“It was. He was. We were used to each other from the very first moment I moved here. Nothing forced, nothing strange. I wouldn’t trade those happy days for anything. He used to tell me that we matched one another so well. ‘You’re a little woman made just for me,’ he’d say. And it was true. He helped me to find my way in what I found to be such an overwhelming world. Without him I am once again very aware of all my imperfections.”
“Will you stay in Paris?” I ask.
“We cannot. It isn’t just the money that is quickly running out or the unhealthy air in this apartment and this city that is bad for little Vincent’s lungs. As a widow I don’t have many options to make money.”
She pauses, embarrassed for me because she is clearly thinking of my line of work.
“We all do what we need to do, madame. Do you have family you can return to?”
“It is an option, though I do not want to return as someone who needs looking after. Thinking about it fills me with dread and exhaustion.” She sighs. She’s revealing so much, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. People want to talk. They’re desperate for an ear. “I should have planned better. We should have planned better. My son and I need so many things.”
Jo sits in front of the fire, shivering even as she gets closer to the flames.
“We’re nearly out of wood,” she says, her eyes glassy with tears and melancholy. They finally land on a canvas of a vast golden wheat field under a dark, turbulent sky. It gives me a feeling of both isolation and unease.
She picks up the painting so that it is at eye level and walks over to the fire. Her eyes flash with fury and fear as she stares into the dying flames.
“Perhaps I should just burn all of them for heat.”
3
Emma
Each time Iwalk through the doors of the Musée d’Orsay I greet my favorite paintings like old friends. My happiest memories as a kid are from visits with my mom to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sundays when it was free. We walked through the galleries giddily saying good morning to all the art. Looking back, I realize those paintings were our only friends.
I repeat the tradition as I wind my way through the Orsay’s galleries, except I say bonjour, out of respect for them and my adopted city. I still have my student membership and I intend to visit as often as I can for free until it expires.
“Bonjour, madame,” to the iconicWoman Bitten by a Serpentsculpture splayed out just beyond the entrance. A small snake dangles from her arm by its fangs. Her body is hideously contorted, her hair disheveled and her head thrown back. She’s tortured and ecstatic and some days my entire face flushes with shame and I need to look away from her. On others I’m remindedof Pascal, my lover and my professor, in ways that shatter my insides but still make my skin heat up with desire. I think about him often in this museum. It would be impossible not to. He molded how I think and feel about everything in here. I used to parrot him like an obedient little pet. His guttural whisper still tickles my brain when I gaze down on the woman and the serpent.Do you think she’s in danger? Do you think she likes it?
But if I want to enjoy my day, I can’t let him in, so I pass the woman and her snake and I carry on. For the record, I think she fucking loves it. I also think she’s in danger. What woman in the nineteenth century wasn’t? What woman today is completely safe?
Bonjour to Olympia, Édouard Manet’s nude courtesan gazing directly at the viewer with a bored stare, a taut ribbon tied at her throat like a dog collar. The painting once scandalized Parisian society. A guard had to be posted next to it to prevent the public from vandalizing it. Look at nearly any wall label next to a painting of a young woman in a museum, and part of the text will usually explain how it scandalized men.
Bonjour to Whistler’s mother. I’d love to know what is going on behind that placid stare of hers. The brushstrokes are smooth as glass. Whistler often said that paint should always appear “like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.”
You have to wander through many, many galleries just to stumble onto the few women artists here, Mary Cassatt, Rosa Bonheur, and Berthe Morisot. I greet Morisot’s woman rocking a cradle with the same dreamy and exhausted expression of every new mother I’ve ever met.
Since starting work cleaning for Stella Swanson, I’m even more keenly aware of certain things in the museum than I was before. The first is the constant presence of plaques that read:Et la collection Swanson. They’re on practically every wall. The family must own half the art in this museum. I can’t imagine howone family even acquires so much. I also pay extra attention to the Van Goghs because of Stella’s interest in them.
Visitors flock to the popular ones, the self-portraits, the painting of his bedroom,The Starry Night. My favorite is the portrait of an Italian woman who ran a restaurant Vincent used to frequent. It’s simply titledL’Italienne,The Italian Woman, but I’ve done a little research on her. I’ve done research on many of the models who posed for the great men back then. They fascinate me. Agostina Segatori owned a little café called Café du Tambourin on Boulevard de Clichy in the Montmartre section of the city. Back then it was a bohemian enclave on the outskirts of the city, a place where artists and writers could get cheap rent. Similar to where we live now outside the ring road of the city. As places get more popular, the riffraff always gets pushed further and further toward the periphery. Agostina became a muse for painters from Corot to Manet. Modeling, and sometimes becoming their mistress, served her purposes. She kept all the money she made from them and invested it into her successful restaurant.
Even though most of history remembers her as only theItalian woman, Agostina was also an art dealer and supporter of artists during a time when women weren’t allowed to play that game. She exhibited the artists she liked on the walls of her restaurant. It’s said that many of them, including Vincent van Gogh, exchanged paintings for her food. She enabled exhibitions for the wealthy patrons who came slumming in Montmartre to visit the bars, dance halls, and brothels, the men who wanted to immerse themselves in the mixture of pleasure and poverty and then return to their gilded lives.
I love looking at her. She stares slyly out at the viewer and is clearly a woman who takes no bullshit. In one of Van Gogh’s paintings she’s smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, sitting in the restaurant she owns in front of paintings she is championing.I say hello to her as I pass through the gallery to my favorite bench on the fifth floor, the one in front of the grand old glass clock window. It’s one of the two remaining massive clocks from the original Gare d’Orsay railway station that the museum was carved out of. From here I can stare down at the Seine, the Louvre, and on a clear day all the way to the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur. I sketch here for hours.
It’s the Impressionists I’ve always loved the most. When I was old enough to go to the museum on my own in Philadelphia, I went almost every day. Children got in free. I just had to attach myself to a family at the entrance, not too close, but close enough that the ticket taker thought I was merely a straggler. I drew every Monet, Manet, Degas, and Van Gogh in that museum. When I started babysitting for the single mothers in our apartment complex, I got enough money to buy my own paints, and I’d fill the sketches in with them when I got home. I painted small at first and then bigger and bigger. I’d paint on anything, old pizza boxes, take-out menus, the walls outside our crumbling subsidized apartment complex. Most days I went straight to the museum after school. The docents and guards finally accepted me as one of their own. I was fifteen when I stopped just replicating paintings and started adding in my own details. I kept the women; I kept the landscapes. I added the danger. Forests and cities burned in the background. Waves were about to engulf the beaches at Trouville and Sainte-Adresse. A masked man hovered in the corner of a saloon. Admittedly these were slightly cartoony at first, but I got better at making the menacing details subtle, at integrating them into the scenery. You don’t always notice the danger at first, but it’s always there.
My mother loved them. She tacked them up on all our walls, and whenever we moved, as we inevitably did, they were the only decorations she brought along with us.
It’s pouring buckets when I finally leave the museum, my sketchbook full. As I rustle around in my bag for my umbrella,my fingers brush the key to Stella’s mailbox. Shit! I took it when she asked me to go downstairs and fetch her mail, but I won’t be back there until next week. I’ll have to return it.
The apartment isn’t far, a fifteen-minute walk at most. Her doorman, Arthur, takes the key from me and promises to bring it up. We both freeze in place when we hear an argument in the elevator. A man and a woman, not bothering to even lower their voices.
“You’re such a sycophant.”
“Better than a heartless bitch.” I recognize his posh private school accent before the gate to the lift opens.
“What has she ever done for you?” The woman’s accent is equally polished, but cold as ice.
