LUCIEN WAS BREATHLESS.
The whore said, “Oh, Monsieur Lessard, I have seen your painting at Le Mirliton. It is so beautiful.”
Lucien bent over and braced his hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. The three whores in the brothel parlor were all waiting for him to say something. He’d just run all the way from Bruant’s cabaret, where he’d found the front door open, the bartender unconscious on the floor, and the Blue Nude gone.
“Toulouse-Lautrec?” he gasped.
“Fourth room at the top of the stairs,” said a tall, blond whore in a pink negligee. “Your bread is very good too, but I think you should have a go at painting.”
Lucien nodded his thanks for the advice and tipped his hat to the ladies before bounding up the swooping staircase.
The fourth door was locked, so he pounded. “Henri! It’s Lucien. The Blue Nude. It’s gone!”
A rhythmic yipping noise with bedspring-squeak counterpoint emanated from behind the door.
“One moment, Lucien,” called Henri. “I’m boinking Babette and if she comes I get a discount.”
The yipping and squeaking paused. “He does not.”
“Ah, she is such a tease. My allowance has not arrived this month, so I am—”
“He’s a little short!” the whore giggled.
“Oh, I will have my revenge now.”
“Would you two hold still!”
“Feel my wrath, tart!”
More squeaking, more giggling. It sounded like there was more than one woman in there.
Lucien felt as if he might faint, more from anxiety than the lack of breath; his pulse pounded in his temples. He fell forward, allowing his forehead to rest against the door. “Henri, please! Someone has stolen my painting. We need—”
The door was yanked open and Lucien fell headlong into the room.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Lessard,” said Mireille, the short, plump whore from Lucien’s last visit. She stood over him, naked but for an oversized black beret. Several colors of oil paint streaked her body here and there and she was brandishing a wide bristle brush loaded with Naples yellow, much of which had found its way to her nipples.
“Get off me, you horny puppet,” said a different woman’s voice from the bed.
Before Lucien could look up there was a thump and Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was lying on the floor before him, quite naked, except, of course, for his hat and pince-nez. (He was a count, for fuck’s sake, not some crazed cannibal pygmy!)
“Lucien, you look distressed.”
“I am distressed. Someone has taken the Blue Nude from Le Mirliton.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t Bruant? Perhaps he took it to a private showing. There’s been quite a buzz, you know. I heard Degas himself was interested in coming to look at it.”
Lucien moaned.
“I know how you feel,” said Mireille. “My painting is ruined.”
Lucien turned his head just enough to see that she was standing next to an easel, on which was propped a number thirty canvas painted with crude figures that looked to Lucien like dogs fighting. He moaned again.
“Oh my.” A woman’s face—a cute brunette with improbably large brown eyes—popped over the edge of the bed and looked down at Lucien. “He sounds forlorn, Henri. Shall I get him a drink or suck him off or something?”
“Lucien, have you met Babette?” Henri said.
“Enchanté, mademoiselle,” Lucien said, returning his forehead and his gaze to the carpet. “Thank you, but I think I will stop breathing soon. Very kind of you to offer, though.”
“Please, Lucien,” said Henri. “My treat. While I am currently cash-poor”—he glared up at the grinning Babette, daring her to reprise her “short” joke—“my account here is in very good standing.”
“Not anymore,” said Babette. “Not after you had us up all night trying to charge up your fancy mechanical shoes.”
Lucien surfaced from his sea of woes for a moment to raise an eyebrow at the prostrate prostitute above him. “What?”
She tossed her head toward the corner of the room, where Professeur Bastard’s steam stilts stood gleaming like the lower half of a lonely mechanical man. “He says that they are powered by suction, yet all night we sucked and sucked while he stood on them and they never worked.”
“We took turns,” said Mireille. “To charge them up.”
Lucien looked to Henri. “They’re steam powered, not vacuum.”
“Le Professeur’s note said these were the improved version.”
Lucien shook his head, buffing his forehead on the rug in the process. “He mentioned something about building a clockwork set, not vacuum powered.”
“Well, we tried that, but having one’s manhood wound like a clock key is less pleasant than it initially sounds.”
“Monsieur Henri,” said Babette. “You deceived us!”
“That is not true, my little bonbon,” said Henri. “I am an artist, not an engineer, such things are a mystery to me, and in my defense, absinthe and cocaine were involved.”
“And laudanum,” giggled Mireille, poking Lucien in the ribs with her toe, as if making him party to some inside joke.
Babette vaulted off the bed, landed with a bit of a bounce, snatched a silk robe from the bedpost, and wrapped it around herself. “Monsieur Henri, I am a professional. I cannot abide such unethical behavior.”
“Chérie, it was a favor for a friend.”
“You will be receiving my bill,” she said, stomping out of the room, nose in the air, letting loose a hint of a giggle when she said, “Good day, monsieur!”
Mireille watched her colleague’s melodramatic exit and seemed to be searching for what to do next. After a second of the two painters looking at her, waiting, she said, “I can’t work with you people. You are shit as models!” She turned on a heel and marched out of the room, head high, her paintbrush leaving a yellow arc on her thigh as she went.
Henri sighed and said, “I’m teaching her to paint.”
“Trousers?” Lucien replied. “Please.”
Henri retrieved his trousers from a chair and slipped them on. “We should get coffee. If we’re to find your painting, I fear I will be forced to sober up and a hangover is likely to descend very soon.”
“You think we can find the painting?”
Henri pulled on his undershirt, and when he had replaced his hat, said, “Of course, you know the Colorman had to have taken it. We’ll get it back from him.”
“The bartender said it was a young girl. A Tahitian girl, he thought. I don’t even know where to start looking. Without the painting, we have no way to find the Colorman, or Juliette. I’ve lost my best painting and the love of my life.”
Henri turned slowly from the dresser, where he had been collecting his watch and cuff links, and sat on the red velvet vanity stool. “And we won’t be able to use your Blue Nude to help restore Carmen’s memory to ask her.”
“That too,” said Lucien.
“I’m sorry, Lucien,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, genuine sadness in his voice. “Perhaps we should have a cognac to console ourselves. Shall I call the ladies back?”
Lucien sat up on the floor, leaned back against the bed. “I haven’t painted anything since she left. I’m not even a baker anymore. Régine is finishing the bread today. That painting was not only the best I’ve ever done, it’s the best I’ll ever do. Nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing.”
“That’s not so bad,” Henri said. “Sometimes, during the day, when there are no men here, and it’s just the girls, they forget I’m here. They brush each other’s hair, or whisper about times when they were young, or they wash out their stockings in a basin. They nap in each other’s arms, or just collapse on a bed and snore like puppies, and I sit in the corner, with my sketchbook, saying nothing. Sometimes the only sound is the scratching of my charcoal on the paper, or the gentle splashing of water in the basin. This becomes a world without men, soft and unthreatening, and the girls become as tender as virgins. They are not whores, as they would be if they took a step outside, or as they will be when they are called downstairs again by the madame, but they are nothing else, either. They are between. Not what they used to be, and not what they have become. In those times, they are nothing. And I am invisible, and I am nothing too. That is the true demimonde, Lucien, and the secret is, it is not always desperate and dark. Sometimes it is just nothing. No burden of potential or regret. There are worse things than being nothing, my friend.”
Lucien nodded, trying to find some sort of value to the emptiness, to the sheer cold vacuum he felt inside since Juliette had left. His “nothing” didn’t feel as painless as Henri’s and his harlot friends’. He said, “And Carmen?”
“… and snore like puppies.” In the Bed—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893
Henri took off his pince-nez and seemed distracted by cleaning the lenses on his undershirt. “Carmen? No, she was something. We were something. When I remember those times, when we would go off into the country together, we ran through fields, we climbed hills, we made love standing up—me with my back against a tree, holding her up. I can remember the bark digging into my back, and I only cared for her comfort, that I could hold her legs away from the tree, letting the backs of my hands be scraped to blood while she kissed me. She and I, together.”
“I didn’t know,” said Lucien.
“In those times, I was strong. In those times, Lucien, I was tall. Now she doesn’t remember who I am.”
“Your paintings of her are exquisite,” Lucien said. “Your best, I think.”
Henri smiled. “I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Better than nothing,” said Lucien.
Henri slid off the vanity stool and offered his hand to Lucien to help him up. “Let’s get some breakfast and go see Theo van Gogh. He always knows what is going on in the art market and will know if the Blue Nude is being offered somewhere. We’ll find the bitch who took your painting, then we’ll find your Juliette. I promise.”
“I am the painter, Toulouse-Lautrec.” Self-Portrait—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1883
WHEN HE HAD BEEN A SAILOR, PAUL GAUGUIN HAD DREAMED OF FIELDS of yellow corn, red cows grazing in meadows, and rusty peasants sleeping on haystacks. When he was a stockbroker he dreamed of ships becalmed in flat, aquamarine seas, their sails as flaccid and pale as shrouds. Now a painter, he slept alone in his tiny Paris apartment and dreamed of tropical islands where buttery brown girls moved in cool shadows like spirits, and despite the chill autumn night, his sheets were soaked with sweat and entangled him like kelp round the drowned.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and wiped his face with his hands, as if he might be able to rub away the vision. The nightmare wasn’t the girl. He’d dreamed of island girls since he’d returned from Martinique three years ago, but this one was different, a Polynesian, in a crisp white and blue mission dress, white flowers in her long hair. The girl didn’t frighten him at all. She was young and pretty and innocent in the wild unspoiled way of the Pacific, but there was a shadow there, behind her, something small and dark and menacing.
He had dreamed of this particular girl before. She wasn’t some general spectre of lust, although she did come naked into his dreams at times and he would wake with an ache in his loins as well as the trembling of the night terror—the dark figure always lurked there; she was a specific personage, with features that he was sure had been conjured out of his imagination as a symbol. He was sure he had never actually seen the girl, but her face was as distinct and real in his mind as that of his wife, Mette, whom he’d abandoned in her native Copenhagen along with their four children, years ago. He could have drawn her from memory.
He stood and crossed the room by the moonlight through the window. It was late, he could tell. The gaslights out on the street had been extinguished and he couldn’t hear the orchestra or revelers at the Folies Bergère a block away. A drink of water, and perhaps he’d be granted a few hours of dreamless sleep before he made his way up Montmartre to see if Theo van Gogh had sold any of his paintings—if there would be money for tobacco and oil color this week.
He poured himself a glass of water from a porcelain pitcher in the little kitchenette, just a burner and a sink, really, drank it off, then noticed as he set the glass down that he’d left the door into the hallway ajar. He’d grown careless, either because the building’s concierge was a vigilant busybody or because he had nothing left to steal, it didn’t matter. He pulled the door closed and headed back to bed with a bit of a shudder—sweat drying in the autumn air.
One step to the bed and he saw her, at first just her dark face and arms against the white sheet—only the pinpoint sparkles in her eyes in the dark, like distant stars. She threw back the sheet, opened it to him, and her dark body was spread across the bed like a shadow in the moonlight—a familiar shadow that evoked a yearning in his loins and an electric-blue bolt of fear up his spine.
“Monsieur Paul,” said Bleu. “Come to bed.”
“—the dark figure always lurked there—” Nevermore—Paul Gauguin, 1897
THEY ATE CROISSANTS AND SAUSAGES AT THE DEAD RAT AS THE WORLD whirled back into focus for Henri with a vivid, vicious sharpness. He wore a pince-nez with dark lenses that he’d had made for just such hangover mornings and made him look like a small and miserable undertaker.
“Lucien, as much as I enjoy the convenience and company at Le Rat Mort, I believe our favorite restaurant has begun to provoke nausea in me.”
“Perhaps it has less to do with the restaurant and more to do with circumstance. The last few times we’ve been here, you’ve just spent the night in drunken depravity at a brothel.”
Lucien held his demitasse of espresso aloft and toasted his friend, who cringed at the sound of the cups clicking.
“But I like brothels. My friends are there.”
“They aren’t your friends.”
“Yes they are, they like me just as I am.”
“Because you pay them.”
“No, because I’m charming. Besides, I pay all of my friends.”
“No you don’t. You don’t pay me.”
“I’m going to buy breakfast. On my account. Besides, I only pay them for the sex, the friendship is free.”
“Don’t you worry about syphilis?”
“Syphilis is a wives’ tale.”
“It is not. You get a chancre on your manhood, then later you go mad, your limbs drop off, and you die. Manet died of syphilis.”
“Nonsense. Syphilis is a myth. It’s Greek, I think—everyone has heard of the myth of syphilis.”
“That’s the myth of Sisyphus. He spends his whole life pushing a large stone up a hill.”
“With his penis? No wonder he has a chancre on it!”
“No, that’s not the story.”
“So you say. Shall I order more coffee?”
They had taken a booth at the back of the restaurant, away from the windows, due to Henri’s self-inflicted sensitivity to light, but now there was a commotion near the front. A large, ruddy-skinned man with a long hooked nose and a black mustache, wearing a long embroidered Breton jacket, had entered the restaurant and was going from table to table, imparting some news that was distressing the patrons; a few of the ladies held handkerchiefs to their mouths to cover their dismay.
“Gauguin,” said Henri. “Don’t let him see us. He’ll try to get us to join one of his movements.”
“But this would be a perfect time to ask him if Vincent was in contact with a woman in Arles.”
As if he’d heard them, Gauguin looked up, spotted them, and slalomed between the tables toward them.
“Here he comes,” said Henri. “Tell him we’ve decided that we are staunch adherents to the Incohérents movement. We will not be persuaded.”
“You and Willette just made that movement up to annoy him.” Henri and other artists who inhabited Le Chat Noir had formed the Incohérents as a response to the Salon des Artistes Français and all the overly earnest, humorless art movements that had risen since the Impressionists.
“That’s not true,” said Henri. “We made it up to annoy everyone, but yes, Gauguin in particular.”
Gauguin arrived at their booth and slid into the seat next to Lucien without being asked.
“Lautrec, Lessard, did you two hear? Theo van Gogh is dead.”
“Murdered?” asked Lucien.
“A sudden illness,” said Gauguin.
“Now the painter, he slept alone in his tiny Paris apartment and dreamed of tropical islands where buttery brown girls moved in cool shadows like spirits.” Self-Portrait—Paul Gauguin, 1888