DEER

Small, pale messages etched in grass.

HE LEAVES ME WITH A fistful of white roses brushed with the faintest green, picked from someone’s front garden. He hands them to me and then walks away, everything disappearing with him. For the next few days I watch them unwhorl with slow deliberation. I had always thought that flowers between a man and a woman were banal, but these aren’t that.

An unopened heart does not bleed, Mme. Tissaud says, avoiding my eyes, when she snips the stems and fishes out a vase the next morning.

A few days pass. I cannot sleep, I eat nothing. Food is pushed around my plate. I am half-starved and liminal. Though I have no appetite, I despise my response. Hunger is not original.

I wash my brushes in Mme. Tissaud’s back sink. The chaud and froid are labelled in reverse, but it makes no difference because no flat in Paris that I know of has hot water. I have an assignment to draw the same fruitbowl on five separate days. Painting food when you are not eating is useful. You see it as more of an object, more theoretically, which allows for the kind of distance required to adequately render the so-called truth. It’s different when a painting comes to me. When I roll out of bed, blink my eyes, and go straight to the canvas, without washing or eating or exchanging pleasantries with Mme. Tissaud. I duck from the world, its diversions, so that I can get it down before I lose it. I squeeze out the tubes and mix the colours I will have seen in my head, and dip in my brush and begin on the canvas and stand back and feel full of electricity. Nothing can touch it.

I am trying to remain open to the tedious assignments that I am told will make me a better painter. I like how they want you to understand the chemistry of everything you use, even pencil and paper. But this assignment and the essay I just turned in on the sculptural qualities of Cézanne’s fruit begin to make me unsure.

What’s next? I groan to Tacita. Am I going to become one of those fossilized critics, describing the colours of a Van Gogh moon?

That’s impossible, Tacita says, buttoning up her coat. The moon is not a colour.

Le loup, as Istvan calls him. Which could be a reference to his name, or his time in the woods, but I imagine it is directed more at something in his wicked, indifferent eyes. The remoteness. His separateness from his own power. Though from Istvan, this comes off as a term of endearment rather than derision.

La rentrée is dying, I think. The leaves are golden and starting to fall, foretelling the brittle cold, the one I will soon know. It is different here than in the north. The savage cold. There it is simple. It is a matter of surviving. There are provisions. Here it is complicated. It is damp, and there are cracks in the tall, thick, clouded windows. The clothing too fashionable and thin. Nothing is designed for creating or keeping heat. I can see my breath in my flat when I wake up now, but the cold is good for painting. You keep your focus.

I have been working on an animal painting, red tones in the landscape as though lit by fire, an odd white moon, birds, and a deer. A strange mist. Thick bright paint, an off-kilter feeling. When you look closer you can see that one of the creatures is a woman with an animal’s face. She is like a ghost, familiar somehow, but unusual-looking. She has rain-soaked skin, like a person barely saved from drowning. But her expression is one of revolt, as though she would tear someone’s hair out if they came too close. It has been slow, trying to find the right white. I’ve mixed red, blue, and yellow together, which becomes a dark grey. In the painting, it comes across as white. This is something I learned at the academy. We have studied Millet, Daubigny, and Corot, who are able to paint snow without using any white at all. I’ve fallen in love with red, not too blue, not orange, but the beautiful perfect reds you see in a child’s cap in Renaissance portraits.

Tacita and I walk to a bistro where she insists we must consume frites, and wine. We pass a faded poster for the bullfights in Spain. You know the word matador in Spanish means killer, she says. Our shoes make little clicks on the cobblestones as we walk, the sound I have read whales make when meeting other whales, though usually they are silent.

The warmth of the bistro is the difference between walking from shadow to sun. Its dim chandeliers lit like a low flame against the mirrored walls. There are potted palms, banquettes of wine-coloured velvet, and women throwing their heads back in laughter. Round tables with rattan chairs on black and white tile, tasselled lamps, and ceilings a whole extra metre above normal, cigarette smoke swirling in the beams of light. All of Paris lives in cafés, I realize, in part because their apartments are too cold.

In the bistro I say, Tacita, you must tell me something.

Anything, dove. What is it?

What do you know of Lev?

She exhales smoke and runs her fingers through her short dark hair, the cigarette an inch from her scalp.

There is a long pause.

Shit, she finally says.

What?

He has a wife.

My cheeks burn red. It is as though she has struck me in the face.

In this time, Tacita, who has the frame of a sparrow, eats both our plates of frites. She washes down some wine. All right, she says, banging down her glass, feigning dead seriousness. There are two ways to become enlightened. One is androgyny.

This makes me laugh. As in a fairy tale, how every character is just an aspect of ourselves, male and female?

Sort of. Smoke spirals out of her cigarette.

Androgyny suggests completeness, the beatific condition of desirelessness. She holds the cigarette to her mouth. The coming together of male and female forces in a single individual. For most of us, she says, her head tilted, smiling, this is not possible. The other is the attainment of this ideal through the meeting of a man and woman in love. It is an ontological leap, one of great daring.

And marriage?

It is everything. She exhales. And nothing too. Though nothing isn’t necessarily the opposite of everything. She pauses. Pronounced man and wife. I think it is ridiculous how in marriage a man gets pronounced as a man. It is always the woman who must change identities. She taps the ash. Marriage can be the highest plane, or merely a binding contract. And really, how can anyone vow they will love longer than the love might last? She shifts in her chair. I mean, I was a child, really, when I married. That day, I washed my hair in the morning. As I sat drinking coffee, an iridescent blue butterfly that looked like it came from another hemisphere alighted on my robe and stayed there. I sat, and then walked around the room, dazzled by its presence in a time when I was not sure what I deserved.

Her words fade in and out of my ears. They are just words. Her experience. What she has identified as essential to her. I can’t even articulate what I feel, in part because I don’t know what I feel. Ardent. Vulnerable. Dangerously inhabited. Words everyone else uses. I know it is supposed to join people, this common language, but now I think it only separates us, reducing our experiences to the same words. And really, what has happened? Nothing. Nothing that can be explained other than this sense of feeling altered. Of nerves exposed. He obliterates thoughts of my work, of myself. It changes everything. I possess nothing.

Ivory, she says, grabbing my hand, which is cold, fingernails flecked with gesso, from across the table.

Don’t be a mourner. Please. Try not to think of it. It will ruin you.

I know this. I squeeze her hand, yet I am unable to perform with forced high spirits.

An obdurate romantic. Merveilleux, she says, placing her hand on my shoulder.

I finally reach for the wine and tip it straight from the bottle down my throat, in one long, theatrical gulp. My brother Edgar once taught me how to open my throat. We practised on lemonade, which made us choke and burn and sputter to the ground laughing.

How marvellous. Tacita smiles. How almost persuasive, she says in a way that tells me she’s impressed.

I have such a vision of Lev that it is as though I’ve willed him here. He is standing in the courtyard of the art academy several days later. He leans against the stone wall. And even though my back is to him, I know he is there. I can tell by the expression on the faces of other women. When I turn to see him, the tangled black hair and flashing whiteblue eyes make him seem almost half-mad. Their portentous purpose startles me. In this moment I can see that something he carries removes him from the world, and from me. He is outside of time and place. Something about this, about him blinds me. He looks at me and I avert my eyes. When you are being looked at, really looked at, it is hard to look back. Standing near him is like being under a low rush of birds.

We walk through all the arrondissements sequentially until my heels blister and a small hole, the size of a centime, appears on the bottom of my left shoe. I have only one pair of shoes now, and the polish I apply each night to fill in the cracks has washed off on the wet stones, staining the foot portion of my stockings into a shoe trompe l’oeil. I barely remember what we speak of. I am cloaked in a shy opacity and become joltingly self-conscious about my slightly lilted gait, about speaking French without mistakes, about which expression I should wear on my face, how my arms should hang, what I should do with my hands, now turning red in the cold air. I am too busy noticing everything in the presence of him, how he speaks, how he moves, to remember what we discuss. There are long stretches of silence, which he interprets differently. These silences always make me think of my mortality. That there is always so much more to be said.

I like how he arrows, straight as a sunshaft, through the crooked streets. We sit at the top of Belleville, the buildings silver under the violet sky. He rips at a baguette and offers it to me. His hands are large, rough, long fingered. I shake my head and I watch the swell of his jaw as he eats, thinking that where he comes from they have black rivers, they eat black bread. I suddenly have a memory of Father telling me how the Russians loved Ivan the Terrible. He explained that for them, the word terrible means formidable. He said that Napoleon could not defeat the Russians because when his men arrived the Russians had already set fire to Moscow. They destroyed their own city. Owning a ruined city was better than giving it over.

His hands rip another shank of bread. I also think, All men are hungry.

We hear bottles rolling and clinking in the back of an open truck making its delivery to the cave aux vins.

What do you think of, Ivory? he turns to me and asks. He says my name, Eve-or-aya.

I wonder if he means in general, or now, and either way there are so many thoughts in this blindingly silent moment between us that I can scarcely pick a single thing. I look at the potted violets on the sill across the street that delineate the space between the shutters and think of how I love old white paint, but this seems silly after such a long silence. I think of songs that take wing. Of how when I wake up, I touch my cheek and part of my forehead to the windowpane in my studio because I like to feel the burn of morning. But I don’t have the nerve to articulate such seemingly constructed responses. I’m not sure if I’m liked enough to say what I think.

We walk back to Lev’s studio. It is a high white room. We climb up creaking wooden stairs. While my studio is just one painting on an easel, his has the exalted chaos of an archaeological dig. It is shockingly filthy. Something I’ve never witnessed in my childhood, where opulence insisted on staring back at you through crystal, marble, silver. Here there are paint-splattered walls, tins of brushes clotted with paint, photographs, magazines, books, and newspapers all torn in piles. The floor littered with coal, charcoal, matches. It is the opposite of his paintings, clear and simple, stripped to the most essential thing. In his studio, it feels as though his subconscious is leaking out. It touches even my feet. Everything in varying degrees of creation and destruction. It reveals his mind in action without ever relinquishing its mystery. Everything smells of smoke and turpentine. A fire left its black imprint on the shared wall of his studio just a couple of days ago, the room burning, banging into flames, twisting upward. He told me that you should never involve the pompiers. They ruin everything. Instead, he got the fire down with buckets of water. The wall, his chair, and table were blackened, but miraculously, everything else, including his paintings, was untouched.

There is no pretense. We are barely up the stairs. His rough hands on my shoulders. The dark cloud jacket in my nostrils. Wool and outside cold and smoke. When I taste him, I am tasting outside. The unshaven skin leaving a constellation of small welts on my cheek and neck. Back-seamed stockings, the ones with the pinhole of white thigh, twisting off. My shoulders fibrillating against the windowless wall, marked with black, carbon wings. New fingers, new mouths. He grabs my hair, the pins scatter on my shoulders and down my back and onto the floor, a barely traceable rain. When my hair comes down it falls over and encloses him in a dark wave. He lifts up the white folds of my dress. I am cool against him. The warmth back into the body. Delicate networks of blood. Flashing silver eyes. Sweat shining on bone. My hand on the tendons in his throat. The truth anointed. The kind of truth that can arise only from such a profound wordless moment. The far, unlanguaged precincts where there is only feeling.

I fall asleep on his bare chest, the bang of his heart against the side of my face. The only thing I think in the folding darkness, Nothing else matters.

Later he moves across the room and brings back a large canvas, its wooden stretcher striking the floor in front of me. On a thick white ground that could be Siberia, or Lapland, is a pale blue square. Blue is the hottest colour, he says flatly. When all the colours melt away, you get blue. From the date on the back, it was made weeks ago but the tiny word in the right-hand corner is unmistakable. The faint glint of those three small letters in graphite, a shining prophecy. It says, feu.