Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “No. In the river.”

  “Oh! Mon Dieu!” she cried in that exaggerated, high-pitched comic way of hers and set down her glass to take them off.

  “Leave them on,” Auguste commanded. He didn’t want to see a shattering truth at this crucial moment. “I want your white sleeve next to the black.”

  “It won’t even be seen way back here,” she said petulantly.

  “It will if you put your hands to your ears like you just did.”

  Her haughty bourgeois lover kept shifting his weight, probably ambivalent about being in a painting with men in undershirts. Ha! Let him think he would be. Let him stand still for an hour hovering over her for nothing. Then he’d know what Pierre-Auguste Renoir thought of him. Or he might use his hand and a slice of his hat to suggest a person cut off at the edge like Manet and Degas sometimes did. A faceless, anonymous nothing of a person. A cipher. A nonentity. Not even enough of him to count as a fourteenth.

  Cécile-Louise had turned in order to look at Jeanne. It was closer to what he really wanted, her interacting with the others, but she’d turned too far. “Your chin a little to the right, please, Cécile.”

  She turned back toward him too far now. “I insist on you calling me Circe. If you don’t I shall have to box your ears. Gently, of course.” The tip of her rosy tongue came out and made a dainty circuit of her lips.

  He pretended he hadn’t noticed.

  Just when everyone had settled, Jeanne said, “Don’t paint me with those patchy dabs. You made my skin look like fish scales in that portrait.” Ellen tittered. “You laugh now, Ellen, but fishy arms won’t do your reputation any good.”

  Gustave cleared his throat as if to make a point. “Are you referring to Auguste’s half-figure portrait of you that hung in the place of honor at our Impressionist show three years ago? The one in a green dress that critics praised? The very one Zola called the success of the show?”

  “Then why was Auguste’s full-length portrait of me hung above the toilet in the next Salon?”

  “Because the graybeard jurors are subject to influence,” Auguste said. “Because Sarah Bernhardt—”

  “Filled the place of honor. It isn’t enough that she gets all the best roles at the Comédie-Française. She has to get the best spots in the Salon too. Anyone wanting to look at me got a crick in his neck.”

  “I’ve got a crick in my neck now,” Circe whined.

  Ah, was that jealousy speaking? He could play that game too.

  “Such a beautiful neck,” he said. “It’s made of white satin, isn’t it?”

  “How much longer?” Circe asked.

  “Soon. Just a little more.”

  “Just a little more,” she mimicked. “A little more, and a little more. Usually I want a little more, but—”

  “If you don’t button up that pretty mouth of yours, I’ll be forced to—”

  “Kiss it?” Circe puckered up her lips.

  “Now, there’s a tempting pose,” Jules said. Alphonsine snickered and the angles of some heads changed slightly.

  He was losing them. “Give me half an hour more.”

  “But I’m sooo tired. Haven’t you done enough to imagine the rest?”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Some painters do that. Madame Charpentier told me.”

  “I’m not one of them. It’s one of my personal principles which I’ve rarely broken. Paint only from the motif.”

  “I commend any man who sticks to his principles,” Jules said.

  “Can’t you make an exception just this once? My arm hurts.” Circe’s voice was tinged with a childish whine.

  “Pain passes, but beauty lasts. Think of that and you’ll forget the pain. Any beautiful thought will do.”

  “You’ll have a devil of a time getting him to bend his rule,” Gustave said.

  “But think of me. I’ll have a devil of a time getting my elbow to unbend.”

  He tried not to listen and just let his instinct take over. Mentally, he walked around the table to remind himself of what he wanted out of each person. Circe, the porcelain doll. Alphonse, the lordly observer. Alphonsine, enchanting, alert, her eyes roving, not missing a thing as she lounged on the rail. Raoul facing Alphonsine, murmuring to her, calling her lady, the English way. In the right foreground, Gustave in his flat-topped boater looking younger than he really was. Angèle provocative, with her arm familiarly behind Gustave. Antonio Maggiolo looking down at Angèle. A good model. Antonio adoring Angèle who was adoring Gustave—the three of them could be substance enough for a painting all their own. Ellen, elusive behind her glass, piquant and charming. Maybe it was a bit unkind to hide her face, but the painting needed someone in the act of drinking. Émile facing her, captivated. Paul and Pierre talking to Jeanne.

  Jeanne. The hot glistening skin of her cheek, her throat, her inner thigh flew through his mind. Her lips moist against his. If it weren’t for Lagarde touching her, he could indulge himself by imagining a mutual love, for the sake of the painting, to give it his best.

  He went around again letting his brush extend the comma strokes into sweeps to suggest the placement of large areas of color, like the strong dark triangle of Gustave’s thigh, Angèle’s skirt repeating the triangle set upright, and now a slimmer triangle of Jeanne’s skirt. He held the spread of bristles vertically and rotated it to make a widening swath as he went down the bottom right of the canvas, ignoring his worries in the act of painting.

  “You’re not using green for our skin, are you? We’re not lizards,” Jeanne said, always the entertainer. “Don’t forget what that critic Albert Wolff said in Le Figaro about your Nude in the Sunlight. A pile of flesh in the process of decomposition and needing immediate burial.”

  “Ugh.” Circe stretched out the sound in a funny way. Competing.

  “There’s hardly any skin showing,” Auguste said.

  “Would that it were otherwise,” Pierre said.

  “But not green. We don’t want green faces,” Jeanne said.

  “No, darling. Your lovely face is a secret mixture of chrome yellow, rose madder, white, and ultramarine.”

  He took great satisfaction when Joseph-Paul shot him a sharp look at the word darling.

  “What’s ultramarine?” Circe asked. “Deep sea sludge?”

  “Blue.”

  “I don’t want blue circles under my eyes.”

  Circe sensing a rival was amusing. Jeanne knew that he’d do whatever he wanted. Circe’s demands were made out of ignorance, but because she was so beautiful, because her dress had those luscious, Prussian blue stripes, he paid her no mind. If he’d been forced to use ultramarine, in a few years the sulfur in it would yellow the edges of the white stripes. At least that was one disaster he avoided, thanks to Fionie.

  “But you want red lips, don’t you? When the time comes to paint them, I’m going to use vermilion. Don’t worry. It’s not like the carmine you use on your lips, which is made from dead bugs from South America. Red ones. Females.”

  Circe pretended to faint.

  Everyone laughed.

  “All right. Remember your positions. We can take a break.”

  “Finally!” Circe sprang up and shook out her shoulders which made her breasts jiggle. “I thought I was going to turn to stone.”

  “Like Lot’s wife?” came a voice from the far table. Aha! The quiet poet had noticed her.

  “No, like Venus,” Auguste said.

  “I played Venus once in Orpheus and the Underworld,” Angèle said to Antonio.

  “And she’s been playing it ever since,” Jeanne said in a husky stage voice.

  Pierre poured another round of wine. “Then let’s drink to Venus!”

  Angèle sliced a pear into wedges and speared one wedge on the end of her knife. “One for you,” she said, her wet mouth opening, her tongue flicking as she aimed the pear wedge at Gustave’s opening lips. “And one for you,” she said to Antonio. “Don’t move or I might stab you.”

 
; Auguste drank a glass of seltzer water and inserted his longest brush handle up his cast, trying to scratch an itch. The light would change soon. He couldn’t give them too much of a break. He hadn’t finished setting the values. He didn’t want to go over and talk to Jeanne, not with this Joseph-Paul standing there smug and proprietary. Let Pierre and Paul entertain her.

  Piano music came up from downstairs, “Le Toréador” from Carmen. Pierre sang a few lines in his rich baritone until Auguste stood up, a signal. He’d lose them on the chorus if he didn’t call them back into position. “Two minutes,” he said above their talk. Antonio rolled his shoulders and stretched. His forward lean was an excruciating position. Ellen faced forward and waited before raising her glass. Alphonse smiled at her. Was he smitten already? “One minute.” Gustave assumed his position. The talking stopped.

  “A little more to the left,” Auguste said to Pierre.

  He lost himself to his unconscious instincts of composition. Circe hummed loudly, dancing her fingernails on the table, then on the edge of a plate so the tink, tink drew attention to her. Jules stood alone now, drifting in his own mental world, probably composing lines of verse. Pierre swayed, struggling to hold his position. He’d had too much to drink. Gustave was as still as a statue. He knew what was necessary and, by example, was trying to teach the others.

  Auguste made another circuit of the canvas, positioning smaller areas of color. Circe let out a long, loud sigh. He’d lost track of how much time had passed. The light had changed. He’d gotten the bones of the painting.

  “Enough for today.”

  Alphonse bolted downstairs to relieve his father at the dock.

  Auguste raised his shoulders to stretch and began to clean his brushes. With only a nod to him, Jeanne and her new man slipped out. He’d pay her privately the next time she posed—without her beau, he hoped. Jeanne, the most famous, would demand the most, even though she was only a smaller figure in the rear. He paid Ellen first, so she could be off. Dance music lured some of them downstairs.

  Alphonsine seemed reluctant to leave. She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, “This is one of the loveliest things that has ever happened to me.”

  He dipped a brush in turpentine and worked out the pigment onto a rag. Loveliest? For him it was the riskiest.

  Jules lit his pipe and came around to the front of the canvas. “Painted with a feather on a sunbeam. Intriguing before one even knows what it is. I can’t wait to see what tints you’ll show us vibrating against each other.”

  “Vibrating? That would make me swoon,” Circe said.

  “Then you’ll have to retrain your eye,” Jules said. “Normally we recognize objects by outline, but we’d see more if we noticed the vibrations between contrasting colors.”

  Circe squinted at the painting. “We suffered aching muscles all afternoon and we’re only smears. Is it because of your broken arm?”

  “He has intentions for those smears,” Jules said. “It’s a rare thing to see a painting so complex emerge step by step. You ought to feel privileged.”

  “Step by step sounds like dancing.” She did a waltz step, thrusting her hip forward, holding her skirt out, and turned her head slowly from Auguste to Jules to Gustave to Pierre and back again. In a measured way, she waltzed to the stairs, gave them a backward glance, and descended.

  Pierre blew air out his mouth. “Quite the dish. Where in the world did you find her?”

  “Madame Charpentier thrust her on me.”

  Jules cleared his throat. “She the primrose path of dalliance treads.”

  “Conscious of her every move,” Gustave said. “Calculated to entice.”

  Auguste wondered if she’d be that calculating horizontal as well as vertical.

  Jules relit his pipe and looked at the canvas. “You see the whole, don’t you? We see only marks.”

  “In a haze I see it. I know that what I’ll see later is there now, but I don’t see it yet. I’ll keep making discoveries until the very end. Sometimes the most important things come out last.”

  Jules nodded. “You sound like a writer.”

  He tossed his paint rag onto the table. “Now I remember how hard Moulin was. You’d think I would have learned. What I’m trying to do is absurd.”

  Gustave gave him a censuring look.

  “Don’t mention that I said that. They’ve got to have faith that I’ll finish the thing or I’ll lose them. It’ll be a long ordeal for all of us.”

  “Why is it absurd?” Jules asked.

  “To capture a fleeting instant with so many figures? My brush can’t move across the canvas that fast. I need to be an octopus with eight brushes going at once to paint all these people and bottles and glasses, the tablecloth and fruit, the foliage, the river, the boats, the opposite bank. Separate perceptible touches of the brush to give the impression that all million of them were laid on in one instant.”

  “An intriguing approach, one that lies at the core of Impressionism, the attempt to catch an instant in time. Would you mind if I used that in an essay I’m writing?”

  “Just so long as you don’t make me out as a theorist. I detest painters prattling about theories. They should paint, not talk it to death.”

  Jules gave him a teasing look, and he realized he’d come close to theoretical babble himself. He tipped his head for them to go downstairs.

  “Wait a moment,” Pierre said, scratching his beard. “Am I right that there were fourteen people today?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to use Jeanne’s beau.”

  “Then you’re on dangerous ground. Thirteen figures around a dining table makes reference to the Last Supper.”

  “I know. It’s impossible for a painter not to know that.”

  “The thirteenth is Judas. The number brings ill to one of them. He’ll die within the year.”

  “A superstition, Pierre. You fret too much.”

  “Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. There’s truth to omens and this one goes back to ancient times. The number is deadly. There are thirteen witches in a coven.”

  Auguste laughed. “I’m not painting witches. I’m painting goddesses.”

  “There’s a reason no house in Paris bears the number thirteen. And why prudent hostesses, having invited fourteen, always arrange for a last-minute substitute, a quatorzième, in case a guest does not arrive. It’s a hex.”

  “No, it’s a hoax perpetrated by cranks and fanatics,” Auguste said. But he knew the gravity of the issue. He would appeal to Charles Ephrussi.

  Downstairs, Auguste drew Raoul aside to pay him.

  “Don’t be stupid, Renoir. Don’t you think I had a fine time?”

  The pianist was playing a quadrille. Without the required eight dancers, Paul and Pierre shared Angèle as a partner in the chahut, a prelude to the cancan with bent knees, lower kicks, and animal imitations. “Shaking out the kinks,” Raoul said, joining them despite his bad leg. Circe, too highbrow for such displays, stood off to the side under her opened parasol. At the end of the dance, Raoul headed for the nearest chair and a glass of seltzer water.

  Angèle tugged on Auguste’s cast and he followed her. She spoke in a low voice, out of breath. “I hate to ask, but I’m in trouble for fifty francs for my rent. I must pay it by nine in the morning and I only have eight. If you could advance me my earnings, I’d turn a spin or two in your honor, else, you know, I’ll have to…And modeling is more respectable, you have to agree.”

  Her veins ran with bohemian blood, equal parts insouciance, vitality, and risk. Auguste dug into his wallet and produced forty in addition to her ten for posing.

  Angèle asked the pianist for “Habanera” from Carmen, and raised one arm over her head like a Spanish dancer, snapped her fingers, and slid into Carmen’s bewitching dance, the rage at cabarets. She swung her skirt to the pulsing rhythm and sang, building intensity in her sultry voice:

  When will I love you?

  In faith, I do not know,

  Maybe never, may
be tomorrow,

  But not today, that’s certain.

  Love is a rebellious bird

  That nothing can tame.

  All eyes were on the temptress, even the crowd of regulars under the arbor, as she sashayed among the men, grabbing her skirt in her fists and raising it to her knees, flirting voluptuously—a sensuous touch under Raoul’s chin, lingering strokes along Paul’s shoulders, snaking down his spine and around his waist. She pulled the carnation from between her breasts and drew it along Pierre’s throat. She lifted her skirt and straddled a chair in front of Gustave just like his pose in the painting, and tickled his ear with the flower. Oozing sensuality, she backed up against Antonio, swiveling her shoulder into his chest, then whirled away, leaving him gaping. With her eyes fixed seductively on Antonio, she stood on a chair and went on singing:

  Love is the child of the bohemian.

  It has never, never known any law.

  If you don’t love me, I love you;

  If I love you, keep guard on yourself!

  She hopped down and flung the carnation at Antonio’s chest. Bewitched and speechless, he picked it up and everyone on the lower terrace clapped.

  “Beware, Antonio,” Pierre teased. “Stay on guard.”

  “Bizet is applauding from his grave,” Père Fournaise said. “You know, he lived just downstream near Bougival. Is that where you found this brazen gypsy, Auguste?”

  “No. Montmartre, the Bohemia of la vie moderne.”

  Circe was standing by herself with one arm around the maple trunk, a position of petulance. Auguste walked over to her.

  “Madame Charpentier said I mustn’t ask you for more than you paid the others, these Montmartre gypsies.”

  “Then you shall have ten francs, the same to a centime.” He placed a coin into her palm. Her fingers folded over his.

  “Do you ever go out in a yole?” she asked.

  “Not as much as I’d like to. I love boats, every kind. I’ve never been able to afford one, so I have to take my pleasure by watching others.”

  “You’re dreadfully honest.”