I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  She went to him, her footsteps slow and measured. He had never seemed more essential to her. He was stripped of his defenses, his armor, his mocking wit; his need, naked and pure, beguiled. But more than his mind, here was his soul, asking for her. She would need help with her buttons; he would need to unlace her corset, help free her of her bustle. These were skills he no doubt had perfected in his life, though she didn’t know for certain, didn’t know what happened behind his doors when models visited.

  He kissed her. He put his hand to her cheek and kissed her for a very long time, affection transforming to need, then to hunger, then beyond, to a place where she had no will. She did not resist, though she thought she ought to because she was not a woman to let herself be seduced. She was not a woman who made undisciplined choices. She was none of these things, yet here she was, being all those things and more. His hands began unbuttoning her shirtwaist. He pulled it off, unhooked the sash at her waist, unbuttoned her skirt. It fell to the floor. He did not stop kissing her. He asked her to turn. She did. He unhooked her corset. She held it to herself while he disrobed, first his smock, then his shirt and pants. He untied her petticoats and they, too, dropped to the floor. He pulled over the tarp that had covered the girl and spread it on the floor, and in that moment she thought she should stop, but she didn’t. She kneeled on the floor with him and then she lay down beside him and he took her corset from her.

  “Are you certain?” he said.

  She could not bring herself to answer, but she meant no just as much as she meant yes, and in that noisy silence he kissed her again and then there was no more no. There was no drawing, either. There was only clumsy touch and willing surrender, timeless discovery and shocked astonishment, and when it was over, the fear that she had been enticed forever into the tangle of him.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  In the first days after their encounter, Degas chose not to see Mary. He wrote to her that he was much taken up with getting his canvases to the exhibition but that he would come to see her soon. He then spread the task over several days, hoping that Mary would understand that he did not yet wish to see her, and that his note was not an invitation to come and help him with the hanging. Because the exhibition was now open, he had to hang his paintings while visitors strolled among the rooms, and the startling sight of an artist with a hammer bewildered many of them.

  “Who do you think hangs them?” Degas spat, after a man made a disagreeable number of comments of increasing stupidity. The inquirer gaped and then hurried away, grumbling to the woman on his arm about the arrogance of artists. Degas turned back to his task but was interrupted again when someone else said, “Could you tell me how you get your ideas? Because I’m trying to paint, and I don’t know where to start.”

  Degas turned in a rage, only to find Édouard Manet leaning on his cane, mocking hilarity enlivening his haggard face.

  “You are trying to get yourself killed is what you are trying to do. I nearly threw this thing at you,” Degas said.

  “I’m here to kidnap you. Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you come to my opening party?”

  He had forgotten all about Édouard’s party. That was the night he had been with Mary. “I took ill. How did you know I’d be here?”

  “When you weren’t home, I went looking for you at Mademoiselle Cassatt’s. She said you would be here.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Sabine?”

  Édouard shrugged “Oh, Sabine told me. I’m just very fond of Mademoiselle Cassatt. As are you, I might point out. That one is crooked,” he said, pointing with his cane at a canvas that Degas had just hung and which was perfectly straight. He made a dozen other comments of questionable helpfulness until Degas finished hanging the last of his canvases, gave the ticket seller the hammer, and announced that he was done.

  “And what about the dancer?” the girl asked.

  “She won’t be coming,” Degas said.

  “Caillebotte must be thrilled,” Édouard said.

  “Caillebotte is no longer speaking to me.”

  “You must be more careful with your friends, Degas. We’ve just lost Duranty.” They had gotten the news only yesterday, when it rippled through Montmartre like a gunshot: Duranty, dead.

  It took Édouard an enormous amount of effort to descend the stairs. Outside, he navigated the cobbles of the sidewalk, stumbling every once in a while and wincing from the pain. They had not gone fifteen feet before Édouard said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to use the carriage.”

  In the past, Édouard would have scoffed at taking a carriage for a walk of less than two miles; he loved walking as much as he loved women, and Degas felt this loss for his friend as keenly as he felt all the others. They climbed into the carriage, which he had kept waiting on the corner in case, for the brief trip to the Charpentiers’ gallery, La Vie Moderne.

  There, Degas fell into rapture. “My God, Édouard, you will never paint an untrue painting in your life.” The vibrancy of the oils and pastels, all of them newly done in the past year, belied Édouard’s condition. Degas was relieved that no siege of illness could ever dim this man’s facility with a brush, no matter that he was falling into the hell of an illness he still would not acknowledge. “You are the incarnation of modernity. You are one of us, Édouard. I don’t know why you’ve refused to exhibit with us all these years. Everything about your work is a revelation.”

  “Your paltry little exhibition is a cloister, effectively separating new art from the Salon,” Édouard said. “I wish to force the Salon to acknowledge us. I’ve sent in two pieces this year and I have every belief they’ll be accepted.”

  Degas rather doubted the Salon would take them; he feared his friend was far too optimistic. The Salon jury enjoyed nothing more than belittling him at every chance.

  Édouard’s admirers delayed them, emitting congenial laughter and gasps of praise when they greeted him, a joyful clamor that resonated in the small gallery, where the number of visitors, Degas was not surprised to see, exceeded theirs by too many to count. While Édouard was gathering compliments, Degas fielded jibes about his empty vitrine from not a few attendees and managed to fend off more with an icy stare. When Édouard finally exhausted his need to hear how wonderful he was, he went with Degas for luncheon to the Café de la Rochefoucauld. Ensconced at a small table far from the window so no passing friends could find them, Édouard lolled on the bench that lined the long wall of the café, one elbow hung nonchalantly over the lip of its back, his despised cane forgotten on the bench beside him. The dreamy wash of too much wine soon gave him the appearance of loosened serenity. During the meal, they discussed his canvases. Édouard’s pastel of Zola’s wife had been a favorite of Degas’s.

  “I have to say, Zola gushed over it. I delivered it myself to Medon when it was finished,” Édouard said. “You should have seen him argue with me when I asked him to lend it back for the show. He adores it.”

  “Zola will never return to us,” Degas said. He was glad for this time with Édouard alone, not only because his sociable friend usually preferred to wallow in a scrum of sociability but because he was rarely given to tête-à-têtes. Also, this time with Édouard helped him to avoid thinking any more about Mary. “Zola won’t, in a spasm of appreciation, join our circle again. He has his own now. He and Maupassant meet at Café de la Paix. Don’t try to woo a writer with your talent, Manet, despite how much you think your poet friend Mallarmé loves you. Writers despise us, and none too secretly. You’ll never get Albert Wolff to write you a good review. Leave the writers be. Art is one thing, literature another.”

  “Maupassant doesn’t despise me,” Édouard said, smiling and taking another sip of wine. “It’s you he can’t stand.”

  “You are the worst kind of bourgeois, Édouard,” Degas said. “You are an artist who wants to be loved. You love to be loved, even more than you love art. Why do you chase glory? Don’t you understand how fickle the world is? How little declared love means? Not only does the world n
ot care about you, but those who you think care about you do not care. You are alone. We are born alone and we die alone and in between any dalliance or declaration that is made is a temporary respite from the damnable truth. You dream of love, but there is no love. It doesn’t exist.” By the end of his speech, Degas was aware his voice had risen, but he could not help himself; Édouard could infuriate him.

  Unoffended, Édouard reared up from the bench, leaning over the marble table and the scattered remnants of their meal. “Dalliance? What is this? Edgar Degas, speaking of love? What has happened? A man who doesn’t believe that love exists is a man wounded. Has someone broken your heart?”

  Degas fiddled with the stem of his wineglass, furious. It was maddening how one’s secrets always made themselves manifest. And the relentless Édouard would delight in sniffing out the cause of his rant. “What do you know of broken hearts?” he said.

  “Everything.”

  Édouard’s gaze slipped away, and Degas wished he had thought of another way to best Édouard. The poor man would never be free of his obsession with Berthe. After the birth of Julie, Berthe had made a religion of her marriage. The others, Isabelle Lemonnier and Méry Laurent, were nothing to Édouard but feeble variances of Berthe.

  “Ah, I know,” Édouard said, coming to himself. “You cannot seduce the brilliant Mademoiselle Cassatt.”

  Degas endeavored not to change his expression or tone. He hearkened back to that moment when he and Édouard had first seen Mary at the Salon. Now he would have to imply that he had taken Mary in order to convince Édouard that he had not. “You are dreaming.”

  “Well, I suggest that you stop dreaming and make love to her or any other woman as often as you can. Death puts an end to all that, you know. Start now. If you cannot persuade her, and I doubt that you can, I see plenty of women here who will cost you a franc, but what is that when there is such pleasure to be had?”

  Degas ventured a comment that any other human being would think was cruel, but that he knew Édouard would find funny. “Really, Édouard, do you want me to end up like you?”

  “Yes. Then I wouldn’t be the only man in Paris suffering such embarrassments.”

  “For God’s sake, just say it. It’s syphilis, isn’t it?”

  “If I don’t say its name, then it doesn’t exist.”

  The two things that didn’t exist in their world: syphilis in Édouard’s, and love in Degas’s. But of course they were both deluded, something they toasted with the kind of enthusiasm that only old friends could muster.

  • • •

  In the two hours they had lingered inside the café, the sky had grown a dull purpled blue and verged now on yet another spring rainstorm. Before summer came, it was conceivable that Paris would drown. Degas put the exhausted Édouard in his carriage and watched it trundle down the avenue in the direction of Pigalle. Not until the carriage was out of sight did Degas pull off his glasses and wipe his eyes. More than his sorrow, he was furious at the ingratitude of Paris officialdom, all the imbeciles who had made Édouard suffer over the years, for the man felt every slight in his bones, despite the unending adoration of the public. Édouard was greater than any of them knew, and the world would not come to its senses before they lost him. They would never understand the enormity of their privation until after he was gone; only then would they mourn all the paintings he would never paint after the syphilis worked its grim end.

  He had declined a lift in Édouard’s carriage because he had put off dealing with Mary for far too long. If Édouard loved to be loved more than he loved art, then what did it mean that Degas loved art more than he loved love, as Mary had accused? In their relationship of three years, he and Mary had affected a certain restraint of commentary that he had relied on to define things. Now that there was no restraint of any kind, Degas worried that he would not be able to keep himself hidden. He would have to define his desire in a more precise way, one that might render him more vulnerable than he wished. To make Mademoiselle Cassatt a more intimate participant in his life would be to make himself subject to the pathologies of humanity, to which he was already more than prey. Subject to love, whose exact nature he questioned, he would be as incapacitated as Manet, who was besotted with Berthe and enfeebled by the myriad afflictions of love, not merely the deterioration the physical act had visited on him, but the other confusing and obligating connections that stole one’s independence. And wasn’t he already troubled enough? In the stormy gloaming, the muted colors of the city were blending into one another, becoming the color of evening, though it was only three or four in the afternoon. Someday this washed darkness would be all that he would see. Wasn’t that frailty enough? Why love a woman and therefore risk losing her when the world was such a fickle place?

  Just go and ask her, he thought. Just go and say, Do you think we should? But his language was not the language of love, as he had once tried to tell her. His language was the language of incision, and if he dared to go to her home, dared to knock and ask for an audience, dared to declare what he thought she might want him to declare, he would fumble the words. He would say, I can marry you, but I have no confidence. He would say, I fear love as I fear art. He would say, You cannot hold my nature against me.

  No gaslight yet lit the streets and only a few passing carts with their swinging lanterns brightened the deepening gloom. Practice for his dark future. He shuffled forward, one uncertain foot in front of the other, toward home.

  • • •

  In her studio, Mary watched the afternoon light dim on the Boulevard de Clichy. That morning, when Édouard Manet had come looking for Edgar, she had worried, suddenly, that Edgar had been indiscreet, that Manet’s visit had been a foray to discover whether or not Mary displayed any sign of her compromise. But Manet had been nothing but charming, as always. He sent his driver up to the studio to ask her to come down to the carriage because, he said to her when she climbed in, stairs were now too much for him, a fact he shrugged off as if he had said that it was a shame that the weather was threatening. Where was she keeping Degas, he wanted to know. He needed to see Edgar now. When she told him where she suspected he was, Manet asked her to come too, as he was planning to force Degas to go with him to see his exhibition, but Mary told him she was working, that she planned to go soon with Berthe, and that she was very happy for him.

  After Manet had gone, Mary returned to her studio. Aside from the terror that she might become pregnant, the other worries of entanglement with Edgar had bubbled to the surface almost as soon as he had left her at her door. He had walked her home, but they had had little to say to one another, and he had let her climb the five flights of stairs to her family’s flat on her own, unwilling, she was certain, to face her family. Since then, she had heard nothing from him except his note that he would be too busy hanging pictures to come by, a feeble excuse of such transparent panic that she had torn it up.

  What had she been thinking? How had she allowed it to happen? What odd creature had taken over her body? In the past few days, there had been moments when she had nearly buckled remembering the unexpected pleasure of his touch. Once she caught her image in a mirror and discovered that she was blushing. The embarrassment was too acute. She couldn’t dismiss the fear that she had disappointed him, that her body had dissatisfied, her inexperience had alarmed, her bashfulness had annoyed. Each day that passed without a note or a visit worked a paralyzing fury in her. She could not erase what had happened and wasn’t sure she wanted to. The days passed at a glacial pace, and his silence chilled any wonder that remained. Edgar? The man who could hurt her with just a look? The man who would lift her up and then just as swiftly cut her down? The man who made promises he never kept? He was maddening: generous at one moment, self-serving the next, incapable, it seemed, of any sustained devotion.

  And yet.

  The dissonance of her situation kept her from work, which had already been compromised for far too long. The past three days she had come every morning to her studio in
hopes that habit would revive the muse that had inspired last year’s extraordinary portfolio. But the room’s neglected disarray, its echoing emptiness after the circus of Edgar’s comings and goings, even the different light, once serenely familiar but now perturbingly foreign, engendered not comfort but unease. She occupied herself with sweeping and dusting, taking inventory of her brushes and supplies, counting her blank canvases, sorting her paint tubes, but the domestic flurry was of little help. From time to time, she had to keep herself from dashing to the exhibition and pulling everything of hers off the wall, restraining herself with the hope that the disaster of her showing would soon be forgotten, erased from all memory but hers. And daily she returned to her family, whose questions she could not answer. Where was Edgar? What had happened? Had he apologized? Had he changed his mind?

  Lydia, always observant, asked her what the matter was.

  He is being difficult, Mary said.

  Surely he’ll come round to see you soon.

  I doubt it, Mary said.

  He always comes back.

  Perhaps not this time.

  When Berthe came to collect Mary for Manet’s exhibition, the first thing Berthe said was, My dear, take care. It’s you who has to keep on living. Mary did not know how Berthe knew, but if anyone would see, it would be her.