Free Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

dredging up.
    She passed the rubber factory that looked like her school in Paris if it weren’t for the smokestack, and the Joly iron foundry that made parts of railroad bridges and their own decorative half arches that held up the terrace of Maison Fournaise. Alexander, the Russian engineer, had asked her to go with him and her father to see the first one being made here. His excited eyes had looked at her for approval as much as at her father. And now Auguste was going to paint on that terrace. Strange how a dead man was part of the painting.
    Up ahead, the Iris was sailing her way. She raised her paddle above her head with both hands to hail him. Gustave saw her and let the sails luff.
    “Did you see that dark blue sailboat with a red stripe? Le Capitaine? ”
    “Yes, I saw it,” he said.
    “Will you be able to beat it in the regatta?”
    “Depends.”
    His boat was passing her. She turned. “On what?”
    “On whom you’ll be cheering for.”
    “You, of course!”
    Gustave grinned. “Then that settles it.”
    He sheeted in, his sail filled, and he was gone. Surely he’d be in the painting.
    Her arms were tired now so she tied the boat to a tree and walked, looking for the weeping willow that marked the way to the secret place where there would still be raspberries to pick. They grew over the ruins of the convent where Héloïse was taken by her secret lover, Peter Abelard, seven centuries ago.
    She had bought an old book of Héloïse’s letters at a bouquiniste along
    • 48 •
    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
    the Seine. Héloïse addressed him as my only love. What an inconceiv-able promise was contained in that. Fifteen years without a word from him and she still affirmed her devotion, her need for his affection, and even for sexual intimacy despite the vows she’d taken at this very convent. To him who is specially hers, from she who is singularly his, Héloïse had written. When she was younger, she had thought Héloïse’s fi delity honorable, but was fidelity to a memory as important for a widow now as it used to be? This was la vie moderne.
    There was the willow with its reverse image in the water. Behind the green veil of its trailing branches, mallards quacked at the intrusion, a loud hoarse quack, followed by softer sounds diminishing into a muttered “qua,” as if grudgingly resigned to her presence. She walked up the incline. Hidden behind a thicket of hedge nettles, the ruin wasn’t known by Sunday crowds. The raspberry vines had threaded themselves like a net over the remains of a stone wall she imagined to be the wall of the refectory where Héloïse and Peter had stolen away between the offices of compline and vigils for their mad, happy feast of love.
    She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within that tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kissed and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven’s rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedged together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth.
    The urge to gorge herself flooded her. She plucked and ate until her fingers were red from juice and the backs of her hands were scratched with a web of red threads. Plenty for two feuilletés aux framboises, one pie for each table on Sunday. When the models would eat them, they would be blessed with all of the elements of earth and sky and water, all the goodness of this river world. The sweet, sharp taste would kiss their tongues, and that would be Héloïse’s blessing on them, but it would be her own blessing on the painting.
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    C h a p t e r F i v e
    Colors, Credos, and Cracks
    La Crémerie de Camille was crowded with young women chatting
    over their café au lait before heading to work at milliners’ shops or dressmakers’ lofts or laundries. Auguste greeted