“Friends?” she asked. “Were we friends, monsieur?”
“More than friends, Carmen. We spent many evenings, many nights together.”
Her hand went to her mouth, as if she were horrified. “Lovers? We weren’t lovers.”
Henri searched her face for some hint of deception, some glimmer of recognition, of shame, of joy, but he found nothing.
“No, mademoiselle,” he said, the words as painful to him as having a tooth pulled. “We worked together. We were more than friends. An artist’s model is more than a friend.”
She seemed relieved. “And I was your model?”
“The best I’ve worked with. I could show you the paintings.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t. He could show her a few of the paintings. But he had only three. Yet he remembered, or thought he remembered, painting a dozen. He could see the nude he painted of her, and remember how reluctant she had been to pose for it, but he couldn’t remember selling the painting, and he certainly didn’t have it now. “Perhaps you could come to my studio. Perhaps I could do some sketches of you, and perhaps your memory will return when you see the paintings.”
She shook her head, looking at her feet as she did. “No, monsieur. I could never model. I can’t believe I ever modeled. I am so plain.”
“You are beautiful,” he said. He meant it. He saw it. He had put it on canvas.
The proprietor of the laundry stepped out on the street then. “Carmen! You want a job or you want to run off with a dwarf, it is no matter to me, but if you want a job, go back to work, now.”
She turned from him. “I have to go, monsieur. I thank you for your offer, but that time is forgotten. Perhaps it is best.”
“But…” He watched her hurry by the boss into the laundry. The boss snarled at Henri as he closed the door.
Toulouse-Lautrec climbed into the taxi, which had been waiting.
“Another laundry, monsieur?” asked the driver.
“No, take me to the brothel at rue d’Amboise in the Second. And easy around the corners. I don’t want to spill my drink.”
Thirteen
THE WOMAN IN THE STOREROOM
MÈRE LESSARD HAD NEVER REALLY USED VIOLENCE AGAINST ANOTHER person before. Of course, living on Montmartre, where bohemians, working people, and the bourgeoisie mixed in the dance halls and cafés, she’d seen many fights and had nursed cuts and bruises on her own men. And during the Prussian War, she had not only endured the shelling of the city and helped with the wounded, but she had also seen the riots after the war, when the Communards took the cannons from the Church of Saint-Pierre, overthrew the government, then were massacred against a wall at Père-Lachaise. Certainly she had always implied, even threatened, that she was capable of violence, and had more or less convinced her family and most of the artists on the butte that she might go berserk at any moment and slaughter them all like an angry she-bear, a reputation of which she was proud and had worked hard to achieve. But smacking Juliette in the forehead with a crêpe pan was her first real act of violence, and she found it wildly unsatisfying.
“Perhaps a different pan,” Régine said, trying to console her mother.
“No,” said Mère Lessard. “I could have used the copper one from our own kitchen, the one with the tin lining, which is lighter, and better, I think, for crêpes, but the one from the bakery is perfect for braining a model. Heavy, yet not so heavy that I cannot swing it. And I didn’t want to use a rolling pin. The point was to knock her unconscious, not crush her skull. No, the pan was perfect.”
They had carried Lucien upstairs to the apartment and sat next to the bed where he lay as still as death.
“Perhaps if there were more blood?” said Régine. “The way we allow just a touch of the fruit to show by venting the piecrusts.”
“No,” said Madame. “I think the blow was perfect. She went out like a candle, and not a drop of blood. She is very pretty, and blood would have stained her dress. No, I think that conking someone on the head is like the sex: a thankless task we must perform to keep the peace.” She sighed, wistfully, as she looked at the photo of Père Lessard on the bedside table. “The joy is in the threatening. Threats are like the love poems of head conking, and you know what a romantic I am.”
“Mais oui, Maman,” said Régine. She stood and cocked an ear toward the doorway. “There is someone on the stairs.”
“Take the crêpe pan,” said Mère Lessard.
Régine got to the top of the stairs at the same time as did a bull-shouldered man in work clothes, who caught her around the waist with one arm, spun her around, then pressed her to the wall and kissed her unmercifully while she squirmed, his three-day stubble scratching her face.
“My sweet,” said Gilles, her husband. “My flower. I thought to surprise you, but you are ready to make crêpes for me. My little treasure.”
“The pan is for hitting you. Put me down,” said Régine. She wriggled in his embrace and he pressed her harder against the wall. “My little love pig, I missed you.”
“It’s Gilles,” Régine called to her mother.
“Hit him,” said Mère Lessard. “He deserves it for coming home early.”