He was not looking at her when he said all this. He had rehearsed lighting this bomb, wanted to have the explosion well contained. Arthur was not a bad person; he was simply someone in need. He was delighted when he came up with the idea of introducing it as a quid pro quo, which seemed to characterize the spirit of the proposition. This bit about others asking questions was not true, but the “others” weren’t the issue here anyway. Just a softer way to express it. He caught a glimpse of the horror that immediately came over her, and he didn’t want to see the tears he assumed were coming. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was rigid, except for her hands, those beautiful hands, clutching her notebook. At length, the hands stopped, and she exhaled, shifted in her seat. “You are wrong,” she said finally. “He’s not my boyfriend. I have done nothing improper.”
“Sure. Yeah. Of course.”
“Why are people doing this to me?”
He might have supposed that she was referring to his purported gossip and chitchat, but he heard more than that. “What do you mean?”
“Why can’t people just leave me alone? What have I done to deserve all this?” She reached into her bag and took out a handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “When will it stop?”
This was going only partly the way Arthur expected. Yes, he’d played the African pretty much right, and it got her attention, but he’d scored no clean victory. He needed to keep his focus on the prize. “I just want you to sit for me. I don’t want to make trouble for you. Maybe letting me paint you will help with whatever it is,” he added.
“How would it help?” There was anger in her voice now; she was not without guts.
He had no idea how it would help. But he knew well enough, and she did too, how it would hurt if he revealed her secret to anyone, starting with her husband. “You might like my painting. I just want to paint you as you are. Whatever pose you want. I could even paint you with your husband,” he said, suddenly electrified with that idea—Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bayly, the couple, with this secret between them, this fearful dark presence hanging over them from shadows. Is that a figure you have drawn in the background, M. Kravitz? No. I don’t know what you think you are seeing.
“You leave Thomas out of this,” she snapped.
“Okay.”
“What about Stanley?”
“I don’t care about Stanley. He’s the one who wants you just for himself. Do what you want about Stanley.”
“Where would you want to do this?”
“In my studio. It’s right around the corner. Not the septième, but it will do. In the spring, when it warms up enough not to freeze my palette. Bring whoever you want to chaperone. I know you like things to be proper.” He liked that, using her word, keeping all this decorous, correct, even if it was being built on a foundation of lies and secrets. They weren’t his lies and secrets.
“My husband would never agree. He doesn’t like you.”
“No. I don’t suppose he does. I don’t know why you’d have to tell him, anyway.”
Arthur didn’t learn for some months what, if anything, she had said to her husband, but he did not imagine that Thomas Bayly would stop her from doing what she wanted to do. Now that he had had a few more chances to observe the man, Arthur had actually begun to admire a certain quiet mettle in Thomas, a self-assurance that seemed not to need to fight meaningless battles. For Arthur, Thomas’s demeanor suggested a third way of getting what you want. Wouldn’t have thought it. Arthur knew that Beal had agreed to sit for him when, a few weeks later, Stanley Dean confronted him on the boulevard, furious, surprisingly confrontational. “Everyone knows that I found her, that she is mine. You ask anyone. You keep your hands off her.”
Arthur held up his hands, turned them front and back. “I’m not touching her. See?”
“You know what I mean. You follow her all over the place.”
All over the place? thought Arthur. Hardly. That first time, yes, that was following; the second time, when she went to the café, that was detective work.
“You are a person with no honor,” said Stanley.
Arthur thought that was unfair, but he could see how Stanley could think it.
“I don’t know why she is willing to do it. She promised me I would be the only one,” Stanley added, letting out a small squeak of pain. “What did you tell her about me?”
“I told her that you may be the best painter of all of us”—he hadn’t told her that, but he was coming to believe it, the best technically—“but that I understood her and could give her a painting that would show who she is. That would speak for her.”
Stanley had been mollified a bit by the compliment, and the truth was, as Arthur knew, that Maître Rodolphe had been moving Stanley away from portraits anyway. “You mean about the hardships she has faced? About the cruelty? About the South?”
“Yeah. Sure,” said Arthur, but of course, he didn’t mean that at all. He meant exactly one hundred percent, one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite. He would show her that she had been blessed, that she had been favored, that she had been held up for all to admire. How could this not help her? Arthur could see clearly the painting Stanley had in mind, neck collar and ankle chains and all. The horror of the innocents. How was that supposed to do anything but keep her shackled into eternity? The painting would be a fraud and a failure for two reasons: first, it would be boring, and second, this girl knew nothing about being enslaved, being crushed, being thwarted. Put that in this girl’s eyes and it would be a mask, a cheap party favor.
“Look, Stanley. Your painting and mine wouldn’t look anything alike. No one would even guess that it’s the same girl.”
That would have to do for Stanley.
5
The depth of the winter had arrived, and what had seemed a cozy apartment in the fall was now revealed as drafty and frigid. Ice formed in the washbasin. Thomas and Beal were both accustomed enough to being cold in the winter; the Mansion House on the Retreat was so big that each room was its own tundra, and Beal’s family’s house in Tuckertown was built to accommodate but not necessarily shelter farmworkers and domestics; in the winter they were on their own. The warmest room on the avenue Bosquet, even if it had no fireplace, was the attic maid’s room, and often at night after Mme Vigny went home they would go up there and lie on the little iron bed and talk until it was time to retire. Thomas held her under the blankets as they talked, and he knew that every day seemed to bring new challenges to her, not all of them uncomplicated, but it was just the same for him. If she wasn’t saying absolutely everything to him, he wasn’t saying absolutely everything to her about the audacious plan that was forming in his mind. As he recorded all these memories years later, Thomas thought of this cold, locked-tight winter as a winter of waiting, waiting for spring, when they would have to decide how they were going to live; he thought about trusting the hours and trusting each other even as, on somewhat separate tracks, they were each discovering who they were and what they wanted. Occasionally they went to the hotel to eat supper with the Richard family, and as the weeks passed, Thomas was surprised by how well both of them were doing with French, especially how much Beal seemed to understand. They went to the theater sometimes, to the Gymnase on the boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle generally, but ventured a few times to the Comédie-Française, sitting high in the loges where no one wore evening dress: that was Thomas’s one inflexible demand. Still, it was fun for him to watch Beal studying the crowd, and in that, she wasn’t all that different from the various duchesses and comtesses in their boxes who also seemed to be doing anything but watching the play. Thomas didn’t mind a bit to notice that just as often they were looking at her, the only African in the house, and that sometimes men tried to catch her eye, that the men in their top hats and evening dress hanging around the stage door would turn and watch her as she and Thomas walked past them. It was all theater, harmless invention, nothing for keeps, and years later, as Thomas was remembering these days, it seemed to him that this w
as where the true legend of Beal got its start.
By the end of January he had worked his way almost to the end of Galignani’s sections on grapes and its much larger sections on wines, wine regions, and wine making. He could have checked out many of these volumes and studied them at home, but for one thing, Galignani’s was the best-heated space he had thus far discovered in the whole city, and for another, he wasn’t ready to tell Beal that this was where his thinking was headed. He understood his own reluctance from the very beginning: every single day that passed, she became more a parisienne. Even her accent was more Parisian than his, and every time she came back from Le Bon Marché with a little piece of ready-made—he almost had to force her to buy things—she seemed to be growing into a person who would never have existed anywhere but here. And Thomas, in his considerations of the future, was diving ever farther away from this place, south, through the Loire Valley, past Bordeaux, across the Massif Central, and into the real wilderness, a region the vignerons of Bordeaux regarded with horror, where it seemed to him that a man with somewhat limited resources and a solidly considered plan could make a mark.
His guide through most of this voyage had been Eileen Hardy. That was another reason he liked to do his work at Galignani’s—because she was there, Tuesdays through Fridays from ten to closing, which so perfectly matched Thomas’s own schedule that he found his time with her slightly preordained. They had come to expect to see each other for most of these appointed times, and neither of them tried to hide their pleasure. This was new for Thomas, having a girl for a friend, especially a girl—a woman—who took such delight in the jape and jest. Beal would like her, he figured; he could easily imagine Eileen as a farm kid, though it was clear that she wasn’t. By now Thomas had realized that she knew far more about wine than he would have expected from a Dublin girl; it had been no accident that she put him onto grapes and wine making at the beginning. He put this right to her one day when they were having their afternoon goûter at a teahouse just a few doors down on the rue de Rivoli.
“It seems to me, Eileen,” said Thomas, “that you have been holding your cards back. You have been foxy with me.” From that early day when she called him “confused,” this was the way they talked to each other.
She reddened, which, given her hair and her complexion, meant that she looked as if she were about to explode. “About what?” she said quietly, as if she expected to be scolded.
“About wine. You know as much as any one of these books I have been reading.”
“I don’t. I just hear things.”
“How does one just ‘hear’ about the difference between Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc? No one has ever breathed such a thing to me.”
She took up her napkin as if she could dust away the violent blushing of her cheeks. Thomas wished that this gesture did not move him so, delight him, make him want to take the napkin from her and finish the job.
“My father,” she said.
Thomas had not expected this, the father that had seemed to be a mystery best left unprobed. “He knows about wine?” said Thomas. “He’s like one of those English lords buying vineyards in Bordeaux? The ones you have been telling me about.”
“Well, yes. He is like one of them.”
“You mean,” said Thomas, getting ready to make all sorts of fun with this, “he is one of them.”
“Irish. Not English. But yes.” There was no jesting here. “One day he just announced to my mother that he had done this. That he was moving there without her. And he didn’t tell her about Mme de Bose either.”
“Oh,” said Thomas. “Her,” he added, a joke.
Eileen smiled gamely.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this in the first place? There’s almost no family secret of mine that I didn’t pour out to you the day we met.”
“No. It was the day after we met. The second time you came in.”
Yes, thought Thomas, she was right about that; the second time he came in, that Thursday, the first of December. “But—”
“Because I don’t like to talk about him. That’s why I am here in Paris. So I don’t have to talk about him. It is still a scandal back home.” The blush had gone. “Besides, you like to talk about your family, as much as you try to pretend you don’t. The Retreat. See? I even know what your farm is called. Everything for you seems to grow out of that place.”
Thomas might have argued that this must be true of almost everyone, that young adulthood grew out of the places of youth, but maybe it wasn’t so. All these painters, these friends of Beal’s: where they came from was just a way of telling them apart—part of their names, like Stanley from Pittsburgh and Kravitz from Newark. And he might have argued that here in Europe, land of aristocrats and thousand-year-old names, surely a family’s past marked one for life. But he knew what she was saying; the Retreat was so present in his daily thoughts that even here, in a tea shop on the rue de Rivoli, he could conjure up the smell of Mason’s Creek just before a rain, the sound of the locusts at noon in July.
“Not that I think you have told me everything. Just a lot.”
No one was joking now, and Thomas understood what she was saying, what her eyes were saying, which was that she wished she did know more, that maybe there were some things here that didn’t line up. He still hadn’t told her about Beal, hadn’t hinted that he was married, which had become worse and worse, meaner and meaner, because he knew this friendship of theirs was no longer as simple as it should be. There was never a right time, but she must have guessed, must have figured out that for all the tales of the Retreat, there was a very big hole. She must have figured it out and decided that she didn’t care.
“I came here to get away from the place,” said Thomas, avoiding her eyes. The tearoom was quite full, mostly American and British ladies, a safe place for innocent transgressions. He had asked her, on one of those early days in the reading room, where he might take a short break, and she said she would show him if she could come with him. No one, especially no woman, had ever said such a thing to him.
“Then we are here in Paris for the same reason,” she said.
“That’s why any mention of Bordeaux makes you curl your lip.”
“Do I? Does it? Well,” she said—the arch tone was back—“it’s not the place for you. You don’t pretend to anywhere near as much as you’d need to do there. Trust that.”
* * *
Beal was late getting home that day. The worst of the freeze was over, and at least the days were getting longer and it wasn’t completely dark when she returned.
Things were starting to feel a little odd; his own guilty voice spoke to him. He made unnecessary and elaborate excuses to Mme Vigny and went out to the landing on the stairs as soon as he heard the door open four stories below. He took her coat from her, hugged her especially hard, the solidness of her, his one true love. “I was worried about you,” he said.
“I knew you would be. I’m sorry. I sort of lost track.”
“Where were you?” Thomas knew that the students in the Louvre had to pack up and be gone by three.
“I just felt like walking. My back gets so sore when I’m sitting on those benches.” One of the artists had lent her a little folding stool of the kind they all had for painting, but it was so low and her legs were so long that her knees jutted up practically to her shoulders and she had no flat place to put her notebook. “I went to Printemps to see the silk. Not that I’ll ever be able to sew. But it sure is pretty.”
“I wish you’d treat yourself more, for all the time you spend in those places. Things to show how beautiful you are,” he said, giving her buttock a caress.
She slapped away his hand, too abruptly, too harshly. He drew it back too quickly, surprised. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m tired.”
She greeted Mme Vigny and then followed Thomas to the table. Lately Thomas’s French lessons with Céleste had included more and more talk about food, and Mme Vigny resisted his interest in cooking far less tha
n she resisted Beal’s presence in the market. Apparently, in France, men cooked sometimes, or maybe, finally, one of these Americans had shown the proper level of respect for her and her country. She was taking them on a slightly involuntary tour of the food people ate in the provinces: pot-au-feu, ris de veau, caillettes. Usually they had no idea what was in them.
“I was in Egypt,” Beal said.
“The sphinxes? The caskets? I thought they scared you.”
She laughed. “They do, but they’ve been dead for four thousand years. If they were going to jump out at anybody, I reckon they would have done it before now.”
“Besides, they’re about half your height.”
They were waiting at the table. Usually Mme Vigny would serve them and then leave. They had no idea where she lived, how she came to be their cook, what she would do when they departed. Beal could hardly get used to being served by a cook; a maid would have been impossible for her. Besides, she had told Thomas years ago that the sounds of her mother and father in the kitchen at the end of the evening, doing the last dishes, talking, sharing their days, had been a sort of magic music of care she wanted to have in her own life.
While they waited, Beal recited the words for the bowls, spoons, glasses, napkins. “Un bol, une cuillère, un verre, une serviette,” she said.
“Very good. Pas mal, as Céleste says.”
“No. Très bien. She always says you’ve done très bien.”
“Céleste is a nice girl.”
Mme Vigny brought out the pot of stew and set it in front of Thomas. “Cassoulet,” she said. “De Languedoc, de Castelnaudary,” she added, with enough emphasis to make Beal ask what she meant.
“Languedoc,” said Thomas cautiously. “It’s a region way in the South. Almost in Spain. It’s the heart of the Midi. I was talking to Mme Vigny about it the other day, and she said we must try the famous cassoulet. It has duck cooked in its own fat, and sausage and beans.”
“Seems a little mean. The duck. Its own fat.”
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 12