Pictures at an Exhibition Page 6

  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.

  “Max,” her voice was tender, even apologetic.

  She stood, turned, and found the box of matches. The firecracker she lit did not sparkle but was a steady flame, as bright blue-white as a flashbulb, a flare, the kind the enemy would use, in less than a year's time, to drop from hot air balloons over Allied lines at night. She held the flare above her, and in the bright light, in the second before she leaped, I thought of all the paintings of women who transform to escape the lust bearing down on them, Syrinx to a flute, Daphne to a laurel, and Rose now like a comet. The flare extinguished. She came up, laughing at the water's cold.

  ROSE'S MOTHER GREW STEADILY STRONGER DURING THE time we spent in Saint Etienne de Saint Geoirs. We left on the afternoon of the third day. What I had not told Rose was that I had desired, were her mother well enough, to ask her for her daughter's hand. But despite my earnest intentions, uncertainty overcame me. And Rose, as always, was a step ahead. She must have seen the velvet box with my mother's ring. In the car ride, after two hundred kilometers of silence, she said, “I have never expected to marry. Perhaps I am ill suited for it. Or, perhaps there are things that occupy me more.”

  I, not listening, understood this as a temporary state.

  Chapter Five

  WHEN ROSE AND I RETURNED FROM THE ISèRE, Lucie reported that my parents had left the day before, setting out early for their annual pilgrimage to the South. Father was concerned over Matisse's ill health. The painter suffered from terrible stomach pains that were, he believed, the result of a botched appendectomy years before. Matisse could not stand up to paint but was comforted with sketching, he said. He sent Father a note, which was left out on his desk (and which I read), saying, A col-orist makes his presence known even in a single charcoal drawing. Father, who was unable to receive a consensus on which Parisian doctor treated stomach ailments most successfully, took two down with him. Lucie followed my parents that evening. I was glad to be in the house unobserved.

  I sent Bertrand an urgent message, asking him to meet me at La Palette. My friend arrived an hour late, wearing a gray cash
mere suit coat with some war medals from the 1870s pinned to it. When I commented on his attire, Bertrand said, “I'm prepared for battle, as always,” and saluted. We sat at an outside table. He hailed the waiter, and two cups of coffee appeared.

  Bertrand withdrew a notebook and scribbled into it. “I've a new idea for a play, about my uncle Nissim, the famous Camondo. I'll interview veterans from the war. It will have a Greek chorus, except the chorus is all wounded beggars, and they're telling the story of my uncle and how it seems—at least it seems to me—that he had to die, like Icarus in a monoplane.” His uncle Nissim, family darling, equestrian, and airman, had been lost over the Atlantic in the Great War. When his aircraft disappeared, Bertrand's grandfather gave his house—and in it, the largest collection of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French furniture and art outside of the Louvre—to the French state. I always thought this strange, though I never spoke of it to Bertrand—this Turkish Jew's obsession with French art at its most frivolous. And then the grandfather donated his museum, as if it were his self, to the country that had killed his son. Though of course the Count de Camondo did not see it this way. His sacrifice was supreme, nationalistic, a sign of how French his family had become in less than a generation, as if by collecting art, he had arrived. As he told my father, “I am a banking man so my children can collect art and theirs may paint.”

  An artist next to me sketched Bertrand as he wrote, shadowing his hollowed cheeks, arched nose, furry brows, and big ears. It was too good.

  Bertrand filched the unopened sugar cube from the side of my saucer and bit into it.

  “Well? News?” he asked.

  I told him about the quarry on Bastille Day, my mother's ring, and the silent car ride.

  The artist smirked. Bertrand said, “Well, then,” and looked away. “You've found such poetry in heartbreak.”

  My eyes must have been brimming. This had an effect on Bertrand.

  “Oh, no, Max,” he said. He jerked his hands around helplessly. “You don't want a woman that stupid.” He pointed a threatening finger at me. “Don't say you do. You choose the wrong women to love. Like Romeo and Rosalind. At the end of the play, his heartsickness over her seems minor. Someday, yours will, too.”

  “I don't read English plays,” I said.

  “If you only love a thing for the chase of it, you don't question if you love the thing itself because you never get close enough to see. You love to yearn, Max, you love to desire. But desire is simpler than love. Here's what your mother would tell you if she were able to string more than seven words together that don't involve Brahms: You're a handsome fellow, smart though you don't try, kind to old ladies, and not greedy like your friend Bertrand. Your motives are simple and pure—”

  “Don't treat me like some house pet. I'm leaving,” I said. Bertrand ignored me. I stayed.

  “You love her, so you want to marry her. Therefore you're a good man! Not that there was ever any question of that. I know you're friends with me out of great charity of spirit, since we have nothing in common other than our caste and race and our formidable mothers. So why, Berenzon, in your old age, why would you continually want to waltz yourself into an arrangement in which you can only and continually fail?”

  “I haven't failed,” I said, unsure.

  “No? Well, then, be disappointed.”

  We did not look at each other.

  “This discussion of love is unmanly,” I said.

  Bertrand made a disgusted face and said to no one, “Berenzon is like a brother to you, so you will forgive him when he gets mad at you instead of at the floozy who has stamped on his heart with her pretty foot.” He stood and threw a few coins on our table. Three bright brassy coins, the circles of the saucers, the white cups, the black irises of coffee grounds at their centers, all circles and eyes.

  As I fumbled, I knocked into the art student's table and spilled his coffee onto his sketch pad. It was an accident, though I was not unpleased. His portrait was looking more and more like an anti-Semitic rag. We pantomimed reproach and apology. I tried to give him some money, he acted insulted, and someone muttered about Jews. I looked at Bertrand. Neither of us was in the mood for a fight.

  “Stay out of this,” I said to the speaker, who wore the blue overalls of a street cleaner.

  Outside, Bertrand said, “Really, old man, you think I can't tolerate a picture, a drawing of me as I really am? Hook-nosed and with ears built for flying? I thought it was a good portrait.” He looked into the windows of a building across the street. They faced east, and the sun winked off them like a lighthouse's warning. “If you hadn't ruined it, I was going to go back there after you left and buy it from him. But I was too embarrassed with you around.”

  I jingled the coins in my pocket.

  “Give me some of those,” he said.

  We stood a few meters from a blind man. He had the words GASSED AT YPRES scrawled on a piece of cardboard and hung by a string around his neck. “You go on,” Bertrand said, moving toward the beggar. “I want to talk to him. Imagine, being blind.” He shook his head in disbelief. I thought my friend might be lying in wait for the street cleaner with the blue overalls. We said good-bye, and I continued along rue de Seine for a way and then turned back.

  My friend squatted on his haunches beside the blind man, who sat on the sidewalk. Bertrand gesticulated with his hands, then caught himself and put them under his armpits. The veteran held the piece of cardboard in his pink hand while he spoke, and shook it three times, violently. With his other hand, he made the gesture a magician might make when releasing a dove.

  I could not imagine what the two men had in common, and yet when I turned the corner, Bertrand was still at the blind man's side.

  NEARLY AN HOUR LATER, AS I WALKED ALONG THE SEINE, I heard a tinkling and felt a tap at my shoulder. It was Bertrand and his medals.

  “Let's go sailing,” he said. It was blustery and beginning to rain.

  “No.”

  “I promise, thou shalt not think about that contemptible girl for at least sixty minutes. Vale la pena, hombre,“ he added. I did not know how he knew Spanish. “It's worth the risk.”

  The risk Bertrand was referring to was that, in fact, to go sailing required us to steal a boat. Which we did, which Bertrand often did, somehow with me in tow.

  This one was named Madame de Pompadour, with a flimsy lock that Bertrand broke against the moorings. We tacked through the green-gray water of the Seine and sped under the bridge at the quai de Grenelle while the Métro rattled the trestle overhead. A roar rose from the crowds at the Vélodrome d'Hiver and drifted above us like a cloud. We turned our collars up against the wind, ducked under the swinging boom when we changed course at Garigliano, and floated between the bridge's pilings, as sturdy as giant's legs. Madame de Pompadour was a sleek skiff. Her hull was painted blue and her brass railing shone. Below deck, Bertrand found a melted box of chocolates and three bottles of beer, of which I drank two and Bertrand the other. The sail back to the dock near Austerlitz was more difficult. The wind had switched directions, and we were sailing into it once again.

  When the quay was within sight, the breeze dropped off. On the shore, a man gestured angrily to two policemen.

  “This is the best part,” Bertrand announced. My nerves jangled. “Nice and easy,” he said, landing the boat with extravagant finesse. “Hello,” Bertrand called out in English.

  The two policemen rushed over, nearly tackled us, and shoved us against the wall of the embankment. We had been through this routine before. I did not know why Bertrand would not purchase, or at least rent, a boat like any other Parisian who loved to sail. The owner of the Madame de Pompadour looked on with satisfaction. Shackled, we were prodded along, up the stairs to the roadway and the police wagons. The younger officer pushed down on Bertrand's head and hustled him into the car. The other checked over his shoulder and watched the owner of the Pompadour float out of sight.

  “Easy there,” the older cop told his partner. �
��It's Patrice Le Tarnec's nephew. We've got to let him go.” Le Tarnec was the assistant chief of police and Bertrand's uncle by marriage. The Camondo-Reinachs believed he granted them universal immunity, like some Swiss diplomat might have.

  Grinning, Bertrand held out his wrists. Once unchained, he fished in his pocket for a few bills. It made it all a game, a pantomime.

  “Gentlemen, thank you,” he said, and we ran to the Métro station at Cardinal Lemoine. The wind that had abated earlier picked up again and licked at my face and hands. It began to rain, a sweet-smelling summer shower.

  “Wasn't I correct?” Bertrand asked.

  “About what, fool?”

  “You haven't thought about the girl in an hour.” He checked his watch. “Or more.”

  I admitted he was right.

  Bertrand slipped past the gate, I paid my ticket, and we boarded the train.

  FOR THREE MONTHS AFTER MY UNFORTUNATE VACAtion in the Isère, I remained in love with Rose, though not as before. She let me creep into the Nurse's Room at night, and sometimes she came to my door and we clung together until the sound of Lucie waking up the kitchen pots roused us from bed. We stayed clothed, like children. At first she permitted me to kiss her, and then just to press my face into her cheek or the curve of her neck. She advised me on gallery matters and, when the bill for her mother's hospital care came to the house, I opened the envelope of my own accord and paid it. For her saint's day, I gave her a gold chain with a gray pearl pendant. On the last day of my medical examinations in Surgery, Anatomy, and Pathology, I found an eighteenth-century treatise on Cuvier that must have cost her a month's salary propped up on my desk. I saw few friends other than Rose. My studies improved as my misery deepened.

  To my mother, I had long ago returned the diamond ring modeled on the Dresden White. She extended her left hand and took back the velvet box and placed it directly into her suitcase, which was already full of clothes and musical scores. Mother worried that Poland would fall any day.