Mary met this news with ambivalence. She was furious that her father had refused her declaration of independence in favor of more control, but on the other hand, though the commission payment from the Ellisons had come in, it was by no means enough to ensure her financial autonomy.
Your father believes this new state of affairs will force you to focus and thereby guarantee your success. To date, we have engaged passage on the St. Laurent of the General Transatlantic Line on October 4th, and will arrive on the 14th; from Le Havre we will then take the express train to the Gare du Nord and hire a hack to whichever address you eventually engage. Please send the address as soon as you can so that we can ship ahead. As you know, my French is excellent, but all the same I shall write down the address for the driver, who should be able to find it but they can sometimes feign ignorance as I remember from my last visit—
In the early morning silence, Anna was bustling in the kitchen, making another pot of tea, slicing bread, spooning jam. These domestic clatterings were the only sound Mary heard in the dreamy haze of morning, before she began to work. Today, before the postman had delivered the letter, she’d been staring at a blank canvas, preparing herself, agonizing over tone and hue, brushstroke and subject, perspective and line. Maybe she suffered from her subject matter, as Degas had recently suggested after another evening at the Manets’. Paint what is real, he had said, what you see before you, the grit life is made of, not some formal ideation. Paint the men and women who travel up and down the street; paint the hod carriers. Or better yet, paint what people hide. What people hide is more real than what they show.
She had to give up this constant thinking of him. She liked to believe that whether or not Edgar Degas had ever entered her life, she would have changed the way she painted in the end, perhaps not as soon, but eventually. His encouragement might have been the reason she had decided to stay in Paris, but she would have gone on painting in Philadelphia, though whether or not even this was true was a question she might never answer. But she was not stupid. She knew the extraordinary when she saw it. Edgar Degas painted in a way that negated all art before it.
Careful, dear. You are exaggerating.
But if you don’t devote, if you don’t commit, then is anything really worth doing?
Of course not, but do entertain some perspective.
Already her father’s voice was in her head, before he was even in France. She imagined suffering his daily scrutiny, his unwelcome opinions, his scorn. What might he make of the Manets’ salon, of Renoir’s less than genteel poverty, of the tangle of the Manets’ familial relations that both Berthe and Degas had alluded to?
And what might her father make of Degas? Neither he nor his paintings shied away from the brutal: nudity as professional uniform for the demimonde in the most unflattering postures; ballet dancers more strangely ugly than beautiful. He had shown her more of these last Thursday, when he’d invited her to his studio and apartment on the Rue Frochot, his studio two railroad rooms separated by an alcove, up a spiral staircase off the building’s entry. The first room was a dim place fraught with chaos: unframed canvases three and four deep lining the wall on the floor, stacks of notebooks and portfolios teetering on tables too small for their burdens, sketches and drawings toppling from the fireplace mantel, studies pinned to the walls, their subjects drawn over precisely graphed penciled grids, others spilling from half-open drawers, their triangle corners draped over the bureau hardware. Shutters covered the casement windows and the close confines smelled of turpentine and oil paint and dust, a miasmic cloud of familiar scents that made Mary feel at home, though the disorder confounded. As she looked about the room, Degas hung back, his tweed coat threadbare at his wrists, his smile an invitation of agitation and pleasure. He’d removed his glasses when they’d come in and he peered at her now to see how she was taking the shambles.
She said, “How do you find anything?”
He shrugged. “Frightening, isn’t it?”
Through the alcove, a second room opened to a wall of windows that betrayed mean balconies opening onto an alley, where neglected pots of straggly carnations and limp baby’s breath suffered on the edges of broken flagstones. Cardboard boxes of sculpting wax dominated the space under those far windows. Two easels, their wooden poles like masts at sea, supported two paintings, but they were turned, so Mary couldn’t see the canvases. A small intaglio press, its drum and wheel glinting in the noon glare, was pushed against the wall.
“You do prints,” Mary said. It wasn’t a question, but a memory, rising. The work her friend Louisine had purchased had been a monotype, enhanced with pastel and gouache, the shock of color against the black and white an astonishing surprise.
“Tourny taught me. I’m surprised he didn’t offer to teach you.”
“Have you seen the Japanese prints at that new shop on the Rue de Rivoli?” Mary said, turning. “Off center, color-blocked, flat perspective? They’re stunning.”
“I haven’t. You’ll show me. We’ll go together.”
They returned to the first room. He offered her a seat, not bothering to dust from the deflated seat cushion the powdery residue of months of scraped paint. In his old studio on the Rue Blanche he would have had his sitting room and its luxurious appointments to welcome her—well, he wouldn’t allow himself the pity. One made do, and one didn’t complain, because you couldn’t change anything, especially the actions of careless parents. How could his father have calculated so badly? And not to tell him. Such a mess.
He did not open a window to let in light or fresh air. Instead, he lighted a lamp, its dusky wax intimating the musky skull of the sperm whale that had donated its life so that Degas could see. Hunched over, he began to flip through the thicket of canvases lining the wall.
“I used to have an Ingres and a couple of de La Tours. Not Fantin’s, you understand, but two gorgeous pastels by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. You know him, don’t you? He drew Voltaire and the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis the Fifteenth’s mistress.”
“Of course I do.”
“But I had to sell them,” Degas said, as plaintively as if he had said, I had to sell my children. “When my father died, I discovered that he was not as skilled a banker as he had led me to believe. You don’t suspect these things will ever happen. These are swords falling from the sky. And now I find myself hindered. We, my sisters and brothers and I, are shackled to grubbing for money to pay my father’s creditors when all I wish to do is make art. One of my sisters might have to move to Argentina to live just to be able to feed her children. Can you imagine? My Ingres fetched a great deal of money, but not enough, it may turn out, to keep her here. And oh, how I miss my Ingres. It hurts me to be without that perfect drawing. As if someone had lopped off my finger. I don’t understand money. It just disappears into a great maw, somehow, and you are left with nothing in the end, not even your family.”
He pulled from the jumble a canvas, presenting it to her cradled in his arms. The painting was a landscape of plowed fields, interrupted by three bare trees and two figures walking into a November horizon and the advent of an endless winter. “Do you know whose this is?”
She didn’t.
“Pissarro’s. Splendid, isn’t it? I’m fond of neither peasants nor landscapes, but there is something so real about this. And look at this one.” After more hunting, he produced a canvas of peasants riding atop a brimming hay wagon drawn by two horses down a lane. “What I love in this one are his lines: intersecting, askew, varied.” He gazed at the unframed canvas, held now at arm’s length. “I could learn to love landscapes if only Monet would paint like Pissarro. God, what Monet could learn from him if he would only pay attention.”
“You don’t like Monsieur Monet?”
“His brushstroke is lazy.”
“Then why do you exhibit with him?”
“Because the Salon won’t have him.”
“Are all these canvases by other artists?”
“No. Most of the rest are mine
.”
“And you don’t hang them?”
“God, no. If I had to look at them, I’d rework them all and never begin anything new. I see every mistake of composition, of brushstroke, of line. They are all flawed, every one of them.” He sighed. “I am weary. I will never finish anything.” He pulled from among the stacks images of the ballet: rehearsals and performances, prints, sketches, oil paintings, pastels, an obsessive profusion of devotion. On more canvases, laundresses scrubbed linen, jockeys rode horses; his much-referred-to hod carriers were not hod carriers at all, but jockeys and laundresses and ballerinas. The pictures lacked any specific romance: The laundresses were workaday rather than glorified; the ballet scenes objective rather than sentimental; but what they both captured was movement, as if Degas were not capturing the memory of the moment, but the viewer instead. And it was more than brushstroke, more than color, more than the play of light, the instruments of his colleagues; his perspective obliterated separation. The viewer was in the room, the audience, the bathing room with the subject, as if there were no distance at all between the viewer and the viewed. As if the canvas didn’t exist.
“How do you do this?” Mary’s throat was raw, the scorch of desire so strong that she could hardly get out the words. “How do you make the figures move, the canvas disappear?”
“Gesture.”
“Held?”
“No. Made. Repeated. Modeled.”
“From life?”
“Yes and no. From what I observe on the streets, primarily, here and there, dinners, cafés, anywhere. I watch how people move; they have no idea that I am raping their lives. Then I make my models reproduce the gesture I want over and over again while I render it on paper. When I finally have it, I trace and retrace it until I can draw the line from memory. Voilà: movement.”
“Nothing spontaneous? Nothing from the moment?”
“Nothing in my art is ever from the moment. Nothing about it is ever spontaneous.”
“And yet it looks as if it is. As if you have deciphered the heart of motion.” Mary was near tears. Her pictures implied motion, but it was the motion of imagination—contrived, fanciful, false. His was the motion of life. “It’s extraordinary. It looks effortless.”
“Effortless?” Degas’s placid expression twisted into a fiery swirl of pursed lips and forehead. “What do you think? That this is easy for me? That I could decide to paint something and then it magically appears from my hand? That I have some gift, that my work arrives finished, that this is not a struggle for me?”
“No. Not at all, but—”
“It’s an insult for you to think that I do not work. That I do not have to earn every painting, every print, every drawing I produce.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you. I was merely asking—I was admiring—”
“You’re not stupid. Don’t say stupid things.”
“I wasn’t.”
He turned away, the tails of his coat brushing a stack of tracings to the already littered floor. His sudden fury seemed to have enervated him, for within seconds he turned to face her, his shoulders drooping with regret, but Mary was already pulling on her coat, lunging for the stairwell, for escape. Up the echoing spiral of stairs, laughter floated from the street, where people were meeting for lunch, for coffee, going about their days, concerned only with the simple needs of their lives.
“Wait. Please,” Degas said.
Mary could not name what tide of emotion rooted her in place. Dust motes danced in the yellow light of the stairway; the clatter of a passing carriage made them shiver and shimmy in arabesques of beauty.
“You must know that if you treat me as everybody else does—as if I am not real—then we are lost, you and I,” Degas said.
“You are wrong. We are lost if you mistake my intentions. It is not an insult to wish to paint as someone else does. To admire someone. To be in awe.”
“Your adulation will give me a power over you I do not want to wield.”
“Desire is not deference. Admiration is not capitulation.”
“It always has been in the past. And it always curdles to envy.”
She turned. “I promise you, nothing terrible will happen between us because I admire you.”
“You must speak to me differently,” Degas said. “As if you are accomplished. As if you need nothing from me.”
“But I don’t know how to do what you do. And I want to know, more than I want anything.”
“You must understand. Every day I awake and wonder how I’m going to get through the day. I have to draw and redraw endless lines upon endless lines, tracing within grids to get the perspective right, to perfect the proportions, to establish the composition. And even then I get it wrong. I have nothing of talent. I have only desire and dogged work. I doubt myself every moment. If you do not allow me my weaknesses, if you do not acknowledge my pain, then I am alone. Do you see?”
“You’re not alone. I feel the same.”
“But you won’t believe that I do.”
He was right. The something, the leap an artist makes so that his painting is more than its technique, he had already achieved. And she wanted that. She wanted his brain to seep inside hers, his vision to be her vision, his skill to be her skill. She wanted to hear him talk about everything, and by doing so, help her make that elusive jump. Was that wrong? Perhaps it was, if she couldn’t offer him anything in return.
No master in need of disciples he, only a man afraid of being alone. How different he was in private. She could hardly reconcile the public man of banter and repartee with the pleading man before her. She thought about what Berthe Morisot had said to her, and decided that Berthe didn’t know the real Edgar Degas, who was as needy as anyone.
“Skill is only an accumulation of attentive work,” he said, his hands falling to his side. “I cannot teach you how to work. I don’t know how to save you from the pain of it.”
“I don’t want you to tell me how to work. I want to divine the mystery.”
“But mystery is indefinable, and therefore divine.”
“This moment. This is all I want. To speak of the divinity of art,” Mary said.
“The precipice of eternity—”
“Is where artists work.”
His gaze sharpened as he assessed her, calculating, she thought, how much credit he might give to her for divining his thoughts, for finishing his sentence, for understanding him.
Degas gestured then. A simple but elegant turn of his wrist, almost balletic in its grace. “I just want to lay my head somewhere.”
“What do you think salvation is if not respite?” Mary said.
He held her gaze a long while, a perfect light now falling through the tall windows of the courtyard, a light to covet, a light to work by, a light to compel an artist to rush into the street to hire a model, anyone, to take advantage of its beauty; he said, “Would you sit for me?”
The rasp of the charcoal on the sketching paper, the tear of the sheets and their falling to the floor, his furious crumpling of paper, his exasperated shouts of frustration, his terse orders to hold, goddammit, he wasn’t getting it, could she do it again, the turning of her head, the dropping of her chin, the smell of dust and turpentine in the sunlit studio, the plaintive wail of an infant across the alley resolving to a gurgle of pleasure, the hour in which he could look at her as intently as he liked and she could allow him to do it, even the fatigue of sitting on the stool, the undoubted cramp in his hand—all this carried them beyond intimacy. She remained clothed; he asked for nothing.
It seemed as if she had known him forever.
• • •
Maybe she had always been hurtling toward him. Maybe her endless arguments with her father at the dinner table in Philadelphia had always had as their end that moment, when the dust of pretense fell away and she surrendered. She turned her mother’s letter to the next page, certain that Degas would not have mourned this development as she was, certain now that having lost his father, he would cher
ish his company if he could only have him back, despite his financial troubles. Her father’s primary motivation, it seemed, was money, yes, but life did come down to economics, as Degas had so brutally learned. In France, the exchange rate was five francs to the American dollar; living here was cheaper than in America. And Lydia, darling Lydia, would be back—not forced, like Degas’s sister might be, to move to Argentina to be able to eat.
Since returning to America from her visit to Paris last year, Lydia hadn’t been well. The French doctors seemed better able than the Americans to hold Lydia’s malady at bay. Back home, her illness had flared and retreated without reason, much like Degas’s eye problem. But their parents, particularly their father, had wanted Lydia with them. He could be so selfish, her father, with his daughters’ lives, no matter that they were grown women. For medical reasons alone it would be better for Lydia to be back in Paris, to say nothing of Mary’s happiness at once again having her sister’s company. And since they would all live together, Mary would only be responsible for her studio expenses. And her mother had never failed to be lively, good company. It might not be too bad, Mary thought. But then she tried to imagine her parents and Lydia at the Manets’ salon and sighed.
I Always Loved You Page 10