The Choiring Of The Trees Part 3

Sometimes I've wondered if she couldn't tell this whole story of her growing up and becoming a woman much better than I could do it. What follows I have put into her words, pretending it's what she spoke to me, but it wasn't then, that year I first met her, and it wasn't even over the many years following that I knew her and we would sit endless hours together rocking away on the porch while she told me the whole story of her life. No, what follows is a kind of combination of bits and pieces she told me over the years, and some other things I learned from other people who knew her, and parts of it, perhaps the best parts of it, not from what she or they said but from what she wrote, in her private diaries, which came into my hands after her death many years later. So yes, I will let her tell this: That studio, up there in the top of that turret, behind that large northern light. No one (except my father) was ever allowed into it, and it became my cloister, my nunnery, my ivory tower, as well as my autodidactic academy. It is not true, as some newspapers have said, that I was self-taught. But Little Rock High School, a seven-block walk east of my house, offered no courses in art, just as it offered nothing in Spanish, French, voice, or piano. I had begged to be allowed to go off to Arcadia College, an Ursuline Academy for Young Ladies in Arcadia, Missouri; I knew nothing about it except that it offered cla.s.ses in art and had a wonderful pastoral name; but my father would not let me leave Little Rock. So for most of the years of my adolescence I had to learn art from trial and error and what books I could find or order. At the age of eleven, and continuing until the age of...well, until I removed myself forever from that house, I used that little turret studio as a private place for working out my ideas about the making of pictures.

My father wasn't a miser, but he didn't throw his money around either, and when his children wanted something we had to beg for it and justify it and remind him several times and then promise to do something in return for it. I always managed to get what I needed for my studio: the easel, the palette, the mahlstick, and all the tubes of paint, and yards of canvas, and endless sheets of drawing-paper. Daddy did not approve of the expenditure; he did not want me to become an artist; for that matter, he didn't want me to "become" anything, other than grown-up...and he wasn't sure he wanted me to grow up. But Mother had her garden, and she would not let me help her in it. My father faulted her for that, and even yelled at her about it, but Mother would not accept help even from the Negro Samuel with the tender plants that she considered her real babies, in the garden. So the north turret studio was my garden, and the only green in it was what I painted. Daddy hoped I would outgrow it.

My only fond memory of Little Rock High School was that I achieved popularity among the other girls by painting for each of them an excellent copy of a Gibson girl as a reasonable likeness of themselves. I was the only "artist" any of them had ever even heard about.

When I told my father that I wanted to go away to the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute to study art, he was horrified. Or, rather, he was at first very puzzled, because he didn't know there was such a thing as an art college that would accept women, and then, when I showed him the brochure, he was scornful, and only later, after I had got up my nerve to tell him that I definitely intended to go, did he become horrified. He stormed and shouted. He railed and ranted. He sulked. He plotted: he told my older brothers of my intention, and they, all in college themselves at that time (Matthew had gone to Vanderbilt, Dallas was at Southern Methodist, while Henry settled for the University of Arkansas), filled my ears with stories of college life, how difficult it was, how impossible for the "fair s.e.x," who were always, if they could be admitted at all, viewed as ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.

"What's an odalisque?" Daddy asked my brother Matthew.

"A concubine," Matthew explained.

"Is that what you want to be?" my father demanded of me.

"If I could be one of the kind Ingres painted," I told him.

"Who?"

When I gave up my dream of the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute and instead actually began to make plans to apply for admission to the University of Arkansas, and needed my father's signature on the application, he flatly refused and said he'd rather see me walking the streets. I did not particularly want to go to Fayetteville anyway; in that year, 1904, the University offered only two courses in art, both taught by a woman whose specialty was penmans.h.i.+p. At the last minute before the opening of the fall term, I applied for and was accepted at Conway Central College and Conservatory of Fine Arts, a women's school in the college town of Conway, less than two hours by train from Little Rock. Somehow I got my father to sign the papers, perhaps by my promise to come home every weekend. And I did: I caught the 4:15 every Friday afternoon and went back on the 6:45 every Sunday P.M. The house went to h.e.l.l during the week. I tried to persuade Cyrilla to a.s.sume my duties as manager of the household, but Cyrilla, while willing, wasn't const.i.tutionally strong enough and wasn't able to give orders or instructions to Samuel and Ruby. Daddy kept complaining that the house was going to h.e.l.l.

There was one teacher, Miss Opaline Dearasaugh, at 4-c F.A. (as it was called, p.r.o.nounced Fourcie Effie), who was reasonably talented at drawing and could impart the rudiments of watercolor technique, so my time there wasn't entirely wasted. But I reflected that the hours I spent in travel, going home every weekend, could have been better spent doing my homework and polis.h.i.+ng my drawings, or, at worst, accepting one of the frequent invitations I received from the young men at Hendrix, a Methodist college in Conway. Most of the girls at Fourcie Effie were enrolled there because of its proximity to Hendrix, where they hoped to find an eligible swain. It did not take me long to discover that my cla.s.smates were less interested in the fine arts than in men, and that all of the girls were indeed ornaments, oddities, or odalisques.

Our first a.s.signment in Miss Dearasaugh's cla.s.s was to do a self-portrait, and I've shown you the pastel I did in the mirror and have kept, and which you have called, I thank you, beautiful. I took no great pride in my features, but men-or boys-seemed to be quick to notice me...although slow to do anything about it. A Hendrix premedical student named Jason Sample stopped me on the sidewalk in downtown Conway and introduced himself and apologized for his forwardness and asked me to allow him to be my escort for the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. I smiled sweetly and thanked him and declined, not on the grounds that I didn't know him and hadn't been properly introduced by a responsible party but that I didn't know how to dance...which was true. He smiled engagingly and told me that he didn't either, that the two of us could watch the others and use the event as an excuse to get acquainted, because all he wanted to do was learn my life's story. I smiled again and said that my life had no story. "Then I would like to start its story," he offered-and I loved that, the way he said that, and I wanted to say, Oh yes I'd love to go with you to the Christmas cotillion (any of my Fourcie cla.s.smates would have given an arm to have been invited), but I said that since the cotillion was on a Sat.u.r.day night and my presence was required in Little Rock each weekend, I would have to forgo the kind invitation. Any other young man, after half an hour attempting such persuasion, would have abandoned the effort, but Jason Sample persisted, and at length I admitted that it just might be possible for me to get out of the trip to Little Rock, and the next day I wrote my father (I could have waited until the weekend and spoken it to him, but I thought a letter would be more effective) and told him I was going to the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. My father did not reply, nor did he mention it when he saw me that weekend, and I wondered if he had received the letter. I waited, and two more weekends went by without mention of the letter. As I was leaving Little Rock the weekend before the cotillion, I said simply, "I won't be home next weekend."

"Yes you will," my father said.

"No I won't," I said, and I was not. I went to the cotillion with Jason Sample, and I loved it. But Daddy came to Conway the next day and told me he was taking me out of school. And he did.

In the months and months following, Jason Sample wrote to me several times and asked if he could come to Little Rock to see me. I attempted to discourage him and told him it was unlikely that we could continue to see each other. He wanted reasons, he demanded explanations, and all I could do, eventually, was ignore him. Alone in my turret studio I was learning more about art than I had in Miss Dearasaugh's cla.s.ses, and I did not miss Conway at all; it was such a provincial village compared with Little Rock.

By accident, in conversation, Daddy's boss Henry Worthen learned that I was interested in art, and he arranged for me to meet his "daubing cousin" Spotiswode Worthen, who was a legendary Little Rock eccentric, a strange old man in his seventies and virtually a recluse. Apparently, Henry Worthen was in charge of Spotiswode's financial affairs, and he thought it would be "useful" if his "unemployed" cousin agreed to give "lessons" to the daughter of his vice-president. Spotiswode Worthen had not given lessons during the previous twenty years, nor had he made any sort of social contact, and I remember how terribly rusty his voice sounded at our first meeting. He wasn't an unkind man, and he knew much about the entire history of Western painting up to but not including the time of the Impressionists, who, he felt, were demoralizing the visual culture of civilization. Do you know the Impressionists, Latha? No? Well, they had revolutionized the art of that time, but Spotiswode Worthen had no use for them. The last great painter, he believed, had been Fantin-Latour-a mediocre academic hack-but Bouguereau-a somewhat more talented hack-remained "promising," although he was in the last year of his life (Bouguereau, not Worthen, who would live two more years).

Spotiswode Worthen was the first "real" artist that I had ever known, although the few paintings of his that I was permitted to see did not impress me, except with their technical facility. His style was...oh, what can I call it if you don't know art? His style was constipated. It was hard and dark and fecal. Yet it was smooth and slick. But I tell you, "Spot" Worthen could paint! More than paint, he could draw. His paintings were actually just colored drawings, the colors reserved and drab. In his first lesson he made me sit for three hours drawing, with nothing but a lead pencil, a single egg. In the second lesson he moved the egg from the tabletop to the windowsill, into the direct sunlight, and made me spend three more hours with it. Sometimes I thought that I must be cackling or clucking in my sleep.

Well, I spent two years, three times a week, receiving a.s.signments and criticisms from Spot Worthen. I never asked my father, or Henry Worthen, what tuition was being paid to the man, who always dressed and smelled as if he were penniless. On my own I did bright watercolors of the Little Rock parks and the Little Rock townscape and the view of the river from Spotiswode Worthen's studio, but my teacher did not appreciate these; he was scornful of "views." His studio and living quarters were in an antebellum warehouse fronting the Arkansas River, down on Markham Street, half an hour's walk from my house. The north windows had a fine vista of the muddy river and the picturesque village of Argenta on the opposite sh.o.r.e, but it never was a subject for him. The human figure, he told me, contained heavenly horizons more sublime than any landscape. He parked me in front of endless plaster casts of torsos and elbows, noses and knees, ankles and navels.

Once I asked my sister Cyrilla to pose for me without her clothing, and she was willing, but her figure was so scrawny and limp that the result, when I showed it to my teacher, curled his lip in scorn. "Use a mirror," he suggested, and I followed his suggestion, in warm weather, spending many long hours at a dresser, studying and drawing the full front view of my own naked body. When I showed the drawings to Spot Worthen, I was surprised (and maybe a little pleased) to see that his aged, wan cheeks actually blushed.

"Good," he said. "Certainly good. Continue. But notice..." and he pointed out the various muscles I had missed or slighted.

He did not give me art history lessons as such, that is, no instruction in appreciation of the great artists of the past, but occasionally he talked about theory, and about the great masters (B.F.L., I came to call them: "before Fantin-Latour"). "Do you know why all of the great painters have been men?" he asked me once, and without giving me a chance to point out that Artemisia Gentileschi, Marietta Tintoretto, and Judith Leyster, to name only three, were female, he said, "Because only the male has a body which is charged with divine afflatus." Modesty prevented a sarcastic comment I could have made on that, and I kept silent as he went on to explain how the female body is a lovely and graceful subject, a.n.a.logous to soft, slow music, but only the male body was truly heroic, capable of grand mordents and cadenzas. The great Michelangelo had a good reason for making even his nude females look masculine.

One day toward the end of my second year of study with Spotiswode Worthen, he impetuously swept his hand against the plaster cast I was drawing, knocking it to the floor, broken, and yelled, "Tate!" and summoned the black youth who sometimes came to the warehouse to clean it. He was a young man, perhaps not as old as I (I was twenty), tall, not dark-black but light-brown, and frightened, or clearly uneasy, in my presence. Here in the Ozarks, where there are virtually no Negroes, you would never understand how delicate the relations.h.i.+p between black men and white women must be. He took off his hat and held it in his hand as he bowed his head to Spot Worthen and waited for orders.

"Do you have a dollar on you?" Spot Worthen asked me.

"I think I may have a dollar," I declared.

"Give it to him, and he'll pose for you."

"I'm not certain I want him to pose for me," I said.

"Because he's a n.i.g.g.e.r? They make good models. Velazquez, Copley, Gericault, they all used n.i.g.g.e.rs. Your Edmonia Lewis did a lot of n.i.g.g.e.rs, although she made 'em look like burr-headed whites, but what can you do in white marble? Give him the dollar."

The epithet did not make me flinch; in Little Rock in those days everybody called them n.i.g.g.e.rs; I myself had sometimes referred to Samuel as "our n.i.g.g.e.r." But except for Samuel, a loyal old family servant, I had never been in a room with a black man before, certainly not one, as this one was now doing, at Worthen's command, removing his clothing. Before Tate removed his trousers, however, Worthen whispered something into his ear and handed him a rag, a long strip of bedsheeting, and pointed toward the part of the studio that was Worthen's living quarters. Tate went in there and returned a minute later wearing nothing but the strip of cloth wrapped clumsily around his hips. Worthen made adjustments to it so that as much as possible of the pelvis was revealed without sacrifice of decency, then he commanded me, "Draw."

I drew. For a dollar the black youth posed for three hours, never seeming to tire. He was extremely muscular, and his taut skin glistened with sweat. I did a front view, a side view, a back view, and an "action" pose of him holding a broom overhead as if it were a sword. The next time I came to Worthen's I did details of the muscles of the latissimus dorsi, the rectus abdominis, the gluteus maximus. I devoted a whole afternoon, once, to his hands, getting the ligamentum carpi volare just right. I drew him asleep, or pretending to be. I drew him stretching and bending and twisting and throwing. I drew him, or tried to catch him, falling and leaping and running and jumping and kicking. I spent almost forty dollars on the Negro, and once when, accidentally, the loincloth slipped down without his notice or Worthen's (the old artist had taken to sleeping through these sessions), I drew also what it had concealed, fascinated with the structure, although my face was so hot my eyes watered until I could hardly see.

That one drawing was my undoing. I kept it in my portfolio in my studio at home, along with the hundreds of other sketches of the Negro. Occasionally my father climbed up to my studio, and he was the only other person permitted there. Once when he came up for a visit, I had a group of the drawings spread out on the floor and was reviewing them.

"Jesus Christ, Viridis, who is this n.i.g.g.e.r?" he asked.

"His name is Tate Coleman, and he is Spotiswode Worthen's janitor and occasional model."

"Model? You mean he stands around like this with his clothes off?"

"When he's asked to."

"With you watching him?"

"That's how I did these drawings, Daddy."

"You drew these pictures?" He began to pick them up, one by one, and then to drop them, as if they were contaminated. He took my portfolio and opened it and exclaimed, "How many times did you do it?" I had momentarily forgotten about the one improper drawing, or I would have sought to stop my father's ransacking of my portfolio. By the time I remembered, it was too late. He held the offending sketch at arm's length and emitted a long whistle with his pursed lips. Then he said, not to me but to himself, "Yep, they're long, all right." Then he asked me, "Did you have to rub it to get it to be that long?"

"Daddy!" I said.

He ripped the drawing in two. Then he ripped it in four. Then eight, and into tiny fragments. He threw his handfuls of torn paper into the air and they drifted down like snowflakes. "Why don't you give up this art foolishness and take up a nice hobby? Have you ever thought of riding? Would you like to have a horse?" I shook my head. "I'm getting you a gelding," he said, and he walked out.

To preserve all of the art I had completed up until that point-several portfolios and a number of canvases-I hid it in the attic. My father removed all the rest of the contents of my studio, locked it, and bought for a high price a chestnut Arabian gelding, which I named Gericault after a famous artist who painted horses, although the groom, servants, and everyone else called him Jericho. Spotiswode Worthen had to go to a hospital. I sneaked away from my riding lesson to visit him there. The old artist was very ill and could scarcely talk. I said I was sorry I'd had to discontinue my lessons with him. I had learned a lot, I said. I was very grateful. It had been a meaningful experience for me. Nothing that I had ever drawn had been as interesting as the body of Tate Coleman.

"That body," Spotiswode Worthen managed slowly to speak, "was found, with a large rock tied to the neck, in the river, downstream a ways."

I tried to lose myself in my riding: with all the fervor I had devoted to painting and drawing, I studied and practiced manege, a fancy word for fancy horsemans.h.i.+p. At a time when most women still rode sidesaddle in their long dresses, I raised eyebrows with my jodhpurs and English jumping saddle. I took Gericault for long rides in Pulaski Heights, west of Little Rock; I rode out as far as Pinnacle Mountain, and I rode back so fast and furious that pa.s.sersby thought I was being pursued. Sometimes mounted policemen did pursue me, to see if I needed a.s.sistance or to find out why a woman was wearing pants in the city limits of Little Rock, but they never could catch me or stop me. I jumped ever-higher fences and walls and fallen tree trunks, anything that got in my way. It is a wonder I didn't break my neck. I took lessons in how to fall, and I had several falls, and more than once I was cut and bruised but never broke anything...except, eventually, one of Gericault's legs, broken so badly that he had to be shot.

The day after Gericault was shot, in August of 1908, I packed a trunk and took a train for Chicago. I had been gone for several days before my mother or sister or the one brother still at home, Henry, noticed that I was missing, and Cyrilla wrote to tell me how they expressed astonishment that Daddy had not only permitted me to leave but had wired a Chicago bank with funds sufficient to keep me there for a year. Was he mellowing in his middle age? Did he feel guilty for depriving me of my art? He wasn't simply letting me leave the nest, was he? How would they all do without me? How would Daddy do without me? He was saying he hoped that Cyrilla could learn to take my place, and n.o.body knew then, yet, just exactly what he meant, but Cyrilla knew, and she asked me in the letter if it was true that she was going to be expected to subst.i.tute for me in that regard as well. I told her I would not let him do that to her.

Two bronze lions flanked the entrance to the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute, a huge new building in the popular Italian Renaissance style. I felt when I pa.s.sed between the lions the same way the ancient Hitt.i.tes and the Mycenaeans felt at their lion gates-that I was acquiring the animals' strength and energy, that I could do anything I wanted, that nothing was going to stop me. Thus I was prepared for the shock of the pictures I saw inside the museum. Remember, now, I had never seen art in the original before, except for a few paintings of his own that Spotiswode had shown me. There were no museums in Arkansas. The poor reproductions in black-and-white in the cheap art books I owned or could borrow had not prepared me for encountering the originals. Now I saw why Spotiswode had abhorred the Impressionists: they violated all the rules he had drilled into me. And the modern artists, more recent than the Impressionists, were even more extravagant. I stood a long time before an enormous tapestry-like park scene done all in tiny dots by an artist named Georges Seurat. But even his color was mild compared with that of another Frenchman by the name of Paul Gauguin, who, I was sad to discover, had died five years before. If only I could have studied with him instead of with Spotiswode! I spent a very long time standing in front of the paintings by Gauguin.

Finally I tore myself away from the museum and visited the cla.s.srooms and studios. The fall semester had not begun, but the rooms were ready, row upon row of easels like a factory of some sort, and the walls held examples of student work from the previous year. I examined these, finding the drawings and paintings staid and stodgy and amateurish compared with the art I had just seen in the museum. I noticed that each painting or drawing had a date and a circled number: 1, or 2, or 3, and I a.s.sumed, correctly as it turned out, that these numbers were the monthly ranking of each student's work, following the French academic teaching system. Would I ever achieve a No. 1 or even a No. 2? On a bulletin board I found a list of the names and numerical ranking of the student body. Nine hundred and thirty-seven aspiring artists! I noted the name of No. 937, Marybelle Curtis, and reflected that the poor girl must feel terrible. What if I myself became No. 938? No, I was too good, I was too confident, but I did not like the thought of all that compet.i.tion.

Chicago was such a huge place. I had prepared myself to find it a hundred times bigger than Little Rock, but I had not known it would be so dense, and so dark, and so vertical, and so flat, and so windy, and so crowded, and so smoky, and so dark, and so noisy. I had trouble understanding the way people talked, and they seemed totally unable to understand what I was saying and asking. After a particularly exasperating attempt at communicating with a streetcar conductor, I said aloud, "I might as well be in France!"

That casual remark stunned me into long and serious reflection.

Those bold artists whose work was hanging at the Inst.i.tute, Seurat and Gauguin, had been French. Spotiswode Worthen had told me that all of the great painters of the last hundred years had been French, without exception (only before Fantin-Latour, of course). I had read an article in one of Spotiswode's art magazines about an American woman with a French name, Miss Mary Ca.s.satt, who was living in Paris, in her sixties, after having studied for years with the Impressionists, especially the one who could draw best, a man named Edgar Degas, now blind and in his seventies. Miss Ca.s.satt was, like me, the daughter of a wealthy American banker. Would she be sympathetic to my story and situation if I could meet her and talk with her? Might she introduce me to Monsieur Degas?

I never enrolled at the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute. I would never meet Mary Ca.s.satt, let alone Edgar Degas, but I did put my trunk back on the train, after withdrawing all of the money my father had sent to the Chicago bank. I sent my father a telegram, which read: CHANGED MIND STOP GOING TO PARIS STOP YES GO AHEAD STOP YOU MAY HAVE CYRILLA STOP LOVE VIRIDIS.

The terrible guilt I should have felt for saying that was obliterated by the excitement of what I was about to do.

In New York I discovered that I would need a pa.s.sport and would have to wait a few days for it, and I used the opportunity to visit the museums there, where I saw more and more of those Impressionists and the moderns. Some of the paintings had labels reading: acquired through the generosity of miss mary ca.s.satt, and I had a constant fantasy of what the generosity of Miss Mary Ca.s.satt was going to do for my life.

That fantasy sustained me during a horrible ocean crossing. Can you imagine the ocean, Latha? Can you picture water in every direction, with waves of it rising up fifty or sixty feet? The boat I was on, a steams.h.i.+p called the Lusitania, the same one that would be sunk by a submarine seven years later during the Great War, was a huge craft of over thirty thousand tons, but even with that great size it was tossed on the waves like a toy. The sea was so rough that the crew themselves became frightened and convinced that we would sink. All the pa.s.sengers were sick or scared to death or both. I began to believe that death at sea would be my punishment for letting my father have Cyrilla.

But the voyage itself seemed punishment enough, and lasted nearly a week. When Nail escaped the electric chair that first time, I already knew the feeling of survival, of being given another chance. And the elation of survival stayed with me during some of the disappointments that came soon afterward: when I arrived in Paris eager to meet Miss Mary Ca.s.satt, I discovered that the American lady had returned to Philadelphia for an extended visit. I attempted on my own to visit Edgar Degas but was told that he was not receiving visitors.

They call Paris the City of Light, but it struck me from the beginning as the City of Dirt: grimy streets filled with grimy people rus.h.i.+ng madly nowhere. If Chicago had intimidated me, Paris left me terrorstruck. You cannot imagine it. From the moment of my arrival in Chicago, I had been uncomfortable walking alone in the city; the feeling had increased in New York, and now, in Paris, it was almost unbearable. Men and women stared at me, or I thought they did, and made remarks among themselves, or I thought they did, understanding a few of their words, having not forgotten my home-tutoring in French. When I heard a man exclaim to his companion, "Tu as vu ces emeraudes?" I knew that he was referring only to the color of my eyes, but I was embarra.s.sed.

My first days in Paris I tried to stay off the streets by retreating into the great museums, the Louvre and the Luxembourg, but the splendor of their masterpieces, my first sight of such incredible paintings by Botticelli and t.i.tian and Poussin, gave me the firm conviction that I could never paint anything worthy of the canvas on which it would be painted.

Strange and huge and dirty as Paris was, I would not have remained there if I had not had a chance encounter with another American girl my own age, in October, named Marguerite Thompson, who was from Fresno, California, and was staying with her aunt in Paris. Like myself, Marguerite wanted to study art and intended to enroll at the ecole des Beaux-Arts. She and I discovered we had a common background, having grown up in small American cities with well-to-do fathers who had arranged for private tutors in French, and both of us had made copies of Gibson girls for friends in high school. But Marguerite had never drawn from the nude, not even the female nude, not even herself in private, and when the entrance examination for the ecole des Beaux-Arts required us to draw from the male nude (loinclothed, of course), Marguerite could scarcely hold her pencil steady and came close to fainting. I pa.s.sed the examination with no difficulty, but Marguerite was required to enroll at the ecole de la Grande Chaumiere instead, and she and I drifted apart. But not before we had gone together to be introduced by Marguerite's aunt to an American woman named Miss Gertrude Stein, who lived on rue de Fleurus in a wonderful house with a friend, Miss Alice Toklas. Marguerite's aunt, Miss Adelaide Harris, herself a painter, had attended Christian Science Sunday school in San Francisco with Miss Stein, and they were old friends. During my brief chat with Miss Stein, who impressed me as the most emanc.i.p.ated woman I had ever met, I learned that she had a low opinion of the ecole des Beaux-Arts, and I myself was beginning to question how it was any better than the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute. After a few weeks there, I transferred to the Academie Julian, where I was much happier. I remained there almost three years. Some of my cla.s.smates, as obscure then as I was, were destined to become celebrated.

In November I spent an entire Sat.u.r.day and Sunday at the exhibition of the Salon d'Automne, where I saw for the first time the paintings of a group of yet little-known artists who were called derisively fauves, meaning "the wild ones." I learned at this exhibition the three qualities I wanted my own art to acquire: color, simplicity, and spontaneity. The Sunday I discovered the Fauves I also made the acquaintance of the girl who would become my best friend for the next several years, a French girl two years older than myself but appearing younger, called Coco. She has become recently very famous, but you would not recognize her name. In those years she was as much a n.o.body as I, although she knew some artists who were already on their way to reputation and money.

Coco was not enrolled at the Academie Julian but had attended the Academie 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 Gericault 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 t.i.tillated by the idea.

But Coco herself was on her way to becoming a mistress to a dark-haired Pole she called w.i.l.l.y-which she p.r.o.nounced Vee-lee-and she was quite eager to have me-whose name she p.r.o.nounced Vee-ree-dee-meet him after he returned from traveling in Holland. w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 b.u.t.te Montmartre in order to show me an outrageous painting the Spaniard had recently finished. It showed a group of five misshapen prost.i.tutes, 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 w.i.l.l.y. 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 prost.i.tutes. There is even a pastoral landscape in the background, with the Pont de Pa.s.sy, 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 naive, decorative, fas.h.i.+onable, 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 ident.i.ty 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 coa.r.s.ely fat, but fleshy, what people here would call pudgy, and not quite as das.h.i.+ng 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y, enthralled, transported, delighted, puzzled, dismayed, offended, and, I have to tell you, aroused, l.u.s.tful, burning.

The next afternoon, after w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 s.e.xual matters, changed the subject.

But if girls are ill at ease discussing s.e.x, just as I am at this moment with you, men are in their element, and I was always scandalized, or pretended to be, whenever w.i.l.l.y, Pablo, and their friend Max were telling dirty stories or making s.e.xual 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. 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?

n.o.body 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 w.i.l.l.y, 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. w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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.

w.i.l.l.y slept at Coco's apartment about three times a week; Coco went to w.i.l.l.y'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." w.i.l.l.y had many strange ideas, which Coco detailed for me.

Whenever Coco went to spend the night at w.i.l.l.y'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 w.i.l.l.y were doing at that moment.

One Sat.u.r.day night in the summer of 1909, I was having my usual reverie about Coco and w.i.l.l.y when there was a knock at the door, and I, wondering if it might be Max at last, opened it to find w.i.l.l.y. "Why, w.i.l.l.y!" 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 pa.s.sionately and attempted to kiss me.

I turned my head to one side to avoid his kiss and pushed against his large chest. "w.i.l.l.y! What are you doing?!"

"o 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 apres 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 etait 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 enamourees devant mon s.e.xe (Have her lift her lovesick hands before my s.e.x), 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 ident.i.ty as a person than with s.e.x 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 f.u.c.k."

w.i.l.l.y 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."

I was ready for that: "I'd rather listen to the nightingale sing first."

"He is mute, for now. He wants only his cage. The cage is new, and he has never been there before, but he knows it is made of beautiful, warm red gold."

w.i.l.l.y stayed for two hours, longer than Coco should have had to wait for him, and when he saw that his finest blandishments would not work, he even tried solicitation of my intellect, a great effort on his part: "Well, if you can't open your legs, open your mind and tell me what you think of Pablo's pictures."

I was game. "I haven't seen his most recent things, what you call his Scientific Cubism. I did not like the Demoiselles."

"Hah! Nor did I. What did you find wanting in it, Mademoiselle Monday? The transformation of Negro sculpture? The mislocated physiognomies?"

"I think," I declared, "that Nature admires geometry but improves upon it in all Her creations. The artist should not return to geometry."

w.i.l.l.y stared at me, as if he had not been listening but now was ready to. "Would you mind repeating that?"

I then proceeded to elaborate on this idea-quite a firm conviction of mine, at the time and ever since-that geometry should not be emphasized at the expense of actual appearance. This was more than poor, lecherous w.i.l.l.y had bargained for; as he appeared to be dozing off, I produced an example that woke him up a bit: "It's as if I drew a skeleton of you and called it your portrait. Not that you wouldn't look better if you were more skeletal." I laughed teasingly.

But he only replied, petulantly, "You're saying I'm obese."

"No, I'm making a point."

"If I were thin, would you have s.e.x with me?"

"No. You are Coco's."

"I am not hers! Nor anybody's! I'm mine! She doesn't own me, nor do I own her. We aren't even married."

"'We are wed in all but fact,' she said you told her," I said.

He tried another tack. "You're an American," he said with contempt. "You Americans are all prudes, and you are probably frigid."