Henri twisted out of Lucien’s grip, losing his hat in the process. “My deepest condolences,” he said, glaring at Lucien and straightening his lapels as he did. “I assure you, I am not the person to whom your husband was referring. Go with God, Madame.” He turned and followed Gauguin.
Lucien could hear Madame van Gogh whispering to the baby on the other side of the door.
“We will call again,” said Lucien. “Very sorry, Madame.” He started to walk away but paused when he heard the door unlatch.
“Monsieur Lessard. Wait.”
The door opened a crack and Madame van Gogh held out a small, cardboard envelope, big enough to hold a ring or perhaps a key. “A girl came here, very early this morning. She left this for you.”
Lucien took the envelope, feeling a completely unjustified euphoria rush through him as he did. Juliette? Why? How?
“A girl?” he said.
“A young Tahitian girl,” said Madame van Gogh. “I have never seen her before.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, Monsieur Lessard, the doctor was here, my husband was dying. I couldn’t even remember who you were at the time. Now please, take it and go.”
“Madame, one thing. Did the doctor say the nature of his sickness?”
“He called it dementia paralytica,” said Madame van Gogh, and she quietly pushed the door shut.
“Merci, Madame.”
Lucien tore the top off the envelope and dumped it into his open hand: a tin tube of paint, almost completely used, and a small, folded note. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around to see Gauguin, holding out his hand.
“I think that is mine,” said Gauguin.
“In a monkey’s red ass, it is,” said Lucien.
It was then, with great force and no little glee, that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec swung the weighted pommel of his walking stick into Gauguin’s shin.
“En garde!” said the count.
It was some time before Gauguin was able to join his fellow artists outside on the sidewalk.
“I THINK YOU CHIPPED A BONE,” SAID GAUGUIN. THEY MADE THEIR WAY DOWN rue Caulaincourt toward Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio, two of the three limping, one emphatically.
Henri said, “You know, for a man of forty-three, you are surprisingly good at hopping downstairs on one foot.”
“You will pay for that, Lautrec,” said Gauguin. To Lucien, he said, “That envelope is mine.”
Lucien held up the envelope to show the writing on the side. “Despite my name on it and Madame van Gogh saying that the girl left it for me, it is yours?”
“Yes. I know the girl who delivered it.”
“You know her? A random Tahitian girl? You know her?”
“Yes, she said that she would be bringing me color, and that was a tube of paint in the envelope, was it not?”
Henri stopped and snagged Gauguin by the sleeve of his brocade jacket, nearly spinning him around. “Wait, how do you know this girl?”
Gauguin shook his sleeve out of Lautrec’s grasp. “I just know her.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“I met her only recently.”
“Recently where? Under what circumstances?”
Gauguin looked around, as if searching for an answer in the sky. “She may have appeared in my bed last night.”
“Appeared?” Lucien loomed over Gauguin, curious to a point that was beginning to look threatening.
Gauguin backed away from his fellow painters turned inquisitors, who, it seemed, were behaving much more intensely than the situation dictated.
“I got up to get a drink of water, and when I returned to bed she was there.”
“And you didn’t find that at all strange?” said Lucien.
“Or convenient?” added Henri, a recriminating eyebrow bounding over the lens of his pince-nez like a prosecutorial squirrel.
“It was as from a dream,” cried Gauguin. “What is wrong with you two?” He limped away to escape them, heading back the way they had come.
“She was perfect, then?” said Lucien. “As if conjured from an ideal?”
Gauguin stopped. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Come,” said Henri. “You’re going to need a cognac.” Henri led them another block, stopped in a doorway to unlock his studio, and led them inside. Dust motes hung in the beam of light through the door’s single oval window, making the open space seem deserted, despite the canvases leaning against every wall. There were perhaps a hundred different sketches of the angular entertainer Jane Avril in different poses strewn about the floor and tacked on the walls.
“So,” said Gauguin. “Jane Avril?”
“A professional interest,” explained Toulouse-Lautrec.
“Professional?” inquired Gauguin.
“She smells suspiciously of lilac and can put either leg behind her head while singing ‘La Marseillaise’*and spinning on the other foot. I thought further study was called for.”
“Bonking,” explained Lucien.
“Infatuation with aspirations of bonking,” Henri clarified.
“I see,” said Gauguin.
“Sit,” said Henri, gesturing to the café table and chairs he kept for just such emergencies. Crystal snifters were set around and cognac poured from a cut-crystal decanter.
“So there was a girl in your bed,” said Henri. “What of the Colorman?”
“I told you,” said Gauguin. “I went to see Père Tanguy this morning. I have an account at his shop—”
“Not Tanguy, the Colorman. Surely Vincent spoke of him to you.”
“The little bent brown fellow Vincent went on about?”
“Yes,” said Lucien. “That’s the one.”
“No.” Gauguin waved in the air as if to fan away Lautrec’s silliness. “I thought that was some Dutch folktale Vincent had conjured up from his childhood. He said that the little man had pursued him from Paris to Saint-Rémy, then to Arles. He was mad.”
“Vincent wasn’t mad,” said Lucien. “Such a man exists. Was there a girl?”
“A girl? You mean with Vincent?”
“Yes, was Vincent seeing a woman?”
“No. What woman would have him? No money, out of his mind half the time, drunk and melancholy the other.”
“He might not have seemed to spend much time with her. Perhaps he spoke of a model.” Lucien thought of all the time he had spent with Juliette out of time, just the two of them. Henri and Carmen, Monet and Camille, Renoir and his Margot, all had experienced the slip of time while alone together. Perhaps it was possible that there had been a woman with Vincent and Gauguin had never seen her.
Gauguin threw back his brandy and closed his eyes as he waited for the burn to pass. “Vincent painted landscapes, still lifes, the odd café scene, but no portraits in Arles that I remember, other than one of me and a self-portrait. No women.”
Lucien pressed. “Perhaps he spoke of someone. In passing.”
Gauguin twisted the end of his mustache mindlessly, as if wringing a stubborn memory from it. “On the day before I left we had a terrible row. It started with differences in color theory. Vincent had been trying to paint without using any blue. For a while he would use ultramarine only when painting at night. He said that darkness drained the color of its evil. It was absurd. Worse than trying to talk theory to you, Lautrec.”
“A woman?” Henri reminded him. He sloshed more cognac into Gauguin’s snifter.
“That’s the thing. Vincent became violent, screaming about blue, then he took his razor and cut off half of his ear. He waved the bloody piece around shouting, ‘This will be for her! This is her price!’”
“Oh no,” said Lucien.
“What?” said Gauguin. “Does that mean something? He was ill, right?”
“It means,” said Henri, “that you must leave Paris. Go far away. And if you see the girl who came to your bed last night you must run like you are being pursued by a demon.”
Lucien nodded to confirm Henri’s warning.
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“But I must paint her. It’s why I was out so early to get color. I need to paint her.”
“You need to run, Paul,” said Lucien. “If you paint her, she is going to die. Or you are.”
“Possibly of tedium,” said Henri. “If you inflict your painting theories on her.”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” said Lucien.
THEY SENT GAUGUIN ON HIS WAY WITH ALL THE MONEY THEY HAD LEFT IN their pockets and his promise that he would avoid the girl from his bed and leave Paris as soon as he could secure fare to Tahiti. He might give up on his ideal island girl, but he wasn’t going to give up on the idea of painting island girls altogether.
“What does the note say?” asked Henri.
“It says ‘Lucien, Sketch me.’ It’s signed ‘Juliette.’”
“Rather Alice in Wonderland cryptic. She’s a beautiful girl, Lucien, but her epistolary skills are shit.”
“There’s barely enough color here for a sketch.”
“Perhaps we should save it. When Le Professeur returns he can use it to hypnotize you. Or we can fetch Carmen and hypnotize her as we had planned.”
“No, I’m going to sketch Juliette.”
Henri shrugged. “There’s some cardboard in the top drawer of the print cabinet. We don’t have any small canvases primed.”
Lucien went to the print cabinet and pulled out the wide, flat drawer, and shuffled around the brown cardboard pieces inside until he found a piece about the size of a postcard. “This should do it.”
“Do you have a photograph to work from?”
“I’ll draw from memory. I think that’s what she meant for me to do.”
“There was evidently subtext to her letter that I did not perceive.”
Lucien took a number two brush from a jar of brushes, took a small jar of linseed oil from the top of the print cabinet, and sat down at the table to draw.
“No white?”
“I’m only going to do a line drawing. If I start painting highlights I’ll run out of blue before I have the figure.”
“Drawing Juliette may not be the smartest thing to do, Lucien, you know that?”
“Yes, I know, but I love her.”
“Very well, carry on, then,” said Henri, toasting his friend. “I will catch up on my smoking and drinking while you work.”
On unprimed cardboard there would be no correcting, no rubbing out, no wiping and repainting, no blending, no overpainting. He mixed some of the blue into a drop of linseed oil on the tabletop, imagined Juliette’s exquisite jawline, and the brush fell to cardboard. Her neck, another line, ever so lightly at first, but then reinforced, contoured by brush hairs, and Juliette’s face began to grow up from the cardboard. Lucien’s hand was the conduit from the vision in his mind’s eye, and he began to lay down the lines like an automated loom weaving a tapestry of silk.
His eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled over in his chair, clutching the drawing in one hand, the brush in the other, and he held them as he lay on the floor, twitching.
LUCIEN OPENED HIS EYES TO SEE HENRI EYE TO EYE WITH HIM, HIS CHEEK pressed to the floor. The two were curled up like battling twin fetuses facing off for in utero fisticuffs.
“Well, that looked unpleasant,” Henri said.
“I went away.”
“I gathered. Where?”
“I saw Berthe Morisot naked.”
“The painter? Really? Nude?”
“In a gypsum mine.”
“Not my first choice for a rendezvous, but it is your hallucination.”
“She was covered in blue.”
“Have you tried strawberry jam? Although the seeds can be annoying.”
“The Colorman was there too. Also naked.”
“Well, now you’ve lost me. Was he being greedy, if you get my meaning?”
“He was scraping the blue powder off of her body with a knife.”
“Interesting. I have no desire to try that. This may be a first for me.”
“It’s disturbing to me.”
“I imagine so. But, tell me, did you get to have a go at Berthe?”
“I was seven.”
“Feet tall? Well that’s just obscene.”
“No, seven years old. It wasn’t a hallucination, Henri, it was a memory. I’d forgotten it all. I was in that gypsum mine back during the war, hunting rats. The entrance is in Montmartre Cemetery.”
“You actually saw Berthe Morisot naked and painted blue? Well that’s going to be awkward if you run into her at a gallery show. I mean, she’s still a handsome woman, brilliant painter, but—”
“I think we need to go to that mine.”
“Perhaps some lunch first. You were unconscious for quite a while. We ran out of cognac.”
“Why are you lying on the floor?”
“Solidarity. And we ran out of cognac. This is my preferred out of cognac posture.”
“Fine. Lunch first. Then we’re on to the mine.”
“Splendid! Onward!”
“You can’t stand up, can you?”
“The floor is cool against my cheek. I’m rather enjoying the sensation.”
“After we’ve procured some lanterns, eaten, had coffee, and you’ve taken a bath. Then?”
“A bath? Really?”
“You smell like a whorehouse.”
“Yes?”
“Which is inappropriate unless one is actually in a whorehouse.”
“A bath it is, then. Splendid! Onward!”
“You’ll still have to stand up.”
“We really should have a maid in to wash these floors.”
IT WAS NEARLY SUNDOWN BEFORE LUCIEN WAS FINALLY ABLE TO GET HENRI sobered up enough to make an assault on the mine. Each carried a storm lantern and Lucien had candles and matches in his jacket pockets. Henri had his cane with the sword in the hilt (Lucien had made him check that it wasn’t the one with the cordial glass), and Lucien had a long, hook-tipped brush knife he’d borrowed from a neighbor who used it for keeping weeds at bay in the hedgerow of his backyard garden.
“Perhaps we should wait until it’s not so dark,” said Henri, ducking under a low archway of brambles.
“It’s a mine, it’s always dark.” Lucien hacked away at some blackberry bushes with the brush knife, losing some skin from his knuckles on the thorns in the process.
“Well we should have brought a pistol. I have an uncle in Paris who would gladly lend us one.”
“We won’t need a pistol.”
“That’s probably what Vincent thought that last day he went out to paint.”
Lucien started to argue, but instead said, “Strange, what Gauguin said about Vincent wanting to use blue only in night scenes.”
“Poor Vincent,” Henri said.
They had reached the mouth of the mine. Lucien knelt and pulled a match from his jacket pocket. “We should light the lanterns. Give me yours.”
“I’ll watch for rats,” said Henri.
“They won’t come out where it’s light. That’s why I had to go in here in the first place. To set my traps.”
“Why were you hunting rats?”
“For food.”
“No, really?”
“For my father’s pastries.”
“No, really?”
“The city was under siege. There was no other food.”
“Your father made rat pies?”
“The plan had been tureens—country pâté—but then there wasn’t enough bread to eat them with, so he made pies. The crusts were about half sawdust. Yes, rat pies, like Cornish pasties.”
“But I love your meat pasties.”
“Family recipe,” said Lucien.
They crept into the mine, lanterns held high. There was scurrying in the deep shadows.
“Was Berthe as beautiful as I imagine her?” asked Henri.
“I was seven. I was terrified. I thought the Colorman was torturing her.”
“I hope she’s here. I have a small sketch pad in my pocket.”
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“She’s not going to be here. That was twenty years ago. She lives in Montparnasse with her husband and her daughter.”
“Oh, and all of a sudden we are bound by time and the possible.”
“Good point.”
“Thus, I brought a sketch pad.”
Suddenly a match ignited only a few feet in front of them and they both yelped and leapt back. Henri tripped over a rotting timber and scrambled to look around.
“My heroes, I presume,” said Juliette, holding the match to the wick of a lamp. She sat on a crate in her periwinkle dress; the Blue Nude was propped up against a timber behind her.
“Juliette,” said Lucien. He stumbled to her; his eyes filled with tears as he took her in his arms.
Twenty-four
THE ARCHITECTURE OF AMUSEMENT
THIS WAS GOING TO REQUIRE SOME DELICACY, A CERTAIN FINESSE, A BIT more subtlety than her normal strategy, which, in most cases, was to remove her clothes. As she kissed Lucien by the orange lantern light in the mine—felt him trying to wrap his very soul around her with his arms, pour it out to her from his heart, in tears, now damp and slick on their faces, as they shared breath and warmth, the moment frozen not by some magical means, but by the exclusive singularity of their embrace, where nothing existed that was not them—she thought: It’s so much easier when you toss up your skirt, shout, “Voilà!” and you’re off to the races. This was going to be complicated.
Toulouse-Lautrec cleared his throat loudly and glanced over his shoulder as if he’d been casually browsing around at the edge of the darkness and had only just noticed his friend voraciously snogging a girl down a mine.
Juliette broke the kiss, nipped Lucien’s ear, then pulled his head tight to her bosom and said, “Bonjour, Monsieur Henri.” She winked.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” said Henri, tipping his bowler hat, which was dusted with the white gypsum powder from the mine.
Lucien seemed to come awake, then, and pushed Juliette away, held her at arm’s length by her shoulders. “Are you all right? I thought you might be ill.”