IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Balard began to take exception to me.
Even though I had no designs on Marie-Claire, my arrival had thrown off Balard’s monopoly of charm. Now he was trying too hard. He spoke at great length about artists he’d studied and exhibits he had seen. Then he would express concern that we hadn’t been to the exhibits, even though they might have taken place years before any of us had come to Paris. Balard was the only native Parisian among us.
The fact that Marie-Claire knew very little about artists like Elisabetta Sirani, Luca Giordano and Andreas Benedetti didn’t bother Balard. He seemed to find it charming. But my ignorance he would not tolerate.
When I said I wasn’t familiar with Sirani, he sat back on his stool, feet hooked into the rung at the bottom. “Not familiar?” he asked. “You’re not familiar with Elisabetta Sirani?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I can’t believe you’re not familiar with her work.”
“Why do you keep using that word?” I asked him.
“What word?”
“Familiar.”
“I’m not using it at all!” He gave a forced-out deep-voice laugh. “You said it first. I am just surprised.”
Marie-Claire watched, saying nothing. Perhaps she was even a little flattered that Balard would go to all this trouble over her. If Balard did succeed in making a fool of me, she would like him for it. It was a primitive thing, but it was there nonetheless.
“You are not very educated in the arts, are you?” Balard asked me.
I felt myself sighing. All right, I thought. Let’s get this over with. “I am,” I said, “too busy painting to talk about painting. There’s always the danger,” I told him, “of becoming an artist who doesn’t do any art.”
Balard folded his arms and then unfolded them again. “Are you saying I’m not an artist? Are you saying that you are the only artist here?” He tried to make it seem as if my insulting him was an insult to Marie-Claire as well, but already Marie-Claire was watching him with different eyes. Balard held up his sketch. “I am an artist! What do you call this?”
Both Marie-Claire and I looked at his half-done sketch of Valya and knew exactly what to call it. The room filled chokingly with silence, like a jar filling with milk.
“I am an artist,” said Balard, his face gone fiery with blushing.
Marie-Claire reached her hand across and rested it comfortingly on his knee.
He looked at her. His gaze was bright and pleading.
“You’re a very good artist,” she said.
What I didn’t admit, of course, was that Balard had been right. Given the choice between painting and looking at other painters, I would always paint. There was never enough time to do both, so I was always painting.
After the class, Balard came up to me while I was packing away my pencils and paper into the leather portfolio that I brought with me from home. He hovered there for a while, casting his gloomy shadow. “We got off on the wrong foot,” he said.
I looked across at Marie-Claire. She had packed up her kit and was standing by the brass pegs, ready to put on her coat. She glanced alternately at Balard and at me and then fussed with the buttons of her coat.
“It’s just a crazy day,” I said to Balard, as we headed out.
“Crazy!” said Balard loudly. “A crazy day! Oh, yes. Perhaps I can buy you a beer.”
We made our peace and there was no more jousting between Balard and me across the worn-out floorboards of the Atelier Pankratov.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, AT the end of our sketching, Valya stood up from her perch, stepped down from the platform and padded barefoot across the dirty floor to where her clothes hung on the brass coat pegs. She began to dress.
I noticed that Pankratov turned away, even though his chair was facing where she stood. Still looking away, as if distracted by something in the dingy rafters of the room, he said, “Valya, I was thinking you could help me tidy up the place once the students are gone.” He reserved for her a softness of voice that he shared with no one else. I knew immediately he was in love with her and that she knew it and despised every measure of his devotion. He seemed humbled by her. She always got her way: whether it was refusing to stand naked up on the stage any more because she said she was cold, in which case we drew her wearing her fur coat and nothing else, or if she wanted to leave an hour early, Pankratov always gave in.
The rest of us were packing away our things, untying the knots that belted our smocks to our bodies, washing out brushes. There was a general clatter of furniture being shifted and the hiss of the tap in the paint-splattered aluminum sink. We gave every appearance of not listening, but we were. Not one word passed between us as we strained our ears to catch each subtlety of breath.
“You’re not paying me to clean up,” said Valya. She stepped into her shoes, jamming her heels into place.
“I shouldn’t have to pay you at all,” replied Pankratov.
“Then don’t,” snapped Valya. After that, there was only the sound of her footsteps fading away down the flights of stairs and at last the thump of the front door closing, which startled us back into motion.
* * *
“WHAT IS IT,” I asked Marie-Claire, as we emerged into the Rue Descalzi, “with Pankratov and the girl?”
We were out in the street, taking our first breaths of air not tinted with the reek of paint and thinners.
“I’ll tell you,” she replied, “but let’s go to the café.” When I hesitated, thinking that today I might go home and work on my own paintings, she set the flat of her hand between my shoulder blades and pushed me gently toward the café door. “It’s Friday,” she said, “and sometimes it’s as important to stop working as it is to start.”
I hadn’t been thinking about it like that. “You’re right,” I told her.
“Of course I am,” she said.
I thought of letting the hours trail by in a fog of coffee and tobacco and the banana yellow brain-fuzzing licorice of Pastis. The idea was sweet and intoxicating, as if I had already drunk the Pastis and breathed in the nerve-smoothing Caporal smoke.
The tables at the Dimitri were filling rapidly. Behind the bar, Ivan worked the coffee machine with movements like an orchestra leader. He smacked the coffee grinds from each shot into a garbage can the size of an oil drum. The sound made a dull boom in the crowded space of the café, as if Ivan were conducting his own version of the 1812 Overture.
Balard was waiting for Marie-Claire at a table in the corner. He did not look particularly pleased to see me.
“We could make it another time,” I said quietly to Marie-Claire.
“No,” she replied. “Not another time.”
I wondered if she had asked me along so that it would not be just the two of them. I knew she was very fond of Balard. Maybe even falling in love with him. But it was clear to me that Balard had fallen much harder and faster. Perhaps she didn’t like things to be going quite so fast. I didn’t much want to be getting in Balard’s way again, but there didn’t seem to be any way of escaping it now.
“So what is it about Pankratov and Valya?” I asked again, once we had sat down.
“What you have been witnessing,” said Marie-Claire, “is the torment of a man who makes this woman stand there naked before him and yet who cannot possess her. He is so infatuated that he doesn’t even know how to talk to her, let alone make love.”
“Valya is the one weak spot in the hide of an otherwise bulletproof man,” announced Balard, then ordered his usual drink. He called it a “French 75,” and said it was named after the French 75mm artillery gun of the Great War.
Daylight trailed away over the rooftops. Marie-Claire, Balard and I sifted through our theories of Pankratov and life inside the tiny universe of the atelier. I gave myself up to the Great God Pastis, adding water from a white jug into the glasses of sharp, honey-colored liquid, seeing it turn powdery yellow. I felt the soft absinthe explosions in my head, one after the other, until it seemed as if my blood were no longer contained inside the anchor of my body.
On my way home that night, I decided not to be stingy with my free time. What good was being in Paris, I asked myself, if I didn’t live some of the life I had dreamed so long of living? I had to make a balance between working and not working.
In the days that followed, I became a regular at the Dimitri, whiling away my afternoons and evenings with Marie-Claire and Balard in the happy thrum of café life. Balard soon grew used to my presence. I always left before they did, and from some of the things they said, I had the feeling they usually went back to his place afterwards. I spent a great deal of time politely ignoring the way they held hands under the table and how their knees touched, in a way that could be mistaken for accidental, except it wasn’t.
We often talked about how hard it was to make a living as a painter.
“We’ll have to live in a commune,” said Balard. “All of us together.”
“Wouldn’t that be fine?” asked Marie-Claire. She put her arms around Balard’s neck and hugged him.
I wanted to ask what her husband would think of us living in a commune, but Marie-Claire seemed to have forgotten all about her husband in these past few days.
One night, more than a week later, I came home from the Dimitri and found Madame La Roche sitting on a chair on the sidewalk outside our building. When I stopped to wish her a good evening, she took the pipe from her mouth and looked at it sternly, as if it had just caused her some offense. “Monsieur Halifax,” she said.
“Good evening, Madame La Roche.”
“Your Levasseur people paid their rent today. On time. I thought you’d like to know. I see you have chosen your café.” She was still looking at the pipe and not at me.
“Yes, ma’am. The Dimitri.”
She nodded. “And how is your painting?”
“Very fine,” I told her.
Her eyes flicked up to me and then away. “Ah-ha,” she said. Then she tapped the old tobacco out of her pipe on the heel of her clumpy black shoe.
It didn’t hit me until I was riding up to my room in the elevator, the gloss-black paint on the bars glimmering with the light of each passing floor. “Oh no,” I said quietly.
When I reached my apartment, the first thing I saw was my easel in the corner, untouched for many days.
“Oh no,” I said again.
I walked in circles around the room. All my promises to work. The twelve paintings I was going to do. I hadn’t made a balance between working and not working. I hadn’t done any damned work at all. Instead of that, I’d grown numb to the passing of time. It had been too easy to follow everyone else into the café. My time at the Dimitri was like being addicted to alcohol or cigarettes. There were moments when I had said to myself that this would be the day I’d start my paintings, but when the time came, the whole idea of starting work would suddenly stop making sense. I told myself I was just too tired to paint. That I’d already done enough work that day, sketching for Pankratov. Told myself I didn’t feel inspired. The excuses lined up so far back in my head it seemed to me I could use a new one every time and still never run out. I understood now that none of these were the real reasons. I was afraid of working here. Better never to have tried to make my way as an artist in this city than to try and fail and have to carry that home with me like some cancer spreading in my guts.
Now, staring me in the face, was the fact that I did not have a single painting. All I had were the endless sketches from Pankratov’s class and a few attempts at my Narragansett series, and they were worth nothing to a gallery.
I opened my black metal moneybox and looked inside. Even with the money from the stipend, my cash was already running low. It wasn’t as if I could just cable my bank at home and have money sent over, either. What I had now was all I had. I shut the lid and shoved the box away.
There was no point making more brave promises. I had already made vows and broken them. The only thing left now was to shut up and work and try to make up for lost time.
I swept the breadcrumbs of that morning’s breakfast into my cupped hand and threw them out on the window ledge for the pigeons. Then I opened up my supply box and mixed paints. I arranged my materials and started painting. I worked until deep into the night, knowing that I was working too hastily. Knowing I would have to go back over this and correct the mistakes I was making. But what mattered now was to be working.
I felt an easing of unfamiliar muscles, cramped so long inside me that I’d mistaken them for bones. The feeling of working after a long time of not working was unlike anything else. I knew I would sleep deeply that night. The only times I ever slept well were after I had been painting.
Deep into the night hours the city seemed to rumble, as if thunder were gathering beneath it. The deep-sleep breathing of a hundred thousand people.
I rubbed my hands across my face, smelling the dust of charcoal and paint powder ground into each swirl of my fingerprints. Then I went over to the sink and splashed water in my eyes. I looked at the time. It was too late to go to bed, but too early to go out and buy breakfast. I was too tired to work any more. I set my chair in front of the window and watched the dawn. The pigeons dozed on the ledge, heads tucked under their smoky-violet wings. I smelled baking bread from the bakery down the street. The whisper-whisper of the street sweepers with their witches’ brooms. Tram cars starting their rounds. The first clip-clop of footsteps. Then the sun exploding on the dewy rooftops. The coo and flutter of the pigeons as they set off in search of food. I felt at home in Paris now, as if each pull of air into my lungs had matched itself against the breathing of those hundred thousand dreamers in the dark.
* * *
I WENT TO CLASS as usual the next day, but that afternoon I didn’t go to the Dimitri. Instead, I went home and worked. Marie-Claire and Balard understood. Balard even sounded genuine when he said he hoped I’d come with them tomorrow. They disappeared into the café. The frosted glass door swallowed them up like a mist.
After that, whenever I was up in my room, the sound of laughter or music from down in the street would tempt me away from my easel. But I was working well now, and the temptations were easier to resist.
When I painted, I slipped away from Paris and felt again the pull of tides in Narragansett Bay, and streams running to the sea through marshes of Spartina grass. It seemed to me that I could sense the storms coming down from the north, as they would this time of year. Red hurricane warning flags blown to shreds on the splintering flagpoles. Indian summer, which would be coming soon. Chevrons of Canada geese overhead, waking me each morning with their muttered honking. I saw the white birch trees bowed down in sheaths of ice and the winter waves frozen glacier green on the empty beaches and the grim faces of the lobstermen, sweeping the snow from their decks as they moved out into the bay, to haul up their pots until their hands would freeze around the weed-slick ropes. The visions that reached me were astonishing in their clarity. I thought how strange it was that I had to cross an ocean before I could be made to understand that value of the place I’d left behind.
When I painted, I moved through many stages of sketching and preliminary studies. I worked at the forms until they stopped being drawings of things. The figures in the sketch slowly evolved in relation to each other, separate from the world from which they had come. Only then, when the picture had detached itself from its source, would I begin to paint.
I usually made a lot of false starts, but eventually the image that appeared among the smoky charcoal trails of sketches tacked to each flat surface around me, walling me in, blocking out the light, would become the image I wanted on the canvas.
I didn’t use paint generously. I didn’t slap it on the canvas and paint over it if I didn’t like what I saw. I scraped it back down to the undercoat and started again. I liked the undercoat to be thin, so you could see the fabric of the canvas, and so that even when the painting was done, you could still make out the texture, but only if you brought your eyes very close. I liked the way it drew the eye toward the picture, made you look at the minutest detail, so that it would stop being the whole picture and would break down into its individual parts, which were different from what the parts had been in reality. Now they were the fragments of a different thing, a thing all by itself. But the ghost of the canvas underneath, the reminder of it, would always bring you back into the world from which the painting had emerged, many incarnations ago.
* * *
AS THE DAYS WENT by, I grew more and more frustrated with the endless sketching at Pankratov’s. Once, as he checked my work and breathed a gloomy sigh over my shoulder, I turned to face him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
Pankratov looked confused, as if I could not possibly have spoken to him in that way and he must have misunderstood.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked again.
“Did I say there was something wrong?” asked Pankratov. Then he looked over my head, taking in the whole class with his gaze. “No more sketching today!” he shouted. He strode back to his chair and sat down heavily into its canvas seat. “This weekend, you three will do studies for me. You will go to the Musée Duarte and choose sixteen of the works there and I expect you to have studies of these works by the time I walk into the classroom on Monday morning. Good!” He clapped his hands. “You are dismissed!”
For a moment, I thought I saw relief drift like a scattering of dust across his face. I wondered if this was part of his teaching. That he would make us sketch and sketch until we rebelled against it and only then would we be ready to move on. Is that it? I wanted to ask him. How in God’s name does your mind work?
A silence followed his announcement. Balard and Marie-Claire glanced at each other, looking for reassurance that their weekends were not shot to bits.
But I knew exactly what would be left of our free time. Absolutely nothing. I’d had assignments like this before. In my head, I drew a neat line through Saturday, when I had planned to go to the open-air markets at Clignancourt and buy some cheap art supplies, since I’d run out of everything I’d brought with me and couldn’t afford high-quality materials from the shops on the Rue de Charonne. I had to force myself to calm down. I couldn’t get out of doing the assignment. I would just have to get it over with and then there would be time for my own work.
I was too annoyed to paint, so I took a walk down Avenue Matignon in Faubourg St. Honoré. Most of the galleries were here. I scouted out the neat little shops, with all manner of paintings set on easels in the front window. They looked so clean and well lit and so unlike the chaos of Pankratov’s atelier that I found it hard to imagine that the paintings on display had come from any paint-splattered artist’s studio. These words seemed to have been transported into a different dimension, where I could neither purchase them nor bring my own work to be sold. I walked home along the Quai du Louvre. I stopped to look at the bronze statue of a lion fighting a wild boar. The bronze was pale green with age. In the fading light, the metal seemed to glow from inside. It was as if the bronze were only a shell, under which the beasts were waiting for the moment when they could cast off their cocoons, thin and shattering upon the road. Then they would roam snarling through the streets, forgetting their centuries of patience.
At ten o’clock Saturday morning, I showed up at the Musée Duarte. It was an intimidating yellow stone building on the Rue Louis Blanc. In the courtyard was a fountain made of the same yellow stone but streaked arsenic green from decades of water trickling over the side. The fountain was turned off and empty. The main entrance was barred with iron railings. The tip of each rail was formed into a spike. The gates had been locked and the main doors were shut.
I walked across the road to a bench and sat down, waiting for the place to open. I set my portfolio on the bench beside me. One hour later, I was still sitting there. I walked down the road and bought a crêpe filled with hazelnut paste from a street vendor. Then I went back to the bench and was there another half hour before an old woman sat down beside me with her shopping in a little basket with wheels on the bottom.
We both stared straight ahead for a minute or two.
Out of her wheely basket, baguettes jutted up like clumsy replicas of the museum gates. “Are you an artist?” she asked.
“I’m working at it,” I replied.
“Oh, you’re Canadian,” she said, having noticed my accent.
“American. My mother was Canadian.”
“American,” she corrected herself. “You aren’t waiting for the museum to open, are you?”
“Actually, yes, I am.”
“Well, you will have to wait a long time. On the weekend, it is only open on Sundays.”
I stood up suddenly. “What?” I marched out into the street. “Well, why the hell don’t they have a sign posted?” I shouted at the gloomy building. The locked doors and shuttered windows made it look pug-faced and asleep.
“I don’t think they’ve ever had a sign,” said the old woman. “It is just a thing one is expected to know.”
I spun around. “This whole city is making me crazy!” I shouted. I marched back to pick up my portfolio and tried to calm myself. “Thank you,” I said to the old woman. “I apologize for shouting.”
“Not at all,” she said. “One expects this sort of thing from foreigners.”
I rode the streetcar out to Clignancourt. I was thinking I might get those art supplies after all and still salvage something of the day. I knew this was some joke of Pankratov’s to send us to the Musée Duarte when he knew it would be closed. Some test that had nothing to do with how well we could draw or paint. And only I had failed it.
I jumped off the streetcar at Porte de Clignancourt and disappeared into the swirl of alleyways that made up the Clignancourt fleamarket. Tables were laid out on the uneven cobblestones, piled with old clothes, shoes, china, boxes of spoons, camera parts. Vendors cooked peanuts in sugar, stirring them in steel bowls with wooden spoons. Arabs carved huge roasts of lamb on vertical spits over charcoal fires. The smell of roasting meat salted the air.
I sat on the curb and drank wine from an earthenware mug at a café whose tables were already full. I buried my face in the mug and felt the wine splash down inside me. All right, I thought. So I wasted a morning sitting on a bench. So maybe I’ll learn to be more careful next time. That’s what Pankratov was teaching me. I’ll do the sketches tomorrow, when the museum opens up. I eased myself up off the pavement, set my empty mug on a table and went looking for art supplies.
I found a shop at the end of a cobblestoned alleyway, somewhere in the labyrinth of market stalls. A sign on the front said: Fournisseur des Matériaux Artistiques. R. Quatrocci. Prop. It was done in swirly letters and borders of painted ivy. The sign stuck out about a foot into the alleyways on either side of the shop.
Everything in the shop was coated with dust. The place was crammed with stacks of artists’ paper and jars of pencils and half-used tubes of paint. Old artists’ paintboxes and portable easels hung from the ceiling. The owner, a large man with deep-set, sleepy eyes, had to keep moving things aside whenever he moved about in the shop. He wore a painter’s smock that was dirty from the constant wiping of his hands across his chest. When I walked in, his big hands were in mid-wipe over his chest, like a woman trying to hide her naked breasts.
“I need some paper, please,” I said, “and charcoal pencils, too.”
“Bof,” he said and puffed up his cheeks. “This whole place is made of paper. What type of paper do you want?”
“I need it for sketching,” I said.
Just then, a man stuck his head in and shouted, “Rocco!”
I couldn’t see who it was and neither could the owner. Our view of the entrance was blocked by a large gilded frame that held the shredded remains of a painting. It hung from the ceiling on two old leather belts.
“Rocco Quatrocci!’ said the man, with the voice of a ringmaster introducing his prize act to the crowd. “Quatrocci, the King of the World!”
Rocco waved uncertainly and smiled.
“Rocco!” said the man again, as if the word felt good in his mouth and he could not help saying it again. Then he was gone, whistling, the echo calling back to him from the overhanging rooftops of the alleyway, where dandelions grew in the leaf-clogged gutters.
“I have no idea who that was,” said Rocco. “Paper. Let me see.” He walked his fingertips up and down his lips, which popped against each other with a sound like water dripping. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack that lay beneath a shelf of brushes, divided up by size and stacked in old jam jars. “But it is very old.”
I hauled down one of the sketchbook pads. I could tell by the writing style of the manufacturer’s name on the front that the pads were from the turn of the century or perhaps even before. The paper in them had browned at the edges. It was brittle. In some places the paper had started to come apart like dead leaves crumbling. I asked him how much they were.
“I am thinking,” said Rocco, the King of the World. He flippered his lips again. Plip plop plip. “Will you buy all of them?” His voice sounded breathlessly hopeful, as if he carried the weight of all this dusted junk not only in his shop but in his mind.
I didn’t buy all of it, but I bought more than I’d planned to.
I liked it there at Clignancourt, being around all the old books and clothes and china and cigarette cases and wallets picked from pockets years ago and dusted with mold the color of weathered bronze and sold now in heaps on collapsible tables. I liked the way the present and the past collided in the relics that made their way here, whose stories you could read like Braille in each chipped cup and crease of leather.
I rode the streetcar home, feeling the sweat cool on my back from the effort of carrying the heavy paper to the tram stop. My pockets were filled with old charcoal pencils and pastels, mostly broken but still good. I had three sable brushes tucked into my socks because I had no other way to carry them. Their quality had once been good. I didn’t think Pankratov would mind me working on this stuff. I smelled the mustiness of Rocco’s shop in the paper. Rocco, King of the World. I even said it to myself a few times, under my breath, my voice lost in the jangle and clatter of the streetcar.
I made calculations, mumbling the sums, figuring how many more days it would buy me in Paris to work with cheap supplies.
The conductor made his way up and down the car with his metal ticket maker slung across his chest, flipping the red, blue and yellow plastic buttons, then striking a lever that spat out a thin yellow slip with a rapid zipping sound.
There was a warm breeze blowing in from the west. “It’s blowing in from Normandy,” said one old lady. “You can smell the apple blossoms from the trees outside Bayeux.” People smiled and filled their lungs. I didn’t smell any apples. Bayeux was a long way off. It was just a thing to say, but still it made everybody smile with the pleasure of remembering the smell. The breeze filled the space of the streetcar, and people turned their faces to it, closing their eyes. I did the same. I felt the dizziness of clean air deep inside me and knew a part of me belonged here now, in the flow of people and machines.
* * *
“SEE ME AFTERWARDS,” SAID Pankratov. He had collected our Duarte Museum sketches at the end of the previous day. Now he was handing them back.
I stared at the folder, unable to hide my dread. Pankratov’s words reminded me too much of what my old Latin teacher used to say when I had failed a test.
After class, when the others had cleared out, I remained at my stool. I hadn’t touched the sketches.
Pankratov sat down in his chair. “Come over here,” he said.
I slipped off the stool and walked toward him.
“Bring the sketches,” he told me.
I turned around, returned to the easel and fetched the damned sketches.
Pankratov held out his hand for the folder.
I handed it over.
He opened the folder and looked through the sketches again. “These are very good, you know,” he said.
For a moment, I was too surprised to reply. I’d had no idea what he would think of my work, but had just assumed the worst.
“Did you hear what I told you?” asked Pankratov.
“Yes,” I replied faintly. “Thank you.”
“They’re very good. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” I told him.
“I’m impressed,” he said, looking around the room as if unwilling to look me in the eye when making such a statement. Then his head snapped back to face me. “All right,” he announced. “You can go now.”
As I walked down to the Rue Descalzi, I replayed his words over and over in my head, not trusting their meaning. Sure that he intended something else. I had never expected any kind of compliment from him. I didn’t think him capable of it. Slowly, as I began to relax, I realized what a hold this man had on me, and how badly I needed his approval.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I woke, as usual, to the sound of muttering voices in the Rue Descalzi. I could smell the particularly sour, perfumey reek of Matelot tobacco, which was the cheapest brand. When I looked from my window, I saw a line of men outside the gates of the Postillon warehouse. They were shabbily dressed, with floppy caps that hid their faces in the shadows of the morning. They stood with the bowed heads of men down on their luck.
When the foreman arrived with his hobnailed boots echoing in the street, his Dragoon mustache was always freshly waxed. Brass buttons gleamed on his double-breasted tunic. He picked out a few of the men, selecting each one with a jerk of his chin. He didn’t make his choices by who was first in line, but the other men offered no protest. Either they were too tired or they knew they would never be picked if they kicked up a fuss. They shambled away down the street with their hands in their pockets. The chosen men followed the foreman into the warehouse. A few minutes later, they rode out of the warehouse on rickety bicycles. They carried wooden placards on their backs. On the placards was the wine company’s motto—BUVEZ LES VINS DU POSTILLON.
Ever since Fleury had brought up the idea of staying in Paris, I tried to push the idea to the back of my mind. I still had a month to go before the Levasseur grant ran out. But every morning when I saw those men outside the warehouse, waiting for work, I tried to imagine myself down there with them. Even if I did decide to stay, I had no idea where the money would come from. At this rate, it certainly wasn’t going to come from the paintings. And then there was the threat of war, which was on everyone’s minds these days. The whole idea of remaining here seemed hopeless to me. I kept seeing those men lined up outside the warehouse. I could practically feel the weight of the placard on my back as I bicycled around town. Buvez les Vins du Postillon. It had become an ugly little chant in my head, like a meaningless taunt shouted across a playground at some unpopular child.
I sat down at my three-legged kitchen table, which was bolted to the wall to stop it from falling over, and pawed through the strange blues and browns of the French notes in my moneybox, wondering how long I could make it all last.