Read Online Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Susan Vreeland
Tags: Fiction, Historical
Ads: Link
she’d felt justifi ed in thinking of boats as wooden shoes, lily pads as frogs’ beds, and white fungi on trees as nature’s meringues.
Now she conjured an image of the river as a blue-green ribbon tying the Maison Fournaise to Paris, not in a direct line as the train would go from Rueil-Malmaison, but meandering through loops of memory beginning with childhood here, school in Paris, and Louis, then through the time of peril to the eventual and permanent locking of the shop door behind her.
Or the river was a cord plaited of many strands, as when slivers of islands like theirs divide the water for a time to reunite with its remembered self downstream, as friends separated for many years fi nally reuniting, flowing calmly, evaporating into fog, clouds, rain that would make puddles, rivulets, brooks, streams, the Marne, the Aube, the Oise,
• 44 •
L u n c h e o n o f t h e B o a t i n g P a r t y
all joining the mighty Seine, until Le Havre and the sea, where the water evaporated again into fog, clouds, rain. Rain that could fall in other streams going to other rivers, the Loire, the Rhône, the Rhine. The Rhine, the river of the land of the Prussian. She trailed her hand in the water that might go anywhere, like a thought.
She stayed close to the bank where there was hardly any current moving against her and the midsummer foliage overhead gave her
shade and turned the water green. Under the sycamore boughs, she looked for marsh peppermint to make a wreath for Auguste’s luncheon on Sunday. When it was dry, it had a piquant, minty fragrance that might mask the occasional smell from the sewage plant upriver in As-nières. She wanted their day to be lovely in all ways so their pleasure would show on their faces for him to paint.
Not that the Seine in Paris didn’t have its own pleasures. For six years, she and Louis had enjoyed them when they lived there as a young married couple ambling along the quays watching sunlight dance on water, or cooling themselves in the shade of the towers of Notre Dame stretching to the opposite bank in the afternoons. She loved the fl ower sellers on the Île de la Cité, the Sunday bird market with hundreds of beaks twittering at once, the floating bathhouses, the café-concert barges sending intoxicating music across the water, the roasted chestnut sellers standing over their braziers in front of Notre Dame in winter, the bouquinistes tending their green metal display boxes attached to the quay walls where she had bought used books—Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, George Sand. Life was full then, with theater, opera, the Universal Exposition, the annual painting Salon, the Salon des Refusés of new painters, scores of journals and fashion magazines, and Louis.
One day along the Quai du Louvre, she had pinched off a three-
pointed leaf from a plane tree. “It’s an amphibian’s foot,” she had said, and walked it up Louis’s arm. On Pont Neuf, she had leaned over a rounded parapet and dropped it. She darted across to the other wall of the bridge to watch it appear and fl oat downstream.
“How long do you think it will take to float the loops and crawl up on the bank at Maison Fournaise?” she had asked.
• 45 •
S u s a n V r e e l a n d
Louis had laughed at her notion, and drew her tight against him, and said, prophetically, it seemed to her now, “There’s no guarantee, Alphonsine. One can never be sure of arriving home again.”
She’d kept her fantasies to herself the rest of the afternoon. They were the stuff of books, not to be shared. Darkness came over her as it came over the city and the river. The light of the gas lamps quivered double, once on their street posts on the Quai des Tuileries, and again in the water, more violently, flame-colored strips of silk blazing the river. Or giant golden fish angrily lashing their long tails, she’d thought, but didn’t say.
She had arrived home again, to the island of Chatou, after the Prussian Siege of
Now she conjured an image of the river as a blue-green ribbon tying the Maison Fournaise to Paris, not in a direct line as the train would go from Rueil-Malmaison, but meandering through loops of memory beginning with childhood here, school in Paris, and Louis, then through the time of peril to the eventual and permanent locking of the shop door behind her.
Or the river was a cord plaited of many strands, as when slivers of islands like theirs divide the water for a time to reunite with its remembered self downstream, as friends separated for many years fi nally reuniting, flowing calmly, evaporating into fog, clouds, rain that would make puddles, rivulets, brooks, streams, the Marne, the Aube, the Oise,
• 44 •
L u n c h e o n o f t h e B o a t i n g P a r t y
all joining the mighty Seine, until Le Havre and the sea, where the water evaporated again into fog, clouds, rain. Rain that could fall in other streams going to other rivers, the Loire, the Rhône, the Rhine. The Rhine, the river of the land of the Prussian. She trailed her hand in the water that might go anywhere, like a thought.
She stayed close to the bank where there was hardly any current moving against her and the midsummer foliage overhead gave her
shade and turned the water green. Under the sycamore boughs, she looked for marsh peppermint to make a wreath for Auguste’s luncheon on Sunday. When it was dry, it had a piquant, minty fragrance that might mask the occasional smell from the sewage plant upriver in As-nières. She wanted their day to be lovely in all ways so their pleasure would show on their faces for him to paint.
Not that the Seine in Paris didn’t have its own pleasures. For six years, she and Louis had enjoyed them when they lived there as a young married couple ambling along the quays watching sunlight dance on water, or cooling themselves in the shade of the towers of Notre Dame stretching to the opposite bank in the afternoons. She loved the fl ower sellers on the Île de la Cité, the Sunday bird market with hundreds of beaks twittering at once, the floating bathhouses, the café-concert barges sending intoxicating music across the water, the roasted chestnut sellers standing over their braziers in front of Notre Dame in winter, the bouquinistes tending their green metal display boxes attached to the quay walls where she had bought used books—Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, George Sand. Life was full then, with theater, opera, the Universal Exposition, the annual painting Salon, the Salon des Refusés of new painters, scores of journals and fashion magazines, and Louis.
One day along the Quai du Louvre, she had pinched off a three-
pointed leaf from a plane tree. “It’s an amphibian’s foot,” she had said, and walked it up Louis’s arm. On Pont Neuf, she had leaned over a rounded parapet and dropped it. She darted across to the other wall of the bridge to watch it appear and fl oat downstream.
“How long do you think it will take to float the loops and crawl up on the bank at Maison Fournaise?” she had asked.
• 45 •
S u s a n V r e e l a n d
Louis had laughed at her notion, and drew her tight against him, and said, prophetically, it seemed to her now, “There’s no guarantee, Alphonsine. One can never be sure of arriving home again.”
She’d kept her fantasies to herself the rest of the afternoon. They were the stuff of books, not to be shared. Darkness came over her as it came over the city and the river. The light of the gas lamps quivered double, once on their street posts on the Quai des Tuileries, and again in the water, more violently, flame-colored strips of silk blazing the river. Or giant golden fish angrily lashing their long tails, she’d thought, but didn’t say.
She had arrived home again, to the island of Chatou, after the Prussian Siege of
Similar Books
