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“No. No. No. Making color. She came in.”
“And she saw you?”
“An accident.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”
She grinned at him as she unbuttoned her blouse. “ ‘Couldn’t be helped’—you like it, don’t you?”
“She had cooked supper already.” Again the shrug. “It’s on the stove. There’s hot water.”
The girl called Juliette shrugged off her blouse and pulled her chemise over her head. The Colorman scrutinized her breasts as she stood, unbuttoned her skirt, and let it fall.
“I like this body,” he said, looking her up and down. “The skin so white, almost blue, yes? Hair black and shiny. I like. Where did you find her?”
“This one? This one is mine.” She walked away in only her pantaloons and black stockings, leaving her clothes behind in a heap. “I guess I’ll be drawing my own bath.”
“Can I watch?” asked the Colorman. He slid out of his chair.
She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. “Why?”
“Pretty skin. Nothing to read.”
“You like scaring them, don’t you?”
“Supper smells good, huh? Veal stew. Maybe she’ll come back. She didn’t seem that scared.”
She turned abruptly to face him and he skipped to a stop, his face almost bumping into her belly, a near collision of the sacred and profane.
“You like scaring them more than you like fucking them, don’t you?”
The shrug. “I’m old.” He looked around the room, as if trying to remember something that was anywhere but where she was. “And scaring them is free.”
She turned on a heel and with three long dancer’s strides was in the bedroom, where there was a high-backed, enameled tub. “Oh for fuck’s sake. Come on.”
“Merci, Bleu,” he said. Bleu was what he called her, how he thought of her, because it fit, no matter who she was, no matter what she was. He limped in behind her.
“Get us a new maid tomorrow, though,” she said. “And don’t scare this one.”
Interlude in Blue #3: A Frog in Time
A substance’s color is generated by the absorption of light hitting it and the material’s resonant frequencies. That is, when a material’s molecules resonate with a certain frequency of light, the light rays are absorbed. When they do not resonate, the rays are either reflected or pass right through it. Only the reflected rays reach our eye and determine color. Natural pigments, like lapis lazuli, from which the Sacré Bleu is made, show their color by the absorption of light. Absorption of light literally transforms the orbit of the electrons in the atoms of the pigment. In short, the color doesn’t actually exist, physically, as we experience it, until it is exposed to light waves. Light makes it appear, changes the surface physically.
Theoretically, if all of the light passed through a substance, an object could be invisible to the eye.
Strangely enough, truly blue pigment exists in no vertebrate creature on Earth. The fish scales, butterfly wings, peacock feathers that appear to our eye to be blue are what is called structural color, where surfaces are composed of microstructures that scatter very short wavelengths of blue light—refraction—the reason the sky appears blue without blue pigment.
There are, however, unconfirmed reports of a blue tree frog in the Amazon river basin. The frog has been spotted on three occasions by Western biologists, but when any attempt was made to capture or photograph the creature, it appeared to the scientists to vanish.
Native legends tell of a shaman who found one of the blue frogs dead and made an arrow poison with its skin. When he shot a monkey with the poisoned arrow, it disappeared, or so he said. But a boy from the shaman’s village remembered finding a dead monkey at the edge of the village the month before, slain with an arrow exactly like the one the shaman had used, even though the shaman had not been hunting that earlier time. Somehow, the blue arrow poison had transported the animal across time.
Many Indians report that they have seen the blue frog of the Amazon vanish before their eyes, and even with a thorough search of the area have never gotten a second glimpse of the same frog. What they neglected to consider was not where to search, but when.
Eight
APHRODITE WAVING LIKE A LUNATIC
Paris, 1890
LUCIEN WORKED IN THE BAKERY BY HIMSELF UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O’CLOCK before his sister Régine came down and found him at the front counter. There had been no sign of Mère Lessard, who was usually bustling about the shop, sweeping and fretting and arranging the cases and racks in the front well before dawn.
