blinds closed and the curtain across her window.
Even after the hard run this morning, I feel like walking instead of taking the bus. The day isn’t as beautiful as it was earlier. Dark clouds are drifting and that high wind is beginning to whip around the ground. It could even rain. But I think there’ll be enough light for the portrait, even if it does.
That reminds me about the light bulbs. I drop into a Monoprix and buy four sixty-watt, 220 V, bayonet-fitting, frosted-glass bulbs. That’s one thing about France, whether it’s bread or light bulbs, there are always about ten decisions to be made.
I drop straight down to the quai on the other side of Pont Sully, where I usually run. I walk along the river looking at the boats. While I’m running, I don’t see much. Most of the boats along here aren’t working boats, people live in them. Boy, would that be a dream, living in a boat on the Seine, right in the center of Paris.
I walk up rue Saint-Sulpice to the Marché Saint-Germain. Inside, I find a small bunch of daisies for only five francs. She can’t see them but she can smell them and feel them. The smell actually isn’t so great, but I think it’s the kind of thing she’d like.
I try again to sneak up on her. I don’t have any box to jiggle behind me and I’m wearing my jogging shoes. Still, when I’m about three feet away, she turns.
‘You are early, Jacques. The bells have not begun ringing yet, but I am almost finished with my birds.’
‘How did you know I was here, Mirabelle? How did you know it was me and not someone else?’
She has one of the brownish gray pigeons in her hand. She smiles at me.
‘Well, first, I could tell from the sounds of the pigeons, the way they were acting, that someone was coming near me. But I did not hear anything and the pigeons seemed nervous, so I figured it was someone carefully sneaking up on me. Who else but you would be doing that? Also, I smell a new smell, something of cut grass. It smells like open places and makes me think of cows and vacations in the country, a lovely smell.’
She has finished giving her grains to the brown pigeon and sends it flying away.
‘You’re amazing, Mirabelle. I can’t even keep a secret from you. Okay, here, these are for you.’
I hold out the daisies. She takes them from my hand and brings them gently to her face.
‘Oh, Jacques, they have the smells of all nature in them, it has been so long.’
She gently strokes one of the flowers.
‘And they are my favorites, marguerites, how did you know? Are they yellow?’
She looks into my face, tears are at the corners of her eyes. I’m pleased and embarrassed at the same time.
‘Don’t tell me you can smell or feel the color, Mirabelle. That I won’t believe. If you keep being this way I won’t believe you are blind anymore.’
‘Would that not be nice? Please, Jacques, you must be gallant now. When you give flowers to a woman you must kiss her as well.’
She turns her cheek to me and leans forward. I kiss her on one cheek and, almost simultaneously, the first gong of the big bell in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés tower chimes. She turns her head and I kiss her on the other side, a tear has run down the cheek and I feel, taste it with my lips. The bells are now beginning to ring. Rolling, almost cacophonic, deep resounding sounds fill the air.
Mirabelle leans forward and kisses me on both cheeks, her lips are dry, cool. The birds are flying, dancing around us to the increasing sound of the bells.
‘Thank you so much for the flowers. No one except my father has ever given me flowers before. He gave me some he picked for my tenth birthday. I have never forgotten. They were yellow marguerites just like these.’
She puts them to her nose again, runs her hands across the top, brushing the tips of the flowers. Then she puts them down on the bench beside her and begins gathering all her pigeon equipment and little sacks together.
‘We must go now. I have a lovely meal cooked for us and we want to have enough light so you can paint me properly.’
‘Please, Mirabelle. Can’t we stay until the bells finish ringing? I’d never noticed before how beautiful they are, they’re like sun and rain blended together, like a rainbow in sound.’
I’m sitting beside her, my eyes closed and my head tilted back, listening. It’s magic. I hear the wind, the flapping of the pigeons, the hum of traffic. Over all, blending everything, is the metallic, sour-sounding, soaring, yet strong thunder of the bells. Why haven’t I ever really heard them before like this?
‘You are becoming like a blind person, Jacques. It is something I enjoy doing very much, also. Sitting quietly and listening to the bells. They are quite different from the bells of Saint-Sulpice. The Saint-Sulpice bells are beautiful, too, but are more dignified, more religious, more sure of themselves. These bells are almost as if they are asking questions, questions no one can ever answer. Let us listen.’
Then she’s quiet and we listen through the bells until the last lingering final notes disappear. In the distance I hear Saint-Sulpice answering in deep tones. Mirabelle stands and I stand beside her. She puts her hand on my arm and I put my hand over hers, it isn’t cold but not warm either. Mirabelle leans slightly into me.
‘This is so nice, no one would have any idea I am blind. I am only a woman walking with a man. This is so comforting, you will never know, dear Jacques.’
She goes ahead of me into the door to her apartment. She takes out her keys. Her pigeon things are tucked into her bag. She feels with one hand for the keyhole and puts the key, without faltering, directly into the hole and leans to open the heavy door. She hangs her coat on the rack beside the door we come in, pulls a drape across to keep o
ut drafts, and slips off her shoes. She slides on slippers. I’d never noticed this before, but then I’d never come up into the apartment with her. She was always already here when I arrived.
I’m beginning to feel like a bull in a china shop. I sit on a chair beside the door and take off my running shoes. Mirabelle puts a hand on my arm.
‘No, Jacques, it is not necessary for you to do that. It is only the idiosyncrasy of an old, blind woman. You feet will be cold. No, wait, if you want, I have something. I sewed them a long time ago but no one has ever used them.’
She turns behind her to a closet area closed off by another curtain. She reaches up high and brings down a pair of hand-sewn slippers, actually cloth sock-like slippers to slide over shoes.
‘See, you can wear these over your shoes if you want.’
‘I have my shoes off, is it possible for me to wear them over my socks?’
‘As you wish.’
She turns to her kitchen. I slip the cloth slippers over my socks, they have elastic around the top and are comfortable. I line my shoes up beside the door.
While she’s in the kitchen I figure it’s a good time to screw in light bulbs. I start in the toilet room. I screw out the bulb and put in the new one, I flip the switch, ‘let there be light,’ and there is. I do the same in the bathroom, standing on the edge of the tub to reach the socket. Same thing, no problem.
The light in the main room is over the table where we eat. I know Mirabelle knows what I’m doing. I figure if she doesn’t want me walking on the floor with my shoes she probably won’t be too enthusiastic about my standing on the table where we’re going to eat.
‘Mirabelle, I have a bulb for the light in the ceiling here, but unless you have a ladder, I have no way to reach it except by standing on your table. Is that all right?’
‘Of course, and thank you. It is kind of you to remember.’
I climb on a chair and then onto the table. Even then I can just barely reach the socket. It’s a double socket with two bulbs. I twist out the old bulbs, then fit both of the new ones in. The switch is on, so they light right up in my hand.
‘Do be careful, Jacques, electricity can be so dangerous, do not hurt yourself.’
‘There, that’s better. I didn’t buy those bulbs for you, Mirabelle. You don’t profit by them, so don’t thank me. I bought them for myself.
‘There, that’s fine, Mirabelle. By the way, when the toggle switches are down, the light is off; when they’re up, they’re on.’
‘I have lived here more than seventy years, more than fifty years since I have been blind. I know the switches, Jacques, but thank you.’
So the lights didn’t burn out, they just died from disuse or temperature change during the years since her sister died. Or maybe they were accidentally turned on by someone else and left on. But then Mirabelle said she could feel the heat of the bulbs. It doesn’t matter.
I sit at the table. Mirabelle is putting down the hors d’oeuvre. It’s tarama. She takes off her apron and sists across from me.
‘Today we are having Greek food. Have you had tarama before?’
‘Yes. I like it very much, especially this way, with black olives and lemon.’
‘I bought it on the rue de Seine this morning. We shall have all Greek food today.’
‘I thought you did your yoga and exercises in the morning.’
‘I did them early and then went shopping.’
She smiles at me, unfolds her napkin, I follow and lift the glass of wine she has poured. She holds out her glass.
‘This is Greek wine, retsina, I hope you like it.’
‘To our portrait and to us, Mirabelle.’
We take a taste of the wine. I’ve never been a great fan of retsina, it tastes too much like turpentine, but I don’t say anything. When you’re a painter, drinking turpentine is not a special treat.
We have moussaka and brochettes d’agneau for our main courses and finish with some sticky dessert. It’s all delicious. If I keep eating like this I’m going to put my potbelly back on.
After we finish, while Mirabelle washes the dishes, I set up my easel by the windows and place the portrait so I have a good view of her and the best light. The weather is definitely changing for the worse. I hunt around and find some detergent, a cloth, and some newspaper. I start trying to wash the window.
‘Is it really that bad, Jacques? I am so embarrassed.’
‘Mirabelle, when you’re blind you don’t need windows, but if I’m going to paint your portrait I need light. Don’t feel badly.’
I need to scrape off at least ten years’ crud from that glass. Paris air is filled with pollution, and since she’s cooking in the same room, the insides are almost as bad as the outsides with accumulated grease. I climb up on a chair and then up onto the windowsill so I can reach the high parts. It takes me at least fifteen minutes for each window, and Mirabelle has finished with her work before I get the last streaks wiped away with paper towels. To me it looks great but I know it doesn’t mean anything to Mirabelle.
‘Now we can really work. It’s amazing how much light there is now compared to before.’
‘Jacques, in so many ways you bring light into my life.’
‘I feel the same way about you, Mirabelle.’
It’s a charged moment but we leave it there. I sit down and try to enter into the portrait where I was when I stopped, before I got all bogged down with my tale of woe. And the ‘woe’ part hasn’t even started yet, might not.
I begin the underpainting for her face and hair. I use a lightened version, thinner, of the alizarine crimson I was using for the background. I blend it with some yellow ocher. I’ve got to find some transparent yellow, maybe Indian yellow, for underpainting. I wonder what it costs.
Mirabelle sits there staring past me out the window with a slight smile on her face. She looks so frail, so fragile in a certain way, but now I know her indomitability, her vitality, her courage, I see her differently. She sits still as a mannequin.
‘You don’t need to sit so still, Mirabelle. I’m finished with the drawing now; if you want, you can relax and we can talk. I don’t know how much sense I’ll make because I get concentrated on the painting and I’m not much of a conversationalist.’
I look up, she smiles and twists her head slowly around on her shoulders, a yoga exercise.
I’m working on the underpainting for her sweater now. I’m using a mixture of ultramarine and a touch of the alizarine crimson. I want to get it dark but rich in a cool way, then I’ll bring it back up again when I start the impasto. The painting’s coming along fine. I’m just drifting with it and I’m about ready to put some white and some of the yellows, oranges, reds, some more earth colors on my palette, to start the flesh tones.
‘Jacques, would you be willing to tell me some more about your life in the past? Do not do it if it is too painful. I would not ask except I want to know more about you, how you have come to be the impressive man you are.’
I stop and begin squeezing the opaque paints onto my palette. One part of me wants to tell her, knows it would probably be good for me, but there’s a knot inside I’ve built over this past year or so which has become something of my sense of security, of safety. I don’t know if I want to unravel it again. I begin with a stroke of pale yellow ocher between her eyes. I look once more to get just the right tone and then look into her eyes. She smiles as if she knows.
‘When you stopped last time, you were in Paris with your family. You did not like your work, but your wife and children were beginning to adapt themselves to the change, the life here. What happened then? I still cannot see how you came to be painting in the streets, or sitting here with me in my room on the rue des Ciseaux.’
She stops. What the hell, I’ll start and keep painting. If she wants to hear all this, it’s okay with me.
‘We were here in Paris three years, then before the third year was up, I was asked to stay on for at least one more. Our three oldest had graduated f
rom high school and were back in America studying at different universities. Still, Lorrie didn’t complain, it was almost as if she’d given up.
‘As I said, Mirabelle, one of the difficulties with my work was it was necessary that I travel more than I wanted. There were subdivisions in several other cities, including Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. I had to visit each about once a month. It kept me away from my family too much, but at least the children seemed happier. When those at the university in America came home for vacations, they now seemed to love Paris.
‘Unfortunately, Lorrie still spent too much time ferrying young Hank from one place to another and she didn’t have much interest in Paris.
‘My own big complaint was that here I was, an artist, in the city of artists, actually living in Impressionist country, and I had no chance to profit from it. I never even had a minute to do any drawing, except doodling while on the phone.
‘Hank was scheduled for graduation in June from the American School. That was when I was told my assignment had been extended that fourth year. Either I’d done too good a job, or they were going to bury me here. I think maybe this was the straw that broke Lorrie’s back.
‘Up till then she’d remained a perfect multinational American wife displaced in a foreign country. She took care of the house, shopped, went to the school frequently as a member of the PFA, helping the kids adapt. She had practically nothing to do with French, France, or French culture. She had a tutor twice a week, as I did, but she didn’t seem to make much progress, just enough to shop or get what she wanted. She avoided, whenever possible, social events associated with my work where most of the conversation would be in French.
‘Then I started noticing subtle changes. First she changed her hairstyle. Just that was enough to make her look almost French, especially with her darkening beautiful auburn-red hair. Then she started buying very à la mode, high-style clothes. We could afford it and she looked great, really stood out beautifully against the other American women here with their husbands. She was still, even after four kids, a very attractive woman. Now she was stunning.