These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  Posing poured insight into me. The body’s secrets. It was an essential part of the practice, being splayed, displayed, cracked open. You recall Maman’s saying, “It’s a fine life if you don’t weaken”? So I sat for him. Crouched, sprawled, cat-arched my back. I won’t be coy. Posing for him, I spread my legs, the light covering my skin like a dusting of snow. His caresses pushed aside boredom. “Just a little longer,” he’d beg, as he never had to the Italians. Arranging me like fruit, though who wanted to be still life? Wooing me. “It’s good for you.”

  Voilà! Cast in stone, my graven image appeared! Yet my spine was a kite-tail, soul jigging beyond his reach. Because I was young and he wasn’t. As he worked me from the neck down, his adoration grew addictive. I am not making excuses. Who minds having her beauty shown? An ear a seashell, hair an ocean’s wave. Under his gaze, his touch, I floated, soared.

  But I swear, while he captured my face and the nub between my legs, he did not capture the me who smoked, whose hands chiselled hard truth, whose eyes held thoughts greener and livelier than the Seine, its current ruched with light.

  Such a green and lovely chartreuse world out there!

  “You leave me weak. I suffer, loving you. Have pity,” he whined on paper. Never letting details interfere with his idea of me. Of us. “Cruel,” he called me. What would he have called you? And how was I cruel? Twenty-two years old, and he more than twice that age, did my youth injure him? Yours would’ve separated him from his balls. Grotesque, any man who grovels.

  His hands made me a monument to him and to myself. Perfected in marble, relieved of my fault — what Maman called my “impetuous, demanding nature.” I hate to tell you this, but sitting still will cure that. Lying on your back, biting your tongue when you can do better.

  Nobody, least of all Monsieur, could carve marble the way I learnt to. How sure was my chisel. The patience it took, polishing a surface day after day with a lamb’s bone! Right and just to focus on bones, C. They don’t yield the way softer parts do.

  “Love makes people do frightful things,” Monsieur said, behind his office door. His greatness shoehorned into his fireplug body, into that small, ugly part of him I gripped in my hand, a boulette skilfully kneaded then pulled, once I learnt to use my hands for more than sculpting, my tongue for more than talking. His tiny, choking voice: “Do whatever … you want.”

  I pulled the sheet over our heads. Covered his mouth with both hands, counted. I’m sure it shames you to hear this. You’d have been appalled. Or you’d have laughed. A piece of theatre, mine the role of a girl not from his beloved Inferno but from Pigalle. His flesh trembling as I kissed him there. The thumping, clanging and pounding around us of others minding their business, unaware.

  “What if your heart gives out? Or you quit breathing?” As if these were my concern! Oh yes, like you, ma petite, I could be a tease.

  “Your fault,” he said. He quoted Nietzsche again, that syphilitic genius, about a person being no more than a body, the soul just “a word.” To think I believed him.

  ***

  SOUL BROUGHT TO mind church, a source of bitterness. That Christmas, you’ll recall, our brilliant brother succumbed to things we’d railed against. Remember. The mystery of Notre-Dame Cathedral, cobalt blue, cardinal red — the rose windows’ colours obliterated by night. Wedged between our parents I dreamed of sex shaped in marble. You were in the moon. Our brother too, apparently, falling in love with Christ.

  Later, Paul hummed Aquinas’s hymn, Pange lingua gloriosi, translated the Latin for us:

  Word made flesh, the bread of nature By his word to flesh he turns;

  Wine into his blood he changes:

  What though sense no change discerns?

  It was the death of our brother of reason, though not of the one I’d sculpted, the boy-poet seeking adventure. “Aren’t you curious? You don’t want to know what’s out there?” he goaded me, about something larger, something beyond us, something that existed everywhere. He seemed to leave you out of it.

  Who’d even mentioned God? To me, creation is clay’s chemistry. I parted my lace, allowing a glimpse of bosom, thinking only of shuttered light, tangled limbs. “What is god but this, mon petit? Chasing God! What about your poet friends, chasing skirts?”

  “What about them? No wonder Maman thinks the worst of you. Why can’t you be like your friend? A nice girl, decent-seeming,” he said.

  My former friend, who now had a gentleman underfoot, an Englishman with a camera, who wanted nothing more than for her Englishness to move home and have babies. Purer, if less alluring, than a fairy-girl in some quaint photograph — which was how I deported myself, returning each night to my little bed.

  She came to our flat to celebrate the engagement of our petite Louise. A lawyer, no less, the unlucky man looked askance sitting next to Maman, our Louise her understudy, Maman herself a sour weed yanked from its soil, while Papa, my friend (ingratiating as ever) and our oh-so-Catholic brother encircled me. Latin chants encircled Paul’s thoughts of Rimbaud, no doubt, while Renan the heretic’s words encircled mine.

  My friend’s Englishman came too, to snap a picture. When he yelped “Fromage” we all looked.

  I missed you so much that day.

  ***

  AND WHILE I slept in my bed, someone stole about Monsieur’s atelier, draping his figures to keep them from drying out — vital, because his practice was to accumulate. Building pieces by adding parts, grouping, regrouping. Mine the opposite, a matter of stripping down, stripping away. He sought permanence, and I, fluidity — so much more to it than making monuments! Stories brought to life, not just recounted. A Hindu legend of fragile love enraptured me, yielded a statue. A prince and nymph entwined, an eternal liquid embrace. Forgiveness and supplication. My man knelt, my woman, seated above him, gave in.

  “But they look so tentative, unsure,” went Monsieur’s critique. “Wouldn’t it be better if they rested on the same plane? Doing what they ought, kissing.”

  But that would be predictable — you would have agreed. I reminded Monsieur of his own advice, to not show what people know. Better to keep them guessing. “See how patient she is, this girl?” And I nudged him, and named my piece after her: Sakountala.

  “Show me some patience,” he said in his office. Such an appetite, Monsieur’s. Taking his time while flames guttered in the pot-bellied stove, the divan’s springs complaining. My skin sopping up his kisses, his promises. I was the only one he could really love.

  Cathedrals have their charms, C, as do older men. As did his famous Kiss.

  He’d take me places, introduce me to gallerists, collectors, journalists who could help. You’d have listened.

  For a time, he did.

  ***

  THAT YEAR, AT the Salon des Artistes Français, my work gained notice. Sakountala won honourable mention and enough of a write-up in the papers to turn Maman’s head and delight our brother. What better praise than printed words! They softened Maman, made her a little kinder, more patient, more accepting of my quirks, perhaps. She minded her own business, attending to her petit-point and giving lunches, and showing appreciation for presents I brought.

  I picked up oddments for her at Samaritaine after work, out of pity. The reason behind her misery? She was homesick! For our native soil, the Champagne’s chalky dirt, vineyards and rolling patchwork fields. I missed the country too, the way I missed you. The roots of her longing ran deeper than mine, but not so deep that they weren’t soothed with gifts. Sensible knickers, hose, the odd trinket to replace one you’d broken. “Yes Maman,” “No Maman” were easily said in exchange for peace, peace to live and breathe work and Monsieur. I wanted only to please her, and Samaritaine was on my route home from the Louvre, which I’d begun to haunt again during moments stolen from his atelier.

  I sketched there — studies, secret ones for the pair I would sculpt. Maman the gentle mother, and you the child, taking shape in my mind. Now was just the research phase, combing the galleri
es for Madonna-and-Infant paintings, Raphael’s Virgins and da Vinci’s Saint Anne looking at the Madonna looking at Jesus. Drawing after drawing I made, stepping over students from l’École des Beaux-Arts. Boys wrapped in scarves huddling over sketchbooks, too self-absorbed to hail the living artist in their midst. To think that once, like you, I too had been so unaware!

  Then love crept up without my knowing it, gaining ground. Monsieur’s attentions, his thirst for me grew unquenchable. He left notes full of pestering questions: What was keeping me? Surely all I needed was in his studio? Why hadn’t I waited for him? Why wouldn’t I wait? “I looked for you all over,” he complained with his pen, “waited half an hour by the Venus de Milo, half an hour more by Winged Victory. Still you didn’t come.”

  Finding someone in the Louvre was like finding a potsherd in a trash heap. “It’s not that I’m avoiding you,” I said, perfectly candid.

  “How do you expect me to feel, when you’re not where you say you’ll be? Don’t you see? I give all of myself, every ounce — must you take it so lightly?

  “My love,” he said. Tears in his eyes, to my great embarrassment.

  Because Maman loved me, as Papa did, and you do, and Paul, and maybe even Louise, in her way …

  “What am I, a priest stuck with your confession?” I joked — a mistake, touching on churches, which possessed him — albeit in a worldlier way than they did our brother.

  His response was a riddle. “What’s the one thing that rivals a woman for beauty?” A petit four, a salmon terrine from Stohrer’s, you’d have said, but a cathedral was the answer. As if the spat hadn’t arisen, he spoke of visiting Chartres. “A miracle of light and stone, its cathedral, a rival any day to Notre-Dame.”

  “My brother would know,” I said.

  ***

  HE RAVED ABOUT its stained glass windows, their singular hue — the bluest blue — which made me think of the Madonna paintings. In them the Mother wears sky-blue robes, unlike the mère in my work-to-be, Maman in her unwidowed widow’s weeds.

  Cerulean. Cyan. Azure. Is there a name for that blue?

  Then Monsieur had an idea, for a piece having to do with water — very odd, his work usually intent as it was on solids. He had me strip and fold myself over a mound of rubble, broken studies swept into a pile covered with a blanket. The fetal position, he wanted, a half-crawl, half-curled posture — weariness — and my hair spilling forth over my head. Left arm folded under, right one forward, cheek on wrist. Arch your right side. Stretch! Bend to the left, shoulder and hip pressed toward each other — that’s it.

  “As if you’ve carried the weight of the world on your back, Mademoiselle.”

  “A world of rock or water?”

  “Please. Don’t move!”

  And he sculpted me, all of me, not as the busy, breathing being you know, but a slumbering silent one. Never mind that the story he used was Danaïd’s, water-hauler of the Underworld forever condemned to filling leaking urns. A girl who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lie down on the job.

  Monsieur was a man who was expert at making the living look dead.

  “Surely it would be more moving to see her labour?”

  “But, Mademoiselle, why choose the infinite, when the finite has its logical ending? Everyone dies, my dear.”

  “Really? No!” Our Monsieur, so easily teased! Resisting his certainties was just one way to pique his desire; nobody likes a milquetoast. “All the more reason then,” I said, “to show what it means to be alive.”

  ***

  HIS DANAÏD WON accolades: such anatomical correctness! It reminded me of a moth, beautiful and deceased, another monument to something unliving. Its success was toasted at a dinner in Palais Royal, a restaurant in one of its galleries. Yours truly not the party-going type, but he persuaded me to go, even bought me shoes.

  “Ah! So you’re his muse,” said the old goats and gawkers introducing themselves. The ladies resembled pastries, dresses and hats sugary confections, the food itself too pretty to eat. Champagne flowed.

  They were moths, and Monsieur was a stubby flame attracting them. Drifting about on his arm, I relished their stares. You’d have expected me to.

  Afterwards I waited for him to propose a task requiring our joint attention: A riverside stroll (no one but lovers that hour on the quays, free to do as they pleased)? Drinks in a café? But we crossed the Pont des Arts without mention of these; too soon, I would find myself alone in my bed. On St. Germain he hailed a hansom. He had someone waiting, he said — his housekeeper, with petty matters to broach with him. I shouldn’t mind, just this once, but he had to hurry home.

  “Your wife, I suppose?” My flirtiest voice, loud enough to forestall the cabby’s impatience. I’d heard rumours and had my guesses about the phantom that draped his figures — one that cooked his meals, too, and mended his socks and other garments. Such thrift in view of tonight’s finery, his top hat and tails.

  “Of course not,” his answer indignant and stiff. “Mademoiselle, if she were my wife, my obligations would be plain — and, God knows, there’d be none of this business … How would a married man keep up with you?”

  We kissed, he paid the driver, we parted. Then, when Monsieur turned onto rue de Bellechasse, I asked the driver to loop around, let me off near rue de Bourgogne. You’d have done the same.

  A velvet darkness. I walked as quickly as possible in party shoes, ducking past doorways. I caught sight of him and concealed myself in the shadows of a crêperie. Watched him hurry closer, my Monsieur. He disappeared into a building, a dismal, unadorned place like the rest on that block where, in an upstairs window, was a hag’s face. The light burning there soon extinguished.

  It was late. Because I had no money for a tram, I walked the two or three blocks to the atelier, his atelier, and slept on his couch.

  ***

  “YOU DIDN’T COME home last night!”

  Maman ripped into me at the first opportunity. Her concern was justified if her anger wasn’t; I’m glad you weren’t there. I’m glad you were spared the ranting. “Where on earth were you? Does it even occur to you that I worry? That you might call? For all I knew you could’ve been raped and left for dead, dumped in the river! My darling girl —” The way Maman spoke she couldn’t have known of my posing, or of Monsieur’s water-bearing nymph, though it was a matter of time before word leaked out. “Just when you start making a name for yourself — a good one — getting ahead in whatever it is you do,” her concern a harangue, “you still haven’t learnt common sense?”

  Thankfully her anger didn’t last. That night our brother had friends, a bunch who took pains to call themselves poets, holding forth in Maman’s blue-and-yellow parlour. Paul recited Baudelaire till Maman was safely in bed. Then out came the brandy and sheaves of verse — theirs, a torture of rhyming couplets and plans to send them to Mallarmé and any other famous writer patient enough to read it.

  “What do you think?” one asked my opinion, a pimply kid who, like others our brother brought home, had his eye on me. If not me, it would’ve been you.

  Paul cornered me when they left. “Indeed. Ma chère soeur, what do you think? What goes on in your head while you’re fucking that man?” His contempt for Monsieur was quite obvious for a while, it’s true, but till then mostly kept to himself. Who knows what gossip his friends picked up and traded? “For such a grand place, Paris can be smaller than Villeneuve, you know.” He wagged his finger at me.

  “Then you’ll excuse me, mon petit, for not being like you, a man of the world and a saint.”

  “Doesn’t take a saint to respect Maman’s feelings!”

  “Please — you’ll wake her.”

  “As if you cared.” A hard glint in those eyes so like yours. “I’m afraid for you, is all. I’ve heard things, not too pleasant.” His mouth looked hard, too, in the lamplight, his cheeks pale. “For one, your monsieur has more women than women have hats. More women, even, than France has churches.”

  “Ridiculou
s!”

  Roused by our arguing, Maman appeared, a brass tack to a magnet. Her face was as long as the braids she did her hair in for bed. “Enough, bickering like children! Is it asking too much, a person getting her rest? You should be asleep, both of you — all those tomorrows ahead.” A bitterness there; a touch of envy, you think? Only the slightest sarcasm.

  I put aside the studies for her piece, the one that would include and incorporate you, that I was almost set to begin sculpting. Monsieur had allotted me time with one of his models, a crone who was standing in as one of his damned (it wouldn’t do to have only males among them). It had taken some doing, finding an old woman hungry enough to pose without clothes, so my time with her was all the more precious — another perk of “being Monsieur’s.”

  ***

  HE WAS WAITING the next morning, waving a piece of mail. On violet-scented paper was a polite invitation: Maman asking him to lunch with us in Villeneuve on our holiday that summer. Please accept my best wishes, I glimpsed, before he stuffed it back in its envelope. More important, Maman had extended fond hopes that his wife would come too. Seeing it in Maman’s hand was a slap to the wrist, let me tell you. Or perhaps that’s dishonest. A kick to the stomach was more like it. Rather unhinging.

  “So there is a madame!” I batted at his shoulders. In the heat of the moment I picked up a head, hurled it, watched with a queer fascination as it exploded. Terracotta pieces everywhere.

  “That woman is not my wife, she’s my housekeeper.” He very roughly twisted me towards him. “If she was my wife, wouldn’t I take her to parties, openings — wouldn’t I? My dear Mademoiselle, how could I be married when it’s you I want, you I share anything of value with?” And on and on, how she rarely left the house, this helper of his. How kind of Maman to include her, because a visit to the country would do the poor wretch a world of good.

  “Fine.”

  And following your example — who wanted peace more than you? — I picked up the mess I’d made. Sealed our truce with a kiss.

  ***

  SPEAKING OF WHICH, I send you one. X