Portrait of Madame X

I

The problem was she became lavender again

beneath his hand. A year of charcoal & oil

paint shaping her image into what he could

see. He tried to not lavender her body, tried

to make curve & tone more than residue

without identity. I am tempted to say ghost

but there was no death or afterdeath. The wash

of colors into one impression, & he knew

that was not enough. He tried to sketch

a way into beauty & realized the body cannot

remain still. On paper. On canvas. Perhaps

he felt the texture of the world, & then felt

everything—the stomata on leaves nowhere

near the painting, the opalescent fabric

he had rendered so many times, the sharp

boredom, the need always to show something

like the heart—slip from focus, into lavender.

II

The temptation, of course, in the gallery was

to say something about art. About the present

decline of form. The way varnish no longer

protected people from fading. The decadent

syntax of skin, sometimes bone. Sargent tried

to make people see. Madame Gautreau, too,

was scandalized by her own image, & begged

to have it taken down. This was more

than the strap absent from her right shoulder.

This was the way a body makes a person in

the eyes. The way it wants to separate from

meaning, as if it does not hold even itself.

That morning, before the gallery opened,

Sargent watched sunlight collide with motes

of dust & thought vision was like that—

moving so quickly it did not see itself as

touched. He knew he had not painted her

portrait. There, in the dawn’s light, he saw her

as if she were himself stepping from a mirror.

III

The sketches are restless. Outside, the river is

quiet. We are too far from history, & meaning

has begun to mean something else. Her face

is the same in each sketch—bored, always at

a profile, as if it were too much like life &

wanted to be viewed only with enough clarity

for there to be something still unseen. Picture

Sargent looking at his reflection in the Seine,

aware of the eye’s language: yellow ochre,

fuchsia, onyx, porcelain, opacity. The words

seemed like nothing to him then, looking

onto the dirty surface of that water & waiting

for it to speak. To say something of the ebb

of shape, or beauty. In one of his sketches,

she is doubled—sitting on a divan, looking

away at herself looking away. In a letter to

Belleroche, Sargent wrote, Madame Gautreau is

at the piano driving my thoughts away. For hours

he forgot about the failing light & her texture

in its chiaroscuro. She played the notes legato,

grave. Against the chiffon curtains, her body

looked like more than a silhouette. Sargent

closed his eyes, wished he could change sight.

IV

As a child, I watched my mother paint water-

color landscapes. She believed that streams &

the distant spruces held her heart—no one

noticed. The landscapes were unclear, blurred

into their own parts. At that age, I thought

everything we did changed us. It does & it does

not. My memory is faint, but my mother

tells me I tried to revise my body as if it were

something I could paint. I imagine Sargent

felt the canvas meant something outside of

itself, as if the face turned slightly another

way would create a new way of seeing. In what

became the final portrait, he had tilted her

head eight times, each time with the hope

she would become more individual, less part

of the time’s aesthetic. He must have known

that no one in the gallery would be able to see

his alterations or the cracks, years later, vein

over the portrait’s paint from his reworkings.

V

VI

There are things our own bodies cannot say.

I imagine Sargent must have thought this

during the years he repainted her. Did he, too,

feel layers of association coat sight until it no

longer knew itself under its raiment of ideas.

Did he look at draft after draft—her body, his

vision—& know how much would not be

seen. How much would. Did he worry,

knowing—in those heavy, delicate hours

before his portrait was shown in the gallery—

that no one’s body touches the eye in silence.

VII

They did not say it directly at first—their

newly finished portrait, like water reflecting

each of them, & each seeing differently. Quiet

pain. Sargent must have thought art made

one vision clear. The years wearing down

belief—& what was left after he realized sight

is lonely? That quiet was kind also & held

understanding. I cannot enter the painting

any more than they could, but still I feel what

they must have felt—neither being able to see

the same image. She sat at the piano once

more, & this time Sargent listened to her

melancholy notes as he looked at her portrait.

The music made the paint look like it had

been plunged below that shallow water. He

felt the portrait was a place they drowned—

& the only place either of them could breathe.

VIII

Paris dusked Sargent & Gautreau. Even art

could no longer hold their bodies. The city,

landscape of distance. Overhead, starlings

flew. Sargent watched their murmurations

& thought of that day on the riverbank when

he noticed images are pierced by ideas. Their

wings looked like death in the sky. How each

moved with each, as if they agreed on a shape

to inhabit in every moment. Those birds,

he thought, are the history of vision, & he knew sight

would change soon. Their wings made faint

noise from where he sat. So faint he wanted

to make meaning of the sound—as if it too

were an augury. Not that he believed omens.

Still, Paris heard the change as the starlings

flew toward horizon. Still, everything was

as it had been. With sunset, Sargent closed

his eyes for a final time in Paris, & in the cool

dark that followed, the rest of the city did too.