IDIDN’T BONK THE JULIETTE,” SAID THE COLORMAN. “I DIDN’T.”
“What’s she doing bent over the back of the couch naked?”
“Dusting?” He shrugged.
“She doesn’t need to be naked to dust.”
The island girl, Bleu, began to gather Juliette’s clothes from the floor and throw them at the Colorman. “Help me get her dressed.” To Juliette she said, “Get dressed.” The living doll straightened up and moved with clockwork awkwardness to retrieve her clothes as well.
“But I was going to make the color.”
“You can make the color with this body,” said Bleu. She didn’t care which body he used to make the color. She would be entranced during the process either way, not completely oblivious, but not completely present, either. There was a dreamlike separateness in it, ecstatic, blissful, removed, and essentially helpless. But unlike the Juliette body, who was just sort of a stringless puppet, if Bleu vacated the island girl’s body now, the girl would find herself in the midst of this strange scene with no memory whatsoever of how she’d gotten there. At best she would be reduced to a drooling lunatic, at worst she might dive through a window in terror. Sacré Bleu might be the essence of beauty, but making it was not a beautiful process.
“Wait,” Bleu said. Juliette paused, stood, and held her silk chemise between her breasts, posed like the statue of a shy Venus, as if she would happily wait a thousand years for the next command.
To the Colorman, Bleu said, “How are you going to make the color? We don’t have a painting.”
Bleu wasn’t about to tell the Colorman about the current state of Lucien’s Blue Nude.
“Remember this?” The Colorman dragged a large canvas from behind the divan where Juliette had been bent over. She really had been dusting, dusting the surface of an oil painting with her chemise.
“Berthe?” said Bleu, a little stunned. She stepped away from the painting and sat down gently on one of the Louis XVI chairs. “I thought you used this painting twenty-five years ago. Where…?”
Making Sacré Bleu required a painting, a stained glass window, an icon, a fresco—some work of art that had been made with the color, but when she was entranced, she didn’t always know which work of art the Colorman had used. But the color had to be made. Without it neither she nor the Colorman could go on. There was always a price, and the paintings were part of it. She had never expected to see this painting again.
“I had it lying around,” said the Colorman. “She is lovely, no?”
“Don’t try to distract me, Poopstick. If you had this lying around, why did you have to shoot Vincent? Why the panic about Lucien’s painting? Why all this drama and desperation?”
“I think maybe she is finer even than your Juliette,” said the Colorman. “The dark eyes—the fair skin—beautiful and clever.”
Berthe Morisot had, perhaps, next to Juliette, been the most beautiful woman Bleu had inhabited, certainly in the modern era, but Manet had painted this so long ago—how and why was it here now? She tried to calm herself, her anger at the Colorman.
“He really did adore her,” she said after a moment.
“It looks like he wanted to walk into the painting and die with her.”
“He did,” said Bleu.
“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. Berthe Morisot—Édouard Manet, 1872
Paris, April 1883
MANET WAS DYING. HE WAS SWEATING, SHIVERING WITH FEVER, AND THE stump, where they had severed his left foot a week ago, felt as if it was on fire. His wife, Suzanne, begged him to take the morphine for the pain, but he would not have it. He would not give up the clarity of his last hours on earth, even if the only vivid element left was pain.
The doctor called it locomotor ataxia because a gentleman’s physician does not tell a grieving wife that her husband is dying of late-stage syphilis.
Until the disease descended, he’d been at the height of his abilities. Only two years ago the state had made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, fulfilling a lifelong aspiration, but even now, those paintings that had earned him the honor, Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, attracted scandal whenever they were exhibited. The revolution he had started but had never joined, Impressionism, was coming into its own, with those students who had gathered around him like puppies at the 1863 Salon des Refusés—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Degas—all becoming lions in their own right, as painters, anyway, if not yet financial successes. They all had come and gone from this room, paid tribute and said their good-byes, although none would admit that was what he was doing. But no more. No one should see the painter Manet like this.
“Suzanne, chérie, no more visitors. Please, give them my regrets and my thanks, but send them away.”
Suzanne sent them away, and amid the tears she cried every day, between the breathless moments of loss that she was already feeling, a few were tears of relief, of triumph, of joy—and immediately she felt ashamed. She had not come, would not come. Victorine, who had posed for those paintings so long ago, the haughty whore-model from the demimonde, had not come. Victorine, whose gaze Suzanne had borne over a thousand evenings as the nude stared down from the canvas, judging. Olympia, hung in the parlor, with the tiny, taut Victorine always watching the stout Suzanne lumber around her own house like an ox, going about the mundane business of caring for her home and her husband. Édouard’s greatest work. Victorine would be immortal, and ever thin, and poor Suzanne a lonely, fat, grieving footnote: the Dutch piano teacher who married her student. Édouard loved her, she knew that, she felt that, but there had been something else, a part of him she had never known, and she could see, every day, when she looked into the eyes of the woman in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, that Victorine had.
The bell rang and Suzanne heard the maid let someone in.
“Madame Morisot Manet,” the maid announced, leading Berthe in from the foyer. Berthe wore a dress of lavender silk, trimmed in white lace, and a hat with a diaphanous white chiffon veil. Berthe, so often dark of demeanor and aspect that Suzanne could not think of her except in black Spanish lace, as if eternally grieving, but today, bless her, she had come calling dressed like a bright spring flower.
“Suzanne,” said Berthe, rolling back her veil and embracing Édouard’s wife, kissing her cheeks. She stepped away but held on to Suzanne’s hands, squeezed them as she said, “How can I help?”
“He’s in so much pain,” said Suzanne. “If I could just get him to take the morphine.”
“I heard that he wasn’t seeing visitors.”
Suzanne smiled. “No, but he will see you. Come.”
Before they entered the bedroom, Suzanne turned to Berthe and whispered, “His color is bad, don’t let him see that you’re distressed.”
Berthe dismissed the thought with a nod. Suzanne opened the door.
“Édouard, look who has come to call. It’s Berthe.”
Manet fought to push himself up in the bed and despite the painful effort, he smiled.
“Berthe!” He said nothing else.
There was a sparkle of joy in his eyes and seeing it brought tears to Suzanne’s. She squeezed his hand and turned away. “Let me fetch us all some tea,” she said, and she hurried out of the room, closed the door, and once in the hall was wracked by a great, heaving, silent sob.
“How are you, Édouard?” asked Berthe, a sweet smile there, just barely. “I mean, beyond the obvious.”
Manet laughed until he coughed. “Well, beyond that, I couldn’t be better.”
“I’ve brought you something.” She reached into her bag, a drawstring affair fashioned of black satin covered in Spanish lace, and retrieved a small canvas; a short-handled, fine sable brush; and a tube of paint. She laid them on his chest, and he swiped at them feebly, as if he didn’t have the strength to even lift the tiny brush. Instead he caught her hand.
“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. “You are still the best of them. If you were a man, your paintings would already be in the Louvre. You know that?”
She patted his hand, then placed the brush in his fingers. She propped up the little canvas on his chest and squeezed some of the blue color out onto it. “So you’ve told me. You don’t remember painting the nude, do you?”
He looked at her, distressed, as if his mind was already slipping away. He held the brush like it was a foul, foreign thing.
“Sketch me, Édouard,” she said. “You are the painter Manet. Now paint.”
And even as he protested, his hand began to move, the brush traced lines over the canvas. “But I’m dying.”
“That’s no excuse, love, you’re still and shall ever be the painter Manet. Now paint.”
He fell to sketching her, from the jawline up, the soft brush and creamy blue barely making a noise in the room as her face appeared on the canvas. She made it no easier on him, her smile broadening as he worked so he had to revise the sketch.
“Poor Suzanne,” said Berthe. “Victorine haunts her.”
“The passion she’s jealous of was for the work, not the woman,” he said.
“I know,” said Berthe. She did know. She’d been there. She had been Victorine Meurent in those times, modeled for those paintings. As Victorine she had seduced, enchanted, inspired, and ultimately killed him, for it was Victorine who had given him the syphilis. But he had never loved Victorine. It was as Berthe Morisot that she had inspired his love and his greatest painting. The painting that only she, Manet, and the Colorman had ever seen. The painting that had been stored in underground Paris for over twenty years.
“Do you remember now?” she asked, the blue starting to take effect.
“Yes. Oh yes.”
She took his hand and led him to the forest at Fontainebleau, where they rented a cabin with a sunroom and she posed on a daybed during the day while he painted, where they made love with the sun on their skin. She led him to a little inn at Honfleur, where the Seine met the sea, and there they drank wine in a café on the mirror-calm harbor, painted side by side, and walked the beach at sunset. She led him to a sunny villa in Provence, near Aix, and she smiled at him from under the brim of a white straw hat, her dark eyes shining like gemstones while he painted.
Only one other time had Bleu been both the model and the painter, both the inspiration and the creator, and not a woman, then. Berthe’s artistic talent had nothing to do with Bleu, and was profound, and out of time. Women didn’t paint, and if they did, they weren’t recognized for it. But Berthe had been accepted among the Impressionists from the start—had painted alongside them all. In the evening, when they retreated to the cabarets and cafés to discuss art, ideas, and theory, she would go home, sit with the other women, where it was proper, despite the fact that she was, as Manet had said, the best of them. Bleu had seen through Berthe’s painter’s eye, and seen Berthe through Manet’s eye, in his paintings. He adored Berthe, before Bleu possessed her and after she had left. He had gone to great lengths to arrange the circumstances for Berthe’s marriage to his younger brother, Eugène, just so he might be near her—all very proper and aboveboard. She the lady, he the gentleman of society. It was only when Berthe was inhabited by Bleu that Manet’s passion was able to manifest in art and love. Bleu, as Berthe, had taken the painter to places he would have never gone, even as she led him now.
They stayed in the South for a month together, painting and laughing and lounging in the blue shade of olive trees, until Suzanne returned to Édouard’s bedside with the tea.
“He’s gone,” Berthe said. “He was sketching, and then suddenly he gasped and he was gone. It was so sudden, I didn’t even have time to call for you.”
Suzanne stumbled and Berthe caught the tea tray and steered it away to the bureau, then was back at Suzanne’s side.
Berthe gently pried the canvas from Manet’s hand, smearing the oil sketch as she did, just enough so that it might have been an image of any woman.
“He called your name,” Berthe said. “He said he wanted to sketch you, and he began drawing with the brush, then he gasped and called your name, ‘Suzanne.’”
“SYPHILIS HAS BEEN GOOD TO US,” SAID THE COLORMAN.
“Very good,” Bleu said.
“Not satisfying, though,” he said.
“Speak for yourself.”
“It’s slow; sometimes you don’t want to wait and a pistol is better.”
“A pistol doesn’t always work for us, as you proved with Vincent,” said Bleu. Then it occurred to her that it might have worked perfectly. What if the Colorman had hidden the painting Vincent had made with the Sacré Bleu, the same way he had hidden the Manet nude? What if he’d shot Vincent to keep her from knowing the painting’s location? What if he had found some new trick to play on her while she was in a trance or in character and couldn’t watch him? He was sneaky to start out, and he’d had a lot of time to get sneakier. He might have been caching paintings away for years, and she would have never known.
“You need to get ready now,” said the Colorman. He closed the drapes and unfolded an oilcloth over their dining table.
“Really? You’re going to do it on the table?” asked Bleu.
“Yes. It’s a sturdy table. Why not?”
“Because you’ll have to stand on a chair—chairs. Dangerous. We should use the divan.” She started gathering cushions from the couch, and upon lifting the third one discovered a small, nickel-plated revolver stuffed in the gap by the arm. She quickly replaced the cushion before the Colorman noticed she had seen. “Or the floor,” she said. “The floor is best.”
She swept the oilcloth off the table and spread it out over the floor between the dining room and the parlor. As she undressed, she said, “I found Gauguin, the painter who shared Vincent’s yellow house in Arles. As soon as we have the blue, he is ours. He has a weakness for Polynesian girls.”
The Colorman stripped off his jacket, then unlaced his shoes and kicked them across the room. “I wondered why you picked this one. There is another painter, too, who bought color from me. Called Seurat, a theorist, though; he may be slow.”
“Gauguin will be fast. He had the vision he was going to paint before he even met this girl.”
“Good, we just need to clean up from the last one, then, yes?” The Colorman was nude now, except for a loincloth made of tattered linen, his bent spine and spindly twisted limbs making him appear like the product of a giant rat crossbred with a chanterelle mushroom. Coarse black hair like a boar’s peppered his umber skin. He was setting four small braziers around the oilcloth, building small charcoal fires in each. To the side, he had placed two round earthenware jars the size of pomegranates, each had a leather cord at its neck and a wide cork lid.
“No cleanup to do,” she said. She was nude now, too, standing aside as the Colorman prepared the site. “Vincent’s brother is taken care of.”
The Colorman turned slowly toward her, holding a long, black obsidian knife, the hilt wrapped with some sort of tanned animal skin. “The art dealer? You shot the Dutchman’s brother?”
“Syphilis,” she said. A smile then, looking shy on the naked island girl as she peeked out from behind a curtain of hip-length hair. “See, it’s not always slow, but slow enough to ask them questions before they die.”
The Colorman nodded. “Good, then we only have to shoot the baker and the dwarf and it’s all done.”
“Yes, that’s all,” she said. Damn it. This was not at all what she had expected. Not at all.
“I’m ready,” he said. “Lie down.” He uncapped one of the jars and hung it around his neck like a medallion.
She lay on her back in the middle of the oilcloth and stretched her arms above her head. The Colorman sprinkled powder into the braziers and a rich aromatic smoke filled the flat. Then he ran about the room hopping on chairs and turning down the gaslights, so that the girl was barely visible in the dim glow of the braziers. He began to chant as he stepped around her, waving the knife over her face. The chant didn’t consist of words, as such, but rhythms, animal sounds given meaning by cadence.
“No shagging the Vuvuzela,” said Bleu.
He stopped chanting. “What the fuck is a Vuvuzela?”
“That’s this girl’s name. No shagging her.” Sometimes the trance was so deep for both of them that when Bleu emerged she was relatively sure she’d been molested. There was never any proof. He was careful and covered his tracks, so to speak, but still, she suspected.
He looked a little disappointed. His thick brow hung over his eyes a little more than normal. “Maybe when we’re done you can leave her and I can frighten her, no?”
“Maybe. Make the color, Colorman.”
He laughed, a wheezing cough of a laugh, and resumed his chant. The girl’s eyes rolled back in her head and she convulsed several times in rhythm to the Colorman’s chant, then she went rigid, bent-backed, and locked that way; only her shoulder blades and her heels still touched the oilcloth. The Manet painting began to glow then, a dim, throbbing blue light that shone over the whole room.
The Colorman chanted, danced his wounded-bird march, the painting glowed, and slowly, ever so slowly, the girl began to turn blue as the color rose on her skin. Even the soul-empty body of Juliette looked wide-eyed at the scene as the Colorman lay the blade of the black glass knife on the girl’s skin and began to scrape the blue powder.
The knife was sharp, but not so sharp that it would shave, and for all his broken-spider awkwardness, the Colorman wielded the knife with smooth precision, shaving the powder off of every surface of the girl’s body, even off her eyelids, and scraping it into the earthenware jar. He rolled her on her side and scraped the delicate curves of her back, rolling her again, back and forth, breaking into a sweat, so that the blue powder covered his own hands, his feet, his thighs. Meanwhile the painting, the masterpiece Manet that almost no one had ever seen, faded by degrees as the Colorman filled his jar. The painting—the passion, the suffering, the intensity, the skill, the time, the life that Manet had put into it, guided by his inspiration—all came out on the girl’s skin as the powder, as the Sacré Bleu. There was always more color from the painting than had gone into it. Sometimes a small painting might yield two jars of the color, especially if it had been created with great sacrifice, great suffering, and great love, for that, too, was part of the formula.
The Colorman chanted and scraped until the Manet painting was just a blank canvas. It had taken more than an hour. He capped the jar and unslung it from his neck, setting it by the blank canvas.
The girl relaxed by jerky degrees, like the tension being released in a spring with each click of some cosmic gear, until she lay flat again, peaceful. She opened her eyes, now the only bit of her body not covered in the flat, blue ultramarine powder—even her long dark hair was dusted with the color from the Colorman stepping on it as he worked. She turned on her side and looked at the Colorman, then at the blank canvas.
“Just one jar,” said the Colorman. He was rolling his glass knife up in a piece of rawhide.
She was exhausted, felt as if someone had dragged the very life force out of her, which, essentially, someone had. “But there is enough color for a painting?”
“For many,” said the Colorman. “Unless they paint impasto, like that fucking Dutchman.”
She nodded and climbed to her feet, stumbled, then caught herself. She looked at Juliette, who was looking back, as blank-faced as a mannequin. Bleu could hear footfalls outside on the landing. The nosy concierge, no doubt, brought up by the Colorman’s chanting, just as she thought.
“You want to share a bath?” asked the Colorman, leering at the island girl, his loincloth now covered in blue and looking rather more alert than it had during the making of the color.
“One minute,” she said. Bleu padded to the kitchen, leaving powdery blue footprints on the parquet floor. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, then returned to the parlor. “Did you light the fire under the water?”
The Colorman grinned. “Before we even started.” He was folding up the oilcloth, coaxing the last of the blue powder into its creases so he could pour it into a jar.
“Good,” she said. “Then we can clean up.” She went to the writing desk in the foyer, listened—yes, the concierge was still out there—then she pulled a roll of bills out of one of the desk’s pigeonholes, took it to Juliette, and stuffed it in the girl’s bag.
“Your hat,” said Bleu to the Juliette doll. “The one with the black chiffon band and train.” The hat was on the oak hall tree by the door and Juliette retrieved it and put it on. When she turned back around, Bleu was placing the jar into Juliette’s bag on top of the money.
“Perfect,” said Bleu. She padded over to the couch, reached between the cushions, and pulled out the Colorman’s revolver. To Juliette she said, “Scream.”
Juliette screamed, a pathetic little toot of a scream.
“What are you, a baby chicken?” said Bleu. “Louder and longer!”
Juliette screamed, much louder and longer this time.
“What are you doing?” asked the Colorman.
“Cleaning up,” said Bleu. She pointed the revolver at him and fired. The bullet hit him high in the chest and knocked him back. She cocked the revolver and fired again.
“Ouch,” he said. Blood fountained from a hole in his sternum.
“Keep screaming,” she said to Juliette. She cocked and fired again, three more times, until the Colorman lay motionless on the oilcloth, his blood pooling around him in the ultramarine powder. She cocked the revolver, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. The gun just clicked.
“Hmmm. Only five shots. Okay, stop screaming and open the door.”
Juliette pulled open the door to reveal the concierge, a large, severe woman, who peered into the room, her eyes wide with horror.
And Bleu jumped bodies into Juliette. The island girl dropped the gun and began to scream hideously.
“I came in from the other room and he was attacking her,” said Bleu as Juliette. “The poor thing had to save herself, I don’t know what horrible thing he was doing to her. I’ll go get a policeman.”
Juliette whisked by the concierge, down the stairs, and out into the Paris morning.