Kate led me without words to a wooden cabinet at the other end of the one room. I opened the door, still as if in a dream, and saw that it had been specially built to hold canvases neatly and separately, like a drying rack in a studio, and that it was full of paintings. She held the door ajar for me, her hand white against the wood. I reached in and carefully took out a painting
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in the thrumming dimness and set it against the wall nearby, then another, then the next, and another, until the cabinet was empty and eight big framed canvases stood against the walls. Some of these must have been from Robert's shows; I wondered if he'd sold many others there and to what homes and museums they'd gone.
The light was bad, as I mentioned, but that only made them more real. Seven of the paintings showed some version of the scene I'd encountered that afternoon at the Greenhill College gallery-- my lady bent over a beloved corpse, sometimes a close-up of the two faces near each other, huge on the canvas, the still-young, strong-featured face hovering over the older ashen one. Sometimes it was a similar scene, but she had buried her sobs in the dead woman's neck as if drinking her blood or mixing it with her tears--melodramatic, yes, but also wrenchingly moving. In another she stood upright with a handkerchief pressed over her lips, the body at her feet, looking wildly around for help--was this the moment before or after the one depicted in the painting at Greenhill College? Over and over, the curly-haired woman was taken by surprise, horrified, grieving. The story never moved forward or backward; she was caught forever in that one event.
The eighth painting was the largest, and quite different, and Kate had already moved to stand in front of it. It was a full-length view of three women and a man, in a weirdly formal arrangement, breathtaking realism, with none of Robert's usual stamp of the nineteenth century--no, this one was unmistakably contemporary, like the sensuous painting I'd seen in Robert's home studio two floors above us. The man stood in the foreground, two of the women behind him to his right and one to his left, all four figures gravely facing the viewer and dressed in modern clothing. The three women wore jeans and pale silky shirts, the man a ripped sweater and khaki pants. I recognized all but one of them. The smallest of the women was Kate, her old-gold hair longer than she now wore it, her blue eyes wide and sober, every freckle in its place, her body upright. Beside her stood a woman I didn't know,
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also young, and much taller, long-legged, with straight reddish hair and a sharp face, her hands jammed in the front pockets of her jeans. Or had I seen her somewhere? Who could she be? To the man's left was a familiar figure, womanly under unfamiliar modern gray silk and faded denim, her feet bare, her strong face as I saw it in my dreams, her curly dark hair falling past her shoulders. Seeing her in the clothes of my own era made my heart contract with the possibility of actually finding her.
The man in the painting was Robert Oliver, of course. It was almost like having him present: his rumpled hair and worn clothes, his greenish eyes huge. He seemed only half aware of the women around him; he was his own main subject, the foreground, gazing out with flat resistance, refusing to relinquish anything of himself even to the viewer. Alone, in fact, despite the three Graces around him. It was an embarrassing painting, I thought--blatant, egocentric, puzzling. Kate stood staring at it almost the way she stood looking out of it, her eyes wide, her little body straight as a dancer's. I moved hesitantly over to her and stood against her shoulder, then put my arm around her. I meant only to comfort. She turned to me with something cynical in her expression, almost a smile.
"You didn't destroy them," I said.
She looked steadily up at me, not resisting my arm. She had the shoulders of a bird, hollow little bones. "Robert is a great artist. He was a pretty good father and a pretty bad husband, but I know he is great. It's not my place to destroy these."
There was nothing noble in her voice; it was a matter-of-fact, bald statement. Then she drew back, disengaging herself gracefully from my arm: closed door. She didn't smile. She smoothed her hair, staring at the largest painting.
"What will you do with them?" I said finally.
She understood. "Keep them until I know what to do."
This made so much sense that I didn't ask her further questions. It seemed to me that these disturbing images might one day put her children through college, if she handled them well. She helped
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me set the paintings back in their tracks, and we shut the door together. Finally I was following her again, up the wooden stairs, across the living room, and onto the porch. There we paused. "I don't mind what you do," she said. "Whatever you think is right." I knew this meant that I had her permission to eventually tell Robert that I had seen his wife, that I had not seen his children except in picture frames, that I had seen the gracious clean house in which he'd once lived, the paintings she was saving for a future she could not look far into.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then she stood a little taller--although not the stretch it must have been to Robert Oliver's cheek--and kissed me sedately. "Have a safe trip back," she said. "Drive carefully." She did not send any message.
I nodded, unable to speak, and went down the stairs, hearing her door close behind me for the last time. Once I was out on the road, I turned up my car radio, then switched it off and sang loudly into the silence, more loudly, thwacked my hand against the steering wheel. I could see Robert's paintings shining under the bare bulb, and I knew I might never view them again. But I had broken open my life, or perhaps she had done it for me.
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CHAPTER 41 1878
The outside of his studio building in the rue Lamartine is unprepossessing. She sits looking at it from her carriage. She has told herself since yesterday that she will bring her maid up with her. But at the last minute, before leaving her house, she realizes she wants no witness at all. Her unnecessary note to the housekeeper explains that she will be calling on a friend and orders a tray to be taken up to her father-in-law at midday.
The facade of the building is thoroughly real, and she swallows hard under the bow of her bonnet; she has tied it too tightly. Late morning--the streets are full of the bustle of carriages, the heavy clopping of paired horses, the delivery wagons. Waiters push the chairs outside their cafés into straight lines, and an old woman sweeps up rubbish at the curb. Béatrice watches as the woman, who wears tattered gloves and a patched skirt, accepts a few coins from a man in a long apron and moves on down the street with broom and pail.
The note in Béatrice's little bag contains a street number and a sketch of the building. His invitation is to see a new large canvas, which he would like to send to the Salon jury next week, so that she must view it now or wait until then--and who knows if it will be accepted? It is a flimsy pretext; she will see the painting later with Yves, she knows, whether or not it is hung in the Salon. But Olivier has mentioned the submission several times, an unwieldy canvas, his uncertainty. The thought of the painting, his struggles with it, have become their mutual concern, almost a shared project. It is the portrait of a young woman, he has most
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recently told her. Béatrice dares not ask who she is -- a model, no doubt. He has also thought about sending an earlier landscape instead. She knows all this and feels the pride of involvement, of being consulted--that is her thin justification for appearing alone there in a new bonnet. Besides, it is not as if she is going to see him at his home; he has only lured her to his studio, and perhaps there will be others there as well, taking refreshments and studying the paintings.
She excuses the carriage for an hour and lifts her skirts to descend. She has dressed herself in a walking suit the color of plums, and over it a cloak of blue wool trimmed with gray fur. Her bonnet goes with the cloak; it has the new shape for hats, in blue velvet lined with silver and heavy with blue silk forget-me-nots, chicory, lupine--marvelously real, like a hat decorated in a field. The mirror at home has told her that her cheeks are already flushed, her eyes b
right with something like guilt.
She watches her own foot in black leather leave the carriage first, step onto the paving stones, avoiding some slimy water. This is a part of town where some of the troubles occurred, she realizes, and tries to imagine it eight years before, piled with barricades and perhaps even bodies, but her imagination will not quite be diverted; she is thinking only about the man waiting for her somewhere above. Can he see her? She is careful not to glance up again. With skirts gathered in one gloved hand, she makes her way to the entrance, knocks, then realizes that she must simply walk in--there is no servant to answer. Inside, a worn staircase leads her to the third floor, to his studio. None of the closed doors on the other floors open as she passes them. She stands looking at his name and catching her breath--her stays are tight--before knocking.
Olivier answers at once, as if he has been just behind the door, listening for her, and they regard each other without speaking. They have not been face-to-face in more than a week, and during
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that time something has deepened between them. Their eyes meet, inevitably, across this knowledge, and she sees that he is aware of the change. For her part, she feels the shock of his age, because she hasn't seen him recently and she knows him more and more as a man, objectively; he is handsome, only a little past middle age, but there are deep vertical lines from the corners of his nose to the corners of his mouth and beneath his eyes, and his hair is pale silver.
Under his face she sees the younger man he must once have been, and this young man gazes back at her as if through a mask he never wanted to wear, vulnerable and expressive, revealing eyes still bright--but not as they must once have been; they droop redly in the lower rims and their blue is compromised, diluted. He has combed his hair away from a pink parting, which she can see when he bows over her hand. His beard still has some brown in it, a warmth at the roots, and his lips are also warm as they touch the back of her hand. In their brief contact, she feels his essence--neither the boy in love looking out of his eyes nor the aging man. She feels instead the artist himself, ageless and in the midst of a long accumulated life. His presence goes through her like the unexpected sound of a bell, so that she cannot catch her breath after all.
"Please, come in," he says. "Entrez, je vous en prie. My studio." He does not call her "tu." He holds the door for her, and she realizes now that he is wearing an old suit, shabbier than what she has seen him in before, with an open linen smock over the jacket. The sleeves of the smock are rolled back, as if they are too long even for him. His white shirt has a few spatters of paint on the breast, and his four-in-hand tie is black silk, also threadbare. He has not dressed up for her visit; he is allowing her to know him as he actually works. She passes into the room, noting that no one else is there, feeling his proximity at the door. He shuts it behind her gently, as if not wishing to draw attention to the point they both understand, the possible compromise to their two
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reputations. The door is shut. It is done. She wishes she felt more regret, more shame; she reminds herself that the outside world can still consider him merely a relative, a dignified elder who might well invite his nephew's wife to see a painting.
But it is as if instead of shutting a door he has opened one, making a long space of daylight and air between them. After a moment, he moves, saying, "May I take your cloak?"
She remembers the ordinary gestures, unties her bonnet and lifts it straight up and off so as not to disarrange the coils of her hair. She unfastens her cloak at the throat and folds it once, vertically, inside out, to protect the delicate fur. She hands him both, and he carries them away through another door. Standing alone in the studio, she feels the increased intimacy of a room without its occupant. It is full of light from long windows, clean inside and badly streaked on the outside, and there is an ornate skylight above her. She can hear the sounds of the street below--muffled thumps; rattling, screeching iron; horses' hooves -- all so faint that there is no need for her to believe in its existence anymore, nor to think about her coachman taking a hot drink at a stable up the street, where perhaps he knows other coachmen and will not think of her for an hour. Olivier returns and gestures toward his paintings; she has deliberately not looked at them. "I have censored nothing," he says. "You are a fellow artist." He says it without ostentation, almost shyly, and she smiles and glances away.
"Thank you. You have done me an honor by leaving your studio as it is." But she needs some courage to view the paintings.
He points. "Here is the one that hung in the Salon last year. Perhaps you remember it, if I am not flattering myself." She remembers well; it is a landscape three or four hand-lengths across, a subtle piece, a floating field with a layer of white and yellow flowers on the surface, a cow grazing at the far edge, brown trees mixed with green. It is a little bit old-fashioned, rather in the style of Corot, she thinks, and chides herself--he paints the way he has always
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painted, and he is good. But it is another reminder of the years that separate them. "You like it, but you think it passé," he says.
"No, no," she protests, but he puts up a hand to stop her.
"Between friends," he says, "there can be only honesty." His eyes are very blue; why has she thought them old? Now they radiate a vigor that is better than mere youth.
"Very well," she says. "Then I like the bravery of this one more." She has turned to a large canvas standing on the floor. "Is that the one you will submit?"
"No, alas." He is laughing now--the reality of his body next to hers. As long as she doesn't actually look at him, she feels again the presence of the young man inside that body. "This one is a little too brave, as you say--they might not take it." The painting shows a tree in the foreground, a fellow in an elegant suit and hat seated beneath it on the grass, his legs crossed negligently and his long hands hanging down over his knee. It is done in a skillful perspective that makes her want to walk around behind the tree to see what is on the other side. The brushwork is more modern than that in the cow painting--here she can see an influence.
"This one shows an admiration of the work of Monsieur Manet?"
"A grudging admiration, my dear, yes. You have a sharp eye. At the Salon, they might say that it is offensive because it has no purpose."
"Who is the boy?"
"The son I never had." He speaks lightly, but she studies his face, feeling puzzled, afraid of revelations. "Oh, I simply think of him that way--my godson from Normandy, who lives in Paris now--I see him several times a year, and we go for a long walk or two. A dear boy, son of some young friends. He will make a good doctor in a few years--he studies incessantly. I am the only one who can get him out to the country for exercise, and I believe he thinks it does me good, his poor old godfather--that's why he
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goes, pretending to take my orders for his health. Thus each of us attempts to fool the other."
"It's very fine," she says in earnest.
"Ah, well." He touches her plum-colored sleeve. "Come, I'll show you the rest, and then we'll have some tea."
The other paintings are harder for her to look at, but she does it unflinchingly; models half-dressed, the back of a nude woman, graceful, unfinished--does that mean the woman will return to the studio one of these days and take off her clothes for him again? Has she ever been his lover? Isn't that the way of artists? She tries not to think of it except as a fellow painter, not to mind. Models are often women of loose conduct, as everyone knows, but she herself has come alone to a man's private rooms, his studio -- is she any better? She hardens herself against her own fear and turns to examine his still lifes, fruit and flowers, which he explains are youthful works. To her they appear a little dull, but skillful, delicate; she sees the Old Masters. "I had been to Holland just before I painted these," he says. "I took them out the other day to see how they had held up. They are antiques, aren't they?"
She is careful not to answer. "And your submission for this year? Have I seen
it?"
"Not yet." He crosses the long room, beyond the two shabby armchairs and little round table where, she assumes, he will serve tea. Leaning against the wall is a canvas draped in cloth, a large one; he has to lift it with both hands. He leans it against a chair. "You are sure you want to?"
For the first time she is frightened, almost afraid of the man himself, this familiar figure whom she understands now in a wholly new way because of his letters, his forthrightness, the revelation of himself, the strange response of her own heart as she stands at his shoulder. She turns to him questioningly but can't think of the question. Why is he hesitant to show her his painting? Perhaps it is a genuinely shocking nude or some other subject she can't imagine. She has a sense of her husband's presence, disapproving, his
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arms folded to indicate that she has gone too far. But Olivier has told her in his letter that Yves wants her to see this painting. She doesn't know what to think or say.
When Olivier lifts the sheet, she catches her breath, the sound audible to them both. It is her painting, her golden-haired maid seated at work, her own rose-colored sofa, the brushwork she tried to make loose and free and yet seeing, all-seeing. "You understand why I have chosen this one to submit to the Salon this year," he says. "It is by a better artist than I."
She puts her hands to her face, and her vision is smeared, embarrassingly, with tears. "What do you mean?" Her own voice sounds weak in her ears. "Are you playing with me?"
He turns to her, swift in his concern. "No, no--I didn't mean to offend you. I took it home with me last week, after you had said good night to us. You must let me submit it for you. Yves approves completely and asks only that you protect your privacy a little by using another name. But it is remarkable--you have merged in it something old and something very new. When you showed it to me, I understood that the jury must see this painting, even if it turns out to be too modern for them. I wanted only to persuade you."