Pictures at an Exhibition (7 page)

AT THE CAILLEUX GALLERY ON RUE WASHINGTON
, a girl with a pink sweater and a vacant stare followed behind me as I circled the room, where three Matisses were displayed. I asked her when they had been painted, if Cailleux had others, what they cost, and if I could take the photographic plates home with me (as was standard practice when one considered investing thousands in a painting). The assistant's name was Mademoiselle Clothilde, and I told her I only liked pretty paintings and pretty girls.

“They're Matisse's most recent work.” Mademoiselle Clothilde smiled weakly. “And these are the only ones we have, though more are expected. Of course, the master's genius is hard to predict.” She adjusted the kerchief at her neck.

I paid a small deposit for the photographic plates and left, puzzled as to why Rose had sent me.

Later, Rose and I were in the gallery.

She was looking at the Morisot on the wall, the
Woman in White.

“Why did you send me to Cailleux's?”

“Think of it as a gift.”

I did not understand. Rose sighed. “Max, you're too kind, too full of humility. I seem to share more with your father in this regard. We both doubt, calculate. What do you think of Cailleux's Matisses?”

“Not as nice as ours,” I said.

“And why not?”

“They lack motion, fluidity,” I said.

“That is your first thought—can you guess mine?” I shook my head. “They're forgeries.”

“Not more fakes,” I said.

Rose lowered her voice. “Your father will want to lose his mind and explode at Henri, and then he will have risked his contract altogether. Tell him to approach by telephoning Matisse and saying that Cailleux is selling fakes and that Daniel knows Henri isn't paid for them. That way, even if your father is wrong, he still looks like he's acting on the side of his artistic client, and he only confirms what all the artists think anyway: that dealers don't understand their art, they're just moneymen. No more.”

I took this in unhappily, but followed Rose's scheme the next day. By April, her theory of the fakes was vindicated, and I had never seen my father so pleased with me.

INCREASINGLY ROSE LET ME VISIT HER IN HER ROOM AT
night. I tried to tell myself she acted out of desire, though I had come to suspect that Rose never possessed motives so simple. Sometimes we drew so close to each other that she would push me away with both hands, turn on the light, and pick up a comic—as if the levity of the material could soften her rejection. Worst of all, she might turn on the radio. Two foreign ministers, von Ribbentrop and Mussolini's son-in-law, made their alliance, and we all said the Italians were dirty
and weak. May and June passed in this way. But I could think of nothing but Rose and the heat that radiated from her skin without my hand even touching it.

“Why not?” I begged, one night in July.

“It's reckless,” Rose said. “Everything could happen too fast.”

“You make me feel like being reckless,” I said. Her face below me was so close her features blurred.

“It's easy for a man to say that. I'm the one with something to lose.” A kiss on the forehead, maternal, without heat.

My intentions were otherwise—that she would not lose, that I could save her from whatever strangeness she might have felt as employee, as sweetheart, as houseguest, as apprentice, and so on. We could run the gallery together.

I had in my possession a family ring, its diamond modeled on the Dresden White.

“For whom?” Mother had asked when I requested the jewel.

“Rose, of course.”

“I find it bad practice to give people what they do not want and then expect something in return,” she said.

A ringing telephone woke the household at five-thirty the next morning. Mother, convinced it was news from Warsaw, answered in Polish. The caller hung up and rang back a moment later. I groaned, rolled over, and returned to my dream of playing tennis knee-deep in a field of mud.

I heard a tap at the door and felt a cold touch against my cheek. There was Rose, pale and shaking in her dressing gown, sitting at the foot of the bed. In the town of Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs, some 560 kilometers away in the Isère, her mother had suffered a stroke. She had been rushed to the hospital, where her life hung by a thread.

“I have not spoken to my father in five years,” she said, “and there was his awful voice on the telephone. The train to Grenoble leaves tonight at ten and does not arrive until the next morning. I can't delay sixteen hours. Mother may not wait.”

“We can drive the Delage,” I said, and she looked at me with a mix of fatigue and gratefulness. We left at quarter past six. It would be a twelve-hour drive if the tires held out.

ROSE WAS SILENT FOR MOST OF THE TRIP. I NATTERED
on about my dream from the night before; about my friend Bertrand, who always called me “old man,” and his mournful sister, Fanny; about a bullfight I had attended as a child; and so on.

“Do you want me to be quiet?” I asked her, somewhere in the hills near Dijon.

“God, no,” she said. “You're a wonderful radio that switches frequencies without me having to change the dial.” In another sixty kilometers, we did listen to the radio, but the news was nothing but reports of executions in Spain and whether the death toll was ten thousand or ten times that. Eventually, we switched back to my babbling and then, once it grew dark and my eyes tired of staring at the road, we were quiet. It seemed as if we were driving away from history and the talk of war.

Once, I ventured, “You have never spoken of your father.”

“He disapproves completely of my life. He didn't think I should even go to university. He did not go himself. One of those men perpetually resentful for not having had a son. Art, to him, is only an indulgence.”

“That hardly seems a cause for such a falling out.”

“It is my single true joy,” she said, and I felt a sadness at hearing this.

The tires finally capitulated when we skidded over a cattle break on the outskirts of Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs. We left the car, right side sagging, on the rutted road, and went the rest of the way by foot. Rose clung to my hand.

We tiptoed on the strip of high ground between the muddy path and the farmer's fence to our left. We passed a stand of poplar trees, then a makeshift camp. A single child's shoe, without laces, waited by the road.

A cobblestone square with a concrete fountain appeared before us. A café and a restaurant, both with grimy windows and tattered awnings, showed signs of life at either end of the plaza. One emitted tinny music. A dog trotted out of the other, pissed against the building's facade, and hurried back into its bar. A monk in a cassock, with a rope around his middle, shuffled by.

The hospital was only a few paces beyond the town square, behind a high wall. The first nun we met cried out with joy at seeing Rose. “You've grown so slender and chic! What a beautiful coat.” She caressed its sleeve in her childlike fingers. “Look at what Paris has done to you!” She herself wore the extraordinary habit typical of those days, her starched wimple like a winged ship.

“Catherine, do you know where my mother is?” Rose asked.

The young nun colored and her hand dropped to her rosary. “Look at me, going on about your coat. It's past the regular visiting hours, but I know she'll want to see you. I go in there and sing to her, and she watches me but doesn't say a thing. Your father hasn't come once. She's had no visitors but me, poor Madame Clément!”

Rose inhaled sharply and I thought it a dangerous sound.

We followed the young nun down a dim hallway. Her skirts streamed out over the varnished floor.

“I'll go in first to tell her you're here,” the young nun said. “On account of her heart.”

Once Catherine disappeared, Rose said, “I thought she might have died already.” I wiped her eyes with my handkerchief and she took it from me. “Will you stay outside when I see Mother, Max?” she asked. “She knows very little about my situation in Paris, and I want to explain it to her.” I agreed. After Catherine emerged and Rose replaced her, the novice offered to take me on a tour of the hospital grounds and gardens. Even though it was dark, some of the oldest buildings were still lit at night and, the young nun said, even prettier that way.

She was twittery and gay as we strolled between the rows of herbs and vegetables in the kitchen orchards, gesturing with her hands so that the wide sleeves of her habit fell back to reveal plump, hairless arms. She reminded me of an uncooked biscuit. We returned to

Madame Clément's ward in three-quarters of an hour and found Rose outside, shaking the hand of a young doctor who had also been her classmate. He shook mine, too, heartily but with some disappointment. This hospital was unlike the ones I was used to in Paris. There were no patients in sight and no news on the radio, only Maurice Chevalier.

We walked back through the shabby plaza, through a series of unlit side streets, to Rose's childhood home. Rose smoked as we walked, coughing while she inhaled. We arrived at a two-level house with a slanted roof. A window on the second floor emitted a sooty yellow light. It began to drizzle. Rose pressed the buzzer and waited. We heard a movement inside.

“I swore I would never sleep in this house again,” Rose said.

I pulled her away from the door, tugging her alongside me through the mist, through a maze of alleys with low-hanging clotheslines. “There must be a hotel then, somewhere, even if we have to sleep in its parlor.”

Inquisitive lights lit our footsteps as we passed.

“The only hotel is in the plaza,” she said. “The proprietress is the aunt of the doctor you met in the hallway. We'll be the gossip of the town.”

I had begun to envision Rose still sleeping next to me in the morning and the pleasures of waking her up.

“We could let two rooms,” I said halfheartedly. Her face lifted.

“You would do that?” she asked, and added, “And pay?”

I said I would and she kissed me. Someone inside the dingy café hooted. We entered, and Rose spoke with the white-haired woman behind the bar, who took down two keys from their hooks below the liquor bottles and led us to our rooms.

Mine had evidently not been used in some time, as a layer of dust covered its surfaces. A newspaper waited in the trash bin, as did a bloodied bandage and a rusty razor. I was nearly drunk with fatigue. When I pulled the musty blankets to my chin, a sleep as heavy as sand settled over me.

When I awoke the next morning, I took my breakfast alone.

“Mademoiselle Clément is already at the hospital,” my hostess
told me. Somehow the whole town knew of her mother's illness. I went out in search of Rose.

It was Bastille Day, and the infirmary managed to have a quietly festive air. The doctors wore carnations in their buttonholes. Several people greeted me by name. I could only smile, confused.

Rose appeared at my elbow as I walked through the hospital herb nursery, which was robust and tidy in daylight. “Mother's not well enough to see you,” she said. “They say she's out of danger but too tired to spend more than a few minutes, even with me. Still, I'm to send her regards and her thanks.” She slipped her hand into mine. “I've a surprise for you,” she said, brightening.

Despite the holiday, Rose had procured a picnic. To my relief and chagrin, the young doctor and his father had fixed the Delage overnight. We drove the car for thirty minutes along uneven roads, past another small farming village and its fields of alfalfa and artichokes and up into the mountains to a meadow.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“No,” Rose said. “You've saved me from this place.”

“How?” I asked. “I'd love to say I did, but you're the more capable one of our duo, don't you think?”

“It's the promise of you,” she said, and my heart swelled so much I could ignore her next words. “You're a good boy, Max. Better than I deserve.” I was nearly twenty, and I was no longer a boy, except in one regard.

The tarte tatin and the wine made me giddy and drunk. Bees and flies buzzed above us and even the sun seemed honeyed. Eventually, Rose fell asleep, and I must have, too. When I awoke it was the gray of a midsummer's night. Rose was rattling a box of firecrackers.

“Let's go to the quarry,” she said.

Ahead, the torch in her hand lit the way. I followed down the sloping meadow and over a path in the woods. In Rose's voice, I sensed a certain deliberation, as I often did, though usually it was with regard to art, not affection. I sensed that she was trying on a role: that of a normal young woman in love. Where I stood in relation to this role, I did not know. I thought of Manet's women, and of the nude in his
Luncheon on the Grass.
The scattered picnic at the sitters’
feet and the men's relaxed poses are meant to suggest spontaneity, and yet the role of the central figure, the naked woman, was always uncertain and unsettling. I, at least, no matter how long I looked, could never read it. Like Rose. Like all of Manet's women—on balconies, in Argenteuil beside a
canotier
, tending bar, at a picnic, lying in bed—all places where one's purposes become obscure and the women, for matters of self-protection or modernity—could I ever understand?—became unreadable.

At best, I wondered, I would be asked to play the lover. I consoled myself with the hope that Rose would find the role fitting and that in real life she would follow.

We stopped abruptly at a rock ledge. The water beneath us was as still and silver as mercury. Rose began lighting the firecrackers, which burst into showers of red and white over the water, and I saw the night clouds reflected in the surface while the firecrackers burned. Our laughter echoed back at us from the rocks.

“I want to go swimming,” Rose said.

“Down there?” I said. Sheer rock encircled the quarry. “It's like jumping out of an airplane.” I blew out the torch and waited for my eyes to adjust. “You won't dare.”

“I won't?” she asked, taunting me. She sounded girlish, even mean. The night regained its contours, with the pale woman beside me in the half darkness, knees bent to her chest, as mine were, our corresponding limbs touching. Her skirt fell back from her knees. I slid my hand across them, urgent now. Rose shifted, settled with her back against my ribs. I ran my hand over the buttons and frills of her blouse, then under it. “May I?” I asked her and she nodded, her head against her knees, and I kissed the ridges of her spine that stood out against her neck. My hands felt along the backs of her legs. Rose pushed them away.