MATHILDE AND HER MOTHER lived up six flights in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. The landlord was a carpenter who ran two floors of workshops, employed a dozen journeymen, and owned four other houses in Paris, one of them in the rue Saint-Honore. Yet he would not repair his own crumbling premises.

I could be sentimental about the smell of sawdust, even glue, but my stomach frequently rebelled against the stinking damp which rose up from the marshy foundations and seeped down from the roof, creating a confluence between the fourth and the third floors, a glistening sour-smelling sheet of scum.

Yet two floors above was heaven, glass panes in the ceiling and a small stove with a fearful zigzag flue which ran like Zeus' lightning bolt from the corner near the door to the uppermost sections of the roof.

Of course it was cold in winter, but now it was warm, and I returned from the petite maison to find the windows thrown wide open and the air perfumed by woodsmoke from the yard below.

In one corner, serving as a screen to hide the old lady's cot, stood a single painting as tall as a man-or woman-for it was Mathilde's self-portrait-the painter in her studio with her fallen angel's marble legs protruding from a silken sheet. Around the walls were models in plaster, a head of Niobe hanging from a nail, a Venus, a hand, other things all being the property of the woman portrayed in that shocking painting, no less a beauty in the living light than on the canvas. The confrontation in the painted eyes was gone that evening, and in its place such a warm and lovely glow.

Her Parrot entered. She rose, wineglass in hand, barefooted, her arms open, and all the velvet shadows of the room held inside her gorgeous clavicles. She smelled of wine and onions, and when she kissed me on the mouth I breathed her deep and pulled her hard against me. She pushed back and looked into my eyes so frankly, and I could already smell that musty rutty salty perfume our parts made in the night. Six years we had been like this, and never a day was less passionate between us. I kissed the old lady too, on her crown, and she lifted her lined face to kiss me on the lips and poured me un verre-un cup in fact-and began to recite the story of the beef daube. Did I think it was too early in the year? Had I felt the change of season? And so on. They were, both together, so dear, so familial, so fond of me and I of them, and if they had been at the wine an hour or two before I got there, that was how we lived. I liked it, our sour red mouths. Soon I would have to give the news of Monsieur's offer, but for now Maman sang to me, the Lord knows what it was, Provencal perhaps, quavering, Moorish. I did not doubt it was her love song to me, but who she really was or what she meant I could not say. I rubbed her swollen knuckles.

She was an extraordinary old thing, and if her spine was as twisted as the stairs, her eyes were like bright stones in water.

I sat at the yellow card table and they waited on me. The daube was rich and perfect and the wine flowed, and I asked my darling how would she like to come to live with me in America, and she laughed, and drank, and left gravy on her glass.

"And I will build you an enormous studio," I said, thinking of the house on the Hudson and wondering which way it faced.

"Oh Parrot, you lovely man."

"And we will look at the river, and have a yacht. And sail."

"Sweetheart." She leaned forward and kissed me, all that smeary wine and meat and fat glistening on her lips and her mother stood and took her plate to the scullery and when she had washed her plate she announced she would sit in the yard and watch the children.

"And we will have a garden, and geese."

"Do you hear him, Maman?"

The old lady made an agreeable sighing sound and then she was gone and we could hear her making her cautious way down the stairs.

"He is mad," Mathilde said, and her face was now close to me, kissing, nuzzling.

"There are many walls in America," I said, "and very few artists."

She cocked her head, a way of looking. She had heard another voice in mine.

"What are you up to?" she said, and she had changed, still smiling but questioning. I felt her gaze and knew I could not hide from her.

"I am asking, Do you like America?"

It was my face she was now reading, certainly not my words.

"You are running away?" she asked, as if amused by me.

"How could I?"

She pushed her chair back. "You are running away!"

"My darling."

"You know I cannot go to America. Why are you saying this? It is that dirty old marquis."

"It is you, my love." But she was on her feet-clatter and scraping in the scullery.

"No, it is you. You are running away."

"You are mad," I cried, not believing what I said.

In the scullery-by which I mean a wooden plank, a pail, a bowl-I found her face awash with tears.

Gently, I touched her salty cheek.

Violently she slammed my breastbone and beat me as if I were a prison door. "Liar," she cried, casting aside her pinny and falling backward upon our bed, her face a seeping rock, offered to the sky.

Kneeling, bundling, I told her I loved her, would never leave her, would never go to America in all my life, and in little cautious stages, with a kiss finally permitted, persuaded my little wild creature into my open shirt, and there, in the familiar dark, she lost her armor, sloughed it off so it joined the jumble of fabrics, castings, pictures, frames without paintings, and paintings without frames, the graveyard beside our bed.

By the time Maman returned we were at peace and then the three of us did homage to the flagon and retired, the old lady to her iron cot behind the portrait, and we to our corner which resembled, more than anything, a pile of costumes for an opera or dance. When the last lantern was snuffed, the colors of the castoffs glowed all around us, blood and anthracite in the velvet night.

We went to sleep at peace, in each other's arms, and there you would think the matter over with, all the sweet familiarity of each other's skins sucked into our pink receptive lungs. Yet to see ourselves this way it is necessary to forget-that although my strange beloved slept, she never did stop living, or arguing, or fighting, or fleeing, and there was always a drama of life and death that occupied her dreams and was no less real than anything that occurred before her open eyes.

Thus she moved from peace to war through that particular night and even though I was asleep, flat on my back, snoring a storm to shake the vineyards of the Loire, I felt her move, as if tugged from me on the tides of sleep, out of my arms, onto her side, her back toward me, and when we woke with the clatter of the streets outside, a hard cold stretch of bed separated us, and she rose without even looking at me and I listened to her heavy footfall shake the boards and, like a traveler who has been hit from behind, robbed and kicked in darkness, I felt not so much the pain or indignity but the injustice of it all. I pulled on my shirt. She was already at her canvas, painting without coffee or bread.

I glimpsed the old lady curled beneath her quilt, hands over her head, fingers in her ears. I should have paid attention, for Maman knew her daughter from the womb and what a holy hell she must have made.

I touched Mathilde's bare shoulder, and gently drew back her hair.

"Go," she cried. "Just go."

"I'm not going anywhere."

She did not look at me but went to our bed, picked up my trousers, and threw them down into the street.

"What have I done?"

She was my treasure, my ball of pain and beauty-her luminous eyes, her little curved belly, her perfect thigh. Who she was fighting I did not know, but I was old enough, had scars on my ankles and my arms, a piece missing from my ear, and saw how the moment had come, like an unexpected death, like God striking, the lightning hitting, and I was a man tipped from his bunk on the ship to find not floor but death water, bubbles, the fierce cold fingers of the salty night. There, die. Rise no more.