The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Afterward, I would look and see spindly arms upon the page, jutting hips, a chest hardly different from a boy’s. I would peer deeper, trying to see what Monsieur Degas did. And maybe I looked too hard, because in the scribbled black lines, I saw a girl vulgar in her face. I saw not a chance of grace upon the stage.

  Today he wants me naked in the same old fourth position but with my hands clasped behind my back and elbows held straight. It is the way he wanted my arms yesterday and the day before that, and I am beginning to think the position is just as cast in stone as that of my legs. “Chin higher,” he says. “Ah, yes!”

  He moves to his easel, picks up his charcoal and my skin prickles under his hot gaze. Then I spend an hour getting rebuked for my chin dropping, my back swaying, my elbows relaxing, even the teeniest little bit. Today he makes a habit of moving his easel over a few steps and drawing me from that angle and then moving it over again, always telling me to stay absolutely still, which twice makes my nose twitch at the thought of a sneeze coming on. “If you’ve got to blow your nose …” His voice is threaded through with annoyance. He sweeps an arm toward my satchel, leaning up against the screen, as if I am free to fetch the handkerchief he knows is not inside. When I dare to lick my lips, he hurls a stick of charcoal at my feet, which will later make him yell, accusing Sabine of hiding the charcoal he cannot find. He keeps up with the sighing and moaning and grumbling, but the periods of quiet in between grow.

  I dream of sausage rolls for supper and think how Blanche, who has begun walking home with me after class, pretended not to care in the least when I told her how I am wanted at the workshop every day. It makes her jealous, me being singled out, even if it is only Monsieur Degas, when she is used to Madame Dominique always choosing her. I shift my mind to one of the paintings turned around from facing the wall. There is a mass of ballet girls in the back corner, adjusting skirts and stockings and staring down at their feet. At the front are more ballet girls, three, one fiddling with the bow of her sash; two sitting down, with their skirts arranged behind them so as not to crush the tarlatan. I know a ballet girl modeled for each of the figures in the painting, because once Monsieur Degas explained how the drawing of me with the fan was a study for a larger work. The girl reaching around to her sash, with the tipped up nose, might be Lucille, which I am sorry to say would mean Monsieur Degas is not too particular about the girls he picks for modeling. Every day she is scolded for her lazy, shuffling feet. “You are French,” Madame Dominique says, stamping her cane. “Our style is refined.” About the other girls, I cannot say. There are close to a hundred in the dance school and more than that in the corps de ballet.

  In the painting, the girl sitting on a bench draws the eye. Her shawl is blaring red, and you can see misery welling up. She is off by herself for one thing, and she is hunched over, maybe even wiping away a tear. Maybe she cannot keep up with the class. Maybe her sister came in late the night before, when already the grey light of morning was slipping through the shutter slats. Maybe she heard her laughing in the stairwell, saying to a boy that, yes, on Sunday afternoon, those few free hours allowed the working girls of Paris, she would go to the Rat-Mort when that woeful girl wanted her sister to spend the time with her. Maybe she woke up to the noise of her mother vomiting up absinthe. Her feet are cut off, which is a habit of Monsieur Degas, something a little planning could fix. And he always leaves swaths of blank floor instead of filling a picture up. Like as not, it is the reason his pictures do not get exhibited with the finest of the artwork at the Salon. It does not help, either, that he makes us ballet girls look common, with our yawning mouths and knobby knees and skinny arms, even though it is what we mostly are.

  If I was not afraid of losing out on six francs, if I had a bit of nerve, I would tell him I want to look pretty instead of worn out. I want to be dancing instead of resting my aching bones. I want to be on the stage, like a real ballet girl, instead of in the practice room, even if it is not yet true. Does he not know people want something nice to hang upon their walls?

  He calls out for his midday meal, and I expect like every other day Sabine will bring a dish of boiled macaroni and a veal cutlet, and I will wrap myself in my shawl and sit myself down with one of the old newspapers he puts behind the screen for me ever since I worked up the nerve to ask.

  Once I am covered up, I say, “That girl in the front, the one in the red shawl, she looks beaten down, like she isn’t at all ready to face the class about to start.”

  He nods.

  “Maybe her papa died.”

  He looks at me then, for a long time, with the softest eyes, and when Sabine finally appears, pushing open the workshop door with the fullness of a hip, he says to me, “You’re fond of veal?”

  A warmth swells for Monsieur Degas, who snaps and yells but has the soul of a lamb underneath, who is sorry he hurled the charcoal. “I’m hungry enough to eat my own lips.” And then he smiles from behind his bushy beard.

  I sit at the table, upon a long bench, and carve up what has to be the largest piece of meat ever set before me, and savor every bite, except that I see Monsieur Degas glancing up from the morning’s drawings spread before him and holding back from hurrying me along. But then, by a stroke of luck, Sabine comes back into the workshop and using her sternest voice announces a Monsieur Lefebvre is here, that she will show him in.

  Monsieur Degas lets out a mighty sigh. “I don’t take callers while I’m working.”

  “He came from Monsieur Durand-Ruel’s gallery,” she says, hands firm upon her hips. “He is wearing a fine coat. Cashmere. Legion of Honor rosette in his buttonhole, too.” And plate of veal before me, I make a little wish for her to hold firm to her ground so I will have a chance to finish up the meal.

  Monsieur Lefebvre’s fine coat does not hide the boniness of the man underneath. It hangs from his shoulders no different from the way it would fall from a length of doweling. His silk hat shifted to his hands, he makes a little bow. Strands of silver hair fall forward, loose of the heavy pomade meant to keep it in place. He is in the middle of shaking Monsieur Degas’s hand and saying how he admires the pastels, the oils, most particularly the ones of the ballet girls, when his gaze falls upon me, my mouth full of veal. “Mademoiselle van Goethem from Madame Dominique’s class,” he says, and I dip my head, keep my eyes on the floor. Why does he know my name?

  “I take an interest in the petits rats,” he says to me and then to Monsieur Degas, “I find myself glimpsing beyond the jutting collarbones and red hands of their awkward age. Nothing pleases me more than smoothing the passage from the school to the quadrille and on through the ranks of the ballet.”

  “Ah,” says Monsieur Degas. “When I found her in Madame Dominique’s practice room, I thought her shoulder blades were like sprouting wings.”

  He clears the patch of table just beside me and moves a sheet of grey wove paper showing three views of me to the spot. In a few scribbles, I am drawn, once from the back, once from the side, once from the front, always naked, always standing with my feet in fourth position, my hands clasped behind my back. When Papa was alive, I made a habit of undressing behind the square of worn-out linen strung across the corner of our lodging room. And in the last year, with him gone and the square of linen thought to be more useful upon the mattresses and me almost fourteen and the mounds of my chest swelling, I turn my back to Antoinette and Charlotte and Maman, dreading one of them caring to joke.

  The drawing I mind most is the one from the front. It is not so much the smudge of grey where my legs meet or the line of charcoal turning, tracing the budding mounds of my chest. It is not so much my nakedness. I hardly mind posing undressed, not for Monsieur Degas, not anymore, and thinking back to the way I quaked the first time, it makes me wonder what a girl can get used to, how the second time is easier than the first and the third time easier still. What I mind is my lifted chin. My comfort with the upward tilt is that of a girl posing in the quiet of a workshop, posing naked, yes, but before a
man who has seen her nakedness thirty times before. It shames me, Monsieur Lefebvre looking down at the drawing, never guessing how I cringe even when Sabine comes into the workshop. That face looks to be the face of a girl wearing a proper blouse and a skirt reaching to the floor.

  Monsieur Lefebvre’s gaze lingers on the wove paper, lingers long. Eventually he removes his gloves and reaches a long finger toward the drawings. It quivers, hovering over the spine of the one showing me from the rear, then lands, tracing the curve of the charcoal line from between my shoulder blades until it is lost in the fleshiness of the rump. His pink tongue licks the corner of his mouth, and sitting there, upon the bench before the table, my spine arches away, the tiniest amount. “Ah yes, sprouting wings,” he says.

  His attention moves from the drawing to me, and I study the veal cutlet on my plate. And then the two of them talk like I am not even there: The way my elbows and knees are too large for such slender limbs. The protuberance of the muscle running from my hip to my knee. The paltriness of my brow. If I was brave like Antoinette, I would make some crack about did they notice the way I had a pair of ears. But me, I wait, holding myself straight because slouching is worse than spitting according to Madame Dominique.

  “Let’s see those wings, Mademoiselle van Goethem,” says Monsieur Degas. “Show us that graceful, childish back.”

  Does he mean for me to bare my flesh to Monsieur Lefebvre? Does he mean for me to drop the shawl from my shoulders right here, when always in his workshop I undressed behind the screen? I look up, and he turns his palms to the ceiling with impatience upon his face. Six francs for four hours. The pay is good and the four hours not yet up.

  My back facing the pair of them, I let my shawl slip from my shoulders, but I hold it pressed tight against my chest in front. There is the sound of breathing and then a finger, this time, on my own flesh-and-blood spine and me, in an instant, much faster than a thought, flinching away from it. Someone lurches closer, a rushed, abrupt step, and I know that finger has been jerked farther away from my back.

  “Come,” says Monsieur Degas. “I’ll show you a finished piece.”

  They turn, and I pull up my shawl, wrapping it tight. So quick, I had flinched. Quicker than a thought. Like Marie the First knew, before anyone, about the reaching-out finger—Monsieur Lefebvre’s, I am almost sure.

  He stays another half hour, looking at pictures, writing a little in his small leather book. But the mood in the workshop has shifted to jittery, and it is nothing more than good manners keeping him there. Twice, Monsieur Degas shows a painting and then changes his mind, turning it around so that the two of them are left looking at the empty side of a canvas stretched over a frame. “Not finished,” he says. The second time Monsieur Lefebvre reaches to restore a flipped-over canvas, Monsieur Degas barks, “No. Just leave it,” and then, more gently, “It requires more work.”

  After that the workshop grows quiet, with the two of them speaking few words, their voices snappish when they do, their arms folded over their ribs. Before leaving, Monsieur Lefebvre comes over to the table and, even if he is older than my own father, bothers to say good-bye. I scramble to my feet. He makes a tiny bow, and I catch his scent of a room closed up too long. “Until next time,” he says.

  Until next time? What does he mean? That he expects to come upon me at the Opéra when never before have I laid eyes on the man? That he will seek me out? No. He only wanted to appear noble, to let me think for a minute the great divide between the two of us did not exist, like there was the possibility of friendship between a man wearing the Legion of Honor rosette and a girl with a protuberance of the muscle running the length of her thigh.

  “Such an unpleasant man,” says Monsieur Degas once Sabine has closed the door behind Monsieur Lefebvre’s back.

  She scowls, says, “You aren’t polite.”

  Monsieur Degas points a finger in my direction and waves it to the spot in front of his easel, whisking me back to work.

  Antoinette

  It being a Monday, the Ambigu is closed, and Émile’s been saying for a week about the fun we are going to have at the Brasserie des Martyrs, with a dozen of us authentic actors meeting there at nine o’clock. Already I polished up my boots and gave myself a good lathering in our tiny tub and took from the satchel of Marie those silk flowers I pinched, back when she was first meeting old Pluque, and yesterday I pleaded with Maman to take my best skirt to the washhouse and launder it with the care she does the best of silks. And I have a new blouse, filched from her delivery basket, wrapped in a sheet of brown paper, stashed on the highest-up shelf of the larder where no one would go searching, expecting to find a crust of bread.

  Soon as I turn onto the rue des Martyrs, I make out Émile, leaning up against the wall of the brasserie, having a smoke and laughing with Colette. She puts her hand upon his chest, only for a second, before trailing it across the fleshy plumpness on her own. I hold my breath that Émile don’t reach out. But no, he only pulls on his smoke, and a lungful of air rushes from my nose.

  With me nearly upon them, Émile steps out from the wall. Hand upon my cheek, he says, “Well, look at you,” and I feel a smugness rising that Colette heard his words. She leans in, makes a show of kissing me, like we are long-lost friends. Tilting her head toward the door, she says, “Suppose the others are inside.” Then, leaving, she gives a little wink. “Come on in when you start missing me.”

  “Don’t like that girl,” I say to Émile.

  He puffs out a ring of smoke, and then he is leaning in and nuzzling at my neck and saying, “Aren’t you smelling extra sweet.”

  Inside the gas lamps are flaring, but with so much smoke the room is cast grey. All the divans are velvet with carved legs, and the oak of the long tables and benches is gleaming away. And never before did I see anything like the jumble of the prints and looking glasses, the statues holding up the doorway lintels, the gilt moldings covering up every speck of wall. It makes my head swim, so much to see, all at once, plus it smells a mishmash of tobacco and beer, kitchen grease and onions, damp mop and boots.

  We pick our way over to the table crowded with a dozen boys I know from the Ambigu. Colette is wedged between Paul Kirail, his trimmed hair stiff with pomade, and Michel Knobloch, his dim face dull as gutter water. Five times that boy stood in the prisoners’ box of the court. Five times he’s been sent off to prison, convicted of some petty crime—vagrancy, assault, theft. To hear him tell it is to wonder if he don’t know the difference between a verdict of guilty and President Grévy himself threading the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor through the buttonhole of his lapel. No matter the look of boredom upon the faces all around, he blathers on, recounting the cherries he stole, the trail of pits the gendarmes followed to the alleyway where he was gorging himself behind a cart. Émile saying, “You’re thick as two planks,” don’t stop him. No, he carries on, about those cherries not being ripe and his belly seizing after getting locked up in a cell. Pierre Gille is there, too, wearing a cravat and a silk waistcoat over a pressed white shirt. “You’re looking a dandy,” Émile says.

  Pierre Gille lifts his eyes from his glass of beer. “Can’t say the same for you. Not in the least.”

  Émile juts his chin. “That shirt of yours still hot from the irons?”

  Pierre Gille smirks, looks me in the face. “I see you brought your mattress.”

  Émile puffs a breath out through his nose. “I see you are all alone.”

  Pierre Gille picks up his glass, swallows the last of his beer. “Not for long.”

  “Another?” It is the way it is with the two of them, all insults and drinks bought.

  “Course.”

  “And the rest of you?” Émile says.

  With that, seven of the boys are lifting up their glasses, draining them dry while the offer lasts.

  Émile and I settle onto the bench, filling the gap beside Michel Knobloch that those arriving earlier were wise enough to leave. None of us have seen Paul Kirail in mon
ths, locked up as he was for pickpocketing a gentleman who bothered to chase him down the Champs-Élysées for a measly five francs. He takes the smallest of sips, wipes a speck of the froth from his mustache, with a handkerchief, no less. “I’m reformed,” he says when Émile mentions about him finishing up his time. “Prison is no place I ever want to see again.”

  Peering over the lip of his sweating glass of beer, Pierre Gille says, “Too many fellows want you as a wife?”

  The others laugh, and Paul Kirail starts picking at the cuffs of his shirt. “I enlisted,” he says. “Be living the life of a soldier at the garrison over in Saint-Malo soon enough.”

  “Saint-Malo?” Michel Knobloch says. “I believe Papa was in his youth one of those thieving pirates of Saint-Malo—a corsair.”

  Émile sets down his glass, pulls his fingers tight into his fists and says, “That, Knobloch, I doubt very much.”

  “You calling me a liar?” It is what everyone’s been calling him for a hundred years. That boy, he don’t have sense enough to make up a lie a single soul would mistake as true.

  “You lie like you breathe.” Émile returns his attention to his beer.

  “It’s nothing new,” says Pierre Gille.

  The eyes of Michel Knobloch gallop from face to face. Some turn away, sheepish. Others stare back with chins bobbing up and down.

  After a long gap, Pierre Gille swirls his beer, says, “The king of France protected those corsairs. He kept them from being hanged, so long as they sent a portion of their haul his way.”

  “Imagine that,” Émile says. “Plundering and no chance of waking up a guest of La Roquette.”

  “No chance of trading the stink of Paris for the salty breezes of New Caledonia,” Pierre Gille says.