Jackie and Me(26)

“They’re hiding something,” I said. “That’s for damn sure.”

“Imagine if they were having an affair, and Monet knew

all about it and painted them anyway. All but captured them in the act.”

“And they let him do it! Say, do you believe in prescience?”

“I once had a dog who was prescient.”

“A dog?”

“He’d always run out of the room exactly two minutes

before Mummy was about to blow up.”

“Like those dogs who leave town before earthquakes.”

“Exactly!”

“Well, the reason I bring up the subject is Madame

Monet there—she’s going to die before too long. Cancer.

And Bazille, he’ll be dead in a few years, too, thanks to the Franco-Prussian War. So when I look at them together like this . . .”

“Ah.” I felt her gasp feathering my neck. “They’re not

philandering, they’re commiserating.”

“About what’s coming, yes.”

“Poor things. And all that beautiful dappling . . . it’s just mortality, isn’t it? Closing around them.”

“Well, that’s one idea anyway.”

Frowning, she studied the canvas a while longer. “They

can still be lovers, too, can’t they?”

“Just doomed ones.”

“The best kind,” she said. “Maybe we should get a drink

now.”

In those days, there were precious few taverns on



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93

Constitution Avenue, so, at Jackie’s suggestion, we took a

cab to La Salle du Bois at the corner of Eighteenth and M.

A swanker place than I usually frequented, but, at four in

the afternoon, the silver fox coats were still a few hours off, and we had the place all to ourselves except for a bartender in a white duck uniform. I ordered a scorpion, she ordered a grasshopper, and we sat there in the parchment-shaded glow of wall lamps.

“They’ve got the best crêpes suzette,” said Jackie, but

when I suggested we order some, she said, “What, so I can

be fatter? No, thank you.”

There was, of course, nothing remotely fat about Miss

Bouvier, but that commonplace did call into focus the con—

tradictory elements of her. Male and female, you might say, warring in the same way Jackie’s parents had. Willowy arms barging out into large and capable hands . . . a stem of a

neck poking out from rangy shoulders . . . and then the flattened, almost boxer-like profile of her nose, as if someone had brought a fist to it in utero. It was a lot to reconcile, and it’s possible I was staring at her too hard.

“Where did you learn all that stuff?” she asked.

“What?”

“Bazille and Mrs. Monet.”

“Oh . . . my misspent youth, I guess. I was a no-good art

and architecture major.”

“I won’t hold that against you. Who’d you study?”

“Tintoretto.”

Her smile was encouraging enough, the rum persuasive

enough, to go further.

94





LOUIS BAYARD


“If you want to know,” I said, “I’ve always believed he

was the first Impressionist.”

“Three centuries ahead of schedule?”

“Damn straight. Look at any of his canvases, what’s he

doing? Exactly what the Impressionists were doing. Grabbing the light, the moment, before it gets away. He doesn’t scrape down his paint to make it look presentable, he doesn’t have the time. Have you seen Il Paradiso in the Doge’s Palace?”

“It’s vast.”

“And intimate. Every square inch pouring out of him as you watch. He’s just the poor fool trying to capture it all.”

A slow smile. “You’re an admirer.”

“Oh, he was the greatest of the Venetians.”

“Not Titian?”

“I guess, if you like your technique perfect and harmoni-ous and . . . regular. If you like your artists all Hellenic . . . ”

“What’s Tintoretto?”

“Hebraic. Spirit over form. He’s looking for the spot

where spirit is erupting through flesh, and all he can do is try to get it on canvas, and it’s the only thing worth doing, really, because—” I stopped, half defeated. “Because why else live, I was going to say.”

She looked at me with a new intentness.

“Do you ever talk like this with Jack?”

“Oh, he’d have no interest. I mean, we went to Venice

when we were college kids. San Marco’s, the Bridge of Sighs, the whole nine yards. And Jack was a good sport the whole way, grateful to be there, no question.”

“But . . . ”



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95

“Well, he went at it the way normal people do, that’s all.”

“You mean he wouldn’t stand gawping in the Scuola

Grande.”

“Or the Chiesa della Madonna. He’d just get his fill and

wait for me outside. Which is how most humans operate, I