I Always Loved You Page 6

  Édouard’s plump wife often swept in with a market basket over her arm, always knocking over stacks of blank canvases in her haste. After relaying some triviality about her youngest brother, Léon, she would venture, “That is quite a dress, Berthe. Whomever did you persuade to knock off such a tarty thing?”

  Édouard would roar at her to get out and Suzanne would leave, but not without an accusing glance over her shoulder at Berthe.

  Sometimes, Suzanne would sneak in and stand quietly in the corner, but Édouard had a feral sense about her, and after a short while he would mutter, without turning around, “What is it?” and Suzanne would claim that Léon wanted to ride to the bois with him, to which Édouard would always answer, “Tomorrow.” Suzanne frequently slammed the door on the way out, and Édouard would sigh, “Why does she care now?”

  Berthe said nothing. Édouard believed that his flirtations had no effect on anyone, and that his serial desertions, for her, for Eva Gonzalès, for Méry Laurent, were none of Suzanne’s concern, or Berthe’s. Berthe’s eyes often drifted to the door as she tried to recall how many times she had fled a room, a party, a gathering, the gnawing grip of humiliation and shame hobbling her. A hundred times she had sworn that she would turn away from him, that she would never again allow him to charm her.

  “Lift your chin,” he would say.

  She would.

  “Higher. Now look at me that way you did that one time. After the ball at the Opéra, when we had so much trouble with your dress.”

  “That look is no longer for you.”

  “My dear Berthe, that look will always be for me.”

  “I hate you.”

  “There. Just so.”

  And so their days had gone.

  • • •

  Now Édouard leaned on the table, his long, languid body lazy as always, waiting. He had had to wait for so few women in his life that he affected patience as a matter of courtesy. “Where does Eugène think you are?”

  “Please don’t be vulgar.”

  “Why did you come?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  “I came to tell you not to give up,” Berthe said. At the Salon, from across the room, she had seen the dismay on his face as the acclaim his portrait failed to garner instead washed over Sylvestre, who had won the Prix du Salon. The crowds marched past, indifferent, as Édouard’s manner escalated from ebullience to bravado, teetered on hilarity, then crashed into melancholy sorrow once Degas had left him. She had wanted to run to him, had wanted to hold him up, to stand by his side, to declare to passersby the damage their ignorance was causing. “People don’t understand,” she said, “what they see.”

  He started then, all semblance of composure fading. His gaze fixed on hers. “Ah, my Berthe, if only it was you I came home to.”

  “She is beautiful, your Nana is; she is fearless. You should be the same. Don’t let them say things that hurt you. They don’t know what they are doing. Or perhaps they do and say it only to hurt you. I don’t know. But they are wrong, in every case. There is no greater artist than you alive today.”

  “You are alive.”

  “I am not you.”

  “I could never have painted Nana if it weren’t for your painting of the girl in the cheval glass. Such command of light you have. Such delicate glimmers of beauty.”

  “You are the one who shines.”

  “My love—”

  “I’m going now.” She picked up her purse and gloves.

  “But no one is coming today.”

  “Please,” she said, holding up her hand. Sometimes, all it took was a mere glance from him for her to surrender, but she had made resolutions.

  “Then let me walk you.”

  “No.”

  “I will hire you a cab.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell me you came on the omnibus again. Your departed mother will haunt me if I allow you to travel like that. To say nothing of Eugène.”

  “I’m caged enough as it is, Édouard. Let me go.”

  “I looked for you, that first day,” he said. “I needed you. No other.”

  One hand on the doorknob, she turned to face him. “I was there.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Degas chased after a woman.”

  A ghost of a smile broke across Édouard’s face. “You were there,” he said.

  She nodded. And was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  The day after Degas met Mary Cassatt, he made a visit to his oculist, Dr. Maurice Perrin, at 45 Rue Saint-Placide, and suffered the usual interminable delay before the doctor called him in from the waiting room. For days and days, the little black hole had floated in the center of his vision. He had talked to it, begged it to go away, then ignored it, thinking perhaps he was conjuring the thing from fear and that if he paid it no attention, it would disappear and give him back the clarity he needed. But at Mademoiselle Cassatt’s, the hole had sometimes obscured her head. He had had to turn to look at her out of the corner of his eye.

  The doctor took a seat and opened his notes. “Which eye, again?”

  “My right. Don’t you remember?” How many times had he told the man that his problem had begun long ago, even before he had turned twenty? It was the cold, he had told the doctor. When he had first moved out of his father’s house, he’d rented an attic atelier that leaked rain and cold on the winter nights. And then six years ago, defending Paris on the artillery lines during the bone-chilling winter of the Prussian War, the incessant cold and wind had numbed his eyes. Surely the two together had damaged something?

  “I have many patients, monsieur,” the doctor said.

  “Light hurts my eyes too,” Degas said. “The light problem started in New Orleans.”

  “Light and a black hole?”

  Degas considered the possibility that the doctor might think he was crazy. Even to him, the affliction sounded contradictory. He suffered from dark, yet he could not tolerate light. And this beastly plague was such an inconstant caller. If he could only discern a pattern to its visits, he might discover the cause and find the solution, but the thing never announced itself or behaved in an orderly fashion. He didn’t even know what to call it. The black sun. The opposite of light. An eclipse of sight. The hole stole everything from him: time, sight, confidence. He might vanish into it, if the hole had its way.

  On the wall above the doctor’s head floated a diagram of an eye.

  “Such an elegant invention, the eye,” Degas said.

  “Not too elegant if it fails, is it?” the doctor said. Once, the doctor had held an eye in his palm, the cool jelly-like grape with its tangle of tissue and tentacles that communicated with the brain. The retina, the macula. What did all these layers do? Names certainly didn’t help, not the painter, at least. The doctor could not impress the painter with anatomy alone. The painter wanted clear vision.

  The doctor conducted an exam, first separating the painter’s eyelids at the window, so that he could better peer at the conjunctiva. He dropped belladonna into each eye, lit a table lamp, and held his new ophthalmoscope before each eyeball, first evaluating whether or not the lenses had clouded and turned cataract, but they had not. He could see no other abnormality. The painter denied any foreign object having scraped or pierced his eyes at any time.

  The doctor set the ophthalmoscope down and sighed.

  “You can help me?” the painter asked.

  “I have an idea,” the doctor said. He would not say he could help him because he was not certain that he could. He knew the painter was anxious, but he could not measure his affliction as he could the simple parameters of refraction or the functional abnormality of a cloudy lens. This was something else. This was something hiding inside the eye, or perhaps hiding deeper, in the mind. An absence of light at the center of his vision. This was what the painter always described. The doctor did not doubt him, but what he could not see and what the painter did see equaled frustration for both men. Some eyes were too mysteri
ous to understand.

  He prescribed glasses to wear in the daytime that might obscure the absence. Purple lenses to hide the black hole. The painter would try to believe that the glasses were working, and so he would not turn up again on the doctor’s doorstep for several weeks at least. He could prescribe different color lenses for a long while before the artist caught on. Later, if the trick of the lenses did not work, the blindness might be something out of the doctor’s control, but he hoped that would not be for a long while yet, and perhaps by then someone would come up with an answer for this odd complaint that yielded no anatomical clue.

  After the appointment, Degas followed the doctor’s directions to an ophthalmic shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to have the glasses specially made, and when he returned a week later to retrieve them, he emerged terrified into the Paris noon drizzle, for the glasses turned the world purple, an unfair distortion given that he already had to remember hues, shades, tone. Recently, he had interrogated his colorist, Jérôme Ottoz, as to whether or not the man had changed his grinding or his composition, ashamed of his suspicion but alarmed at the way the very light had seemed to be shifting. Jérôme’s small shop was on the Rue la Bruyère, just around the corner from Degas’s old house on the Rue Blanche, in a little cubby of a shop with a glass door, but its proximity was not what Degas loved. He loved the purity of the colors, their absolute reliability. It frightened Degas that even this certainty might be pulled from underneath him. He implored Ottoz to remember that color was perennial, imperishable, and that to alter even the slightest tone was to violate the laws of physics.

  The doctor claimed that light was a wave, but in New Orleans, where Degas had gone to visit his brother René the light had been a battering ram, an all-day assault that left his eyes feeling taut and naked. He had been able to paint, but only after weeks of contending with the flat gulf light. He always marveled that Monet and Renoir worked outdoors, in the uncontrollable elements, in the blistering wind, en plein air.

  Degas adjusted the colored glasses, pinching them lower and then higher on his nose, searching for the black hole in the purpled light. The doctor had been entirely too happy about the eyeglasses. In fact, the man was entirely too happy about everything, in Degas’s opinion, which was why he tried hard to keep from believing too much in the doctor’s ability to help him. It was too much to believe that his eyes might be helped by curved and colored glass.

  The Damoclean sword of blindness, for a man whose work was to see. All he knew was art. When he woke in the morning, his hands were already moving, as if his unconscious mind were dictating his work. If he’d been sculpting, they would be kneading wax; if painting, his right hand would be making brushstrokes of his dreams; if drawing, his head would be angling for the line. What would he do, if blind?

  He stood on the corner, watching the altered world pass by, muted in a lavender hue. He waited a long while, until, at the center of his vision, the hole reemerged, now tinged a deep purple by the useless glass.

  Chapter Nine

  Across town, Mary Cassatt readied her studio. She had written her father a letter, explaining that she was going to stay in Paris and, understanding that she was flouting his wishes, wanted to inform him that she was also renouncing her allowance. She had saved some money, but only a little, and as soon as she posted the letter she could hardly suppress her terror. How would she support herself, an American woman in Paris, alone? She supposed she could paint plates, or teacups, or even lampshades for that little bric-a-brac shop in the Galerie d’Orléans in the Palais-Royal, which the souvenir-hunting Americans visited by the omnibus-ful, but she feared she would be paid only a pittance.

  Nevertheless, she had made plans to visit the boutiques when a reprieve came in the form of Miss Mary Ellison. A friend, she was one of the contingent of American girls sent over from the States in the years after the Civil War to learn French, to absorb a sense of style, and to obtain that indefinable je ne sais quoi needed to become highly desirable and therefore marriageable. She lived at Madame Del Sarte’s Pension for Young Ladies with Mary’s other young friend, Louisine Elder, who also loved Degas’s painting and had once managed, on her own, to buy one of his pastels. Mary still barely managed her envy. At tea with them last week, Mary had related her new circumstances, and within a day Miss Ellison had sent a telegram to her father explaining that Mary Cassatt was the only artist in Paris she wanted to paint the portrait her father wanted her to have done.

  Now Mary laid out her walnut palette and knife, boar bristle brushes, and the new tubes of paint from her favorite shop, Maison Édouard, on Rue Clauzel. She’d been so excited by purchasing the new colors that she’d forgotten an appointment with Abigail Alcott for tea, and had had to send a note explaining her truancy. I’ve fallen in love with color. Please forgive me, but the attraction was irresistible. Abigail had readily forgiven her, and would forgive Mary anything, Mary believed, now that she had decided to stay in Paris.

  But Mary had yet to experiment with the new colors, her first foray into the impressionist style, and she worried that Miss Ellison’s father, who was paying the commission fee, might not like the surprise. She feared that the Ellisons might be expecting a dull Salon portrait, the kind she had vowed to never paint again, and touchy sitters—and their paying fathers—sometimes grew furious afterward and withheld payment. His reaction mattered. If he liked what she had done, he would recommend Mary to other Americans on their grand tours seeking a portrait to take back home as a souvenir. And if he didn’t, she would be painting bric-a-brac.

  Miss Ellison arrived in a high state of nervous excitement. It was something to do with the fiacre driver’s accusation that she had misdirected him with her poor French and he was therefore due an extra fifty centimes. Mary seated the girl on her rose velvet couch, trying to calm her. On the wall she tacked the studies she’d made two days ago when Miss Ellison had sat for the preliminary drawings: the line of her neck, the shape of her eyes, the curve of her hands.

  It occurred to Mary while she worked that she had not heard from Degas since he had come to see her three weeks ago, nor had she seen him passing on the street. She had come to believe she might have imagined his visit, his invitation to show with them, everything. She wondered whether it was possible that he could have forgotten his proposal. She didn’t know enough about him to know whether or not he kept his promises. She hoped he did, because now there was no going back.

  The sitting lasted only two hours, but when the chattering Miss Ellison left, Mary was exhausted. She studied the painting, walking away and returning again. She was not concerned with form. Form she had conquered in the early sketches, perfecting Miss Ellison’s small shoulders and round, as yet innocent face. It was instead the color, more dazzling than she had ever applied, ultramarine and permanent rose painted directly from the tube, the colors so saturated and pure that their intensity was a deeply visceral surprise. Tears sprang to her eyes. Without help, without instruction, without anyone telling her how, she had achieved the beginning of something new.

  Cleaning her brushes at the stand in the back of the building, Mary planned the next few days. How impatient she was to paint the lace of Miss Ellison’s dress, how thrilled to attempt her articulated hand holding her embroidery hoop, how pleased to render a portrait she knew the Salon would undoubtedly reject.

  Chapter Ten

  Sunday Evening

  My dear Mademoiselle Cassatt,

  Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the Manets’ Thursday night soirée, where you will meet people far more interesting than I, if you can tolerate their idle chatter and nonsensical opinions about art? I think it is time you met a few of the brigands with whom you will be exhibiting; that should give you plenty of time to repent your decision to join us. There, you are warned.

  Thursday, June 7? I will call for you at seven. They feed us there, but poorly. Dress as you would for an evening at the Opéra. Do you enjoy the Opéra? One of the many myster
ies to unravel about you.

  Yours,

  Edgar Degas

  The slightly flirtatious note arrived with the Monday morning post in the first week of June. Mary laid the letter on her writing desk. She’d been living permanently in Paris for three years now, and not once had she ever been invited to an “evening.” The French rarely invited Americans to their homes. That was why the American colony—the expatriates, the low-level diplomats, those in town doing the season—crafted their own social events, entirely separate from the French, excluding the occasional open-invitation balls at Versailles and the Presidential Palace. These, however, were off-limits to those who hadn’t sufficient money for the required regalia of resplendent evening dress and diamond tiaras. Mary no longer followed the notices in Galignani’s Messenger. The colony, on her rare early ventures into its jaws, had proved insular, a provincial small town in Paris rife with gossip and nonsense. Mary’s evenings consisted of tea with other art students in their shared rooms, or an occasional night at the Opéra, obtained through a cultivated friendship with one of the ticket sellers, who provided her with a seat on the mezzanine for the price of the third-tier balcony.

  In her reply, Mary did not want to mimic Degas’s flirtatiousness, though formality somehow seemed wrong for the casual air of his invitation. In the end, she simply thanked him and said that she was looking forward to it, an understatement that amused Abigail Alcott very much.

  “Looking forward to it? It’s what you’ve been dying for,” Abigail laughed. Louisine Elder’s family was visiting and had lent Louisine their suite at the luxurious Grand Hotel, on the Place de l’Opéra, frequented by Americans who loved that the entire hotel staff tolerated their poor French. Louisine had arranged for a belated birthday celebration for Mary: dinner served in her family’s suite.