The Painted Girls Read online

  I poke up my hand after a while, when none of the others do. Never have I been one for licking boots, but old Busnach is not so bad and Émile is watching and a little idea flew into my mind and already I know the smile it will put on his face. “Mademoiselle?” Busnach says.

  I fish in my tub, look up crossly, and then in a good, strong voice say, “What’s become of my bit of soap? Somebody’s been and filched my soap again.”

  There is giggling from the authentic actresses, all of them knowing the way soap gets lost in sudsy water, the way it melts, the way it is easier to tell your mother it was pinched than that you were careless again.

  “Perfect,” Busnach says. “From the top.”

  He points a finger, and I say my bit, and he is grinning like he never does.

  After that we make it through the rest of the tableau without the barking of Busnach, and it just about slays me, looking morose and bored and tired while wringing linen and wiping my brow and pushing up the soggy sleeves of my blouse. Busnach liked my bit about the soap enough to put it in his play, and now I have myself a speaking part.

  I glance up at Émile from time to time, sitting in the third row, his feet propped on the seat in front of him, a home roll dangling from his lips. He don’t wink or nod, like he usually does. He does nothing to show a bit of pride. Maybe in the storeroom, between those tableaux when he is required on the stage, atop the chaise that is not a bit lonely, not no more.

  The first time he took me there, I could see the trouble he went to, shifting crates, wiping away dust, leaving a scarlet hair ribbon on the chaise, all so I would feel like a queen. There was none of the yanking and mauling, like behind the tavern that time. No. He lifted me up and set me on the chaise. And then, kneeling beside, he put the heels of his hands under my chin and spread his fingers on my cheeks. “Just looking into those chocolate pools of yours,” he said. I kept my eyes locked onto his, feeling no need to glance away. He put his lips on the sunken place between my collarbones. He touched the drawstring of my blouse and said, “Can I?” and I said, “You can,” just like we were countess and count. Blouse fallen from my shoulders, I watched his eyes grow large, taking in the paleness of my breasts, the rosiness of my nipples. His mouth tender upon my gooseflesh skin, his hands gentle upon my midriff, I closed my eyes, feeling like the most adored creature in all the world.

  There was a tiny bit of clumsiness, both of us fumbling with the fancy clasps of a garter filched from the basket of Maman. The rest of the time we were there, in the storeroom, kissing and stroking and cleaving, until my back arched up from the chaise and I was shuddering, with him collapsed upon me and shuddering right back.

  I suppose he knew I was no virgin, but I wanted to say how my first time was nothing, not compared to the lovemaking upon the chaise. I looked into his eyes, knowing he would see the glossiness of my own, and when he did not smirk, I said, “It felt like getting adored.”

  “Well, Mademoiselle Antoinette, I intend to keep up the adoring every single day.”

  And now, every day, just like he said, I find myself laying back on that old chaise, and that bit of time in the storeroom, while tableaux four, five and six are taking place, is the sweetest hour of my day, the bit I put my mind on when the morning is cold and I don’t want to get up from the nest of my mattress, the bit I recount as I shut my eyes for the night.

  It is on my mind even now, in the loge of the actresses, as I wiggle out of my washhouse costume. Any delay and it means being stuck waiting for the wardrobe mistress to come back from the room of costumes, her arms freed up for another load of aprons and skirts.

  Marie’s been poking fun, laughing and saying I’ve got a sweetheart, that she never knew me to take such care with my hair, with my toilet. Well, she was until I told Émile to come up the stairs to our lodging room and show himself to Marie and Charlotte. The second he was gone, Marie leaned her back up against the door and said, “There goes a beast,” and then she started in about him disrespecting Maman, not shutting her trap until I said in my harshest voice, “Not a single word more.”

  “Bluebeard,” Charlotte whispered.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Like you said, not a single word more.”

  “It’s a story I told her,” Marie said, “about an ugly king with a blue beard. He made a habit of hanging his slaughtered wives from hooks on the wall.”

  “I can tell you the end,” Charlotte said.

  I shoved a chair from my path, and she took a step away slow, but I could tell her legs were ready to spring. How was it those two girls could not see what was before their own eyes, how Émile made me step light and breathe deep? The feeling was like the one that comes on the first day of spring—with the sunshine and warm breezes and the whole world waking up—except that the day kept coming again and again.

  The next morning Marie was up even before the tiniest fragment of light was reaching between the slats of the shutters. I dozed on the mattress, listening to the sounds of the rue de Douai stirring awake—the clatter of hooves; the rattle of cartwheels on cobblestones; the morning greetings of the baker, the fruiterer, the pork butcher.

  Sprawled on her back, Maman was snoring, her breath catching, resulting in great snorts. Despairing about her ever shutting up and bracing myself against the coldness of the room, I heard Marie come back in, taking care to shut the door behind her without a sound. She stood there, blinking away, getting accustomed to the grey light, and then on seeing me awake, startling and jerking a small package wrapped in brown paper behind her back. “Our morning meal?” I said, knowing it was no baguette she was hiding there.

  “What?”

  “Behind your back.”

  “Shush. You’ll wake up Charlotte.” She sucked on her lip a second. “I’ve been over to the rue Laval to see Madame Lambert.”

  According to Madame Legat, downstairs, it was a tincture of Madame Lambert saved Lucy Roux from birthing a child. “Marie,” I said, “the odds are far against it, in case you never heard.” But inside, I was remembering my nervousness a week ago, those long days of stewing until my courses finally came. I even made a bargain, one I was dim enough not to keep. Let the bleeding start and I would say to Émile about pulling out in time.

  “It’s vinegar,” she said, tossing the package to me. “Soak a bit of cotton and put the wad up inside before you let that boy have his fun.”

  I imagined her blushing and chewing her lip and hardly able to explain to Madame Lambert what it was she came to get. “I know it wasn’t easy, going to Madame Lambert.” Color crept onto her cheeks, and she said she was getting water and, in a flash, was out the door and upon the stairs.

  When I next went to the storeroom with Émile, I said about those bits of cotton and the vinegar and asked him not to look. “Don’t mind in the least,” he said, turning his back. “I got to salt away a few sous before we set up house.” Oh, I was grinning, even as I fumbled, drawers around my knees. The future he saw for himself included me. He imagined us settled down, a lodging room of our own, and I was more than just another girl, a link added to the chain.

  So now I have two tiny chores on those days I get myself adored, which is very nearly every single one. The rinsing out of those bits of cotton, I take care of at the pump, six doors down from our lodging house. For the laying out to dry, I spread the cotton flat upon the highest shelf of the larder. The second tiny chore is putting a little x in the calendar I snatched from the desk of Busnach. The old goat deserved it, the way he kept me waiting for near half an hour. He excused himself from the office, saying it would take but a minute to sort out why the payroll clerk could not find my name on his list. But I could hear him chuckling in the corridor with Monsieur Martin and not rushing in the least. He won’t be missing that calendar. No. On his jumbled desk it was opened up to a page showing the fluttering leaves of autumn, when already the trees were stripped to bare.

  The covers, front and back, are leather with gold lettering, and th
e pages inside, scalloped and painted up with snowflakes or strawberries or leaves turning yellow and red, depending on the month. Every page has a few words, too, fancy letters with curlicues becoming vines sprouting with leaves. Someday I might ask Marie what it all says, but for now I keep it in a hiding place, wedged into a gap between the chimneypiece and the wall, only getting it out late at night to make a little x, marking the day as a day I was adored.

  Why do I bother keeping track? Maybe I only want to make use of the calendar, pretty as it is. Maybe it is my way of marking a day as momentous even if it looks like there are going be ten momentous dates for every one left blank. It makes me happy, putting down an x, counting them up, seeing that there are now twenty-seven when yesterday there were only twenty-six.

  Still basking in the rosy glow of getting myself a speaking part, I pull my washhouse costume over my head and tie the two ends of the drawstring at the neckline in a hasty knot. It is what we been told to do to keep the drawstrings from ending up on the floor. “Always rushing,” says Colette, another of the authentic laundresses, one I have no fondness for, not with the flesh always spilling from her neckline, not with the way she is always brushing up against the authentic laborers, even Busnach, in the corridor when there is no need. Just the other day, she puffed up her chest and gave herself a little stroke. “Like peaches,” she said to Pierre Gille. “Sweet on the tongue.”

  “I like to watch the play,” I say, and it is true. After the washhouse tableau comes the descent of the laborers tableau, with a river of workmen coming into the city from the heights of Montmartre and Saint-Ouen. It is where Émile—a mason—first appears, crossing the stage in white canvas trousers with a trowel and a half loaf tucked under his arm. With the reddish glow of the gas lamps lighting up shops that match those of the rue des Poissonniers, it is easy to be tricked into thinking it is early morning in the Goutte-d’Or. If I don’t dawdle—never mind sluttish Colette—with a bit of luck, I will catch the part where Émile halts mid-stage and blows a bit a warmth into his hands.

  After that the tableau grows syrupy as caramel, with a roofer called Coupeau shunning the workmen stopping in at L’Assommoir for drink and half the time losing their reason in the bottom of a glass and not bothering to head back out to the forges and mills. He halts Gervaise on the pavement and declares his true love and hears her pretty little speech about the life she wants for herself. “My ideal, you know, would be to work quietly, to be sure of always having some bread, a clean room, a bed, a table and two chairs,” she says. “That is all I should like, and life would be happy.” Syrupy talk, but I admit to a lump in my throat and I saw tears in the eyes of some of the other girls. I imagine it is a dream we all dreamt, and with Coupeau proposing marriage and promising Gervaise she is going to get her wish and her saying yes, it don’t seem impossible she is lifting herself from the gutters of the Goutte-d’Or. It is the place in the story brimming with hope.

  Colette huffs, a sneering sort of huff. “You like to watch Émile Abadie.”

  “So.”

  She shrugs, pulls her washhouse blouse up over her head, exposing me to the full glory of her swelling breasts. “A brute.”

  I shrug back.

  “Don’t you think?” she says, and I imagine her lip split open, a look of shock upon her face.

  “I don’t. Not in the least.”

  Her mouth twists a little sideways and her pretty teeth grip her fleshy bottom lip in a look of concern. “He isn’t respectful.”

  I give my washhouse dress a good snap, narrowly missing her chin, and toss it onto the pile collecting on the outstretched arms of the wardrobe mistresses. “He don’t care for flesh shoved in his face is all,” I say, before leaving Colette with her skirt pooled at her feet.

  Like always, after finishing his tableau, Émile comes out to the house seats, still wearing the trousers of a mason. But he don’t sit down beside me and start with the teasing, the little kisses snuck onto my neck. Today from the aisle at the end of the row, he jerks his head, telling me to come. And then he don’t have the decency to wait up for me. No, I scamper behind, calling out when we are two flights of stairs from the others. But still, he don’t wait.

  “Well,” I say, catching up to him at the door of the storeroom, only because he is taking a moment to twist the key in the lock. “You like that bit about the soap?” But he don’t laugh or say I ought to be asking Busnach for credit in the program or a private loge. No, he glances up from the lock, wearing a hard face.

  I sit on the chaise, rather than laying back. He steps toward me, and I look away from his cold eyes, and next thing his hands are upon me, yanking at my arm until I am twisted around and hunched over the chaise with my backside facing him.

  It is all over in a minute—my skirt lifted, my drawers yanked down, his hardness thrusting inside me from behind, then him buttoning up his fly.

  It takes but a second to coax my drawers and skirt back into place, a further second to get myself seated on the chaise. The quiet between us blaring loud, I sit there, knowing I have every right to stand and boot him in the shins, to spit in his face. “What was that?” I finally say.

  He runs his fingers through his scrub-brushy hair. “I got needs, Antoinette. I was looking high and low for you yesterday and you were nowhere to be seen. Didn’t get a wink of sleep last night,” he says.

  I draw myself up to my full height, put my face close to his. “Don’t you ever try nothing like that again.” Or, what? It will be the end of me? I will scold him, again, and lift up my skirt the very next day? “Isn’t right, Émile. Not in the least.”

  “You can’t stand me up,” he says, unable to lift his gaze from the dusty floor. “Can’t bear it, Antoinette.” He peeks out from under his brow. “Where were you, Antoinette?” He reaches toward my cheek, all hesitant, and I do not pull away,

  “Spewing into a bucket dawn until dusk,” I say, holding my voice meek. We are made up now, and I will not tell about escorting Marie to a modeling job, not with his badgering about me coddling her and Charlotte. Keeping them babies, he says, when the only thing for the poorest girls of Paris is to grow up faster than fast. Another time I might have said the truth. I might have said how those girls don’t have much of a mother at home, how I want to be, for just a little longer, the shield that keeps them from the harshness of the world. But right now I don’t have the strength of even a tin plate.

  1879

  Marie

  Turns out, Monsieur Degas is not so bad, maybe a little peculiar, but he would not hurt a flea. Oh, he is grumpy, more so with Sabine than anyone else. He hollers when he cannot find a brush, when he cannot find a clean rag, and then hollers again when he finds his pastels all lined up, back in their box with all the crumbling ends gone.

  Today he is happy. I know it the minute I walk into his workshop and see three of his canvases turned around instead of facing the wall. It means that at this moment he is thinking less harshly of his work, also that I have something new to look at while posing hour upon hour.

  After half a year of my modeling maybe twice in a month, he has grown obsessed, and now I must come every day. Always he wants me standing upon one of the dozen platforms spread around the workshop. He needs to observe me from above and below, he says. It began on a scorching Tuesday, when I arrived to find him staring for a good quarter hour at a pastel of me holding a fan.

  For that drawing he had wanted me posed in fourth position, my right foot ahead of my left and the toes of both feet pointed out to the sides. That part was nothing, easy, with my hips naturally loose and getting more so with all the exercises for training the legs to roll outward in the hip sockets. The hard part was the way he had one of my hands holding up a fan and the other reached around the back of my head like I was massaging my neck. It was the kind of picture he liked to make—a ballet girl hot and tired in the practice room and taking a second to fan herself while awaiting her turn. At first I had to work up a look of exhaustion, but with
Monsieur Degas caught up in his sketching and being extra miserly with the breaks, I held the pose for most of three hours and soon my neck genuinely ached and my shoulders truthfully slumped. The more tired I became, the merrier he grew. I slouched a little more. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s it.”

  On that scorching Tuesday, he just kept pondering the picture, the thumb of his one hand tucked up under his chin and his forefinger curled against his mouth. His eyes were narrowed, and he looked to me like a man on the verge of thinking up his greatest thought. I stood there, dying of thirst and telling myself not to move, not to draw his attention away from that picture, not until Sabine was back from fetching a glass of water.

  After I had drunk my fill, he cleared his throat and said, “All right. Mademoiselle van Goethem,” which was his way of saying I would be posing naked, that I was to go behind the screen and get myself undressed. If we were starting with me in practice clothes, he would say, “In your skirt, then, Mademoiselle van Goethem,” and I appreciated the tiny kindness of him not barking out how I should strip bare.

  He began a set of drawings—simple drawings, lines of charcoal with a touch of white pastel—with my finger resting on my chin; with my arms spread wide and holding my skirt; with a hand upon the fallen strap of my bodice, as if pulling it up. Sometimes he wanted my hair off my neck, up in a chignon. Sometimes he liked it hanging down my back in a braid or even loose, collected over a shoulder. As often as not, I was naked. The part that never changed was always he wanted my feet in fourth position, and I began to wonder if that was the great idea he was thinking up while he stared at that picture of me with the fan: that I would stand in fourth position and he would draw me a hundred times.