Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  A tall, wiry player with a wide dragoon’s mustache approached us at the edge of the terrain de boules. “Excuse me, Pascal, but it’s your turn.”

  “In a moment, Aimé. This is my family, come from Paris to live with me.” He turned back to André, and the man withdrew. “We’ll talk about it tonight, and you’ll see. Everything will be all right, eh?” He held out both hands to me. “Lisette, you look fresh as a new lily after a long ride. You’ll be happy here, I promise.”

  “Pascal!” shouted Raoul, a player wearing a farmer’s straw hat.

  “I am obliged,” Pascal said with a slight bow to us. “Just one turn, and we’ll be finished.”

  He swaggered over to the dirt court with surprising energy.

  “I’m sorry, Lisette. I didn’t expect this.” André crossed his arms, made a fist, and battered at his chin with it.

  Despite what was most on our minds, André’s attention was being drawn into the game. Pascal and his teammates, Aimé and the farmer, Raoul, circled the playing field, studying the position of eleven—I counted—steel balls and one smaller cork ball.

  “Alors, point or fire?” Aimé asked Pascal.

  André explained. “Each team tries to get its boules closer to the cork ball than the other team’s closest boule. Point means to roll a boule directly at the cork. Fire means to throw a boule at a boule of the other team in order to knock it away from the cork. Or you can fire at the cork, to knock it away from a boule of the other team, or to knock it closer to a boule of your team.”

  “Fire,” Pascal said. “Definitely.”

  “You’re a fool!” said the farmer. “It’s too far.”

  There erupted a heated argument among players and spectators as to how he should play his turn, some contending for pointing, others for firing, citing the pebbles on the court, the slope of the ground, the inaccuracy of Pascal’s aim, the strength or weakness of his arm, the unsteadiness of his balance. Some resorted to name-calling. His teammate Aimé pretended to throw a boule, trotting with his arm arced above his head to show the route of the ball in the air, advising some backspin, pointing along the ground to the cork. Everyone shouted robustly, agreeing there was no safe way to play it, everyone definitely having a fine time.

  Raoul began to sweep the pebbles away with his boot, which brought an outcry of “Against the rules!” The other team rushed in to put the pebbles back, and the argument exploded again as to their exact places.

  “Forget the stones,” Pascal called. “I’m going to fire.”

  “Bon Dieu,” André whispered to me with a tinge of disgust. “He’s trying to show off for you, to win us over.”

  How endearing, an old man trying to impress me with his skill.

  “Tell him to point it, Aimé,” an opposing team member said. “You know he’s afraid to fire.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pascal grumbled. He chewed on his mustache with his yellowed bottom teeth. “All right. Have it your way. I’ll point it!”

  “A safer shot,” André said to me, “but he got credit for wanting to risk firing. It’s all strategy, bluster, and drama.”

  Everyone was respectfully silent. I held my breath, wanting the old man to win the point. His knees cracked as he bent to play the shot. His boule landed at the spot where Aimé had pointed, rolled toward the cork, but it hit a stone and veered left, coming to rest a meter away. I felt betrayed by a pebble.

  The other team had won the game and the tournament. There was no cheering, no animated analysis. Oddly, the other team and the spectators turned to head for the café in near silence.

  “I should have fired it like I wanted to,” Pascal muttered.

  “Don’t go blaming us,” Aimé said. “If you had fired, you would have missed for sure.”

  “Set them up again,” Pascal said. “I bet you a packet of cigarettes I can do it.”

  The entire procession came to a halt and turned back toward Pascal.

  Aimé placed his boule where Raoul’s had been, and the farmer placed the cork where it had been. Pascal threw high, his arm gracefully suspended in the air long after his boule left his hand. The ball spun like a silver planet and landed like a meteor, knocking Aimé’s boule away with a clunk and settling right next to the cork, as he had claimed it would.

  “Just like two peas in a pod,” he said with smug self-satisfaction, to which no spectator responded, no hand slapped his back in congratulation, no applause hung in the air, except my own robust clapping.

  Only Aimé said quietly, earnestly, “Formidable, old man.”

  A surprising streak of pride rioted within me. “Bravo, Pascal.”

  “It was just one turn,” he said sheepishly. “Eh bien, ma minette douce, you are here at last.” Trying to make peace by calling me a charming kitten, he offered me his arm, and we began trudging uphill toward home, his breathing labored as he leaned against my shoulder.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PARIS WE KNEW

  1937

  “WE’LL GO TO THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA AFTER THIS IS over,” André whispered against the pillow that first night in Roussillon.

  But for now, what? Was I to wish that Pascal would die soon so that we could go on holiday and then restart our lovely life in Paris? How unconscionable to think that. I nestled closer to André’s chest so he wouldn’t read that very thought on my face.

  “I can imagine it,” I said. “So vast, the sea so clear at my feet, so richly dark farther out. The lustrous blue as exotic as the peacocks’ necks in the Jardin des Plantes.”

  He knew what I was thinking: No public gardens in this scrap of a village. No opera. No cabarets. No jazz at La Coupole. No Folies Bergère. No dance bands like Ray Ventura’s. No cinema. No street musicians. No Guignol puppet shows. No department stores. No sculptures. And not a single gallery. I would wither away.

  “The moonlight coming in the window makes your skin glow like pearls.” He was trying with all his might to diminish my despair. “My Lise. Fleur-de-lis de la mer, with wet hair clinging to two sea-glazed nipples. That’s what you’ll be. A water nymph. A dark-haired beauty. A Cleopatra. A Greek siren. You’ll sing to me, and I will forever adore you.”

  And I did feel supremely adored, and I adored him in return. But when he had fallen asleep, and the village fell silent except for the occasional hoot of an owl, I thought of what we could be doing if we were still in Paris.

  We could be lingering along the shadowy quay below the Conciergerie on Île de la Cité among loving couples cooing in soft voices in a circle of yellow lamplight. Or we could be taking one of our favorite promenades, up to Montmartre to see the spread of rooftops from the vantage point of Sacré-Coeur.

  Once, early in our friendship, before we had so much as touched hands, he insisted that I ride the carousel in place des Abbesses in lower Montmartre. Afterward, he lifted me off the platform and swung me around until I was so dizzy I had to hold on to him. His grin told me he had planned it. Then we took the funicular up to place du Tertre, the high square on Montmartre where artists sold small paintings to tourists and where there was always accordion music. André gallantly paid a man to cut out a silhouette of me in black paper laid on white. “A treasure,” André had said, “deserving of my most elegant frame.”

  I especially loved our Saturday morning gallery tours to see new paintings hanging in André’s carved frames. He felt no more proud than I did when we spotted one. By making beautiful paintings even more beautiful, he contributed to the rich world of art in Paris, and as his wife, I basked in the glory he created.

  On Sundays we often went to the Bois de Boulogne and took out a rowboat to commemorate a certain Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1935. We had been rowing in the upper lake that day, and I happened to mention that the park had once been the hunting grounds of kings, while he said it was a promenade for queens.

  “You are the queen of my heart. Lise, la reine de mon coeur,” he had said in a liquid voice as he rowed slowl
y. “Will you be my queen for life?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

  I hadn’t considered it a serious promise of marriage, only a flirtation, but, acting quickly, André told me he loved me on the point of Île de la Cité, proposed formally on Pont Neuf, and by year’s end we were married under the dome of Église Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in the motherhouse of Daughters of Charity, although he would have been happier with just a civil ceremony conducted by a magistrate. I was eighteen and in love.

  He was a romantic as much as I, which showed itself when we took our walks. The first time we’d passed by a confiserie and smelled the almond and vanilla candies, I had tugged on André’s arm to stop and look at the brightly colored marzipans laid out in neat rows. Little apples, green with red streaks; strawberries with flecks of black; peaches with candied skins blending golden yellow to orange to deep rose at the stem. Miniature works of art they were. André had just sold an expensive frame carved with interlocking arabesques, so he tried to guess which piece I would like in order to buy it for me. Cherry, he had said, but I chose a peach, just to tease him, laughing that I had fooled him. He called me Lise, my precious peach. Lise, the strawberry of my heart. Lise, the succulent melon of my life. Lise of the lavender eyes. Lise with skin like blushing ivory. Lise, my own true love, my life. Hearing him say extravagant things like that as we walked along holding hands made me feel that I was the luckiest girl in Paris.

  That’s what you did in Paris. You walked and you looked and you posed for the other people looking, and you pretended not to hear their conversations, and it was all a pageant of color and laughter. And through all this walking and looking, I heard Sister Marie Pierre calling after me as I left the orphanage, “Find some beauty along the way. Tell me in picture words.”

  Nibbling that marzipan, we walked until our feet ached, then stopped at a pâtisserie and had a café crème and shared a palmier, a flat, flaky leaf-shaped pastry drizzled with caramel. All over Paris, lovers fed morsels to each other, just as we did.

  We often arranged to meet Maxime Legrand, André’s good friend, the art dealer who had asked his employer, Monsieur Laforgue, to consider taking me on as an apprentice. Whenever André and Maxime were together, they were exuberant, gesturing in broad arcs, Maxime taking stairs two at a time, long-legged André taking three. They fed each other’s spontaneity, bowed to old women, called them a breath of spring, danced in the streets with little girls, and sang Maurice Chevalier’s “Louise” or “Valentine” while their mothers beamed.

  In summer we three often sat outside at Café de la Rotonde to watch the parade of people. André and Maxime wore straw canotiers, and Maxime sported a white carnation in his buttonhole and striped trousers and white spats. But in winter we met him in the Closerie des Lilas, where it was warm and where the Montparnasse painters came to have a café and talk about each other’s work.

  Coming inside all smiles one afternoon in his beaver-collared overcoat, Maxime exuded an infinitude of charm—infinitude, a word I learned from Sister Marie Pierre. She loved teaching me words, and I liked to surprise André and Maxime with them, so that day I said, “I am experiencing an infinitude of elation in your presence,” and then giggled at my affectation. On hearing cups and saucers being stacked by waiters, I said, “Listen to the infinitude of clamoring.” She had also taught me to describe things by calling them something else, so I told them that the voices I heard singing in Notre Dame were “a brotherhood of seraphim,” which delighted them both.

  Maxime discreetly tipped his head toward some painter at a distant table and whispered, “Fernand Léger.” When no one was within earshot, Maxime spun a tale of a wealthy art buyer assessing Léger’s paintings in the Galerie Laforgue, where, as Monsieur Laforgue’s protégé, he was learning how to praise a certain passage of painted light, or a strong, unifying diagonal, or an inventive composition. Maxime dropped casual comments about this rising star or that, and who was buying what, and how much the buyer had paid, and how one particular painting, newly arrived from the painter’s studio, though a few centimeters smaller, was more exquisite in a number of ways, a vastly superior purchase to a larger canvas. I lapped up his stories like a starving cat.

  “Why don’t you ever have a lady friend with you?” I asked.

  “I would be forced to ignore her in your presence. My devotion to you is a million times stronger.”

  I threw my shoulders back, sucked in my stomach, and laughed at his exaggeration, tossing it off as though it were a fallen leaf, yet all the while waiting for his next murmur of flattery, hoping for a private glance that would say he meant it. This easy talk, in a way, I think, charmed André as much as it did me.

  “It’s a good thing André is taking you away from Paris,” Maxime said the last time the three of us met before our departure. “I would have pestered you until it became dangerous.”

  I knew beyond any doubt that he was only half teasing.

  BUT I WAS ANDRÉ’S. From the first time I saw him, I was his. He had found me on boulevard Saint-Germain at rue de Seine as I was hurrying home from picking up an herbal remedy for Sister Marie Pierre at the boutique d’herboriste. I was drenched with rain, and he held his umbrella over me. I took sly, sideways glances at his profile—his long neck, angled jaw, and dark brown eyes, whose mysteries I could not decipher, though I learned his name: André Honoré Roux. We walked the lengths of a few streets together, and when he had to turn onto rue des Saints-Pères and I had to continue straight toward rue du Bac, he wrapped my fingers around the handle and, with a blithe “Enchanté, mademoiselle,” turned the corner and was gone.

  The next day my search for the tall stranger in the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PASCAL’S NEGOTIATION

  1937, 1874

  THE MORNING AFTER WE ARRIVED, ANDRÉ AND I WERE awakened by roosters, the first morning in my life that I had ever heard their raucous cackle. Apparently the roosters of Roussillon had a robust language too. We left Pascal snoring in rhythm with the roosters and with the cigales’ scraping calls, harsher than a chirp, maddening in their incessant repetition.

  André peered down a side street. “A sawmill. That’s good. I’ll need lumber to build sawhorses and a plywood work table.”

  I gave him an apprehensive look. Who would buy a frame in a village that had no gallery?

  In the boulangerie, a middle-aged proprietress who introduced herself as Odette wore a white daisy in her hair and a beauty mark made by twisting the point of an eyebrow pencil on her right cheekbone, a practice five years out of date.

  “So Pascal prevailed upon you to come. This must be—”

  “Lisette. My lovely, lovable, smart, spirited—”

  “André, stop. You’re embarrassing me.”

  “Wife.”

  Looking me over, she said, “Your Parisian wife.” She shouted into the kitchen, “René, come take a look at André’s wife.”

  Superb. What was I? A department store mannequin?

  His cheeks and hands dusted with flour, the baker poked his head through the doorway, greeted us, and disappeared.

  As a gesture of welcome, Odette refused payment for the two baguettes we wanted, something that would never happen in Paris.

  At home we found Pascal sitting at the table in the salle, which served as living room, dining room, and kitchen, his elbows on the oilcloth in a posture of despair. He apologized again and said for the sixth time how happy he was that we had come.

  André merely said, “We know” and left to go to the sawmill.

  I looked for a place to sit and realized that there were no cushioned armchairs, only a bare wooden settee that demanded erect posture, a backless bench pushed against a wall, and four ladderback chairs at the table. It would be a long time before I could make cushions if I had to wait for every duck in the countryside to be caught by Maurice and plucked for its feathers.

  “All the years that you grew up he
re, no one thought to put cushions on the chairs?” I asked.

  He shook his head in the most dejected manner. “We Roussillonnais do not care much about comfort of the buttocks.”

  “Where do people go to buy things?” I asked to distract him from my rudeness.

  “There’s a big Saturday market in Apt, eleven kilometers from here, and we have our own smaller one on Thursdays.”

  He pointed to a pine cabinet fastened to the wall near the sink, which had a drain but no water faucet. The cabinet had ornamental openwork to allow air passage and elaborately carved double doors.

  “It’s a panetière, for bread, one of our traditional crafts in Provence. My uncle and I made it for my mother. I remember she said, ‘Poésie bien provençale,’ which I took to mean poetry in wood, a high compliment. I must have been fifteen, but that made me feel like a man. I’ve made others too.”

  “It’s lovely.” I opened the doors and put the second baguette inside.

  “We made that piece of furniture under it, too. It’s a pétrin, for kneading the dough.”

  I stroked the rough wood marred by years of use as a cutting board as well. How long would it take for him to realize that I would never use it for kneading dough when there was a bakery here?

  “I hope you will like living with the paintings.”

  “That I definitely will.”

  I walked from one to another hanging in a row on the north wall and stopped at each one, pretending I was in a gallery. Maxime had only just begun to instruct me in how to look at a painting. I had been overwhelmed by what there was to learn. Nevertheless, in front of a broad panorama of tilled fields with a distant mountain, I gathered the courage to ask, “Cézanne?”

  Pascal grinned and nodded.

  I was elated. In front of a soft-colored country scene with a girl in blue and a goat, I ventured, “Monet?”

  “Pissarro,” he corrected.

  I sank into inadequacy.

  Before a grouping of red-roofed houses seen through autumn trees, I guessed, “Either Monet or Sisley or Pissarro again.”