The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan Read Free Book Online Page B

loiter and all the mothers with their watchful eyes. The trick will be not to stop, to take the steps three at a time. I have done it before, soaring down the flights, when I was bursting with the news of being put up with Madame Dominique.
    The scuffing of my flying feet draws Monsieur Degas’s weary eyes, and as I round the landing with the bench, he calls out, “Mademoiselle van Goethem,” and I do not like it that he knows my family name when Madame Dominique always calls me Mademoiselle Marie. “Please stop!”
    He stays put, his backside planted on the bench, and unaccustomed to defying gentlemen, I come to a halt halfway down the flight of stairs, a decent head start.
    He gets to his feet, and with me sidling two steps lower, he plops himself right back on the bench. His hands, palms facing down, make a tiny shuddering movement, a gesture meant to still.
    “I’m called Monsieur Degas,” he says, putting his hands in his lap. “I’m a painter.”
    “I know,” I say. “Ballet girls scratching their backs.”
    Even with his bushy beard, I can tell by his eyes, he is swallowing so as not to laugh. “Will you take my card?” he says, pulling one from the pocket of his rumpled waistcoat. “I’d like you to model. My address is there. I pay six francs for four hours.”
    “Perot won’t do it?” I say, thinking of her small, white teeth in a perfect row.
    “Perot?” His brow wrinkles up.
    “Josephine is pretty, but her mother says she isn’t to speak to you.”
    His eyes flicker closed, then open again, wearier. “Your face is interesting,” he says. “And your back. Your shoulder blades are like sprouting wings.”
    “I’m skinny.”
    He pushes aside my skinniness with a wave of his hand, and I wonder about a sash the color of a robin’s egg. He leans forward, holding out a card. “You’ll take it?”
    I climb three steps, pass my hand between the spindles guarding me from him and take the card. He is in the rue Fontaine, number nineteen, as close as the pork butcher and the fruiterer.
    “You can read?” he says.
    “Of course.” I say it haughtily.
    “Come after your Thursday class, one o’clock.”
    “I’ll see if Papa allows it.” And then, imagining the most brutish fathers are the ones who lift barrels all day long, I add, “Once he gets home from the coopery.” Immediately I suck in my bottom lip, clamp down with my teeth. Have I learned nothing about lying from Antoinette?
    Monsieur Degas’s weary eyes tighten a notch. He knows I do not have a father, except one buried in the ground.

Antoinette
    I was looking for Émile Abadie since the springtime when the trees were all loaded with blossoms and new grass was underfoot and there was rain enough to make me want to cry every day that passed without seeing that scrub-brushy hair of his, those stout fingers that put the plumpest of the mussels into my mouth. The scorching pavements and bleaching sun of summertime were come and gone; and the trees were stripped bare, waiting for the mantle of winter to set in, when finally I set eyes upon that boy.
    Earlier I was at the Opéra where I bothered to climb the million stairs and poke my head into the practice room of Madame Dominique. There was Marie, looking like one of the graces, even in that greying skirt. The way she was holding her neck long and floating her arms from one position to the next and arching her back better than any of those other girls, it made me ashamed that I ever held a speck of doubt. It put a lump in my throat, thinking of her someday upon the stage and elevated beyond the second set of the quadrille. For a tiny moment, I wished I was not so quick to snap at old Pluque, but then I remembered doing a thousand retirés, all for the sole purpose of learning the exact position of the toe against the opposite leg, and that bit of longing was gone quicker than a swatted fly. I went next to the practice room of Madame Théodore and held open the door but only a little