I Always Loved You Read online

  Mary accepted the coffee and then set her cup on the table too. “Tell me, Edgar, were you ever going to say anything, or were you going to keep it a secret?”

  “Edgar has a secret?” Robert said. “Well, no doubt he has. I’ve never met a Frenchman who didn’t have dozens of them. Must have been what made him so jumpy all day.”

  “I didn’t tell Pissarro either,” Edgar said.

  “Monsieur Pissarro lives in Pontoise!” Mary said, her voice rising. “I saw you last week. All you had to do was tell me. There are a thousand ways we could have worked it out.” She was remembering the canceled exhibition, his preemptory action, his thin excuse. She had been impotent then, too, in the face of his resistance. “I have just three paintings ready.”

  Robert and Katherine glanced at one another and recognized the marital tone: the implied ultimatum, the private conversation carried on in public.

  “What is the matter?” Katherine asked.

  “Your problem, Mademoiselle Cassatt,” Edgar said, “is that you worked on only one thing, while I had other projects. You should have been more prolific.”

  Mademoiselle Cassatt. He hadn’t called her Mademoiselle Cassatt for a year.

  “How could I have been?” Mary said. “I sacrificed everything for that journal. On a promise you made. You saw me. I was at your studio every day. When could I have done more?”

  “What is all this, Mame?” Robert asked.

  “Edgar is pulling out of the journal, Father. He told Monsieur Caillebotte not to pay the printer.”

  Lydia shifted in her chair and reached for her mother’s hand; as she did the print slid off her lap to the floor.

  Robert leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, assuming a professorial air, immune to the currents of emotion running through the room. “In business, Edgar, people meet their obligations.”

  “This is not a business, Robert; this is art,” Edgar said.

  “But when you commit to a project, when you involve other people, when it involves investment, it is a business, no matter what the commodity,” Robert said.

  Mary winced at her father’s use of the word commodity, but Edgar said, “Yes, our articles are for sale, but only when we are ready to sell them. I am justified in withholding whatever I choose from the marketplace. I cannot compromise my work merely to benefit another person.”

  “But Mame is not just another person, is she?” Robert said. “She’s Mary. Your friend. And I don’t know what else.”

  “Robert!” Katherine said.

  “I never believed you selfish before, Edgar,” Mary said, “though everyone warned me.”

  “I can’t produce the journal if I’m not ready,” he said.

  “But what has to be ready? Everything is finished. Everything is prepared. There is nothing else to do.” She stood and went to the window. The curtains had caught the cooling breeze and billowed into the room. The journal, when published, was to have showcased her work, to have catapulted them both into a wider audience. What a nightmare the past year had turned out to be: the tedium of her trip with her father, Abigail’s death, Lydia’s frequent illnesses. The only bright time had been working with Edgar, and now what had that gotten her? “This is all I have,” she said. “This is what this year has been about for me.”

  “I am not responsible for your work or your happiness,” Edgar said, rising. “I cannot apologize for doing what is right for me. I see that I have hurt you, which is unfortunate.”

  Lydia said, “But you don’t mean this?”

  “I am afraid I do,” Edgar said, and was out the door before anyone could say anything else.

  “Well, that’s the last of him, I imagine,” Robert said, snapping open a newspaper and staring into it.

  The wind began to chill. Lydia crossed the room and shut the window, and the sailing curtains stilled.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Edgar:

  What he does not tell her:

  That sometimes he cannot sleep at night because he is dreaming of gouache, lithography, pastel, monotype, charcoal, oil, etchings, plates, wax. That he wants to stop and start time at his prerogative so that he can revel in the bounty of materials, can challenge himself and experiment without time passing because the day isn’t long enough. That the circus or the Opéra ballet or the café chantants or dinners with friends or the delicious masculine embrace of the racetrack devour his evenings and Sundays but in between there is only work. That some days he looks up and hours have passed and he is late for one thing or another and he races to the café or the friends or the theater and what he leaves behind is unfinished work, and he thinks nothing he makes will ever be finished. That he must make careful calculations in order to produce his articles because he is not gifted, he is not prescient, he is not an auteur, he is only a draftsman, a servant, a plodding poseur who wishes to excel. That he is hampered by the infernal blur in his eye he fears will only spread. That the arrangement of legs on a group of dancers or the color of skirt sashes or the depth of the stage or the bend of a laundress’s back or the line of her apron confounds him and has to be worked and reworked. That these problems haunt him, and he fears that he has lost his touch. That he has to struggle with each canvas, though he has already painted many. That with each beginning he is again a beginner. That each composition requires its own rules. That his experienced yet flawed eye needs repetitive correction. That color is still changing, though no one believes him and no one believes that what he sees and what he used to see are so different that it is as if he were seeing the world through an ever-changing, ever-blurring, ever-achromatic prism. That the Sturm und Drang about their annual exhibition is always a struggle when people—Renoir, Monet—defect to the Salon seeking its false external confirmation, hoping to find in the cloistered snobbery some validation, when validation ought to be internal, personal, private, and he can’t understand why they don’t believe in themselves. That art is a confection—it is true only when it is false—and their attempt to render natural light negates the filter of the eye and the brain. That the endless haggling over apartment rental and lights and hanging takes up so much time that he thinks of never exhibiting again, but there is no economic salvation for the artist who does not show. That the inglorious details of buying and selling and the oppression of the Bank of Antwerp intrude and force him to ask Durand-Ruel for money in order to pay his housekeeper, Sabine, and to eat. That the process of selling art is so repugnant, so commercial, yet so necessary that he submits to it and tries to do so with integrity and inclusiveness, but the others like to complain and exclude artists they believe inferior, which is just like the Salon jury, but they can’t see the hypocrisy because they are so taken up with themselves. That one must believe in oneself enough to attempt to surpass Rembrandt or Ingres or Delacroix. That this striving is always on his mind, this making a mark, this elevation of art to the sublime, the real, the relevant, the necessary. That he is unequal to the task—every day, he believes this—and doesn’t know where to place himself in the world or history or the future. That the red herring of pride interferes with real work because the real work is lines and more lines and the willingness to stand before the canvas, the sculpture, the pastel, the easel, the subject, the window, the model and construct form and shape and light and color. That such courage is only the beginning. That there is the essence of the thing that struggles to make itself known, and you don’t know what it is when you begin, that you discover it as you work. That is the secret that critics and laypeople do not understand. That nothing is clear to the artist until the art reveals itself, and it is a mystery where art resides before it is expressed, even though he can recount each step and each choice and each calculation he made; it is this riddle of art that eludes him, even as it infuses him as he works, even as he rejects it because he applies tenacious deliberation to his days and the tension between what he knows and what he doesn’t know abounds. That he doesn’t want to believe the muse exists, though she does—of c
ourse she does—for he cannot account for the music of his composition; even as he follows the golden ratio and the laws of tonality and perspective there is the in-between, wherein his brush works and color plays and it is magical and true and beguiling and it comes from him and not from him. That he falls in love with every new confection and doesn’t want to let it go, though he must, to pay bills, to live, to eat, to drink, to go to the Opéra, to travel, to buy oil, charcoal, paint, canvas, wax, fixative, frames, nails, lumber, saws, brushes, turpentine, poppy seed oil, needles, plates, silk, and now his latest, his most exciting: tulle and tarlatan and even a skein of real hair, and this new project—more than the etching, more than the puzzle of black and white that delights Mary Cassatt—absorbs him, and he would like to tell her that he is not fickle, that he is not flighty, that he is not mercurial, that he is helpless, that inside him is a pirate who plunders his desire and twists it and distracts him from a single scheduled purpose with deadlines and demands and expectations to explore the unexpected, the rare, the difficult, and he has already mastered the etching, so therefore it is boring. That he needs to prove himself only to himself. That work is never finished, because some other beguiling insight is always out of reach, lurking, taunting. That he defected because he has to make money, has to meet commissions, and he could not find the time to devote to his avowed goal of Le Jour et la Nuit. That this is not true, not really, because the truth, ever elusive, is that he cannot slow down his mind for other people, nor for the arbitrary requests and obligations and responsibilities he has imposed on himself, because deadlines are malleable, and he is sorry that he committed himself to Mademoiselle Cassatt and that she believed him and made a religion of the print and the paper and the press but he is past that now or not yet ready or the process no longer intrigues him, all possibilities that he cannot parse, not for her, not for anyone, not for himself. That the conundrum is that he is who he is, and this defection is not personal or disloyal or a breach of trust. That the non-elusive truth is that she has never failed him. That he can’t think of a moment or a gesture or an act wherein she betrayed or disappointed him. That even her anger over Berthe was an attempt to persuade him to kindness. That she cheers him, she delights him, he respects her. That she looks at him sometimes as if she sees through him, but he knows himself to be opaque, because he has painted himself that way, and it is only her desire that makes her believe she understands him, when even he cannot escape the murky dungeons of his own soul.

  Chapter Forty

  Mary:

  What she does not tell him:

  That sometimes she cannot sleep at night because she dreams of texture and shadow, of prints and plates, of ink and burin, of perspective and foreshortening, of light shimmering and colors colliding, of juxtaposition and contrast, of press and pressure, of mordant and hydrochloric acid, of damp and dry paper, of depth of line and shallow, tiny scratches, of third, fourth, and fifth states, of the craft of dimension, of detail and restraint, of the uncommon, the difficult, the true, the sublime. That not enough time exists to accomplish mastery, though she wants it, she dreams of it, she aches for it. That some days she rues the tyranny of the clock, a devil that instead of recording hours steals them from her, impeding her progress, handicapping her, because she needs time, she is not quick, she is not cavalier, she is not prolific; she is studied, careful, deliberate, cautious, even, though no one would believe her—they think her courageous and adventurous, and while it is possible that this is true, they do not know with what reflection she approaches her art even as she strives to be free. That she is hampered by her fear of being irrelevant even as she is determined not to be. That her father’s doubt nags at her, that to have to maintain resistance to skepticism even in her own home exhausts her. That suddenly the fear that she is not gifted, not skilled, not talented overcomes her and she has to bury the unease so as not to alarm her models and make them question her and in so doing drift away and lose the expression or even the desire to please her and she needs them to want to please her for she does not paint out of doors, she does not paint vases or flowers or rivers, she paints people, she seeks to portray their inner lives, and they will not show them to her if they do not believe she can reveal them. That color and light are all she has in the world by way of tools. That though her sharp mind does her well, it can only be deployed through brush and beauty, for she would not be welcome to run a railroad, a bank, a university, though she believes she could if given the chance, though no man would give a woman such leave, but in art all is allowed if one frees oneself of prejudice, which is why she needs the madding rabble of the impressionists in their quarrelsome disagreements, because they never say to her face that she is a woman, though she is one and sometimes, sometimes, she yields and it is this that troubles her, for Edgar is necessary to her and gratitude is not the word to describe her relief that he came to her and rescued her because she had been on the verge of quitting, there were days when she thought I can’t fight them anymore and surely there was some grand, divine bon mot in the universe that would convey to him what it meant that he had shared his courage, intellect, and artifice with her, that he had befriended her, that he had given her her sight. That she has had to find a way to say that she needs him without capitulating to the romantic, though as a woman she does sometimes capitulate, for what is more desirable in life than someone who knows you, who finishes your sentences, who challenges you, who gives you what you need, who considers you an equal, who makes your days fuller, brighter, better, and this to her is romantic, it is the heart of romance, a mirrored mind, a matched soul, twinned yearnings, reciprocal intellects, and why this should frighten him she doesn’t know, because it does not frighten her, though if he came to her and said I am yours what would she say, because Abigail died for love and what other woman has survived marriage intact, childless, free to pursue that which is selfish, because art is selfish of necessity, it is selfish by its nature, it is selfish because art is the thief of time, and love also demands time but then wilts into something other, something institutional, something obligatory, like Berthe’s unholy imbalance of motherhood, sisterhood, and marital obligation, a nightmare of subterfuge Mary could never countenance but admires for its honesty because Berthe’s desire is for art, it is fully for art, as is hers, but somehow Berthe has managed to love if illicitly and while Mary has painted love and seen love and been admired for seeing and painting love, somehow she has not managed to have love. That it confounds her that her life must be devoid of love to have art. That it confounds her that this must be the choice. That she remembers her avowals and declarations and certainties from not so long ago, when she was young and her goals seemed distant and a monastic life necessary to achieve them and she had not hesitated to announce her firm renunciation of the encumbrances of womanhood, but she’d been young then, not yet in love, not yet torn apart by desires so palpable they cause her pain. That it was the pain that surprised her, that it was the love that surprised her, that it was she who was in need of the love that astounded her. That life is ungovernable, even for a disciplined soul like hers, and betrayal its practical joke.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I see nothing.”

  “Is this a statement? Is he mocking us?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “It’s the emperor’s new clothes. He wants us to praise it to show our idiocy.”

  Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte, pretending to study Berthe’s paintings in the room closest to the apartment foyer, eavesdropped on four art critics crowded around an empty vitrine in an apartment on the Rue des Pyramides. It was Tuesday, the opening day of the exhibition, and the spectacle of the empty glass container seemed to have arrested them all. Somewhere upstairs, hammers were pounding to the grating dissonance of rasping saws and the occasional loud thud. The building was still under construction, and this apartment, like all new apartments in Paris, smelled of the ubiquitous wet plaster. Outside, on the street, people were going about their business
, not at all enticed by the large green posters with red lettering tacked to the kiosk outside that announced the exhibition. It might have been the blackening downpour, but Mary feared that the public had perhaps grown indifferent, or had tired of the new and different, or that the yearly change of venue was too difficult for them to follow.

  “This is the Wandering Jew of exhibitions,” one of the critics said, as if he had read Mary’s mind. A nervously thin man, he was thumbing through the catalog, smudged in places where the pages had been put together while still wet. “One year here, one year there. Who can find them?”

  “Just tell us, will you, what the catalog says this case is supposed to display?” another said.

  “It’s Degas, right?” The one critic turned several pages and read. “Ah! A little dancer of fourteen years.”

  “Well, then, that hypochondriac Degas is telling the truth after all. Maybe he really can’t see if he believes there is a piece of art in there. Or he’s finally gone mad. Such a shame, really, though I’m sure that Manet will keep drawing enough laundresses and prostitutes to bore us all.”

  “Why Georges Charpentier has opened a new gallery to extol the virtues of these idiot rebels is beyond me.”

  “Manet has never exhibited with these bottom-feeders. I hear he’s sending something to the Salon again this year.”

  “I heard that Manet can’t even stand up anymore. A touch of Neapolitan fever.”

  “More than a touch, I’d say, if he can’t stand up.”

  They focused again on the vitrine.

  “I heard Degas made the dancer out of wax and that she wears a real dancer’s dress and shoes.”

  “A wax sculpture? Are you certain? Not stone?”