Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  She still loved taking the girls out to play, and a few times they went on outings to the Champs-Elysées for the guignol shows at the marionette theater, and then she watched them as they played tag with the other children, almost all of them under the eye of someone of dark complexion, Arab, Iberian; Beal fit right in. Gilberte was turning into a little bit of a bully, and when she was tagged, she pouted; she was mean to a shy little round-faced boy who seemed always to be there, wanting to play with them. Beal did miss going to the theater, which was one thing she could not do alone; she had made no real girlfriends since Colleen and Hilary left, and there was no way she could go with Arthur. Besides, he hated the theater. She missed Thomas. Of course she missed Thomas. She missed their intimacy; she could make desire bloom just by thinking about it.

  She reached for the other letter on the table. It had appeared two days earlier, an escalation, an insinuation that brought this battle right into her home. Another week had gone by and she had not visited him in his rooms. But she had returned to the café as always. What was the meaning of this? he demanded. In six weeks he would be returning to Senegal and he had to know whether to tell his household, his other wives, to prepare a suite for her. This was all so ennuyeux, so inutile; she knew he was right, that her future lay in Africa. He had been patient beyond any acceptable measure. As one could see, he was willing to look beyond her bad American manners. Until now, he meant. She would stop this. At three o’clock on Wednesday she would come to him and she would accept his offers.

  This was all getting very complicated. She had seen Arthur the day before, had snuck out the back way lest Madame Bernault be at the hotel keeping her eye on things, on her. She had wanted to tell him about this letter, because by now she had very few secrets from Arthur and he was a wise person, but he had not been at any of his afternoon spots; no one had seen him for a few days. A bad sign. She went to his building, trudged loudly up the stairs to warn him that she was coming, and he met her at the top, unshaven, unwashed, dressed in a grimy gown. His black despair seemed to be increasing; this time he didn’t even try to hide it from her. “I thought it was you,” he said. Her visit seemed to give him no pleasure.

  “Can I come in?” she asked. It was the first time she had been there since she stopped sitting for him. When he stood aside for her to enter, she noticed that the canvas was still at his easel, with a cloth over it. “You haven’t finished it yet,” she said, tipping her head. She was trying to make it into a little joke.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I ever will.” He pointed her to the chair where she had spent so many hours, and he sat down on his bed.

  The air in the apartment was awful: sweat, sewer gas, fear. “Can I open a window? Wouldn’t you like some fresh air?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She turned the latch and tipped the window open; a light breeze entered the room. “Arthur. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just didn’t want to see anyone.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No. Tell me about your happy life.”

  Beal thought she might tell him about the letter from Thomas, the farm in Languedoc. Arthur had been talking up Thomas’s plans to her, saying how he envied them, getting out of this stifling, malodorous swamp, away from the pestilence of Paris. Thomas, he had said not long ago, was “unfinished,” by which he meant he had some kind of potential that no one could imagine. Beal knew she couldn’t paraphrase what Thomas had said in his letter without revealing that she didn’t want to go, that she had risen above her life as a farm girl, that she had risen above her parents, above any expectation anyone had for a little black farm girl in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, which was just what her mother had worked so hard to make happen. She had risen above her own people. There. She had said it to herself. She would say it to Touré. But not to Arthur, who was trying so hard to rise above his own background. That’s what these despairs were about, his feeling that as his centimes played out and the portrait remained unfinished, he was entering into the long, painful slide back to Newark.

  Instead, she nodded toward the shrouded portrait once more and asked Arthur why he had wanted to paint her so badly. “What you did to me was awful, but now I know you did it because you were desperate. You did it because you needed to paint me.”

  He shrugged. “Everyone wants a pretty model. Renoir prowls the streets of Montmartre looking for a pretty model.”

  “I am getting very tired of hearing people say that.”

  “I know. It shows how boring and unimaginative painters are. We’re really very stupid.”

  Beal didn’t say anything in response, because she had begun to think there was a drop of truth in it. She stayed on the portrait, which made Arthur uncomfortable. “My looks had nothing to do with it. I bet you didn’t make me pretty in your picture. You were too mad at me.”

  He sat up as she said this, his eyes wide. “How do you know that?”

  “That you were mad at me? That you hated Thomas and me?” She aped an expression of astonishment.

  Arthur grimaced and shook his head. “No. Not that. What makes you say I didn’t make you pretty?”

  “Well. You would have showed it to me otherwise. You can’t even look at it yourself, now that I am your friend. You don’t like what you did to me.”

  Arthur slumped, his back curled against the wall. He said nothing for a full minute, and she let the silence settle.

  “I didn’t make you unpretty,” he said finally. “No one, nothing could do that. In some ways I wish I could. Your beauty is your curse.” It was Beal’s turn to be disconcerted. Before she could say anything, he continued. “Look at me.” He raised his arms as if to show off his fine figure. “No one cares about me, no one wants me. I am the very essence of free. Look at the way your nun treats me. Compare that to your…”

  Beal had leaned forward, and as soon as he began that sentence, she bored her pale eyes into him and forced him to desist.

  “Yeah,” he said. Once again, a silence.

  Beal wished she had never come, almost the way she felt the first time she sat for him, but once here, she was going to follow it through.

  “Okay,” said Arthur about nothing in particular. She nodded, allowed him to go ahead. “I could have just as well compared the way I treat you. That’s what you said once, that we all want a piece of you. You know I love you.”

  “You do not. I’m too fat for you. My chest is too big.” Beal had seen him once with an alarmingly thin woman, taller and flatter than he was, in every way his opposite, and she had instantly recognized that this was Arthur’s sexual preference, the sort of body that excited him. When she posed for him naked that one time, she had not felt a single blood pulse of desire from him; before she saw him with that consumptive model, she had assumed that what put him off was her skin, but she realized now that it was the ampleness of her flesh.

  He laughed a little. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want more of you than you want to give.”

  She had been handling this well, she thought, concentrating on cheering him up, but this comment grabbed her by the throat. More than you want to give. Sometimes, even now when she had so firmly renounced home, she was frightened about how very far away from herself she felt. New things had been thrust into her life, but old things had been torn away to make room. It was like the baron and his new city. Through the window she could hear the sounds of late afternoon, the medical students coming back to their flats after a long day with their cadavers, the omnibuses rumbling by, heavy with passengers. She should be on one of them, going home.

  “I’ve had a letter from Thomas,” he said.

  “Yes. He would have written you about his farm.”

  “His farm? That isn’t the way he sees it.”

  “No. It isn’t,” she said. “He thinks he’s buying it for both of us.”

  “Well, he is. No? He feels the clock is ticking, but you are the one controlling the hands.”

&nbs
p; Beal felt she was controlling very little.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked when she said nothing.

  “About the farm?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or about Diallo Touré, you mean?”

  He opened his hands in a gesture of dispassion. “Only if you want to talk about it.”

  “I love Thomas. I know that more every day.”

  “See?” he said. “There’s more to any or all of this than love.”

  “He wants me to come to his lodging.”

  “You mean you haven’t been there before?”

  It took her a moment to understand what he had said, to understand that Arthur had assumed, in some way, that she had already been there, and since it was true, Arthur’s assuming it meant that no denials could ever work with him, or with anyone. What she had done, or not done, so far contained its own undeniable truths. Yet one had to resist. “Arthur. How would you think that? How dare you say that to me?” She wheeled around to reach for her hat, her gloves.

  He looked genuinely sorry. “I am just trying to understand you.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.” Beal knew this wasn’t true. In some ways, Kravitz was the first person she had ever met who seemed to read her with no difficulty whatsoever, who seemed unconfused by his love or by her beauty.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just want you to know you’re not alone. That I’m willing.”

  “So you keep saying. You keep saying you want to help me; Thomas keeps saying he wants me to be happy. Is all this well-wishing part of my curse?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  She did not put her hat down, but she relaxed her wrist. With her heart still beating in anger and surprise, she realized why she had come here: because it was safe. Her most shameful and carefully guarded secret, that she had gone to Touré’s flat and probably would again, was nothing in this room, even as it remained a secret. This awful little hovel felt like the safest place in Paris. If safety was what she wanted, she could find it here.

  “Is this all in my portrait?”

  “Yeah. You see the problem. I wanted deep, but I haven’t found a way to pile it all in the layers of paint. Even ten layers isn’t thick enough.”

  She laughed at the idea of layers and layers of paint, but she understood what he was saying. She had seen this in some of the paintings in the Louvre, some of the canvases made from a paste so thick it seemed one could fall into the light and space of their cracked surfaces. “I don’t want to see it. Not until it’s done. Not until I’m done.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to be faithful to Thomas. This man means nothing. But he won’t allow me to ignore him. He won’t let that stand as my answer.”

  “But won’t he just go back to Senegal? Isn’t that what you said he had to do?”

  “I suppose.”

  In the course of the conversation Arthur had pulled himself out of his depressed shell and was sitting forward at the edge of his cot, his elbows on his knees, fixing Beal in his gaze. He felt better, Beal knew at least that had been accomplished, at least one of them felt better.

  “Then, Beal…”

  “What?”

  “That means you can just ignore him. Doesn’t it?”

  “I think it means I haven’t found a way to answer his questions. I have to do that, don’t I?”

  “In his rooms?”

  “I was there once and came out unspoiled.” She let this out a word at a time, an admission that felt better and better as it progressed, especially because where it ended, the unspoiled part, was the truth.

  “Ah,” said Arthur. “As I suspected.”

  That was yesterday. Tuesday. By the time Beal got back, Mme Vigny had gone home and Beal paced around the little suite of rooms in the gathering darkness. She recalled the cold of the winter, the way it drove her and Thomas together on the love seat, in bed. I have seen a farm in Languedoc: the words came back to her as a sort of curiosity. Languedoc. Why would he think this would mean anything to her? “Langyduck,” she said out loud, a churlish little joke. She pictured the ducks on the Retreat, the way they swished their tails when they waddled out of the creek; she pictured old Uncle Pickle slaughtering them, their unsuspecting round heads lying smoothly in the grass below the chopping block. Thomas could just as well have said he had found a farm on the moon. But then she reflected that almost three years ago, back when no one could have dreamed what was coming, Thomas had said they could run away to France, and that had seemed farther than the moon. She sampled from the pot of Mme Vigny’s chicken in apples and cream. Mme Vigny had told her that she grew up in Normandy, where they made almost any dish with apples; they made sandwiches with apples and Camembert cheese, which Beal could hardly touch. They didn’t drink wine in Normandy, they drank cidre. Mme Vigny had left rural Normandy when her husband was sent to march on the Commune of 1871, and whatever the modesty of her situation in Paris, she had no desire to return.

  Beal walked into the bedroom, with its simple brass bed, its deep pile of down coverings. The walls were bare, but textured with water stains and plaster patches in a way that reminded her, happily, of home. Someone was singing, humming maybe but with a sure voice, in the courtyard. The house is simple but commodious. She undressed, got into her nightgown. She reached for the covers but stopped, her hands outstretched; maybe each night that Thomas had been gone, there was just a little less of him in this bed. But she would be faithful to this room; she would protect it with her life. She couldn’t just crawl into it like an animal in a cave, without faith or will. She thought of the little maids’ rooms on the floor above them. There were several girls in them, and she had seen them many times on the stairs, at the markets; they greeted her, but rarely spoke of anything other than the weather. Beal knew they would be fast asleep very soon—in her former life she would have been—so she waited for another half hour, then crept up the stairs in her nightgown and bare feet and crawled into the little cot. It was just right, and in the morning she crept back just before Mme Vigny arrived.

  She stood in front of her armoire. She did not have many dresses, despite Thomas’s urgings and her frequent browsing at the Bon Marché. For her, buying a garment was a surrender to its appeal, a giving of oneself that had to be done with certainty. She’d hesitated all winter over a satin dress in the ready-made department—the salesgirl Denise Baudu looked lovely in it, but she was more slender than Beal—and by the time she had decided it was right, the season had changed and it was gone. Her hand lingered over her newest, a champagne color that matched her eyes, but it was too gay, too lighthearted. In the end she settled for something slightly unseasonal, a maroon skirt, over which she would wear her new dark gray jacket. Perhaps the epaulets were a touch too military. She dressed, wondering with each button and tie what would happen to her today, ate breakfast, wrote in her journal, took some soup for lunch, and now was sitting at her desk. It was a little after one.

  Coming home from Arthur’s yesterday, she had reaffirmed that she would confront Touré in his rooms. She felt that Arthur had given his assent. To confront him. I’m going there, I’m going there tomorrow, she’d said to herself, to the rhythm of her footsteps. It seemed to help. Then, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what’s going to happen—which helped even more in ways she did not want to analyze. I love Thomas, I love Thomas, she tried, but that didn’t help at all. It had so little to do with this, which was perhaps a convenient thought, but it seemed to Beal, in the earnest center of her self-understanding, to be the truth. Besides, this repeating of phrases was kind of silly.

  At two she stood up, hobbled on a sleeping leg to the bedroom, where she put on her hat, grabbed her gloves, and slipped out the door. Mme Vigny had said nothing about Beal’s late return the day before, so maybe she wouldn’t mention it if it happened again today. She could not worry about Mme Vigny or Mother Lucy or her mother, or anyone. She had planned to walk
all the way to Touré’s building, but an omnibus with several vacant places was just about to depart when she passed by, and she guiltily paid her fifteen centimes and climbed to the second level. She looked down at the poor horses, just three of them pulling this immense wheeled structure, and felt guilty all over again. All these guilty feelings were feeding off her real transgression; Beal knew that she wanted to lie with this man, that this desire she had been feeling for weeks could be truly quenched, would be truly quenched, and all she had to do to make it happen was say yes. Yes. She wanted all that, but didn’t think she was going to do it, believed instead that the warmth she felt between her legs riding in the omnibus would be gone the moment she entered his flat and she would walk out not a few minutes later “unspoiled” once again, as she had said to Arthur.

  Because she had ridden the omnibus, she was early, and she passed a few minutes in Les Halles, where most of the trade was long over, except for farmers and fishmongers trying to unload the last of their stock. The streets were a mass of carts and wagons, some almost medieval in design. A little girl in a dirty pinafore stood tearfully in front of an immense pile of cabbages and begged her to take some. “Emma,” a sharp voice called, an order to make her work harder. Beal gave the girl a five-centime piece but took no cabbages. In the fish stalls, the last of the sea creatures, in all their unfamiliar shapes, iridescence, and unblinking eyes were arrayed in melting ice; in one stall, two women, a seller and a less-than-prosperous-looking customer, had a shouting match over a turbot, and Beal sensed that neither woman was in a very good position: the seller needed to get something for the fish before it spoiled, and the customer was hungry. Two people, each trying to get the upper hand: Was this not what she was there to do, to get the upper hand over Touré? This person who had been haunting her, stalking her, spying on her, testing her at every juncture, judging her, desiring her? Desiring her and desiring her and desiring her, ever since he’d laid eyes upon her in the dining room on the boat. She wanted to hurt him for that, all that lust for her body, hurt him with sex, give it to him and then deny him, deny him, deny him.