Weekend in Paris

by Robyn Sisman

  To begin with, she felt faintly embarrassed to stand beside Fabrice as they gazed at the more explicitly erotic pieces. It was impossible to look at so many bodies in wanton display and not be aroused. Fabrice’s presence gave everything an extra charge. When he told her that, even for his clothed figures, Rodin had often made a nude study first, so that he could be sure how the clothes would hang, she could not help looking at Fabrice himself in a new way, observing the twin curves of his shoulder blades under his T-shirt, the taut stretch of jeans between his hipbones and down his thighs.

  Fabrice led her from room to room, full of talk and expansive gestures. In this group of apparently different men, he showed her, the figures were in fact identical; they had merely been positioned at different angles. Wasn’t it remarkable how a change in physical perspective elicited such different emotions? And this pair of hands, upright and almost clasped, the fingers not quite touching: had she noticed that they were not, in fact, a pair, but two right hands? Comme ça? He seized her right wrist and raised it diagonally to his own in demonstration. “Rodin thought it was more graceful not to have the same fingers opposing each other,” he explained seriously. Then his expression softened. “But look at your little tiny hands.” He pressed his palm flat against hers; the tip of his middle finger projected a good inch beyond hers. He smiled and Molly reeled, as if she’d been plugged into the mains.

  From time to time he drifted away to examine something more closely, but Molly no longer felt neglected. The work exerted its own emotional forcefield; Fabrice colored her responses to everything she saw. In one of the downstairs rooms she came across The Kiss, the sculpture of a naked, embracing couple she’d seen in countless photographs but never in its full-size, three-dimensional reality. Now she noticed the way the woman’s foot pressed on top of the man’s as he pulled her close, a detail of such tenderness and sensuality that she felt her own body stir.

  There was one piece she kept returning to, a woman folded facedown on the ground, her spine gently curved, long hair flowing forward from the nape of her bowed neck to reveal one exquisitely delicate ear. A printed caption explained that this represented a mythical story about a young woman in hell, condemned to pour water forever into a bottomless vase. Molly leaned her cheek against her fingers, her imagination caught, her sympathy engaged. The marble was lustrously smooth and polished, showing every swell and ripple of the beautiful young body stretched in despair. When Fabrice returned to her side, she found she had tears in her eyes.

  He looked into her face. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” Molly turned her head away. “A little. It’s just so beautiful, and so sad.”

  “Ah, Molly.” He brushed a finger under each eye, and took her hand. “Come. We’ll go into the garden.”

  They stepped out into the warm sun and wandered down a pathway overhung with lime trees. Two little girls with impossibly shiny blonde hair skipped ahead of them. In the distance Molly could see a small café arranged outside, in dappled shade; from the girls’ happy shrieks she gathered that ice cream had been promised. With her new eyes, she noticed the sheen of their smooth calves and the fragile structure of their ankles. She was intensely aware of Fabrice’s hand in hers, and tried to imagine how Rodin might render its contours of flesh and ingenuities of bone to capture everything she felt about him.

  “What about your art, Fabrice?” she asked him. “Do you want to be a sculptor, too?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have the talent. Drawing and painting are what I like best, especially the human body. But that’s unfashionable. My friends think I’m crazy. They tell me I have no originality.”

  Molly’s eyes kindled with outrage. She was quite sure that Fabrice was brilliantly talented. She remembered him telling her that he’d dropped out of art school. “That’s not why you’ve given up, is it?”

  “No.” His face darkened. “It is my father. He refuses to pay the fees.”

  “But why?”

  Fabrice shrugged. “I failed some exams.”

  “But that’s so unfair! Rodin failed his exams, too, you told me, and look what a genius he turned out to be.”

  “That’s true. But it’s no good arguing with my father. He’s a very rigid man. I can’t talk to him. He won’t even help pay for a studio. I have to share a room with some other guys. Unheated. Filthy.”

  Molly sighed with sympathy. But it was hard to be too depressed. They had reached the end of the lime avenue, and now turned to follow the curve of a large pond, with one of Rodin’s most tortured sculptures at its center, and two more positioned on either side. There were wooden benches here, at the end of the garden, facing back toward the house. In harmony of mind and body, Molly and Fabrice sat down on one, and stared in silence at the view. The house, pleasingly symmetrical, glowed back at them across a long strip of smooth, untenanted lawn (“Pelouse interdite”), its topmost pediment reflected in the still water of the pond. Sunshine slanted from the west, still meltingly warm. Unselfconsciously, Molly took off her jacket and relaxed against the bench. Through half-closed eyes she watched tourists, encumbered with cameras and plugged into audio tours, crunch up and down the gravel paths, moving from statue to statue with the dazed, meandering gait of giant herbivores on the brink of extinction.

  “I like your dress,” said Fabrice. “That color is fabulous for you.”

  Molly smiled lazily. After a moment, he shifted closer and slid an arm around her. His fingers fluttered against the skin of her shoulder.

  “Alors, you think I’m a genius.” He said it as if it were a joke.

  “You never know until you try. Maybe your father simply can’t afford the fees.”

  She felt Fabrice’s chest heave as he gave a derisive grunt. “He’s loaded with dosh.” (Bourr, de fric : the phrase was unfamiliar, but its meaning was easy to decipher from the way he shook out his fingers from the wrist, and blew a whistling breath through pursed lips.) “He’s just stingy. He thinks only of himself. I bet your father’s not like that.”

  Molly didn’t answer.

  “Well, is he?”

  “My father’s dead.” As always, when she said these words, a fist seemed to tighten around her heart. She stared at the gravel.

  “C’est vrai? ” Fabrice jerked forward to peer into her face. He seemed profoundly agitated. “Poor Molly.” He put his other arm around her and hugged her close. She could feel his lips against her hair. “My mother, too, she is dead. She died when I was fourteen years old.”

  “Oh, Fabrice, I’m sorry.” Molly curved a hand up to his forearm and rubbed it gently, feeling the tension in his muscles.

  “I detest funerals, don’t you?” he burst out. “Everyone in black. Those hypocritical priests. The smell of incense. I don’t like to go inside churches now, even to look at paintings.”

  Molly felt unbearably sorry for him—and guilty, too, unworthy of his pity. “It’s different for me. I—I never knew my father.”

  “He died when you were a baby?”

  Molly made a small movement of her head. She didn’t deny it.

  “That’s tragic.”

  With a bitter exclamation he turned to stare at the calm house floating above its sea of green. In profile he looked broodingly intent, and so handsome that Molly imagined herself grabbing his face and wildly pressing her lips to that hollow under his cheekbone. She dug her fingernails into her palms. What was happening to her? She should be ashamed of such thoughts at a moment like this. His mother was dead.

  “Do you miss her very much?” she asked.

  “Every day I suffer.”

  Molly was moved by his simple statement. Je souffre. French was so direct and unembarrassed.

  “And you suffer also.” Fabrice captured her hand and held it tightly. His marvellous, melancholy eyes gazed into hers. “You and I,” he told her solemnly, “we are twins of sorrow.”

  Jumeaux de la tristesse. How poetic it sounded. How persuasive was the image it conjured up of herself
and Fabrice, bound together by the shared experience of a dead parent. But it wasn’t true. She had lied to him. She always lied.

  Her eyes slid away, as she struggled against a painful confusion of feelings. She hated her deceit, when Fabrice was so open. She felt inflamed by his hot hands pressing on her flesh, and chilled by the old, cold secret she carried alone. Her mind teemed with Rodin’s images of bodies caught in the throes of ecstasy or agony—breasts offered for caress, mouths wrenched with pain; muscled legs, rounded thighs, hands fisted in despair. Everything seemed so much more emotional in French.

  “Don’t move!” Fabrice commanded.

  But the urgency in his voice made Molly turn to him at once.

  “You moved.” His thick eyebrows were drawn accusingly. There was a new intensity about him that made her a little frightened.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Your face just then . . . the light . . .” He zigzagged his hand through the air, scooping invisible shapes. “It was extraordinary. For a moment, it was as if I could see into your soul.”

  Her soul! (me, not âne.) Molly’s eyes widened.

  “Come.” He jumped up, and pulled her to her feet. “I want to paint you. Now.”

  Molly tottered on her boots. He wanted to paint her! But she had no bone structure. Would she have to take off her clothes? “But how?” she asked. “Where?”

  “We can go to the studio. It’s not far.” He yanked impatiently at her hand. Molly resisted, tugging him to a standstill while she tried to think.

  Fabrice stepped close, pressed his body hard against hers and kissed her roughly on the lips. She could feel his teeth. His fingers dug into her spine. When she opened her eyes again, the light dazzled. A green horizon tilted, and steadied. Fabrice rested his forehead against hers. She felt their eyelashes brush. “You permit me?” he asked.

  Molly didn’t say anything because she had no breath to do so. She wiped a trembling finger across her bruised bottom lip, and nodded.

  13

  There was a butcher’s shop at street-level, displaying flayed rabbits, ducks in full feather hanging by their iridescent necks, and black sausages wound in snaky coils. Their gamy smell pursued her as Molly climbed upward after Fabrice, past silent apartments whose half-glazed doors, shrouded with lace, allowed a grayish glow to seep onto the landings. Wooden steps sagged rottenly under their tread. At the top, Molly waited in the gloom while Fabrice, still in a fever of artistic impatience, tussled with a padlock. Finally, it yielded. Fabrice pushed the door wide, and Molly followed him into a long, narrow attic.

  The floorboards were bare and dusty, splodged with paint. There were no windows, only squares of wire-meshed glass let into the roof, on which pigeons’ feet scrabbled. Canvases lay in disarray against the sloping walls; an overflowing waste-bin squatted in one corner, surrounded by empty beer bottles. The furniture consisted of four easels, two wooden chairs, an ironwork daybed with a mattress and tattered bolsters, and a large metal table piled with artists’ clutter: rolls of paper, stacks of board, old tins jammed with paintbrushes, spray cans, sticks of charcoal, crumpled rags, misshapen tubes oozing pigment, and a blackening banana that Molly felt sure must once have formed part of a still life. It could not have been more romantic.

  “Over here, where the light is good.” Fabrice was energetically dragging the daybed under one of the skylights. Molly hurried to help. She saw that he had already taken off his jacket and hooked it on a nail by the door. Other garments hung beside it—paint-smeared overalls, someone’s raincoat, exotic folds of peacock-blue silk that looked like a woman’s kimono. Of course Fabrice must use models: that was only to be expected.

  Molly felt a flutter of nervousness. On the way here, swaying on the back of his scooter, she had decided that she would be prepared—if necessary—to pose naked. It would take courage, but sometimes personal scruples had to be sacrificed for a greater good. Rodin’s example was hot in her memory. The voluptuous poses that had caused outrage a hundred years ago were now universally admired. Fabrice, too, would have his own creative vision, which ordinary people like herself could not grasp. Even thinking about the wanton positions Fabrice might force her to adopt had made Molly give a little gasp (fortunately drowned by the timely toot of a car horn). But she must not be prudish, especially in France. If Fabrice turned out to be a genius—well, he might (the thought had made her squeeze her eyes tight and hug him with excitement)—she would be immortalized. It was a great responsibility. Thank goodness she had shaved her legs this morning.

  “Take off your jacket,” said Fabrice.

  Here goes, Molly thought.

  But all he did was carry it off to a spare nail, then stride over to the big table and start rummaging for materials. He seemed brusque and absorbed.

  Feeling superfluous, Molly wandered round the room. At the far end there was a narrow door, set into a flimsy partition wall. She opened it and peeked inside, only to withdraw her head quickly from the sight of a murky lavatory and a wash-basin evidently used for cleaning brushes. She continued her prowl past the canvases, peering with silent respect, wondering which were Fabrice’s. One painting was still propped against an easel. It looked like a very complicated paint-by-numbers kit, with the contours of a giant female face crudely outlined in black, and strange mathematical calculations scrawled in each white space.

  “Those are the chemical formulae for each of the pigments,” Fabrice explained, noting her interest. “My mate François believes that art must at all costs avoid the obvious. But, then, he has a spider on the ceiling.”

  Molly glanced up anxiously, then remembered that this was an idiom, like “bats in the belfry.” She was relieved that the picture was not Fabrice’s work. She had a vision of herself drawn like one of those posters of a pig’s carcass at the butcher’s, with dotted lines dividing “Chop” from “Loin.”

  “Come on. Quickly.” Fabrice had his easel in place now, a fistful of brushes in one hand. His sleeves were pushed up to the elbow, his hair raked back.

  Molly swallowed, and walked awkwardly toward the daybed, agog at what he might now ask her to do. “Like this?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at her dress. “Or do you want me to, you know, change?”

  “What?” Fabrice glanced up impatiently. “No, no. The red is good for painting. Sit down.”

  Molly perched on the edge of the mattress, knees together, hands in her lap, and watched him squeeze different colors onto a bit of board. Purple! What on earth was he going to do with that?

  Fabrice raised his eyes and fixed them on her with such intensity that Molly couldn’t help smiling back. He was so lovely to look at, with the light from above making his face a wonder of sharp lines and angled planes. She should be painting him—except that she didn’t have the talent.

  Fabrice gave an exasperated sigh. “Not like that. I’m not taking your photograph, you know.”

  “Sorry.” She crossed her legs and leant back a little. “Is this better?”

  She could tell from his expression that it wasn’t. Oh dear. She was already a failure: not beautiful enough to paint naked, or indeed at all. “I’m sorry,” she repeated helplessly. “I don’t know what you want.”

  Fabrice waved a hand. “Don’t look at me. Concentrate on something else. Take off your boots. Relax. Dream. What were you thinking about in the garden? You had such a beautiful expression, très mélancolique.”

  Molly bent obediently to unlace her boots, and cast her mind back to the sunny bench. What had she been thinking about? Fabrice, of course. Fabrice’s mother, who had died. His ogre of a father. Her father . . . She eased her feet free, swung her bare legs onto the mattress and stretched out on her side, settling her elbow as comfortably as she could on one of the bolsters. She wondered what would have happened if she’d been brave enough to tell Fabrice the truth about her father.

  “Eyes higher,” he commanded. “Look at the wall . . . Relax your other hand . . . That’s it.”

&nbs
p; He sounded remote, withdrawn. She wasn’t even allowed to look at him. It was too late for talking. Deep down, she was relieved. To share her secret would be to lose its addictive mystery. It gave her a strange shiver of pleasure to know that, however good an artist Fabrice might be, he could never paint what was inside her head. Dream, he had said. Molly leaned her cheek on her hand, thinking about the lie she had told him, and the truth as it should have been. She let her eyes drift out of focus until the patch of grimy wall evaporated to a smoky nothing, and waited for the pictures to come.

  She was standing on stage in a large auditorium, accepting an award. Applause thundered in her ears. Spotlights danced in her eyes. It was a very glamorous ceremony, but she felt calm and in control because she, too, was glamorous. With all the hard work that had gone into winning this award, her body had miraculously toned itself and the weight had simply melted away. Her dress was perfect.

  Walking triumphantly offstage, she was immediately engulfed in a babble of congratulations from her many friends and colleagues. Someone handed her a glass of champagne. As she raised it to her lips, she couldn’t help noticing a man standing on the fringes of the group, staring at her with admiration and intense curiosity. He was around fifty, tall and handsome, with distinguished graying hair, and an air of cultured elegance that hinted at sophisticated European origins. Though Molly was sure she had never seen him before, she felt an inexplicable tug of familiarity. While she chatted gaily she was aware of him watching her, but he bided his time until the crush had subsided and he was able to find his way to her side. He had an intelligent face, and kind eyes in which Molly thought she could detect a hint of sadness. As they talked, she felt once again a strange prickle of recognition. He told her his name: Jackson Carruthers. It meant nothing to her, of course, but when he asked if he might take her round the corner for dinner, she cast all her other invitations to the wind, and accepted.