She leaned against me and pressed a cheek against my face. A tear rolled down her own, lodged against my mouth, and trickled onto my tongue. It tasted hot and salty. One of the museum’s guards coughed politely. With embarrassment, we smiled and hurried into an adjoining room. I felt saddened by Julene’s anguish, by her helplessness, if not, somehow, partially to blame for it myself.
We ambled past numerous paintings, the art gems of the world. We passed Manets, Monets, and Pissarros, Renoirs, Degas, and Cezannes. Morisot’s In the Cornfield at Gennevilliers caught my eye. Its pale golden wheat field seemed to soothe that forlorn feeling that had crept inside my breast. The lone figure in the blue shirt and straw hat, standing on the worn path, sounded an even deeper emotion, too subliminal to define. Yet it stirred a sense of holistic otherness, of being swept up imperceptibly into that larger world of unbroken green trees and white and gray houses with red rooftops that Morisot had created as a border. Here was an immersion into beingness itself that silenced any need for conscious explanations.
“I once had sex with a girl in a wheat field,” I said in a whisper.
“Was it that beautiful woman you mentioned earlier?”
“No. She came later. It was with an Israeli girl, on a kibbutz, near Haifa. We had been working together in the kibbutz’s citrus groves. We roomed in the same barracks. She and a roommate were at one end of the hall, and I and another guy roomed at the other end. After dinner one evening, we walked out into a nearby field. The stars were especially bright, and the night air was clear. It was in April, or maybe May. Her parents were from London, but had come to the kibbutz in the late forties to become part of the Jewish state. She was about seventeen and soon due to fulfill her military obligation. She wasn’t religious, just an ethnic Jew, a true Israeli, a sabra, as she called herself. We lay down in the field together. I had never had sex until then. We undressed each other amidst a flurry of kisses. We had dust all over ourselves when we finished. We laughed and ran back to the barracks and showered together. We met like that for a whole month, until she had to leave for the army. I left soon afterwards, myself. I never saw her again. Nor heard from her, nor wrote her. She had short, honey-colored hair, which, of course, was dyed.”
“Carl and I had our first sex behind a smokehouse. He had come out of the big house to fetch a side of bacon. I guess I was fourteen. I ran along side of him. He was wearing overalls, a white shirt, and brogans. It was his last summer on the farm before returning to Harvard to defend his dissertation. I was barefooted, wearing a flour sack dress Mama had stitched for me. It was gray with pink flowers. We still had a mill in Alabama, not far from the farm. Its wheel is broken, now, and its wooden sluices split and spilling water, but it was quite a mill in its time. I’d been on the steps of the mill once when Carl looked up and saw my behind. I didn’t have any pants on. He smiled and kept staring, until I moved. But that day at the smokehouse, I teased him: ‘Where you headed, big man?’ Then I ran ahead of him and got on the plank steps. God, he was tall, lean, good-looking. Sweat was coursing down his neck and soiling his white shirt. I barred his way to the door. ‘Julene!’ he said. ‘You’re too pretty to be acting sassy like this. You know I got hormones, just like my uncle had for your mama.’ ‘I ain’t hiding nothin’,’ I replied. I put my hands on his arms and ran my fingers up to his shoulders. ‘Dammit, girl. I got a notion to do it right here,’ he smiled. I glanced toward the rear of the building. And, Lord, Clayton, we did it! I mean we did it, right there up against the back of that smokehouse. God, it’s a wonder I didn’t get pregnant. Mama had seen me and made me wash my pelvis with a douche of vinegar. I cried, it stung so much. ‘You piece of trash!’ she scolded. ‘The Sullivans are gonna be the death of us.’” Julene’s smile had now evaporated, replaced by a rueful scowl. She let out a long, slow breath. “After that, we used condoms.” She turned and managed a smile that filled me with a rush of desire.
“We’d better slip out of here, if we’re going to keep talking.”
“Yeah. I guess so. But I want to see Manet’s Olympia, first.”
“I think we passed it. Come this way. It was in that other room.”
We retraced our steps and found the painting.
“Yes, look at that!” she whispered. “Look at the maid. No one probably ever sees her. They’re all gawking at the mistress, or the whore.”
I stared at the prostitute in her inclined position, on the pale pink shawl and white bed linens. Her high heels seemed to mock any sense of respectability. Her hand over her private essence created a sensuousness all its own. Her breasts and legs shimmered with invitation! But the hardened and solemn stare of her eyes evoked an emptiness without joy. Then I looked toward the black maid. It was difficult to make her out against the equally black background. In her right arm, she cradles a large bouquet of colorful flowers. But the prostitute doesn’t even notice them.
“Look at those eyes of the maid. You can see their whites. What she would give for a paramour to love her, to send her flowers, to have someone wait on her!”
“It is magnificent. Almost disturbing,” I admitted. “There it all is. Life at a glance. Nothing lost. Her nudity. The uneasiness you are forced to feel, that you can’t escape.”
“Let’s slip out of here for some lunch.”
“OK! We’re not that far from La Place de Vendôme. Let’s find something there.”
Near La Place de Vendôme we found a delightful café, squeezed between two elegant jewelry stores. We seated ourselves at a small table, reminiscent of those marble-topped tables in Degas’s In the Cafe. The tiny restaurant radiated with light, dispelling any sense of depression one might bring into it. A large chandelier, suspended from the ceiling, brightened the entire café. Each table had been set with large white plates, dark green folded napkins, nickel-plated flatware, and tall stemmed wine glasses.
We ordered a salad, pâté of lamb, bread, and white wine.
“Here’s to you, kid!” I smiled at Julene.
She raised her glass and clinked it against mine.
“Careful! Cheap glass shatters you know.”
She laughed and rolled her large soft eyes. Her dark brown irises smiled back from their sea of aureoline white ocular spheres. Her nose was as splendidly chiseled and small as any of the painters’ models we had viewed. Her dark chocolate lips, tinged with ruby, and her delicate and slightly rounded chin, bestowed an unparalleled air of grace upon her.
“I could fall in love with you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Don’t you have anything better to do? What do you do, anyway?” she smiled.
“Oh, I work some, write some, travel some.” I glanced at her slender fingers. Just then she was toying with her wine glass. “I take long walks and reflect. It’s been a great sabbatical.”
“I guess so! Just what are you working on?”
“A new book. About Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, and Kant. Paris invigorates me; helps me clear my mind of suppositions and allows me to think on my own. Plus, I’m interested in the existentialists, and being able to buy and read French editions of Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and others has been exciting.”
“Sounds dreadfully morose,” she arched her thin eyebrows. “‘You are what you choose’ and all that garbage supposes an inner freedom only a few of us have. Certainly blacks aren’t that free. We’re still possessed by demons of hurt and anger. That’s why I like art. It’s concrete, imaginative, subtle,” she smiled, as she emphasized the last word. “It’s fluid, emotional, and all that’s good. Besides, it defies right or wrong, good or evil. It’s just what it is, and what you see. And what you feel. It has a life of its own. And sometimes it grasps you, like the works we just