She had told Julien she was potentially a good painter, and her self-confidence was not misplaced. By the late 1930s she was beginning to be known as such, although her reputation was still small. She had, it is true, studied in Paris at the Académie Colorassi—the Mediterranean cruise with her father was to mark the end of this part of her apprenticeship, and the beginning of the period in which she truly began to learn to be a painter—then was an early student of Matisse, a man she admired and who even attracted the approval of her father. After this she went her own way; she did not follow the necessary route to fame, was disdainful of the associations and connections that artists must have to make their mark.
Someone once said that being wealthy had been her ruin as an artist, and in her heart she agreed. Not because it had stunted her vision, or affected what she painted, but because she could afford to ignore the dealers and the critics who make artists great. She paid little attention to them; they returned the compliment. Had she worked at it a little harder, the posthumous reputation that began to form in the 1960s around her surviving work would have crystallized earlier.
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 are you people always so hysterical?”
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.”