She met the viewer, Thomas, head-on; anyone eavesdropping or snooping would be stopped dead in his tracks. His tracks: this portrait was about a woman and a man standing somewhere outside the frame. What had he just done or said? The man could have been anybody—the portraitist, the husband, the rival, a brother: Don’t marry him! Arthur had not allowed her to be heedlessly beautiful in this painting. In fact, he had given her looks a harder edge. If she was striking-looking, it was the beauty, the depth, of the beginning of the second act. Just what Thomas had noticed yesterday at the train station. Her lovely eyebrows were just slightly furrowed; that sensuous, fluent mouth was set firm; she wasn’t going to let anyone off the hook by speaking. So there was defiance here, of a sort, but really—and this is what finally knocked Thomas back into his seat—what she seemed to be expressing was irritation, as if this dramatic moment caught in paint would soon pass, but how tiresome that it had to happen at all. In the end, she seemed eager to leave the room, the canvas, to leave the viewer behind.
“Gee,” said Thomas.
Arthur stood up and came around to stare at the canvas; it seemed he hadn’t done this in some time. “Yeah,” he said again, gloomily. “The eye moves the hand and the hand moves the brush, so the brush is the eye, if you see what I mean.”
“I feel I need to go grab her, not let her go. Turn her around. To make her stay whether she wants to or not.”
Arthur grunted.
“Has Beal seen it?”
“No. She…” Arthur stopped.
“I know she came to see you here last week. Don’t worry about that.”
“Right. But no. She said she didn’t want to see it until I told her it was ready. She did say that she guessed I had made her ‘unpretty.’ She knocked me out with that. Sometimes your wife is scary.”
“I know,” said Thomas, looking back at the portrait. He speculated for a moment about what Beal would think of it. It didn’t seem to be an image that one would like or dislike or a view that one could argue with. It was just the truth, or a truth. Oh, that awful portrait, she might say years later, but not now.
“I guess—” said Arthur, then stopped himself.
“You guess what?”
“I guess I think this whole project—my painting her—caught her at a moment in her life when she should have been allowed to be invisible. Invisible to anyone but you, Thomas. Really, you came to Paris to hide. But that’s the thing about Paris: it swallows up ordinary people, mediocre people—but the happy few, well, it roots them out and puts them on display whether they want it or not. It spots them before anybody else does. Like Stanley, maybe. You heard about him, right? The Salon? I should have let Stanley paint her. He would have made her beautiful and virginal, and people would have been falling in love with her for a thousand years.”
Thomas stood up, took one more very long look at the painting. “I don’t care about Stanley and the Salon. This is good. It’s a painting, maybe, for us, just a painting. We don’t care who Beal really is, we care about the moment and about whatever is happening on the canvas. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s what we’re supposed to do if we’re any good. As a painter.”
“I believe in the painter that painted this.”
“Thanks, but that painter is at the end of his leash. I think I’ll run out of dough by November, and then Newark, New Jersey, will be calling.”
“Don’t answer. Don’t go back to Newark. Come to St. Adelelmus.”
“Where’s that?”
“My farm. In Languedoc. There must be half a dozen small buildings, or houses, where you could live. Come for the winter. Don’t painters go to the South for the winter, the light and all that? Open air?”
“No. They stay in Paris in the winter and go south in the summer. If they’re lucky.”
“But?”
“You think Beal would want me there, hanging around like some kind of mongrel?”
“She doesn’t think of you that way. In fact, maybe I could use you as an incentive. Arthur will come! He’ll paint the garrigue! Won’t that be gay!”
“I don’t think anybody, especially Beal, would describe me as gay.”
* * *
With all her being, Beal knew that she was only partway through the door to womanhood, to her life, to herself, and that she would be useless to everyone, but most especially to Thomas, like this. Or so she told herself in moments she thought were more detached. Useless to everyone, she repeated. I’ll just get done with this, she told herself; it’s something I have to do. When she thought of their relocation to this place in the South, she became desperate, short of breath, because all this would be only half done. In moments when she allowed her thoughts to wander, her whole body felt as if it were on fire. She and Thomas made love every night in these weeks, and together they gave each other license to be more and more bold; she’d be embarrassed after it was over, but the next day, ready for more. Thomas didn’t question the cause of any of this; he seemed to have determined that she had awakened after six weeks of chastity and was now on a journey, and he had no reason to complain. She wasn’t the only one who had changed during their time apart. That was perhaps the only good part of all this confusion. He had come back stronger, more confident, more manly, and that should have been all she needed. He was busy all day with meetings; just like his father before him, he was probing the minds of the academics about grapes, grilling wine merchants and sommeliers about vintages, cépages, terroir, appellations. At the end of a day of this, in bed, there seemed more of him to confront, more than just his love for her.
But still, even as this was happening, it drove her desire to go even further, like a game of I Dare You. What she had wasn’t enough. No, that was wrong: not about enough or too little, because she had so much. It was about now. About these last days and weeks, when everything she had created was beginning to be disassembled, lodgings let go, goodbyes said, trains and boats departing. These were the last few weeks of this time-out, this Paris time, this “adventure time,” as she had thought of it, when her clock was racing years into the future while everyone else’s ticked slowly into July … and for just these few days or weeks, there was other business to be done. To be finished with. Business that would never count. I’m losing my chance, she’d think, as if it were her youth that was being lost. She hated thinking this.
And of all things unexpected, of all things not to be imagined in a million years, she’d feel frantic with a kind of jealousy: Who was he with now? Which one of his wives did he prefer? She had defeated him, she knew that: no more talk of Dakar, no more imperious demands, just one note put directly into her hand by someone swiftly and silently, like a pickpocket. “Come to me.” She wanted to do it. This war of wills all winter had been won by the less likely combatant, and now she wanted the spoils. She quivered with desire when she thought about him; her eyelids fluttered.
But she resisted. Of course she resisted. She loved Thomas, she was married. But what was he up to, this man who had come back to her? She had seen the red-haired girl. Oh yes, one day she had stopped into Galignani’s and there she was. It didn’t take more than a glance to figure that out, so Beal snuck a quick look. As fast as all that, their eyes met, and then Beal was back out the door in a minute, her heart pounding. If the girl were in a line of a hundred, each one prettier than the last, this is the one Beal would have picked out for Thomas.
When she slept with Touré, she had told herself that this would be the one time, sanctifying the event with her promises to herself, and as long as it was the only time, she could believe in her own righteousness. Or at least in her logic. Going back to him would prove the falsity of her resolutions, would reveal all this as nothing but lust. Yes, lust. She was astonished by its power. No one had ever warned her. Her mother’s almost silenced breathy Oh Lord, coming from her parents’ bedroom: that was pleasure, that was feeling good, but it was not this. Was it? When her friends Mandy and Esther, back at the colonel’s, spoke of boys and l
ovemaking, it was like an idle game, a power they had over men who could lose their minds to it, but no one had ever told Beal that she could lose her mind to it. That the female body could feel this racking, desiccating desire. Never, ever had that possibility occurred to her, and she worried from time to time that a lot was wrong with her, that she was truly defective and evil, because other women didn’t feel this. Otherwise, all the stories she’d ever heard were only half true, all the great literature she hadn’t read but knew a little about would have to be rewritten with the parts restored about the princess or the preacher’s daughter being driven mad with this craving.
Thomas resumed his routine, reading and studying, but it was with a focus now, and where before Beal bled from time to time for the loneliness of his projects, now she felt abandoned by his purpose. How could anyone, how could he, care about grapes so much? He did his best to paint a picture of their new life, told her that everyone in Languedoc agreed that these farms were about family, wives and children, and Beal understood that; on the Retreat everyone worked side by side, too. It was just the way farming happened. Mail came for Thomas and she’d ask what it was about and he’d explain how this property was managed, what grapes he hoped to plant, how wine was made and sold, where you got bottles and corks, how you shipped on the trains or the Canal du Midi.
“It’s funny,” she said one morning. He was reading the mail quickly before heading to the telegraph office. “It don’t seem right.”
“What doesn’t seem right?”
“All this about wine. Don’t we really think the world would be a better place without it? No one needs wine.”
Thomas laughed, which was probably what she wanted him to do. It was sort of a joke, but a serious joke. “I think that debate was over by the time the Romans got to Languedoc. Grapes are better for the land than tobacco, after all. See what tobacco got us at home.”
“Oh,” she said. “The Retreat would have been there with or without tobacco. Didn’t take tobacco to invent slavery.”
He looked back at his letters for a moment, then put them down. “Beal, it’s a good life, I think. Maybe I am as nervous about it as you are, but I saw something there. I think I found something there that I have been looking for.”
She came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. It’s hard to be a man; she remembered saying that to Arthur. Paris will devour him; she remembered Touré saying that about Thomas. His neck was still brown with the sun. She gave him a hug. “It just seems so far away to me. Farther away than France did when we left. France was just somewhere Out There, no closer or farther away than Baltimore. This is a place, it’s real. You’ve seen it, slept there.”
“Maybe we won’t succeed, but we have to try. It was time, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was time.”
“We won’t be able to delay much past the beginning of August.”
“I know.” She could tell he was itching to get back to his mail.
“We’ll come back, to visit.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll stop bothering you,” she added, but he was already back at work.
Then one morning she sat on the toilet, idly counting days and weeks on her fingers and then counting again. She could not remember exactly when she last had her period, and now it seemed that this was quite a while ago, and she realized it had been several weeks, and suddenly the thought that she might be pregnant crashed over her, threatened to topple her off the stool as she straightened to attention in a bolt. When had Thomas come back, what day of the week was it? That rainy week: Was it before or after the Last Time? She put her hand back between her legs and pushed quite hard, as if to squeeze out a single drop of blood, but none came. Pregnant. Nothing that had happened in the past month was more likely than this, but she had simply not expected it, as if Paris were too ethereal a place for such an earthly event. She wasn’t ready for this; she was too young. Plenty of girls at home, younger than she, had children, and that was the way of things, but not here. She stood up, lowered her skirt as if to drop the curtain on a play, after which everyone would return to their real worlds. But this was her real world, this life event taking place in the darkness of her womb.
She walked back to the parlor. Thomas was out doing business; Mme Vigny was, as always, not to be seen during these hot early-afternoon hours. Beal’s whole body felt empty, which seemed exactly wrong. If she was right, and two people were now occupying her body, why would she feel so skeletal? She was more alone with this than she imagined, and it seemed to her that this isolation would continue, past the months of pregnancy, past the birth of the child. Down there in Langyduck—or however one said it—who would show her how to care for a baby? She was the youngest of her family, the baby herself; she’d never been around an infant, a newborn, a newborn human anyway. She did not cry, but she did sit down on the love seat, tracking a chill of despair as it traveled up from her abdomen. She didn’t even have someone to tell about this! Nobody in the world. It was too soon, much too soon to say anything to Thomas; she’d keep this a secret from him for months, until at last it couldn’t be concealed. Colleen and Hilary were gone, and Vivian, the only woman remaining among them she counted at all as a friend, was in no way the sort of person to whom you would reveal such a thing. Céleste? Too young. Madame Bernault? Beal blushed with horror at telling her this, and all that it implied. Arthur? Unthinkable—so unthinkable that as she sat there reviewing her options, she never even thought of him. The little girls?
There was only one person she would really want to tell, and that was her mother, her Mama, but writing a letter, what would that do? Simply sending out a piece of information was not what telling someone you’re pregnant is all about. So of all the world, of all the people she’d ever known, there was only one person she could imagine telling, one person available, whose reaction she could anticipate, who could offer some kind of certainties even if they were wrong. There was only one person she could imagine who would care in the slightest, care if she were living or dead. That’s the way this moment made her feel. Pregnancy and childbirth were a mortal battle for sure, and if she lost at the last moment and the child lived, would anyone care? Yes, she would go to him, and as part of a more formal and less fraught goodbye, she’d share the news. Thank him … well, she had already thanked him, but still. Oh, and guess what? I’m pregnant. And he would assume and assert that he was the father, and even though she liked the notion that he would argue this, she would inform him quite authoritatively that this was not the case. That her husband was the father. She considered all this for a few days, when everything she had been thinking and feeling over the past months became roiled, both sanctioned and damned by this new turn. She had a new clock, a new way of telling time. Thomas knew that something was preoccupying her, and a couple of times he asked what was on her mind. Oh, the move, she said. I’m thinking about it. Perhaps we should leave sooner than we planned. Or a week later. This city, Narbonne; show me on the map where it is. Did you really invite Arthur to spend the winter with us? That woman, Léonie, you said she was pregnant? Did she tell that to you—a stranger? Weren’t you a little embarrassed when she said it? Did she seem pleased about it? How many months was she, since you said you noticed when she stood up?
So it was that a week after her discovery Beal was back in Les Halles, standing once again among the fishmongers, being stared at by octopuses and eels and mighty halibut and stringy little sardines. This thing inside her, they said it was smaller than a mustard seed, that before it looked like a baby it would look like a fish. There was no sign of little Emma with the cabbages, but a boy was being scolded and cuffed on the ear, and as soon as he could worm his way free, he took off, followed by a stream of abuse. He would end up on Devil’s Island, it was shouted. The day was hot and airless; under the pavilion roof the only movement was the swallows and pigeons swooping and nesting. It seemed the entire market had closed down to mark this moment in her life.
; Beal wasn’t sure why she was there. She still believed that Touré was the one person she could tell about her pregnancy, that as ridiculous as it seemed, telling him would take the loneliness out of it. But she had had time to adjust a little, and the secret didn’t seem quite so unbearable, especially because each day, the secret itself became more and more certain and less possible to contain. She might have been there to say her final goodbye, to thank him one last time, because she would spend the rest of her life pondering and trying to make sense of all the things he had said to her over the winter, imagining how it would have been if she had never been challenged in this way, if her very being had not been called into question, and years later, she awoke with a start, wondering how it all would have gone if it had gone differently, more conventionally. She knew that Diallo Touré had in some ways put her on a path that could accommodate both her own needs and her duties as Thomas’s wife. Yes, that’s how it worked. Both of us. And would she make love to him, if he wanted? She could not be sure she would not, although now it all seemed less necessary and less momentous. A man enters a woman’s body and leaves the possibility of life, and pierced in this way, she becomes marked, her body shared, yet all becomes meaningless, pointless, when a new life is actually growing inside.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 21