Read Online Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland - Free Book Online

evening.”
    He went out into the warm night. Two prostitutes on the café terrace looked like Degas’ marvelous pastel come to life. Inadvertently, he
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    S u s a n V r e e l a n d
    caught the eye of one of them in the yellow light from the window. A pitifully hopeful expression played across her lips. She was trying too.
    He passed her by.
    No, it wasn’t a hot brand. It was a setup. Degas knew he wouldn’t want to submit to the magazine under those terms. The prickly bastard just wanted an argument. The group was in trouble.
    Fatigue suddenly weighed him down. He dragged himself the four
    blocks to his studio and lay down on his narrow bed. His whole body throbbed. He had six, nine if Charles Ephrussi, Pierre Lestringuèz, and Jeanne would come. He needed a few more. He thought how good the day had been, on the whole, how different he was this night compared to the night before. Something miraculous had happened. He closed his eyes. It had been a long day.
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    C h a p t e r F o u r
    Reflections on the Seine
    Alphonsine finished the week’s accounting in her father’s offi ce and slapped the ledger closed. Normally she was content doing this
    task as she’d done in the hat shop in Paris, but today she thought, I have more appealing things to do—preparation for the painting-that-is-to-be.
    She would not be just the hostess of the restaurant, as usual, but hostess to the birth of a painting. A midwife. She wanted everything perfect—the weather, the light on the water, the fruit on the table, the dessert. If she picked pears today, by Sunday they would be golden streaked with bronze, with a pleasant tang. Auguste might want to paint them. She had river errands to do. She went to the oar shed for her paddle, basket, and collecting can, and lowered them into a périssoire at the dock.
    She pushed off. It happened to be her favorite périssoire, not because of anything about the boat. All their périssoires were nearly the same—
    long, wooden, needle-nosed boats with open hulls for one person using a doubled-bladed paddle. Their narrowness made them precarious for first-timers, but she had navigated the river in them for twenty years. It was her favorite because of its name. Aurore. Dawn. Full of promise.
    The painting-that-is-to-be was full of promise too. All the models to get to know. A chance to make real friends, not just day-trippers out for an afternoon affair in the country with any grenouille, any of the easy country girls of La Grenouillère who lifted their skirts and spread their knees like a frog to attract hungry young men eager to lie on the bank with them.
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    S u s a n V r e e l a n d
    She paddled out beyond Restaurant Lemaire on the northern point of the narrow island. Here commercial traffic wasn’t separated from pleasure boating. If she kept paddling up the big north loop, rounded it, and turned south along the Bois de Boulogne, then rounded the south loop, she’d eventually be in Paris, but she doubted if anyone had done that in a périssoire.
    Once, when she was a little girl, her brother had lifted a stone and pointed to a worm curved into three loops. “Look, it’s the Seine,” Alphonse had said.
    “No, imbécile. It’s a worm,” she’d insisted.
    “It’s the river. The river’s a worm.”
    That a worm could be a worm and a river, or that a single word
    could signify a worm as well as a river, was devious trickery. Her eyes told her it was only a worm, and she’d stubbornly held to that, stamping her feet, until he made their father show them a map. It was as Alphonse had said. For calling him names, Papa had given her the task of memorizing the river towns from the two that their island straddled, Chatou on the west bank and Rueil on the east bank, all the way to Paris. But knowing their names was less momentous than realizing that a person could look at one thing and see another or call it another. That was something truly thrilling. From then on,