4

OF HAPPIER TIMES I’m happy to write, lest you’ve forgotten them. I won’t let you forget. Shysters in white coats say, go back as far as you can remember. So many years between us, I’ve lost count. If you could see me now — this moment — if I could see myself! Whiteface. A geisha’s makeup, all the rage in Paris, where under the shadow of Eiffel’s grande asperge we hankered after japonisme. All because of Hokusai’s wave swamping tiny boats, a village. And studies drawn from life — no École des BeauxArts for people with tits! But. Bodies, freedom: the shape of vastness? Like God, some might say. Or Paris. A wisteria-tangled joie de vivre, a well-pruned riot — heaven; and you its debutante, at what age, forty? That show they gave us near La Madeleine: a coming out?

But before the tormenters return I must get to the point … the point before the troubles began, when the world was fresh, that other time: April in Paris, what finer place to start?

***

ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS
DAY? MONTH? YEAR?

MY DEAREST C,

In the grey-green thrall of another life, this earlier time (what’s to erase memory’s greenness?) the only bounds we knew were in Montparnasse. Maman’s, and the walls of our flat. Flocked paper, Papa’s pipe smoke. A holding pen, a corral and its starting gate bolted by rules, rules, rules. In those unbroken days — correct me if I’m wrong, it was 1884? — you were as headstrong as any horse.

Released, we raced along the boulevard at gunshot speed. As fast as they would take us, our feet skimmed cobblestones, fish-scale shiny after the rain. Moisture breathed up from everywhere — sidewalks, sewers, budded lilacs. Coffee smells, butter smells. Gutted fish, orange peels and piss in the gutters — the muse of all these scents enough to hold us, hold us up.

We were with a friend, of course; it didn’t do to be alone, girls flying arm in arm past shopkeepers sweeping shop-fronts, setting out fruit. Equally eager to escape Maman’s badgering, our friend behaved as one of us, though she was merely a boarder. We could not move fast enough with Maman’s voice in our ears. Who had time to waste taming a wild mane or properly lacing a corset? The dandruff dotting my hair was marble dust and dried clay, and my middle was bound, but by yesterday’s smock stiffened with plaster and not whalebone. When it bunched over my skirt and rode up, I peeled my jacket off and tied it around me by its sleeves, barely stopping.

“A target for pigeons, you look like. You might’ve been shat on!” our friend jeered, as if she too wasn’t splotched and splattered, a compliment paid out of mouth-full-of-marbles English decency. But, then, she wasn’t so different from us. Cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens, politely holding the gold-tipped gate, she paused to light a cigarette, took a puff, passed it. Its taste cut the perfume of freshly pruned trees.

Forgetting Maman’s well-pruned urbanity, we didn’t bother hiking our hems to jump puddles. Down chestnut-bordered allées we raced, past fountains and old men reading newspapers. We barely ogled the statuary, far too rushed to speculate about man-bits under fig leaves. Sprinting round the perfectly circular pond, even you hardly noticed the little toy boats drifting there.

Not soon enough we swung out into the streets again, past windows dressed with finery: hats, gloves, parasols, soaps, tarts, rainbow spreads of macarons and chocolates shaped like roses, fruit, birds, rabbits and any other form of flora and fauna imaginable. Vanities now, they were treats we would buy for ourselves when we were rich and famous, with the wealth caked in the creases of our knuckles and beneath our nails — dried clay, from which we made our treasures. Seduced by marzipan pigs and tartes citrons, my friend pressed her nose to the glass.

“Today of all days” — I stamped my foot, wrested her away — “how dare you think of your stomach?”

“Yes, Maman. No, Maman,” she mimicked my accent pathetically. “Because I can’t buy doesn’t mean I can’t look. If I could I’d window-shop down every bloody street here.”

“No time to be a flâneur! You said yourself, this is the chance we’ve been slaving for!”

“I as much as you.” Such presumption in one so falsely humble. “Can we not speak for each other? Though perhaps one can’t and mustn’t gauge another’s mind. But one can try.”

I had awaited this day all eighteen years of my life, as far back as I could remember. Long before we’d made the city our home, I’d delved with both hands into muck and murk, shaping faces out of mud, to Maman’s great disgust. All I had thought of was the chance, ooh-la-la, to study with a great artist, even persuading Papa to move our family — Maman, our brother, sister and me — to Paris.

Alas, studying here was to sketch statues, drawing from death, not life. How could we hope to show true anatomy, movement? To students like us, blessed with breasts, not penises, real bodies, living, naked ones, were off-limits. Most would give their eye teeth for the opportunity which had landed in our laps. Some would have given eyes and teeth.

As we wound our way up rue Jacob, and rue Jacob broadened and straightened into rue de l’Université, my friend’s babbling overran the river’s sounds — such a torrent that I quit listening. My belly was a bundle of nerves, and a brassy wonder took such hold that my bad foot dragged.

My foolish friend teased, “You’re not getting cold feet — you’re not afraid of him, are you?” I suppose that you remember this? My friend had acquired a habit of baiting me, finding a warped delight in it, perhaps, ever since our old teacher had brought the Master to our atelier and said Monsieur would instruct us in his absence.

“Cold feet! Don’t be stupid. Afraid of that runt of a man? Talking to him will be like talking to Papa, he must be that old.” I believe you put those words in my mouth. They shut her up, momentarily. Still her round eyes swooped over me.

“I’ve heard about him, from the other English girls — the ones studying too. He’s got a reputation for getting inside people’s knickers.”

I let out a snort. “And we’re lambs for the killing? I can’t speak for you, of course. But I care only about his work. The work of his hands, our own Michelangelo’s.” And I waved my own grandly, for we stood before the Dépôt des Marbres.

It was a gloomy building, arched windows glaring behind the lofty planes and their seedpods’ fuzzy, dangling bursts of green.

“Since you’re so sure, missy, you go first.”

A tenacious joy, climbing like wisteria, choked out any trepidation. The light inside, barely interrupted by the leafy branches beyond, was so harsh that we squinted. Pouring in, it showed a dusty purity — an oxymoron like our brother, who, after getting religion, could be sharp and dull.

Men worked silently in the clammy brightness, barely looking up, the air charged with its cellar-smell. Despite their bustling industry, their hammering and chiselling, we seemed the only breathing ones. It was a morgue of sorts: statues making a company of ghosts frozen into position.

Is it vivid to you, still? Everywhere, stacked and scattered over worktables and shelves, were body parts shaped from clay or plaster-cast. Torsos, heads, arms, legs. A limbo of fragments, as if plucked from a battlefield. My friend was agog. In this purgatory of white lay paradise.

Only then did I notice one of the workers breezing past, a wraith-like fellow with a vaguely familiar face, who half nodded. I couldn’t think of his name. Perhaps he had been at our old school, was now privileged to be among the legion of Monsieur’s praticiens?

My friend, entranced, put out her hand, stroked a rigid ankle. Someone coughed a gruff Bonjour, and we were no longer so alone. Trapping her hand in her pocket, my friend struck the pose — do you remember? — so useful in currying Maman’s favour.

“Mesdemoiselles …?” Monsieur said vaguely. He was short, with threads of grey in his reddish beard and itchy-looking eyes. Exactly level with mine, his gaze was neither masterly nor instructive but just shy of being rude, lingering with a blunt curiosity, his blue eyes roving under pinkish lids. In one arm he held a sketchbook, in his hand a stub of chalk. He ran his other hand over his bristling grey hair, rubbed his big fleshy nose, and clapped his hands.

A girl appeared, with translucent skin set off by the dark triangle between her legs. With feline grace she stepped onto a platform and crouched. Neither you nor my friend looked at her. Then a man slipped from behind a curtain, naked as David. His face might’ve been raw canvas; my friend’s too, only hers was filled with such dismay it might have been her posing, undressed, stripped, by his hands. Not that it would’ve been torture. The muscles of his torso rippled like those of a Michelangelo, his penis a fat snail curled against his thigh.

It would be lying to say only my friend gaped. Not that we hadn’t seen a penis before, each of us lucky enough to have a brother. You were silent. But my friend elbowed me, choking back a giggle, a cough. Stop, I nudged her back, hoping our new master hadn’t noticed. Affecting the indifference fools take for wilfulness, I tried not to imagine Maman’s chiding: Your attitude will be the death of us all, my girl!

Fears of Monsieur seeing our display lifted when we saw that he had set down the sketchbook, seized a boulette, and was busily shaping it into a pointy lemon tart topped with a raspberry — a much too perfect boob.

Around us fell such quiet you could hear dust settle. A taller girl, naked as day, strutted past, muscles yielding to some inner current, while another (her twin?) moved as through a dream stripped of thou-shalt-nots. Circling, they slipped past, the soft flexing of limbs vibrations you could almost feel. Just when I felt dumb and peeled my eyes away, another man appeared, supplearsed as a Marly horse. Around and around he strutted in a silent rhythm with the others — a soundless ballet, each perfecting a pas de seul. A dance of flexion, a musical of the imagination, it evidenced a heaven our brother — our dear Paul, for all his prudishness-to-come — would gladly have died to enter.

When it ended Monsieur drew me aside. Hand at my waist, he whisked me to where the woman squatted. Guileless, sharpkneed, thighs spread wide, kohl-rimmed eyes blazing, she might’ve been a cancan girl from Pigalle or the seediest stretch of rue Saint-Denis.

“Look closely — pay attention.” His voice had a banker’s rasp. Stroking her thigh, he placed my palm there. The cool of her skin gave me chills. Was I choosing a cut of well-marbled meat for Maman at the butcher’s? Monsieur’s hand guided mine. I saw through my fingertips: skin rougher than it looked, a firmness that was hungrily pliant.

“Perfection?” he breathed into my ear, then strode off to reposition the others and prod the man into a half-kneeling crouch.

The rosy, canine hang of testicles is what we saw.

Forgetting us, Monsieur returned to his posing woman. Gave her a slap, forcing her into a deeper squat, flaying her open. Her hips were a walnut’s lobes, thighs etched with a dishwater-blue light, reminding me of our cook whose bust I’d done in plaster, of our maid’s nimble fingers. It piqued an urge to fly back to our apartment — not to see our bookworm brother or spoiled sister, and certainly not our dear Maman, but to observe the help at their chores, hands like birds.

My friend huddled beside the cold stove and observed Monsieur’s man from across the room, as if he were an explosive device she mustn’t get close to. Busily she inspected a plaster shin, her hand falling away when Monsieur rushed to nudge the man’s elbow to his thigh.

“Hopeless, hopeless — I pay you to sleep? Try looking like there’s a brain in your head!”

The Master began pinching and pummelling a lump of clay, spitting on it as he worked to keep it moist. Faded from his sight, my friend was as wan as the fellow from school who’d gone off to do Monsieur’s labour, chiselling, spruing, casting, pouring plaster — the domain of anyone lucky enough to apprentice here.

Job description: Praticien/Praticienne: Practitioner, one who enables. From pratique: method, practice; clientèle. Related to practical: businesslike, convenient. Expedient, advantageous, profitable. A sibling of pratiquer: to exercise; to frequent; to open; to build; to cut. To practise not all that different from being a churchgoer, our brother might say.

Was being a model also required?

Once more Monsieur was beside me. Shyly, it seemed, he stroked his beard. “You’re good with marble, I hear. Have you the patience to pose, too, Mademoiselle?” Out of the blue it sounded playful, like the things Papa said to thwart Maman.

We’d discussed this, over pots of tea and an asphyxiating number of cigarettes. How we would not model to foot the rent for our studio, tiny as it was and just steps from home. We would refuse distractions from our work, would starve before we’d take off our clothes!

My friend stood. “I can tell you right now, sir,” she spoke for me, “Mademoiselle does not.”

“C’est impossible,” I declared, glancing at her. I hope you know I meant it, too, that I’d have sooner licked the pavement than bare myself and have some old goat finger me with his eyes.

Except, except — until then, no one had shown me the gift of sight. True sight. What it was, what it is to see through one’s fingertips. Nor had I felt towards anyone before that the slimmest debt of gratitude.

Can you blame me?

Like our Paul, I write for the certainty of writing, and send you a kiss.

— Mademoiselle