Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “See? You are a river spirit.”

  They spoke softly so as not to disturb anyone, and it lent an atmosphere of intimacy.

  “What brought you out here?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep so close to my wretched painting. The smell of the linseed oil kept reminding me of the hideous smear.”

  “Don’t call it wretched.”

  “It is tonight. I wheeled it out here so I wouldn’t smell it, but I still couldn’t sleep, so I’m waiting for dawn. Not too long now. First light will tell me whether it’s worth the canvas it’s painted on.”

  “That’s nonsense.” Even though the figures were dim and ghostly, she could see the empty place. “Do you regret forcing the issue?”

  “No. I regret losing the striped dress.”

  “Do you know how you’re going to fill the space?”

  “I don’t know if I am.”

  “Don’t even whisper that. Tell me, who do you want?”

  Auguste looked away. A long moment passed.

  “Margot.”

  She took a few breaths before she said, “I certainly hope she’s modeled for you before.”

  One side of his face smiled, but his forehead wrinkled. “Many times. Once standing on a swing in a Montmartre garden.”

  “If she still lives there, you could ask her.”

  “She’s dead.”

  The unexpectedness disoriented her. The dead were living with him too. She leaned toward him to encourage him to say more, if he wanted to.

  “The winter before last. Smallpox. She was so young. I begged two doctors to go to her, friends of mine. One gave her something to ease her in the last days, but we knew there was no hope.”

  “Did she have family?”

  A moment passed. “Did she have family. A simple question.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. I never asked.” His voice wavered. “She sent me letters pleading for me to come to her. I was afraid.”

  “Of contagion?”

  “Yes, that, but also I didn’t want to remember forever what she must have looked like. I stood outside her building looking up at her window for two weeks. I didn’t paint a brushstroke. What I did was inexcusable.”

  His chest heaved as though he was gathering all his strength.

  “I loved her, but I let her die alone.”

  She struggled not to reel. What kind of man was he, that he could stay away from a dying lover?

  One who puts himself first. Was that the kind of man for her?

  He stood before her naked. Waiting. Remorse furrowed his face. His eyes asked for understanding. It had cost him much to tell her. She knew that anguish.

  To hide her horror, as much as to dress his wound, she said, “I think she knew you were there. There are other ways of seeing than with your eyes, Auguste.”

  She was willing to say it was his passion for life that made him stay down on that sidewalk, the shuddering abhorrence of life stopping, his fervent, all-absorbing need to do more with it. The world needed him to do more with it. Would she have wished him to die in order to prove himself an ardent lover?

  “I forgive you,” she whispered.

  How self-important that sounded. It wasn’t a thing for her to forgive. The contrition in his voice suggested that he had already been forgiven. He only needed to feel it. Whatever she thought was irrelevant.

  “If you would have gone to her and caught smallpox, this painting would never come to be.”

  “You didn’t let that Prussian die alone in the street,” he said.

  She caught her breath.

  “And I forgive you,” Auguste said softly. “You listened to your instinct, the best guide.”

  Out with her breath came a rush of relief. He had only needed time. She felt that hard knot in her chest, as familiar as her own knuckles, softening and shrinking.

  “You must never regret it,” he said.

  “I don’t. It’s not guilt that I feel. I just regret the effect it’s had on me.”

  “What effect?”

  “How it’s made me afraid that if I told someone I cared for, it would make him reject me. Once, I held myself back with a man because of it. That’s what I regret.”

  “May I ask who it was?”

  “Do you remember I mentioned a Russian, Alexander Demouy, the engineer who designed the repair of the railroad bridge after the war?” She swept her hand along the railing. “And the iron supports of the terrace, and this railing.”

  “Yes.”

  “We used to go rowing together, and to the Bal des Canotiers. He danced like a Cossack to the cancan. One day I showed him where I found the lovers tied together after the flood, and told him I thought there was some appalling beauty in what they had done out of love. I should never have said that.

  “He began to love me, and I was beginning to feel the same for him. It was seven years after Louis died. I thought that was a respectable amount of time. We took a walk that evening to the point of the island and he tried to kiss me. Stupidly, I pushed him away.”

  “Like you did to me?”

  “Worse. I actually pushed on his chest. I didn’t want to let myself fall in love unless I told him what I had done during the Siege and was assured that he still loved me, that he wouldn’t cast me away as unfaithful. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him right then. I went to bed determined to tell him the next day. Early in the morning, we heard a shot. On the bank, under the railroad bridge, he had killed himself.”

  He murmured a low sound, not words, stepped back to a chair and drew her onto his lap, rocking her, letting her nestle against him.

  “Alphonse found him. Papa told me. Do you think it evens out? If I saved a life and caused a life to end?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. He must have been despondent about other things too. A man doesn’t kill himself that easily.”

  He kept stroking her cheek as if he were painting it.

  “All month, I’ve made you pose along the man’s railing.”

  She felt his chest rise and fall in a soothing rhythm.

  “Once when Alexander and I were in a yole under the west arch of the railroad bridge, the arch he had worked on, he asked me to imagine the bridge set on end, into the sky. He thought the same method to build a bridge with steel and bolts and rivets could be used to build a tower. Not solid like a stone tower, but airy and curved, the tallest in the world. What he had in his mind must have been a marvel because he became so excited that he began speaking in Russian by mistake. He and another bridge engineer, a Frenchman, were talking about it, drawing it. Now it will never happen.”

  “You don’t know that. You’re not responsible,” he said louder, squeezing her arm. “A man needs a host of reasons to take his own life. Don’t take it on yourself.”

  She nodded. Papa had said the same thing.

  He rocked her until her breathing slowed. The weight of her curled against his chest and on his thighs was pleasant, one small breast pressing against him. The bullfrog kept up his hoarse, lovelorn moaning. Sh, he thought. She might fall asleep. As he felt her relax, he wished better things for her, and for himself, and felt his eyes close.

  The frogs and crickets were silent when he opened his eyes some time later. The air had cooled. Violet vapor rose over the water and became mauve as dawn neared, and then dove gray. He remembered his wretched painting, her Alexander, his Margot. Moving would awaken her, so he just watched a pale yellow light rise above the rooftops of Rueil and turn the water olive green. His legs tingled with numbness. He shifted to relieve them, and she awoke with a little “Oh!” She looked around, unfolded herself, and darted down the corridor, a disappearing spirit.

  His thighs creaked with the memory of hers. He tried to get up, thought better of it, massaged life back into his legs, raised his shoulders in circles hearing the crunching sounds in his neck, grasped the railing, and pulled himself up. He looked at his painting and felt himself wither. It wasn’t just Circe. Several figures were angled incorre
ctly. The painting was slipping from him.

  He hurried into his room, put on a shirt, and grabbed palette, turpentine, rag, and scraping knife. He scraped away Angèle’s hat, her eyes, her chin and its shadow on her neck. He scraped off Alphonse’s hat. He removed the tallest bottle of wine. It needed to be farther to the left so he could show the vertical support in Raoul’s chair back.

  The appalling sound went right through her, the raspy scrape ending in a higher ting when the wide blade sprang free. She raced back, buttoning her dress, horrified. “Sacrebleu!” He was attacking the canvas. Raw, shadowy parts defaced it. Wounds. One large one, Circe. Others smaller. Angèle’s face mutilated. Alphonse, the top of his skull gone. Nightmarish.

  She grabbed the wrist of his hand that held the knife. “Stop.”

  “I have to see what’s left. Whether there’s enough to salvage.”

  He yanked his arm out of her grasp and scraped her jaw and chin and nose off the canvas. The ruination sickened her. “Did I pose wrong?” she cried.

  “No. It’s my mistake.”

  “But it can be saved.”

  “Maybe. I need to have you face Raoul more. That means your hat and hand will have to change too.”

  “What’s wrong with Angèle?”

  “The angle of her head was wrong. Her eyes weren’t looking directly at Gustave but somewhere between him and Antonio. I placed her hat too far on the left side of her head too. If she actually wore it in that position and straightened her head, it would fall off.”

  “But you loved her expression.”

  “Ellen has to be farther to the right, between Jules and Charles, not just in front of Jules.” He kept scraping. “I may have to rework that in the studio when she’s available again.”

  “Then it’s all correctable.” She made sure it didn’t sound like a question.

  “There’s a bigger problem, what I feared from the beginning. The thing that made me postpone this painting for so long. It might be catastrophic.”

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  He stopped scraping. “Doesn’t it look to you as though the people and the tables are floating out over the landscape without being anchored to a building?”

  She tried to see what he saw. “No.”

  “Your mind is putting in the context because you know the setting, but others don’t. There’s no space to paint the edge of the building to attach it. No solution that I can see.”

  “Now. No solution that you can see right now.”

  “And the perception of depth. Gustave and Edgar are masters at it, at judging the sizes. I might have made the rear figures too small compared to those in front.” He leaned forward, his hands and the palette hanging between his legs. “To toss it all might be the answer.”

  “You’ll regret it if you do.”

  He raised up. “And if I don’t but should have? I’ll be crucified. After twenty years of effort and privation with only a few good years but no dependable assurance from the public, a man has the right to think it might be better to give up.”

  “Not when he’s this close.”

  “Three weeks is all I have. The light will change. If I only come close to creating a masterpiece but fall short, it would prove that my talent has declined after Moulin de la Galette. A short career, one botched painting, foolishly ambitious, savaged by the press as a mishmash of styles, an indecipherable magic carpet of people floating in the sky, or on a barge, a thoughtlessly conceived subject between city and country with people of different social classes mixing together, a social threat which the government-sponsored Salon won’t countenance, ridiculed by the caricaturists as a degenerate allusion to the Last Supper, a flagrant prophecy of doom to one of the models, a darkly ironic party designed by a wicked mind, one colossal failure, and then obscurity.”

  “Stop! You’re arguing against yourself.”

  His palette clacked against the floor.

  “Don’t you want to prove Guy and Edgar wrong? Don’t you want to present your vision of the world? In the end, it just might be your vision that we need most. To neutralize misery.”

  “I’m not a philosopher. I’m a painter.”

  “How many people are in the painting?”

  He glared at her.

  “Fourteen,” she said. “You’ll find someone else. For Circe and for Émile too. Besides the models, think of all the people who have contributed. Name some.”

  “You.”

  “Who else?”

  “Your father.”

  “My mother too. She made the meals. Who started you?”

  “Zola.” He puffed out a breath. “Zola plus gauntlet does not equal masterpiece.”

  “That’s seventeen. Where did you get the paints?”

  “Père Tanguy. With some help from his wife.”

  “How about the doctor who fixed your arm? That’s twenty. Add the people who don’t know but still gave you something. Our grocer, Luc. The laundress who washes the table linens. The orchardist who grew the pears. The vintner. The butcher’s delivery boy. Twenty-five.”

  “This means nothing to me.”

  “The train engineer who brings out the models.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Even Alexander, who rebuilt the bridge, and built the terrace. Now, who taught you to paint?”

  “No one. I don’t know how.”

  “Be honest.”

  “Claude Monet. We taught each other at La Grenouillère.”

  “Before him. Start at the beginning.”

  “Charles Gleyre, a teacher at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Once he said, ‘No doubt it’s only to amuse yourself that you’re dabbling in painting?’ I told him that if it didn’t amuse me, I wouldn’t be doing it, but right this minute it’s not amusing me one bit.”

  She pressed on. “Who else?”

  “Courbet urged us to paint outdoors. Delacroix taught me colors.”

  “And?”

  “Rubens. I couldn’t paint women without Rubens. And Fragonard. Boucher. Ingres. Watteau gave me the mood. Titian gave me the belief in human beauty. Veronese gave me a setting, and the courage to begin. So what was that all about?”

  “This: To whom much is given, much is required.”

  “Are you my conscience?”

  “All of us are. Nous. All of us are behind you, urging you or giving you direction. Dead or alive, all of us are living through this painting. If you have an ounce of gratitude, you have to go on.”

  “I don’t paint out of obligation.”

  “No, you paint because you can’t help but paint. Listen to your instinct. You said you’re a cork in the current. All these people doing something for the painting are the current. You can’t help but continue.”

  “Not if it’s not salvageable. And not if it doesn’t give me pleasure.”

  “What if you found another model? Someone with all the qualities you’re looking for. Someone who would be a dizzy pleasure to paint. Forget about the stripes. Go to Paris today. Don’t come back until you find someone.”

  “It will take too long.”

  “Don’t be stubborn. Think about your friend who died in the war.”

  “Bazille.” His voice cracked. “Frédéric.”

  “Don’t you think he’s here every day with you, still living through you? If you stop, he dies. Of all people, don’t you dare let him down.”

  Or Alexander. Don’t let Alexander down, she told herself. She would not let this marvel die.

  She gentled the scraping knife out of his hand.

  “Regret is a bitter knife, Auguste. You know all about it. Don’t let it gouge your soul.”

  Frédéric. The purity of his generosity. The pleasure they took in painting together. Painting each other. Painting for each other.

  All at once he saw what the painting could be. A painting to carry on the work of Watteau, of Rubens and Vermeer and Ingres and Veronese. To bring them live into this age. He turned from his painting to her. She knew art was co
llaboration, and standing on the shoulders of those who came before. He took her face in both his hands, pulled it toward him roughly before she could back away, and kissed her, not tenderly. Roughly. The kiss to end the drought of kisses. He heard his scraping knife clatter to the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Repairing to Paris

  He heard people stirring downstairs. Alphonsine backed away and went down. In his room, he found some letter paper, and wrote:

  My dear Monsieur Bérard,

  I’m at Chatou working on this cursed painting, the last big picture I will ever undertake. I’m struggling with the figures, the perspective, and other problems. I don’t know if I have the courage to finish it. I suppose I’ll sacrifice one more week on it and if it doesn’t look as though it will ever come right, I’ll pitch the damned thing into the river and go back to Paris to paint portraits.

  I have some regrets, not the least of which is the trouble I’ve given them here, perhaps for nothing. It would spur me on to receive some funds from you. I’m in arrears here for food and rent, to my colorman, and now with the models, so if you can spare a little money, I’d be much obliged.

  He wrote another letter to Deudon, who might be a more likely source, ending it the same way. Much obliged. He was always saying “much obliged” to someone. It made him feel like a charity case. He swore that there would come a time when other people, when Bérard and Deudon themselves would feel much obliged for the chance to buy a Renoir. On the bottom of his letter to Deudon, he drew a caricature of himself jumping out of bed with his cycling cap on to hug a postman bringing him a sack of coins.

  He joined young Alphonse downstairs for a café.

  “You seemed to have enjoyed your little excursion with Angèle on the steam-cycle.”

  Alphonse chuckled. “I did. If you permit me, I’d like to take it across the bridge to some smoother ground.”

  “What would it be worth to you to own the thing and take it wherever you please?”

  “To buy it from you? You don’t want it?”

  “I want to pay my debts more.”