She worked obsessively, and generally in solitude. It was a life she had chosen at some cost to herself, for no husband could fit into such a schedule for long; there was not enough room. The marriage that so distressed Julien when he heard of it was a foolish mistake, partly a desire to escape the overpowering presence of her father, and partly a desire, for once in her life, to do the expected, to be like everyone else. Jacques Menton was, as her father told Julien, a diplomat with a great future in front of him. A good family, not too high, not too low. A man of intelligence, kindness, and even some wit. A Protestant originally from Alsace, with more than a bit of German in him. Not wholly French, as she was not, but in his case the sense of not quite belonging made him more conventional, straining constantly to be and appear perfect.
But he loved her, in a diplomatic, cautious fashion, and she believed for a while that she responded. She felt a wish to belong, and he could show her how to do so; curiously her father said nothing against the match even though he found Jacques’s company tiresome and never for a moment believed it was based on any great love. Julien saw this and later remarked on it in a letter to her. “Of course he was unsuitable as a husband,” he said loftily from his desk in Avignon. “Your father didn’t mind him. You must make it a rule in the future never to fall in love with anyone unless Claude Bronsen detests him. The more he detests him, the more suitable he will be. If you are not prepared to meet your admirable father’s jealousy head-on, then you will have to wait until he is dead. He is a healthy man, your father. Good for many years yet. You’d better get on with your painting, I think.”
His instincts were right, for while her husband indulged her painting, and judged it a fine thing to have an accomplished wife, she thought that he understood why she painted, and mistook his indulgence for something more profound, his silence on the subject for an instinctive understanding.
“I’m not going to stop painting. It’s my job. It’s what I do.” This astonished comment replying to a casual remark he dropped into a conversation after they had been married for some six months, during which his disappointment grew that she had not changed her way of life one jot since their wedding. He had pointed out— perfectly correctly—that she did not have time to paint ten hours a day and fulfill her role as hostess at the parties he needed to give in order to rise in the diplomatic service. Let alone fit in children, which he wanted quite desperately.
It was his light laugh that killed the marriage, stripping away all the make-believe. One slightly high-pitched whinny from his mouth, half choked off in the way he had learned, imbued with a cynical tone, lasting only half a second. He mistook her passion for an amusement, and her deep concentration for empty-headed vacuousness. Worst of all, he had no idea how good she was. That was something she would not tolerate.
Perhaps she was wrong in her reaction; she never discounted the possibility. From a diplomatic point of view—her husband’s point of view, indeed—the unrestrained rage she let loose was unforeseeable, excessive, even a little coarse. But there was no forced melodrama, no striving for effect in the way her hands trembled and her voice shook as she tried to explain—to someone who could no more understand than a deaf man could understand Bach—why she did what she did, and why it was important.
“Why
Centuries, if not millennia, were squeezed, dessicated, and distilled into that one offhand comment made merely to fend off her anger; the implications could write, and had written, many books. The words themselves, the tone of contempt, the mingling of distaste with a slight fear. All these could have been unraveled at enormous length. But there was no need to; Julia needed no interpretation and could see by the alarm in his eyes that he needed none either. He knew what he had said.
She never talked to him again; there was no point. Nor did she ever divorce; there seemed little point in going through such a complicated ordeal, and for her husband’s career even an invisible wife was better than none at all. He had been, and remained, a decent, honest, simple soul; loving in his way, and once the anger passed she could see his many fine qualities. But she had also glimpsed a darkness that, although she could forgive, she never wanted to be close to. Still, she had no desire to harm him. She was not vengeful and eventually felt somewhat apologetic. The fact that her rage had faded so swiftly convinced her she had never loved him in the first place; the whole messy business was her fault.
By the time she told Julien, she could even laugh about it. He had been her confessor during this period, as she reopened the correspondence with him shortly after her wedding, ostensibly to explain why he had not been invited. She wrote him letter after letter justifying what she was doing, and he replied, sometimes consoling her with idle anecdote, sometimes giving reassurance, sometimes criticism. It was, Julia realized, the worst form of betrayal, an adultery of the mind and of the emotions, and the pleasure she gained from his letters was one of the main reasons that she ultimately decided to walk out.
“You spend too much time trying to find a reason for things,” he said gently in one letter. “I suffer from the same fault myself, so I know what I’m talking about here. Listen to an expert. You want to run away. You have made a mistake. And that is the end of the matter. After all, no one around you will ever manage to be happy while you are not.”
“Do you know why I’m a painter?” she said when they met a few months after she had finally packed her bags and moved into an apartment. “Do you know why I cover myself in brightly colored oil like some ancient Pict? It’s my sign. It’s so that people know immediately that I belong to nothing and don’t waste their time trying on me. My mother was as Jewish as can be, my father has cast all that off and regards religion as superstition and tradition as cowardice. So I am nothing. Thanks to him even the outcasts cast me out. So I have to do it all myself.”
“Do what?”
She laughed. “I don’t know. If I did, I’d probably know what I was looking for. And I wouldn’t have troubled poor Jacques by marrying him.”
He smiled gently at her, and watched as she ordered another drink. A whiskey this time, her second since they’d come into the dingy bar that she had adopted as her favorite after a day working in her studio on the boulevard Montparnasse.
“Why do you never ask me questions, or try to understand me? I always feel a bit of a failure with you. I try to be elusive and mysterious, and you seem quite uninterested.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t you find me fascinating? Strange? Wonderful? Quixotic? Exotic? Aren’t you concerned about where I come from, where I’m going? What makes me tick?”
He looked puzzled for a moment. “Not really,” he said eventually.
She sniffed. “I don’t know whether that is charming or the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“At least I haven’t said you’re hysterical.”
“That’s true. But I’ve never thrown a vase at you either.”
“You threw a vase at him?”
She nodded, an impish, childish look glinting in her eyes. “Missed him though,” she said. “Dammit.”
Their eyes met in mutual appreciation, and they started to laugh. It was a delightful meeting. And Julien was aware once more that he had never tried to charm or impress or compliment her. He was also aware, of course, that Claude Bronsen quite liked him.
HER REMARK was not true; not entirely true in any case. Julia had determined to become a painter at the age of ten, in 1913, when she had a tantrum two hundred yards from the family apartment in the boulevard Haussmann. She was with her nanny, an Englishwoman of the sort the wealthy Parisians preferred at that time, a kind woman but with the emotional subtlety of a cavalry officer, reluctant to admit what sort of family she worked for but who loved Julia after her fashion. She was not destined to remain long; she tried to impose order and discipline, but had to battle against Bronsen himself and his indulgent whims. Julia at that stage had spent only a short while in school, for her father was forever taking her with him on his voyages around Europe, sometimes for a month, once for six. They would go where his business took him, and while he knew he should settle her in some pension and give her proper schooling, he could not bear to be parted from her. He had, after all, worked hard to keep her from his wife and, having won her, would not easily let her go again.
Julia had many relations, but was brought up almost alone, for the way her father had ended his marriage had been bitterly criticized. His wife, thought sweet and obedient, known to be so gentle, had been clearly wronged, had been driven into illness trying to understand the fiery and aggressive man she had married, so given to titanic rages and bursts of angelic kindness, each as unpredictable as the other. All agreed that he was impossible, and in revenge for the condemnation, Bronsen had cast off much more. He never accepted his guilt; far from it, he believed
