The Choiring Of The Trees (11 page)

Coco was not enrolled at the Académie Julian but had attended the Académie Humbert and was now earning her living painting designs on porcelain. Her background was not at all like mine; Coco had never known her father, or even known who he was, and had until recently lived with her mother, a strange recluse who supported herself embroidering designs Coco drew for her. But Coco had quarreled with her mother and had recently moved into her own apartment in Auteuil in the western part of Paris. She needed a roommate to help with the rent, and I needed a companion in the lonely world of the big city. So perhaps we were destined for each other.

Coco and I, despite our differences in background, language (but I picked up French slang from Coco as fast as she spoke it), and temperament (I thought of myself as more serious and reserved than my flighty French friend), became very fond of each other. Coco, for all her lighthearted, capricious, even scatterbrained manner, was devoted to “modern” art, and to becoming a good painter with her own style, and she and I talked much about art. Auteuil is on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, a great woodsy park, and there we took long walks together and talked about the differences between the Fauves and the more recent, geometrical painters called Cubists. I was delighted to discover that Auteuil had a famous steeplechase, where I could watch horses leaping hurdles as high as Géricault had done, and Coco and I went to the races together, although we couldn’t afford to wager.

Coco had some friends she wanted me to meet: in particular, a Spanish painter by the name of Pablo, and a mistress of his who helped support him, named Fernande. I had never met a “mistress,” and I was titillated by the idea.

But Coco herself was on her way to becoming a mistress to a dark-haired Pole she called Willy—which she pronounced Vee-lee—and she was quite eager to have me—whose name she pronounced Vee-ree-dee—meet him after he returned from traveling in Holland. Willy was twenty-eight (the same age that Nail Chism was when I first met him), and Coco said he “knew everybody” and wrote absolutely fabulous wild poetry. Coco had been introduced to him by their mutual friend Pablo.

Coco was wispy and tall, with an unusual oval face and dark hair, but I never thought she was especially pretty, and in fact she considered herself quite homely. But she aroused envy in me because she had such a boyfriend, whom she never tired of bragging about, and because she had just sold her first painting! I had never sold a painting and couldn’t yet conceive of it. But Coco had, and she asked me to help her deliver the painting, and I recognized the address, because I had been there before: 27 rue de Fleurus. “Mademoiselle Gertrude Stein,” I said. Coco asked, “You know her?” “We have met,” I said, and indeed my compatriot Miss Stein received me cordially when I accompanied Coco to deliver the painting, which depicted Willy in the center flanked by Coco and their friends Pablo and Fernande. Miss Stein, it turned out, was interested in buying Coco’s picture primarily because it portrayed Pablo, for whom she had an extravagant regard, and she showed me a brutal portrait of her that Pablo had done. Later Coco took me to see the Spaniard’s squalid, cluttered studio in a building nicknamed The Wash-Boat at the top of the Butte Montmartre in order to show me an outrageous painting the Spaniard had recently finished. It showed a group of five misshapen prostitutes, and Coco claimed that she had posed for, or at least been the inspiration for, the second “lady” from the left, and I had to concede that at least that lady had a better face and figure than the other four, who were grotesque. I thought I was open-minded—or tried to be—but I thought that Pablo was not simply
fauve
but
fou,
and that this was the worst painting I had ever seen.

The painting that Coco had been working on for some time (and one of the important lessons I learned from Coco is that it’s perfectly all right to spend months and months on one painting, even if it ends up looking as if it had been dashed off in one morning) was an expansion of the one she had sold to Gertrude Stein: it was a much larger canvas, and would show eight or nine people gathered around Willy. Two of these people were Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo. Coco had painted Miss Stein much more flatteringly than Pablo had done—perhaps in hopes that Miss Stein might want to buy the painting when it was finished, and would pay enough to keep her in clothes and food for the coming year. The painting already included portraits of Willy and an unflattering self-portrait of Coco, as well as Pablo and Fernande. Now Coco wanted me to pose so she could include me in the group scene, and she proceeded to paint me into the picture, the third figure from the left, beneath one of the extravagant flowered hats that Coco liked to dress me up in. It is a kind of paraphrase, not a copy but a restatement—of course without the grotesqueness—of Pablo’s painting of the five prostitutes. There is even a pastoral landscape in the background, with the Pont de Passy, a bridge we liked to sketch. The painting makes me look prettier than I am. Recently I saw a photo of it an art magazine. That painting is done in the same style that later created the reputation Coco has: seductive and charming color, mostly pastels, pale blues and viridians, incomparable pinks, but essentially somewhat naïve, decorative, fashionable, transient, and without substance or depth. But that painting may be my only small claim to immortality. Each person has the enormous irises that became Coco’s signature or trademark, and although my irises are bright-green, they do not convey any of my identity or personality. Coco’s people never seemed to possess souls.

Coco finally introduced her Vee-lee to her Vee-ree-dee, and his first words to me (after bending low to give me the first hand-kiss I’d ever had) were “We’ve already met.” When I looked puzzled, trying to remember where I’d met him, he gestured at the now-completed painting of Coco’s and said, “That’s you up there, my sweet one.” I was surprised to see that Coco had flattered him somewhat in his central reigning position in the ensemble: he was actually fat—or, well, not
coarsely
fat, but fleshy, what people here would call pudgy, and not quite as dashing as Coco or her portrait of him had led me to expect. And the next thing he said to me, the first of many questions he would ask me without giving me a chance to answer them, was “Are you a virgin? No, you are not. And how do I know? Because of the shape of your forehead, there, and because of your fragrance. Ask Madonna if I have ever been wrong. Eh, Madonna? No, your forehead and your fragrance tell me that you long ago lost your virginity. Am I wrong?”

I had to shake my head, not because he was wrong or to tell him that he was not wrong but in wonder that he should know that. Often thereafter when looking at myself in the mirror I would pay particular attention to my forehead but was not able to tell what there was about it that gave away my secret.

Willy spent the night. Although I had my own room in the apartment, I could hear them, and I lay awake a long time, ashamed at myself for eavesdropping, shocked at Coco, disgusted by Willy, enthralled, transported, delighted, puzzled, dismayed, offended, and, I have to tell you, aroused, lustful, burning.

The next afternoon, after Willy had left, I had a brave impulse to ask Coco, “How many times did you and he…copulate?”

“Copulate?” said Coco, and laughed. “Oh, now, Veereedee, do you mean what Willy calls ‘the game of navels’ or do you mean ‘midnight snack’ or ‘the ride’ or ‘the beast with two backs’ or ‘plucking the rose’ or ‘knitting wings’ or ‘the combat’ or ‘burying the pinecone’ or ‘yodeling’ or something else? There are so many ways. We do them all. I don’t keep tally. You say you are not a virgin. How do
you
do it?”

“Carefully,” I said, remembering a joke I had heard about porcupines. Coco laughed, and we two girlfriends, uncomfortable talking about sexual matters, changed the subject.

But if girls are ill at ease discussing sex, just as I am at this moment with you, men are in their element, and I was always scandalized, or pretended to be, whenever Willy, Pablo, and their friend Max were telling dirty stories or making sexual commentary in our presence. Coco told me that she was glad for them when they became obscene, because it kept them from becoming violent, which is what happened whenever they talked about art.

Max was not an artist, just a clerk in a department store who wrote occasional strange poetry. Max was madly in love with Pablo, although he was not a homosexual. Pablo kept trying to get Max to take me to the opera. Max said he would if he had clothes to wear, but his clothing was terrible, threadbare and soiled. Pablo asked him why he didn’t steal some decent clothes from the department store he worked in. Because his department didn’t carry men’s clothes. Why didn’t he just take me boating? Or for a Sunday afternoon stroll up at La Grande Jatte? Because he wasn’t fond of the out-of-doors. Why didn’t he just take me to bed?

Nobody asked me what I would say if Max finally did ask to take me anywhere. I didn’t think I would say yes. Max was, in addition to his awful attire, nearly bald, bespectacled, and shorter than I, which wasn’t so bad, but he also had a chest covered with thick, curly black hair, which he exposed as often as he could, especially when he was doing his skit impersonating “the barefoot dancing girl,” which was hilarious but scandalous. He was also a Jew. I had never known or seen a Jew before (the few in Little Rock were tavernkeepers or merchants I never traded with), but if all Jews were like Max, I was afraid that I might come to dislike all of them. He was loudmouthed, clownish, and crazy, with a malicious streak. When Willy, Pablo, and Max were sitting around scorching their enemies and arguing art, Max could become vocally more vicious than the other two. At these get-togethers, which usually took place at The Wash-Boat, or sometimes at Austen’s, a bar in the rue d’Amsterdam they liked to frequent, the three men would become loud and vehement while we three women watched and listened, or Coco and I would chat and ignore Fernande, whom neither of us liked, and the feeling was mutual.

I developed a fondness for absinthe, which is a favorite French liqueur, green and bitter and tasting like licorice. But I had to be careful. I knew my mother was an alcoholic, and I didn’t want to be like her. Willy and Coco were not heavy drinkers. Everyone had a bottle of wine at meals, and I had to be careful there too because I became genuinely fond of both white and red, but none of them drank heavily, except that about once a month Willy and Pablo and Max would decide to have one of their binges, which, oddly enough, did not make them more violent or misbehaving but, rather, excessively polite and courteous with one another and with us girls.

Willy slept at Coco’s apartment about three times a week; Coco went to Willy’s about once a week. Coco didn’t like it at his place, she told me—they always had to make love in an armchair, because his bed was “sacred.” Willy had many strange ideas, which Coco detailed for me.

Whenever Coco went to spend the night at Willy’s and I was alone, I began to suffer from homesickness: not that my lonely nights in Little Rock had been a bit more enjoyable or even more comfortable than my lonely nights in Paris, but that being alone in Arkansas was a condition you took for granted, a natural state, whereas being alone in Paris was unnatural and hard to bear. I was even tempted to encourage Max. Sleeping with Max might be better than spending the night imagining what Coco and Willy were doing at that moment.

One Saturday night in the summer of 1909, I was having my usual reverie about Coco and Willy when there was a knock at the door, and I, wondering if it might be Max at last, opened it to find Willy. “Why, Willy!” I exclaimed. “I thought Coco was at
your
place.”

“She is,” he said. “May I come in?” Without waiting for a reply he entered the apartment, and as soon as I closed the door he embraced me passionately and attempted to kiss me.

I turned my head to one side to avoid his kiss and pushed against his large chest. “Willy! What are you doing?!”

“
Ô combien je t’aime
!” he breathed directly into my ear. “I adore you! I must have you! Meet my lips with yours!”

I stared into his eyes, which were hazel, and large, like Coco’s, seeming even larger in contrast to his mouth, which was as tiny as a pimento. I permitted the pimento to mash against my mouth for a moment before I shoved against him again and asked, “Did you and Coco have another fight?”

“I haven’t seen Madonna tonight,” he explained. “I left her a note saying I had to go out for a while and would soon return and asking her to wait for me. I did that so that I could steal away to this place and be with you.”

“That was a sneaky trick,” I said. “Coco will be furious with you.”

“You won’t tell her,” he said. “Come, let me recite for you a poem you have inspired.” He unfolded a sheet a paper from one of his pockets and read it to me. The poem was called “
Lundi après mon lundi,
” a play upon my name, Monday, and it was written as if he had composed it the next Monday after this weekend we had made love. He described our love-making as if it were a fait accompli and he were remembering it in graphic detail but with flattering sentiments:
Cette femme était si belle qu’elle me faisait peur
(That woman was so beautiful she frightened me) and
Elle balla mimant un rythme de l’existence
(As she danced she imitated a rhythm of existence) and
Qu’elle les dresse ses mains énamourées devant mon sexe
(Have her lift her lovesick hands before my sex), and so forth. I tried to remember if I had heard any of these lines before. I was touched that such a great poet—Pablo had called him the greatest poet of the epoch—would write an original poem for me…if it was original—even if the poem was less concerned with my specific identity as a person than with sex acts we had not yet performed. When he’d finished the poem, he looked with those hazel eyes longingly into my eyes and said, “Quickly, now, let us do it!”

I said French words which mean, crudely but honestly, “You just came here to fuck.”

Willy was taken aback. But he was ready for it: “No, of course not,” he said. “I came here because I need to have your opinions of Pablo’s latest paintings, but I think we can talk more freely after we have put the nightingale in his cage.”