To Capture What We Cannot Keep

by Beatrice Colin

  Finally the tutor appeared, shuffling through the courtyard below with a stick in one hand and a bundle of bones wrapped in cloth in the other. He unlocked the door to the studio and stood back as the students rushed in to claim a space. A classical sculpture had been placed at the front of the class, a study of an athlete in marble. As they set up their easels and sharpened their pencils, a young man stepped into the studio and, without a word from the tutor, began to undress. This week’s class, the tutor announced, was in human anatomy.

  “Look,” he said once he had the students’ attention. “Look at the way the bones are connected, at the way they move beneath the skin.” He picked up the model’s arm and bent it. “Consider the skin tone, the illumination from within. This can be achieved by building up layers of pigment like Delacroix,­ Rembrandt, and Dürer. But to paint well is not just a matter of technique. An artist has to understand the human body both inside and out. It is not just a matter of capturing the fleeting surface.”

  There was a mutter of acknowledgment, of agreement. They all knew that he was referring to the work of the Impressionists.

  “Here is a pelvis,” he said, holding up the bones. “And the femur, the tibia and fibula of the left leg. When you draw today I want to see that you understand the bones beneath the skin.”

  Slowly he maneuvered the model into position: sitting down, with one knee raised and one arm outstretched.

  “Well?” he asked. “Who is this? You?”

  He pointed at Émile. The pose looked familiar, but Émile had no idea. He shook his head. The old man seemed to find this amusing.

  “Have you ever set foot in the Louvre?” he asked.

  “Many times,” conceded Émile, his face blanching.

  “Well?” he asked the rest of the class.

  “It’s The Creation of Adam,” they chorused. “By Michelangelo.”

  Émile shrank a little into his shoes. Of course. He should have known that. Although the original was in the Sistine Chapel, there were numerous studies in pencil in the Louvre.

  He could almost hear Gabrielle’s laugh, the tickle of her amusement tainted with scorn. But she had no idea that he had tried to keep up his art, studying painting or drawing whenever time would allow. After he spent days calculating exact measurements and gradients, using rulers, a sector, a compass, and a pair of dividers, it was a relief to work with just a pencil and paper and draw what was in front of him. His style was the exact opposite of his technical work; his line was loose, economical, free. And he wanted to capture what he couldn’t keep, the fleeting, the transient.

  Since the night of the show, he had barely seen Gabrielle. Finally they had arranged to meet in a small café in Montparnasse that he had chosen because they were unlikely to meet anyone he knew there. As she approached his table—late, of course—he saw immediately that the sales of the pictures still elevated her mood. She walked with her head held a little higher, her smile pulled a little wider, her eyes filled with a kind of brightness that seemed focused on an entirely different beyond from everybody else’s.

  After she had pressed her cheek to his, twice, and coffee had been ordered, she seemed finally to notice him.

  “How are you, anyway?” he had asked.

  “Better for seeing you,” she had replied, then reached for his hand and held it. Something within him seemed to plummet. Their affair was like a horse and carriage without a driver, careering forward toward a catastrophe all of their own making.

  After a moment, he withdrew his hand and pretended to wipe the perspiration from his brow.

  “It’s hot in here,” he said.

  “You work too hard,” she replied.

  She blinked and he saw that her pupils were huge and black. What had she been taking? Laudanum? Opium? Morphine? He knew that it was point­less asking; she would vehemently deny it. They had both fallen silent. Once you removed lovemaking from the equation, he realized that they had little to say to each other. Émile drank his coffee quickly, draining his cup right down to the sugar granules at the bottom. Gabrielle started to play with her spoon, spinning it on its end with the tip of her finger.

  “What was America like?” she asked suddenly.

  The previous year, Émile had spent a month in New York helping Eiffel install the metal framework for the Statue of Liberty. He remembered the ripple of the Narrows, the uncompromising glare of the sunlight on the water and the taste of the slums in his mouth. He remembered the wide streets of the grid and the lush green space of Central Park. And he remembered the first time he had seen a huddle of “street Arabs,” as they were called, six or seven homeless children, some as young as five or six, sleeping barefoot in a doorway outside a hotel on West Twenty-Third Street. One of them had thrust a small, filthy foot onto the pavement, or sidewalk, as it was known. As he watched, a middle-aged lady all dressed up in silk and pearls had climbed out of a carriage and then simply stepped over the foot as if it were nothing but a length of broken stick or an old umbrella handle before heading into the paneled interior of the lobby toward the restaurant to dine on oysters, he supposed, and fine wine.

  “It’s wonderful if you have money,” he replied.

  “And why shouldn’t we?” she said. “If we were to go, that is. I mean, what is there to keep us here?”

  He turned to her, but he could tell by her face that she was elsewhere again, caught up in the drift of an imaginary future. Although he did not like himself for it, he had been unable to stop himself from asking the question.

  “Did you find out?” he said. “Do you know who bought the paintings?”

  His words were like cold water in her face. She blinked rapidly.

  “No,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me. Why? Do you know?”

  He shook his head. He would never tell her. And neither, he knew, would her husband. He sat back and closed his eyes. What was he doing? What was he becoming? He should break it off now, quickly, before any more dam­age was done. And yet he had become unwittingly addicted.

  “Gabrielle?” he had said, reaching for her. “Come back to my apartment? Is there time?”

  But once she had visited the water closet and fixed her face, there was only time to leave.

  The students at the artist’s atelier were of two types. The thin ones with the pigment in their hair and deeply engraved frown lines on their foreheads were the serious ones, the ones who had given everything for their art. The rest were men like Émile, men whose smart dress, well-filled bellies, and clean hands gave them away as men with jobs, as amateurs.

  As Émile tried to draw the model, the studio was silent but for the flutter of pigeons on the glass high above and the scratch of pencil on paper. He tried to capture the bones beneath the skin, but he could not help noticing that the model’s skin was not made of cool white marble; it sweated, it twitched, the muscles were not firm but slightly wasted. There were scars and the marks left by badly fitting shoes and the fastenings of clothes, and the model’s face had the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker. When, finally, the model was allowed to relax, he had to unfold himself out of his position, as every joint and every muscle ached with the effort of staying still. It was not an easy pose to hold.

  The tutor passed among the students, making comments and using his own pencil to correct a line or emphasize a contour. When he reached Émile, however, he stood and stared at his drawing for a moment in silence and then moved on. It was then that Émile realized that the other drawings in the room bore no real resemblance to the model in front of them; the artists had all drawn Adam.

  At lunchtime, some of the students had packed up their easels and either headed back down the hill—they sat in the shade of cafés like Le Chat Noir—or climbed higher to the café beneath Le Moulin de la Galette. The tutor wiped his nose on his sleeve and then began to sketch the model’s up­per body, each muscle, every bone, picked out in light and shade.

  “I learned to draw from drawing corpses,” he told the ones who remained. �
�At the Académie. They do not get cramps or tire easily. Oh yes, the dead are indeed a joy to draw.”

  Without any warning, an image entered Émile’s head: Gabrielle, her body naked, her eyes open, and her skin the smooth flawless white of a corpse. He was gripped with a sense that something awful would happen to her and it would be his fault. It suddenly seemed as if he was going to suffocate; he struggled to inhale enough air. He loosened his tie, then gathered up his jacket and rolled up his sketch. Once outside, he tried to calm down, to breathe normally. He put his hand against the cold stone of the courtyard wall and let its rough surface chafe his skin. There were other women, women whose lives were not shot through with tragedy and addiction, women who were not already married. He would write her a letter; he would end it tomorrow.

  7

  ____

  WITH A HISS OF BRAKES and the long, low sigh of the train’s whistle, the London train came to a stop on the tracks just outside St. Enoch Station in Glasgow. They were on the bridge high above the Clyde. It was dark, but Cait could still make out the paddle steamers tied up along the Broomielaw, the loom of dredgers, the black spindles of the steam cranes unloading cargoes of coal and, in the distance, the lights of the Govan ferry. Nothing had changed since they had left for Europe; the air was still hazy with coal smoke, the skies still threatened rain, and there was a thick, damp fog rolling in from the Kilpatrick hills. Even the smell was the same—rust and soot, collieries and roasting hops from the brewery. The train finally jerked twice and began to roll into the station. Cait sank a little farther into the seat; after six months of traveling, they were finally home.

  “I wonder if anyone will be here to meet us,” said Alice.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Jamie replied. “Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.” “Did you send that telegram in London?” she asked.

  Jamie clapped his hand to his mouth. “I knew there was something I was supposed to do!”

  Alice looked momentarily horrified.

  “He’s teasing,” Cait said.

  “I knew that,” she replied with more emphasis than was necessary.

  As soon as they had come to a standstill in the vaulted glass and iron cavern of the station, the second- and third-class passengers hurried off the train and streamed in one huge mass toward the omnibus stop and the taxi rank. The first-class passengers, however, took their time. They climbed down and congregated on the platform as dozens of porters swarmed into the carriages to unload their cases and trunks, traveling bags and paper parcels onto a flotilla of wooden trolleys. And then, once their baggage had been checked and checked again, some waved to their drivers while others headed off toward the main entrance to wait for their carriages.

  Of course, there was a welcoming party for Jamie and Alice. After a suit­able pause, they stepped off the train to a round of applause.

  “At last!” squealed three young girls as they rushed to embrace Alice. “Did you see everything?”

  “Everything!” Alice replied. “And it was wonderful!”

  Cait smiled as she pushed her hair into her hat and fastened her traveling cloak. Not the Panthéon, too busy; not the great cathedral at Chartres, too dark; and not the Duomo in Siena, too boring. But it was true that she had seen a great many stations and grand hotels and shopping arcades.

  As she waited for the porter to lift her case off the train, Cait noticed a man waiting on the fringes of the crowd with a bunch of red roses in his hand. Alice must have noticed him too but was pretending she hadn’t. After a moment, however, it seemed as if he considered he had waited long enough.

  “Look here, Miss Arrol,” he announced so loudly that everyone turned. “I was informed that you would be arriving today. I was here for the nine thirty-eight. Unfortunately my informant was mistaken that you had taken that train, since you had in fact boarded the ten forty-three. Did you receive my letters?”

  The welcoming party parted to allow him access to its heart, to Alice. A rush of panic crossed her face.

  “Mr. Hogg, what a surprise,” she said. “And roses. How generous!”

  She had indeed received his letters. She had just never gotten around to replying to them.

  “Well, did you?” he asked again.

  “No!” Alice lied. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Hogg. On the Continent the post is very unreliable. But never mind. How nice to see you again.”

  Mr. Hogg, who had suffered some kind of unfortunate skin condition as a boy, had a face as pitted and coarse as the skin of a Seville orange. And yet his eyes were of a vivid blue. His skin, however disfigured, now glowed with expectation, with pleasure, while his upper lip glistened with a thin film of sweat.

  “You’re looking—” began Mr. Hogg. But he had no adjectives or metaphors at his disposal. He was not, he often announced, an expressive kind of man. And so he left the sentence hanging unfinished and then cleared his throat.

  Alice blinked and smoothed down her dress. And then she fixed her face into an expression that sought to hide her disappointment.

  “Mr. Hogg is in the butchering trade,” Alice explained to her friend.

  “Pies,” said Mr. Hogg succinctly.

  Someone stifled a giggle. From another platform a whistle blew, and with a great sigh of steam and smoke, a train prepared to leave.

  “Well,” said Alice. “We must—”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Hogg with several nods of his head. And then Alice let out a squeal.

  “It’s Tiffie!” she said as a girl in a huge white hat approached. Behind her a man in his late thirties, her husband of a year, glanced at his watch. As the welcoming party shifted to admit Alice’s friend, Mr. Hogg and the husband were both excluded.

  In all the furor, Cait had climbed down from the carriage without any­one noticing. Alice did at one point glance over her shoulder as if she had forgotten something, and Jamie caught her eye and gave a small private wave, but then they were both swiftly swept away by nephews and cousins and school friends and long-lost acquaintances. Cait watched as the Arrols and their entourage made their way through the station, their voices shrill, their laughter filling the empty concourse. Four porters hurried behind them, each pulling trolleys piled high with luggage. Mr. Hogg trailed in their wake, the roses still in his hand, unsure if he was invited to wherever they were going.

  Now there was only one case left on the platform and it was hers. A porter looked around to see if there was anyone else, a man, to tell him what to do. When she was first married, it used to amuse her, the way drivers and porters were deaf to her voice and only seemed to hear her husband’s. Did she have to speak louder, or lower, to be heard?

  “Madam,” the porter asked, “does this belong to you?”

  They both looked down at the suitcase, shabby from six months’ use. It did not look like much, considering.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  “You’re not being met by anyone?” he asked.

  She shook her head no.

  “Where to, then?” he asked as he picked up the case.

  “The rank,” she told him. “I’ll take a hansom.”

  It was as they were walking through the station, she a little behind the porter, that she noticed William Arrol standing beneath the clock, tapping the tip of his huge umbrella on the ground impatiently. Now that the Lon­don train had disembarked, the station was almost deserted. As soon as he saw her, he raised a finger and marched across.

  “Mrs. Wallace, what a pleasure to see you back home safe,” he said. “Did you have an interesting time?”

  “Very,” she replied.

  His eyes darted over her shoulder.

  “I’m afraid you missed them,” she said. “By about ten minutes.”

  He looked disconcerted. “I got held up at the office.”

  Outside, it started to rain, a sudden downpour that thundered onto the glass of the station roof. He paused and glanced up.

  “We ordered it in especially,” he said. “To welcome you
home.”

  For a second she wasn’t sure how to respond. And then she realized he was joking.

  “Why, thank you.” She smiled. “And how is business?”

  “The construction of the Forth Rail Bridge is going well,” he said. “I’m just back from Queensferry. And the new Tay Bridge will open to traffic in July.”

  “Will there be a ceremony?” she asked.

  “Not this time,” he said softly. “Out of respect.”

  He paused. “How are you getting home, incidentally? Is anyone meeting you?”

  “I’m going to take a cab,” she said brightly.

  It took a moment for her words to register. And when they did, he seemed shocked.

  “I’m so sorry. My nephew should have sorted this out.”

  “No, really,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “My coachman will take you,” he said. “I insist. It’s the least I could do to thank you for bringing them both back in one piece.”

  “You haven’t seen them yet,” she replied.

  He frowned at her for an instant and then let out a short blast of a laugh. “Aye, right,” he said.

  William Arrol was a large man with hands as wide and short as trowels. As if to make up for the hands, his lack of education, and his impoverished background, he was always beautifully dressed, his white hair combed, his muttonchops trimmed, his collar freshly laundered. And yet, although he may have been unaware of it, he betrayed himself in a multitude of tiny ways; he wore too much cologne, his sleeves were cut a little too short, he mispronounced words, such as premise and expertise and emphasis. Once you got to know him, however, he revealed the kind of intelligence that could not be learned from a book.