There are three main qualities that bother her about Sofia, I suspect:
– She is not afraid of other women, and Anne-Claire is the type of woman who often inspires fear in her gender (not to mention mine).
– She is as stylish as my ex-wife, when Sofia decides to make the effort.
– Sofia is a very talented painter—and because this talent is apparent in every painting she has made in the past several years, it cannot be explained away as a fluke.
A woman such as this—it is the world’s good fortune that she was born. About Jayne, I think I can say the same, but her potential is still being plumbed. Sofia’s is too, though, of course. They are both so young, just a year apart, Sofia born the spring before Jayne was. They could, perhaps, be sisters with their dark eyes, shapely ears, and long hair that is often held back in a band—Jayne’s hair the color of dark chocolate, Sophia’s of anise-flavored licorice. I describe them as if they are edible, which, in a sense, they are.
(Am I like Hemingway in that I might be accused too by Jayne of devouring women? I hope not. I try to give back as much as I might take from them. More, I hope.)
CHAPTER 5
Origin Story
It has been more than twenty-five years since I’ve called myself a painter. Half my life. When friends asked why I wanted to be an artist, I could give them several reasons, but it wasn’t until a while later, several years after I quit painting, that I realized the foremost reason was that I hoped to impress women. I wanted to impress other men too; of course I did. We want our friends to respect us (and envy us a little too) and our rivals to be threatened. I wanted to be able to say that I could produce things with my hands, things of beauty and intelligence that people, women especially, would have trouble tearing their eyes away from.
The idea that you want to master a skill purely for the joy of doing or being—well, I have trouble believing it. Humans are social creatures, we live and move in herds, we fight for attention and affection, even those of us who say we are loners and prefer our own company to other people’s. I know that true hermits exist—men, rarely women—who leave society and have no wish to return, but I am not one of these people. I want to be among other people, to look at and talk to them, to kiss a lover’s lips and touch her smooth, warm skin.
My parents were responsible in some ways for my adolescent desire to be an artist. When we came to Paris at Christmas each year and walked through its crowded, cold, exquisite streets—the storefronts bejeweled with expensive, closely guarded gifts—we also went to museums and churches to look at the stained glass, Sainte-Chapelle the one my father kept making us return to each December, until I started to be grateful for what seemed to be this Catholic shrine’s immutability, how no matter what had happened in the twelve preceding months, it would be there, looking the same as it had the previous year—only the other tourists were different. As a boy, I spent the year between visits drawing from memory what I had seen on those trips. We did not take photographs; my father instructed Camille and me to remember with our mind’s eye instead, and I took him seriously, teaching myself to record in pictures some of the rooms and museum galleries we had entered.
There were the streets too, and the girls who caught my eye. I drew their pink, wind-burned faces, their long legs in thick stockings, feet in buckled shoes and boots with heels. The girls I was most attracted to walked with their backs straight and chests thrust out, arms linked with another girl’s, their expressions alive with laughter. These laughing, glamorous girls seemed agonizingly unattainable, but within a few years, when I was fifteen and at a birthday party for my friend Etienne Rivard, his older sister Fabienne took me into her room, locked the door, and offered herself up in all her womanly, eighteen-year-old splendor. She tasted of wine and garlic and let me press my nose to the soft, fragrant skin behind her ear and breathe in her warm, intoxicating scent until I found the courage to do what she wanted me to do. The elastic of her black silk stockings that reached up to mid-thigh, their tops just visible beneath the hemline of her miniskirt, was so tight that it had scribbled angry pink bands around her strong, smooth legs. She rode horses, and when I’d see her on some afternoons riding her chestnut mare Loulou on the road near my house, I thought that she was the sexiest girl in all of France.
In bed with her that first time—her parents, oblivious to our disappearance, were drinking the new vintages that night—my fingertips kept returning to the imprinted flesh of Fabienne’s thighs, these temporary scars irresistible. I had the sense there in her bedroom, the Rolling Stones playing on the turntable, of finally waking fully to my life and its possibilities. I knew that women were going to be an important part of the story, maybe the most important part. That is still being decided, I suppose, but I’ll risk saying that more likely than not, it’s true.
Fabienne had a slim, limber body that she was already comfortable with, more so than I was with my own, with its occasional embarrassing eruptions and pimples and recent, coarser hairs. She showed me where to put my hands; she whispered and coaxed and told me gently how to use my mouth on her, one of her hands pulling hard at my hair whether I was making her sigh or moan or cry out, “Non, là … oui, oui, très, très bien, Laurent, oui …” I worried that someone might hear us, hear her especially. She seemed to hold nothing of herself back; I still remember my shock and pleasure in her cries and convulsions. I’d had no idea that girls were really like this—the movies, even the little bit of pornography I had seen, often showed women in submissive positions and attitudes, or else in cartoonish dominatrix roles. She didn’t want to talk very much, not until afterward, and then she expressed surprise when I admitted that she was my first. “But you’re so handsome,” she said. “I’m sure other girls have offered themselves to you?”
Yes, I admitted, but not as boldly as she had, not without fear, not with so much feline confidence. I had kissed other girls; there had been some groping and a botched attempt at fellatio, but not what Fabienne had offered and also taken for herself.
I probably fell in love with her that night. Maybe I have always fallen fast. For three days I walked around in a haze of remembered carnality. I could not control my body, the impromptu erections after I sat down at the dinner table, or when I was at the lycée supposedly learning algebra or reading about the resolution of the War of 1812, or even worse, changing after school for a soccer match with my friends. At eighteen, Fabienne might as well have been living in another country. In the land of fifteen-year-old boys, there are curfews, no driving privileges, many locked doors real and virtual, and the unnerving sense that everything is meaningful and momentous. It took me a while to figure out that everything is not momentous, and a little more time to understand the fact that this relative lack of gravity is a gift handed down from above.
On the fourth day Fabienne appeared at my school, waiting for me with a heart-stopping smile by the gate. Every cell within me leaped toward her, but I stopped and stared at her sly, vivid face, making sure that she really was there because I had had her almost ceaselessly in my thoughts since being invited into her bed. She had borrowed her mother’s car, and she drove me to her house, asking on the way how I felt, laughing when I stuttered an indistinct reply. Who at the school had watched us leave? I wondered. Her brother would surely know before long what we were up to.
We walked in through the back door into the kitchen, which smelled of stewed tomatoes and roasting lamb, and went straight upstairs to her room. Her parents were in Dijon doing household errands, and Etienne was with his girlfriend at her own house, Fabienne reported, smiling at me as if he were a coconspirator and would have approved of our new relationship, but I was certain that he would feel betrayed. I knew that he adored and admired her, though he wouldn’t have said as much to me or any of our other friends.
She was not wearing stockings this time; she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all. I could not believe how fearless she was, how daring and hungry. Within three, maybe four, minutes it was over, but Fabienn
e did not laugh or get angry with me. At that age, an amorous boy belongs to the same cadre of marvels as a circus sideshow character, and she knew that it was only a matter of minutes before I’d be ready again. I remember that it was early November, warm outside her bedroom windows; she had left them open, and I could look down at Simon, the family dog, a hairy, aging German shepherd mix. He was sleeping peacefully on the lawn, oblivious to the fact that my life had changed, that Fabienne was teaching me how to be a thoughtful lover, something I remain deeply grateful to her for. If I had had the same passion for painting that I do for women’s bodies, I would have been a success.
As a painter, I was merely able to copy what I saw—faithfully but without, I finally had to admit to myself, finding the soul of my subject and capturing or imaginatively reinterpreting it. I might have made a good illustrator, but I knew that I would never approach anything like John Waterhouse’s genius with his perfect Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott paintings, or My Sweet Rose, his female subjects so flawless and idealized that I could imagine lovestruck men losing their wits if they stared at these images for too long. When I first saw Waterhouse’s paintings in a book my father’s older sister, Aunt Cécile, gave me for my thirteenth birthday, hoping to encourage what she considered to be my artistic promise, I had trouble believing that women such as these walked the earth, but if they did, how to find where they lived and convince them to let you kiss them and touch their luxurious hair? How to inspire them to love you too?
I was mocked by artist friends who were firm in their belief that art was something more than a reflection of an artist’s sexual desire, which I hadn’t realized was the view I was embracing, not until they made this clear for me, though I don’t think this is true for everything I painted—only, perhaps, the most elemental motive behind my wish to be an artist. I had moved to Paris at nineteen and began to lurk around the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, to which, a few years later, I did not succeed in gaining admission. Twice, a year between each attempt, I took the entrance exams and presented my portfolio to the admissions jury, and twice I was turned away. You are only allowed two chances, and so, that was that.
It was crushing—probably the worst pain I had ever felt, my self-doubt a savage, clawing force that left me wrung out and bleeding internally. By my second attempt, I had met and was close to marrying Anne-Claire, our parents disapproving of such an early leap into marriage from their homes far from Paris, far from the city that is the self-appointed arbiter of all that is beautiful in the world.
Maybe our marriage was doomed from the beginning; maybe Anne-Claire could not help but see me as a failure too, even though I came from a wealthy family and we and our children-to-be would never starve. And before long the idea also arrived that I might be able to sell the work of my artist friends, who had succeeded in gaining admission to ENSBA, but had no clear idea how to make a living from their talents. I conducted self-directed studies for a couple of years, reading the business plans of companies of various sizes and missions, talking to a number of gallery owners who were willing to share with me a few of their mistakes and successes. I put away the canvases and brushes and paints. With time, I learned how to make money from art rather than how to make art itself.
I did not undertake this change with a light heart, however. It took me years to accept that I was more skilled at imitation than at creation and interpretation.
As for Fabienne, she and I continued to meet for a few more months, into the new year, but after that she left Bourgogne and went abroad, married a man from New Mexico, divorced him several years later, and eventually resurfaced in France. She was the woman who took me to Italy, to the nudist resort that worries Jayne. Fabienne and I have kept up with each other, and meet from time to time when she is passing through Paris or I am traveling somewhere she also happens to be, and one or both of us is free. The friendship between her brother and me faded away after he learned that I was his older sister’s lover; we had a fierce argument, one that ended with him driving his fist into my hotly blushing, defiant face. In any case, his and my paths have not crossed for years.
Perhaps he has forgiven me by now, but it isn’t important anymore—these things happened almost forty years ago, which in itself seems to me the bigger injustice: how hastily our lives pass. Fabienne is still my friend, and her brother is not. I am sorry to have caused him distress, but at the time I wasn’t sorry. I regretted nothing. She was one of the great joys of my life up to that point, possibly the greatest. A boy’s carnal education, those earliest lessons especially, I believe most of us will remember far into our lives, the suspense and urgency we experienced, the mute awe. And what gratitude I felt toward Fabienne, her willingness to take what she wanted, to let me know that other girls may have felt about me as she did. There are people who live chastely, who think they can get by without wanting or needing sex, who say that it causes too much trouble, that it is dangerous and shameful, and that, like the value of one’s bank account, this aspect of our lives should never be discussed. I do not believe them; I have to think that they have not been with the right person, or that something awful has happened to spoil it for them, whether it was abuse or shame over their appearance or too much religious dogma.
I can see ahead to a time when it will not be so easy for me to find a willing partner, beautiful and youthful (Anne-Claire can make as many snide remarks as she’d like to). This question should be considered too: would it be better to die than to live without this most instinctive and elemental of pleasures?
No, nothing that extreme, but I suspect that it would be like losing your ability to see color, to taste your favorite foods, to hear the nocturne that sometimes lulls you to sleep. I am not some kind of sex maniac or slavering addict—what I am mostly saying is that there are limits to what a person should learn to live without, that deprivation is yet another kind of sadness, possibly the worst kind.
CHAPTER 6
Other Women I’ve Known
Living with Jayne is different from living with the women I have shared my home with in the past. Most days she is so quiet, never stomping from one room to the next or leaving her dirty clothes on the floor or talking loudly on the phone or watching the television at an unpleasant volume; she watches so little television at all. She would rather read and paint and draw or take naps in the quiet hours of the afternoon when the motorbike messengers are more scarce, when the boisterous students are locked up inside the lycée with which we share our street. Some days I have come upon her lying on the canapé, the curtains drawn on the tall northeast windows, a book facedown on her chest. She sleeps with head tilted toward her left shoulder, her face and brow pale. She is so lovely in these moments, sweetly childlike, as she is when she tells me a joke from when she was a girl, one that she must patiently explain to me, her expression growing tart, her eyes turning fiery with disbelief that yet again I do not understand! Her drawings—of human hearts with muscular aortas, of cats with owlish faces (or owls with feline faces), of dachshunds in little blue shoes—convey her sense of humor, these mementos she leaves for me on my pillow, a line or two written beneath each picture:
For you, mon amour, because we all need an owl in our lives!
You have my heart now (please take good care of it).
She must understand somewhere in this young heart of hers that our situation will not last, that her life with me will come to an end before long; other men here will catch her eye, or it will be Colin with his broad shoulders who succeeds in seducing her back to New York. Even then, I can see ahead to what she will experience: eventually she will find someone else, even if she marries Colin, has his child. Her essential restlessness is something that she is only beginning to admit to herself. We have many things in common, whether she believes this or not.
Hand-to-mouth circumstances in Manhattan kept her marching in place for a while, along with fear of losing the little she did have—her independence, such as it was, her place in a New York apartment
with its interchangeable roommates. There are so many young women, from what I have observed, who live this way, waiting for the right person—lover, boss, dying relative—to come along and rescue them from the indignities of budget meals and inconsiderate neighbors and oppressive crowds, the near-ceaseless noise from the street and inside the claustrophobic buildings where millions of city dwellers are trying to live meaningful, mostly peaceful lives.
If it is nothing else, money is the escape hatch from the constant tyranny of other people’s bad behavior. This is part of what I have offered her by taking her away from East Second Street in New York—the space and leisure to make art. It is what I offer the other artists I help support, something I started doing without Anne-Claire’s knowledge near the gasping, exhausted end of our long marriage. Those ENSBA friends led to other artist friends, ones whose work I wanted for the gallery, and sometimes succeeded in acquiring and selling.
Over the last twenty-five years or so, there have been a few men and more women to whom I have given money for art supplies and food. My parents were stingy while I was growing up, paying the bare minimum to the housekeepers and handymen we employed over the years, and I felt deep shame over this. I told myself that I would never be so stingy, that when I had money of my own, I would worry less about it running out, which I believe was the main problem for my parents, even though neither of them had ever gone hungry. They feared another world war, having lived through the horrors of the second. I think they believed that they had to squirrel away as much money as possible and buy property on other continents, in case they were ever forced to flee their land and start over somewhere else.
Although I have profited from the free market and complain at times about the money I earn that must be sent to the government’s tax treasury, it doesn’t seem right to me that there has never been a functioning collective, whether state-run or otherwise, that has truly embraced economic and social equality. The poor continue to remain poor, and the rich remain rich. Jayne wonders why, if I feel as I do, André and I do not show overtly political art. I suppose it is like this: you might admire the people who bake bread for a living but do not want to bake it yourself. Similarly, I admire the people who speak loudly against injustice, but I prefer to conduct my protests in private, giving to artists who are not supported by their families or an arts council, or by employers who permit them enough time and energy to devote to their studios.
Paris, He Said Page 21