Read Online The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti - Free Book Online Page A

silk, blue and ivory; patterned crystal; the beating wings of a large bird; a man’s body stretched full upon mine, his lips on my breast; a caress, melting away.
Such a long road. So tired.
Then uncertainty, and I fell a long, dark way.
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    Above the rooftops, the air was thin. Another day, one more sitting. One in which the coals that offered the atelier scant warmth burned down more than they were lit; and Chasseloup stared out at the buttes and smoked, a scarf wrapped round his neck. The studio’s expansiveness had narrowed to a foggy, helpless anxiety; a state of arrest. From my position, standing on the wooden slats, I watched the progress of the day’s light: dawn slowly grazing the wide surrounding sky, clouds wisping past windows. In some distant part of me, a bell clanged an alarmed tocsin, and yet I did not move.
    Chasseloup accused me of standing as though all of my blood had drained from my veins. No position pleased him. “What do you think it is, this game, to work when you feel like it?” He retreated to the windows. I wrapped myself in a dusty length of cashmere from the rental rack and sat down on the box.
    He rolled another cigarette, the twentieth of the day. Stared out through the north exposure, toward Montmartre, invisible behind the flat, sleeting sky. He flexed his fingers and sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.”
    I began to cry. Chasseloup swore at the falling sleet.
    On the easel was a line, rough and dark, but graceful. The contour of a shoulder, stretch of leg, curve at the waist. A girl half-turned, looking over her shoulder. Brief reprieve; shaft of light in the dark tunnel of self-recrimination.
    â€œThat is a good line,” I said, wiping my eyes with a handkerchief from the bins. “Berthe—my mother—taught me a strong line from a weak one.”
    Chasseloup flipped through the pages on the easel. He shook his head. “She studied?”
    Tears, and the ghost of an emotion tightened my throat.
    â€œHer teacher was an old painter.
Very
old.” I smiled through my tears. “He hated Paris; he also thought there were too many railways here.” Pierre’s smoke curled upward; his eyelashes were so long, they lay against the curve of his cheek like a child’s. That I was his
present cure,
like wormwood, and he mine, had pulled us together through the hours.
    â€œYou must be cold,” he murmured. “Dress if you’d like. I am sorry to keep you.” He let out a breath and leaned back. He was tired. More tired, today, than I. It would not be so difficult to slip my arms around his shoulders and feel his warmth; be of comfort if not of use. I drew in a breath.
    â€œYou just need to go on,” I said. “I’ll stay if you’d like.”
    The painter turned abruptly, looked at me where I stood, the length of cloth draped around my shoulders and falling. He adjusted the shades.
    Was it just then, or a bit later . . . after the gaslights twinkled bluish on the street below us, that he turned. Pressed his face into the barely curved area of my belly, against the dusty pink shawl, folded me into him as though he had been doing so all along. And perhaps we had been holding each other, on a sightline across the studio, and it was not what was on the easel that had been important.
    His scent of earth; of linseed oil and iron. Two hundred stairsteps into the sky I shed my shattered self, breathed in moments, one to the next. My present cure, the coiling, bone-melting green; his arms now around my body, ever warmer in a room full of windows, seven winding stories above the street. And so on a pile of rental dresses and Sunday suits, I made love to that part of him that wanted release; found the way to him with my lips, my hands, my belly and thighs. Amid all the draperies and boxes and columns and props, the smoke and days of futile effort, I passed the deadness, the empty spaces, what the